Rebrand | Week 6 | Daniel Goulding

we over the last few years moved to Arizona from San Diego. Were We here for a little bit, we moved back to San Diego. And then pretty quickly after that, we moved back to Arizona. And I just have to say, I don't recommend it. It's not the most fiscally sound

thing out there, but it is what it is. It's a journey and our family needed to go on it. But here's the cool part, is we did learn some things in the first move that we didn't have to relearn in the second move. One of the most painful lessons that we learned when we moved out here is apparently in Arizona,

you have a separate utility company for power and one for gas, right? We have SRP and Southwest Gas, or at least I did in Power Ranch. In San Diego, have one company. It's called San Diego Gas and Electric, right? So when you move, you make one call to the company that is run by the devil himself, SDG and E.

Highest utility rates in the country. They're the worst company in the world, but at least you only make one phone call when you move. So when we moved,

I called, I got an internet set up, and I got our power turned on, right? Well, the day comes to move. We move cross country with little kids and a couple dogs and a cat and a bunny, and luckily we left the chickens at home. But long story short, it was not the easiest move in the world, right?

Cross country, I say cross country but out of state is just not a fun experience, right? You finally get everything unloaded, you get there, everybody's exhausted, your kids are fighting, all you want to do is take a hot shower and go to bed. I go to get in the shower, I turn the hot water on, nothing, just cold water.

So you know, okay I'll wait a little bit, maybe it's like a tankless water heater or something, you just got to give it some time. I wait plenty of time and there's no hot water coming. So I go through the process and try to figure out what's going on, eventually I walk outside and I realize the gas line is turned off and it's locked, which makes no sense to me because I called the power company and they should have turned all of this on.

Well, come to find out Southwest Gas is a thing, that I needed to call a separate company, right? So take a cold shower, go to bed, wake up the next morning and I call Southwest Gas and say, hey, we just moved here, we need to get our gas turned on.

They go, cool, your first appointment is like two and a half weeks from now.

And mind you, it's like the middle of November, right? Like it's cold at night. I'm like, me like the 18 hundreds. I'm gonna live without hot water in like a heater. Like what do you nobody can come out here and turn it on for two and a half weeks? And they're like, yeah, sorry. We're just super busy. And it is what it is. And so I'm like, alright.

So to bathe for the first few days, what we did is my wife would literally boil hot water on the stove and then she would take hot pads and try to make the journey up the stairs, right? Go up, make turn around the stairs, get to our bathtub and fill up the bathtub. It was like a survivor challenge to see how fast you could do it to get it to raise to a certain level, right? And then finally you get two inches of water, and then you have to bathe in it, and then your kids have to follow, and you are now doing the same emotional scarring to your children that your parents did to you by making you share the bathwater with your siblings. Anybody else?

Like it is what it is. We're not gonna go through the process of doing this 37 times. And there was one point, like I remember my wife was like pouring water over my head and I'm sitting in this bathtub. And I'm not like a bath guy, I'm a big dude. It's not a great visual, don't think about it too long. But like,

I just was like, this is the worst. There could not be a worse way in a less efficient way to like bathe the whole family, right? Well, a couple days later, I'm driving out of our neighborhood and I see the Southwest gas truck at my neighbor's house. So I like turn around, I pull up, I knock on the door, my neighbor comes to the house and he's like, hey man, what's going on? And I'm like, this is super random, but I need to talk to the gas guy. I'm hoping I can get him to come over to my house and turn our gas on. And come to find out they had just moved here too and they were getting their gas turned on. The cool part is that family now comes to Rock Point and there's some redemptive story in this. But I talked to the gas down, I'm like, look man, I'm only a couple houses down. I don't have an appointment for like two and a half weeks. We're dying, know, like we're freezing in the middle of the night. We have no hot water. My wife's bathing me. Like it's just a demoralizing experience all around. Can you hook a brother up and just come and turn on my gas for me? I know it'll take thirty six seconds. And the guy literally says, sorry man, there's nothing I can do for you.

I'm like, what? Like just, we're like right down the street, know, there's this big padlock on the lock. And so I'm, at this point I'm so frustrated, I'm like, okay, hypothetically, if somebody were to cut the lock off and just turn on the gas themselves, what would happen?

And he's like, oh man, that's a federal offense and like the FBI comes to your house and you'll spend the rest of your life in prison and blah, blah, blah.

So eventually I get frustrated enough that I'm like, I'm done with this. I don't care what happens and I go in the garage and I grab these big bolt cutters that I have. Why I have bolt cutters? I was a youth pastor, okay? You've got to figure out some stuff. I still have them, it's awesome. And I just go outside and I say, and I cut this lock off and I literally just cut the bolt off, I turn the gas on myself, the heater starts working, But the problem was there was still no hot water because I had to turn the pilot light on on the water heater itself.

For the life of me, I could not get this stupid pilot light lit to turn the hot water heater on. I watched 7,000

YouTube videos. I did all of the steps. I did literally everything for like four or five hours going, I broke the law. I did all of this. I'm risking going to prison for the rest of my life, which side point, hopefully there's statutes of limitations if this really is a federal offense and that if somebody's here and you're going to arrest me, this was all a theoretical story. Okay?

But for the life of me, no matter what I do, I promise I'm going somewhere with this. I couldn't get the pilot light bed, I couldn't get the hot water heater on, and we were basically resolved to just wait for the Southwest gas guy to get there. Well, two and a half weeks later, guess who shows up to my house?

The exact same guy that was at my neighbor's house a few doors down. Luckily, I wasn't at the house so my wife got to deal with that fun situation, right? And she's texting me like, he says you're going to jail. I was like, ah.

Funny story, nothing actually happened. I didn't even pay a fine or anything so come at me Southwest Gas, alright? Why do I tell you any of this this morning? This guy showed up to my house, he was literally there for like thirty to forty seconds, turned the gas on, had everything operational

and up and running. And it took me all of this time and I could not figure it out. I needed his help, I needed his assistance. He had something that I didn't, whether it was a knowledge of how things worked or just a bit more masculinity than I possessed, but he had the ability to do what I couldn't.

The reason that I start there is what we're gonna see today in Romans chapter 10 is Paul had been walking through the book of Romans. If you're just joining us, is one of the most important books in the entirety of the Bible. Paul is walking through this incredible dissertation about who Jesus is and how why,

what he did changes everything for both the Jews, God's people at the time, and the Gentiles. And he's been talking about this free gift that's available to all of us that happens in a moment of faith that's empowered by this thing called grace.

And he starts to talk about how God loves you and I, and then it's not about what you do or what you didn't do that gets you approved with God. He starts talking about this what Jesus did and how Jesus on the cross changed everything for us. But what he's gonna show us in Romans chapter 10

is that for those of us who raise our hand and say yes and we accept the free gift that is offered from Jesus, you've got to understand that in the very invitation of faith is a charge and a challenge to go and now bring that good news and be the person that helps the other people who are by themselves helpless.

We are the Southwest Gas people spiritually to our friends, to our neighbors, to our coworkers, to the people in our circle of influence. Here's the big idea we're gonna look at for the next few minutes if you're taking notes. For you and I, if we are called to know, we are also called to go. What Paul is gonna say

is that for those of us who accept the invitation of faith, yes, it is one that is for you, yes and amen. But you now possess the keys to unlocking prisoners from captivity and you have a responsibility to bring that message of hope to other people. Without you, without your insight,

they'll never be able to get the water heater lit. They will be on their own. Romans chapter 10, here's how Paul starts in verse eight.

He says, In fact, the message that we're supposed to carry, it's a message that's very close at hand. It's actually the message that's already on your lips and in your heart. And that message is the very message about faith that we preach.

Let me kind of catch us up real quickly because if you were here last week, Bill wrapped up the end of Romans chapter eight. And I know some of you are like, wait, are we skipping Romans chapter nine? Kind of. Romans nine, ten and eleven are a really complex theologically dense section of scripture.

In truth, if you look at most of the divisions that happen inside of the Protestant denomination, you look at all the different Christian churches and why we have different camps and different denominations of churches,

it's a lot of times because we read Romans nine, ten and eleven and we take some things that I don't think Paul was necessarily making an emphatic point about and we make it something that we need to divide over. What Romans nine, ten and eleven really is, is a response, a long brilliant, sometimes hard to understand

response and answer to a pretty simple question actually. Paul knew that the question was coming from the nation of Israel, from his people, the Jews, going, wait, I thought you said God chose us. In Romans eight, it says that there's nothing that can separate us from him.

But isn't the fact now that God is inviting the Gentiles in, doesn't that mean that he's no longer choosing us as the Jews? What the Jews are going to ask is, is God done with us? Did we like have our season and now it's over? And Paul is gonna say no.

And in Romans nine, he walks through Israel's history and the nation of Israel's history and he goes, look, this is your history and here's what you missed in that history. You falsely believe that because you were a descendant of Abraham that that somehow made you one of God's children.

He's saying just because your parents are Christian, just because you come to church, don't believe the lie that that's what makes you a Christian. The biggest mistake that the nation of Israel made was believing that what God wanted to do was to build some type of holy huddle for the good people

and shield them from the bad people. And friends, unfortunately, it's the same mistake that you and I can be tempted to make this morning. There are no good people and bad people. There are forgiven people and not forgiven people. But the forgiven people are always meant to go and share the message with the unforgiven,

unreached people. The mistake the nation of Israel made is that they believed that the message was just for them.

And in Romans nine, Paul walks through the fallacies of that. Romans 10, he talks about the present state of Israel. We'll see next week in Romans 11. He's gonna talk about the future redemptive plan that God has and his future plans of how he's gonna use the nation of Israel and bring them back into reconciliation

with Him. But Romans nine, ten, 11, all that to say are one long winded answer to no, God's not done with you. He still has a plan for the nation of Israel. Just like he still has a plan for us. But the plan is intricately tied together

with our willingness to go and share the message of the gospel with a world that doesn't know God. So the question is what is that message? Paul says that it's a message that you already know.

It's a message that's already on your lips. It's a message that's already close to your heart. Here's the brilliance if you're taking notes, write this down. The method of salvation is our message.

Here's what I mean. Sometimes we think that for us to share our faith with somebody who doesn't have the same faith beliefs that we do, that we have to have some type of formal education or some type of

level of experience in sharing the gospel with people. Because we just don't necessarily know what we're going to say. Or what if they ask a question, how do we respond? And what Paul says is that you already have the message, it's already within you. And the method is the method of salvation.

Luckily he's going to tell us exactly what that is. The greatest message that we have, don't ever mistake it, it is not a political rant, it is not a candidate that we support, It is not a policy that we should vote for. The greatest message of the church has always been, will always be

that Jesus came, lived the life that you couldn't, he died the death that you deserve, and he's inviting you into a life beyond your wildest dreams. We have to fight the temptation to let God and the church stand for really truly almost anything other than that.

Friends, the method of salvation is the most important message that the world needs to know. So what is it? Here's how Paul explains salvation. He says, If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be

saved. He continues and says it again in verse 10, he says, for it is by believing in your heart that you're made right with God, and it is by openly declaring your face

that you are saved. He goes so far as in 11 he says, as the scriptures tell us, anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced. Friends, what is salvation? What is faith? This is one of those verses that is the famous one that we talk about all the time. Paul makes the understanding of the complex really simple.

Faith is something that happens in a moment. It is a moment of belief in your heart. But then you have to do something else and you have to declare it with your mouth. And he says in two verses, two times, faith can be deduced down to believing and declaring, but it's not belief or declaring, it's belief and declaring.

Here's the thing sometimes that we get mistaken in our Western context of church, because Paul says that we have to believe in our heart. And sometimes when we hear heart, what we hear is like our emotions, right? That we have a moment that was emotional. And if we were to sit down and ask ourselves, hey, how do I know that I truly am Christian? How do I know that I've placed my faith in Jesus?

I think oftentimes what we do is we think about

the emotional experience we had at summer camp one year, or the one time that like we were in church and the music was just right and the keys were playing and the fog was there and the guy said the thing and we just started crying and maybe we even went so far as to write like our sins on the piece of paper and we put them in the fire or nailed them to the cross and then we went home and did the same sins. But that

emotional experience is the proof to us that we're saved. And again don't hear what I'm not saying. Sometimes when we truly have that moment, experience the magnitude of who Jesus is and compared to the depravity of our sin, it can cause an emotional response. It can be something that's emotional, yes and amen.

But Paul is not saying that that's what salvation is. To the Jewish audience, the readers of this letter, they understood that the heart represented much more than just an emotional decision. To the Jewish audience, the heart was an encapsulation of the entirety of their being.

The heart represented the totality of their emotions, the totality of their actions, their intent, their motive, their thought life. It was all of them, the all consuming part of them. Paul says that is where you have to believe Jesus at.

You have to believe Jesus to the core fabric of your being to the point that it actually begins to change something. AW Tozer famously said, the faith that cannot change your behavior probably can't save your soul. We have to understand

that what we the reason we do all of this is not because we're trying to invoke an emotional response in people. That can be part of it, but what Paul says is salvation is to the very core of you. You go Jesus, this thing is real. And he says part of the proof that you know that has happened is almost instantaneously,

almost at the same time out of the overflow of that decision, out of the abundance of the heart that has been transformed and regenerated, what happens? Your mouth will speak. Salvation, you could make an argument that Paul is almost saying here that you believe in your heart, that's how you're made right with God.

But the way that your salvation really gets worked out, how you really go through the process of fear and trembling, the Bible says, which is how we work out our faith, is as we get uncomfortable and we begin to learn how to declare our faith with our mouths. Here's the thing you gotta understand. Paul has an entire

letter written to church staff where he talks about pastors and elders and the people who lead the churches. Romans 10 is not that section of scripture. This is the message to all who have and have accepted the invitation of faith. Yes, know in your heart, that's awesome.

But the notion that we have in America that it's a personal decision, it's a personal faith, it actually goes completely against what the Bible talks about. It has to come out of you. You almost can't help it and that's the beauty though, is we don't have to have eloquent words, we don't have to know all of the things.

All we have to do is leverage our story and share the gospel. Because if you're called to know at the exact same invitation is one to go. You cannot separate the two. Here's how Paul continues.

He says, As scripture tells us, anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced. He says, Jew and Gentile are the same in this respect. They have the same Lord who gives generously to all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Again, if you read Romans nine and ten and you really dive deep into a few of these verses, you can get yourself really lost going, well, how much free will do people really have?

And I think sometimes we make something a big deal that really is not Paul is not trying to make a big deal. You can get so focused on one tree, you miss the whole forest.

And at the end of the day, if you're here and you're like, I don't know what predestination is, don't worry about it. But for those of you who love geeking out on predestination, at the end of the day, Paul makes it abundantly clear

that whether they're predestined or they have a choice in it, God's heart is for all people to have a saving faith in Jesus. All people. And here's the reality friends, if nobody's told you this, every single one of us will at some point have to make a choice what we do with the message of Jesus. The choice is yours

to make. All of us will hit an impasse where there will be a fork in the road, where you will have to make a decision to go left or right. I grew up camping at this little Indian reservation and it was like a river when I was a kid, but I'm sure it was like a little stream.

But we would take our inner tubes and go up to the top of this

stream and we would get in the inner tubes and you would go down and there was a fork in the stream that we would go down. There'd be signs that would say, hey, don't go to the left because there's a waterfall and you can probably die if you fall down the waterfall. Make sure you stay to the right, right? And they had all these signs. This is dangerous, why would they let kids do this? I don't think my brother can even read, you know what I mean? Like he's gonna for sure end up going left.

And as you got closer and closer and closer to that fork in the road, to that fork in the stream, the signs would get a little bit more precarious and say, hey, sure you do not go left because death is

imminent. Stay to the right. What Paul is telling us is that every single human will have to make that decision when they hit the fork in the road of their life, in their spiritual journey.

For those of us who have said yes, we're staying to the right, we've accepted the free gift that Jesus has offered us, he's now saying your life is supposed to be a sign for other people to see that I have to make the same decision too. Paul will say in second Corinthians that you and I are called to be a living epistle,

a living gospel, a living account of the power of Jesus and Jesus resurrected. That's what we're called to do. That's what we're called to be. And sometimes here's where even the illustration of a sign sometimes falls apart.

Because I don't know if you've heard the saying but I've seen it a lot around church where it says, hey, live your life and preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.

The sentiment of the saying is okay, right? Where hey, live your life in a way that people look at and go, man, there's something different about this person. There's something different about the way that they live. But the very notion that it says if necessary use words completely

misses the next part of what Paul is going to tell us. And this is the part that makes this whole sharing your faith thing get awkward because it's completely necessary to use words.

You have to at some point turn the corner with your non believing family, your non believing friends, your non believing coworkers and share the message of the gospel with them and it is abundantly clear that you and I have to use words. We have to share what it is that God has done in our life. Here's how Paul continues

in this thought. He says, But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they've never heard about him, right? He says they have to hear about him. But here's the most important part. How can they hear about him unless somebody tells him?

How can they hear about the good news of the gospel if nobody's willing to tell them? Here's the second point if you're taking notes. People cannot hear what you don't share.

Here's the reality friends. You look around right now, service is pretty full. We had to turn away families from the last service because our kids ministry was too full.

Even if we knock these walls out, we put another second row, we triple the size of this building, we somehow figure out how to grow Rock Point to 100,000 people. If we don't get this,

they will record the history of Rock Point Church going how did they miss this? We will be the equivalent of the nation of Israel today going, oh, they thought it was just about building the church bigger and making this a bigger and bigger holy huddle. The greatest mistake that we could make is believing that God just wants to grow this thing. Does he? Is that part of how he accomplishes the great commission? Yes and amen.

But what Jesus knew and leveraged better than anybody else in the history of the world is Jesus understood exponential growth. Jesus' responsibility, think about this. He was God in human form.

My back hurts after preaching two messages and I have to lay there and yell at my kids if they try to climb on me, right? Like I'm a terrible messenger in vehicle. Jesus was God in human form. Yet every time a crowd like this would gather, he would almost run away.

And he would go and he would either be by himself and spend intentional time with the father remembering his calling, remembering what he was asked to do.

And then he would gather these 12 knuckleheads that God had given him that did not understand what was happening. That asked him questions all the time that Jesus is like, it is so clear you guys don't get it. And of those 12 men, Jesus really, if you look at it, He poured himself into three of them.

There was three of the 12 that Jesus poured his life into. Jesus knew the path to changing the world was not filling stadiums and filling auditoriums with people to hear Him. He knew that if He poured out everything that He had, leveraged everything in His ability to massively impact the people in his circle of influence.

And if they turned around and did the same thing, and then those three got another three, and then those three got another three. The thing that started somewhere in The Middle East, some thousands of years later would be preached in the middle of Arizona today. Jesus himself had the ability to truly impact three people.

It tells me something powerful. You and I, man, we are never going to reach the entirety of our communities, but what all of us can do is all of us can deeply impact at least one person. If God could do three, I think we can do one. But if that one

does another one and then that one does another one, think about how impactful this whole thing becomes. If we believe the lie that it is my job, it is Bill's job to preach the message and to preach the gospel, and it's your job to be a nurse, to be a teacher, to be a lawyer, to be an accountant, to be a stay at home mom,

we will unintentionally become the nation of Israel all over again. This friends is all of our responsibility. The reason that the moment of salvation once it happens that we're not just beamed up to heaven is because you are in a group of people that don't know who God is that are hurting and that are broken

and you have the message that can unlock them. And you're the only gospel and pastor they might ever encounter. We have to begin to realize that this is an intricately tied together part of the invitation of faith. You almost can't know without going. And I know for some of us that freaks us out.

For some of us we're like, what if we try to turn that corner and we start talking about the gospel and what if they don't hear us or they think we're weird or they push back, right? And in fairness we are living in a bizarre time. This is the first time where like you can have any truth and everybody has to accept it,

except if you're a Christian, right? Like oh, that's cute. You look like a flat earth person, you've never read a science book, like that's a guy walking on water and stuff, like that's good for you. Somehow our message has become one associated with hate.

Now I'm not completely saying that I think some of the correction is wrong. I think a lot of it actually is healthy and needed. The church does really, really well under persecution. I would actually almost make an argument that the church was always designed to thrive under persecution.

And unfortunately in the country today, almost in the world today, the church has become known for a lot of things that I don't think Jesus really cared that much about. I think if half of our church spent as much time online

praying for their friends and neighbors instead of arguing with their friends and neighbors about the freedom convoy, I think we could change the entire community of Rock Point Church's impact tomorrow. I think we have to remember to keep the main things, the main things and understand

that there's going to be people that hear it and it falls on deaf ears. Paul actually tells us to expect it. Here's what he says. He says, how will anyone go and tell them without being sent?

He says, that is why the scriptures say, how beautiful are the feet of messengers who bring good news. It's an important point before you share the message with your friends, make sure you get a pedicure because you have to have beautiful feet. It's in the bible. I'm just kidding, kind of. He says, But not everyone,

this is the important part, not everyone will welcome the good news. But this shouldn't surprise us because even Isaiah, right, what Paul is doing is referencing the Old Testament. Even Isaiah the prophet said, Lord, who has believed our message?

He says, faith comes from hearing, that is hearing the good news about Christ. He says, but I ask, have the people of Israel actually heard the message? Yes, they have. The message has gone throughout the earth and the words to all the world. What the prophet Isaiah said is, well, who believed it? He says, wrong question.

He says, your responsibility is just to make sure they heard it. Belief, salvation, change, all things that you and I have no control over. You and I cannot save anybody. All we are asked to do is to be faithful and to be obedient and let God take care of the rest. The last point I have for you is this,

success when it comes to sharing our faith is measured in obedience, not outcome. This is the liberating freeing part of this whole thing. Our job is to get to heaven one day and God say well done good and faithful servant. Friends, our responsibility is obedience and faithfulness.

This applies to every arena of our life, but specifically when it comes to sharing the hope that we have. The new testament tells us time and time and time again, we have to be able to give an account for the hope that we have. We have a responsibility to steward the message that we were freely given,

but we can't believe that the results of this are up to us. For those of us that are here who are heartbroken and I've gotten to talk to the parents this weekend in the lobby that are heartbroken, that their kids have walked away from the Lord,

it is your job to pray for them. It is your job to be a safe place for them to come and ask questions and to be somebody that is always reminding them about the God that loves them. But it's also not your responsibility to save them. That's what God does. That's his process. And friends, we cannot underestimate

what God is doing in people's hearts that we can't see. I would love for you to go this week and read a story in Acts chapter 10 that proves this. In Acts chapter 10 is this incredible story of this guy named Cornelius.

Cornelius is a really good man. He's a God fearing man. His whole family goes to church and they give to the poor and they're good people. But again remember in the book of Acts, this is post Jesus' resurrection and him coming back and gathering the disciples. And the message of the gospel is spreading like wildfire and Cornelius has not yet accepted the free gift offered through Jesus.

Well one night Cornelius is in his house and an angel shows up to him. And this angel shows up and he tells him, you need to go find Simon Peter. So he sends somebody to go get this guy named Peter. Well simultaneously,

God is giving Peter a dream. And it's this really bizarre dream that almost makes no sense, but with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, Peter understands, okay, God's gonna send me somebody, Now I've just got to share the message of Jesus with them. Cornelius

and Peter at the end of Acts chapter 10, they meet and they both connect the dots going, oh, you're the guy. That's what the stream is for. Oh, that's what the angel was for. Peter simply shares the message of the gospel. It says that the Holy Spirit falls on the room and the entire room gives their life to Jesus. Here's why that story is so important for us to understand.

Number one, the first thing that's mind blowing about this is God sent Cornelius an angel to tell him what? To go find a human. Think about that for a second. Could God have used an angel to tell him about the gospel? Probably, but he doesn't. He sends him to one of us. He sends him to another human,

but he starts doing something in Cornelius' heart. He starts to get him to realize, okay, something else is here. I'm missing something.

And all Peter has to do is be faithful and share the gospel and then everybody in the room gets saved. You know what's crazy I try to find this week? A story in the New Testament, anywhere in the New Testament. If you can find it, I would love to hear it, but I don't think it's there. There's not a single account of somebody in the New Testament giving their life to Jesus

in any other way besides a human telling another human about Jesus and then responding through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit and saying yes. Here's why I say that. Could God use the rocks and dreams and donkeys? Sure, it's all through the Bible. But I think the point of it

is part of how you and I truly begin to step into the abundant life that is offered to us, right? John ten ten, that he comes so we can have a life that is abundant. I believe friends, the abundant life is one that is found when we fully leverage and realize we have a responsibility to share the gospel with the lost.

I don't think God is in heaven going, man, I hope they get this this morning because if not, I don't know how I'm going to tell people about me.

I do think that for those of us who don't get this and aren't willing to do something with it, I think God is deeply saddened on the adventures that you're going to miss out on. The fullness of life that's available on the other side of it. Because I'm telling you, when you begin to do this and you begin to realize and remember and live as if this life really is what it is,

which is temporary, It's never going to satisfy. Doesn't matter how big the house is or how many cars or how much the salary is, it will all not be enough. And like some of you have experienced recently and in a moment, your life can end and what you thought was going to take a long time has ended in a few moments.

And we have to begin to realize that everybody that we interacted with, their eternity hangs in the balance And us refusing to share our faith with them is the equivalent of being in the cancer war going I found the cure.

Man, it'd be so awkward to talk to these people about this. Like they're going think I'm weird, somebody else will do it. Like it would be ludicrous, But we do the same thing spiritually.

What Paul is saying is that you and I are asked to leverage everything that we have to advance the kingdom of God. That is almost the totality of life on this side of heaven. I want to close by sharing with you the final words that Jesus had for his disciples.

If you go read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, four accounts of the life of Jesus, none of them end with, oh, it's an empty tomb, awesome, Jesus overcame death. Hoorah, that's amazing, good job Jesus. It's not how the story ends. And this for me was the parts of this whole Christianity thing that was really hard as a skeptic

to explain away. I can get away from like, okay, a guy was swallowed by a whale and was in the belly of a fish for a week. Like that sounds ludicrous to me. But how do you explain Jesus' 12 closest friends who upon the moment Jesus is arrested, they all run-in fear and hide for their lives. One of them goes so far

as to go, hey, wait, aren't you that guy that was with Jesus? He's like, no, I don't know him. Three times he denies him. And yet in a matter of days from that moment to here, those same 12 guys that were in hiding

are now willing to leverage everything that they have and most all of them die a brutal martyr death sharing the message of Jesus with people who don't know it. What happened in those three days? Well, the Bible tells us that the resurrected Jesus showed up

and he walked among the people and he gathered his disciples and his last words to them were this. Matthew chapter 28, here's what he says.

He says, Jesus came and he told his disciples, I've been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and live comfortably in your homes in the suburbs. He doesn't say that. He says, go and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Teach these new disciples to obey the commands that I've given you and be sure of this. I am with you always even to the end of the age. Jesus' final words to his disciples was, guys, here, come here, come here, come here. Leverage everything that you have.

Everything that we've talked about. This is the moment. This is the culmination of everything that I've been teaching you. Go. And these 12 guys go to the farthest ends of the earth and again most all of them die

brutal deaths. But the mistake that you and I can make this morning is going, oh, that's awesome. Those guys were great. None of it matters what they did. The most important question that we will answer this morning is where are you supposed to go? Where are you supposed to go?

What God is going to ask me is Daniel, what did you do with what I gave you? He's going to ask you the same question. And here's the craziest part, we don't even have to go to Ethiopia or Africa to go on a mission trip. Do you realize that we live in the fastest growing city in the country for the last five years?

The world is coming to us. All the realtors in here are like, yeah man, we're ours. That's why we love it. Right? But it's not just good news for the realtors, it's good news for all of us because the harvest is plentiful. It's the workers that are few friends.

Rock Point as a church can only do so much. Can we invite people to Easter? Yes and amen. But if every single one of us in this room found one person, shared the gospel with them, our church would double overnight. I'm not a mathematician, I'm pretty sure the math works on that.

Let me end by telling you a story. Just watched a movie called Act of Valor, incredible movie. If you haven't seen this movie, you've seen a movie like it, right? It's the war movie where you have the guys that are gathered, the SEAL Team Six or the Special Forces,

and they're at the base camp, right? And they're in their sweatpants and they're hanging out and they're playing Xboxes and they're throwing darts and they're just having a good critical moment comes,

where they're gathered together by their leader. And their leader tells them, hey guys, this is the time to go and do what we were built to do. This is where we go and we kill the bad guys. And then the scene cuts and they all back and they're in their uniforms,

They've got their bulletproof vest on and they've got the guns and the helmets and the night vision and they're ready to go to battle. And then they're in the Blackhawks and they're going in the helicopter and we're all like, this is where it gets exciting. They're gonna kill the bad guys. Imagine for a moment that that movie cut right there.

And the very next scene was them back on the couch sitting in their sweat plants playing Xbox and the lieutenant walks in and goes, guys, what happened?

Like, oh man, it was really scary out there. Like we tried it before and there was people that were just, they were against us and I just think you should send somebody else, like I would rather just stay here. They would never make that movie. That movie would never sell yet spiritually, that is what so many of us

are doing is you will be tempted to believe that somehow the people on staff at a church that were the special forces that are asked to do that. But the thing that you got to understand is it's not just the special forces that are called to do this, it's every single person that is in the army of Christ.

There's an incredible marine commercial that summarizes this best. There's this scene where it's just utter chaos, absolute chaos, And then the screen goes completely dark and it says, if you saw the chaos like that, what direction would you run?

And then it cuts to this thing I was like, I'm about to sign up for the marines after watching this, right? And it's all the marines running in and it says, we're the runs that run-in the direction of chaos, What direction would you run? What Paul was saying friends is that we have no plan b.

Humans are the only way that other humans can experience the fullness of who Jesus is, but it has to come from us if we are called to know and the very invitation is one that you can't get away from to also go. Father, I ask God for every person that's here. God I ask that you would show us right now

who it is that there's that one person is in our life. God if it's a coworker, somebody in our family, a neighbor, somebody in our classroom, on our sports team, that God that you would make that one person abundantly clear to us.

And that Lord we would begin to be intentional with pursuing relationship with them. That God we would pray for them, that we would begin to engage them and begin to share the hope that we have with them and that we would tell them about the message of the gospel.

And Lord, we pray for all of those lives to be transformed. God, would you give us the courage and the boldness to live that out. And God for the other people that are in this room that have never even started and never even had that moment where they have believed in their heart that you are who you say that you are.

God, I pray that we would not miss this moment right now. That if that's you that's here this morning and it feels like I'm speaking directly to you, that's what the Holy Spirit does. It's what the Bible says is God awakening your heart. And I pray if that's you right now that you would not miss this moment

and that you would respond and answer the call to surrender your life to Jesus. The reason that it says how beautiful are the feet of the messengers is because that the beauty in the message is that this is how captives get set free. And in that moment where we believe in our heart and confess with our mouth,

we get to walk away from the bondage. We get to walk away from the sin that so easily ensnares. If that's you, pray a prayer like this right now in the quietness of your heart. Say Jesus, I believe that you are who you say that you are. I ask for you to come into my heart right now and set me free.

It is in the mighty name of Jesus that everybody said, amen and amen. Hey, you guys are awesome. I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday. We'll see you all next weekend. Thanks

for joining us online this weekend. Let us know if we can help you in any way. Make sure to follow us on social media and connect with us on rockpoint.io for prayer and everything happening here at Rock Point.