What Would We be Doing

We're happy in the spirit this morning. After, after having been with the apostles for several years and, after having performed incredible miracles, Jesus tried to point his apostles to the future. And he said to them in John chapter 14 verse 12, truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do because I go to the Father. Now, in later years, we would see the apostles do the greater works. You know, here's Jesus doing all these fantastic things.

And he says to his apostles, when I'm gone, you people are gonna do even greater things. Hard to believe, isn't it? And yet, in later years, we will see the apostles repeat the miracles that Jesus did in the same power, if you wish, because the apostles raised people from the dead. So they demonstrated the same degree of power that Jesus had demonstrated. But in addition to this, the apostles also established faith in Jesus Christ throughout the world, a work, a great work, that had not been done during Jesus' time.

During Jesus' time, faith had only extended to the area of Jerusalem. So the greater work here is that faith extended to all parts of the world through the preaching of the apostles. Of course, this took time. You see, when it came to evangelizing the world, the apostles were very slow in understanding the scope of the great things that they were to do. They thought that they were to go out and preach the gospel to all the Jews in the world.

It took them 10 years and a miracle and a special apostle named Paul for them to understand that the gospel was to be spread to everyone in the world, Jew and Gentile. Nevertheless, they managed to understand that and with time did do the greater works that Jesus had pointed them towards. Now we see Jesus as a wise trainer of men, if you wish, confirming the work of his apostles and encouraging them, but also encouraging them to look to the future to see the great things that laid ahead for them to do, even though it would take time for them to finally accomplish it. Well, this morning I'd like to emulate that spirit, and I'd like us to look ahead at the greater things that we, as a congregation, could be doing to glorify God and to build up the kingdom of God here in this area of the world. Now, I've mentioned to you many times in the past that when it comes to the work of the church, the Bible describes 5 areas of ministry that we need to be active in.

Very briefly, the 5 areas, most of you know them, you can almost recite them with me. The first area is evangelism, the preaching of the gospel to the lost. That's one ministry of the church. The second area is education, teaching the saved about Christ and his word and teaching the saved to obey the word of God. That's another area of ministry, education.

3rd area is fellowship, helping the brethren share their lives and their work together. That's another area of ministry. The 4th one is service, taking care of the needs of the church, and the church taking care of the needs of the community. That's the ministry of service. And then the 5th ministry is worship, training and organizing the church to offer praise to God.

Now, I've told you in the past that when we pursue these 5 biblical ministries, evangelism, education, fellowship, service, worship, when we pursue these 5 ministries, the church grows. The church naturally grows. You don't have to say, we wanna grow by 10 or 50. All you have to do is be active in those 5 ministries and the church, like 11, will grow naturally as a result of our activity in these 5 ministries. Now, I can say to you that we have been active in all these areas, and the church has grown as a result.

But like any other enterprise, our growth will not continue if we don't open up ourselves to the possibility that there may be some other things that we could be doing. We're doing okay, but there's some other things that we could be doing, and I'd like to go over those this morning with you. You see, the question that is before us now is what greater works could we be doing? Aren't we doing everything we could be? Are there some greater things out there?

Jesus pointed his apostles to greater and higher things, and we must also be able to set our sights on new targets and new goals for the future. Permit me, therefore, to run back through each ministry group that I've talked about one more time and suggest, maybe not all the ideas and not all the goals that might be out there, but a few of them to stimulate our faith and to set some kind of a direction for our future. Now, as you know, I've been with you almost 3 years. It'll be 3 years this summer. So, you know, you have to earn the right to say the things that I'm gonna say.

And I think after 3 years, I've earned the right to say these things because I've gotten to know you. You know, medical doctors, they examine the body and they say, oh, I think you have a cold or I think you you know, this thing is broken or, you know, this thing is disconnected. We need to reconnect. We'd have to go into surgery. Well, ministers minister to the body of Christ, and they have to be able to diagnose the body, how well it's doing, and what it needs to grow and to develop further.

So this morning, this is an exercise in diagnosis, what the body has done and what the body could be doing in the future. Well, first of all, in the area of evangelism, I can't say it any more plainly than this. I believe that we need to put more effort into local evangelism. That's about as simple as I can make it. Getting the message out to the people of Choctaw and the surrounding areas.

You'd be surprised at how many people do not know the gospel in our community. You'd be surprised at how many people are looking for the very thing that we have, New Testament Christianity, and just don't know where to find it. Because as far as they're concerned, all church buildings look the same. You can't tell what's on the inside just by looking at the outside. Without a strong effort to evangelize our own community, we will not have the resources to send missionaries elsewhere.

We like to do mission work and we spend a lot of money on mission work, but if we don't evangelize our own community, we won't ever have the resources to be dynamic in sending missionaries to other parts of the world. So here's some of the things we could be doing in the area of evangelism. We could have a regular column in the newspaper in this area, like my bulletin article, for example. We could print that in the newspaper. It's an evangelistic tool.

People could read that, get some sort of Bible training, get curious about what we're doing here. It's a good reflection of us. We could be sending out a flyer to each home in this community with the gospel message and some information about the church. Every single home receive a flyer every quarter, every 3 months. We could have a radio program or a TV program.

We could have a gospel meeting. We could have each member make an effort that each week they're going to invite at least 1 person to church, just 1. Target 1 and invite them. Whether they come or not, not the issue. Target 1 person and invite them to come to worship with you.

We could use our care groups, our youth group, and all of our benevolent groups to target people for evangelism, to share the gospel with them. I mean, there are a thousand Lewis has got a lifetime of experience in personal evangelism. He could stand here and give you 50 more ways to evangelize. But you get my point? You get the drift?

We are a family here, and we're a very loving family in this congregation, but we are not very evangelistic. You know, I hold the the stethoscope, the spiritual stethoscope to our body. And I'm here to tell you, I've worked in lots of churches. And I'm here to tell you, we're not very evangelistic. And we need to be more serious about saving souls.

Never mind saving the souls in Nigeria and Ghana. That's very important. Saving the souls over on First Street over here, And on Main Street, in the trailer park? What about them? They have souls too.

And our greater responsibility is to our community first. And that's a biblical idea. First, they preach the gospel in Jerusalem, and then in Judea, and then in Samaria, and then they went to all parts of the world. That's how evangelism works. Education.

Let's talk about education, what we could do. You know, we have a great education program in this church. Great program, but not enough teachers, And not enough teachers being trained. We could be having a special class, for example, on Wednesday nights to train new teachers and help them prepare to teach the next quarter. In other words, on Wednesday night, there'd be a class that would be just for teachers, and they would be studying, for example, the gospel of John.

And in that class, all the teachers would be studying the gospel of John. They'd be getting handouts, overheads, resource material, background material, and they would be taught that gospel thoroughly. And then the background material, and they would be taught that gospel thoroughly. And then the next quarter, those teachers would go out into the other classes, and they would teach the entire church. And another group of teachers then would be trained during that time for the following quarter.

In other words, there would always be teachers in training. We could be doing that. We could organize a seminar to train teachers in preschool and elementary school in the use of materials and decorating and teaching and so on and so forth. We could do that. We could have a special class for new Christians and those who are not quite Christians yet, who are just searching and studying and, you know, they don't have it all together yet.

We could have a special class for them where they could just ask any question and go as deep as they want on anything they need to know. And when I say new Christian, I don't mean a week old. I mean a year. You're a new Christian if you're a year old, 2 years old. There's a ton of stuff that you need to know.

And I'm sure you want to know. We could have a special class for that. We could hire a minister who would specialize in education and family ministry to develop and coordinate long term bible curriculum and family oriented programs in this church. See, I firmly believe that youth ministry is family ministry, and the key is to help parents minister to each other's children. That's the key.

We could be doing that. We could train more men who would serve as elders because they have the key qualification of being apt to teach. We'll never get more elders if we don't get more good teachers. We could renovate our buildings so we would have more and larger classrooms to offer greater variety of subjects and classes to larger classrooms to offer greater variety of subjects and classes to our members and accommodate our growing numbers. You would know it by this morning.

You know, there's a there's a cycle. Another thing about church work, you know, you hit a peak and then you go down. Last week was a peak. Over 400 people on Easter Sunday was packed to capacity. I could have I don't bet I don't believe in gambling, but I could have predicted that today would have been a very light day for attendance.

It's just the way it works. People work up to a point, and then, woof, they get tired. They get busy. They feel they've been to church. But, normally, normally, our attendance is much higher than today on the average.

I went around this week to every classroom. You know that? I walked into every classroom this week, and I counted how many people we could fit into all our classrooms. I did it on this side and this side, everywhere. And I counted that we could put 250 people in our classrooms.

That's packed. I mean, that's 15 kids in one of those little classrooms there. So I wasn't fooling around. I really packed them in like sardines. That's 250, not counting our auditorium.

That means that normally, not counting today, but normally, we're about at 80% full and we're growing at a rate of about 15% per year. Brothers and sisters, I want to remind you that Bible school, you know, Sunday school Sunday school is what drives church growth. And unless we manage this growth by doing some of the things that I've just mentioned in education, We could simply ride the curve into what's called non growth for the next 5 years. In other words, you grow to capacity, and if there are not some very significant changes in personnel and in structure, it just implodes. It's just like a balloon.

It just it grows and then it goes pop. And then it just starts to shrink down again. And then there's a movement to grow again, and then it shrinks down. But what happens is that churches grow to a certain plateau, and then instead of bursting through that plateau to keep going, they hit the plateau and then they go down and they just keep hitting that plateau. And this has been the history of this congregation.

I've studied it. I've studied it. I've read it. I've gone through all the back records. We could have a volleyball court and facilities to to, excuse me.

We could, we could finish the classrooms and provide the type of space needed for the growth that I have just, that I have just mentioned. Some of the things we could do. Another area of ministry is fellowship. Now, fellowship for us is a very strong ministry because Choctaw has been established for a long time, and people here are like a family, and that's I'm not giving that lip service. That really is the case.

However, we could begin having our care groups you know, wonderful idea care groups a wonderful idea that has not reached its potential. We could begin having our care group meetings on Sunday evenings once per month, for example, as an alternative to the evening service. So, one Sunday evening per month, there would be a service here for those who enjoy an evening service at the building and are not interested in participating in care groups. And then those who want to become involved in care groups could simply go in the evening to their care group leader or home, designated home, and do their devotional time there and eat supper and be together to put a little kick into that care group program. We could do that.

We could double the number of our care groups to increase our effectiveness. You know, our big care groups exist just on paper, not as effective as they look on paper. We could begin a mentoring program. Here's an idea. We could begin a mentoring program where well established married couples would agree to take on younger couples, who are just starting out in marriage, or couples who are struggling with their marriages and help them.

You know, big brother, big sister? Well, this would be like big brother and married sister who could kind of take under their wing another couple that is struggling or just newly married. And help them and encourage them. You know, there's nothing more encouraging than to model positive married behavior to another couple. We could use, as I was saying before, I was getting ahead of myself, we could use our volleyball court and facilities to host activities to get young people off the street in this community and evangelize them.

We've got a volleyball court that sits there empty, week after week after week. That's a resource. We don't get mileage out of it. We could renovate the building and add a fellowship hall where our dinners and weddings and social events and outreach activities could be held, instead of having to travel a mile to somebody else's building or jam everybody into a room that has only capacity for 50 people, put a 100 people in for only 50 people. You know, in the area of fellowship, we could be the kind of church where people want to come and want to come back to because they feel that they belong to a family.

That part we've got down pretty good. But that this family is willing and equipped to care for them. Yeah, we could be doing that. In the area of service, well, service is a very very wide ministry. Because it's divided into 3 different groups.

Administration, which is the office and money and bookkeeping and all that kind of stuff. Communications. Maintenance, which is the building and grounds and all that business. And then, Benevolence, which is not just food distribution, but benevolence. Counseling, visitation, the elderly, all that kind of stuff.

That's all Benevolence. Here's some of the things we could be doing in each of the areas. In administration, for example, we could be putting Bible material on the Internet. I mean, that's the way the world is going. That's the way the world is communicating.

We are in the communicating business. Isn't that what Jesus said? Go preach the gospel to the entire world. Go communicate the gospel to the entire world. Well, the world is now communicating on this thing called the Internet.

It will in 10 years from now. Somewhere along the line, we have to get on board. We could be doing that. We could have an electronic billboard, where members who have computers could, you know, access the church billboard and find out what's going on. We could renovate the building in such a way that we'd have a reception area that would be much more welcoming to our guests and visitors and people who do business with us, instead of coming in the back door.

In the area of building maintenance, boy, we could have and I know the deacons are sitting there counting the things, and I'm surely not going to mention all the things that you're thinking of. But we could have a new landscaping, and we could have a sign that would reflect the quality of the people inside the church building. I want to tell you something. We're a lot better on the inside than we look from Choctaw Road. We're a lot better than what we looked like on the out.

You know, they say, don't judge from outward appearances. Well, that's a good thing for us. I mean, when you drive by, what do you see? You see a place that has a dilapidated sign and no front door. That's just the way it is.

We look we look like we don't want anybody to come here. You get any marketing specialist that knows anything about anything to look at our layout, they'd say, boy, who figured this one out? We look like we don't want anybody to come here. And yet, you get inside and you find out you know, I once said Choctaw congregation is a pearl inside of a brown paper bag. The outside doesn't look like much, but, boy, when you get on the inside, you find a great treasure of love and friendliness and spirituality.

But now we're not talking about the inside. 51 weeks a year, I talk about the inside. I talk about spiritual things and preach the gospel to you. So indulge me for a moment while I talk about the outside. We need to start working on the outside a little bit.

We need to be a church that has a facility that says in every way, We are growing and you are welcome here. You're welcome here. In the area of benevolence. Oh, boy. In the area of benevolence.

We could buy the land that's next to us here and we could build a home for senior Christians. Or we could have a facility for unwed mothers, you know, for, you know, girls, women who have wanting to have babies, but nowhere to live because they've been thrown out of their houses. Or how about a home for people who are dying with AIDS? You know, the church has missed the greatest opportunity in the 20th century to reflect Christ because we did not jump on the opportunity to minister to the people who died with AIDS. Oh, what a marvelous witness that would have been for Jesus Christ had we stepped forward and said, and put our money and resources into some sort of ministry, national ministry, that would have identified us as the people not afraid to go and take care of the lepers of our society, which are the people who have AIDS.

But instead, the homosexual community has put the money and the time and the effort to raise money to minister to themselves, and that's to our undying shame. But it's not too late to do those good things. We could do that. We could begin a food service and distribute meals every single day. Nobody hungry here in Choctaw?

No elderly people missing food? Nobody too sick to cook for themselves. We could begin support groups for the divorced and for the abused and for the addicted and for homosexuals and for those who are suffering in our church. Never mind, in our community, in our own church we have people who are suffering from the very things that I've talked about. We could do that.

We do do a lot of things here. That's true. But I want to tell you something. We're not in the heavyweight category of church work yet. We're not in that division.

As you can see, we're still a ways off from the weightier matters of ministry in the name of Jesus Christ. Or as a man named Cy Progress said, and he's a member of Exodus International, that's a group that helps ex homosexuals, ministers to them. He said, if your church is equipped to minister to the needs of your society, then you will be relevant to your society. But if you are not equipped and busy ministering to the real needs of your society, it doesn't matter what you say, you will be considered irrelevant by your society. We are relevant to each other.

Yes. That's not the issue. The issue is how relevant are we to this community. That's the issue. They don't care if we use an organ or not.

We do. They don't. And then, of course, in worship, the final category, our most successful. I'm not saying that tongue in cheek. It is our most successful.

Attendance has been increasing at worship in a steady way over the years. And we're improving our ability to organize a meaningful worship service. But if we wanted to, however, we could be realizing even greater results in this area of the church. We could televise our worship services. We could duplicate last Sunday's 412 figure every single week.

Some people say, Yeah. But look at all the visitors. Well, I get to see the cards, brothers and sisters. There aren't that many visitors here. Not that many.

Mostly, there were the extra numbers where people who are members here just don't come regularly, except at Easter time or Christmas or, you know, something special like that kinda punch the card. Don't mean to be cruel, but that's the truth. We could all come. We could have, what are we, 250 to 300 people this morning? We could all be 250 to 300 on Wednesday nights.

How about that one? Or on Sunday nights. We could train another pulpit minister. And some of you are thinking that might not be a bad idea at this point. We could train another pulpit minister and send me out to do some kind of mission work.

Boy, how biblical would that be? Do you ever notice that in the New Testament, what they did is they kept the ones who were in training, you know, and so on. They kept them at home, and they sent the guys that had some experience on them, had a little bit of hair on their chin, you know, they sent them out to do the mission work, do the heavy lifting. In our brotherhood, we do the reverse. The little kids that just come out of school don't know nothing, we drop ship them into some foreign field somewhere, and the guys like me are the guys that stay home because the church would never think of actually underwriting someone my age with my financial needs to go somewhere else, to plant the church or to start a television ministry or to write a book or to do anything like that.

I don't know. We wanna keep our best stuff at home. That's why we don't have missionaries. That's why a lot of these young guys and girls go out there and come back burned out after 5 years. Of course, that's unbiblical.

In the New Testament, Paul spent 15 years in training before the elders of the church or before the prophets and the teachers laid hands on him and sent him out to start doing mission work. 15 years after his call, he went. That's a lot of training. We could build a new auditorium that would hold 500 people. You know, in 1991, our average attendance, I was back looking back through the bolt ons, was 216 people around this time.

And now, it's around 300. That just shows a steady growth. It won't be long until, you know, we're over we're reaching the 400 mark. We could build an auditorium, think ahead, be ready for that time. We could renovate our foyer to include a visitor center.

We could make budget and actually give more than what we need. There's a concept. You know, our bookkeeper, Steve Howes, tells me that we are now running on a zero balance. You know what a zero balance is? That means that every week, at the end of the week, we have absolutely no money in the bank.

So come Friday, the checking account says 0, and the only money that goes into the account is what's in here. And do you know why that is? Because we've spent our savings, and now we're going into our investment money, and we're transferring that into checking account. We're just using all that up because we don't realize that every time we don't make this budget, we've got to pay the bill somehow, so we go and we go into our savings account. Now visitors I know visitors say, Oh, man.

Visitors must be uncomfortable. Boy, this church is getting a tongue lashing. Why do I have to come at this Sunday? Hey. This is the truth.

You know, I said this this is a family. That's how it happens in a family. We just tell it like it is. We could match the words of our lips with the power of our pocketbooks, and we could make our worship the giving of ourselves rather than just the making of a lot of noise. Now, it's easy to get stirred up about the future and what we could be doing.

That's the easy part. The question is, what's it going to take to get us there? And as I survey the past and look ahead to the future that may hold these and other things, I believe that in order to obtain and achieve these things, we're gonna need the following. And I just give me 5 more minutes, and this painful exercise will be over. Here's what we need to get to where we want to go because I think we can agree that we all want the things I've just talked about.

First thing we need to have at every level is visionary leadership At every level. If we wanna get to where we're going, we need visionary leadership. Leaders who are able to see the things that I've just talked about and want these things. You know, Jesus says that it was enough for the disciples to be like their master or teacher. Matthew 10 verse 24.

The point is that disciples will rise only to the point of their leaders. If the leaders don't see the future, if the leaders don't know the direction, if the leaders themselves don't hunger and thirst for the kind of things that I've just mentioned, then those who follow will not see or want these things either. Leaders don't have to know how to start a benevolence program or actually build a building, but they've got to want it. And they have to be at the throne of grace praying for it each day. The purpose of leadership in the church is to maintain the purity of the doctrine, not maintain the status quo.

And that's a general idea in a lot of leadership, not only in the church, but in a lot of businesses too. Leaders begin to think that their job is to maintain the status quo. That's not the job of leadership. The value of leadership in the church is that it sees what's ahead and leads the congregation towards it. If we want the things that could be, then we need leadership that sees and desires and prays for and exhorts the church to reach for it in faith.

We need that. The second thing we need is we need a committed congregation. You know, the things that I mentioned are exciting, but they're difficult and impossible to obtain if only a little group is committed to getting them. Everyone who is committed needs to be entirely committed. Our problem here is that everyone wants the things that I've mentioned, but not everyone wants to make the commitment that goes with it.

We could do all the things that I've said if we were committed, but commitment requires a couple of things that we're not willing to do. For example, commitment requires that we prioritize. And our problem, I think, is that we can't make up our minds. Is it the flesh or is it the spirit? Is it the world or is it the kingdom?

We try to keep spiritual things on the lowest level without losing our souls. In Matthew 25, Jesus clearly says that the caring for others is the criteria by which we'll be judged. And in Matthew 28, he emphatically states that our number one priority is winning the world with the gospel. If you don't make these things the priorities, we're never gonna do what we could be doing. We'll only be giving lip service.

I think the reason we don't have the things now is because getting these things are just not a priority. It's just not that important. It might be important for the preacher, but not for everybody else. We need to stop fooling ourselves, And I mean that because we usually get what's important for us. We usually get it.

And if these things are not important for us, then we're not going to get them. You know, in our lives, I know many of you are strong and capable business people and, entrepreneurs and salespeople, you know, and so on and so forth. You're getting what you want at work, in your lives somehow. All I'm saying is if we don't get what we want in the church, it's simply because it's not that important to us because we usually get what's important to us. Another thing that we need to do is to be willing to pay the price.

Commitment requires us to pay the price for what we want to do. You know, preachers are the world's experts at hearing excuses because we hear so many. You know, why this isn't happening, and why I wasn't there, and why the church is the way it is. But the bottom line, I believe, is that we don't have what we could have because we're not willing to pay for it. Now I didn't say we can't pay for it because we can pay for a lot of other things that we have.

There's a lot of things that we buy and own and invest in, so we've got the ability to buy stuff, but we don't have the things that I've talked about because we just don't want to pay for those things. I think that what happens is we want God to give us extra money, so we can keep our time and our money and just give the extra money back to God. But the gospel is the story of God giving up what he had to save us, not what he had extra. The great things that we could do for God will require us to give up something in order to give it to God, and that's the point. Giving becomes a sacrifice only when we give up something that we have, not just the extra that we have.

The future is expensive. It requires more than just leftover time or extra money. It requires prime time and a generous portion of everything we own, and then some. You know, in the New Testament, Barnabas, it says he sold his land and he gave the money to the church for the work of the church. It doesn't say he sold his extra land, or the land he wasn't doing anything with, or the land he didn't want.

It says it's he sold the land that he had. He had a piece of property worth something to him, and he had a choice to keep it for himself and do what he wanted with it or to give it to god. He was willing to pay the price to move that thing along, and he paid it. A committed congregation that has its priorities straight. In other words, no excuses.

You know, we had a sign up here, moving on to maturity, pressing on to maturity. We took it down, you know, because we had it up there for a while, and so on. I said, I put up a sign. I think the next sign I'm gonna put up there is called no excuses. There's nothing in the Bible that says no excuses.

But I think the Bible is filled with admonitions that tell us, Stop making excuses. Just do the thing. Committed congregation has no excuses and is willing to pay the price in terms of time and money to transform what we could do into what we can do and what we will do. Well, today's lesson is like a seed, and it'll find hearts that are ready to accept it, ready to grow. The question is, will there be enough hearts to accept it that it will make a real difference in accomplishing the things that we could do?

I tell you this, time will tell, and we're all going to know if this sermon has really found its mark because it'll be evident in what gets done and what remains undone in each of our lives, What we could be doing and what we end up doing will be a witness for or against us in the days and in the months to come. I hope that you have ears to hear. This is one of those sermons. You know, it's not a feel good sermon this morning. This is one of those that says pay attention.

Pay attention. I hope that you have ears to hear and eyes to see what we could be doing today and in the future. Certainly, one thing you could be doing right now is becoming a Christian if you're not already 1 or be restored to Christ if you've fallen away. That costs no money, but it will cost you a total commitment to your Lord Jesus Christ. If that's something that you could be doing and need to be doing, we encourage you to come forward now as we stand and as we sing.