Moving Forward - Pastor Greg Addison - May 17, 2026

Sermon from Pastor Greg Addison on Sunday morning, May 17, 2026.

Ministering to the heart of the Western Arkansas River Valley for over 165 years. Welcome to Chapter and First- the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith First Baptist Church, you'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg Addison, our ministry staff, and guest speakers. Thank you for listening!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church. You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers. Thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

I want you to turn with me in your Bibles to 2 Samuel chapter 11. And as we get started this morning, we're going to talk about one more time moving forward as a church. We are doing the uh reading the Bible chronologically together as you know we're continuing to do that. But we are also focusing this year on moving forward as a church. That means moving forward individually, spiritually, because the church is a collective of all of us. And as each individual person, family moves forward spiritually, we see our church move forward spiritually. Now, today we're going to look at a pretty famous story in scripture, and we're going to use that as an illustration for us as a church family for this summer, right? And what I told you two weeks ago is that we would have a special moment of prayer each time as a church family as we are engaging in this study together. We just prayed for the Martin family, but we're going to have that prayer time at the end of this service, which will be obvious in a moment while we're doing that. What we're going to talk about is how we approach the summer as a church family and how we move forward this summer. Now, here we are in 2 Samuel chapter 11. And this is a very famous story as we have read it. Everyone has heard to some degree of David in Bathsheba, right? And so that's the introduction to this story. And so, as you know, David was lollygagging around the uh the palace. In fact, the Bible says strolling around the palace, right? And when you put yourself in neutral, bad things happen. Uh he's walking around and he notices that across the way, his palace roof, he sees somebody else bathing on the roof. Happens to be a beautiful woman, the Bible says. And so he takes a fancy to her, he has her brought to him, they have an affair, she gets pregnant, and then as you read the story, her husband is off in battle with the soldiers. So David sends orders for him to come back to make him a messenger because he assumes you're off at battle, you miss your wife, you come home, you're with your wife, and they can cover the pregnancy. But this guy is a man of honor, so he doesn't do that. He camps out where everyone knows because he knows his compatriots, his comrades at arms, can't be with their wives, so he's not going to be with his, and he goes back. David's plan is foiled, so he comes up with another idea, and he has him put on the front lines, he's killed in battle, and then he takes her as his wife. A terrible story of tragedy and sin that continues to deteriorate. But the linchpin to this story begins right here in verse 1. This is where it actually all comes unraveled. 2 Samuel chapter 11, verse 1, the Bible says, In the spring when kings march out to war, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel. Now that is a hugely significant factor. If you have any knowledge of military history from this time, or though if you're interested in those things, you'll understand how significant this statement is. In the spring when kings march out to war. What it's saying there is back in that day and time, obviously, no technology, so you're marching foot soldiers. There would be some version of cavalry, but they were moving uh logistics and um uh and supplies and all of that by wooden wagons, probably had wooden wheels, all that kind of stuff. I mean, it was difficult, to say the least, to move an army logistically. And so they did not fight in the inclement weather times of the year, like in the winter. You simply couldn't move the army in that time. And so here we are. We are in the spring, and the Bible says, makes reference to that historical fact that in the spring is when armies would go to war. They would re-engage in battle because you are now getting a time when you could logistically move and function your army. It was the responsibility of every king of every nation to recognize the significance of this time. They would spend the winter planning for it so they could then move into this strategic moment and do what they needed to do militarily. That's especially true for the Israelites, for example, because they're surrounded by enemies. They were constantly at war with the Ammonites and the Philistines and all of that. And so you get a very clear picture in just a small sentence that this is a bad decision. In the spring when kings march out to war, David failed in his responsibility as the king and the commander-in-chief, and he sent Joab and others off in his place instead of doing his job. That's the Greg translation there into Arkansan in 2026. Then it says, they, the army that went without David, destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabah, but David remained in Jerusalem. Another translation says, David stayed home. Not much good happens in life when we stay home in the meaning of this passage. What this means is David abdicated his responsibility. He bailed on what he was supposed to do. He is lollygagging around and neutral in life rather than being who God had appointed him and called him to be. And so here's what happens when we have these moments in life when we stay home. This is an incredibly powerful warning in Scripture for all of us, has great spiritual application in any time in our lives individually. This is what happens. When you put your life in neutral, you stay home. You don't move into what God has called you to move into to do. You open yourself up to temptation just as David did. You're not engaged spiritually, you're not responsible spiritually, you're not moving forward as we use that word. And when you're here, you were open to attack. You are open to temptation. And that's what happened to David. If he had been at battle, this would have never happened. If he'd have been who he was, supposed to be, where he was supposed to be, this would have never happened. You also leave your responsibilities. He sends off Joeb and it says, All Israel. Imagine the thousands of men in the army that are gone to battle, and you just bail on your people. You just bail. You just step out of what your responsibilities are instead of doing what God has called you to do and put before you. You're also without accountability. Now think about if David goes to battle with Joab and his officers, what they're doing is they're focused on the mission. He is feeling his responsibilities, he is pulling his people around him like Joab and the other officers, and they are talking and they're working on what's happening. And he can't do something crazy or weird because he has this accountability structure of people around him because he's where he's supposed to be, and he's surrounded by the people who he is supposed to be surrounded by. And so he is in a safe place where he's growing and focused. We sang this song this morning in the Chaffee campus, and I'll just remind you of this song. It's Be Thou My Vision, which is one of the classic hymns in our Christian faith, and it has some of the greatest lyrics ever written. And so here is one verse what he says Be thou my wisdom, thou my true word. When we're walking in our relationship with Jesus, he literally is our wisdom, our guidance, our protection. That's what it says. I ever with thee, and thou with me, Lord. When you give your life to Christ, you enter into a relationship with the Lord. You're walking with him, he's walking with you. And that's what's describing. I ever with thee, and thou with me, Lord. Thou, my great father, and I, thy true Son, thou in me dwelling, and I with thee, we are one. That's what a relationship with Jesus looks like. When you give your life to Christ, you enter into this relationship. He is our heavenly father, and he adopts us into this relationship, and we love him as a father, and the Bible says we're joint heirs with Christ. Jesus told us in John 15 that this is what it looks like. I am in the Father. The Father is in me, and I am in you, and you are in me, and we are one. That's what this song is grabbing a hold of. How in the world can you be one with the Lord and you shift it into neutral and do what David did and stay home? By definition, that's not going to work. It also in David's life created a very bad trajectory. This whole story unfolds and it gets worse and it gets worse, and one bad decision leads to another. Think about how much better it would have been if he'd had just repented the first time instead of trying to hide it again. And then arranging the husband's death and all of that. Yet he just continues down this path. Why? Because he's not walking with God, he's put it in neutral, he is mistaken, and even when we know that we can come to the Lord and confess our sins, he'll forgive us, he'll sort through that. David doesn't rest in God's forgiveness. David just keeps going. He keeps going, and he's in a bad trajectory because he's not anchored in his relationship with the Lord. Now, you don't have to take 30 seconds and you can immediately recognize a time in your life. All of us can, where that's what happened to us. Is that not true? I mean, everybody can point to a time when we put it in neutral and we stayed home and we got in trouble because we were not walking with the Lord. And so that's what happens in that life. Now it's also particularly interesting that this is a season when the armies of the Lord go to battle. And so I think it's a particularly good illustration, not just for each of us individually, but for us as a church. Why? Because here's what happens. In the summer, if this was written for modern churches in American life, it would say this. In the summer, when churches stay home and quit coming to church, David went with them. That's what it would say. If you are been in church any amount of time in your life, you understand the numbers drop dramatically in every way. Attendance, giving, participation, because we take the summer off. That's what happens. Our entire lives are built that way. From the age of seven as a first grader to when you graduate in high school at 18, you work from the middle of August to the end of May or 1st of June, and then you take the summer off. And about the time, it's funny, we hire these young people, Abigail and Brad and Maverick and everybody. And it's funny, I know what's happening. Man, we hit spring break and it's their first year working, and man, they are lost because they have spent their whole life on spring break. And I'm like, nope, it's Tuesday, you've got to come to work tomorrow. Y'all remember that time? Right? It is so ingrained in who we are, we can't help it. We just hit that wall. It's who we are. And about the time you finally get over it, you start having babies. And then you get right back into it again for another 25 years as every one of your kids gets through high school and you walk through that deal. We never get out of this mode. And what happens is it trains all of us culturally. We just we just lock it down in the summer. We go to the lake house, we spend time on a boat, we go on vacations, we do all this kind of stuff. And because of that, it's just like this. It's just like this. We put it in neutral spiritually, and we shut down. But here's the here's the news for us Satan does not take the summer off. He doesn't. And so we as a church, we don't take the summer off. We do a lot, and we keep moving and we work our way through it. So, what we're gonna do is I'm gonna set up for you today some vision casting for the summer. Now, this is not your typical sermon, this is a vision casting deal. So, but don't go to sleep on me because days like today is what makes us a church and not an organization. Because we're talking together about how we move forward as a church family, illustrated in this passage. So you got two things when you came in. If you didn't, you uh you need to get them on the way out. One is a short one, it looks like this, and one is a full 8.5 by 11 piece of paper that looks like this. And so this is a summer calendar. So we're going to move forward with these two ideas as railroad tracks for us, and I just want to highlight them for you and talk about how this is supposed to go. Now, this is a summer calendar. It's not fully exhaustive, but it's really, really a lot of key things. We've highlighted key moments and events here. Why? Because we want you to take a vacation. Please do not email me tomorrow and say I said don't take a vacation and how terrible that is. Take a vacation as a family. I'm all in vacations. I want to take a vacation. Everybody say take a vacation. Okay, when I get that email tomorrow, I can say everybody in the church heard that but you. Right? But it doesn't mean take the summer off. And it doesn't mean spend all your time skipping church, long weekends, everything else. It means be engaged for the summer, and this helps you do that. It's fine, it's good, it's appropriate to have some family times, but we don't take the summer off. And so what we've done is we've highlighted some key events for you here in each of the months, and this is designed to function between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And it gives you some key events, both campuses, all kinds of things, every age group for the summer. And so I want to highlight a few of these, and here's what I want you to see and hear. These are opportunities for you to be here, number one. Number two, when we are here, we are not David leaving our people and lack of accountability. When we are engaged, we are helping each other stay engaged so the people next to you don't experience what David did, and you and I don't experience what David did. It is also an opportunity to invite people to church. This is something that we have really got to invest ourselves in as a church family: inviting people to church. That's what we want to do. I've shared this illustration, but I want to share it again. I have a very unique experience that relates to this. Now, if you study these matters culturally, they will tell you that forever it has always been that 50% of the people who visit a church visit because they were invited by a friend or a family member. That has always been the stats. Advertising did not change that. Television did not change that. Social media has not changed that. 50% of the people come because they were invited by a friend or a family member. Statistics also tell us, George Barner and others who study these things, they tell us 75% of the people who are not involved in church would attend a church if they were invited. 75% of the people would say yes if they were invited. And yet we don't invite enough. Now here's my experience. I attended a, I'm from Memphis, Tennessee. If you don't know that story, you don't know me yet, and so I went to a large, what you would call a megachurch there. It was one of the most mediated churches in all of history. We've been on television since 1953 as a church family here. That church had been on television since 1951. Our pastor was famous and known all over the city. Everyone knew who he was. He was one of the most famous pastors that you could imagine, and he was literally one of the most famous people in the city. We had thousands and thousands of people watch our services every week on television. We were advertising. We had a professional advertising staff. We advertised over the city. When I was called into ministry, I stepped out of a secular career and I went on staff in my home church. And there were not a lot of things that I could do, but there were two jobs that they could give me. I could do men's ministry because I was a man. And number two, I could do new member ministry because I had been in that church my whole life, and I knew as much about that church as anybody else. Right? And so I began a required new member class. And so we had everyone who joined the church who were required to come in. We processed between 120 and 1,300 new members, adult new members, every year. You got that? So that is a highly significant statistical sampling, is what I'm trying to explain. Not bragging on the side of the church. I'm trying to illustrate something. Let me tell you what. In a church where the pastor was the most famous guy in the city, everybody knew the church. Everybody had probably visited once, sometime, I imagine. It was so iconic. It was on I-40, and there were these three crosses that were put up, and they are humongous. They are taller than any pilot sign or any of those kind of signs that you've ever seen. In fact, they were so iconic right there on I-40. The pastor's name was Adrian Rogers. Truckers, we found out driving by, used it as a reference point, and they called it Adrian World. They would refer to the church as Six Flags Over Jesus. That's how prominent this church is. Are you getting the picture I'm painting here? And when we started doing surveys of 1,300 new members every year that I did that, do you know the percentage of people who visited the church because they were invited by a friend or a family member? 50%. None of that moved the needle. None of that moved the needle. Being on television, advertising, any of that. 50% of the people who come to church, they come because they are invited by a friend or a family member. And you cannot change that reality. But praise the Lord, we have a bunch of people who know a bunch of people, and that's how you reach people for Jesus. And so we want to equip you and help you. Our staff has prayed through this. We've worked through this together. We've worked with lay leaders in different areas of the church to put this together. And so what this does is it gives us a roadmap for the summer. And so if you're out or you take one extra week in on the lake or whatever, you go on vacation, that's fine. Pick up the other events, schedule around that, engage with us as the army of God going to battle at the time when churches go to war. And you'll see all of the things we have going on. Now, let me highlight a few of these for you. We begin May the 31st, we have a cookout at our Chaffee campus right after service. We did this right after Easter, and it was fabulous. And some of you came and stopped by. It was great. You're welcome to all of our leftovers that you want. I'm kidding. Y'all come on, it's great. Come with us. If you have a friend and you think they live out there and they want to go to that church, that day you take them to that campus and you invite them and you connect them. Let's get people wherever it is that we can get them. When you get into June, you see one through five vacation Bible school. You haven't got your yard sign, go to war. Go to war. Get your yard sign. If uh you will look at uh uh June the 10th, every Wednesday night from the 27th of May through the summer, we have covered. You'll see on the 27th of May on that. Wednesday night before we get moving, we're going to pray for the campus. We'll be praying for VBS. We'll be praying for all the things that happen. We'll be praying for our summer. We expect a large turnout of people to be here to prayer walk our campus. And then you'll see June the 14th through the 20th. World changers will be here again this year. If you were here last year, you knew what happens is there are a ton of teenagers who take over our campus. They come from all over. It's a mission trip for them. They work all over our city. They're helping homes or painting homes or helping senior adults. They're doing all kinds of stuff all over the city. And they're inviting them to First Baptist Church. They're sharing the gospel with them and they're inviting them here. And so we're supporting that. It is a great time for all of us to be prayer warriors for this event. You'll see on uh as we move into that on June the 20th, as Jacob has been announcing to you, we're going back and we're singing the national anthem and we're going to the baseball game. There's a concert before, fireworks after. Last year we took a hundred or more people to it. It was great. It was an incredible fellowship. We had our own section. It was awesome. Anyone that came into it, we had four bouncers. Matt was their supervisor. They beat them up and escorted them somewhere else. It was awesome. We had a great time being there together. It's an incredible night. What a night to invite another family. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. As you know, as we move into July, this summer is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and there will be a great communication, a great discourse, conversation going on culturally across our nation, and we need to be a part of that. So on July the 1st, on that Wednesday night, we're going to have a huge birthday bash for our nation. We're going to grill out, we're going to be outside, we're going to fellowship, we're going to have hamburgers and hot dogs and apple pine, every kind of American thing. We're going to have a great time. And so we're all going to come together and celebrate that. And then on July the 5th, July the 4th is on a Saturday. July that we didn't want to get in the way of city fireworks and other things. And since it's on the 5th, that morning we're going to have a combined worship service with both campuses, a monster service, all kinds of special things. It'll be big as Christmas, if not better. It is awesome. Jacob is going to have to take off three weeks after it's over. He's going to be so tired. It's going to be great. And so you'll want to be here and be a part of that. And that is a great opportunity to bring somebody with you. People are thinking, what am I going to be doing on the fourth? Well, you can surround the fourth with a huge cookout birthday party and an incredible service here at First Baptist Church. And then when you get into August, you see back to school, and one of the things on there, we're doing a back to school party at Creekmoor Park. And so we love that. It was a great event last year. Everybody be out. I don't swim. I don't care. Bring a lawn chair. Hang out with us. Right? Be a part. Bring someone with you, right? And just to make sure we've beaten that horse good and dead, if you will notice on the Wednesday nights throughout July, we will be engaging as a church family in evangelism training. And so we have done this before. It's very effective. Love worth finding, which I'm a part of the board. It's a preaching ministry of Dr. Adri Rogers. Worked with Evangelism Explosion, which is a longtime evangelism training ministry. We have great heritage with EE here at our church. And we've done this before. We're going to do it again. They have an online platform that's incredibly easy to use for everyone to go through and have a basic this is how you share your faith training. Matt, Pastor Matt, and I will be teaching on Wednesday nights in July here to coincide with that online training. And so we will make those lessons available on our church podcast, the sermon podcast, along with the online training. And at the end of the summer, we're going to have a banquet, a dinner, kind of a celebration and fellowship with everyone who finished the course, whether you finished it online or you finished it on Wednesday nights or both. So we're going to do that. We're going to elevate this and make it as good as we can make it. This is what God has called us to do. It is called the Great Commission for a reason. Right? Right? There we go. And so that's what we're going to do. Now, the other thing that happens in the summer, it's not just inviting people or engaging that we miss. We also statistically, our attendance goes down, our involvement goes down, and our giving goes down. It's pretty incredible. That's why we've given you this sheet. This sheet just gives you a couple of things on the did you know side, things that happen in the summer that are part of our regular budget, part of the regular things that we do every summer. It keeps going. Church keeps going, right? And so let me give you an example. 38% of our children's ministry budget is spent in the summer on vacation Bible school. That's how big an event vacation Bible school is. That's how much we invest in it. Eli, tons of an army of you all volunteering. It's incredible the experience. It's the best week of the year in church life every single year. And that all happens in the summer. Our utilities go up 20% in the summer. How many of you remember two summers ago with no chiller? Raise your hand. How many of you want to do that again? Raise your hand. Right? We love our air conditioning. Well, it keeps going. So there are things like that that you'll see illustrated on here. Now let me just say this. See at the bottom. I want to thank you for your faith forward giving. You guys have done incredible this year. We have got a great start to the year. It is awesome. As you know, we talked about casting vision for that, that we were looking for, we'd love to have$350,000 this year. We had about$300,000 last year. That put on top of the$200,000 that the FCRA has contributed to that, along with the Dirt, means we pay for a whole lot of that project already, and we maintain a war chest to prepare us for whatever the next stage or step might be. And so it's important. We've had an incredible start, but we have the whole year, and so we have$170,000 that we'd like to see come in through between now and 2027 faith forward. And that is an incredibly easy goal because you guys have done so well starting off the year. That's just a basic amount every month of folks giving. So that's an idea of what the giving and the spending looks like during the summer. On the back, you'll see giving things. Now let me just show you a graph. We show this to our finance committee. We show it to our deacons. This is what it looks like. It's not really hard to understand. This is down the bottom, you see January, February through December, and this just tracks our giving, right? And that looks like normal churches. And you'll see there are variations ever every month, but not much in the general arc of it. January always starts bad, December is always high, and you'll see those vertical circles highlighting that every year the summer goes down. It goes down like 20%. I told this story the other day in the office. When I was in high school, when I was in high school, graduating high school, my parents got me a car like you would expect. It was a nice car. It was a Corolla. It was a Toyota Corolla in 1983. It was back in the day, right? 1983 was about the, you know, those were great. You couldn't tear them up. My dad wasn't worried about me getting lots of speeding tickets or racing in a Corolla, right? Although I figured out how to do that a couple of times. And so, and it got like, it drank like a bird. It got at that time some of the best gas miles you could get. Well, I'm a college student. I'm going to college. Dave Scroop and I went to college together. We're spending most of our money at Pizza Hut every day at lunch. And so I don't have a lot of gas money. So what would happen in that Corolla? I would have this little light that would come on. Y'all got that light in your car still, right? This light would come on, say low fuel. I would figure out when that light came on, I could still drive 89 miles in my Corolla before I ran out of gas. Well, you can imagine what happened. For four years, I drove that Corolla with that light on. I drove it with that light on so much I burned out the light bulb. Now, what does that have to do with what we're talking about? Well, pretty much every summer we burn out the light bulb. That's kind of what happens. Now, let me just say this. Hear me. Don't send me an email tomorrow. We're doing great as a church. In fact, you guys are giving this year in an incredible fashion. It is wonderful. This is not a cry for help. This is not some weird, we don't have any money. This is not that kind of a deal. Okay, you hear me? Nod your heads. You guys are doing great. And you guys did great last year. But last year you took the summer off because that's what Baptists do, and every other church that you would go to looks like that in the summer. I mean, that's just kind of what happens, right? What would happen in our church if we sent our tithes in in June and July like we do January through May and October through December? If we just cut the bottom out and just made budget in the summer, can you imagine how that would move us forward in our ability to do more ministry and to invest in more opportunities to see people save and bring people to church? You see, this is a forward thing. This is a, as we learn and grow as a church, this is stewardship training. This is why it says forward through stewardship. We are focusing on how we can advance as a church, step up our game, move forward, impact the river valley around us more. That's what we're looking at here. And so here's an opportunity to see. We have 80% of our folks, they give in person on Sundays. It's fabulous. We're glad you're doing that. Keep doing that. Like, let's go. It's all good. But that means in the summers when we're not here, we're not bringing. When you can go online, you can mail it in, you can drop it off at the office, whatever. Matt will meet you here at midnight if you want to bring your tithe then, right? So that's what we're doing. So this is not some weird, this is not some weird deal. Get what we're doing. We are simply looking at what is our normal ministry work in the summer and how we can engage with that and move forward through the summer. Now, all of this is designed to capture this summer. And so when you look at that calendar of events again, what that does, that should trigger in every mind the love list that we have for each person. Each person in our church, we challenge you, this is a part of our engaging, to have a love list. What is your love list? It's three people that God has put in your life that are lost to need Jesus. Three people. Just three. I mean, pray for everybody you want to, but everybody ought to have at least three. You're praying for them by name and you're praying three things. Three people, you're praying three things. Number one, we're praying for an opportunity to invite them to church. Wow, Pastor, we should have a list of stuff that we can invite people to that we can pray over inviting them to. We're praying for an opportunity to invite them to church. We are praying for an opportunity for you to share your testimony with them, how you met Jesus and how you were saved, and hopefully that leads to a gospel conversation where you can share the gospel with them. A lot of times it happens out of one of these events. You invite them to an event, and when you come back, you have the opportunity to share Jesus with them. It's been created by that visit. And the third thing we're praying for is we are praying for them to be saved. Praying for them to be saved. Now, we're going to have a time where we're going to pray over this as a church family here as we close. But here's what I want you to think. Two weeks ago, when I told you we were going to have these prayer times in our services, I told you two things. It shows our faith in the Lord, and number two, it shows our expectation of what God does when Jesus is here. We sang a song today, the choir did, about the presence of God and what that means when that happens. I'm going to ask you to pray over a couple of things with me. I'm going to give you a prompt and then we're going to pray. Okay? Now, after that, we're going to go on the invitation. We're going to close with the invitation because we have shared the gospel and we hope people are saved. If you've never trusted Christ as your Savior after our prayer time, we're going to sing a testimony of how much we love Jesus and what it means to be saved. We'll have ministers at the head of our aisles. If you'd like to trust Jesus as your Savior, come. To enter into that relationship I talked about before you come. But here's what we're going to do, Church Family. I'm going to give you a couple of prompts and I'm going to ask you to pray for those. And then I'm going to pray for us, and after that, we're going to have the invitation. Are you with me? You good? Most of you are asleep. Some of you are good. Here we are. I want you to bow your heads and I want you to do this. I want you to pray and ask God to move us forward in the summer. Whatever that feels like in your heart and mind, ask him to move us forward. Ask for God to move through his people and move us forward. Now I want you to pray specifically. If there's one of those events or ideas that's just sort of stuck you as I was running through them, just stop and take a moment, put a pen in that thing, and pray that God will use that. However He prompted that in your mind and heart. Now I want you to pray for your love list. By name if you already have them. If you don't have one, that's okay. This is a great day to start. So just ask the Lord to give you three names. If he puts a name on your heart already, nail it on your list and commit to engage this summer. Now I want you to pray for our church family to be engaged. Pray that we'll see those statistics of attendance and giving and involvement and all that. That we'll cut the bottoms out of that and we'll see more people engaged in more things because our church is caught this vision in moving forward in the summer. And finally, we, as we talked about, we're praying in faith, but we're also praying in expectation because when God shows up, things happen. That's why we're asking Him to do these things. So I want you to ask the Lord to give you a vision. Just you personally. What could happen in your life, in your Sunday school class, if you're engaged in the choir or orchestra, what can happen there, a place where you serve, maybe children's ministry or students? Ask God to give you an impassioned vision, a picture of what could happen in a church who engages in the summer. Heavenly Father, we have come together today, two campuses, one church, lots of people, brothers and sisters in Christ, seeking you as our Heavenly Father to ask that you move us forward this summer. We openly proclaim and we proclaim our dependence on you. We know that anything and everything that is ever good that ever happens in the church, it happens because Jesus does it. And so right here, we are asking you to move in our church this summer. God, we don't want to stay home in the springtime when other armies are going to war. We acknowledge that there are opportunities in the summer to be captured. And we acknowledge that the enemy is at work in the summer. And Lord, we ask that you will make us strong and you will raise us up as a church and you will call us to battle. Lord, I pray that we'll take these every one of these dates and we'll pray over who might come if we invite them. We'll pray for visitors to come. We'll pray for opportunities to meet people who visit our church and to show them how wonderful it is to be in the body of Christ and amongst the people of God. Lord, we pray that everything that we do will be to be a lighthouse this summer. And we pray that people will look and see that God's presence is at First Baptist Church and call them to want to be here. Lord, we pray for new members to join this summer. We pray for people to be saved this summer. Lord, we pray for baptisms this summer. Lord, I pray that as you challenge us with evangelism training and our love lists and a focus on that, Lord, I know we have some folks in our church they've never had the privilege of leading someone to Christ before. And I pray that this will be the summer where a number of our people for the first time will have the joy of leading someone to faith in Jesus Christ. They'll get to walk down the aisle with them, they'll get to be in the baptistry with them, they'll get to celebrate that celebration. Father, we believe you can do that in our church, and we pray that you will do that in our church. Lord, I pray that this summer will be like no other. Lord, I pray that this won't just be a message or a handout, but this will be the start of another level of church life for us as a church family. I pray it'll be an extension, a growth, another level of spiritual life for individuals in our church. Because we don't take the summer off. We go to battle with the gospel to see lost people rescued and saved by salvation that only comes through Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray that our fellowship will be sweeter this summer because we're spending time together and we're on mission together. Lord, I pray for strength in our Sunday school classes and our ministries like choir and orchestra and Bob's team in the tech folks and in the preschool and in the children's ministry and in the student ministry and in our young adult ministry. Father, I pray that we'll see a strength in those things because we're seeing you work and you bear fruit through the lives of people who are engaged, who are seeking to move forward through the power of Jesus in what we're doing. Lord, we we claim all of this in the name of Jesus and we place all of this at your feet. This has been prayed over, and now we're praying over it as a church, and Father, we are dependent on you and we look to you. We don't have any idea what all that fruit might be, but we know what it could be when you are here and you go to work. And so, God, we present ourselves to you for this summer as a church. We ask that you use us this summer as a church. Lord, we ask that we see fruit that only you can bring in individual lives, in church lives, in spiritual growth, in salvations, all of that. Father, you, the word tells us, can do more beyond anything we could think or imagine. And we are coming with that as our expectation and presenting ourselves to you for you to work through us and do what only you can do. And Father, we believe that you work. We believe that the gospel is the power of God and salvation. We believe those things, Father. And we come now asking you to work. As we sing this final hymn, Father, I pray if there's someone who needs to be saved. You'll use all of this to give them a vision of what they can be a part of when they're walking with Jesus. If we have folks that need a church home, I pray they'll be stirred and want to be a part of this with us. Lord, if people need to be baptized, if they've been struggling with a baptism decision, what better way to kick off the summer than folks to come and present themselves for baptism? Lord, today we ask that this be the first moment for the rest of the summer. It is in your name we pray, and all God's people said.

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We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus. Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you. Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can. Thank you for listening to chapter and first the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith First Baptist Church.