TRANSFORMED

Transformed

By Missionary John Leonard

Fun with a purpose is going to come give us some special music. And I I shall note I went when I call. Jesus always together.

Jesus never thank you. We don't me always forever to good morning. We have our bibles with you.

Let's turn to Luke, chapter twelve. We'll be looking at verses 16 through 21. If you don't have your bibles, you can go ahead and follow on the screen.

Let's go ahead and stand for the scripture reading as we look into God's word. Verse 16 says, then he spoke a parable to them, saying, the ground of a certain rich man yielded plentiful. And he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do since I have no room to store my crops? So he said, I will do this.

I will pull down my barns and build greater. And there I will store all the crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, you have many goods laid up for many years.

Take your ease, eat, drink and be merry. Verse 20 says, but God said to him, fool, that night your soul will be required of you. Then whose will those things be which you have provided? So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.

Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we love you. We thank you for your mercy, your grace.

We thank you for today to come before you and worship you in this house. We just pray and ask that you give Pastor Jordan the word, speak from your word, and just ask that you help us to be attentive to your word and our hearts in Jesus name. I was born in the nineties, and you were already serving on mission field in the nineties.

And that is humbling, that an example of great faithfulness is here with us. So thank you for being faithful to ministry for so long and serving as a church planner in Brazil and providing ministry to people who are in desperate need of the gospel. And as amazing as it is that people go around the world, to Brazil, to China, to Russia, all the way across the corners of this globe, we have an amazing mission field here, and we have amazing neighbors that we can talk to and connect with and just have daily conversations with.

And I would imagine that you find that ministry is different everywhere, but it's the same everywhere. It's relationships. And I look forward to us as a church hearing what your ministry experiences have been, and we look forward to being encouraged by the word of God.

So come bring the word of God to us. Thank you, princess. Good morning.

It is great to be here with you this morning. Let's open the word of God to two Corinthians, chapter five. But before we stand for the reading, I'd like to give a little introduction to the sermon.

Please go by our table at some time during this morning, pick up a prayer card, pick up a coffee, candy. They are a limited supply, so if you like it, grab another one. Okay.

But we didn't, unfortunately, didn't bring a lot, but we brought enough for you to savor what Brazilian coffee tastes like. We are here this morning not only to preach the word of God, but to seek out prayer warriors, people who will pray for us as we go back down to the mission field. We are church planters.

Is it easy to plant churches from a wheelchair? Well, it's not impossible. Let's say that. And with your prayers in God's power, we are able to do that.

So please do. And if you want our prayer letter, our email is on that card. Drop us a line with your email and say, put me on your list.

And every two months, you will get a prayer letter in your email. So you won't only pray. Dear Lord, bless the Leonards in Brazil.

You will know specific places and people and what we are doing. Title through the sermon this morning is transformed. When we accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior, we are transformed.

We have inner city works in Brazil, just like Northridge Baptist church. We are inner city. We are even more inner city because the city we are in.

And yes, please stay for the second hour, the Sunday school hour. We will share with you what God has done through prayers and through our efforts in the last four years in Brazil. So please stay for that.

You will see what it is like to be in a city of 23 million people. So Paulo is mass chaos. It is seven times the population of the state of Iowa.

So not the city of Des Moines, the state of Iowa. You get the whole state of Iowa times seven crunched into an area 30 miles north to south, 50 miles east to west. But that's for Sunday school.

And do the people in Brazil have the same problems that we do here? Yes. And the main problem is they are unsafe and they are looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places, usually alcohol, drugs, promiscuous living. It is down there, just like it is here in the United States.

And when they accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they are transformed. Let's stand for the reading of the word of God. Second Corinthians, chapter five, verses 16 through 21.

We read Luke 1216 through 21. Now we're going to read two Corinthians 5:16 through 21. The first verse, if you notice, talks about before we knew Christ in a different way, before we accepted Christ as our savior, and after we knew him, we knew him in the flesh, and we knew him as a born again believer.

So follow along as I read the second Corinthians 5:16-21 wherefore henceforth know we him no more after the flesh. Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.

Old things have passed away. Behold, all things are become new, and all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation, to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ.

As though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead. Be ye reconciled to God, for he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Heavenly Father, we ask your blessing on this moment as we direct our hearts and our thoughts towards your word and your message for us today.

May we use it in our lives. If there be one here this morning who has not accepted Christ as their savior, who knows of Christ in the flesh, but not as a transformed believer, that today will be their day, and that we might use this message and share it all around as we go about our week. In Christ's name we pray.

Amen. You may be seated. Next a state Brazil has 27 states.

It is larger than mainland United States. They just chose to make the states a little bigger. So they don't have 50 states, they have 27.

But Brazil is larger than mainland United States. When we purchased Alaska, Brazil then became smaller than the United States. Enough for that geography lesson, right? But the state north of us, it's about 2 hours away, driving is called miner Jedi.

That is where most of the precious and semi precious stones of the world come from. They are shipped elsewhere to be cut and polished and some of them are cut and polished there. But you go to Mena Jedis and in the churches I say lift your hand if you're a miner.

And chances are there's three or four of them in the crowd that are miners because we are in the place to mine precious and semi precious stones. What is precious? Well, a diamond's precious. Okay.

And semi precious. Well there's a lot of the other stones that are semi precious. Now, in one service, a gentleman brought.

I went to speak a few times, like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday night, and he brought a rock for me, and he says, what is this? And I said, what do you see? Rock. Right. And what do you do with a rock? Well, I like to.

I used to like to skip rocks before I was shot on the mission field by a drug lord that didn't want us preaching, because when people get saved, they don't need crack cocaine anymore, and they stopped buying it, and it put a dent in his income, so he thought he would do away with the guy that was putting a dent in his income, and that was me. And that was 19 years ago. But this was recent.

But before I was shot, I used to like to skip rocks on the water, and this one has a flat surface on the bottom. And I said, oh, no, I think this one will skip. It'd be a good one to throw across some water.

He said, oh, you wouldn't want to throw this one in the water. He said, the outside is pretty rough, but the inside, it's an amethyst. It's beautiful.

And sometimes we look at people, and especially in the inner city, and we'll say, oh, that person's chock full of problems. That person has a lot of baggage. That person is.

He doesn't even have a flat side to skip across the water. He's worthless. Well, not to God, because cod is the miner.

He doesn't look only on the outside. He looks on the inside. And he says, that person, if that person so wishes, he can be transformed into something beautiful.

And here we see the amethyst Baptist. You got to put the finished product in there. And here's a ring made out of that amethyst when it was broken open, and it was showed what the precious, semi precious stone inside, and it was made into rings and necklaces and etcetera.

The first point we have this morning is when we accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior. We have a new story to tell. Should have kept the water out.

Thank you. We have a new testimony in verse 16. It tells us of the before and after the person that knows Christ in the flesh.

And then it says, we don't know him that way anymore. And then in verse 17, at the end of the verse, it says, all things are become new many, many years ago. And I'm 64, so I can say that now.

They had a song that said, the things I used to do, I don't do them anymore. Things I used to say, I don't say them anymore. Things I used to see, I don't see them anymore.

And then it went on and on about other things, places I used to go, I don't go there anymore. Since Jesus has come into my heart, we are transformed. We have a new testimony.

All things are become new. The things that believers do are not strange anymore. They're common.

The things I did before I knew Christ in the flesh, I heard of them. The person even sometimes used his name in vain because he was taught that that's what you were supposed to do. You knew of Christ, but you knew him in the flesh.

Now you know him as your savior because you have been transformed. As a missionary, church planner, I like to encourage people to witness, to carry tracts around. Oh, they won't read them then.

That's their problem. In hell, one day when it's too late, they will remember you as a friend that cared enough to hand them a gospel tract. Oh, they'll throw it away.

They'll rip it up. They won't read it then it's their problem before you hand it to them. It's your problem when you hand it to them.

Now, that's not the attitude we should have. We should be caring. We should be loving.

We should hand it to them with a smile on our face. I think you'll like this. There's something from God our creator to you in this.

Would you care to read it? And by the way, our church's address and service times are on the back. Love to see you there someday. Oh, no one will come.

They will come. Eventually someone will. If you hand out enough tracts, it might take ten, 2100, 1000, it might take 10,000 tracts handed out before one person will come.

But they will come. Our Jerusalem. And the Bible does, Christ does encourage us as his disciples.

Jerusalem, Judea and outermost poster parts of the earth. Your Jerusalem is your family and your friends and your workmates and your classmates. You're supposed to witness to them.

80%, 85% of those who are witness to, they ran a survey who have accepted Christ as their savior was through family, friends, acquaintances, classmates, workmates. And then 15% was cold turkey. They didn't know the person.

They heard the gospel and got saved. So we do door to door visitation as church planners, we move into an area that God has led us to. We knock on doors.

We don't know anyone. So we're looking for that 15% and we find them. Mata and Homildu, their door was knocked on Bev was out with the ladies, I was out with the guys, and Bev knocked on their door and handed them a truck and invited them to church.

And they said, we already have our church. Now, Brazil is the largest roman catholic country in the world, so we just presume that they are a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Do you go to church all the time? Oh, yes.

What church is it? And they were spiritists. They worshiped demons. Their gods were demon gods.

They lived in fear. And basically we say, well, someday if you wake up and you feel that there is something missing, you come to our church and I think you'll find it there. So they did.

They felt that there was something missing. Have you ever put a puzzle together and there's pieces missing? Frustrating, right? That was Maat and Homildu. And they came again and then they came again and they found the missing pieces and accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior and were transformed.

We don't only have a new testimony, we have a new task. We have a new job to do. Ooh, job.

I don't like jobs. Oh, welcome to life. It's part of living, getting a job, working, paying bills, giving your tithe to church, paying your rent, etcetera.

We have a new testimony, we have a new task. I had a friend in Brazil, I grew up with them. We were kids together.

Names? Adalto. I always liked to take friends to church. A lot of them did get saved, some of them didn't.

But I'd say, Adalto, let's go to church. No, don't have time, too busy. He was focused, said, I'm going to get money together and I'm going to buy a cattle ranch.

Oh, great. But it's Sunday, man, let's go to church. No, no, no, I work on Sundays, too.

Some people do, some people have to. But come on, let's go, just a couple hours. Come to church with me.

Don't have time. So few years. Adulthood did buy a cattle ranch.

And I'd look him up and I'd say, hey, Adalto, let's go to church, man, let's go worship God with me, man, it'd be great. Nope, too busy. I said, when is enough enough? And he says, there's never enough.

I said, you already have more, you already have your dream. He says, no, I have other dreams now when more is never enough. And I says, well, what do you want to, what are you going to get now? And he says, well, I want to be mayor of our city.

So he ran for mayor and he got it he's a good guy. Hard worker, honest, driven. He became the mayor.

Went down to his nice fancy office. It was nice. Have a special sermon tonight.

Come to church, man. Don't have time. More's never enough.

I said, yep, more's never enough, right? And he says man, come on, take a break. No, I don't have time. And I says, well, what do you need more? And he says, well, I want to.

I'm running for Congress now. And he ran for Congress and got it. First shot, got it.

And the same story repeated itself. And I says, what's more? And he says, well, I'm going to run for senate. Senate seat.

And he ran. And good man, honest, driven, hard worker. Everything he promised he did, he became a senator.

I went by and I said, hey, Adalto Moore is already here, man. What else do you want? He says, I want to become the governor of our state. Great.

So he ran for governor and got it. About that time Covid came around. I caught it.

He caught it. I made it through and out. Who didn't? He died.

He died a good man. Everyone loved him. Hard worker, driven, honest, but christless.

More was never enough. Like the reading that was done this morning in Luke, chapter twelve.