If you would, let's take our copies of the scriptures and we're going to turn together to Acts chapter 18. Acts chapter 18. We are in week four of four of the series that we're beginning. to start this new year that's called Bring Them to Jesus. I've mentioned before that I want to bring a year-long emphasis in the life of our church to the importance of evangelism. And in order to do that, we've had to think about a number of different things together to kind of orient ourselves to the discussion. One of the central things that we've been thinking about since the very beginning of this series is a very basic question, but one that we don't want to rush past. It's the question, what is evangelism? This morning, we're going to draw our series to a conclusion with what I hope will be something encouraging for you and something challenging for all of us. But I want to remind us of where we've been so that we can proceed together this morning. So we've asked, what is evangelism? And flowing out of our first week together in this series, I gave you this definition, this summary. Evangelism is our happy, loving efforts to bring people into the presence of the living Jesus so that they can recognize and receive him as their long-awaited, all-satisfying Savior and Lord. We've summarized it in the title of this sermon, Bring People to Jesus, because Jesus is alive and Jesus changes people and there is no salvation apart from Christ. So we're thinking about this together. What is evangelism? And we thought together not just about what it is, but what it actually looks like in the life of our church. The second week we thought about why we should be engaged in the work of evangelism. And we considered how nobody gets saved if we don't bring them to Jesus. How Jesus has entrusted this work to us. Last week we thought about what we should say in evangelism. And we said that we wanted to be people who spoke with the voice of Christ. Because it's the voice of Christ that calls Christ's sheep together and assembles them, gathers them as a people. It's the voice of Christ that governs our life together as a church. We need to be a people who are devoted to the voice of Christ as the thing that guides and directs the way we evangelize and that shapes what we say when we do it. This week I want to come to a final thing. I want to think together about why we can keep doing this. Why can we persevere in the work of evangelism? Because the reality is, if you've tried to share the gospel with somebody, you've run into people who've rejected you. There are different estimates. We have an estimate from a member of our own church that says that it takes seven times or so of sharing the gospel with somebody before they'll really give you a hearing. It takes a lot of work to bring people to Jesus, and yet we're supposed to do it. If I were to ask in a survey what keeps most of us from actually being engaged in evangelism, I suspect that for many, many of us, perhaps even the majority of us, it all boils down to what if they say no? What if they reject me? What if they reject Christ? What if that causes consequences in our relationship? How can I just keep doing this over and over and over again with people not knowing what's going to happen as I do it? How can we persevere in evangelism even when people reject Jesus and reject us? That's the question I want to put before us this morning. How can we persevere in evangelism even when people reject Jesus and resist us? Now, many of you are married and have dated before. I may have told this before, but I'm going to use it again if I have. When I knew that I wanted to date Elise, I knew that I wanted to date her, but I did not know if she wanted to date me. And I wanted to make sure that I had a pretty good guarantee of success before I went in and I talked to her about what it would mean for us to date. So I did what any self-respecting 18-year-old man would do. I asked her best friend. I said, hey, Amy, Amy's her best friend's name, Amy, does Elise have any interest in dating me? And Amy went back and she gathered information and she let me know that she wouldn't be opposed to the idea of dating me. And so I depended on that. So that when I went in and had that awkward conversation, asking Elise, hey, would you be interested in dating me? And then when she said, let me think about it. And then we sat on top of washing machines in the laundry room and talking about whether she would date me. And she said, let me think about it some more. And then I waited another six weeks and I knew that she said, let me think about it all the way through Christmas break before she finally said, yes, I'll date you. The thing that I held on to through all of that waiting and wondering was that her friend had said that in a moment of clarity, she said she would be interested in dating me. I had a guarantee of success, at least to some degree. And that changed things for that conversation. What I want to suggest to you this morning as we look at Acts chapter 18 is that when you go to have a hard conversation with somebody about Jesus not only can you be assured that Jesus is with you and that he will strengthen you and that he will work through you through his word but you can be assured that according to God's own sovereign purpose people will be saved if you share the gospel. People will trust Christ if you share the gospel. God has given us every reason in his word to believe that evangelism will be successful if we do that. So I want to look at two ideas with you from Acts chapter 18 this morning as we think about these things together and as we begin to prepare ourselves to process what faithful evangelism looks like for us in 2025 as Manti Baptist Church. So if you will let's read in Acts chapter 18 beginning in verse 1. After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks. When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, Your blood be on your own heads. I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles. And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titus Justice, a worshiper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue. Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians, hearing Paul, believed and were baptized. And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent for I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you for I have many people in this city who are my people. And he stayed a year and six months teaching the word of God among them. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. We're asking this question, how can we persevere in evangelism even when people reject Jesus and reject us? At one level, I want to say that, well, if Paul could do it, so can you. Paul repeatedly faced opposition throughout his ministry. In fact, up until this point, the norm for him was to go and try to share the gospel in the synagogues, be rejected by the Jews, reach a few Gentiles, and run out of town before they could kill him. That was his normal experience. He saw some success, but he faced a whole lot of rejection and resistance and persecution because he was devoted to bringing Jesus to people and people to Jesus. Now, if Paul can endure that rejection, perhaps we ought to think, well, we can too. We have the same spirit at work in us, but at the same time, we have to look at this and realize that this is hard. And Paul himself seems to have struggled to know what he should be doing as he continued to do this work. As we come to our passage this morning, Paul goes into the city of Corinth. We have two of these long letters that Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, the Corinthians. This is a significant church in the story of the New Testament for a lot of different reasons. But as Paul begins to work his way into this city, which was one of the preeminent cities in the Roman Empire, one of the preeminent cities in Greece at this particular time, He begins to continue the work of the gospel as he's done it. Once he gets there, he meets a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius, the Roman emperor, had kicked all the Jews out of Rome because of some strife that was coming because of them, maybe because they were persecuting Christians. Paul goes to them and he begins to stay with them working as a tent maker and he begins to do what he's done so many times. He goes to the people that he has a lot in common with, the Jews, and he begins to try to show them from the scriptures that Jesus, the one whom he serves, is the Christ that they've been waiting for. But when he goes and when Silas and Timothy come and accompany him in this work, he immediately encounters opposition to the point where he finally says, as he faces all of this opposition and being reviled by these people, your blood be on your own heads. I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles. And so Paul goes out, he finds a place where he can begin to continue the work of evangelism that he's begun, and he begins to share the gospel with people. People come to faith in Christ. But it's at this point, as he's facing opposition from the Jews, as he's receiving a sort of small harvest among the Gentiles, that for so much of Paul's ministry, he said, it's time for me to move on. But God has other plans for Paul and God has other plans for the people in Corinth. Paul receives a vision in verse 9. The Lord speaks to Paul in a vision and tells him that he needs to press on with the work that he's begun. And what I want to suggest to us this morning is that we need to press on with the work that God has begun with us. Two things I want you to see in this text. Number one, we persevere in evangelism because our faithful God has promised us his presence. We persevere in evangelism because our faithful God has promised us his presence. Notice how the Lord's words for Paul begin in verse nine. And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent. Okay, there's the instruction. Keep sharing the gospel. Don't give up. Why? Verse 10, for, for I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you. The very first thing that God wants Paul to understand as he's carrying out this work of evangelism is that God is with him. That the God of the universe is on Paul's side. He's going to work with him. He's going to protect him. He's going to provide for him. He's going to preserve him. He's going to fulfill his purpose in him. And if we look at all the times that we received the Great Commission in the scriptures, what we see over and over and over again is that the power that is at work to enable us to persevere in it is the power of Christ himself. What does Jesus say at the conclusion of the Great Commission? He says, go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the very end of the age. Now, what does that mean? I thought Jesus was ascended into heaven. Well, Jesus gives us further clarification as Luke records his words at the beginning of Acts. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. What enables us to carry forward in faithfulness, not just in evangelism, but in everything as Christians, is that the God of the universe is with us. He is on our side and nothing will happen to us that falls outside of his good and gracious will for his people. We can persevere in evangelism because our faithful God has promised us his presence. And that promise will not fail us. Life gets hard, doesn't it? We face all kinds of difficulties. And I think sometimes because we want to be logical, we want to be rational, we want to be prepared, we can begin to excuse disobedience on the grounds of, well, I've got to protect myself, or I've got to protect my family. I've got to make sure that I've got everything covered. And what we end up doing is spending so much time providing protection and coverage for ourselves that we don't actually obey the will and the word of God. And we have forgotten in all of that, that if God wants to take us out of this world, all of the protection that we can provide for ourselves won't stop him. The assurance that we have in every circumstance is not how many insurance policies that we can take out. It's not how many camera systems we can put on the exteriors of our homes. It's not how well invested we are in all kinds of different products and procedures that can help us to respond in a crisis situation. The ultimate assurance that you have in everything is what David himself acknowledges when he says, the Lord is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me? That's exactly what God is telling Paul. Don't be afraid, Paul. Go on speaking. Go on fulfilling my purpose. The God of the universe is on your side. Man won't do anything to you unless I let him. So that one day, Paul could write to the Philippians that it didn't matter what happened to him. To die would be to depart and be with Christ. To live would be faithful ministry. He knew that no matter what happened in his life, he won. Because the faithful God was with him and had promised him his presence. Listen, when you go into a gospel conversation with somebody, the temptation for us is to think, I'm alone. It's just me and this person. I don't know how this is going to work. But as we've already seen, you're not alone. The God of the universe is with you. Christ is speaking by his spirit and he will be with you even if that conversation goes as badly as you can imagine. Because God is faithful and he's with his people. We persevere in evangelism because our faithful God has promised us his presence. But then the second thing I want you to see is that we persevere in evangelism because our sovereign God has promised us success. Notice what the Apostle Paul hears as God clarifies his presence with him in verse 10. He says, For I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you. Why? For I have many in this city who are my people. What is it that God is saying here? God is saying, I'm not done with the city of Corinth yet. There are Christians here who aren't Christians yet because they haven't heard the gospel. But I've got a purpose and I'm going to see that it's fulfilled in my sovereign plan. I'm going to ensure that everyone who's here has this opportunity to hear the gospel and that people come to faith in Christ. God speaks with sovereignty here and he uses that as something to motivate Paul to be faithful. Why? Because God's sovereignty is going to be the guarantee of his success. Now, I want to acknowledge as I say that, that we get a little squeamish in Southern Baptist churches when preachers start talking about sovereignty. Because of a word that starts with C and ends in Alvinism. We get nervous about talking about God's sovereignty. Because at the end of the day, we realize that this is a really difficult doctrine for us to understand. It's a really difficult doctrine for us to process because the Bible so clearly teaches that the God of the universe is sovereign over everything and that we are responsible for what we do. And Christians for generations have been asking, how do we fit all of this together? And we have to be willing to acknowledge that there's a ton of mystery there, but that whatever the Bible teaches, it teaches us that God does not surrender his sovereignty, nor do we cease to be responsible as God fulfills his purpose in the world. Instead, we need to use the doctrine of God's sovereignty in the way that God uses it in the scriptures. Listen, if the doctrine of divine sovereignty becomes for us a reason for spiritual pride, to look at other people and say, look how superior I am, we haven't understood the doctrine of God's sovereignty, and we need to repent. On the other side, if the doctrine of God's sovereignty becomes an excuse for us to be disobedient to what God commands, because God's just going to work it all out. We need to get rid of that. That's not biblical. And we need to repent. I don't care if you're a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Methodist. I don't care if you're a Calvinist or an Arminian. The doctrine of God's sovereignty is biblical and it matters because it does certain things in our lives that actually enable us to be the people that God wants us to be. How does the New Testament itself help us to understand the sovereignty of God in the nitty-gritty of life in a sinful world as we seek to fulfill God's purpose? Well, the sovereignty of God humbles us because we realize that we serve this majestic, all-powerful God and we are utterly distinct from Him and we have no claim upon Him. He is glorious and we are sinners. It humbles us to the dust. It doesn't exalt us in pride. It shows us how frail and weak we are in his presence. The sovereignty of God helps us to see the glories of God's love. Because God could use his sovereign power to crush you. But he gives to you life and breath and everything. And through faith in Jesus Christ, he gives you eternal life in his presence. The sovereignty of God also becomes for us a motivation to faithfulness. The sovereignty of God is not an excuse to not evangelize. It is a motivation to evangelism. You say, well, how can you say that? Look at our passage. What is it that's going to keep Paul engaged in the work of evangelism? It's not that he knows everybody in the city who's going to trust Christ. It's not that it's going to be easy for him to go out and share the gospel with all these people, but he has this assurance that the God who is sovereign over all things, his will is that people in the city of Corinth would be saved and so he can press on. And brothers and sisters, we have the same assurance. We have the same assurance. God tells us what his desire is, what he wants to see happen. He says it as clearly as day in First Timothy, that God desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. Listen, we have the God of the universe standing here telling us that if we will be faithful to share the gospel, people will be saved. And that's supposed to help us to carry on. In the midst of rejection and resistance and frustration, God says, I am with you and I'm going to accomplish my purpose in you. I'm going to do exactly what I always intended to do. Listen, we see what happens at the end of the story, don't we? Sometimes when you read a really long book, it helps to go to the last chapter and kind of get a feel for how things are going to end. I know that's kind of cheating. But really, if you've been assigned to read a great Russian novel by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or if you've been assigned to read The Lord of the Rings, or if you've been assigned to read any of these number of classic works of literature that we all would probably see on a bookshelf at a bookstore and say, maybe one day. If you've looked at those books, one of the things that can be really helpful to you actually getting through it is kinda knowing where things are gonna end so that you can begin to process your way through the rest of the story. Listen, as we process what faithfulness for us looks like, we need to recognize that God didn't tell us about the end in Revelation so that we could just sit on our haunches and wait for the rapture. God told us about how the story ends so that we can carry out the work that he's given us to do. Do you recognize what Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and 25? The end does not come until the gospel is preached among all nations. Christ will not return until every tribe, people, and tongue hears the gospel. So stop watching the news and start watching missionary reports. Because that's where you're gonna see evidence that Christ is coming back. As the gospel advances, we see Christ fulfilling his purpose and promise in the world. I can't speak to the eschatological significance of who the president is, but I can tell you there are a lot of people who don't know Jesus and have never heard of him. And that's what Jesus promises he'll do. And we not only see that as a promise from Jesus there, but we see the picture of it in Revelation, don't we? What do we see over and over and over again in Revelation? A multitude of people gathered around the throne of God and of the Lamb. Where are they from? From every tribe and nation and people and language. Every people group represented glorifying God around his throne and the Lamb who has accomplished their redemption. That's where the story ends. So that means that when we send missionaries around the world, they may not know what's going to happen in their lives. They may not know what God is going to do, but they know that they're going to be successful. You ever wonder how our missionaries keep going? They may not even see it in their lifetimes, but they know they're going to be successful. Why? Because God told them, and our sovereign God will fulfill his purpose. But I wanna even push on to our side of things. I don't know what God is going to do in any individual gospel conversation that I have, and I don't have enough of them, and neither do you. But if our God is very clear that his desire is that none should perish but all should come to repentance, if that's what God gives us as an assurance of his heart for people around us, and if God has shown us that he really will save people by the gospel, then oftentimes the thing that stands between people coming to Christ And people going to hell, it's not God's will, but our resistance to his will. You see, we persevere because God says, you're going to be successful. You can resolve to share the gospel with somebody, and you might not be successful today. You may not even be successful with that person. But if you keep diligently sharing the gospel, God is going to bring gospel fruit. because he has many people who have yet to come to Christ and he is faithful to fulfill his purpose. You see we need to understand that the sovereignty of God is a motivation for us to do anything and everything that God commands because we recognize that we know the end and God will do all that he said and it will all be for our good. Now, I want to get practical this morning. I want to give us a chance to kind of bring all of this together. We have spent the last several weeks thinking together about the work of evangelism. I'm going to summarize. I have done a little bit of that already, but I want to summarize and to get us to where we stand now. And then I've got a really practical thing that I want us to do together as a way to hopefully motivate us to take this and make it real. Okay? So we saw that evangelism is our happy, loving effort. to bring people who are far from God to the living Jesus so that they can recognize and receive Him as their all-satisfying Savior and Lord. We've seen that picture in the Scriptures. We talked about how the reason we do this is because people don't get saved if they don't meet Jesus. There's no salvation apart from Christ. So our fundamental aim is to bring people to Jesus. We can entrust Him to do what only He can do in saving sinners, but we want to bring everyone to Him so that they have a chance to recognize and receive Him for who He is. We've seen that what we're supposed to say is what Christ has said, because we're not bringing them to Reeves or to any of you, we're bringing them to him. And he has spoken through his word and by his spirit. So we speak the word of God and the word of God shapes our evangelistic practice. And now we ask, okay, well, why can't we keep doing this? And it's because God has promised us that he's going to be with us and that he, according to his good purpose, will grant to us success as we're faithful. So we've got all of this picture in front of us. The question is, okay, are we going to do anything and how? Are we actually going to do something with all that we've heard? Now listen, I'd be the first to admit that I can't make you do anything. All right? I can go out, I mean, I've already seen them. Maybe they just fell out, but some of you may have already thrown away the little insert in your bulletin because you don't want to do it. And that's fine. There are other ways to approach this. But that's going to happen. We're going to go out today, and I've been through churches long enough that I'm going to see some of these in the trash can, in the bathrooms, because you're not interested. I don't care if you want to fill out the card, but I do want you to understand that if you are a follower of Jesus, you need to be sharing the gospel. And I want to make it specific enough for us that we realize that this is something that we can actually do. We can actually do this, and here's how. If you look inside your bulletin, you're gonna see two cards. They're connected by a perforated edge. These cards are gonna help to shape the way that we're gonna approach this, at least at the first of this year. One of these is for you, and one of these is for you to share with somebody else. So I'll explain that in just a moment. The first thing I want all of us to do is I want you to make a basic resolution. I bet you can think of a lot of people that you need to bring to Jesus, and that is awesome. But you know what happens when you begin to list out 25 people that you need to bring to Jesus? You just think all the time about who you need to bring, but you never actually talk to any of them, because you're so overwhelmed by the number of them. So here's what I want to suggest we're going to do this year. You track with me, okay? I want you to pick one. Just one. one person that you want to bring to Jesus. It could be a family member. It could be a parent or a child or a spouse. It could be a cousin or an aunt or an uncle. I don't care. It could be any kind of family member. It could be a friend. It could be a coworker. It could be a neighbor. Pick someone in your life that you recognize as far from God and that you want to bring to Jesus. Now, I also want to mention that sometimes we can get caught up on, well, is this person actually lost? I remember when they got baptized, but I'm not really sure that much of their life says they're a Christian. That's why I've been careful at times to use the language far from God. You may know somebody that is a member of even this church, but you know there is no evidence that they're following Jesus. And so for you to engage them, you recognize that basically for practical purposes, you've got to treat them like a lost person and remind them of the gospel. That's okay. You can do it that way. Or maybe you know somebody that openly and completely rejects Christ. Whatever the case is, find somebody in your mind, in your heart, and I'm trusting that the Spirit of God is going to lay this on our hearts, who is far from God, who you realize that you have a burden to bring to Jesus. What I want you to do with the first card, it says, this year I want to bring blank to Jesus. We're gonna spend a few moments to do this together, but I want you to write in the name of a person there. All right, really simple. And here's what I want you to do with this. I want you to first resolve simply to pray. I'm not asking any of us to go tomorrow and share the gospel. If you wanna do that, praise the Lord. But some of us just need to start with praying for lost people. And some of us just need to start with praying for one lost person. So here's what I want to challenge you to do. Put this somewhere where you'll see it. If you're using the Bible reading plan that we handed out last week and you're tracking along, use it as a bookmark in your Bible. You can use the ribbon for whatever else you want to use it for. Use this as the bookmark so that every time you read the Bible, you see this and you're reminded to pray for somebody. Tape it to the bottom of your rearview mirror in your car. Don't look at it all the time that you're driving. Drive safely. But if you're going to notice on the rearview mirror hanging down this card that reminds you to pray for somebody and to think about somebody and to share the gospel with somebody, put it there so you'll see it. Put it on your bathroom mirror so that as you're brushing your teeth in those two to three minutes that you're brushing, you're thinking, I'm going to pray for this person. And it's right there in front of you. Find a place where you're going to see it, pray for this person, and then begin to try to take steps to actually reach this person with the gospel. If you don't know how to do that, we're going to keep talking about that on Sunday nights. And we're really going to be getting into the practical stuff tonight. So I would encourage you, come back tonight and you can hear that. But even if that's not the case, I can give you resources. I can give you booklets that you can read, things that you can listen to. I can talk to you one-on-one. But let's talk about bringing people to Jesus, okay? This is what I want you to do first. Here's the second thing. I want us to do this in community. When Jesus sent out the 72 disciples to go and prepare the way for him, he sent them not one by one, but two by two. Jesus has never intended for you to do this alone. He never intended for you to have to bear the burden for bringing people to Jesus by yourself. He always has intended for you to do this with people. I mean, look at Paul. Paul works with Aquila and Priscilla making tents and sharing the gospel. And then as his associates in ministry come to him, he continues that work. He works with people. And if you look around the room, part of what God has given you this people for is so that we can do this together. So here's the second piece. I want you to fill this card out, say pray for me, and put your name there, as I try to bring, and now, I wanna be clear that somebody that you may wanna mention here might be somebody that you don't wanna share their name for, with other people, because you realize that it's not something that you wanna be, you wanna protect somebody's privacy, okay? So maybe you don't wanna put their name. So maybe you wanna put pray for me, Reeves Garrett, as I try to bring a friend to Jesus this year. Pray for me, Reeves Garrett, as I try to bring one of my children to Jesus this year. Pray for me, Reeves Garrett, as I try to bring... You can be as vague as you want. You can put an initial. You can be specific. Listen, I'm not here to give you explicit directions for everything, you're grown-ups. But what I want you to do with this card is I want you to take it to a group of other Christians that you meet with regularly to pursue accountability together. I would encourage you to do that with your Sunday school class, and this is a good opportunity. If you don't have a Sunday school class, go find one. I can help you. Do it with your Sunday school class. And resolve with the class when you meet together for the teacher to say, hey Reeves, how is it going as you share the gospel with a friend? And share. And if you're not, be honest. Say, I'm not doing anything. and pray together for the people that you're trying to reach. Maybe you could do it with another group, a WMU group. We have several of those. Ladies, if you're not part of one of those, plug in. I don't think it'll take long. I'm not trying to take the ladies' time, but I think all of them would be okay with at least a brief prayer for the lost people that are in their lives. Maybe it's connection with youth ministry. Maybe you're part of some kind of discipleship group that meets outside of the regular ministries of our church. Hey, maybe husbands and wives, you just want to do this together every night. Maybe you're one and it's the same person. Maybe it's a child of yours that's never trusted Jesus. And you say, hey, we're gonna get together and we're gonna pray every night. And that's how we're gonna pursue accountability. I'm not trying to set up legalistic standards for this. This is extra biblical, okay? But sharing the gospel is not. It's something that Jesus has commanded and that God has promised to bless. So what I want you to do is we're gonna take several minutes and I want you to think and pray. Donna's gonna come play for us. And I want you to think and pray about who you would want to bring to Jesus and how you might wanna bring somebody else into that. After she's played for a couple of verses and you've had some time to think, I'll come back up and I'll close our sermon out, and then we'll sing a song of response together. Well, I hope this is gonna be something that's gonna be helpful for us as a church, because I'm concerned, and I know you are, because you love Jesus and you love people and you love lost people. I'm concerned that we see people brought to Jesus And maybe you're still thinking about it. Maybe you're not sure what to do about all this. Hey, maybe you don't have a card. I'll have some in my pocket if we leave this morning. You come grab me and I'll give you one, okay? So that you can begin to think about this on your own. But I'm convinced that these small steps that we take are often the means that God uses to do big things in the lives of his people. God is not asking you to change the world with one action. Only Christ can do that. But God is calling you to be faithful right where you are, to fulfill the purpose that he's given you to accomplish. And God can use ordinary faithfulness to do extraordinary things. Now even in the midst of all that, I would acknowledge that there are people in this room who have never trusted Jesus. Not truly, maybe openly. So I want to close our service today by just simply reminding you about what this is all about. See, the Bible is abundantly clear that we're sinners. We are sinners who are separated from God because of our sin. We are subject to death and decay and all of the consequences that come with sin. And that's not just true of some people, the particularly bad people, that's true of everybody. Paul can say of sin in Romans 3, none is righteous, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood, and their paths are ruin and misery. In the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes." That's our situation. That's our situation apart from Christ. We have no desire for God, no connection to God, and because of that, every one of us is subject to God's condemnation. But that's not the end of the story as God tells it, or as God has done it. Just a few verses later Paul can say, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Pause for a second. That's your situation. and are justified by his grace as a gift to the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. He was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be an be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." Listen, this is what Paul is saying. You have no hope for salvation. God would be unrighteous to just look over your sin and say you're okay. And God can't be unrighteous. He's perfect and pure in all of His ways. He is just and He would be unfaithful. You don't want a God who is unrighteous or unjust. So how then do we have any hope of being saved? Paul tells us that God puts forward Christ as a propitiation. You know what a propitiation is? It's a sacrifice where your sins were laid on the shoulders of Christ. so that God's wrath was poured out on Christ and not on you as you trust him. And now if you belong to Jesus, there is no condemnation for you because Christ has already borne it in your place. And now if you want to be declared right before God, it's not because of anything that you do or don't, it's because God, who is just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ, looks at you and he says that you're not guilty because Christ has borne your sin. And not only that, he has covered you with Christ's righteousness so that God can say of you, you are right in his sight. If you have never known this God, you need to recognize that he loves you and that he offers you all of this. You say, well, I'm too much of a mess. No, you're not. Paul that we just read about, he's a murderer. Killed a ton of Christians because he hated Jesus and God still saved him. and he used him mightily according to his purpose. You remember, there's a thief on the cross next to Jesus? Jesus didn't deserve to be there, but that guy did. Suffering one of the worst punishments imaginable. And out of all of that sin, after he had been mocking and scorning Jesus, finally that thief on the cross saw his sin for what it was. He rebuked the other thief and he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And as that man hung there being executed for crimes he did commit, the one who hung for crimes he didn't said, surely today you'll be with me in paradise. Listen, God loves you. And through Jesus Christ, he says, come, be reconciled to me, and I will be just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ. We're gonna sing a song of response. Like, I don't want the ones to be out there. Maybe you're a one in here. And maybe somebody's already been praying for you because you've never trusted Jesus. Come, let me talk to you. Talk to somebody in your family or among your friends who loves Jesus and let's bring you to Jesus today because He is willing.