Three Habits of a Contagious Christian - Part 3

Three Habits of Highly Contagious Christians [Part Three]

I want to start with a question this morning. If you had to respond to this: What do you think is the greatest danger facing Lincoln City Church? What would you say? I was listening to a message recently by Andy Stanley. It stimulated my thinking. He was talking about his church, but it made me think about me and about us.

If you had to answer that question, what would you say when you look around at all that’s happening here, all the lives in this room that have been changed? If we were to stumble and fall, where would it be most likely to happen? I’ll tell you where I don’t think it would be.

I don’t the greatest danger we face is that we’ll drift from our faith. We have a very strong doctrinal statement — if you’ve been around for a while you’ve seen it. We have a board of elders that watches with great vigor to make sure we stay on target theologically. I don’t think we’re going to drift away from that.

I don’t think our greatest danger is financial. We have a very generous congregation. The elders monitor our finances with amazing competence and integrity. I don’t think that’s where we’re real vulnerable.

I don’t think our greatest danger is organizational at all. We have a very clear mission. We want irreligious people to become fully devoted followers. And we have a real clear strategy. We talk about the TRAKS System. We have a very clear picture of what it means to be a participating member.

We talk about the twelve covenants of LCC, and it’s a way to help us get a sense of what it means to be fully devoted.

We have a statement that’s been kind of the informal model of this church since it got started: People matter to God. I’ve never seen a church — I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen any organization — that works harder to articulate its basic values in memorable ways than this church does. It’s amazing to me.

I’m not worried that any of that is going to get lost in our curriculum or our membership materials or our welcome brochures. I think the greatest danger that we face is here in my heart and your heart. I think the greatest danger is not organizational drift, it’s personal drift.

I think the danger is that because LCC is in many ways such an amazing place with so many programs with so much excellence, I can start thinking about it just in terms of, "What am I getting out of it?" And then forget to say, "People matter to God. Lost people matter to God. Do they matter to me?"

You see, to help irreligious people become fully devoted followers is not just the church’s mission. That’s not just an organizational purpose statement. That’s your mission. That’s your mission and mine. And Jesus said it was so.

About the last thing he said to his followers after his resurrection was, "Go into all the world; proclaim the gospel; make disciples of all people; baptize them; teach them to do all things in my name."

So the question this morning is, "Are you on mission? What’s the mission statement written in your heart personally?"

I think it’s possible that we could have a big church, wonderful programs, very impressive buildings, an orthodox statement of faith, generous giving, and still fail. Because ultimately the mission statement that matters is not one that’s on a brochure or in a message or part of a curriculum someplace. It’s the one in your heart. So, are you on mission? Do lost people matter to you like they matter to God?

I think the biggest danger we face is our danger, it’s personal drift. And that’s why we have spent this whole series looking at what it means to be a highly contagious Christian. We talked about the first habit, and we decided that as a community of believers we’re going to develop relationships with people who are far from God.

Then last week we looked at the second habit. We said, "We’re going to learn how to share the gospel, how to share a verbal witness, explain how to become a Christian in the clearest, most compelling way that we can, even though that’s a stretch for a lot of us."

And I’ll tell you how important that is. Remember last week we all walked through the bridge illustration together? I talked to a woman after New Community last week, her name is Gwen. And she was here last week with a friend that she has been bringing for the last few months. And they did the deal where the two of them walked through the bridge illustration together.

Afterwards, Gwen asked Helena, her friend, "Have you ever prayed that prayer? Have you ever accepted Christ as your Savior?" And Helena said, "I never knew how." And Gwen said, "Well, do you want to?" This was last week, and Helena said, "Yes." So after New Community, they got together and prayed. Helena asked Christ to be the Savior of her life and forgive her of her sins and be the leader of her life.

They didn’t realize that this was just supposed to be like a training session, it wasn’t supposed to actually work.

When Christ-followers learn how to share their faith, how to explain the gospel, things happen. It’s just predictable. But now this morning we talk abut the third and final habit of contagious Christians.

After we work at developing relationships with people, we have spiritual conversations, and we explain about the gospel, here’s the third habit: We commit that we will invite seeking friends to a service designed to help them take the next step in their spiritual journey. We’ll invite them to an event or a service, an experience designed with seekers in mind.

Now this is why this is so important. Some of you, a minority of you in this room, have a very, very strong evangelism gift in your gift mix. And it’s possible that you may be able to do the whole process of evangelism on your own from when you first meet somebody to leading them across the line of faith and helping them begin to grow. Some of you can do the whole deal all by yourself. The vast majority of us are not that way.

I’m not. I need help. I need to be part of a team where I can receive motivation when I get discouraged — which I do sometimes — and training that will make me more effective. I need resources to help answer questions that I might not be able to, and experiences to stimulate seeking friends in their spiritual journey.

If I’m going to be on mission, I need to be part of a team. And this is essential to our strategy at LCC, what we’ve adopted.

A long time ago we designed a seeker service — a service for seekers. And it’s real important that we understand the distinctiveness of that event.

A seeker service is a tool created to help fully devoted followers be more effective in carrying out the mission Jesus gave them. It’s a tool in your hands and mine. We’ve said, "We’ll harness the Arts, we’ll try to touch the heart, we’ll have relevant teaching for seekers that informs their minds and appeals to their wills."

And we’ve said that all of us, everybody that’s a part of the committed core, will never be more than seven days away from an outreach event designed to help you achieve the mission that Jesus gave you. One of the things that most attracted me to LCC a long time ago was its clarity about this strategy.

We have two corporate services, two kinds of services — the weekend services and New Community. And it’s very important that all of us understand clearly that we are real intentional about the purpose of each of those services. And they are quite distinct. A lot of churches are not that way.

I grew up in a church where we had services every Sunday morning, and then we came back for services Sunday night. And nobody was clear on what the difference was between the two. Sunday night services were just like Sunday morning services only worse.

Teachers would teach on Sunday night that would never be allowed to teach on Sunday morning. And singers would get to sing on Sunday night who would never be allowed to sing on Sunday morning. It was like the JV service, the minor league service, people who were trying to work their way up to Sunday morning.

But if you were to ask what the clear, distinct purpose of this service was, we didn’t know. We really didn’t. It was just that we’d always done it that way. Have an outreach event designed for people to bring seeking friends to? Hardly ever, maybe once a year, maybe at Christmas.

Now here we’re real clear on this. Our primary time for followers of Christ to gather, worship, learn, celebrate the sacrament of communion, that’s at the New Community. That’s on Wednesday and Thursday nights. And there’s a very important reason why we do it this way.

It is because a long time ago, folks that were involved in the beginning of this church realized if our seeking friends are going to come to church at all, most likely they’ll come on the weekend. So we as Christ-followers say, "We will defer our convenience. We’ll worship and learn in the middle of the week even though logistically that’s more of a hassle. We’re going to give the best time to an event designed for seekers, and it will never be more than seven days away."

But it’s a team deal. I’ll tell you what I think is the biggest illusion about seeker services across the country having seen lots of churches that start them. The biggest illusion is that you start a seeker service and it will just draw people to it by itself.

There was a movie years ago some of you might have seen called "The Field of Dreams." It’s about this guy who was told to build a baseball diamond, and one of the mottoes through the film is, "If you build it, they will come." And a lot of people have that idea about seeker services, "If you build it, they will come." It doesn’t work that way.

They will not come if a friend does not invite them. Most seekers don’t wake up on a Sunday morning saying, "Man, I just wish there was a church service someplace I could go to. I think I’ll drive around until I can find one." That’s not what’s on the mind of the average seeker when they wake up on Sunday morning.

The seeker service will only be effective if it is a tool in the hands of highly contagious Christians already cultivating the first two habits. And it is crucial for us to understand that. You think about last weekend. Last weekend, there were over 18,000 people at this church, at the weekend services.

You ask, "Why did they come?" Not because of some marketing campaign, not because of some mass media deal or a bunch of slick ads or something. You trace it back and almost every one of them came because somewhere along the line — a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, 10 years ago — somebody invited them. We are an invitation-dependant community. That’s just the truth about us.

Not only that, but Christianity is an invitation-dependant faith. It always has been. Go back to the beginning in the Gospel of John, chapter one. Andrew meets Jesus and his world is turned upside down. The next thing he does is go to Peter. The text says, "And he brought him to Jesus."

He brought Peter to a place where Peter could find out about Jesus. And then we read about Philip, and Philip meets Jesus, and his world is rocked. He goes to Nathaniel and says to Nathaniel, "Come and see, come and see. I want you to come to a place where you can learn and see more about Jesus."

That’s what believers do. Christ-followers for 2,000 years have been going after seekers and wanting to bring them to a place where they can learn about Jesus, "Come and see, come and see, come and see." And when they do that amazing things happen.

George Barna, a pollster, according to a poll that his company conducted, wrote that 25 percent of Americans said they would attend a church if invited by a friend. Twenty-five percent — you think about what that means. If this is true, if it’s close to true, 65 million Americans are one invitation away from launching out on a spiritual journey that could bring them home to God. You think of the difference it would make in this country if every Christ-follower and every church would take that seriously.

On the other hand, you think about the consequences if churches don’t take it seriously. And I’ll tell you how easily churches drift off mission because it’s very easy even for church leaders. I don’t know if any of you ever read Ann Landers, but somebody pointed out to me a week or two ago that she was running letters over a number of days all on the same theme.

It was one of the biggest topics to get letters about that she’s ever featured. They’re letters from pastors and church leaders complaining about what a pain in the neck it is to do weddings for people who don’t know how to behave in church. And day after day, she ran tons of letters she’s gotten from pastors and church leaders.

Here’s what’s interesting to me just in following those in the last several days: there’s not been one letter where a pastor or church leader wrote in, "I’m so grateful to have a chance to get one crack — just one crack — at wedding parties or guests who are far from God because I know this may be the only time they ever come to church. I’m so grateful that I’ve got at least this one chance to talk to them about God and try to touch their hearts."

I haven’t seen a single letter where a pastor or church leader says, "I’m so grateful to have this one chance to leverage or have spiritual influence on a couple who otherwise is going to be headed for spiritual and marital disaster. I’m so grateful that at least in our society I still have this one chance. And I’m going to think and pray and work and do everything I can to maximize it."

Instead there’s letter after letter after letter about what a pain in the neck it is to have to deal with people whose behavior is really bad. And these are church leaders and pastors. See how easy it is for people in churches to lose focus about the mission and focus instead on convenience and comfort?

There’s a well-documented study of one denomination — and this is amazing — that averages less than one invitation per congregation per year. That’s not one invitation per person per year. That means that out of the whole church, out of the whole congregation, the average is less than one person in that whole congregation through the course of a year who goes to a seeking person and says, "Come and see, come and see."

And that denomination has been in severe decline for three decades.

Now I want to tell you, friends, there is no church, including this one, that is invulnerable to that. This was a whole denomination, not just a church. It’s a whole movement that was once characterized by vibrant faith and passionate evangelism and concern for people far from God.

They just lost mission focus one person at a time, and they’re dying. They are in a decline that experts believe is not going to be arrested. It’s not going to be turned around unless God does some miraculous intervention. And there was once a whole movement a long time ago.

And we’re a part of a kind of movement today. Not a denomination, but a movement. But I want to tell you, it all hinges on the mission statement in your heart and mine. It’s that vulnerable. So in the moments that remain in this talk, I want to think with you about how to cultivate this third habit, how to be inviting followers to Christ.

I’ll run through a few principles on this one. Here’s the first principle. I talked about this a number of years ago, and I hope this just becomes a mantra for all of us. The first principle when it comes to this business of inviting people is never say no for anyone. This principle is fundamental to the spread of the gospel in the New Testament.

What happened there was people who everybody gave up on, Jesus didn’t give up on. And the reason the gospel spread so rapidly is because the seed just got scattered everywhere. And tax collectors and Samaritans and lepers and sinners and Gentiles and people that everybody else was sure would say no to God, said yes to Jesus. You never know.

I remember being at a banquet one time. It was not a church banquet; it was at a thoroughly secular setting. A group of us were sitting at a table, and there was one empty seat. And this guy came and sat down in it. He was kind of a smooth character. I was sitting here, an empty seat, and then a very attractive woman was on the other side of it.

He sat down and his first comment was, "Well, what have you been doing here except turning the heads of everybody in the room?" And I said, "Well, just eating lunch." And that launched us into an interesting conversation. It turned towards spiritual things, and at one point I talked about being at a church for people who don’t like church.

He said, "Well, that’s kind of interesting," and then told me his background. He grew up Jewish, had no involvement in that faith, worship, or any practices beyond the age of 12. He had been to a Unitarian Church a couple of times a long time ago. And he said, "I have kind of an interesting deal. I’ve been divorced three times." And we talked about a number of issues.

If I had to assess somebody who on the pages of one conversation I thought was about as far away as they could be, it would have been this guy. His name was Steve. But because we talked about it, and because I had a bit of a tug, I invited him to come to the church that I worked at. This was when I was in California.

I told him where it was, and I never thought I’d see him again. And the next Sunday he came to a service and sat in the front row of that church. He sat right in the front row. He came up to me and talked to me about it afterwards. He asked where we got our material, and I told him about the Bible. He went out and got a New Testament. He had never read a New Testament in his life. He never had one, and he never read one.

This was a seeker. He had to get up real early in the morning because he had a long commute. He started getting up a half-hour earlier, and he would read 20 or 30 pages of the Bible every day. And he came back to church the next week and the next week. And we kept talking about this. He started thinking about making a decision.

It was a very costly thing for him because of his heritage. His family told him that if he became a Christian, he would be dead to them. That’s what he went through. But he finally made that decision. He said "yes" to God. The last time I saw him when I was back in California, he was with a friend. He came up to me and threw his arms around me and said to this person, "I want you to meet the person who helped me find Jesus."

And I almost missed that. I almost did because I said no for him. Think of your world. Anybody in your world so far from God that you’re just ready to give up on them? Maybe it’s a neighbor who is quite shy and never leaves the house, doesn’t seem to want to be in a relationship with anybody. Maybe it’s a co-worker who just grates on everybody’s nerves including yours.

Maybe it’s a relative who makes fun of your faith. Maybe it’s somebody you’ve known for a long time that just seems real deeply sunk in a pattern of sin. Maybe it’s an acquaintance of 10 or 20 or 30 years that is just apathetic. Maybe it’s somebody that’s cynical. Maybe it’s an atheist. Maybe it’s somebody who’s quite hostile. Listen, don’t give up.

You never know when a crisis will hit. You never know when a hurt will open a door. You never know when a heart is going to soften. You never know when some ice will melt. You never know what God can do. You just don’t know. So don’t you ever say no for anyone. That’s the first rule of effective inviters — never say no for anybody because you never know.

The second rule for effective inviting is to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re inviting. This is very important because a lot of us have been around church for so long, we forget what it’s like to be a stranger.

A few blocks away from where my parents live in Hacienda Heights, California, is the largest Buddhist Temple in America. And when you visit it, you get an insight into what it’s like to go into a place of worship where you’re a stranger. I took one of my kids there when we were back over Christmas.

It’s a real educational experience to go into a place of worship where you’re a stranger, and you don’t know the customs, and it’s kind of intimidating. You go in there and say, "Do I have to take my shoes off?" "Do they have a good system to make sure I’ll get my own shoes back? What if I end up with a Buddhist pair of shoes? What do I do with those?"

Mark Mittelberg, as you know, is real involved in the Contagious Christianity Course, designing it and writing it. He was back in that area and speaking at my parent’s church. He went to visit this temple, and being as interested in evangelism as he is, he got involved in some evangelistic conversations with some folks who were there in a group. Somebody came up to them and asked if they could take a picture of the group. So they did.

But then Mark subsequently found out that picture was going in a brochure for the temple. And he’s been afraid now that there’s like promotional Buddhist literature going around the world with Mr. Contagious Christian on the front panel. It can be kind of an intimidating experience when you go to a place of worship, and you don’t know the rules, you don’t the customs, you don’t know the people.

A lot of us forget what that’s like. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re inviting. Like when you invite someone to come offer to pick them up, and drive over together. That’s both a gesture of friendship, and it makes it more likely that somebody will feel comfortable to actually come.

Another thing that helps is put an invitation in their hands — something physical — that will remind them of what it is that you’re inviting them to. Folks in our communications department print out invitations that are available every week. There’s some at the information booth. You can get some following the service this morning to use between now and the weekend.

Offer to go out after the service and eat together or have coffee afterward. And again, that's a gesture of friendship, and it also gives you a chance to debrief what it is the other person might be thinking. And if you do that, if you go with the other person, you all should know this, but who should pay? You people just scare me sometimes. There’s only two choices, either them or me. So you’ve got a 50/50 shot at it. Just be bold and take a risk, them or me?

When you go out after the service, who should pay? Some of you have to stay after class. You should pay. Now sometimes you ask and the person says no, or you ask and they say they’re going to come, but they don’t. Or you ask and they say they’re going to come, and they do, but they don’t get converted. Nothing seems to happen. Don’t get discouraged.

You know, we have a name for a piece of furniture. My favorite name for a piece of furniture in this whole place is out in the lobby. There’s a little bench, and a lot of people will sit there, and they invite seeking friends to come. They sit on that bench, and they wait for them, and they pray for them. And sometimes their friends come, and sometimes they don’t. And it just feels embarrassing and painful. And that’s called the fool’s bench.

It’s called the fool’s bench because sometimes you just feel like a fool waiting for someone who doesn’t come. You know, people who have a heart like Jesus’ heart are willing to put up with a certain amount of risk and pain and difficulty, which is pretty small compared to what Jesus put up with to redeem you and me.

But that’s part of what an effective inviter does. They put themselves in the shoes of the person that they’re going to invite. And that leads me to the next point. You need to recognize that this third habit of invitation is a process, not a one-time event. The deal is not that you invite somebody one time and then say, "Well, I can check habit number three off my list." It doesn’t work that way. It’s a process.

I’ll tell you about a new believer at LCC Creek. His name is Quinn, and somebody developed a relationship with him and gave him a tape of a message from here, and he liked it. He listened to another one, and got a whole bunch of tapes. And finally, he started coming. He sat through a service one day, and when it was over, he just stayed in his chair because he didn’t want to get stampeded.

A LCC attender, a guy from Axis, saw him sitting there. He walked into the lobby and was almost out to his car, and he just had this prompting from God, "You ought to stop and talk to that guy." He didn’t want to do it, but kept on walking. But finally he said, "All right, I’ll go back." He came back and struck up a conversation and developed a relationship.

So Quinn started going to Axis. He came here and also to Axis, and devoured everything he could about the gospel. Eventually, he found there’s this course called a Contagious Christian Course, and he wanted to take it. So he asked one of the leaders here, "Can I take that class?" Even though he wasn’t a Christian. And the leader had to think about two seconds and then said, "Yeah, that would be great. Why don’t you do that."

So Quinn went to Contagious Christian although he wasn’t a Christian yet, so he wasn’t ready to get contagious, but he went to it. And he learned just about every form of presenting the gospel known to human beings. He became one of the most sophisticated seekers in the history of this church.

After Axis one time one of the attenders was talking to him and found out he was a seeker and said, "Would you like for me to explain to you how to become a Christian?" And Quinn said, "Well, okay. What are you going to use? You going to use the bridge illustration? You going to use the bridge with Romans 6:23 at the bottom? You going to use do versus done? I like do versus done."

He threw the poor Axis guy so much, he didn’t know what to say. He was completely psyched out by the end of that conversation. It took a long time, but eventually Quinn crossed the line. And he became a Christian. But it’s a process deal. It is not a one-time event.

And if you think about invitations as a one-time event deal, it’s not going to be effective. In fact, one way to think about it is that extending an invitation in a relationship with a seeker has a kind of similar dynamic to asking a favor of someone. You can ask somebody a favor when it’s a significant favor, and they’re likely to say yes. But if you come back for another favor too soon, if a relationship consists just of me always asking you to do me favors, it’s not sustainable.

Well, if you’ll think about inviting somebody to a service in kind of that category, it’ll help you get a handle on the dynamic stuff. So you need to be involved in a caring relationship where you’re developing the relationship, and you’re hanging out with the other person. You’re genuinely caring for them, and you’re listening, and you’re talking, and you’re being with each other.

So that the invitation process becomes part of a larger, deeper relationship, just as asking a friend for a favor is part of a deeper relationship. And if you want more training on that, again, the Frontline event coming up January 22nd can be real helpful. But think about inviting as a process, not a one-time event. And be sensitive to the dynamic, that it’s kind of like asking somebody a favor. So there needs to be a lot of relational depth and periodic invitations, not back to back to back.

The next principle for effective inviters is to be creative about what you invite them to. And there are so many opportunities here. We have seeker services on a real regular basis. But there are other things that you can invite people to.

A long-time LCC Creek attender named Daniel has two seeking friends. They were at a party together, and he wanted to help them take the next step in their journey, but they weren’t ready to come to a service here, yet. They weren’t ready to come to church.

So Daniel asked if they might be willing to go an extension opportunity to serve some people in need. This one was going to be at an AIDS clinic. And these two guys were kind of thinking about it. While they were having that conversation, another person came up. This was a young woman, an attractive young woman. She heard about it, and said she’d like to go. So then they decided they’d like to go. That’s another evangelistic principle to keep in your back pocket somewhere.

Well, they all ended up going to this clinic, and it was a real stretching experience. Daniel talked about how they met one patient there whose name was Joe, and he was quite depressed. This is just before this last Christmas, and so Daniel said, "If you could do anything, what would you do?"

This guy said he’d like to go Christmas shopping, if he could just get out and go to the store. So Daniel had kind of a creative prompting. He went to the head of the clinic, and got permission, and they all went in the van. Two AIDS patients, three seekers, and one Creeker all got in a van.

They went Christmas shopping and then went to Taco Bell afterwards. And they were all kind of wondering about Joe’s story, how long he’d been sick and so on. And so he told them. He said, "I have AIDS. When I was ten years old, I was raped." He told them a story like they had never heard before. Daniel said, "You could have heard a pin drop in that van.

Here’s a couple of seekers, and they were so moved by this experience that they said to Daniel, "We must come with you next time. The next time you go out to serve like that, we want to come with you." Now again, these are seekers. They’re not even ready to come to a service yet, but to see the love of Jesus in action, to get a chance to watch that and be a part of it, that opened their hearts. They were ready for that.

We have so many tools around here. We have seeker services. We have special outreach events. You’re going to hear next week about this event called "Jairus." It’s going to be unbelievable. We had the opportunity to see some of that stuff at a staff meeting last week. That’s going to be unbelievable.

We have extension opportunities to serve people. We have seeker small groups just designed for folks that are seeking. We have events in sports ministries that could be a great front door for a lot of people. We have regular small groups with open chairs. I honestly don’t know of another church that offers more tools to help people do evangelism effectively. But it all rests on whether or not we’re on mission.

And so that leads to the one final thing I want to say for those of us who want to be inviting followers of Christ, and it is this: Keep your heart right. Guard your heart. Do what you need to do to keep it soft and tender and to have written on it that mission statement — "that lost people matter to God and they matter to me too." So pray bold prayers.

You know, between now and Easter is a real key season for us. I want to challenge you, everybody in this room, to have at least two people or families that you’re praying for on a regular basis. Maybe God will lead you to pray for a whole lot more than that, but pray for at least two. Think of what it would be like if they were here now, knowing and loving and worshiping God with you. Pray for the chairs they’ll occupy.

Maybe some of you want to pray for a whole row. Maybe just look at a row of chairs and say, "God, I’d love it if someday this whole row of chairs would be filled with people who come to know you and love you, and I could have a part in that process. So I’m going to pray for this row, God. I want this row to be filled up. One day I want to look at these chairs and just see them filled with people who have come to know you."

Well, we can all pray. And we can all invite. We can all do that. And if you ever wonder, "Is it worth it? All of that prayer and energy and nervousness and the risk and the rejection and the effort, is it ever worth it?" I want you to see something. I want you to take a look at the side screens, and I want us to see a brief picture of why it is that we do what we do.

So they’re going to roll a video right now of a baptism that took place this last June. Now watch as they come up. There’s like an explosion of joy. Just look at the emotion. And every one of us who is here that’s a Christ-follower and has been baptized, we’ve all had that moment. We’ve all had that joy. For some it might have been kind of quiet, for some it was real intense. We’ve all had that, and it’s wonderful. It’s unforgettable. It’s also unrepeatable. You only get to do that one time.

But there’s another joy, in some ways maybe even a greater joy. It’s the joy that heaven experiences a lot. It’s the joy of someone who’s a part of the process of leading another human being to repentance and new life in Christ. So I want to show that video one more time. But this time I want to ask you to notice the joy of the believing friends that are in the water helping the baptism take place. So, let’s roll it one more time.

Now this time, keep watching, but take a look. Some of the people go down, and we’re going to freeze it right there. I want you to take a look at the faces of the three guys that are still standing. I wonder in this moment right here if you could ask them, "Was it worth it?" What do you think is going on inside their minds right now? What do you think is going on inside their hearts right now?

I don’t have any question. You look at a picture like that. You just look at that picture for a moment. And they would tell you in a heartbeat, "To be standing here right now it’s worth it. It’s worth every prayer I prayed. It’s worth every tear I shed. It’s worth every spiritual conversation that I launched into even though it was difficult and awkward sometimes, and sometimes I didn’t do it all that well.

"It’s worth every question that another person had even though I couldn’t answer them all. It’s worth every time I invited them to an event here and sat on that fool’s bench and had somebody not show up, and had to go through that sense of rejection. It’s worth it all.

"It’s worth it to be able to stand in this water and see people whose lives have been redeemed by Jesus Christ express their commitment to follow him forever in baptism and know that their sins have been washed away. And they will spend an eternity with Jesus Christ. It’s worth it." You look at that picture, and here’s the deal: that could be you. That could be every one of you.

Wouldn’t it be something next June when the lake thaws — which it will by June — if every one of us in the New Community was in the water? Would that be a vision? Just like we’re sitting here with each other now, what if we all saw each other in the water in June because every one of us was a part of the miracle of the drama of redemption? You tell me that wouldn’t be worth it. That’s our mission.

And I want you to notice the joy on these people’s hearts. We’re going to roll this in just one second because I know last night I had a number of people come up to me saying they got real concerned about guys being down in the water this long. You’ve got to let them up.

So just to remind you, this is just a video, this is not live. Let’s go ahead and roll it now and you look at the joy on the faces and in the bodies of the friends who were a part of this experience. And they know in this moment it was worth it, everything they did, to be able to share this celebration which is the joy of heaven every time one sinner repents, every time one son or daughter comes home to the Father.

That’s the mission, friends. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we say, "We will work and sweat and pray and devote ourselves. And we will develop relationships with people who are far from God, and we will learn how to share our faith and the gospel with them in a clear and compelling way.

And we will invite them to events that become tools for us where they can come and see, come and see, like seekers have been doing for 2,000 years — come and see. And I’m telling you, friends, as a team we can do this. And it’s worth it. Let’s stand for closing prayer.