00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcript
1/0
This message was recorded at
Vision Baptist Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. It is our prayer that
you'll be blessed by the preaching of God's word. Acts chapter 20,
verse 28. Just let me real briefly, 12
minutes and I will get you through it. We'll pray at 6 or 601. So
I'll let you know where we are. If I could tell you my heart
and my dream and get it across to you, this is what I would
say to you. And so I just want to walk you through what the
church is. I've heard people say all along,
let the church be the church. So that's what I called it. I
want you to know, man, it's the greatest thing you could ever
be a part of. You're a member of a church that is trying to
honor Jesus Christ. The Bible says in Acts 20, 28,
take heed therefore unto yourselves and all the flock over which
the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers to feed the church
of God. It's his church which he hath
purchased with his blood. And so how would the church be
the church? Number one, it would take the
gospel to the world. Any real New Testament church
has to be a crazy missionary sending church. The commission
that was given to the church is in Matthew 28, 18 through
20. And Jesus said, I have all right
to say anything I want to say, and I'll tell you what I'm going
to say. Take my Bible and get it to the world. Tell everybody,
my son died on a cross, and they can be saved, and they can begin
to serve me, and they can begin to tell other people. So how
does that work in our church? The first thing is we're not
an attractional church. I don't know if you know what
that means. That means that we're not here to draw them in. We
do not change our ministry and our program to get people to
like it. We do not seek to put out bait so that lost people
will want to come. Now see, if you want to build
the newest kind of churches, it has to be attractional. You
need a young, good-looking, cool pastor. In fact, there's even
a joke out about it, how they lift their arms out and show
they've got a tattoo so they can identify with the people.
And that's not the kind of church we are. We are a biblical church. So instead of saying come, we
say go. The Bible says in Matthew 28,
19, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
We will invite people to Jesus, to His church, to His salvation,
to His service. We will not change the church
to make them want it. We will go and tell them the
truth. We will expect a response of
obedience from them in getting baptized. We will teach them
to live out all that God has put in them. You see, light and
darkness never get along. So if you turn on the light,
darkness is going to run. And if the Bible is light and God
is light and Jesus is light, we're going to preach the Bible
here. We will practice what we want our missionaries to practice. And that means that we will get
out and seek ways to get the gospel to our community. It means
that we will build up strong Christians that are able to reproduce
other strong Christians. That's what foundation is about.
We are a destination church. That's what they call it. We're
a destination church. That means you only go to vision
if you want to go to vision. It's not the kind of church that
you're going to hear about. The social media never lights up
when I preach. I mean, I get through preaching
a message, there's never, this is the coolest saying, Oprah
will be saying this tomorrow, that just never happens. So we're
not, we are what they call a destination church. That means our location
isn't as important as it could be. Because our people want to
come to this kind of church. They'll find it where we put
it. People will come to our church because they want to come. People
will come because they've been saved and are looking for a church
that preaches the Bible. People will come because we bring
them in. We will seek to see more and
more of our members called to carry out, carry the gospel to
all the world. I'll just tell you unashamedly,
I want to see more people called to be missionaries. You can say,
well, brother, I think everybody ought to just serve God. Well,
I'll just say what I think. I think everybody ought to serve
God by carrying this gospel to the world. And I can prove to
you in the Bible, you don't find a whole lot of verses on sitting
around here. You got a whole lot of verses on how we are to
mobilize and get out and carry the gospel. So I want you to
know that is my dream. We will seek to help all believers
learn to be obedient to him and his teachings. So if you're staying
here, I'm challenging you to get out and go on knocking on
doors, inviting people to church, sharing the gospel message and
discipling people, because we ought to do what we expect ministries
to do. We give that money. Number two, second thing, we
ought to train. We want to train every member
to be a minister, every member to be a minister. And that's
the reason I wanted to start out by having everybody come
up here. I know you may think that was kind of a waste of time.
I know you may think that, hey, you just wanted to read everybody's
names. Maybe you think I didn't have enough to say. You didn't
know me very well yet. But I want you to know that God
wants His church to be people that are working. And everybody
doing the smallest jobs are all important. In Ephesians 4, verse
11, we went over it this morning, so I'm not going to spend much
time there. He gave the leadership to perfect the saints to do the
work so that people would grow. And every joint, effectually
working in the measure of every part, will get the job done.
So God gave gifted people to the church that were to perfect
or mature the saints so that they could get involved in ministry. so that the body would grow.
Every joint and every part was to find their place in the body
and in the ministry. It is our goal that every one
of you be involved in ministry. Two things, if I could tell you,
number one, everybody ought to be a self-feeder. It's a great
day when your kid learns to put their own food in their mouth
and not their hair. Amen? That's a great day. Every
Christian ought to learn how to get this book and learn. and
have a daily time with God and be growing self-feeders. They
ought to be able to feed themselves spiritually. They also should
not be spectators. I should be leading a great team,
a whole host of people, which I feel like we are, that are
doing great work for God. So I challenge you to get involved
in some ministry. No one should be a spectator.
No one should be finding a place to sit. Nobody ought to be a
splinter gatherer. Everybody ought to be out working.
You should get involved in foundations. You should be learning how to
teach others. Now, John, and I will help you, and the church
will help you. We'll give you the material. We'll teach you
how to use the material. Maybe you're thinking, well,
I have better material. Well, if you do, you'd already be doing
it. So you're not. So let's get with it. Just come and get involved
in the ministry. And don't be too proud to say,
let somebody show me how to do something. We need people that
learn about Jesus. People ought to know the truth
and they ought to learn that. You can be teaching others. You should
get involved. You should feel real responsibility
for what God's doing here at Vision. Everybody in this room
ought to be like, this is my church. And if the gospel goes
out, it's up to me. If the lights get turned on,
it's up to me. If the lights get turned off, it's up to me.
This is not a social club. It's not a dinner theater. It's
not an entertainment venue. It is a working body. It's a
place where you join with others in serving God and man. No place
for sideline coaching because you'll be too involved in the
game to have time for second guessing. You know who knows
more about the Super Bowl than anybody tonight? You, the fan.
And the other idiots that are going to tell you what's going
on. But the guy throwing the ball, catching the ball, and
getting his head beat into the ground, he don't know nothing.
If he knew anything, he wouldn't be there. He'd be talking about
the game like you. Well, here it is. We're in the church, amen?
So get in. You won't have anything to complain
about. You'll be so busy. You'll be getting tackled and
tackling. It's a lot of fun to tackle.
You will be an integral part of all that God is doing here.
We have no desire for our church not to grow. We expect growth. For that reason, one man or a
staff of pastors can never take care of all that we have to do
as a church. Visitation, funerals, sick people, regular house calls
must be taken care of by many in our church. And I'll just
say they are at this church. The deacons do it. Sunday school
teachers do it. Thank you so much. You should
be involved in a small group so you can find out where the
needs are and love people. It will not be a job that's named
in the bulletin, but it will be a job that's making a difference. If you see a need, figure out
how to meet it. We give you that freedom and liberty. Vision has
a strategy. You're listening to it right
now. We want to get the gospel of the world. We want every member
to become a minister. We want everyone involved in
discipleship. We all want to be involved with
our missionaries. We don't want to have any wasted
meetings. No meetings to meet, no special buildings to brag
about, bricks and mortar, but men and women that are prepared
to serve. I've got four minutes, so three
pages in two. Here you go. 2 Timothy 2. Number
three, training others to be in ministry. So the first one
is, the first thing, we're moving through a whole progression of
what the church ought to be. And so now the church ought to
be a group training others. In 2 Timothy 2-2 Paul said, what
you've heard of me among many witnesses is the same, commit
thou to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.
As a church, all of us ought to become servers, ministers. But there will be some people
that are going to go out as leaders and pastors and missionaries.
And the honest truth is in most churches, when a guy's going
to be a missionary or a guy's going to go to the field, it
shocks everybody. Around here, it shocks me when they don't.
It ought to be like, man, we're expecting people to leave. You
ought to be looking at everybody like, when are you leaving? Where
are you going? What are you going to do? How
are you winning people to Christ? What's the difference that you're making
that you can make as a difference? As pastor and staff, we will
devote our lives to preparing the next generation to carry
the gospel to the world. We'll prepare men and women to
impact the world to the best of our ability. There will be
no great men of God that are really impressive here. We will
simply train them to carry the gospel. We will think that if
you're one of a kind, you're a failure. You're not a success
if you don't have a successor. All in our ministry should be
training someone else for the ministry. Number four, we are
functioning as a pillar and the ground of the truth. And I've
got to give you this, but we're a Bible-preaching church. So
we're going to tell them the Bible, we're going to fill them
up with the Word of God, and we're going to get the Bible into them. I'm going
to skip everything I would say there, but that's the whole point.
That when they come into this church, it ought to be like,
man, this place is full of the Bible. This place is full of
the Word of God. You sit down in a Sunday school
class, you ought to hear it. When you hear people over here talking,
it ought to be that God's Word permeates everything about us
and who we are. We are the pillar and the ground
of the truth. We will be working as a church
of self-feeders that know how to grow from God's Word. We won't
be involved in showmanship, entertainment. We will be involved in teaching
the truth. We'll work at bringing in other
preachers and teachers of the truth so vision can truly be
a pillar and ground of the truth. Last one. One minute. Ephesians
3.21. We will honor Jesus every way
we can. Ephesians 3.21 says unto Him
be glory in the church by Christ Jesus. Unto Him be glory in the
church. He ought to be glorified by our
presence to worship, glorified by our obedience, by our sharing
the gospel, by our love for His Word, by our doing good works
in our community, by loving people just like they are. He ought
to be glorified because we live and practice His grace. He should
be glorified because we sing and preach about Him. He should
be glorified as we see new souls coming to Him. So Vision Baptist
Church, I honestly tell you from the bottom of my heart, God's
doing great things. He has been doing great things.
Over $1,100,000 given to missions, that ought to bless your heart.
All the missionaries that God has allowed to have a part in
this church, all the young people that are training, all the Sunday
school classes are meeting all over the building. You can't
hardly hear yourself think on a Sunday morning. That's a wonderful
thing. It's a beehive of activity. Amen? There are plenty of churches
you can go to and you'll hear everything. There won't be nobody
there. Drop a pen and they'll all hear it. But you're in a
church where it's happening, and I'm proud of you, and I thank
God for you. And I expect fully that God's
going to give us more missionaries, and God's going to let us see
more done. And I would like to challenge you to be a part of
the church. Not just a part of the church that sits, not just
a part of the church that sits down and listens, but a part
of the church that says, shoulder to the wheel. Pushing the load,
carrying the load, doing my part. I'm asking you to get in. I'm
asking you to help. I'm asking you to say this is
the ministry God put me in. It's six o'clock and I said I'd
do it. We're going to pray. But this is a prayer I'm going
to ask you to do. I'm going to ask you to do the weirdest thing.
I know you'll never do this at this church. I'm going to ask
you to get out of your seat, come up to the altar and say
on your knees before God, I will get under the load more than
ever. Tonight, we ask God for a vision.
We ask God to do something. So I'm asking you to do what
you never do. It won't hurt you. Just come, get on your knees
and say, God, I'm praying for vision for this coming year.
And so if you'll come right now, we're going to have a word of
prayer together. Where is my Ms. Pepperdine? You'll be ready to
pray, or play, not pray. I'll have you pray too if you
don't watch it. Let's pray. Let's ask God to bless Vision.
Let's ask God to help us carry everything out. Let's dedicate
ourselves to Him to get the gospel message around the world because
we want to honor God. It's a God night. It's a God
thing. We're just going to do that and
ask God to work. This message was recorded at Vision Baptist
Church in Alfred, Georgia. For more information, log on
to www.visionbaptist.com where you can find our service times,
location, contact information, and more audio and video recordings.
Vision Night
Series Other
| Sermon ID | 211151843255 |
| Duration | 14:12 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Acts 20:28 |
| Language | English |
Add a Comment
Comments
No Comments
© Copyright
2026 SermonAudio.