Brother Bill McDonald and his wife Marie Claire come to us from Austria, where they work with the congregation there in Salzburg.
They work specifically and especially with refugees that are coming into Austria.
And they have done work through their time as missionaries on five different continents.
They, uh when they're here in the states, which is rarely, but when they're here, they're stationed and based over in uh north of Little Rock.
The Windsong Church of Christ there in Arkansas is their supporting congregation.
I was introduced to Brother Bill and Sister Marie Claire a couple of years ago by Brother Curry Montague and...
uh
He said Bill has been a humongous help to his work in Budapest and in Hungary.
And through the work that Bill's done, I was encouraged and enabled to go to Albania and to Budapest in 2023 to share what myself and others are doing with Truth FM and the
internet radio work and the work that we're doing through social media as well.
And then this last year, was able to go to the Philippines.
Again, thanks to the invitation of Bill and to be able to speak to missionaries in that region of Asia about what they can be doing with technology.
Bill's one who, I will freely admit he doesn't understand all the technology, but what he does have is a vision for how missions and evangelism can happen through the world and
throughout the world.
And so I'm not going to take any more of Bill's time, but I appreciate him being here and look forward to the message that he brings.
Thank you, Aaron.
It's a joy to be with you and especially to have spent the weekend with Aaron and Eddie and some others who work with Truth FM.
Glad to see these young preacher students with you.
I commend you guys for what you're getting ready to do.
I challenge you to do it where no one else has been.
Walk in the footsteps of Paul.
Paul wanted to go and preach not where others had preached.
but go preach to people who'd never had a chance to hear the word.
And I would encourage you, brethren, to seriously consider that.
That's what we've tried to spend our lives doing.
I'm going to be reading some very familiar passages to you this morning.
Most of you could probably quote them, but I want us to think about them again.
You know, the Apostle Paul was one who, well,
most of the writers of the New Testament, but Paul especially, who kept repeating the same things over and over again.
He said on one occasion, wouldn't have you ignorant, brethren, so I'm going to tell it to you again.
And I know that you're not ignorant, but I'm going to tell it to you again.
In John chapter 3,
the most known passage of the New Testament of the Bible.
In the whole world we read from John chapter three, beginning with verse 16, where John is writing and he's quoting Jesus.
And he goes on and he says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting, or this translation says, eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the Son of God.
God doesn't want anyone to be lost.
don't preach about a God who is a loving God and wants everybody to be lost.
Somehow that doesn't fit together, does it?
God wants everyone to be saved.
Jesus said that we all need to be saved.
He said that He didn't come to condemn us because we're already condemned.
Every single person in the world, whether they claim to be a Christian or not, know that they do things that are wrong.
They might not call it sin, but that's what it is.
But they admit that they do things that are wrong.
And so Jesus is saying, I came to seek, I'm looking for you, and to save.
He says, I'm coming for you.
I want to save you.
I want to find you and I want to share this message with you because I want you to be saved.
When we talk about mission and I spent my entire adult life in foreign missions, we talk about mission, we get different visions, different people, different ideas.
What does mission mean to you?
Well, we know that people were sent.
Way going clear back to Abraham.
That people were sent by God for a particular reason or on a particular special mission.
And they were sent to do all kinds of things.
If you look in the New Testament and the Old Testament, you'll see that they were not just, the apostles were not the first ones sent or Abraham wasn't the first one sent, but
people were constantly being sent by God to do His will.
A few examples.
Joseph was sent without knowing it at first, but to be in a position to save lives when a famine came in Genesis chapter 45.
God sent him to do a specific thing.
Moses was sent.
unwillingly at first, but to save God's chosen people.
Elijah was sent to influence international politics in 1 Kings 19.
Jeremiah was sent to proclaim God's Word in Jeremiah 1 verse 7.
Noah was sent to call people or to preach repentance.
asking people to change.
Jesus claimed the words of Isaiah that he was sent to preach good news, to proclaim freedom, to give sight to the blind, and offer release from oppression in Luke chapter
four, verses 16 through 19, and he's quoting Isaiah chapter 61.
Even Jesus says that I was sent.
He was sent for a purpose.
People were sent.
You know, there's a host of activities that God's people
can do to participate in missions.
So what's your idea about missions?
Well, the first thing that comes into your mind, some of you would say, well, I think about helping the poor in our community.
Others would say, I think about training preachers to go into all the world.
Some would say, I think about radio broadcasting, about television broadcasting.
Others would say, think about personal evangelism, my mission in going to share the good news.
But whatever it is, it's God's mission.
God's mission is our mission.
So I want to look for a moment at what God explains to us that his mission really is.
God just has one mission.
it's nice that he loves us, and I'm thankful for that, and I especially appreciated your prayer this morning and your mention of love.
We work with Islamic people, and they tell us that the difference between Islam and the reason some of them become interested in Christianity is because there is no love, they
say, in Islam.
But when they read the Bible, they say, and I ask many of them, what got you interested in Jesus or in the Bible?
And they say, love.
We never heard about love in Islam.
Mohammed never wrote anything or said anything about love, but the Bible is full of love.
And that's what drew us to it, God's love.
And so when we think about mission, we have...
all kinds of ideas depending on our background and where we've been and what we've done.
Some of us think about going abroad.
That's what I think about when I think about mission.
Although I know missions right here, right here in Collierville are just as important as the mission that I'm involved in in Salisbury, Austria.
But mission means different things to different people.
But it means for all of us that we're doing God's will.
m
That's our mission, is to do God's will.
What's the scope of God's mission?
And that's what I like and want us to see.
What's the scope of God's mission?
Well, He told us to go in all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, to all 8 point something billion people.
You'd say, are you serious?
How are we gonna teach the gospel to eight
point four or five now I think billion people?
it cannot be done!
Yes it can or God wouldn't have asked us to do it.
He never asked us to do something that we couldn't do.
He gave us tools all kinds of tools first of all He gave us our bodies our voices our minds.
He gave us the personal ability
to share the gospel and that's a big part of God's mission.
But God's mission has to be much bigger than that.
When I look at the world and because I've been in world missions all of my adult life since I was 23 years old.
I think about this a lot.
How in the world are we ever going to be able to proclaim the gospel to every creature in our generation?
It wasn't done in the last generation, and it wasn't done in the generation before that, and I don't know when it was done since the first century, if ever, but it's been
commanded and we should be doing it.
Thankfully, we can say that there are more people right now obeying the gospel than ever before in history.
Did you know that?
more people responding to the gospel message now than ever before, maybe more than in the first century.
We read about in the book of Acts and we get all excited because you know there were 3,000 and there were 5,000 and they multiplied and it kept getting bigger and bigger and we
think wow wouldn't that be wonderful?
Stop saying wouldn't it be and start saying isn't it wonderful because it's happening right now all over the world.
You can say, well, it's not happening in Collierville.
Well, maybe not, but some things happen that we don't even know about, so it might be, but it's happening all over the world.
There are more people becoming Christians today than ever before in history, and all who look at statistics would agree on that.
But what is the scope of God's mission?
Well, it's whether there is ignorance,
of or rejection of Christ.
That's the scope.
That's where we need to be.
Wherever there is a rejection or a lack of interest in Jesus Christ.
When we go to Vietnam where the Lord willing will be in about two and a half weeks and we meet with the underground church because it's illegal to worship
Christ in communist atheistic Vietnam and we're going to be there teaching for two weeks and some people say, isn't it dangerous?
Yeah, it's dangerous for them, not very dangerous for us.
If they don't like us, they just pull our visa and kick us out of the country.
I'm not worried about going to jail.
I might get kicked out of the country and never be allowed to come back.
But the local people...
go to jail.
And some of them have been to jail before.
And so when they ask us to come, I say, are you sure you want to do this?
They say, yeah.
I we've been to jail before.
It's not that bad, you know.
We've had 24, I believe it was, brethren locked up in Laos for simply worshiping Jesus Christ.
That was their crime, officially.
That's what it said.
There was a girl among them who they arrested them on a midweek night when they were worshiping and having a Bible study.
There was a young lady, a teenager, who was arrested and her crime was, officially, teaching the Bible to children.
She had a Bible class with little kids.
She celebrated her 16th birthday in prison.
She spent 418 days in jail because she was teaching the Bible to children.
But as soon as she got out, she went right back to teaching them.
That's the scope of God's mission.
That's our calling, that we teach the gospel wherever it does not exist or wherever it hasn't been preached.
We're also on this next trip, we're going for two months, to Burma.
Me and Ma, they call it now.
Burma, where it's illegal to change your religion.
They say mainly for...
propaganda for the Western governments.
They say, we have freedom of religion here.
Otherwise, the Western governments would have all kinds of sanctions against them because of that.
But they say, no, no, we have freedom of religion here.
Yes, we lived there for years, we know all about it.
You're free to be what you were born into.
All right?
That means if your parents were Buddhist,
which 89 % of the population are, you're a Buddhist and you're free to be that, but you're not free to change your religion.
It's illegal to change your religion.
It's illegal for you to teach someone and try to encourage them to change their religion.
That keeps people Buddhist.
And the official religion is Buddhism.
And so they're under threat.
There's a civil war going on there right now.
on three different areas, we're helping brethren there because villages are being bombed where we have brothers and sisters in Christ.
Christians aren't being targeted per se, but they live in these villages where the rebels live and they bomb the whole village.
Not only that, but when the people flee, and they are, and go out into the jungle and live off of roots and berries and whatever else they can find,
and live in a cave somewhere, they're sending, the government's sending drones above the trees to look for them and when they find them, they call in airstrikes to bomb them.
That's God's mission.
That's our mission.
We're trying to help them resettle and help them because they don't have anything to eat.
They're farmers.
They can't farm.
And some of them are on the verge of starvation.
So that's God's mission.
That's the scope of his mission.
When we go to Europe, where I spent 20 years as a missionary to Germany and church planting, that's God's mission.
And the pseudo intellectualism that causes people to claim they're atheists and most of them are really not, but they're just ashamed to say that they believe because that's not
popular.
We baptized a brother and he's been a faithful Christian for about 50 years who was a mathematician and physicist.
He taught at the University of Bremen, Germany.
And he said, when I tell my colleagues there,
that I believe in God, they think that my education didn't take.
Nobody as smart as you are, and he's brilliant, nobody as smart as you are actually believes in God.
Something went wrong, your education didn't take.
And yet, when death comes, and when they're on the verge of death, they all suddenly become believers.
In Iran,
where some of our members in Austria have relatives, it's illegal to own a Bible, to read a Bible, to talk to anyone about God or Christianity, and if you're caught, you'll be
imprisoned, sometimes you'll be killed simply for reading the Bible.
We could tell you story after story that our friends from Iran who are now in Austria have shared with us.
One brother said, I went to a barber who I knew was a believer.
And he said, when no one else was in the shop, just I, then this barber would talk to me about God and about the Bible.
And he said, he got me interested.
But he said, if someone walked in the door, suddenly the conversation had to be changed.
But he said, when it was just the two of us, he would talk to me.
And he said, I would ask him questions.
And he'd open the Bible and read the answer to me.
He knew his Bible well, he said.
And he said, one day, he said, he went to his cabinet and he got out a Bible in my language and he gave it to me.
And he said, take this home and answer your own questions.
Read the Bible.
So he did, but he dared not even tell his wife that he was reading the Bible.
They lived in Northern Iran and Turkey is just a few miles further north.
And Turkey's a nice place to go on vacation for people who live in Northern Iran.
It's pretty reasonably priced and the people in Iran, most of them have enough money they can afford to do that.
And so he'd taken his wife and his young daughter,
to Turkey for two weeks vacation.
He had a business of his own.
And he said, we'd been there about a week and my wife's sister, his sister-in-law, called her and said, father found his Bible and you can't come home.
He said, my wife said, what?
She didn't know he had a Bible.
Said, yeah, my father had been going over to their house or her father.
to water their plants and look after things while they were away, lived in the same town, and he found this Bible.
He admitted, the brother admitted to us, he hadn't hidden it well.
And he said, I'm gonna kill him.
And he told his sister-in-law, I'm gonna kill him when he comes back.
And she said, you can't come back.
And she mentioned that the sister-in-law said, well, you can come back and the daughter can come back, but he can't come back.
And the wife being a very faithful wife said, well, he can't come back.
I'm not coming back either.
And so they stayed in Turkey.
These refugees, they're called different kinds of refugees than we're used to.
We work with refugees in a lot of countries over the years.
Usually they're poor and destitute.
and need everything materially.
These people have money.
Some of them have ATM cards and they go get money from their bank back in Iran.
Some of them had good businesses.
Most of them have good education.
Most of them have master's degrees.
The people who are in our congregation, the refugees.
They fled Iran.
So this family hung out in Turkey.
and finally begin to say we've got to make a plan, we've got to do something.
And so they said we need to go on to Western Europe since we can't go back and try to start a new life there.
And in the meantime he was studying the Bible with his wife.
They ended up in Austria after going to two or three other countries.
And our brother Gerhard Krosnick, who's an Austrian brother in Vienna, was one of the first people that met them.
and he studied the Bible with them and baptized them.
And they're now Christians living in Austria.
But imagine that you're arrested, that you might be killed just for reading the Bible.
That's the scope of God's mission.
We need to be in those places.
We need to be where evil and ignorance exist.
What about the ignorance of your own neighbor?
All of us have neighbors.
Do all of your neighbors know what you believe about the New Testament?
Or they just think, well, yeah, she's a Christian like everybody else.
My wife is from France.
Some of you met her this morning.
Her older sister's not a Christian.
And her sister said something about, Marie Claire said, well,
They were having a conversation.
She said, well, you're not a Christian.
She said, of course I'm a Christian.
I'm French.
Of course I'm a Christian.
I never go to church.
I never practice what Christianity, never do the things Christians do, but I'm French.
Everybody born in France is a Christian, she thinks, and many people think.
Many people...
in our neighborhoods, in my neighborhood, and no doubt in yours.
Think that they're Christians because they've never been taught.
They're ignorant.
And if we don't tell them, they're probably not going to know.
And if they just say, well, we're real nice neighbors, we have some of the finest neighbors I've ever had anywhere.
We've got neighbors on both sides of us across the street that'll do anything for us and for each other.
Wonderful neighbors.
We know them all well.
They know that we're missionaries.
They think that's nice and good.
But they also know because we've told them.
that we're New Testament Christians and we've tried to get them interested in going to church with us or maybe studying the Bible with us so far without much success but at
least we've tried to give them an opportunity.
That's all God asks us to do.
Provide an opportunity.
If we never said anything to them they would think well McDonald's they think we're fine and all of these people if you ask them
I think all of them, maybe not one neighbor, but the rest of them would say, yeah, we're Christians.
Most of them don't go to church anywhere.
A couple of them go.
One to a Methodist church, another to a Disciples of Christ church, and so on.
We've had some discussions.
But if we never talk to them, they don't know.
And if we never talk to our neighbors, we're keeping the most important information that we could ever share with them to ourselves.
And in reality, we're telling them that they're okay.
So that's our mission, our neighborhood.
Our mission is to stamp out spiritual ignorance and misinformation.
And I want to emphasize misinformation because there's so much misinformation.
Like Marie Claire's sister who said, well, of course I'm a Christian.
I'm French.
Misinformed.
She doesn't understand what a Christian is.
Do my neighbors and friends understand what a Christian is?
God's mission is and always has been the whole world.
In Genesis chapters one through three, we read about the creation, about Adam and Eve, stories we're all familiar with.
I'll not read it to you.
And how Adam and Eve sinned and God had to put them out of the garden, but that wasn't the original plan.
God created Adam and then he created Eve to help Adam because he was lonely and needed someone.
and created this beautiful place for them to live called the Garden of Eden.
And I think that was God's happy place because it says He would go in the cool of the evening and walk in the garden and talk to them.
That was God's happy place.
And that's the way He originally planned it all.
But we human beings fouled it up and we sinned.
But God didn't just give up on mankind.
And when I think about that, and I ask myself, why didn't he just give up on us?
Well, know, a little while later, he said, we need to start over.
And so he sent the flood and destroyed everybody but the faithful family.
But he never completely gave up because we are God's family.
Some of us have family members who aren't Christians, but never give up on them, and I hope you have it.
Pray for them.
I've been seeing these signs and I understand it's a movement and you probably know more about it than I do, but people are putting signs in their yard.
I want one of them that says, never stop praying.
Have we seen those around here?
They're all over our neighborhood.
Never stop praying.
Well, it's a movement about the U.S.
political situation.
But I think it applies to all of us every day.
And I'd like to have one of signs.
I tried to find where I could buy one, but you had to send some guy, a contribution is all I could find, and then he'll send you a sign, and I'm not gonna support his political
movement.
But I do support the idea that we never should stop praying.
Never stop praying.
Never give up on our kids.
Some of us have kids who are not faithful Christians.
Some of us have grandchildren who are not faithful Christians.
Some of us have siblings, brothers and sisters who are not faithful Christians.
Never stop praying because that's the scope of God's mission.
We're all God's family and He hasn't given up on us and we must not give up either.
The Bible is a stark contrast to the world.
If I go too long here and pull the plug.
The Bible is a stark contrast to the world.
When we look at the world and we look at the Bible, it's like our Iranian friends are saying, there's love in the Bible.
There's no love in Islam.
It's a stark contrast.
That's why we enjoy so much our visits to America, because where we live, we don't hear prayers like we heard this morning.
Because we're dealing with young Christians who are just learning how to pray, who just learning how to trust God.
they pray, but there's not that depth of understanding that there was by the man who prayed this morning.
The thankfulness that we all feel who've been a part of God's family for so long, that takes a long time to build and develop.
And if you never worship with a group of
where there were no older Christians?
Young men, you'll come to appreciate older Christians a lot more than you did in the past.
They're not those old fogies that keep us from doing things.
They're those wise people who help us and encourage us and show us the example and lead the way.
The gospel is not just to be heard.
but is to be obeyed.
We see a lot of that being taught in the New Testament.
God's Son Jesus taught that.
In the passages we're real familiar with, when he told the apostles to go into all the world and preach the gospel.
And he said, if you believe and you're baptized, you're going to be saved.
But you gotta believe, yes, and you gotta do something.
You've got to be proactive.
You've got to be baptized.
And once you've been baptized, you've got to continue with your proactivity and become a disciple, a follower, one who wants to be like Jesus if you want to be saved.
If you love me, said, keep my commandments.
James said, be doers of the word.
They're not just hearers.
There were people in the first century who liked what they heard and they were good listeners.
They liked it, it's good stuff, but they didn't want to do it.
He says, if you want to be saved, not only are you hearing it, but you're doing it.
The apostle Paul reiterated this in Romans chapter 12, where he said that we should present ourselves a living sacrifice.
holy and acceptable to God.
I'm acceptable to God when I present myself a living sacrifice.
were to be transformed, he said.
I remember several years ago when kids had those transformers.
You remember those things that look weird and they'd twist them two, three times and all of a sudden it was something different.
I love those things.
Transform, changed.
All of a sudden we're something different.
We're sinners and we obey the gospel and we try to live like Jesus and we're different.
People should recognize us.
when they see us that we're Christians.
Mary Claire and I spend a lot of time in airports.
And one of the things we enjoy is people watching.
And we sit in airports and we see people walking by and people sitting over here, especially when airports are real full and busy.
And we say, I bet he's from Italy.
She looks like she might be from China.
And maybe this one is from
you know, hungry.
And we try to guess where they're from.
And how do we do that?
We do that by their appearance.
Usually we can spot people from France very often, because she's from France.
I'm pretty good at spotting Germans, because I lived there 25 years.
Usually not always, but we can spot Americans by their dress, by the way they walk, by the way they act.
We recognize people.
But when we become Christians, people ask me sometimes, say, Bill, are you a Christian?
I say, yes.
They say, what kind of a Christian are you?
And they want me to tell them what denomination I belong to.
You are you Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal?
What are you?
I say, I'm a Christian Christian.
They say, I never heard of that.
I'm a Christian Christian.
That's the only kind there is.
I'm a Christian Christian.
were to be transformed.
The mission is a matter of loyalty.
And I can't help but encourage you to look at that strongly.
Trust is so important.
Can God trust me?
I know I can trust God.
Can he trust me to be his son, to act like a Christian?
Am I loyal?
When countries send ambassadors to other countries to represent them, they don't go and just say, this is my idea.
They say, my government should stand on this particular issue is this.
This is what my government wants me to tell you.
God says, you're a part of our family.
This is what I want you to tell them.
Don't just make up something.
Don't just shoot from the hip.
Don't just think, well, I think if you say that word, get it out of your vocabulary.
It doesn't matter what you think.
You don't care what I think.
Be honest.
You don't really care.
You might be remotely interested, but what matters?
It's what God thinks.
And so try to remove that from your vocabulary.
Somebody says, what do you think the scripture means?
I say, I don't have a clue.
What does God say that it means?
Let's look at it.
Let's let the Bible interpret itself with other scripture.
Let's find out what it means without giving my ideas.
We don't need to get together.
in what we call a Bible class when it's very often just a time to share our ignorance.
We need to follow God's word.
We need to be trusted messengers.
Can God trust me to share His message as He gave it?
Am I trustworthy?
Trust and commitment are non-negotiable.
God is uncompromising when it comes to loyalty.
He doesn't want me to be half loyal.
to be loyal when it feels good and when it's popular and when it's all right.
He wants me to be loyal all the time.
From the very beginning this was Adam and Eve's problem.
It was a trust problem.
They loved God.
I think they did.
They were friends with God.
But they weren't sure that they could trust him.
Otherwise the devil wouldn't have been able to influence them.
When he came along and said, well, did you know such and such?
They didn't say, well, we know that's not true.
God told us otherwise.
They said, ah, looks good, tastes good, makes me look good.
They didn't trust God.
And so are we trustworthy?
Evil and sin will weave its way into every aspect of our lives if we're not trustworthy.
From creation on, it brought about physical problems because of a lack of trust of Adam and Eve.
That's why we get old.
That's why I have arthritis.
That's why I have a knee that doesn't work real well.
That's why I get white hair.
I still have some hair, but it's all white.
That's why I need to go to the dentist often because Adam and Eve didn't trust God.
That's the bottom line.
That's why.
It affects us intellectually.
We actually sometimes use our God-given powers to rationalize and excuse our own sins.
We say, I know what...
that it's not good but you know everybody's doing it.
It's okay.
It affects our societies.
It affects every human relationship that's fractured and disrupted.
It affects parents and children's relationships.
Social and ethnic, international relations are all affected because of sin.
The wonderful truth though is that the Bible gives us the gospel and that this addresses every dimension of the problem that sin has created.
God's mission is the final destruction of all that is evil in this world and in people's lives.
And I wish I hadn't used all my time telling you stories and I could go on with my lesson, but my time is about up.
But when Abraham was called by God and he said, I want you to be a blessing.
That's what he's saying to us.
I want you to be a blessing.
You can be a blessing.
And once you help someone, when you do something for someone, when you stand for the truth,
in front of others, then you're a blessing.
The church is actually the multinational fulfillment of the hope of Israel.
God called Abraham.
Through his seed, he said, the whole, every nation, the whole world is going to be blessed.
Israel were his chosen people.
Israel fulfilled their mission.
Jesus came, opened it up to the rest of us.
We are the result.
of the blessing that Abraham shared.
We brought, or the gospel brought to us, what God's chosen people always had.
And now we're a part of the chosen people.
The church demonstrates God's transforming power in this world.
And you're a part of this great mission.
Be glad.
Don't say, oh, you mean I gotta go tell somebody about Jesus?
I don't know how to do that.
Sure you do.
sure you do.
You do just like our Iranian new friends and tell the people about how God loves them.
I wish you could meet Javad, Javad and Nasini and Mohammed and Arash, all from Iran and Afghanistan who've obeyed the gospel.
And they're so excited that they tell their friends Javad brings new people to church almost every Sunday from the refugee camps.
This morning earlier, because they're five hours ahead of us time wise, Javad, I know, came with seven other people that he has found in this new camp where the government led
him to church.
All but one of them is a Christian because Javad talked to them.
He brings new people and he comes and he says, Bill, I can't teach him, but you can.
But they trust me, trust.
They trust me.
And they come with me.
And I bring them to you.
Everybody can do that.
Invite your friends to obey the gospel and to come and to hear the gospel.
Enjoy sharing the message.
It's fun.
I have a son-in-law and daughter who are missionaries in Athens, Greece.
And every once in a while when we send out a little report about something that happens good in the congregation in Salzburg, Phil, by son-in-law, will tell our daughter, said,
you know, your dad's having a lot more fun than we are.
It's fun.
Having a lot more fun.
You want to have a lot of fun?
Go share the gospel with somebody.
In a closing note, when we all get to heaven after the judgment,
There are going be people there that we've known.
We're told we'll know each other.
There are going to be people there that we've known.
And I like to kind of envision, and this may not be exactly how it's going to be, but this is my idea.
So if you disagree, that's okay.
It's just an idea I'm sharing.
I like to think that we're going to be there, and there's going to be a young man that I met in Brownfield, Texas when I was going to love a Christian college and working for a
church there.
that became a deacon and then became an elder, Damon Brock.
And Damon would tell everybody that I'm out visiting because Bill encouraged me to do that.
And I'm gonna look forward to seeing Damon because he brought a lot of people to the Lord.
And he's gonna be saying to me, Bill, I want you to meet so-and-so.
Remember when I took you by his house in Brownfield, Texas, and we always said they named that place right.
It was a Brownfield, all right.
When I took you to visit that fellow and he wasn't really interested, well, I didn't give up on him.
And now he's a Christian and we're all here together.
And I'm going to look at my family.
I'm a fifth generation Christian.
Those of you who know restoration history in America.
My great great grandfather was baptized by Raccoon John Smith in southern Missouri at a camp meeting.
And I'm so thankful he was because if he was and I'm not sure I'd be here today.
Hopefully I would, but I grew up in Idaho Mormon country.
Not many Christians there.
Our youth group had four young people in it.
We used to hitchhike 150 miles to go to youth meeting just to be with other young people.
I'm not sure I'd be a Christian today if my family weren't Christians.
And I'm so thankful for them.
But when I get to heaven, they're going to be those people that I've helped along the way.
And the people that they've helped along the way are going to be there.
And there's going to be a multitude of people
because I was faithful and the same will be true with you.
If you remain faithful, there's going to be a multitude of people that are there.
Well, maybe you didn't have a Bible study with them.
Maybe you didn't actually teach them, but you influenced them for good, for Jesus Christ, and they're there and wouldn't be there possibly if it wasn't for you.
And so, feel the joy,
the excitement, the joy of sharing the fact that you're a Christian.
Don't hide.
I know preachers who actually don't dress up because they don't want to look like a preacher.
And I say, well, you're probably not much of a preacher if you don't want to look like one.
If you're ashamed of it, you're probably not much of a preacher.
All right?
What a preacher looks like.
And he looks like different things in different places.
Went to India and they gave me a
long dress to wear.
That's what preachers wore.
I haven't worn it since I left India, but nevertheless, that's what they wore.
And people recognize them by what they wore.
Be proud of the fact that God has blessed you.
Be proud that you have the opportunity to share the greatest message in the world.
You're not a Christian, then we want to encourage you.
all we can to look at the blessings.
Do a comparison.
Our Iranian friends do that a lot.
They say, look at Islam, look at Christianity.
Which one do you think is best?
Pretty clear.
You want hate or you want love?
You want eternal salvation or you just want to hope that you might make it to a safe place in eternity?
Do a comparison.
and there's really no comparison.
God sent His Son to die, and when He was on the cross, we really could have called 10,000 angels.
10,000 angels had perhaps drawn their swords and ready to revenge Him, and He said, no, if I come down off this cross, nobody will have a hope of salvation.
And so he bled and died for us willingly because he knew if he didn't, we had no hope.
People out there, if you don't share that hope with them, have no hope.
If you'd like to respond in some way to the invitation, we're going to sing a song and invite you to come.
Let's stand.