Well, good evening. It's good to see all of y'all this evening. It is a Friday night. Most folks don't want to go to church on a Friday night. You know it? Now, I feel like I'm getting older because my Friday nights used to be, what are we going to do tonight? And now my Friday nights are more like, I don't want to do anything tonight. You know, when work is over and things are finished and the kids, I got two adult kids in my house and they say, we got this, we're going there. And Lenay and I are just excited because there's less people to eat our food and less people to bother us while we're watching TV. And maybe you want to get back home and do that so I won't take too long and too much of your time. Let's turn our Bibles to Romans chapter eight and quick introductions and then we'll get right into it. introduce my family to you. I'm not going to make them stand. My wife was a missionary's kid and a grandchild of a pastor and a pastor's kid and God help her, she married a preacher that's a pastor now. And so I'm not going to make her stand. I have to hear about it at the hotel. But my wife, Lynnae, is here with me and my middle daughter, Madison. She was able to take off work. She works at a hospital. She was able to take off and come with us for this trip. And my youngest is now 17. Lord help me and taller than I am and max Maximus is his name max is here with us as well And so you have to know y'all get to hear their names and now hopefully they'll get to know you and you know us I was just talking at dinner with brother Brother pastor over here Yeah, I know. And we were talking, I was mentioning how the uniquenesses of every church. Now, to me, that's a colorful and beautiful thing. I think it's amazing. Every little church you go to is different. But the Raleigh Campbell Mosaic Baptist Church, the first time I went there, he asked me to speak on Cuba when the church I was at was doing some work in Cuba. That was shocking. I mean, it was a completely different connection. There was a lot of different people, multiple languages being spoken. And I fell in love with it immediately. A lot of my training in early ministry was in foreign missions and doing missions projects and missions trips. And I guess it gave me a taste for those things which are not cookie cutter. Every church is different. Every group of people are different. There's a different, it's almost like McDonald's, you see. Every McDonald's has a specific rule of how to fry their fries. Do you know that? and they have to follow those rules to the T. Now that doesn't mean that you're gonna get a great fry. There's always some employees not gonna follow the rules, but they have a book, a A book, for every McDonald's there is worldwide. But they're all different. There's McDonald's number 362, there's McDonald's somewhere number one, there's a McDonald's 874, but they're all McDonald's, they all sell a Big Mac, and they all have a large fry. and they all use the golden arches. Isn't that amazing? And so I look at all the different churches that are Christ churches, and there's some that don't have doctrine, there's some that no longer honor Christ, and there's some that no longer believe the word, that Lord be merciful to them. But it's amazing to come here and we have the same doctrine. I've known Darren, as he said, a long time. I've known Brother Hudson for a long time. And we have the same doctrine. We're in two different locations. You're in Houston, Texas. We're in El Reno, Oklahoma. You couldn't get almost two opposite unless I was in Chicago. And yet, we are churches with the same Bible and the same flair and the same hunger and the same heart and the same savior and the same desire to please him. Amen? It's good to see a friend, Thomas George, here also. And it was a good surprise to see him walk in. God has been very, very good to us. And if you're upright and breathing today, God's been good to you. There's so much destruction, so much pain in this world. I struggled a lot, honestly, in what to speak here. I know some guys just toss stuff together, and I suppose we all do to some degree. I prayed a lot about this because what I initially thought, oh, I know exactly what to say. God blew that up, and it completely rewrote what I was thinking. And it just so happens, some stuff that we're going through as a church in El Reno is, God's used that to change my mind and my heart about what needs to be done, that He wants to use me for at least. I pray it's a blessing to you, I hope it's encouraging. Beyond that, I hope it's the definition of the word exhortation. It's not just exhorting and not just encouraging, but also goads us a little bit. Because if we're gonna keep doing this that we do in this century that we're in, ladies and gentlemen, I think you know it's gonna get a lot harder. Everything has shifted since 2020, but Thomas and I were just talking about that. I'm telling you, the freight's gonna get much, much worse. The people that we talk to lately, counseling this week, my wife has been helping me and we're at the office just two times this week. Somebody needs to talk to us or go to lunch with us and talk some more with us. Once you're done talking to them and helping them and sharing scripture with them, praying with them, and they walk away, you feel completely evaporated because you're going through so much more than I ever have in my entire lifetime. There's so many troubles and so much darkness and they've gone such terrible paths that only God could fix this, which is a great thing because God can and will if they let Him. But people desperately need Jesus Christ. So to think about an anniversary, y'all are going all out. I don't know a church to celebrate its anniversary for an entire weekend. So I'm not sure if you're really doing great or if you're glutton for punishment, but hey, I'm here for it. And I think it's exciting. I think next time my wife and I have an anniversary, it's coming November, we should spend an entire weekend, right? Don't you think so? I need to get my menu to her as quick as I can so she can have that whole weekend. That's a joke. That's a joke. I'm just playing. That's not true. Church anniversaries are like many other kinds of anniversaries. It's a time to celebrate, but it's also a time to reflect, to ask good questions, and to relaunch. And I was looking up on your wall up here. Philippians 127, that's a great verse, isn't it? I mean, there's not really a bad verse in the Bible, is there? Only let your conversation be as it become of the gospel of Christ. That right there. I know you're focused on the striving together, and that's right, but striving together what? For the faith of the gospel. It's that gospel of Christ that changed my life. It's that gospel of Christ that will change everybody's life that will choose to believe. And only he can fix what's going on. Now, I am an American. I have been all over the world. But I am so glad God has me here. But I will tell you this. As an American and as a good citizen, I plan to vote this year. And I'm not going to tell you how to vote, who to vote for, or what to vote. All I'm going to tell you is this. I can actually tell you whatever I want because I'm leaving on Sunday. And it doesn't really matter, does it? But I will tell you this, no matter what you vote and however God utilizes that, nothing's gonna fix this but Jesus. I know the news media makes fun of us for saying stuff like that, but it's the truth. It's the heart of man that is depraved. It is warped and twisted in desperate need of a savior. And they will not get that from either party. They need people like us who have been given the gospel to give the gospel. Romans 8, 29, we'll start there this evening. Romans chapter 8 and verse 29. And I'm going to take a few different passages. At home, we take a text and we dissect that text into details, and I'm pretty sure I bore people half to death, but tonight we're not gonna do that except for a couple places. My job is to set the tone of what we're talking about for tomorrow and for Sunday, and hopefully we'll be able to connect the dots. Romans 8.29 says, for whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate, now what it says there, to be conformed to the image of his son. He predestinated us to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren." That word conformed, morphe, means literally to change. That is a terrifying word for most every human. It depends on what it is. When I first moved to El Reno, we had an older gentleman by the Wayne Hall, and he His brother had a burger joint that's been on different TV shows, and he took us for breakfast, and I just felt like, you ever have somebody ask you for lunch or dinner, and you feel like something's coming your way? And that's what I felt like, and so Lenny and I went to breakfast, and we sat down at the table, and he ordered, and we ordered, and we ate, and he said, I was gonna tell you right now, I don't like change. Now, we'd been there, what, two weeks? The first week, maybe? And I thought, well, here we go. I mean, the feel of being threatened by it, and that I'm the new guy, and what all is he going to do? And you've got to know they've been talking about it. And I guess they heard rumors of how crazy I am. And I thought, I'm actually pretty easy. And I thought, how do I answer this? And here's what I told him. I said, well, Brother Wayne, I don't know if that's true or not. He goes, what do you mean? I said, do you still drive the same car you first drove? He goes, oh, no way. Why? They didn't have air conditioning, they didn't have power brakes. It was a jalopy. I said, what do you drive now? He said, I got a Ford Explorer. I said, is it nice? Leather seats, air conditioned. He said, I got heated and cooled seats. Absolutely, it's nice. I said, you like that change? You see, everybody is afraid of change. I think churches are fighting over stuff that don't matter sometimes. I mean both ways, I really mean that. Some things, who cares? That's what I tell our people. There's some things I just don't care. Our room is going to be out of space in our auditorium. And to build is going to cost a fortune. And we don't have that money. And so what are we going to do about that? And we can add about 26 chairs and we can rearrange if we put chairs in, because we have pews right now. And the issue is, you know, pews versus chairs. I'm going to take my vote on pews versus chairs. I don't care. It's a seat. I'm not going to fight over it. It's a pew or a chair. Now, we need usability. We are going to be out of room. We have to do something about that. Otherwise, if I come in and we have 18 people in a room that seats 150, and I say, oh, we got to have chairs because, you know, this mass influx of people that are coming. Where are they at? You can't set up an argument like that. You do understand this is all Satan, right? Divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide and conquer, get you upset, get you stressed out. You say, are we really talking about that tonight? Absolutely, here's why. This just said that he is determined for you that you and I are to change and be more like him. to be conformed, morphe, change, to the image of his son. And so why not get us on other arguments instead of what we're supposed to be changing, me? That make sense? Now I've been in Highland for 14 years. I told Brother Wayne that day, and he became a great friend by the time he passed away during COVID. But Brother Wayne told me this. He said, I still don't like change. And I said, Brother Wayne, me coming here makes change. Every person that comes in your life makes change. And I hope it's a good change in your life. And we didn't change a whole bunch of junk. That wasn't my goal. My goal was to pastor a flock and the flock is what matters. It's the people. It's not the wood grain. I'm so much more concerned with the people than the wood grain. We We have to obey this passage and be conformed to the image of his son. I'm so glad that we have somebody working on us to do that. It's called sanctification. It's the Holy Spirit that does the work, doesn't it? And he does it through the word of God. So we have to teach it, have to preach it, have to talk about it, have to come back to it as much as possible. I want to encourage you as a church to be something wholly different altogether than you are. Every day. It doesn't matter if, you know, I used to tease our senior saints class because one of our men in our church, he said, he says, so this activity we have coming up, who all's going? I said, all the adults. And he said, so, but I know you got some young adults there, but you have all the adults. This man's bald. Okay. And now he's in his seventies. And Brother Paul said, so he goes, well, how many, are you sure the older ones and younger ones? I said, yes. And so publicly, I got up there. I guess they didn't have activities with everybody mixed in together. And I walked up, I got to the pulpit that morning. I said, this coming week, we have those that have kids, those have grandkids. We have the gray hairs and no hairs. We want everybody there. And then from the back, he said, and the blue hairs, just to make a joke. And I'm glad he did it, being an older guy for all the older folks. The church body, you're a body, we're a body. Highland Baptist Church is a separate church to Northwest Baptist Church. You know that doctrinally. This body right here is uniquely built to be this body right here in this place. God wants to use y'all and morph y'all and change everything necessary to reach as many people as he can. Jesus didn't die to cut it off. Jesus died so as many people that can hear and would say yes would believe. It's our job to get the message out. I have found in my own Christian life how hard it is to get the message out when I'm so messed up with side issues. How calloused I get, how hard I get. And I'm sick of it. Philippians 3, Philippians 3. I'm gonna show you a couple of verses about Paul saying the same thing. Let's look at his determination as an individual talking to the church in Philippi about how they ought to be that same way. Philippians chapter 3, we read verses 7 through 10. And he says, but what things were gained to me, those I counted lost for Christ. Yea, doubtless. and I count all things but loss. What a change in text. Up to this point he's been talking about all the past and all his human accolades and now he changes and says, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and do count them but dung that I may win Christ. That is a heavy statement, isn't it? If I want to account for It's an accounting term like he used in other places. This issue of having a ledger and a reconciliation. He said, if I account for this, he said, if I added all that up, it's just this. He said, I count it but done, that I may win Christ. In other words, not stay the same as he's always been, but be wholly different. Now if the Apostle Paul can say, I am still going, I am still changing, I'm still trying to, also in the text, apprehend the very next chapter, if he was doing that, I must surely have to do that. Verse nine, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteous which is of God by faith, verse 10, in, sorry, that, or in order to, I may know Him." That word, know, is intimacy. I may know Him and the power of His resurrection. Well, who doesn't want to know that, right? And the fellowship of His sufferings being made conformable unto His death. And he goes on from there. death to life is the entire story of the gospel. Our baptism resembles that very thing, does it not? The gospel itself is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not how anybody thinks so, but according to the scriptures. And the dating of that writing means you're going way back back here. It's been such. It's been such that it's the death to life. That's what resurrection is all about. Death to life. Have you ever been there when somebody received Christ? It's an amazing privilege, isn't it? There's a lot of sow and seed we do, and there's a bunch of watering we do, but it is an amazing thing to sit there and look at somebody's face. I mean, you can see it. Isn't that the wildest thing? Yeah, I'm a Baptist to my core. Now, I'm not into the super spiritual stuff, but it is a wild thing to look at somebody's face and just see when it happens right in front of you. The change, instantaneous change that occurs. And that doesn't mean everything's done. I mean, there's a lot to do now. They have a lot of teaching they need, don't they? There's a lot about to happen. They're going to run into a whole lot of brick walls they had no idea they had in their life. They're going to go home and open their refrigerator and look inside and go, why is that in there? And they never knew it was a problem the day before. Isn't that right? A man named Yozmar. He was just gloriously saved weeks ago. Yozmar went home after work. His typical thing to do is walk in. He's a roofer. Walk in, open the fridge, grab a beer, go to the couch, and drink a beer and watch TV. the day after his Bible study got saved in. No teaching necessary, just God. The next day, he comes home, walks over to the fridge, opens it, and goes, why is that in there? And he starts pulling every one of them out and pouring them out outside, throwing the bottles in the trash. Got a water bottle, went and set it on the couch. His wife, who was already saved, who visited our church and got the Bible studies we got started, Man, that's a great text to get as a pastor. To see that God is changing somebody. What an amazing thing that is. Now Yozmar is barely bilingual. His wife is one of our translators. We got hearing devices for those that are hearing impaired, and we had to buy another set and open up another channel on our soundboard just so she can live where she's sitting in the auditorium. Anybody that's speaking Spanish in the room now can sit where they're sitting, and she's translating on the fly while I'm speaking. Now, there's some things that she told me. It was the very next week, she said, now, I'm sorry to tell you this. And I said, well, go ahead, what is it? She goes, you have to slow down. And she's translating on the fly. And it's fun to watch these families sit with each other because they're tapping, going, what? What is he saying? Because they could pick up on most of it, but not all of it. But they're craving the truth, and you can see in their life how much they're changing. There's some natural process that God working in us, but it's our job as churches to engage that process and becomes God's associate, God's assistant on this job. He is the authority making the change. It's our job just to keep feeding them to help that baby grow. That's exciting to me. Now, why am I telling you that? Paul said here, about the conformity even to death, not just the death, the life, resurrection, but he said how it works. He said, I want to know him even his death and the fellowship of his sufferings. I want to go to the nth degree to find out what this is all really about. I'm willing to give it all is what he's saying. That word conformable. I'm going to break that down just a bit for you. That word, sumorphou, is actually multiple words put together. It means to conform to or fashion self according to. To bring or force to the same form to conform myself. The two words are together with and embodiment. To be together with the same embodiment of another. What's messed up today in modern Christianity is everybody's trying to be like somebody else. Instead of the one person we ought to be looking like, and acting like, and feeling like, and thinking like, and desiring like. Sharing the same form, embodying the same reality. to be something wholly different all together. I think that's the theme here. To be wholly different and together in doing so. That's the amazing thing about church, isn't it? I mean, I find that to be so. I stood up Sunday to speak this last week, and looking out across the crowd, you got every little age bracket there is in there. You got brand new believers, You got a couple of other unbelievers, you got rebellious teenagers that are not saved, and those, Yosmar and Nayeli that we're talking about, they, it's her kids, and they have a blended family with multiple marriages, and it's a little bit of everything everywhere. One girl that was born in Kenya, we have folks that, I mean, every kind of thing in that room. And to me, that's just amazing. I mean, if you watch the news, they say that nobody can get along. But what Jesus can do is he can morph you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and make you one. Isn't that amazing? I mean, we've been married a long time now, and I just almost double-clutched. 26 years? Does that sound right? So you can't even breathe there. Good deal. I'm only half in trouble. So, 26 years. You know, I look back at it now, you get older and you start realizing how dumb you used to be. Right? I mean, I thought I had it all figured out. And it wouldn't take me too long to fix everything wrong with her. And I'm pretty sure she thought the same thing about me. And now we look back and go, none of that worked. Not a bit of that worked. Isn't it amazing how God takes two things that are completely different and brings them, makes them one? Isn't it an awesome thing? I mean, you can't manipulate that. You can't force that. You can't make that happen. Only God can do that. I think it's a beautiful thing. Everything God makes, He does so uniquely that nobody else could possibly do it. You think about evolution versus creation. What a fun argument that is. I mean, just logically, any farmer can tell you. They don't believe in evolution. In an instant, they don't believe it. They're putting their hands in the dirt. They're watching what's going down. There's no way you can convince them. You say, oh yeah, but you know how all this happened. You know, the Camden explosion to however their designs are. Hold on a second. You know, the interesting thing about this is it just all of a sudden create trees, it creates trees, it creates more trees. They keep reproducing the same kind. Humans are, dogs are, everybody is. Just like the Bible says. There is no model for that. Only God could do it. Same thing about a marriage made in heaven. Only God could have done that. How can God take two people? I grew up in a Christian home, but they didn't get saved until later. My dad's a construction worker. My mom was a pretty hardcore country girl. We had a loose tongue and kind of a violent temper in our family. We have a blended family and it's all split and messed up. I married a preacher's daughter. I don't know if that was her being rebellious, I'm not sure, but I married a preacher's daughter and you couldn't have found two different people in the world to come together and yet God God did it. There's no way she and I could sit on council with somebody and say, here's what we did right. Most of it, we're looking back going, how'd that happen? Because God did it. You look at church, how'd that work? God did it. 60 years, brother, your prayer is right, 60 years. I mean, there's a lot of churches that cannot hold that stat anymore. The staggering statistics on churches shutting their doors, is mind-blowing, sad. May God help us. We're one of the unique people groups in this whole world that can show, just by our love one to another, what it means to be a follower of Christ. That only God could have done that. God is a God of amazing things. But for something to change like that, I'm gonna tell you the nasty answer here. You ready? You gotta die to live. You have to die to live. 1 Corinthians 15, 36 says, thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. Nothing's gonna happen until it dies. Weeks ago, we were, going to church and I walked out and one of our plants in the back of our deck, I looked down at it and there was a shoot coming up and the leaves looked, it was a citronella plant. And they're very good about keeping mosquitoes away and ours doesn't work. I'm not sure what it is, but there was a shoot coming up and different looking leaves, and the leaves looked familiar to me. I'm like, that's interesting. And so I went to go pull it out of the pot. When I did, guess what it was? A pecan. It was growing a pecan tree. And so all the soil I dug, we have a pecan tree in our backyard, so I got some soil to mix with the other soil and put it in that pot, and sure enough, one of those pecans went in there and it began to germinate, and it had a shoot and a little root. And I thought, man, I'm gonna plant this pecan tree. It started creating a pecan tree. Now, I know you know this. If I took that shell, as it was split open, shoot's coming up, the root's coming down. If I took that and opened it and started eating it, it would be nasty. It would be gross. It no longer looks like a pecan in there. As a matter of fact, it's kind of fuzzy. You don't want to eat that. We all agree with that, right? It had to go in the soil and die so that something else could live. Something entirely different. It morphed. It changed. I'm seeing a phenomenon amongst believers today because it is getting harder, as the Bible tells us. We are living in perilous times. Men shall be lovers of themselves. It is not good. It's getting worse dramatically, as the Bible says, wax worse and worse. So exponentially it's getting worse. It's increasingly more difficult faster. It does something to us as believers. Do you notice that? It changes us in not good ways. I found in my own life having to have a lot more prayer about my own hardness of heart and callousness. God is a God of real fruit. But for the fruit to happen, something's got to go in the soil and die. So I'm starting to see a problem in the councils we're doing, especially new believers. It's like, it's the same thing with older believers. It's the same thing in my own Christian life. After all these years, I still have to die to me. And that's becoming so difficult for modern believers, especially when there's so many on TV and radio and other churches and there are other kinds out there. They're telling you, you're amazing. You're awesome. Your self-esteem is everything. You can do great things. You, you know, don't even mention the word God. Don't even mention Jesus. They don't mention surrender. They don't mention dying. That is horribly unpopular. John 12, 24 says, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. That is so true. I live amongst wheat fields. That seed looks good. It goes in the ground. Here shortly something comes up, right now it's very dry. Usually you plant in our area about September 15th, but it's very dry. So they're just now starting to, if it gets some more rain, otherwise it's gonna scorch it. It's worthless to plant at this moment. You peel the dirt up right now in our part of Oklahoma, it is dry, dry, dry. But isn't that amazing? That right there is the answer we're talking about. Because if that farmer, we have some farmers in our church, if they put that wheat in the ground right now, They have no control over it from that point on. Only God can make that germinate. Only God can bring the right amount of rains. Only God, only God, only every piece of this puzzle, God. You just release that seed to the ground. You cover it over. It's absorbed into the dirt and you walk away from it. There's not much else you can do. if we would just lose ourself in Christ on purpose and be morphed by Him and allow Him to change us, allow the conviction to come in. I've had Christians recently ask questions like, I just feel real bad when I read my Bible. I can't believe after all these years I'm having to sit and I go, let me explain the word conviction. And their mouth on the table going, what? Yes, the feeling you feel is the Holy Spirit telling you what you're reading, that's you. Oh, isn't that amazing? What's happened? Madison here was doing a Bible study with somebody, a basic Bible truth study, matter of fact, and that lady said, I've never owned my own Bible or held one in my hand in my life. How old is she, Madison? 38 years old in Oklahoma, never held a Bible in her hand in her life. Isn't that wild? We have a very desperate world that needs somebody to die. Jesus did, thank God. Every illustration, every chapter we've been reading so far, it's about him. But he's the first fruits. If you die to yourself, you get buried in Christ, you cease to exist as you are, God can bring life out of that. Do you know how scary it is to tell somebody about Jesus? That's what I'm finding out, how many people are terrified to tell somebody else about Christ. We have all the right answers, right? If you love Him, why can't you talk about Him? I love my kids, I can talk about my kids all day long. I mean, there's things I love that I can talk about. If you like old cars, you can talk about old cars for hours. If you like plants, you can talk about plants for hours. I don't know what's the problem. If you love somebody, why don't you talk about them? That sounds good until you go to work and that person's right there in your face. So how do you do that? Well, that's the whole point. God does it. God brings it to fruition. God gives you the courage. God gets them to ask a weird question. God does all those things. But I gotta die. Because I'm always trying to protect myself or I'm trying not to look like I'm dumb if I'm always trying to put up barriers that I'm never going to get anywhere. I know y'all know all this stuff. I'm glad he called it a renewal and not a revival. My job is to come here and just stir it up a little bit and remind you of stuff you already know. So here's a question we have to ask. Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead to give you what you have as it is right now? How many churches out there are distracting people with this prosperity gospel? That's been around for a long time, a long, long time. It was around in the times of Christ. It's right here in our New Testament. But now it is so wide, it's everywhere, and I'm running into believers now, or even those who are unsaved just now getting saved. And you start talking to them, and they are just blown away that, well, why can't I pray for something God give it to me? I mean, he should, why didn't he give me what I want? That's what he says in his Bible. It doesn't say that in the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible. And they're just dumbfounded. Satan's not wanting to raise up Satanists, he just wants to raise up false teachings. So when we go in there and say, no, no, no, you gotta die to yourself, you gotta take up your cross, and what? I mean, we're talking crazy talk. It's the answer. I know this church knows this. I prayed hard today, this very day, about this driving down here. If God would let me give some illustrations to y'all about just recently what God's done for our church. It's not our good work. It's not my organizational skills. I'm not that good at it anyways. It's God just doing a God thing, and you can't explain it any other way. But watching what God does, I mean, I feel like I'm Gomer Powell, you know? You just look at it and go, oh, shucks, you know? I'm blown away by what God's doing, going, oh, oh, okay. One Sunday, I told the church about the condition of souls and gave some illustrations, and we really hammered down one passage. Paul speaks in Romans 9 about his burden for Israel. What an extreme passage that is. So unbelievable, he even has to say, I lie not. It's so unbelievable, he even says, the Holy Spirit bears me witness. And as that's broke down, explaining his burden for Israel and sets up the next couple of chapters. I told the church, I said, maybe we need to get on our knees and cry out to God. Is our concern to the level it should be for lost souls like it used to be? I mean, we're in a bad situation in America. We're in a bad situation as Baptists. We're in a bad situation as believers these end times. I'm not so worried about repainting the walls on auditorium right now. I wanna see people coming in to see those walls. God, help us. So far, every person I saw go down to that altar, and every one of them that I heard, and they did, I, they cried out. Folks that were talking out loud, begging God, they were so broken and hurt for their neighbor, for their friend, for their coworker. And I mean, I really wasn't expecting that. Every one of them have either landed a Bible study, got a chance to tell their friend. Not everyone got saved, but many of them have changed. I'm gonna read y'all a text. You may have your own, you know that show, The Chosen? You may or may not like it, that's not my point. It's hilarious because this text group I have, we call it The Chosen. Isn't that funny? And somebody had an attitude and said, it's like The Chosen. I'm like, that's a great name. Why don't you use that? Listen to this. Zack Summers wrote this. This is last night, 9.32. Finish lesson four with David tonight. David is how old? 13? This is Nayeli's boy. Yozmar's stepson who just got saved. Finish lesson four with David tonight. He said that he believed, he believed in the son. The second time they came to Holland, And Aeli asked him if he believed Jesus Christ died for his sins. And he said, absolutely. So what do you need to get saved? And he said, I did today while he was talking. In response to that, I knew my phone lit up in the middle of the night. I'd check it just in case. And I saw it as a paragraph and I just put it back down. It wasn't, you know, normally if it's that bad at 3.45 in the morning, I get a phone call. And it was a text, so I put it back down. This morning I was so pleased to open my phone and see this. Jacob Hunker wrote this. Chloe was in last night's Bible study with Terry, did a thorough review of lesson four, and she was saved eight years ago at her mom's house. See, it's not just the person got saved, it's also bringing that back to renewal, back to their memory. It's been dormant for this poor girl for eight years and nobody's discipled her, nobody's talked to her. She's been just got left hung out to dry and her parents don't go to church. And now it's through a Bible study with Jacob as a coworker, electrician to an electrician. Isn't that amazing? People think you gotta surrender to go to Honduras or something. You can be an electrician and lead somebody to Christ. Now Terry's wife, She's unsaved. She's hostile to the gospel. They've been doing Bible study at their kitchen table. She stays in the living room, says, nope, I don't want anything to do with that. But she doesn't get her phone out. She doesn't turn the TV on. She assists there and listens to all of it. Isn't that wild? I've done six studies with Terry. Now they're going through a thorough review of lesson four with the kids. She's getting a double whammy and she can't get rid of it. And so this last week she said, uh, the house is too dirty and we're not going to have Bible study here. So Jacob said, okay. And so they went over to the church building, which is literally catty corner from the front door of our church. And they met one of our classrooms. That's really going to mess up that lady. And now when our daughter comes home and says, Hey, I just got reminded, yeah, I was saved eight years ago and now I want to get baptized. What's gonna happen with that? Who knows? But we're praying for her salvation. Now both the kids are saved, now husband is saved. I know. that there is absolutely no way you can sit here tonight and not have somebody that you're broken for. I'm not talking about a region of the world. I'm not talking about all of Houston. I'm talking about there is somebody somewhere you know that doesn't know Christ. That's where you start. But Lord willing, tomorrow morning, we're gonna take off from where I just left off. We're going to a specific text where Jesus taught a specific thing about death to life and dying so you can live. And I wanna share some more testimonies with you and hopefully encourage you. God is still working all over the place. It is very encouraging to get a missionary, Doug Hammett. He was a pastor. Now he's over in Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa. I'm not sure where all he's at, Zimbabwe. He's trying to conquer the world by himself. And brother Doug Hammett, his emails are very encouraging because all these men that are now reaching their communities very indigenously in those areas. And I see that and say, God's working, right? And we had a rash of multiple people getting saved in Bible studies for a couple weeks. And man, our church was just lit up. We were excited. We were on fire. Then you go a couple weeks without it and you go, what happened? Because you're so used to it now, you know? You're so excited about it. It doesn't mean that God all of a sudden just quit. It means that we got to keep telling. And again, Lord willing, if God lets me this coming Sunday, we're going to be in a very simple passage, Mark 16, 15. And I'll go ahead and tell you the conclusion. I'm going to ruin it. I'm going to destroy all the preacher rules right now and tell you what the conclusion of the whole weekend is. Tell everyone. Tell everyone. They're not all going to say yes, but tell everyone. I asked our church, I thought, well, I don't know what's, I mean, dummy me, Gomer Pyle here, like, I don't know what's going on. I said, God, you know, let me do whatever. And that Sunday morning I said, if anybody wants to learn how to teach a basic Bible truce, let's just, we'll start there. You know, meet me today at four o'clock in the chapel. 24 people showed up. I expected three. We put tables out, we started training, and I was pleasantly blessed. God's doing something. The main thing is, most of these folks, you know, I said, okay, I gotta get the drawing down, I gotta start learning how to do it, we're gonna teach each other, so on and so forth. Oh, man. The second weekend to it, one of our deacons, who's in his 70s, came to me and says, okay, I went through the whole drawing in order on lesson two. I said, okay, good, yeah, how'd that go? It took me three hours. I'm like, okay. When I told the whole group, I said, listen, I'm gonna tell you two things to do. First thing is this, just start offering Bible studies. Hey, you wanna do a Bible study? Hey, you wanna do a Bible study? Man, I think my wife and I are gonna get divorced. You wanna do a Bible study? Just offer it, keep offering it. You're gonna have your mind blown how many will say yes. Two. Once you get started just saying, hey, you want a Bible study? The next thing you need to do is help teach it. And I saw their faces. I could see what was going on, and I said, if you want to, just call me. You draw the drawing, and I'll teach, and you watch me do it. And you're talking about a sigh of relief. I mean, 70-year-old men that own companies, they run 100 people out every day, they're in control of millions of dollars of stuff. You have other housewives with five children, that's a worse job than the other guy. And then you have all, I mean, stressed out people, their life is strung out to every kind of walk of life sitting there in those tables. There is a very real pressure to touching eternal things. I remind them, every chance I get, die so others can live. You gotta be the seed in the ground so somebody else can get something out of this. Just like Jesus did for us, we've gotta do likewise. It is absolutely amazing to watch God work, isn't it? Wimpy Wright. Wimpy Wright was a bricklayer on a job site. Commercial site, big job. They're putting CNU block walls up. He came in the job center one day and he said, Charles, I want you to come to church with me. Charles said, if my wife says yes, then we'll go. I haven't been in church in a long time. Okay. That next Sunday, my parents went to church. My dad was raised in the Assemblies of God. Struggled with his assurance of salvation, obviously. I finally determined he wasn't and got gloriously saved. My mom already was, but was very backslidden. We started going to church. There was ups and downs. There was back and forth. But you give years for that. In that same church, I went on a missions trip to Mexico. God called me to the ministry. 10 years later, I thank God that Wimpy Wright prayed hard to God to give him the courage to go to my dad and invite him to church. My dad was a scary man. My dad was a tough man. He ran that job with an iron fist. When he went in the trailer, poured a cup of coffee, sit down beside my dad's plan table, and he said, Charles, I want you to go to church with me. That's all he did. That's all he did. That's all God called him to do in that day, that moment. And he died to himself, pushed through the fear, begged God for the courage just to ask this burly man if he would go to church. I thank God for Wimpy Wright. Church, if you're gonna strive together for that gospel of Jesus Christ, for that faith, that one true faith, we're gonna die to our individual selves. for that to be so. You're still here, aren't you? God's still working, isn't he? Then we gotta do it. Amen? Pastor. We've done this the last couple of years. Can anybody look up at that picture? You see any more words than striving together in there? There's one more word in there. It says go. I think it's along the same lines as die. Just do it. Just do it. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We thank you for all you do. We thank you for your word. We thank you that your word is so rich. And Lord, that it carries such deep and powerful meaning. Lord, help us to be conformed. Lord, help us to be ready to change. Lord, not some change that we're afraid of, Lord, change that you want to bring, not something we've imagined in our minds, something you want to reveal to us. Lord, help us to change. Lord, I pray the greatest change that happens in each of our lives is that we are willing to die. We're willing to take a step forward and do something scary so that someone else might have a chance at life. Lord, we love you, we praise you, we thank you for Brother Travis Jones' message this night. We thank you for the messages he's gonna bring tomorrow and on Sunday, and we pray you would just continue to fill these seats, as many as possible, so they might receive a blessing, and we might be encouraged, and we might band together as one for the faith of the gospel. Lord, we love you, we praise you, and Lord, we trust you. In Christ's name, amen.