So you've got from now to about quarter past. So you've got a solid 45 minutes. Is that enough? Yeah. Good morning. Beautiful day that God has given us. Praise the Lord. I'm going to ask you to turn your Bibles to the Gospel of Mark and the second chapter. Mark the second chapter. And I want to take the time here to read the first 12 verses, so follow along as we read. And again, he entered into Capernaum, that's Jesus. after some days, and it was noise that he was in the house. And straightway, many were gathered together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door, and he preached the word unto them. And there came unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was born of four. And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was. And when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. Notice he saw the faith of the ones who were bringing him to Jesus. But there was certain of the scribes sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, why does this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only? And immediately when Jesus perceived in the spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, arise and take up thy bed and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on the earth to forgive sins, he saith to the sick of the palsy, I say unto thee, arise, take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. And immediately he arose, took up his bed, and went forth before them, insomuch that they all were amazed. and glorified God saying, we never saw it on this fashion. In this passage of scripture, Jesus is in a place called Capernaum. And probably he is in the house of Simon Peter. This is where Peter's home was. And I see here in this passage of scripture a great need for missionary work because there is a man who is very sick. He's in the same town that Jesus is preaching in, but he could be a million miles away because he can't get to Jesus. He has no strength, he has no ability to get to Jesus. We live in a world that's in that same condition. Many people live close to a church that's preaching the gospel, but they don't get there. They are sick in their sins and unable to reach where Jesus is. So that means there is a mission involved in getting that man where he cannot get himself, getting him to Jesus. That's what missions is all about, getting people to Jesus. And this man must have been a pretty good sized man because one man could not carry him to Jesus. Fact is, two men could not carry him to Jesus. In fact, three men could not carry him to Jesus. They must have been a pretty big man. It took four men to join hands to go to a mission of getting a sick man to Jesus. Many hands joining together can often do what one pair of hands cannot do. And that's one of the reasons that our faith promise offerings are so important. Because one person joins another person, and another person joins them, and on and on it goes until there's enough to get the job done, to send out a missionary, to support a missionary that goes out and gets people to Jesus. The Bible tells us here that even though this sinner was in the same town Jesus was in, he was afar from him. The sinner could not get to Jesus on his own. He is helpless. I believe we live in a rather helpless world where sinners for one reason or another are helpless to get to Jesus. So Jesus, they have to be taken to Jesus. They have to be brought to Jesus. There has to be an effort on somebody's part to do that kind of work. Someone has to care enough to help this poor man. He doesn't even know he needs help. A lot of the world does not know they need the Savior. We need to tell them. We need to help them. So missions, is joining hands together to do what just one pair of hands cannot do. You will notice here that he had four friends who cared about him. We need to care about the lost, not only here in our own city, but around the world. We need to, in many places I go, Almost the entire population of that particular country is lost. Think about that. There's religions all around. They're not helping. They're not bringing people to Jesus. They're bringing them to idols and statutes and all kinds of other things. But here this man had four men who cared about him. I don't know what they did. I don't know the kind of sacrifice they had to make in order to get this man to Jesus, but I'm sure that they had families. Maybe they had businesses and they neglected the family for a period of time. They neglected a business perhaps for a period of time to join hands to get this man to Jesus. And nothing was going to stop these men. When they got to where Jesus was, they couldn't even get in the house. It was so full of people wanting to listen to Jesus, people who were able to get to him on their own. This man was not able. They had to bring man, bed, and all to where Jesus was. And they were not going to stop in the carrying out of their mission, even if it meant crawling up on the roof and taking the roof off the house. I don't know whose house it was, but if somebody crawled up on my house and started tearing the roof off, I think I'd have some problems with that. I would go out and ask him, what in the world's he doing? But nobody seemed to object here to the effort these men were making to get a man to Jesus. And The wonderful thing about what you see here in this passage is that Jesus observed the faith of the four men. So their offering to get this man to Jesus was a faith offering, trusting the promises of God. A faith promise offering, if you will. Joining hands to do together what they could not do by themselves. See, that's a very interesting thing. God always recognizes faith, even in your giving. And he recognizes faith in your living. He is not ignorant of the fact that we exercise our faith. Now faith has to be exercised in order to be profitable. You say, well, I believe in God, and you do nothing to show that your faith is active. Faith promise offerings activates our faith in Christ, our faith to reach a lost world. I don't know who owned that house, but he didn't seem to object. Now, when four men are on the roof and they have hold of a man laying on a bed, and they let him down into the house to where Jesus is, think about it. There has to be some men down there who will reach their hands up and bring him on down. So that means that there could have been as many as eight men joining together to get one man to Christ. They joined their faith. That's what you giving a faith promise offering, someone else giving a faith promise offering, another person giving a faith promise offering, all of them joining together gets done what you could not do by yourself. You couldn't give enough faith promise offering to send out all the missionaries your church is supporting. But when you add hands and hearts and faith all together, then you accomplish what would be impossible otherwise. Jesus saw their faith. He saw their combined faith. See, faith promise offering is the way you combine your faith with other believers so that you can do the thing called world missions. Joining hands is very important. Joining hearts is very important. Your hand has to reach into your pocket. It has to get a hold of some money, and that money is, dedicated then as you give it to reaching people for Christ right here in your town and also all over the world. Faith promise offerings started in the Word of God in Jerusalem. Then it spread to Judea, and then it spread to Samaria, and then it went to the uttermost part of the earth. So that's what missions does. You have home missions, you have foreign missions, all supported by faith promise offerings. Faith promise is not something new. It's been in the Bible ever since we've had the Bible. A lot of people just didn't see it, didn't recognize it. But now we recognize what faith promise offerings are all about. The sinner, is both saved and here and healed here. Before Jesus healed him, he forgave him of his sins. You see, Jesus is in the saving business. The healing is an after effect. But his real business that he came here to accomplish was to die on the cross to provide salvation for sinners. Jesus didn't give a tithe. He didn't give a faith promise offering. He gave his all. He gave everything he had. Think of what he left when he left heaven to come down here. I mean, it was a trip way, way down from where he was. It was a forsaking of all that he had in eternity past, yet he was willing to give up everything, holding back absolutely nothing to save us from our sins. He doesn't ask us to give everything, but he does ask us to give. And we ought to be willing to give him more than he asks because of what he gave to us. So faith promise offerings is stimulated, our giving is stimulated by what Jesus gave to us. Think about that as you approach the time of deciding what your faith promise offering is going to be to the one who gave you everything, gave you all. They gave their time, these people gave their time as well as their, and their effort. They set aside their own plans. They gave what belonged to them. And in the morning message, we're gonna talk about what belongs to God and what belongs to you and how that correlates to giving and bringing God's offerings. They perhaps neglected something of great importance at home or on the job to give what this man needed them to give. He was helpless and he was sick and he was lost. We go to many countries where disease is running rampant And there's a great deal of effort made on the part of some organizations to go to those places and to give medical aid. But they never give any spiritual aid, you see. They recognize that the person is sick physically, but they don't recognize that they are sinners. and they need something more than just medical help. They need spiritual help. Jesus gave this man spiritual help before he gave him physical help. And remember, he could not have given this man anything if somebody had not gotten him to Jesus. That's what faith promise is all about, getting people to Jesus Christ. Faith promise is joining hands together. How wonderful it was to see these men come to his house and get this man and say, we're gonna take him to Jesus. I remember when I was about three years old, I was playing in the front yard of our house And a man drove up to our house by the name of Mr. Coles. That was his name, Mr. Coles. And he knocked on the door and my dad came to the door and Mr. Coles said to him, I'm here to take you to the revival meeting. And it was a complete surprise to my dad They were holding a tent revival meeting and he came to get my father. Now my father was not saved and Mr. Coles felt like it was God laying that man upon his heart. So my dad said, okay. And he was a good friend of Mr. Coles. So he accepted the invitation. And when he got in the car, I watched him go away and my unsaved father went to the meeting. But when he came home that night, I had a saved father. He got saved in that meeting. Now, Mr. Coles had a wife and seven children. And I'm sure that if you have seven children, The wife needs a little bit of help from the man. But for some reason, he told her she'd have to take care of the seven kids he had another mission to do. So he went to get my father, and my father became a believer. He became a great student of the Bible. Many people called him the preacher. He wasn't a preacher. He wasn't a pastor. But he was always giving out the word of God. He was, so this man joined his, the effort to get this, my father to Jesus Christ. And I had a father after I was three years of age, all the rest of my life. He went to heaven, he's in heaven now. He was a great student of Bible prophecy. I learned most of my Bible prophecy not from the preacher but from my father. My father would lay out all the books, the Larkin's Dispensational Truths on the table and he'd begin to study them and I'd crawl up there next to him and I'd try to look at what he was looking at. And so my father passed it on to me. And then I've been able to pass it on to many people throughout the years of my ministry. Faith Promise does a lot of things. It shares where sharing is not being done. There are people who are saved all over the world because Faith Promise offerings were given in a church that sent them out. And now what we have in many foreign countries is missionaries asking me to come and help them get faith promise offerings started in their foreign churches so that they are now practicing what the missionary was able to start because some churches were practicing faith promise offerings. So here you have helping hands, how important that is. You can't do it by yourself unless you're very, very rich. And I don't know very many people that are very, very rich, and if they are, they don't let me know it. They don't let preachers know if they're rich. They're afraid he'd get in their pocket, you know. So it's a wonderful thing. when we can recognize how important faith promise is. You can go clear back to the days of Abraham and see he practiced faith promise giving. You say, well, how did he do that? Well, the Bible says that Jesus came to him one day and said, I want an offering from you. It wasn't his tithe because he'd already been tithing. Even before Jesus came to him, he'd already been tithing in the Old Testament. He gave 10% of everything. But Jesus came and wanted more. He wanted a personal offering, a very dear and a very precious personal offering, his own son. He wanted him to take him to a certain mountain. And if you study that all out, he went to the very mountain on which Jesus later died, Mount Calvary. And I'm sure that Abraham didn't tell Sarah what he was doing. I'm going to go kill our son. I mean, that would have really gone over big at the house. So he got his servants and his son and away they went. He put his faith in what God had already promised him about that son. He'd already made a promise about that son. Somehow Abraham knew that if he took that boy's life, God would give that life back. in order to keep the promise. So he by faith struck out and was going to do what God wanted him to do based on having faith in the promise of God. That's a faith promise offering that Abraham offered way back there. And the son was concerned, of course, because he saw no sacrifice for the offering. And Abraham said God will provide himself a sacrifice. Somehow God knew that, Abraham knew that if he exercised faith in the promise of God that everything would turn out all right. And when you exercise faith in the promise of God that he will supply all your need and you give that offering for missions, you're exercising the same faith that Abraham practiced. So they went to that mountain, and he proceeded to do what God had asked him to do. God stopped him, and there was a lamb, a ram caught in the thickets, and God did provide A sacrifice, see. And on that mountain, God later provided a sacrifice for all of us. His only begotten Son. I believe that's the same place. I went up there on that mountain one Sunday morning very early some years ago with a group of about 20 people, and I had the privilege of preaching on that same area up there on top of Mount Calvary to those people. We had a man get saved, and I took him to the River Jordan the next day and baptized him because I had my deacons with me. So we baptized him. He was saved and baptized in the Holy Land. Whenever you do what God wants you to do, folks, remember God keeps His promises. That's what you have to remember about faith, promise, giving. Faith is based on putting that faith in what God has already promised he will do. God doesn't lie. God does not fail. He keeps his word. You can count on his word. You can't count on a lot of people's word, can you? A lot of people even in church give their word to you and they don't keep it. Jesus keeps his word. So I want you to remember that when you decide what your faith promise offering is going to be. Is it going to be an offering based on putting your faith in the promise of God? That's how that works. and join your hands with other hands to do what one pair of hands could not do alone. Even as these four men who saw the need of bringing a man to Christ and they did whatever they had to do to get that man to Jesus Christ. We have young couples who surrender themselves to a mission field. They leave the comforts of their own home and their own church And they go to a land where they don't have many of those comforts that they left. They take their children to a land that may be dangerous to even live in. And they depend on the church, headquarters for missions, to give to the faith promise offerings to both send them there and then sustain them on the field. Your faith promise offerings will send them and it will sustain them, both things. And in your prayers, go with those offerings. And what a blessing that is when you see God working in that marvelous and wonderful way. I don't know if you've ever been involved in faith promise offerings, but I hope that this will be the year that you become involved and become a vital part of sending people around the world with the message of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I believe that finishes up my Sunday school lesson today. I'm sure you didn't mind if I cut it a little short. That's fine.