I'd like to express our sincerest gratitude to you for your encouragement to us and your support. And we count it a real privilege to partner with Calvary and to be a part of an international disciple-making ministry in Peru as Ambassadors for Christ. We've met a lot of missionaries over the years, and not many missionaries have the type of connection to a local church that we enjoy. And we thank you so much for the way that you pray for us. It was an incredible encouragement for us to have page come down for a few months during our first year and then to have pastor and his wife come down and that again is an unusual occurrence I think for missions to have church members come and stay and to see what the Lord's doing and to have pastor come was incredible encouragement to us. And now to be speaking in English is a little different. But glad to be here and to share what the Lord has been doing in Peru. Glad to hear from you what the Lord has been doing here and it's been encouraging to talk with you and and to interact and to see how you've grown in the Lord, how some of the younger Children aren't children anymore, they've grown physically, and that's an encouragement to see that families are persevering on bringing children here to the church. What I want to do this morning, I've got about an eight-minute video to share with you. It's an overview of what the Lord's been doing in Peru from the perspective of our family. Our disciple-making ministry starts in our family with our children. We have four girls, Alexia, Isabel, Esther, and Lillian. They're here this morning and went out to Children's Church. Alexia's here still since she's seven. And hope you get a chance to talk to them and interact with them. They speak a good bit of Spanish, but still to this point, English is dominant, so they won't have any trouble at all communicating with you. And you'll see On the video, a little bit of what daily life is like as we interact with our girls and with different people in the community. We're there to encourage the Peruvians to continue on serving the Lord. There is a growing number of Peruvian Christians, Catholicism has been dominant throughout most of South America for the past several hundred years. But a lot of that is changing. The gospel is advancing and people are coming to know the Lord and we're glad to be a part of what the Lord is doing there. We tell the Peruvians we're not here to take away the work from you. We're here to encourage you to serve the Lord faithfully. And we're serving with a local church in Puerto Maldonado. Puerto Maldonado is a city of about 100,000 people. And it's the gateway to the jungle. The way God directed us to that particular city was through some missionary friends that we have up in Cusco, another Peruvian city up in the mountains. And they mentioned to us people that they knew there and the need that they had seen there in Puerto Molinado. And as God prepared us over many years to serve full time in Peru, many of you know that story. And if you haven't heard it before, I'd love to take the time to tell you later on. But we heard about those needs and God directed us to move down there to Puerto Maldonado on October the 12th in 2016. And for us, it's been a great stretching time as we learn more Spanish. God was so kind to give us opportunity to learn Spanish over many, many years. But we moved to a particular place and vocabulary is a little bit different and the slang is a good bit different. But we thank the Lord that he's continued to give us opportunity to learn, and it's been an encouragement to see as we've cast the gospel seed alongside of our Peruvian friends, alongside of Pastor Daniel Nunez and his family, other foreign missionaries there in Puerto Molanado, that the seed is growing. We've seen, like you have here, I'm sure seen that the seed's fallen on some rocky soil, on some thorny ground, it's fallen on the pathway, but some has fallen on fertile ground, and we praise the Lord for the saving work that he's doing there. And as we look toward the future, we're planning for future ministries. When we get back, I'd like to take more of the opportunity to go out more consistently to the tribal communities with our local church and with local churches there. In Puerto Molanado, there's a need, just as you've seen here, the teens, for example, on their recent trip to Ohio, seeing that there are people in this country that are around churches, probably there's a church within close proximity to where most people live. But there are people, there are children growing up and they haven't heard the name of Jesus. They don't know about him and his salvation. They don't know the basic stories of God's working throughout history that he tells in the Bible. And that's the case, especially in Peru where jungles and rivers and muddy paths stand in the way of people coming and going to churches. So we want to be a part of ongoing and to get out into places like that. And many people have cell phones like like most of us have, that have an internet connection, so I'm working on a series of videos to put together, been doing some preparatory work, need to get a few more tools to make it a little more efficient and quick to put together while we're here in the United States, but want to be a help to the Peruvian churches in that way, to provide some leadership training for the men that are there serving the Lord and to answer basic questions. Sometimes the people that come to the church and sit under the preaching and listen to us, Pastor Daniella, myself, and others, open up the Bible and teach it to them. Week in, week out, they still come back after many months and have basic questions about who God is and what his word says. And so we want to give resources to those people. They don't have access, there's access on the internet, but sometimes they get on Google and type in a question and get to a place that doesn't give reliable truth and the truth of the gospel. So we want to be a part of the network of churches and Christian ministries that are providing that kind of service to the Lord's people. So, Marco, if things are ready, I'll ask you to play the video now and then I'll come back and share God's Word with you. So, I was alone, I didn't see the rest of the world. I was alone, I didn't see the rest of the world. One, two, three, four, five. Yeah. Yeah. Wow! in el agua Yeah. Is this one? Where are my daughters? Get up! There they are! Well, through the pictures you met, Daniel and Becky Nunez. Daniel is Peruvian. He is from Lima. He grew up there and moved over to Puerto Molanado about five years ago, about six at this point, I think now, and is married to Becky. And she is an American and served in Peru for about eight years. and they were married four years ago, and so we're glad to be serving alongside of them. You also met J.R. Dudek. He's a young single guy serving the Lord, looking to do Christian camp ministry, working with children, and you might have confused him with me a couple times. We have a similar look, but glad to have him there and others that we're serving alongside of, and that's really what you need, and that's what we're going to look at this morning. If you'd open your Bible to Matthew chapter 9. What we're going to do for the next few minutes is consider God's mission of salvation and how God desires for us to be a part of it. And as I mentioned previously, it's been encouraging for us to hear what the Lord is doing here in this place. In Peru, we're doing similar things what you're doing here. We have a soccer outreach. We have in-home individual and group Bible studies. We of course meet together with the local church to preach and teach the gospel and to and to teach people in the truth of the word of God. And you're doing that here. And as we go and we do that, what we're doing is we're participating in the mission that God is on. You realize he's on a mission, right? He's on a mission to save people. And it's a mission that began in eternity past where God chose to save sinful people. And the story of the Bible, the narrative that covers the whole Bible is exactly that. God working out that plan of salvation. And if you know the Lord, You've come into, by faith in Jesus Christ, you've become a part of that story of God's salvation. And let's pick up a summary here of what God is doing through the ministry of Jesus in Matthew chapter 9. We'll start at verse 32. And this follows a number of stories, specific stories, where Jesus is shown as authoritative. And he confirms his authority as the Son of Man, the Son of God. with specific power and signs and wonders and his fame is spreading abroad and we see as we get down into this short passage here what his mission of compassion is and how he goes out to preach the gospel of the kingdom. So let's read in verse 32 in Matthew chapter 9 where it says, So what we see here is What was typical of Jesus's ministry the whole time throughout, there were people that heard him and saw him and some that believed and some that doubted and the Pharisees, the religious elite of the time that thought they didn't need a savior. Many of them, they cast Jesus off as a blasphemer. Nevertheless, Jesus continues on. And we see his response to people, to people like that, to people that want to self-justify themselves, people that think they could not be good enough for God to love them and save them. How does Jesus respond to them? Look at verse 35. And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, here's a summary of what Jesus was all about, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. So here we see what Jesus is, came to earth to do, to show his power, to show his authority, and to bring his salvation through the proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom. And that idea of the kingdom is a transformational that is in scripture, one that I've been meditating on recently to think about how every part of my life and my family's life and my service for the Lord fits into God's kingdom. Enjoying the world that God created, that's a part of being in God's kingdom, serving through the church, doing our work and business in God's kingdom. We're doing all that we do in God's kingdom. And the goal of God's, the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom is that people would see their need for a savior. What we see here is that Jesus, knowing that that is exactly why he came, he looks out at these people and verse 36 tells us how he responds emotionally to these people. But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them because they fainted and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd. And as we know from scripture, that Jesus is the primary example that we all can follow. In every aspect, there's nothing in him that we would say, that's not right. There's no darkness in him. There's no wickedness in him. There's no lying. There's no deceit in him. We look at Jesus and he's the word of God. He communicates. truth to us, truth of the gospel, who God is. He himself is God. And we see here something that will motivate us. It's easy for us to look at the unsaved world with disdain and think, oh, these wretched people, they're ruining my country, they're ruining my life, they're ruining my economy, they're ruining everything, they're ruining my church. But when we see people, we ought to see them as souls and people that need a savior and look on them with compassion. And where is that? How does that grow in our lives? Well, we get to know God because we see in all of scripture, I was preaching just before we moved, I came back here, I was preaching in Malachi, and that's what the goal of the preaching through Malachi for God's people, the Israelites, to see the offerings that you're bringing, the sick and the lame offerings, those aren't right. Return to me. You're being unfaithful to your marriage covenant. You're being unfaithful to me. Return to me. And we all have to see ourselves in that condition, day by day, whether we're saved, By faith in Jesus Christ, whether we don't know the Lord, we need to be returning to the Lord, confessing our sins. We need to know the Lord. And as we get to know the Lord, we see the sin, the blots of sin that are still in our lives. There's sin in us. There are sinful desires in us. And God points those out to us. And we realize, I'm no different from the people around me in a very real sense. I'm a sinner. Saved by grace if I know the Lord, but I'm a sinner. And just as I know the Lord, Jesus as my Savior, I ought to have compassion on them, preach the gospel to them, and meet their needs. We see that here also with Jesus, that he's preaching to their spiritual need. That is the most important thing, but what also is he doing? He's meeting their physical needs. He's healing every sickness and every disease among the people. And at this particular time in history, we don't have that ability to go and and cast out demons and to heal people's sicknesses. We pray that the Lord will work his power, and he does, and we have demonstrations even in this congregation of God's power worked out in a marvelous way for God's glory to heal somebody from cancer or from some other sickness. But we can meet people's needs, and that's a part of bridging our lives to an unsaved person, not participating in what they do that's sinful. We all have family members. We all have acquaintances. and co-workers and people that we think, you know, I'd rather not spend, and it probably wouldn't be best for me to spend a lot of time rubbing shoulders with that person, going and doing the things that they do, listening to the things they listen to, watching the things they watch, being the kind of person that they are. But as we follow Jesus and we see people around us, what can we do? We can have people over for meals at our house. Jesus did that many, many times. He sat down for a meal with people. And people said, oh, what's he doing? He's eating with sinful people. Doesn't he know if he was really a prophet, he would know who these people are. He wouldn't be there. But he he does. He is a prophet. He is the true God. And because of that, he knows the needs of the people. So he brings his life close to them and gives himself an opportunity to show them the truth. We can follow Jesus. in that example, and that's part of what he wants us to do, whether we're near or far here in the United States or in some international ministry like my family and I have a privilege of being a part of. We show compassion to people and we look for opportunities to preach the gospel to them, because as your pastor, as Pastor Clowbridge shares week in, week out, the gospel is what We all need, it's not turning over a new leaf like he says, it's not just trying to be better, it's realizing I'm a sinner, I can't save myself, I never could. Give me a million years, I can never save myself. I couldn't add up good deeds enough to save myself because God says it's not by works of righteousness, it's by his grace. And we all have to come to that point of realizing I can't save myself, but Jesus can save me. And if he has saved me, he's given me the opportunity to be an ambassador for him and to go and plead with people to be reconciled to Christ. by faith in Him. And knowing that that is the goal, knowing that that's the responsibility that we have to be a part of God's Kingdom work, look at verse 37. Another aspect, in addition to realizing that God's on a saving mission and getting to know that mission by getting to know God, realizing that we have an opportunity to meet people's needs and and show kindness to them in the love of the Lord and preach the gospel to people, we recognize that we can't do it alone. One church can't do it alone. One Christian can't do it alone. We work together. with believers throughout all the world and what we do. And listen to what Jesus says, verse 37. He says, Why is it plenteous? Because God's chosen to save. And He will save people, will preach the gospel. Some will cast it away and say, no, I don't want that. Some, though, will believe. And so he says, the harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few. And we know that to be the case. There's always a need for more people to go and preach the gospel, whether it's to your neighbor or in the next town over or in another country. There's always a need to be preaching the gospel. And what does God say? To recognize that in verse 38, to pray, to pray, therefore, that the Lord of the harvest would send forth laborers. into his harvest. That's what God wants to do. And that's what he's doing. If you're out there preaching the gospel, that's what he's done. He sent you out. The title missionary in front of your name or any number of letters behind your name that represents a theological degree doesn't make you a super Christian, doesn't make you an awesome gospel proclaimer. But as we get to know the Lord, all of us following the Lord, part of following the Lord is being an ambassador for him and interacting with people, sharing within that because of their sin they could never save themselves. And who are the kind of people that we're sharing the gospel with? With our children. They need to hear it. We can't assume that because they're born into a family with parents that know the Lord that they're just automatically going to fall in line and come to the Lord. We pray for their soul. We pray that they'll come to the Lord. And what do we tell them? They see it. They disobey. And we say, your sin separates you from God. But God is a saving God. And he sent Jesus, the Son of God, to come and live a perfect life. and to die in your place in mine on the cross and shed his blood to pay the penalty of our sins and to raise from the dead so that by believing in him we could have eternal life. And we share the gospel with our children. That's a very natural place to share the gospel. If you're not doing that, listen to the Lord this morning. He says, share the gospel in your local context. Sometimes we think so grand and big in our scale of what work needs to be done that we forget the work that's closest to home. Share the gospel with your children. If you're married to someone that doesn't know the Lord, live out and proclaim the gospel with your words and with your actions day by day to that person, knowing that the Lord can save at your workplace, through the local church. And that's the next aspect I want to look at here as we just three verses here in chapter 10, then we'll look at five verses in Acts 13, look at chapter 10, we see that as Jesus tells us to pray that the Lord will send forth labors into the harvest, he shows that's exactly what his will is by doing it, and he sends out his disciples to preach the gospel, and at that particular time he gave them the ability to cast out unclean spirits and to heal sickness and disease. So let's look at which would be unique to them. Let's look at verse one and see how that story of God's saving work continues and where it really began. And this is a bit of a shift. In the Old Testament, people were to come to Israel, to come to know the Lord. And in the New Testament age, from Jesus coming to us and going, he commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And that's what he's preparing his disciples to do. It's a beginning step towards the ministry that they would have when he would descend to heaven. Let's read verses 1, 2, and verse 7. Verse 1 says, and when he had called unto him his 12 disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. Twelve apostles are these. The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, and James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother. And it lists the rest of the disciples, and look at verse 7. And as ye go, preach saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And what are they to go and do? They're to go and preach the same gospel that Jesus was preaching. That you're a wretched sinner, and if your life ends rejecting Jesus, not receiving Him, not believing in Him, you will spend an eternity separated from God, in eternal torment. But God loves us so much that he tells us in all the Bible that I want to save you. I will save all that come and believe. So let's look at chapter 13 of Acts, Acts 13, and we'll see that the way at this point in time in history, where is God working out that type of sending ministry? Where is he preparing people And how is he preparing people to go and preach the gospel? It's not by each of us thinking, you know, how could I do this all on my own? And if I could just strategize a little bit better, then I could do it. No, we see how we can fit in to the body of Christ, and that's the church. And you heard this passage a little bit just before we left. October of 2016, I think it was the last Sunday we were here, Pastor, I think, opened up this part of the Bible and he showed how the church is to work together. People are to be serving and preparing themselves, spiritually maturing and growing, so they can be sent out to do different types of gospel ministry. So let's read together the first five verses here of Acts 13. Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers as Barnabas and Simeon, that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manan, which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when he had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. So they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost departed unto Seleucia, and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. When they were at Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had also John to their minister. So what we see here is a connecting point and a continuation of what Jesus began and what he intends to continue until he returns. That we would be working and serving in the church. Isn't that what we see? We have people here and we think of Saul later on, not too far down into this passage. We see his name changed to Paul, we're very familiar with who Paul is, and we think, oh, Paul was a super-Christian. Well, he was a sinner saved by grace and used mightily by the Lord because of God's grace at work in his life. But what was he doing? It wasn't because of his special skills. It wasn't because of his growing up as a Jew and as a Pharisee and knowing the law. He, in the epistles, makes that very clear. All that's just rubbish to me, it's garbage. None of that gives me a standing before the Lord. So we can realize that what Saul and Barnabas were sent out to do, what they were called to do, is a similar thing that God wants to do in us. What are they doing? They're serving in the local church. Now these people were prophets and teachers, they had a teaching ministry. Not everybody here has a public teaching ministry, but everybody here has a service. opportunity. You have gifts that the Lord has given you, opportunities to serve. It could be an encouraging word that you share with somebody, a word of God, part of the Bible that you share with people when you meet together on Sundays. It could be going to visit somebody. It could be praying for somebody. There are a lot of gifts, and the Bible mentions those as specific gifts that are supposed to be worked out and served and used in the local church, and that's what's taking place here. And these men with others are serving the Lord there, and look at verse 2, what happens? Well, God, who is the Lord of harvest that we're to pray to, that he'd send forth labors into his harvest, that work had been done, no doubt, the disciples as they were going out and they themselves experiencing opposition similar to what Jesus had experienced and suffering some level of persecution. They felt that and they prayed, God send other labors to come and encourage us. Send other people to come alongside of us. And as they prayed, how does God respond? He answers. And he communicates, the Holy Spirit communicates to the church there, separate Barnabas and Saul for the work I've called them to. And when they prayed, and fasted, they laid their hands on them, and they sent them out. And what do they go and do? Verse 5 tells us that they preached the word of God. And so that's what we're called to do. And it's been encouraging for us to see this take place in Peru. We're working with a small church plant in Puerto Maldonado, and there are needs in that community that we're a part of and in that local church for people to come and to serve. to go and preach the gospel in other places farther into the jungle. And the neat thing has been we've seen God working in people like Alberto. He's a young man that had made some unfortunate choices and suffered the consequence of sin over the past few years. But we met him about 18 months ago, came to know the Lord, and began attending church, growing in the Lord. And he works lumber. So he goes into the jungle, gets contracts for lumber, comes out. takes it up to Ataquipa, where his father lives, and that's the kind of work that he has. But his work takes him places that I don't regularly go. I might go at some point, but I don't regularly go to those particular places. And he's met people that live in small communities, maybe just one older person in a house, or the person that he's doing the contract with, people that their job is in the jungle, they're going and getting lumber, they're coming out to the edge of the road, sending it off, and going back in. And unless you go and look for those people, or if you have a connection to those people, you're probably not going to meet them. And that was the case, that's the case for our church. And there would be hundreds of cases similar to that in that part of the world. And it's not all that different from what you experience here. It's just the way that people live, their context of life and work. Sometimes you have access to them in a natural way, sometimes you don't. And Alberto had a natural connection point to those people. And so we've been praying for him and for others, and what's he been doing when he's going out there? Well, he takes his Bible, and sometimes he sits down and he reads a passage of scripture to someone that can't read, but they can hear. And he shares the gospel, and we haven't heard of any particular person coming to know the Lord yet, but seeds are being sown in a place and in a way that brings glory to God. And there have been other people that are connected to the church. There's a couple that works in has a small business and they have people that work under them about seven or eight employees. And we have a Bible study with them on Thursday mornings there at their where their shop is. And through the people which, to be honest, haven't been faithful to the Lord. very much over the past few months, but God has been gracious to them, working in them, and we can relate to that, right? We see our sin struggles, and we realize God wants to work in my life, and he wants to give me an opportunity to serve him, so we've been encouraging them, they've been attending the church more faithfully, and they're becoming more a part of what God's doing there at the church, and through that, the people that work under them, are exposed to the gospel and some of them have come to know the Lord. One of the last pictures that was up there of a lady being baptized, she recently came to know the Lord and that was a fruit of the labor put in through the local church that we're a part of. God sharing the gospel to people and bringing them along in their following of Jesus to the point where other people can realize they're being transformed. I've seen sin in their life but they're changing. and then asking questions and hearing the gospel. So what I want to encourage you with this morning is that you can be a part of God's saving mission by praying, by showing compassion to people, by preaching the gospel, and maybe by going to some international place, or maybe God would move you to another part of central Florida, or to another part of the United States, or another part of the world. If we keep our focus on, our eyes on Jesus, and we realize that That he is the prize and that serving him is exactly what he wants for us and it's best for us. That no sin could ever give us the joy and fulfillment that we find in Jesus. Because we're free, he frees us. And when we follow Jesus and when we know him and he gives us opportunities to serve him, it all serves that we are a part of God's kingdom work for God's glory. And once again, thank you so much for the ministry that you have to us. We know that so many of you are praying for us, and it makes a big difference and it's a huge encouragement to us. Moving down to Peru wasn't something altogether new when we moved down there, but we'd only lived in Peru as a family for three months at a time, 2014 being the longest. time that we were there for three months and so living in a new place with a language that we're very familiar with but much more to learn and learning the logistics of a new country is challenging but we thank God for his grace that through the difficulties we faced and logistics of purchasing a vehicle and getting visas and renewing passports and dozens of other things that are part of missionary life or international life and questions that we had and things that we had to learn. Through it all, God's given us opportunity to share the gospel with people along the way, and that's a lot of what he does. If we look at our lives in that way, that God is using us to take the gospel to somebody that We never know. It could be one of the last or last time or the last few times that they have the opportunity to hear the gospel. So as we're living life and something's frustrating to us, instead of thinking, oh, my day's ruined and getting in a bad mood, which we all can get in from time to time, I suppose, we keep our eyes focused on Jesus and realize he's got something for me. here today. He wants me to meet somebody, to share the gospel with somebody, and to be a witness for him. And that's been a big part of what our life and ministry has been like for the two years and about seven and a half, eight months that we were down in Peru. We're looking forward to going back. We're glad for the ministry that God's given us here. Very glad to be here with Calvary. This is, in a very real sense, home to us here in Florida with Calvary Baptist. There's work to be done in other places here in the United States, and then, Lord willing, back to Peru in early November. And we're looking forward to that with a better understanding of what life's there, all with our visa cards in hand and with a ministry that we already, to a good bit, know how we fit into to get back and plugged in. And certainly, Lord, they're encouraging people and then reaching out into places that need to hear the Lord. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your kindness to us.