Week 1 Sharing Sheep

“You will be my Witnesses…”

Week 1 - Sharing Sheep

Luke 15:1-7

Series Slide

Good morning and welcome to worship on this amazing day that the Lord has made.  It is so good to be back with you today. 

Yes, the Sabbatical was great!

Yes, I finished my Lenten Devotional and it is now available on Amazon, and we should have a few copies available by Wednesday.

Yes, I worshiped at other churches where I am the Presiding Elder.

Yes, I did some diving. AND

Yes, that Awakening Conference was refreshing, uplifting, and powerful, as you heard from Brian last week, but it is so good to be back in this house of the Lord, with you today.

I wanted to remind you that we will be gathering to worship this Wednesday, “Ash Wednesday,” as we begin Lent.  Jerod will be leading a service in The Current at noon, and I will be leading a service here in the sanctuary at 6:00.  I hope you will be here.  This will be a powerful time together as we begin this season of Lent together.  It will probably not be like any Lenten service you have attended in the past… so, make sure you are here as we gather in worship together.

Before I get into today’s message, I must say “Thank You” to Bishop Leah, Jim, Ryan, and Brian for stepping into the pulpit in my absence.  I told a couple of people last week, “I must be a fool to leave for a month and have Leah, then Jim, then Ryan step in and preach!  Then I have to come back and follow them!” But then I thought, well, I’ll send Brian in; that way they’ll be glad I’m back… Then Brian knocked it out of the park last week.  I’m just picking on Brian, but he did bring an amazing and inspiring message last week!

Brian’s sermon perfectly set up my new sermon series!

As I told some of you, one of the things I do when I take a Sabbatical is sermon planning.  I consider what it is that I will preach for the next few weeks and months.  I had come up with an acceptable idea for a sermon series for Lent, but it just wasn’t setting right.  In fact, it felt off.  Then I went to the Annual Awakening Conference, and the focus was, “Can I get a Witness?” I spent 5 days focusing on Evangelism.  It was kinda interesting to think, “I wrote a book on this stuff… and what they are teaching and preaching is in my book.”  I could have gotten a big head about that, but then, during one of the times of worship, I heard the Holy Spirit, almost audibly, tell me, “You wrote a book on this, and you haven’t even preached it to the people in your care.  That is what you need to be preaching!”  So, I said, “Yes, Lord!” and here we are. 

So, we will spend the weeks leading up to Easter considering the idea that we are to be His witnesses.  And, we are going to do something new.  Starting this week, we will have a memory verse.  How many of you had memory verses in Sunday School?  Well, the Psalmist said, “I have hidden God’s word in my heart that I might not sin against him.” And the “God’s word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  That can only be true if we place God’s word on our hearts, if it is on our lips, if we are thinking of and contemplating it day and night.  So, our first memory verse is Acts 1:8.

“But You will receive power when the Holy Spirit Comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses, first in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth.”

Now, we are going to get started with that right now by reading that verse together.

Acts 1:8

“But You will receive power when the Holy Spirit Comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses, first in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth.”

Very good.  I’m not going to quiz anyone this week, but I want us to start working together to remember God’s word and place it in our hearts, on our minds, and over our lives.

With all that in mind, today, we are going to begin this journey to become witnesses.  We will be looking at four points that will develop into sermons in and of themselves over the next few weeks; starting with breathing deep.

Sermon Slide

But first, Would you pray with me?

<Prayer>

During our vacation in Roatan, Renee and I got to dive all four days we were there.  They way Coco View Resort works is, you wake up, do a beach dive if you want to, then eat breakfast, get on a boat by 8:30 and they take you to a dive site.  They would drop us off at different places like Mary’s Place, or Gold Chain Reef, or Mr. Bud’s Wreck, and a Dive Master would guide us along.  After that dive, you surface, get on the boat, and then prepare for another dive where they drop you off on Coco View Wall or Newman’s Wall and you follow the wall back to the resort and walk out of the water… then, you eat lunch, rest, and repeat in the afternoon.

Well, on the day we dove the Wreck of Mr. Bud, the winds were starting to pick up.  When we started to surface, we realized that the seas had gotten a little rough and it was going to be hard to get back on the boat.  But, Coco View’s boats have something different than a lot of dive boats… they have a center ladder.  In other words, you can get back on the boat by climbing a ladder in the center of the boat so you don’t have to worry about the rough surface waters.

We all got back on the boat and started preparing for our next dive.  The Dive Master came by and talked to all the divers and made sure we were all ready to dive and to know which ones were not going to dive.

As we approached Newman’s Wall, Renee and I got ready.  I had talked to Renee about what is called a negative entry, which means that you have no air in your BCD when you jump off so you immediately begin to descend.  That’s a safety type of entry when the seas are rough or there is a current.  So, we jumped and descended… then the boat took off.  I looked down, and we were on top of a reef that was about 30’ down to the sand… we were supposed to be over a wall that dropped down to over 100’ feet.  Renee and I looked around and none of the other divers had jumped, so it was just the two of us.  So, here we are… the two of us… alone in the ocean, not in the right place to begin our dive.  One option… we could panic, which wouldn’t help anyone… another option, we could surface, look around, and decide what we were going to do… Or, we could stop, breathe deep, and look at the facts.  I knew that we were on the south side of the island of Roatan.  I knew that the resort was North of us and Newman’s wall was between us and the resort.  I looked at my compass, and followed the heading North until we came to the wall, then we dropped down to about 60’ and began following the wall back to the resort.  Sometimes, when things aren’t going as they seem… when we feel lost or alone… we simply need to stop, breathe deep, look at the facts, and correct our course.

That is where we are.  That is where we are today, not as a denomination or a church, but as followers of Jesus Christ.  Most of us grew up in a time when Christianity was seen as a positive.  If you wanted to be successful, you had to belong to a church and profess to be a Christian.  Around 1994, that mindset began to change in society.  Christianity became neutral.  It didn’t hurt to be a Christian, but being a Christian or not being a Christian didn’t affect your daily life in society.  Fast forward to 2014, and we see that everything shifted again.  We are now living in a negative world view toward Christianity.  There is a large part of society that not only doesn’t believe what we believe as followers of Jesus Christ,  but they think that what we believe and how we live is wrong… that it is Christian’s fault that bad things are happening in the world… that it was the churches fault that the Crusades happened… that it was the churches fault that slavery happened… that Christians were the cause of WW1 and WW2… that we are the ones who perpetuated misogyny and sexism… that we are hateful and angry toward sinners.

Now, for some of you, you are thinking, “well, yeah… I’ve been seeing this trend for years.”  Others of you are thinking I lost my mind this month.  So you don’t think I’m stating my opinion, here are the facts.

Several research groups conducted studies from 2018-2020.  Barna did one that I quoted a good bit in my book, Evangelism for Today.  But the one I want to focus on is the 2019 Pew Research study.

In that study, they discovered that 26% of the US does not claim a Religious Identity, up from 17% a decade before.  In that same study, they found that, 35% of those who claim a faith do not identify as Christian.  10 years before that was 23%.  What I am saying is that fewer and fewer people claim to be followers of Jesus Christ and more and more have abandoned faith all together.

Now, to bring this a little closer to home, Navarro County has 50,113 residents according to the most recent census.  Looking at those numbers from above… that means that 13,029 Navarro County Residents do not claim a religious identity,

And

Another 12,979 Navarro County Residents do not identify as Christian.  That’s a total of over 26,000 people around us that do not know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  That means there are 26,000 people in Navarro County destined to a hellatious eternity separated from God.  That means there are 26,000 of our neighbors living outside of the abundant life in Jesus Christ that we are promised.

Those are the facts… now it’s time to correct the course.  Over the next few weeks we will dive deeper into these next 4 points, taking them one at a time, but today I want to introduce the ideas.  

1)    We’ve got to stop sharing sheep and calling it church growth.  What do I mean by that?  When a family or an individual gets mad and leaves one church and joins a new church, the new church calls it growth.  The problem is, God’s kingdom hasn’t grown… in fact it has probably shrunk, because while the new church is looking for the sheep in another pasture, the lost sheep are getting away.  There is no rejoicing in heaven with sheep sharing… More on that next week.

2)    Let God do God’s Work.  You are not called to save a single soul.  God does the saving.  Your call is to plant, water, and gather the harvest for the master.  Be faithful to what God has called you to do.  Sometimes, you get to be the planter, sometimes you get to water, and sometimes you get to be a part of the harvest… but the Harvest belongs to the Lord.

3)    Evangelism is participatory.  You have to be involved.  You have to ‘do’ the work.  We all love the quote attributed to St. Francis of Assisi… “Share the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.”  Well, I don’t think he said that.  In fact, St. Francis was known to be a preacher… and preachers use words.  As Scripture tells us, “How will they know if no one tells them”. It is our work, our job, our calling to share the faith.

4)    Evangelism is Incarnational.  God became flesh and dwelt among us. And, as Christ is in you and me, so we share Christ with the world.  We do nothing without Christ in us.  We, as the Body of Christ, are to be sharing Christ with the world.

We will get much deeper into all these points and more as we traverse this topic of evangelism.  But what I want you to walk out of here today with is an understanding that the religious landscape of the world has shifted.  You do realize that the world is sending missionaries to the United States now.  Yes, we send out missionaries to other countries, but we also receive about 12% of the missionaries from around the world.  Thousands of people come to the US every year to evangelize this “great nation.” 

Sermon Slide

Here is what an Oxford Press Article said about this:

“Missionaries in America view the United States as a “Christian” nation in trouble. America has lost its spiritual fire with growing materialism, secularism, humanism, and sexual immorality. It is no longer a “city on a hill” or a “beacon of light,” and may even become like the now secular and “dark continent” of Europe. Although the United States is a predominately Christian and a dominant missionary-sending nation, it is framed as a nation that has lost its foothold as a leading Christian influence. Its churches are great in number, but they are weak in “Spirit.” Missionaries are therefore needed to bring spiritual revival in America.”

That article was from 10 years ago.  Think about the statistics I started with.  Over those 10 years we have continued to see a 10% rise in those who do not profess a faith and a 10% rise in those who profess a faith other than Christianity.

That is the world we live in.  So, what’s the point?  God has called us to go into the world and make disciples.  As the Global Methodist Church, we are called to spread scriptural holiness across the land.

These next 6 weeks, I hope to empower you to do just that.

It is time to make a difference in our community by stopping, breathing deep, looking at the facts, and sharing our faith.

But one thing we cannot forsake is taking Christ into us, letting our Lord fill us to overflowing with His grace, with His love, with His mercy… so, we stop now to receive Christ into us, to fill us, to be made new in us through Holy Communion.

Ushers….