Elders of my home assembly have asked me to bring greetings to the conveners of this conference. And so I'm going to do that. They're going to ask me if I did that as soon as I go home. And I like that pronunciation that Stefan has, Wallenstein. Does that sound German to you? We live in a German Mennonite, some Amish community. That assembly sits starkly out in the edge of a farmer's field. And David has been there once about twenty years ago and left an indelible impression upon the saints there. And he was traveling with Emmaus, and they were doing singing and showing slides and things. And just before the meeting started, he reached around and pulled the screen down, as he should have done. But it slipped out, went shooting up, hit the top of the thing, broke and fell to the... When he told me that, he said on the phone, he said they didn't even send me a bill. I said, I'm bringing it with me. But they remember David and the Emmaus team very well. It's a pleasure to be here and to get to know some of you and be part of this community of saints. and to listen to the Word of God that David is bringing to us and to try and be obedient to the Word and learn to love the Lord more perfectly. Now I watched very carefully this morning. I had breakfast with David. I wanted to see if he tried two more bowls of granola. How many tried two big bowls of granola and fourteen ounces of milk this morning? Nobody. Well, he didn't do it. I was disappointed. But I look like all the time as if I've had three bowls of granola. It's my wife's passion to get me thin again. She sends me little notes when I travel and to remind me that I should be remembering that. I like big wide platforms and things like that. I was preaching in a certain place. She was with me. She sent me a little note. Does your wife ever send you encouragement just to the pulpit? Her's read, Honey, your figure used to be your fame. It helped you get ahead. But that was thirty years ago, and now your famous spread. So I didn't even ask her if she wanted to come here this weekend. Please open your Bibles to Acts chapter one. What we would like to try and do today, and maybe one session tomorrow, is look very simply through some of the early chapters of the book of Acts. David is reminding us what we have in Christ Jesus. If you want a tremendous Bible study, just stick out the in Christ Jesus references in the New Testament, especially in the pastoral epistles. and it will bless your soul. And so Colossians helps us understand that in everything he must have the preeminence, Colossians one eighteen. And you're going to enjoy that. So make sure you get one of those printouts and take it home and study it for yourself. The advantage of printouts is that stats show that even in well-trained assemblies and any other church for that matter, if If you come and enjoy the message and go home, one week from that time, but less than one in ten, can even tell you what the general title was, never mind anything else. I have a few scratchy handouts there. I don't think there's enough to go around, but we want to just wander through a few things in the early part of Acts and see if we can learn how we respond to what we have in Christ and how the church functions with all of the struggles and and troubles that we tend to have. So let's read in Acts chapter one, I'm reading from the New King James Version. Chapter one, verse six. When they, therefore, whenever you come to anything like that in your Bible, stop. Now who are they? If you don't know who they were, then what follows doesn't make much sense. Well, we're talking here of a time about eight weeks after the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. It's important when we're reading through the early part of the Book of Acts to remember that we're talking about a very early time in the history of the Christian church. They didn't know they were the church. I think as we read the early chapters of the Book of Acts, they were very Jewish. It was a very transitional time in their spiritual life. It was going to be fifteen years before they were given the information about the mystery that Paul was blessed to bring and talk about how the church is and what elders do and what deacons do. And he calls it something that God gave to him and he reveals to the body of Christ. They were very Jewish. Acts is a very transitional book. in no way is it entirely normative for the church today. And when we try to get back to the very roots of where we began, we fail to understand a lot of things happen in the book of Acts that are not normative for the church today. That's a very dangerous minefield over here. So this is the group I'll talk about. You can listen if you want. I like to wander around. Well, I just put my computer on and and picked up, I think, about thirty-seven things that are not normative for the church today. None of you who are told to go into a hospital to have some serious surgery are going to ask for the shadow of an apostle to go by you and heal you, or maybe a handkerchief, and we could go on and on and tell you things that are not normative. So remember that. Remember that you're a Jew. And you are following Christ. You're part of the little embryonic group of people who are doing that. And it's only a month or two after the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. And the crowd that crucified him are still in charge. And this enormous opposition from Rome and from the Judaizers and from the Jewish status quo hated the name of the Lord Jesus. They were struggling with where is the body? because eight weeks before they put him in the ground. That's the end of the story, unless the body is missing. And we know that the body is missing because Jesus Christ is alive. We need to thrill on that every day, that we serve a risen Savior. He knows where we are at this moment of time. He's instructed the Holy Spirit to bless our souls by illuminating Scripture. And we have the opportunity to rejoice in the fact that Jesus Christ is alive and His Spirit lives in our mortal body. Just think in this group of people, every one of you, if you belong to Jesus Christ, God the Holy Spirit is alive in your mortal body. More about that tomorrow morning. But what does that mean to you? Anything? Does it change anything? I've taken the Holy Spirit to some places that didn't make them happy. Living in my mortal body, he has heard me say things and think things that I wouldn't want you to hear. And I have reacted to the body of Christ in ways that displeased him terribly. But the Lord said, when I send the Holy Spirit, he's going to abide with you forever. And he's determined to live with me until the call comes and we go to be with the Lord Jesus. But it's a wonderful thing to have the Holy Spirit living in our mortal body. Now, he also has some precious, precious things to do in the illuminating of Scripture and in directing our thoughts and our vision to the risen Christ. There's a whole lot of things. He's our guarantee and our down payment that what God began at the cross is going to be completed until the day of Jesus Christ. So think of this background to Acts, and we'll try and nibble away at that background as we go. But who were the they, the eleven apostles? But at the end of this chapter in verse twenty-six, the number jumps to twelve, and they gave forth their lots, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles. That's why in our community when the bishop of the local church dies, they draw lots just like this, and some of who are unsuspecting Mennonite farmer, but the next Sunday becomes the preacher. Sometimes can't read. sometimes have to say things like, well, somewhere in the Scriptures it says. And the poor folks and the few don't know because they're not allowed to bring a Bible to the meetings because that means that they are threatening the bishop as if they could know anything from Scripture. I can sense that I'm going to wander off some bunny trails today, but that's okay. The simplest believer in this room with the Word of God and the Spirit of God can understand the Word of God. He is the illuminator of Scripture. Now, it doesn't mean we don't study it. We read the Scripture to see what it says. Now, pagans and agnostics and everybody else can do the same. They can read the Bible to see what it says, but only a Christian can study the Scripture to know what it means by what it says. And the function of the Holy Spirit is to illuminate Scripture. I don't know a thrill that a Christian can have short of leading another soul to Christ than to be in your study and be serious about Scripture. Study to show yourselves approved unto God. That's hard work. That study means sweat it out. But when you're committed to the Word of God and you read it to know what it says, study it to know what it means, there comes a time as we mature in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit turns the light bulb on. and God speaks to your soul. That's real Christianity. And a lot of us are very casual about our Bibles and very casual about the effort of the Spirit of God to teach us Scripture. And that might explain the adeptness and the weakness in the body of Christ when we do not know what God is speaking to us and informing us and teaching us and directing us. Well, these men, the eleven, were the disciples and now apostles and It says, verse six, when they, therefore, were come together. Let's stop again. After the crucifixion of Christ, they came together, didn't they? What a dynamic group they were up in that little upper room for fear of the Jews. The door is locked. It really means locked and barred. I can see them moving the furniture over under the handle, you know, and And there they were in that upper room. That upper room just keeps reappearing through the early chapters of the Book of Acts. They're in this upper room for fear of the Jews. And here they are, met together again. A lot of that fear was still there, but they were learners of God's program for the body of Christ. Eleven Jewish men, one of them already dead, the twelfth one Judas, And the same enemies out there, the same hunts going on for the body, and one of the burning issues that they were faced is they were going to have to go into a world that needs to know Christ and preach that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. And that was the hot button. You see, the religious crowd out there that you face all the time, they don't care if you talk about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God is the father of all mankind. That's not what the Bible says. He says he's the creator of all mankind, but the father of those that believe. So they're wrong to start with, but they like that. The golden rule. A few of the parables will talk about his teaching of the Lord. But as soon as you get down to talk about that he was buried, he died, he was buried, and he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures, you've got a war in your hand. Because you have entered the arena of spiritual warfare. Do you hear much teaching from the pulpit about spiritual warfare? Do you sense that that's real or that's kind of a dramatic little side light that certain groups of people dwell on? Is Satan very real? He's very real. Greater is he that is us than he that is in the world. He's not all-powerful. Only God is all-powerful. He's not omniscient, only God is omniscient. He's certainly not holy. He has none of the attributes of God, but he has a lot of experience with Christians. And when the Word of God goes forth, you can be sure at six o'clock tonight when the gospel is shared, he'll be here. Luke four tells us he wants to be there to snatch away the seed of the Word of God because the warfare goes on and on and on. Let me suggest that you commit to next Monday when you go back to work. You commit, pray about it, and go to one of your neighbors or your workmates or whatever and say, I'm going to tell them about the Lord Jesus. You know what happens? You walk up to them, already your mouth is dry. Too much peanut butter and it's just sticking to the roof of your mouth and through sweating, hearts going a little faster. And all these things begin to happen. We don't have any trouble going up to talk about the Blue Jays, which is our nearest baseball team, not to be thought too much about. But many of these other things, we can share everything we want with people who don't know Christ until you share the Lord Jesus. And then you've entered into the area of spiritual warfare. And you feel... that you're there well he's these men they were having a whole lot of these kind of feelings and and it says that when they therefore were come together they asked of him now the hymn is the Lord Jesus as you're going to see Lord wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel and he said unto them it is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father has put in his own power but ye shall receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld he was taken up, and a cloud received them out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, which also said, ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you've seen him go into heaven. Now we're just reading it as if it's the phone book, but it isn't. These are powerful, powerful words. If we never read another portion of Scripture this weekend, he's gone to be with the Father. He's in the Father's throne, but he's coming. And verse twelve, they returned... to Jerusalem from the Mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey. And God will bless to us the reading of his work. I want to talk a little bit about priorities. Priorities. Do you think priorities are important in the world? My wife has a little list on the fridge door, which is her priorities for me every day. And I've learned to... do one and scratch it off and I kind of make it on an angle so it looks like it's gone through three things. And then it's got there with magnets and I turn it upside down so it looks like it's finished. But she knows about that. But she has priorities for me. I think God has priorities for you. You see, if you don't have God's priorities as your priorities, not much is going to happen in your spiritual life. And as we come together, we're just a collection of people known as a local expression of the body of Christ. And the problem with the church is the problem with the people who make up the church. So we've got to be sensitive to the fact that God has priorities in the world. And when we look for God's priorities to change the church, we don't begin in the church, we begin in the home and in our individual life. What do you think would happen if you asked the Lord to show you five things that are a priority for him in the life of your home, or your own life for that matter. And then assess how our lives are sitting. Do you think there would be changes? Do you think our homes and our marriages and our kids would change? Well, you see, the church cannot resurrect what is not happening in the privacy of our personal lives and homes. So if we looked in our homes and marriages, we'd see that Scripture clearly tells us that people come before things. That's not how the world thinks. We need to ask ourselves quite frequently, in my home with my wife, do people, does she come before things? We need to see that the spiritual always comes before the material. And that is something that we in North America desperately need to know, including believers, that the spiritual always comes before the material. Missionaries come home. In our assembly, we have twenty-three or four fully commended missionaries to foreign fields from that church. And I think they are culture shocked when they see what we put out on the street in a garage sale. Because we don't understand that the spiritual comes before the material. And that home comes before occupation. Home comes before occupation. Any occupation. including what we commit to do in the local body of Christ. God puts his priority on men, on your high priestly responsibility in the home. You're the person who ought to be speaking to the Lord on behalf of your family, and he should be speaking to you on behalf of your family. But occupations drive the agenda so much of our lives because of materialism and many other things. Spouse before yourself. Spouse before yourself. If we understood the biblical teaching of mutual submission and support and new scriptures like Philippians two, one to four, that we esteem other better than ourselves, the Christian feminism movement would evaporate in a moment of time when we understand that we submit to one another and the husband who is the head of the family in a spiritual sense is also one has to be very sensitive to his spouse and vice versa. and spouse before children. Spouse before children. God's program and intention for marriage is not based on children. It's based on, and a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife and they too shall be one flesh. You don't cleave to your children. No great marriage is ever built upon children first, but many marriages are ruined by children first. And grandmothers take note. Well then that comes the final thing that children before friends and our children need to know that we value them and esteem them and pray for them and have time for them and teach them and that friends of their parents are not more important than them. I never knew a day that my mom and dad didn't pray for me publicly, publicly. They made sure I knew they were praying for me before I came to Christ and afterwards. Warren Wiersby said he used to pray for his kids. And one day his wife came to them and said, Warren, I suspect that behind that door of your study, you're praying for our children, that they'll come to Christ and grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus. But Warren, it's behind the door. If you want them to know that you care about their spiritual welfare, open the door so they can see and hear you pray. I've been surveying teenage and younger college kids for four or five years now. about some of these issues. And what I tell you is that most of them have no idea that their parents are in touch with the living God about their spiritual lives and eternal welfare. So these are some of the priorities of the home. But that's another matter. What we have a little time for is to talk about priorities in the church. And here we have a group of men who come to the Lord and they're in this embryonic state and and they are, the Lord joins them in the room. How gracious he is when we're struggling, he's with us. And it says, they ask him a question, Lord, will thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? Was that a good question? Not when you listen to preachers in the pulpit putting down these men. I mean, look what the Lord went through and look what he has in the future. They didn't know that future. And how could they be thinking of a kingdom Well, they thought about the kingdom because Christ had told them a lot about the kingdom. They said one day, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. And the Lord said, pray like this. Our Father, which art in heaven, what's the first thing? Holy be thy name. That's the most important thing you need to know about the living God, His holiness. The godness of God is His holiness. We forget that. And that's why we worship the way we do, because we do not stand in reverential awe of the living God and all He has done in Jesus Christ. It would change the kind of easiness with which we approach the throne of God and the word of God and the person of God if we understood. The first thing He wanted them to know was that holy is thy name. What's the next thing? Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth in that kingdom. as it is in heaven. So he told them that in prayer. He had constantly, so had John the baptizer, told them, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and this person who I am here to make known to you, said John the Baptist, is the Messiah King of Israel. And right up until the upper room ministry of Christ, he kept talking about the kingdom. I don't know of anything that's so confusing to believers who know their Bible as the subject of the kingdom. Is this an earthly kingdom the Lord was talking about here? Yes, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. And yet when Pilate interviewed him, he said, my kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom was of this world. My men would fight. A lot of confusion around the kingdom. A lot of erroneous teaching, just kind of tainted teaching because we don't understand what the Bible says about the kingdom. Dave will probably clear all this up as a sidebar to Colossians. I'm counting on them to do it. And so we don't dump on these men because they asked about the kingdom. You see, in John thirteen they were thinking of the kingdom too, weren't they? But it was selfish and self-centered and they wanted each one to be on the right hand and the left hand of the Lord in his kingdom. And all of them were into it, although only two were honest enough to admit it, but the Lord sees our heart. That's the scary part, isn't it? And so that was a selfish thing, but this was not selfish, because when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, all of their teaching, all of their culture, all of their Jewishness demanded they know about the kingdom. So it wasn't a wrong thing, but it was a secondary issue. And when we're in priority seeking, we need to know that a lot of the good things are secondary issues. And the Lord didn't rebuke them. He just said, there's a plan. There's an eternal plan. You're part of it, I'm part of it, and the Father's part of it. And his responsibility is to deal with when the kingdom comes, and it still is. So what he's saying to them, it's not for you to know the times of the seasons, which the Father has put in his own power. So there's a danger that these men face of distraction from God's priorities. Christ's priority was quite different. It was that they come to profess Him to be their Savior and Messiah, that they then have an authentic Christian life that puts that relationship into action, and that they should propagate the faith that they had come to know as visible witnesses of the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So the first thing is they were confused. There was a principle to learn. The principle is this, when the purposes of God become the purposes of God's people, God's power is unleashed on the world. Always is. When your purpose as an individual believer or a family or a local body of believers, when your purpose lines up with God's purpose, God is prepared to put power and might into your ministry and to do his work visibly and spiritually through you. The corollary of that is when we go in thirty directions with a whole lot of priorities, they're not God's priorities. Not necessarily wrong, but not his priorities. God's power is not unleashed in the body of Christ. And as I travel around amongst God's people, it is disheartening and discouraging to the extreme to see people exerting and spending and putting so much energy to things that are not God's priority. And it becomes confusion and distraction. And so what we have to do is learn to major on the majors. When I first was saved at age fourteen, my dad got me studying the Bible and he said, Paul, always make sure that you make the main thing the main thing. And I've not always done that. But if we study Scripture, listen to the Word of God, make sure it's the main thing. So they were in a confused state. The Lord had talked about these things and There's something I've noticed about distracting things. You see, Philippians one ten says that we need as Christians to distinguish between things that differ. That's literally how it reads. Distinguish between things that differ. It isn't a question of good and bad. It's a difference between good and better. I don't see a lot of Christians meeting in the local body of Christ doing desperate things. I see them. floundering around, thrashing around, filling their bulletins with programs that are okay, but they're not God's priority. And so we need to remember that they can be distracting things. The other thing I remember mostly about distracting things, because I've been part of that problem and I've been in lots of assemblies as I moved around in my spiritual life, and most of the distracting things center on me. They center on me. But God's priorities always center on the Lord Jesus and the Word of God. That's an easy test. But folk are wandering around all the time, coming to test out to local churches. And the first thing they say, what's in it for me? Because we're all getters, very few givers. And they're saying, what's in it for my young people? What's in it for my kids? Let me see the nursery. And we go through all of these things centered on us and our needs. And we have more... than the body of Christ has ever had about the things that don't matter a pinch. And the Lord is saying, my priority is nothing to do with the things that center on you. They center on the risen Christ. In all things, he must have the preeminence. That's the number one obligation of the body of Christ to exalt the Lord Jesus. Well, this is what they were doing, but our distractions are often very difficult. I don't want to be too negative, but they're petty things, often. As I move amongst God's people, I see the petty things and the trivial things and things that are called urgent, which are not, and basically secondary things. I can't tell you how it bothers me when I walk into an assembly I've been invited to for two years, and the first thing they ask me is, which version of the Bible do you approve of? Let me ask assembly people here. That is a distraction and a secondary issue. We are blessed with Scripture that no other nations on earth have ever had. And they're not all perfect, but they're exceedingly good. And God is pleased to give us a choice. Now, I have my own preferences, and it's okay to have assemblies have their own preferences. And if I'm not told ahead of time, I come and I bring my King James Bible. I don't want to offend the saints. But it is not the Bible. It is only a copy of it. And we need to know that that kind of stuff fussing around hymn books and whether we sing off the wall or whether we don't sing off the wall till we get all tied up with form instead of function. The function of the church in this chapter is declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ. But the form in which we lock it into a little box is something that disappoints the Lord Jesus and is a distracting thing. And as we look at the Lord moving through his life, the form in which he functioned as a share of the good news of the gospel, was in crowds and individual people, little home groups, and all those sorts of things. But I just urge you not to listen to me telling you what's right, but listening to the Spirit of God and asking, is this God's priority? Is this furthering the thing for which he's left the body of Christ here? So these are distracting and confusing things. The concern of the Lord was what he wanted to direct them to in verse eight, but ye shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth. He wanted them to do his will, and that was to share the message of salvation. It was a missionary vision. they were ahead of that program because they were they were dealing with the issues that was at the end of the day of God's grace and so he wanted them to know that there was no kingdom come without the message of regeneration going out into all the world and while he was speaking these words it's interesting while he's he's he's just telling them that that what you're looking for is biblical and it's okay and I understand it but it is not my priority as he told them this and told them that Speaking the word of God to lost people was his priority at this particular time. It was at that moment that he was received into heaven. As he was headed for the throne, his heart was with people who were lost. People who were lost. Do we tend to think of people in our homes who don't know Christ as lost people? Do we tend to think of... the folk that we live next door to as lost people. Do we tend to think of the folk in our community as we look into their faces? We see them as people for whom Christ died, but most of them will die in their sin, and the Lord said, where I am, you cannot come. Just think of it. Our hearts would burn with an evangelistic fervor if we looked into the faces of people as the Son of God looked into the faces of people. I was preaching in an assembly about three months ago and a man, eighty-four, walked up to me and he said, Paul, this assembly started in my home and now look at it. And he said, I want you to know something else. I have never had an unsaved friend in my life and he was happy about that. The Lord's passion was people that are lost. A.B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, used to go into his study first thing every morning, and he would put his arms around the globe of the world, and he would just be devastated before the Lord. His tears would wet that map because he had a passion to see the whole world as lost people dying without Christ. Billy Sunday said, when I go to sleep at nights, I can't sleep because when I try to sleep, I hear the pounding feet of a million people dying and going to hell. And I don't know when I've talked to people who cry and are moved emotionally in turmoil as they think of the opportunity of having the Word of God and the Spirit of God and the salvation of God and the passion of God and we don't care for people who are dying. You see, the Lord has never asked us to do what we do. to bring the world to Christ. That's what we say, don't we? But we have gospel meetings and I was saved in a gospel series and I applaud people who preach the gospel. But the Great Commission wasn't to bring the world to Christ, it was to take Christ to the world and there's a vast difference. So your obligation is to go into your world and take Christ to people. and not to sit and pray and ponder and ask that somehow in a corporate sense my responsibility to dying people will be satisfied by meeting together and hoping that some unsaved people will be here. Does that sound harsh? God's purpose is to take Christ to the world and not bring the world to Christ. Well, that was the concern of the Lord that this would happen. Then the distinctive of the message is interesting. It's in verses that follow. He said, the program is we are in the business of taking Christ to the world. That's my program, he said. I had a friend who was the vice president of our national railway, one of them in Canada, and he said, we were losing money to the competition. We were... we were going down the drain and then we we all got together all the the big wigs in the company and we started with our mission statement and it said we are in the railroad business but we were going down the drain then we discovered there's a big difference between being in the railroad business and in the transportation business you can be in the railroad business and never move an ounce but when in the transportation business you're moving freight and he said That is what changed our company around. You see, we are not in the religious business. We are comfortable being in the religious business. We are in the business of witnessing to the power of God at the cross. Paul said to Timothy chapter three, verse fifteen, but in case I am delayed, I write so that you may know how to conduct yourself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. Paul, I'm writing you, he says to Timothy, that you know how to behave yourself in the church of God. You think he was thinking that Timothy was a bit immature and he'd stick his gum under the pew or run around or snatch a cookie from the kitchen? No. I want you to know how to live your life in the church of God. First of all, it's the pillar of truth. The church holds Jesus Christ up as the way, the truth, and the life. That is the message. Don't dilute it down to anything that makes it more palatable. Jesus Christ is the only way, and all sorts of churches and believers today are trying to mail it down to something that is acceptable to a greater group of people. And you don't hear words like sin anymore, or repentance anymore. Repentance is a word that vanish from the statements of faith of most evangelicals. And that's why I applaud Harry Ironside having his book on repentance reprinted. You need to read it. We all need to read it. It's a good study for a midweek Bible study to know that repentance toward God precedes faith in the Lord Jesus. We need to talk about sin and death and hell and repentance and many of these things. And so this is what he's trying to get them to think about. And he says, I want you to know that our responsibility is to hold Jesus Christ up. We are the pillar in which the Lord Jesus has seen, but we're also the ground. And that means when folk come to Jesus Christ, then we are a fertile ground and we all are participating in the nurturing and discipling and the strengthening of new believers in Jesus Christ. I also wonder if the assembly I'm in, which is a wonderful place, if a thousand people came to Christ, through the preaching of the gospel, would we have ten who could step to the front and begin to nurture people in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus? Do you know your Bible? Can you teach them? Have you a life that's authentic that they can follow? This is the issue that the Lord had on his program. And then it says the personnel, who's involved in this? Stefan Johnson and some of the rest of you I've met, yes, they are involved, but it's not for evangelists. I sense that the gift of evangelism that we find listed in, and you know those chapters on spiritual gifts, First Corinthians twelve, Romans twelve, Ephesians four, and a little snippet in the Epistle of Peter. If every gift is for the edification of the body of Christ, then evangelism must be some other gift than just going out and speaking on the street corner and handing out tracts. I believe the body of Christ has been equipped by the Holy Spirit. He desperately wants to equip some of you to realize that your responsibility is to make people aware of the lostness of the lost and strategies to know the scripture which is powerful under God to salvation and to teach us to be active and incisive and practical in spreading the gospel of Christ. Every assembly I ever visit needs that kind of gift. Well, here we are that everybody is responsible to preach the gospel, to share it, and we need to be part of that. Bethany Chapel, where I belonged for a while in Calgary, Alberta, a huge, a huge place, seats about twelve hundred people. Its foyer is bigger than most of our assembly buildings. But when you walk out of their foyer, there's a huge banner as you enter the world that says, you are now entering your mission field. So you can't leave that building. without knowing that what I have learned and experienced and fellowshiped with in the Scripture and with God's people and the Lord is equipping me to be a missionary in a mission field. Well, quickly, my time has just about gone. The process is be a witness. Now, unfortunately, that is the translation of the word martyr. That doesn't mean you're dead as soon as you witness, but there are a lot of people, as we're going to hear this afternoon, who are. It's not a dead person because our assemblies are filled with lots of dead people, although they're alive in Christ. They're dead in terms of God's passion, his priority for the world, early in the book of Acts. And they're not dead people, but people who know the Lord and they're willing to tell what they know and they're prepared for the cost and to live a life that is authentic. Because the greatest argument for and against Christianity is Christian. Sad but true. Finally, the power. Now, the power, he said, you shall receive power. David rightly told us that this word is dunamis. And, of course, we get our word dynamite. And I know a lot of sort of groups of Christians who want to dynamite the world away. They want the power to flow visibly and audibly in every way. This is not a word of you blowing away the opposition. You just plow through. This is the word of enablement. It says, ye shall receive an enablement. God won't leave you without resources. And what are the resources we have as we take his priority to be a witness in the world? There's only two. What are they? Not your experience. It's not basically your testimony. That's why I'm relieved that I grew up in a Christian home, but there was a time when I thought I missed it. I should have been in a home where I robbed banks and did drugs and messed around and all that evil and I got saved and then I could go out. My testimony would knock them dead. God has never promised to bless the preaching from the pulpit, but he has promised to bless two things. It's his power. One is the word of God. The word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. So when you're witnessing for Christ, make sure you major on the word of God. This is what he's guaranteed to bless. Now the second part of his power package, his dunamis, is God the Holy Spirit. For only he can convict the world of sin and of righteousness and judgment. And your job is to go out and share the word of the gospel as it's printed in the page and don't change it one bit. And the second thing is that to trust the Holy Spirit to do his work in the lives of people. Your job is to be faithful. It's God's responsibility to make the preaching of the word successful. So we wanted to remind them. They went out into this world. They're going to put this into practice very soon as we'll see this afternoon and maybe tomorrow morning. But the power was God's power. And we need to understand the power lies with Him. I'll finish with this. The pattern. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria. than the uttermost parts of the world. You need to decide where your uttermost parts of the world are. We have twenty-three or four missionary couples out in full-time work commended from our assembly. So they're in the uttermost parts of the world. But our elders will not send them out until there's been a Jerusalem and then a Judea. and then in Samaria. Jerusalem was the toughest place to be a missionary because Jesus Christ was alive. They couldn't find the body and the same crowd that crucified Him were persecuting them. Lord, don't send me to Jerusalem. How about Samaria? That's a tough assignment too. But God wants you to begin where you need to begin. You remember the Gadarene who was chained and burned and broke his chains and cut himself. What a testimony he would be. So he thought so too when he was delivered. He said, Lord, let me get on board ship. Let me be with you forever. Isn't that a wonderful thing to do to be with the Lord Jesus?