The Making of a Missionary

Thank you so much. I'm so excited about being here and worshiping with you and the ability to having the privilege of sharing from God's Word just a bit and some other things with you.

Such a joy to be here. I don't know of any church anywhere that is more involved in taking the gospel to the world than this church right here. If I were living around here, this is the church I would join.

I can tell you that right now. I would love to be a part of this church. I'd like for us to hear from Paul, Apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians, the 5th chapter, and I just want to begin with the 16th verse, a few verses here, especially that 17th verse. So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. The old is gone.

The new has come. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. What a beautiful, beautiful promise. I'd like to share with us today a little bit about some of the things that make us to become that new man and some of the things that impel us forth as it says here, ambassadors for Christ, or as missionaries. I suppose if I put a title on what I would share this afternoon, it would be the making of a missionary. God has blessed me with 52 years overseas as one of his servants in some very choice places in the world. And I count that the greatest privilege. Sometimes I come home at night and I say to my wife, Rachel, I wish I had one more life.

I'd give it just the same way as I have given it. Now there are some days that I wouldn't take anything for, but there are some days that I wouldn't live over for anything in the world. But God has been so good to give me the life he's given me. And I'd like to share some things that have gone into my own life to mold and make me into that person that God wanted me to be and wants me to be and wants me to become because I'm in the process always of becoming what he wants me to become.

And I hope it will stimulate you to look back and see the things that God has used to make you who you are in him and that are making you who he wants you to be. Because you see, we have experience. Every one of us are having experiences on a continual basis. Every day we have experiences. So many of those things we experience and then we forget them.

We've moved on and maybe sometime later down the road a smell of something or a view of something will remind us of that. But some of us, well, all of us have some wonderful experiences in life that impact us in a major kind of way. Those are the experiences that we learn from and they make us into the person that we are, that inspire us and drive us forth. And then all of us inevitably have those painful experiences, those negative experiences that come into our life that seem to wreck us, that destroy who we are. And sometimes they become like a cancer in our soul, in our life that eats away at us. And if we're not careful, we hold on to those negative things until we become a negative person and a person of anger and disappointment and discouragement and depression and all of those kinds of things. So much depends on what we do with the experiences that God brings into our life. Sometimes we process them in such a way that we learn from them. Long time ago, I quit talking about why does God do this to me or why did God make me this way?

Why did God make this happen? What I ask now is, Lord, what are you teaching me through this? Let this be a training moment that I'm going through right now that will make me into something far more better than I ever thought I could be and a vessel that you have shaped and you can use in a much more beautiful way. Sometimes it's almost always those very difficult experiences in life that make us into a much more beautiful person than we ever thought we could be if we could just process them right. And so this afternoon or today, I want to just go into a few of those kinds of experiences that God has given to me that has impelled me forth to be the kind of a person that He is making me to be. And I want to start back when I was just 13 years old. And what I want to say is that sometimes as little children, we have certain experiences that make an impact on us. Maybe in a little mind, we don't understand it all, but we hold on to those things and we grow up and we carry those with us and God uses those experiences to make us even as an adult to change us.

So we go back and look at childhood sometime. I was just 13 years old in Liberty, North Carolina, not too far from here. And we were a very poor family and resources were very scarce.

So at 13, I began to look for a part-time job so I could help support my family. And there was a place on the side of 421 that goes from Greensboro down to the coast and passed right by Liberty, right through Liberty at that time. There was a place on the side of the road, a very typical place, had a cafe and a beer joint and a service station and a grocery store and a car dealership and a garage to fix cars, repair cars, service cars. It was all there in that place and so I got a job there working in the grocery store. And sometimes they'd let me work in the cafe. And as I worked in that cafe, God, boy, He really showed me something that I needed to learn that helped me so much later because these big oil tankers would come through and stop off there on their way to the coast or back from the coast. They would stop off and they'd come into that cafe and sit down at a table or a booth order their food and eat and maybe relax a little bit and then get back in their rig and go on to the coast.

And that was true of the white drivers, the Caucasian drivers, but there were African American drivers, black drivers of those same trucks driving the same hours of the day, the same problems that the others faced. But you know, in segregation during the late 1940s when I was 13 and the 50s and 60s, it was very difficult because they would come in, but they couldn't come inside. They had to go around to the back of the cafe. There was a little window back there and I would get their order. I would write it down.

I would take their food and give it to them and they would have to stand up in the back of the building there and eat or maybe sit down on the ground or maybe find a place if it was raining where they wouldn't get wet and eat. And I got so angry about that. As a little 13 year old, I was a white boy. I didn't know that much about segregation and all that kind of thing and the difference between races.

I didn't even think about it that much. I didn't have to, but boy, that work in that little cafe there taught me a great deal. And I got so angry about that.

I went to the owner of the cafe the very first day. I was so disturbed by this and I said, you've got to change this. It's not right for these people to have to have to stand up back there when others are sitting down and they drive the same hours and they work just as hard. And this little 13 year old boy was reading a riot act to that owner and you know what he said?

He said, if you don't like this job, find another one somewhere. Well, I needed that job and I kept working there, but it kept teaching me a great deal about life and about how we tend to separate people out. And I would go to Sunday school some. I wasn't a believer at that time, but I'd go to Sunday school some and I learned something about the Bible. And I knew that God created every man and he created us all equal and he loves every single one of us that he created. He loved us with an unending love and he loves those people, these people and other people of societal strata and economic strata and colors and religion and all these kind of things.

God loved them and I didn't forget that as a 13 year old. Now fast forward some and I spent six years in the Navy. Came back out. I found the Lord in the Navy and I gave my life to the Lord to be a missionary while I was in the Navy. Came back to prepare myself and I went to Wake Forest University. It was a college back then and a group from a rural church came and called me as pastor and just 25 years old I became senior pastor of a little rural church.

Very few people there, but God began to bless and so many people accepted the Lord and the church began to be crowded out, just totally crowded out. And an African American church, Edwards Grove Baptist Church pastor came over to see me and he said, would you come over and preach for us on Sunday night? I said, man, yes, I'll be there.

Went over there. We had the greatest service you could imagine. There were just many people were saved that night and young man surrendered to the ministry. Later became pastor of that church. It was a wonderful service and I was so keyed up with that service of praise and the word of God.

And I wanted to tell everybody about that service. But Wednesday night I came to my church for prayer meeting and we usually had just almost standing room in there for Wednesday night prayer meeting. There wasn't a handful of people there. And I said, something's wrong here.

What is it? Sunday morning I went to church and usually it was just crowded. People standing in the vestibule even, bringing out chairs.

That Sunday morning there were 25, 30 people there. So I went to a lady who's a wonderful prayer warrior in the church, wonderful friend. And I said, Ms. Orr, something's happened here. There's something wrong with our church.

What is it? And she said, there are people in this community who put out the word that you're trying to integrate the church. And she said, they're calling you all kinds of names that you don't want to hear. And she said, they're not letting their families come to church. They hear that you're going to integrate the churches.

They're not going to like that. These were tough days in those times. In fact, just three years after that, four little children were bombed and killed in Birmingham, Alabama at 16th Street Baptist Church. Medgar Evers was shot dead in Mississippi. Those were days they even shot through the picture window of a nearby pastor when he said something about racial problems and so forth.

Those were dangerous days. And I began to really be concerned about this and I knew something had to happen. So I called the whole community together. I sent out word.

I said, Sunday morning I have an announcement to make and I want everybody here to hear it. Do you know the church was full? There wasn't even standing room there. And my wife and my little eight-week-old daughter were sitting down on the front row and I went in the pulpit and I was quite frightened. I was scared.

I didn't know what was going to happen there. I looked down at my wife and with her beautiful smile, she smiled back at me. I felt that support of a loving wife and she just smiled and nodded her head and I had the courage. And I said, folks, if I've been your pastor for two and a half years and I've preached almost every service about how God loves all the people of the people of the world, the white, the black, the red, the yellow, the brown, all colors, God loves them.

You know that. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should have eternal life. If I've preached that for two and a half years here and you still don't understand it, then I could stay 10 more years and you may not understand it. So I want you to think about something today.

I want you to take a vote. If you want me to stay, you're going to open this church to anybody who comes. You're going to welcome them here. They're going to be a part of our family because they're part of God's family and that's the kind of church we're going to have here in this day and age in this place. If you don't want that, you don't want that, you vote no and I'll take my wife and my little baby and we'll try to find somewhere else where we can preach the Word of God.

So I'm going to leave it with you and I got Rachel and our little baby and we went home. They took a secret ballot. The deacon came down to the house 30 minutes later, had a smile on his face and he said, you know, we took a secret ballot this morning.

We talked about what you said. If you're going to do this, if you're going to have a church that welcomes everybody, sees everybody as a child of God, then vote for our pastor today. If not, vote for him and leave and he said he'll go and he's willing to go. We know that.

He said they voted 100 percent, not one ballot. He said no and I just praise the Lord. I needed that job for one thing. I was a college student, poor student. I didn't know what I'd do.

The tiny little baby there. But God knew and you know what he did? He gave me that experience as a 13 year old and I think he knew that one day I would be a pastor in a church and I would face some problems that that experience back there would feed into my life and help me to know what to do and how to do it and then he gave me this experience so that I would know that one day I'm going to go out yonder on the mission field somewhere and I'm going to have people of other cultures and other colors of skin and other languages and other habits and other customs and I'm going to be preaching God's word to them and he gave me those experiences to prepare me, to train me for what he wanted me to do. See, you're having those experiences all the time that God is training you.

You just got to deal with it. You got to learn from it, you see. Well, I went on in the Navy when I graduated from high school, six years. I navigated on board a small aircraft carrier and we were docked in Yokosuka, Japan, a big city, big port city and we were going to go through the inland sea of Japan and I had to get some hydrographic charts so I was going up to Tokyo around Tokyo Bay to get those charts and bring them back and I got on the train.

It was very crowded. There was an empty seat beside me and this beautiful young Japanese girl came up and said, may I sit beside you in this seat? It didn't take me one second to say yes. I was a single guy, you know, and she sat down and we talked about a lot of things. She stood in the University of Yokohama, very bright young lady, could speak English fairly well.

We talked about all kinds of things but before we got to Yokohama where she was going to get off, she looked deep in my eyes. She held out her hands and she said, my professor told me to believe in Jesus. She said, how do you believe? How do you believe?

And oh, I sat there. I'd been in Sunday school quite a bit. I'd been in worship services but I didn't believe in Jesus. It's not that I didn't believe, I just didn't think about it.

My life certainly wasn't the life of a believer and I couldn't tell her anything. And she got up, we got to Yokohama and she bowed very politely and she disappeared into the crowd and I went on to Tokyo but as the train started up, the wheels began to turn and every time they turned they said, how do you believe? How do you believe? How do you believe? How do you believe? How do you believe? And it just echoed in my mind, I couldn't get it out and my heart was heavy, I was so burdened. I didn't know Jesus.

I myself didn't believe. I got the charts, I walked the streets of Tokyo just burdened with this, got back on the train, went back to my ship, it was all blacked out because of the Korean War and I got a flashlight and a New Testament and I went in an empty ammunition room. I sat on the deck and I shined that light on the Gospel of Matthew.

I was so hungry. I read the whole book of Matthew and I read all of Mark and I got to Luke and I read all of Luke all the way down to the last two chapters where he's talking about Jesus being betrayed and where he goes to the cross and he dies on the cross and he's been raised from the dead. It was almost like the first time I'd ever seen that and I just suddenly realized it was like the Holy Spirit was speaking through that word and I knew why Jesus was dying on the cross. He was dying for me, a sinner. He was paying the penalty for my sin on the cross. I could see that clearly and God raised him from the dead to show that it was finished, it was done. My sins were forgiven and I just bowed my head and I prayed and I said, Lord, I need that.

I need to do that. I didn't know all the words to say. I didn't have anybody there to guide me, but I knew I wanted Jesus. He came into my life. I stayed there all night reading the Bible.

I couldn't read enough, just so hungry. The next morning I had about 60 men in the division. We mustered on the flight deck and I gave out the jobs for the day and then I said before I dismissed everybody, I said, something happened to me this morning early.

I said, I believed in Jesus this morning. Well, you know, in a group of Navy guys, hardly any of them who believe, it was a shock to them. Some of them kind of laughed. They were nervous about it. I found out later they were taking bets.

I'd last one week or two weeks or three weeks. It was a lot of money. I'd be a wealthy man today because it's been 62 years now, but God did something in my life. I went up on the bridge of the ship that morning where my station was and I looked out over the city of Yokohama and a question came to me. You want to tell everybody about this?

Yes. Where are you going to tell them? Where are you going to go? And I thought of my hometown, Liberty, 1400 people, seven churches in the city limits of Liberty for 1400 people. One pastor had been there 28 years.

Do you want to go back home and share the gospel there in Liberty? Not on your life because they've got churches everywhere. They've got radio. They've got books. They've got magazines. They've got all kind of availability to the gospel.

What I want to do is go to a place like this that I'm looking at where there's no sign of Christianity. This was right after the Second World War in 1951, 52 and scars everywhere the Second World War and people lost, depressed, discouraged. They'd lost a war.

They'd lost their homes. They needed Jesus. And I said, Lord, if it could be your will, let me go somewhere like this and put my life and tell them this good news that has so thrilled my soul because when I septed Jesus like the sun broke through clouds and just shone right on my life and I was so overjoyed with having Christ in my life and I wanted everybody to know, Lord, call me.

I want to share this where people don't know it and don't have an opportunity to know. Another experience, you see. God gave me that experience because He knew what was what He wanted me to do some years down the road after all that preparation, college and seminary.

Couldn't wait to get to the field, but I knew I had to go through that in order to be the kind of servant He wanted me to be. And He took me on out. I'll never forget the day we got on a ship, San Francisco. We went by ship then.

There weren't many planes going across the ocean. My wife, three-year-old daughter, 18-month-old son and an eight-week-old son. And it was a great day. But God had given us another experience before that that I had to go through. My second son was born with a split uvula and a soft palate. And the doctor said, you've got to wait a year so we can repair that.

Before you can go, he'll have problems with food and he'll probably always speak with a speech impediment. But we can fix that in a year. And the International Mission Board said, well, you'll have to wait a year to be appointed. Well, here I was, pastor of a rural church that was overflowing, needed a new building. Now I'm going to be delayed a year. I couldn't leave them to build and didn't leave them.

What am I going to do? Five laymen from Durham, North Carolina came to see me. They sat down. They said, we understand you're going to the mission field in one year. Yes, sir, I am. We want to plant a new church in North Durham and we'd like to ask you if you'd come and help us plant that church. It didn't take me one second.

I said, yes, yes. But you see, the Lord was going to make me into a church planter overseas, but I hadn't planted a church before. And so he arranged that for me to have an experience, which would help me to know how to plant a church. And I went with those five laymen.

And I want you to know the Lord taught me to trust laymen, finest soulwinners that ever lived. They'd go out visiting and they sacrificed so much for the Lord and that church grew and it grew. After eight months, we had over 250 people and 50 percent of them had been baptized during that eight or nine months. They decided to organize into a church in March.

They named it the Homestead Heights Baptist Church. And I was so excited because we had the big inauguration service, inaugural service that morning. That afternoon we left for Richmond, Virginia to the International Mission Board to be appointed missionaries to Vietnam.

We were ready to go then. And God had brought those experiences from 13 years old to 25 years old, all of those experiences that fed into life, to kind of mold this life into what He wanted it to be. Later, I was so thrilled when I heard the new name of that church, The Summit, because I had preached more times than one that I was hoping that church that we founded there and planted there would be a lighthouse like it was like it was sitting on a hill and that light would shine into the darkness of the world, into the furthest corners of this earth. Someday, right in the DNA, as the pastor just said, would be that concept of missions that the gospel would be carried from this place to the uttermost part of the earth.

And the name Summit sort of said that. We're sitting on a hill here to reach the world for Christ. Well, God did take us to the field, two weeks on a ship on the third deck down below the water level with three little children. Oh, it was, I thought the mission field has got to be better than this, especially when you've got an 18-month-old who can't turn his clock back every day, you know, and change times.

I'm on the deck at three in the morning walking this little guy. It was a terrible time, but God taught me patience. Well, after years in Vietnam, and I'm going to close with this story here, after years in Vietnam, God revolutionized my life. It was New Year's Eve. We had founded our seminary out in a little village called Tu Duc, 12 kilometers north of Saigon, about seven miles north of Saigon, kind of an isolated village out there.

We founded our seminary out there. New Year's Eve came. Our family gathered for prayer.

We sang some hymns. We saw the New Year in, went to bed. Three o'clock in the morning, I woke up. I was very uneasy. Something was wrong.

Something's wrong here. I got out of bed, went down a hallway into our living room. There was a living room, kitchen all combined, and there was nothing there. I looked toward the back, and somebody had cut the back door off, had come in and stolen everything. Children had gotten bicycles for Christmas. They stole the bicycle, stole all the toys, all the presents, everything. They were gone.

Went in the kitchen, stole everything out of the kitchen, even frozen food out of the refrigerator. Hope it made them sick. Anyway, they got everything. Often say they're two kind of missionaries, those who've been stolen from and those who will be, because it happens out there. That's why we go to the field, because these people aren't believers. They aren't followers of Jesus. They act like the world. That's why I'm going to the field.

They act that way. Well, I was angry, really angry, stealing from me like that, violated. I ran out. It was dark. Nobody there. They'd already gone. And we had no real police out there.

A war was everywhere. Week later, a few days later, the students came over, knocking on the door, went to the door. They said, oh, Pastor, somebody's been in the seminary, broke in. They stole everything out of the kitchen, the chopsticks, bowls, pots, pans, the rice bags. Everything's gone, bags of rice, everything's gone. When your office took all your office equipment, nothing left. Ran over there, and sure enough, everything was gone. Now I'm doubly angry. I mean, I've come 12,000 miles to save you folks, and what do you do? You're just stealing me blind, you know.

I was really angry about that. If you've ever been stolen from, you know what it feels like. Well, a few days later, I went to get in my car to go into town and tried to start the engine.

It wouldn't start. I said, my battery's dead. Went around the back of the Volkswagen microbus, lifted it up, looked, and they'd stolen my battery. I couldn't keep anything. I just unlocked my door and said, y'all come.

Whatever's there is yours. Oh, it was a terrible time for me. Well, the Air Force called me and said, we're going to start an orphanage over here at Cameron Bay for children who've lost both parents in the war. And the government's not listening to us. They won't let us. Could you serve as a liaison between us and the government and help us open?

I said, yes. It's not my job description, but I'll do it. I went down to the Ministry of Social Services, and she gave me a stack of papers about that big. I took them home, and I had to call everywhere, get all kinds of information, filled them all out. I brought them back, put them on the girl's desk, and she looked through them, and she said, you're short one form.

Okay, give me that form. I had to have all the rest. I took them home, filled that out, took them back, laid them on her desk. She looked through them, and she said, you should have done it in triplicate. You only did two copies.

Okay, I'm angry now. Went back, filled it all out, took it back, and I wish I could say I just kind of put it gently on the table. Couldn't. And she said, we'll call you. Well, weeks went by. I went back to check on it. I said, how about our papers? She said, oh, I remember you. Yes, yes, okay. An hour later, she comes back and says, I'm sorry, I can't find that file. I said, I've got a receipt right here, right here. Yeah, you got to know.

Okay, yeah, that'll be good. Went back in there. An hour later came back and said, we've lost that whole file.

I'm sorry. She gave me a stack of papers that thick. I went home, filled them all out. I came back, and this time I really put them on the desk. And she said, we'll call you.

Well, that just, I was just fit to be tied. I was in Saigon. My car was broken down, and I took a taxi home. And the taxi driver looked at me and he said, you've been in Vietnam a long time, haven't you?

Yes, I have. He said, then you must like the Vietnamese people. Well, it was a bad time to ask me a question like that. And I thought, now you're a preacher, you're a missionary, you're a pastor, you're president of a seminary, you're all those good things. What are you going to say? What I had to say, rather hypocritically, I said, I love the Vietnamese people.

Then he turned and looked in my eyes and all that traffic, and he said, what do you love about us? I would say, don't push it, brother. Don't push it.

That's enough. But I thought of something, one or two little things, and didn't say much. I got out of the taxi, went in the house, Rachel had dinner ready, but I couldn't eat. I had this big lump in my throat.

Because you see, I believe if you could take the Christian faith and put it in a pot and boil away all of its excess, what you'd have left in its purest form is love, God's love. And I didn't have it anymore. It was gone. Tried to sleep. I got up middle of the night and went in and knelt where our couch used to be. And I poured my heart out to the Lord.

I just poured my soul. And I said, oh God, I don't love these people anymore. Too many things have happened.

Oh, just so many things that happened. I lost that love. How can I be here and reach people for Christ? I have no message to give if I don't love people. I'm through. Tomorrow morning, we'll pack up.

We'll go back to America. I don't have any right to be here. Because you see, I think human love is very fragile. And I'd lost it. And then that morning God spoke to me. It wasn't like thunder or lightning, but it just welled up in me. And this is what I want to share.

God said to me in a very intimate kind of way, just welling up into my mind and heart, my son, you're not in Vietnam because you love the Vietnamese people. You're here because I love them. And I want to love them through you.

And oh, how that hit me. Human love is fragile. One look sometimes makes it so we don't want to talk to that person again.

One word, one gesture, one little argument, one little confrontation. We're through with them. Human love is fragile. But God's love is eternal for neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come can separate us, nor any other thing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. That's what the Bible says.

It's true. God's love doesn't depend on how much we love Him. He loves us anyway, even as sinners, lost, condemned. He loved us and He gave Christ to die on the cross for us. That's how much He loved us. And that was the night I got on the altar, as it were, and I said, Lord, help me to be totally emptied so that you can take up your life in me and flow through me unhindered out to the people around here. Oh God, I want your kind of love that knows no reward and wants no reward and wants no response but to love as you loved us. And God changed my life that night.

The next morning I went down to the marketplace and I'm just about through here. There was a leper lady sitting on a bamboo mat. Every morning I walked by her. Her nose was completely eaten off. All the cartilage gone. There's just a hole in her face. No ears. A hole in the sides of her head.

Fingers gone. Pads on her elbows and her knees to drag herself out in the morning and put a little bowl out there. It was a hideous looking creature. Every time I walked by there on the way to the seminary, I turned my head because it just made me almost sick to see her. But you know that morning I looked down at her and you know the question came in my mind. I wonder if anybody loves her. I know God does.

But I don't know if anybody loves that woman in that kind of condition. And I sat down beside her on that mat. It was like almost like my eyes, it's like Jesus looking through my eyes and by the hands and my heart. And I began to tell her how this old body is human and it's temporary and it's going to fade away.

It's going to pass away. But God has made us so that we can be with Him for eternity. He loved us. He loves us. He loves you. I said one day He's going to wipe the tears from your eyes.

There will be no more crying, no more pain, no more sorrow because of what Jesus did. And I talked to her but there was no response. Muscles in her face were gone.

Nerves were gone. She just sat there looking forward. Sometimes looking at me I thought. And I didn't know she understood. But for months and months I sat down beside her so that she would know that God loves her.

Somebody loves her. One day I looked in her eyes and there was a little bit of water in the corner of her eye and it rolled down her cheek. I didn't know if it was a tear but I thought maybe it's a tear. I wanted to kind of wipe it away. But then I thought that's too precious. Let it go. And I realized maybe, just maybe, she does know that God loves her.

But I want to tell you something. It may be easier to love an old leopard lady sitting in a marketplace like that with her body crippled than it is to love a neighbor or somebody at the office, somebody at school, somebody sitting in this church who has offended you, who's not very sensitive, who's hard to love. It may be easier to love that lady than it is to love somebody sitting right here in our midst. And sometimes the people who are the hardest to love are the ones who are the people who need it the most. And you and I have to crucify ourselves at times.

We can't crucify ourselves. We have to say, Lord, just take me and fill me. I can't love with this human love but God you can love through me. Take me, fill me, and make me the kind of person that you want me to be. I want to ask you, what kind of experiences have you had that is making you into what God wants you to be? What kind of decisions have your experiences brought you to at this point in your life which is ready to change your life or is changing your life? Think back on those things.

What kind of decision would you make today because God has given you some experiences in your life and has taught you and trained you so that you can respond to Him. Think about that. Let's pray. Oh, Father, oh Father, you want to use everyone in this room in some way. You've given us gifts and talents and abilities that are beyond our imagination. And Father, today we want to give them to you. Take us, Lord.

Empty us. Break us, Lord, of all pride and all of that and just fill us, Lord, with your presence and your power. Oh God, may this church be that lighthouse on the summit that because of those who are here and in all the places in which this church is worshiping this day, oh God, take these lives and help them to shine into the darkness of this world until they come to know the preciousness of Jesus our Savior. And we want to give you honor and glory and thanksgiving and praise for it all in Jesus' name. Amen.