Missional calling

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Good morning everyone, after we have been sitting and contemplating the meaning of gathering at the table, it's just heavy on my heart that the mission of Jesus was passed on to his believers, to his disciples, then on to us as well. And it's with that heavy heart, so to speak, and that responsibility that we talk about missions month, and we're starting off with concentric circles, we're starting off with the understanding that when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, when poop, like that, it spread out. And as we read Acts 1.8, and we're going to look at that for the whole of the month, we're going to explore that means for us individually, as a group, and as a church family, and as a faith group, I suppose, across the wider area of Australia and across the world. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you Lord for, Lord, just the opportunity we have, Father, just to sense your presence, Father, just by taking those few moments just now to contemplate your journey to the cross and what that meant, for the freedom of mankind to be raised again in their sins, washed white as snow, and Father, we ask today, as we open your word, as we Lord, study it, as we meditate on it, Lord, you impress upon our hearts the significance what you've called us to be, Lord, your believers, your followers, or if for those who are watching at home, or those who are connecting in other ways, we pray, Lord, just bless them as well, connect with them, Father, we ask. They might just know your message today. And we just give you thanks and praise for who you are. And as always, the words I speak, Lord, I pray your words, not mine, in your name, amen. One of the things, one of the challenges, I suppose, we have about thinking about tradition of missions month is that it seems to be that it's something that the Queensland Baptist have put together. So May is mission month, and June is prayer month. That's coming up. We've got some exciting stuff happening there. But for us today, it's a reflection and going in. So I'll be speaking about your Jerusalem today. So I'll be speaking about what it means to be in your Jerusalem. Then as we go through, we'll be looking at Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. So over the four weeks, we're going to look at those different impacts we have. And so I'm just wondering how excited you are about that. Yeah, OK, thanks. And back to praying again, I suppose. Back to praying again. You would have been given a little piece of paper as you've come in. My asking for you is to keep that handy. I'm going to ask you to pray and think about and it's God lays upon your heart three people to pray for and with during the month of May that they may come to know Jesus. We might have a quality of life with Jesus or they might be reconciled with Jesus so that they can walk fully with Him. That's the challenge. We'll talk about that a little bit later if that doesn't fall off the pulpit as I swing my hands around and I speak. So let's have a look at this passage of Scripture before we go any further. In Acts 1.8, it says these words. But you'll receive the power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you'll be my witness in Jerusalem, in all of Judea, and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. That's the passage. The mission's team is using this month to focus on their activities and so it's a passage we're going to do as a church in supporting that and see what God says to that. It's actually an endorsement of the mission that was set by Jesus when he spoke in the Great Commission. Going to the world to make disciples. Our own church mission statement is committed to growing in Christ and going for Christ, committed to going for Christ. So we're on a mission already. And sometimes we think, well, that's somebody else's role. And one of the great things about looking at our Jerusalem, my Jerusalem and your Jerusalem, will be what happens in your area of the woods, what happens around you that God has uniquely shaped you for. When Jesus came to him, he said, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me and therefore go and make the disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you and surely I'm with you always to the end of the age. Let me step into our mission area, into your Jerusalem, into the place that God has called you to. Sometimes you do it as an organisation. So we might do it as a church. We might do it as a youth group leader. We might do it as a Sunday school teacher. We might do it as someone on the barbecue trailer. We might do it as someone in the coffee cart. All those are part of the design that God has for us as a church family, I believe. And coming into this church family, one of the things I prayed and sought, I said, Lord, what is their heart permission? What is the heart for reaching the loss I found out? The church has been doing the soul shift for quite some time. And Edmund Chan is coming in a few months time to do some specific teaching on that and taking us a little bit further in that journey. That excites me because it means that we all get the opportunity to say, Lord, how can you use me? What is my Jerusalem? What is the part you've called me to? I am so thankful that every person I've met this morning has had the grace not to point out to me how tight fitting my football jersey is. I've seen people avert their eyes, some in horror. This jersey was presented to me as I left Gatton. It's the Gatton Hawks Rugby League jersey. And it was a symbol, I suppose, of them saying thank you for being involved in our community. For me, my Jerusalem was the football club out there. I'm praying about my Jerusalem here to see what God leaves me. It might not be a football club. I pray it's not an AFL club. But I pray it might be a rugby league club, Lord, please. But one of the great things about it, I said, I'm gonna wear this when I preach. And a couple of the guys said, good luck with that, Pastor Doug. They call me Chappy Doug as well, plus Pastor Flagon and a few other euphemisms that you get used to out there. But the church actually is involved in the club. And on their jerseys, they wear the church logo from Gatton. So Gatton Baptist Church, they wear that on the field. That was my Jerusalem. That was where God had me preaching and administering and working beside people. Now he has a new Jerusalem. The question I have is, what is your Jerusalem? How was God saying to you about that? So where is your Jerusalem? Well, the first thing we want to know is there's a map. Excuse my back for a moment. Yeah, it doesn't look too bad from here. Probably looks dodgy everywhere else. But we're in the middle of that crossroads in the section there. And so that's the start of where things are for us. So we say, yep, I'm a member, or I participate or I go to Gatton. Sorry, I'm gonna say this for a while now. Kabbaltia Baptist Church. Many, many years ago in the early 2000s, I did a evangelism course here in church. I was on long service leave from teaching. And part of that preparation was several things we had to do, which I'm gonna get to a bit later. But one of the things they had us to do was door knock around the town and just with a little questionnaire. Say, hi, how are you going? What's some of the things happening in your world? How can we help you today? Do you know where the church is? And then one lady who lives five doors down from here said, what church? And I said, the Baptist Church. Gee, where is there a church up there? Five doors down. I've been going to this church for a long time. Then I thought, oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed. Another guy said, well, the one looks like a pizza hut. And I said, that's the one. He was eight doors down. Then one of you, before we had the big sign out the front, I can't remember now, but it was just interesting that when you're in your Jerusalem, we think, oh yeah, we know where it is and what's going on. But man, people need to know about Jesus. They need to know where we meet and what we're on about. They need to know what you're on about. What is it really important to you? You see, when we go into where we are, we have things like our neighborhood, our workplace, our social interactions, our relationships we have with family and friends. There's a distinctive that's called the coal face. And that is a place where you get dirty. And if you look up coal face on any sort of app by any sort of image, it has a person as black faced because they're right up against the hard work. Mark Green wrote a book called The Frontline. It's called Frufulness on the Frontline. And in his book, he talks about what it means to be, just look at the opportunities around you. You're in the front line of ministry. You're there to the start of, that's your Jerusalem. We know that Edmund Chan talks about the marketplace. And he goes into a chapter about that, about talking about what it means to be in the marketplace. He gives all these wonderful examples about how Jesus worked in a marketplace. And I've got them up there on the screen. In public appearances of 132, 122 of those were in the marketplace that Jesus was working. In the parables, when you talked about those, 45 out of 52 were about the marketplace. That's the Jerusalem. That's where it is. It's that nitty gritty that's down the work where people see you at your honest, I suppose, is the word I'm looking for. In Acts, it's an invioling counter. They talk about 39 out of 40 were in a marketplace. So, Jerusalem is your marketplace. It's another way of saying it. And it's a challenge for us, isn't it? They say, well, what's that mean for me? How is that going to impact my life? Ray Bond passed the Doug because I'm still not impressed yet. One of the things I really do struggle with in different situations is where lighting is in the church. I like to make eye contact with people and really like burn into their souls. But when the lights are like this, all I can see is the first three or four rows. And so, oh, I can see, oh, is that Bruce? Oh, Bruce, there's a halo on you, Brucey. Is that intentional? The light actually right on top of you and Helen there. And so, if I look a bit bewildered sometime, please forgive me. But folks, any divine encounter is important to God. Any divine encounter that you have. In your Jerusalem, when you come across people of your workplace, you come across people who you get served by or you serve, it's a divine encounter. And that's your Jerusalem. That's the first place you start off with. Jesus and the Samaritan woman we read about at the well in John 4, 4-42. We know that story. Who's heard that sermon? I heard that, yeah, Bible verse, now back to the front. A couple of things when I was researching this that really astounded me and really impressed upon me, even how I integrated into the community in Gatton for all those years, into the football club in particular, was that Jesus did a couple of things when he went through this situation. And if we read into it, it's just this great little lesson on how we can be more effective in our Jerusalem, more effective in our marketplace. The first one is that he broke a social taboo. In this case, he changed the status of women. Now, what is a social taboo? It's something that the people frown upon. It's really interesting, walking around our state with our dog and we run into people and they sort of not literally run into them, just sort of hello and you encounter them. And when we're talking to people getting to know our neighbourhood, it's really interesting to see the look on people's face. They say, oh, you've moved to the area because they naturally assume by my white hair that I'm retired. And I said, no, I'm actually, we're job boarders here. And we start talking to them and say, what do you do? I'm a pastor. Well, is that the time? I've got to go. Not if they go. So breaking down the social taboo is really interesting because people have a thinking about what it means to be involved in church life. And sometimes we recall a little bit because we're not quite sure whether or not we want to put it out there too early in the conversation in case we cut them off. Jesus broke that social taboo. He went to a place, he talked to a woman that you shouldn't have been speaking to. He talked to a woman, which he shouldn't have been speaking to, but he talked to a woman of a certain ethnic group that he shouldn't have been speaking to. He talked to a woman who was an ethnic group in the middle of the day. That's how he breaks the taboo. The question I have for you today and the challenge I have is, is there a taboo that guides later on your heart that you need to break? Is there a way of raising something in a question or in a conversation with somebody you know who's not a believer, who's on the edge of finding out what the love of Jesus is all about, even inquiring, that's going to break through that social barrier? One of the challenges for me being involved in the football club ministry, and please forgive me, I'll talk a lot about this because it's recent memory, is that my dad was an alcoholic and so when I got to the age when I became a Christian, God said, quite clearly, no more drinking for you, Doug. I used to give a little bit of a bendy for that, but praise God, he saved me from that. I believe in my heart of hearts that alcoholics are made. They're born that way. So God cut that off for me. So in God's humour and wisdom, one of the places I served in Gatton was in the Canbar. Not serving alcohol, but actually doing crowd control in the Canbar. When you're walking through a Canbar at a football club, in a country football club, there'll be probably 150 people squeezed in there, probably no bigger than these three seats, four seats deep. It's a seething mass of humanity and the alcohol is just running everywhere. The smell of it gets in your clothes, it gets on your body, they spill it on you, all sorts of things. But the interesting thing is I've never been tempted to have a drink or even down that. I've been offered lots. So for me, the taboo to break, for myself personally, was something from my past. What is God saying to you that you need to break so you can be wholly available for him? Because I've got to say, no, no, I've got a history of alcohol, I don't trust you, God. That's not what he's saying. He's saying in your Jerusalem, you've got to break through that barrier and embrace it. Can I say too that swearing, which is prolific in that atmosphere, is another one that God had dealt with me so severely in my younger days. And so the language I use is very soft language. So what is the taboo God's laid on your heart? Because he's teaching you all the time, he's challenging you all the time. God is not static. He doesn't say, good, you're a Christian now, and that's OK, you can go on with your life. He wants you to keep growing in him and keep chipping away at those parts of your life. So let me have our Jerusalem where we are as part of our understanding of Acts 1.8, that makes more of a profound understanding for us. He also sets aside all the bitterness of past history. So there was all the things that happen between the Samaritans and their Jews goes way back centuries and centuries. Jesus broke through that barrier and he came. It's almost as the same as if I went up to someone who supported New South Wales in state of origin time and said, Jesus loves you despite of your choices. Have I crossed the line? Jesus still loves you. He set aside the bitterness because that was going to inhibit what the kingdom of heaven could do in that situation. He humbled himself and this is a tough one for us as Christians. People ask you, can they help you? We always think we're the helpers. We always think we can offer food vouchers, we can go and see people, we can go and support you in this. But every now and then we have this wonderful encounter where someone will say, can I help you? And sometimes in Jesus' understanding here when he was talking to the woman, he asked her for water. He wanted to humble himself and her presence and say, could you get the water for me? According to tradition, the water gathering device, if I can use that, the receptacle was leather and it was like a leather pouch that had four sticks across it to hold it open. And no well actually had a bucket in it like the Westerns in American Westerns where you wind the bucket down. So you carried your own rolled up flat pack, I suppose, bucket, leather bucket. He didn't take it with him. He could have done, but he didn't because he wanted to interact with this woman. He wanted to say to her, can you help me? Can I just say from personal experience that all the things that we do in life, when someone who does not understand Jesus but sees you in their life every day, when they offer you help, that gives them a certain amount of just that, just being validated. That in their heart of hearts and their minds, they say, I can actually owe more worth to this person. So when was the last time you asked someone to help you? Or if they offered help, you said, I know it's cool, I've got it. The challenge, isn't it? It's a challenge because we're so used to doing ourselves. Let people help you. Jesus gives us a great example. Now, speaking of help, I'm putting a shed up in my backyard and then I've got to pull the old shed down. So if anyone wants to be, you know, I am doing that, but that's just illustration purpose. I'm not taking names till later on. One of the things he didn't do, he didn't mask why he was there because right at the end of the conversation, towards the end of that first part of the conversation with this lady, he presented the surprise that the gift of God is a man. It's not a book, it's not a religion, it's not a philosophy. People in the world, the people in our mission field, the people in your Jerusalem are surprised when you say Jesus is a man. Sitting with a young gentleman a few years ago, the phone call came to me while I was in an office talking to another guy in town in Gatton and I could hear the wind in the phone. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm out under a bridge near Oki. He said, life is too hard for you, I'm going to take my life. So I'm talking to him on the phone while trying to mention the other people. Ring the police for me. As I was talking to him, I heard all this rattle and clatter and the phone went dead. So I got on the phone and rang the police and said, look, this is what's happened. About half an hour of praying and praying and praying the whole time, half an hour later, this young man rings me back. And I said, what happened? He said, oh, I said the eski tipped over and the rope snapped. And I landed on the ground and I was out cold for 10 minutes. So I met this young man at the picnic point. I said, we need to meet and talk. It took someone with me, it was a big unit who knew a fair bit about this stuff as well. And we had sat and chatted and the police showed up. And the police said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm the chaplain of the football club and this is one of our players. I said, he's had a rough time. And I said, he needs to know that, you know, we care about him and we're here to support him. The police had this wonderful reaction. They said, good, he's yours, see ya. And they took off. So we took him along to the mental health unit in Toomba. The whole time the discussion in the car was his relationship with God and how God had let him down. I kept saying to him, you got to think of it in this terms. Think of it in the personal terms, what has Jesus done for you? Fast forward seven years later, and I got to speak at this young man's funeral. Not because he'd taken his own life because the Lord had taken him home at 26 years of age, aneurysm burst in his head. And his family asked me to come and speak. An indigenous family. Heaps of people at Church of Christ in Toomba and Hume Street. And I got to share the story of young Ashley. And we could celebrate together, he was a child of God because of the things that God had done in his life. The people, not just me. I say all these things out of humility, believe me. Not me, it's God. The things that happen in people's lives. You see, when we're looking at our Jerusalem, we need to understand quite clearly, we are on task all the time. Be ready. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit minute. It takes a wonderful opportunity to say Jesus isn't a book. He isn't a person as in a religion, but he's actually a relationship. And that's how our understanding comes. See, we have roles. God's role and your role or my role. The first thing we need to understand that God sets the situation. So your Jerusalem, you're in, God puts you there for a purpose. Whether it's fitting tires like I used to do, back in the day at Caboolture Tire Shop when I first became a Christian, first got married. I'll tell you the story one day, how they used to baptize me in the tube testing tank and all sorts of things. God puts you in the situation. The Holy Spirit prompts people. You can say what you want, but I'm gonna be very emphatic about this, that we can be present in someone's life. God's put us there. The Holy Spirit is the one who's working that person's life. The moment you take the reins and try and make them become a believer, or try and get them to church, you're saying, God, I've got this, I don't need you. Please allow Holy Spirit to work. That should be a prayer of prayers. Holy Spirit, please give me the words to say. You want me to say, Holy Spirit, please work in this person's life. That's what you're writing those names down in those sheets. That's the sheet I've given you. It's about embracing God that way. Not only that, as God set the situation, the Holy Spirit prompts, His word transforms. We can have all the cliches in the world we want, but it's His word that transforms. Reading from God's word. And someone says, how do I become a Christian? Well, it says in the Bible, you confess to your heart that Jesus, Lord, wrapped Him from the dead, and you believe in that, you will be saved. That's straight from God's word. That's not out of a pamphlet someone printed years ago. That's eternal word. You may come across this symbol every now and then. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. It's just humbling to think about this. When I first came across this, again, it was this seminar I did 30 years ago, but it still resonates with me, that we're on this sort of understanding that we have a cultivation, a sowing, and we have a harvesting scenario. So the cultivating is the big one. The cultivating is 60% of what happens. That's the discussion, that's the love you show, but someone's a kind word, indeed. That is interacting in their life. That is getting up late, getting it going about early. All those things for people that you do in your Jerusalem, in the place where God puts you. And then we have the sowing, and that's about 31%. And 39% is that the deeper stuff that happens, it's about how we change from, if someone speaks to the heart, we speak to the mind, that's where we get to share the gospel, that's where we get to have those meaningful, deep conversations, and still someone might not come to know Christ. And then we have the harvest. Has anyone done the maths? Harrison, what are we up to? 1% left. 1% is the harvest. See, in your Jerusalem, you might have one or more of those little parts of that triangle up there, you might not have them all. You might be saying, I never get to bring someone to Jesus, that doesn't matter. Someone else, you can plant and water and do everything you need, and someone will come along one day and say, hey, I need to tell you about, have you heard about Jesus? I have, this other guy's been annoying me about him, but you know what? I really want to know what he's about. My dad has gone to be with the Lord now, rejected God for 64 years of his life. When he was in Redcliffe Hospital, my brother and I, both believers, we up there and we share with Dad. And he's in bad stage of cancer, and he's gonna die. He was in palliative care. And one day we went up to him, he said, I'm gonna go build the Lord. I went, really? I said, did Cameron talk to you? He said, no, one of Cameron's mates, did you two annoyed me so much? I had to ask this guy what it was all about. He's got to do the harvesting. Thank you, Jesus. Three weeks later, he was gone. He was like the thief on the cross. He waited as long as he could. But that just says to me that, folks, that when we are engaged in our Jerusalem, our part of the Great Commission, our part of what we're talking about at Acts 1A, is that for us, we say, Lord, what is my role here? Don't tell God what your role is. I've had people, oh no, I could never do that. Don't ever do that. Ask the Lord, what is my role? It may be just cold of aim. It's just sharing, just being nice, offering a great work environment. It may be something a bit more where you get to share the word. Or it might be that time where you're just prompted by the Spirit to say, just ask Him. And turning you say, do you want to know Jesus? Do you want to be born again? Do you want to become a Christian? Oh, yes, please. You go, gee, this is easy. This evangelism thing. Someone's already done the work for you. So we've got God's role, and now we've got my role. Your role in your Jerusalem. The Scriptures tell us that, first of all, we need to be reconciled with God. First and foremost, you cannot go unprepared into a football game. If you think you don't need to do pre-season training by the time you get halfway through the season, you're busted, you're bruised, and you don't feel like it's not fun anymore. Famous football coach said that fatigue makes cowards of us all. Fatigue makes cowards all, so we've got to be prepared. So we need to have a right heart with God. In 2 Corinthians 5.18, it says, all this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. The ministry of reconciliation, because he did for us first. Get your heart right with God. If it's a prayer just before you walk into a situation, when I was going to football, I used to go to church out there because the football club was about 2K from the church, and Sunday afternoon, I'd make the last two or three, last two games. It's all good. And I'd go and do my thing down there. But I'd pray from the church down there, Lord, help me to be useful today. Lord, help me to know what to do, and help me to know what to say. And sometimes I'd go through a whole Sunday afternoon and not say a thing about God. But I prayed the prayer. I said, Lord, you need to show me. If it doesn't come up, I'm not going to force it. Because a couple of times I have done, it's gone, yuck. So we know our role. We know we need to be reconciled with God in our heart first. Get your heart right with God. If you need to get rid of sin in your life and get yourself right, we're not doing this thing with Graham a couple of years ago. One of the things we did was evangelism, of course. So we have the notepad, and I'm ready to take notes about how to win people to Jesus. You know what we did for the first two days? We looked at ourselves and how filthy we were and how much we needed to be cleaned up before God and get our hearts right before we had the authority to go and speak. So be reconciled. We spent time praying. First of all, writing and confessing and then talking to each other and praying for each other. And then we went out and did our thing. But if we're doing, we're reconciled with God all the time. We're walking close with Him. Then what happens is that we have this great joy that we can say, okay, now I can speak because I know the words aren't going to be mine. They're going to be His. I won't be a person who tried. The next one is to be available. Luke tells us in Luke 10.2, Jesus said, the harvest is plentiful. But the workers are few. Just ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out the workers into the harvest. I've heard this one spoken from missionaries overseas all the time. They stand up and they go, well, this is a passage from Scripture. Why aren't you in the fields and make people feel compelled to come and say, I need to go to the mission field? But the field, the harvest is out there. When I went to this church as a young man, we had a board across the doorway, which I think is being taken down because we need the exit sign there. But he used to have committed to growing in Christ to committing to going in Christ. And we'd walk under that sign as we walked out. If that's the mission of this church, the mission statement of this church, then that's the mission statement of our heart. Do you agree or not agree? Do I have an amen? Okay, that was interesting. I'm joking. Next one is to be authentic. To be who you are without airs and graces. Not to put on the false front, but to be a person humbly before God. Just as Jesus was, he was who he was with the woman at the well. Proverbs 27.19 says to us, a water reflects the face, so one's face reflects the heart. People know if you're not being rigid, then I think you die. They know if you're going to be a person who changes things around and be inconsistent, they know it. They'd just be authentic with them. One of the great things about being involved in a community like Gatton is everyone knows who you are pretty well straight away. I couldn't hide. The secretary of the church had organised a photo shoot in inverted commons with a local paper. So I got there, we started on Sunday. I was interviewed, Shari and I were interviewed Tuesday and by Thursday the local paper was out. Everyone in town, because the local paper was read like the Bible out there, and so everyone in town knew who I was. That was the pastor who liked football, and that was it. The secret was out and it was all over and over from there. And so you've got to be authentic. Be prepared to share. 1 Peter 3.15, it says these words. But in your hearts, revere God Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. So if you're a person who's been asked to be a cultivator, you just cultivate the ground. Share Jesus every now and then. If your person is asked to be a sewer, then you get to share a little bit more about faith and about your faith and about what Jesus means to you, because nothing's more false than putting somebody else. The question I got asked mostly is what does Jesus mean to you or who was God to you or why is there so many religions? Great curly ones, but the head starts to click around and the cogs start going. Be prepared to share. Always have an answer. Be faithful. The first Thessalonians, rejoice always, pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances for this is God's will for those in Christ Jesus. Wow. So you've got God's role and you've got your role, the things you need to get in your head, the things you need to get in your heart, the way you relate to Jesus, because in your Jerusalem, you're the one that God's using. You're the one that God's guiding through discussions. You're the one that's being a witness, even though you don't even realise it, but you're a witness. You've only heard of Rhys Fadden. Rhys Fadden is a fellow who loves to be on the edge of ministry. He goes to the place with drugs, and needle rooms, and things like that. He works out of several different churches over a period of years. And Rhys spoke at Bible College when I was there. I remember he was there that time, David, when he spoke. And he said, what you need to do is know the currency of what people are dealing with, what they value. And he related a story where he pulled up on his motorbike, his Harley, and he bumped into another Harley of a biker. I should say bikey. You know, the full tats, the big zeezy top beard and mustache, bandanna on the head, doesn't smile. He walked in, and someone said, this guy's knocked over your bike. And so what did Rhys do? He looked around the bar as soon as he did an assessment and bought the guy a rum and Coke. All was forgiven. Now, he said and said, the pastor should go around buying rum and Coke for people. So I sort of disappoint you there, fellas. But, all ladies, but he knew the currency, the situation God revealed to him. So what's the currency? The currency in the football club where I was involved in my Jerusalem was service, acts of service. Show up, every training session, help put out the cones. Show up on Sundays and Saturdays. Do stuff around the field. Just be there constantly. And God opens doors, He opens conversations because people see you there, see you haven't got any ears and graces. Just going in there, being who you are. Know your currency. Ask God to reveal the currency, the situation. In your possession, you have this little piece of paper. Is my marketplace and my neighbourhood is my Jerusalem. And on it, I will written down, who matters to God and His kingdom. That's the prayer we're going to pray now. And then there's, I'm asking for three, you may have more. You may need to get more sheets of paper, take out a full scout page. You may need to go to the computer on your phone and write down names. But the end of it is, my commitment is to pray for them, or these people above, and with them. Pray and offer to pray with them. Every now and then God opens the door and says, pray with them, they just offer. Say, can you pray for me? Or can I pray for you? With grace and truth. Believing God brings divine encounters and transformation, all for His glory. God has set you in your Jerusalem. I'm not going to collect these pieces of paper up. I'm not going to say, hey, look, I'm going to mark you and give you a grade. I just want to encourage you and challenge you to take this as something that God has said to you today. These laid people on your heart continue to pray for, some of you are already doing this, I know, because I've spoken to a lot of people. I just ask you to be involved in this. For the month of May, pray without ceasing. Pray with a heart that says, Lord, we want to grow your kingdom because we know people are lost and they need you. Worship teams are going to come up and just going to close and close in prayer. So just in closing up, just to get it all in one spot, my Jerusalem and your Jerusalem is anywhere God places you. It's whatever He gives, whatever He, it's whatever, sorry, wherever He gives me divine encounters. So it's your marketplace, it's where He gives you divine encounter. Somewhere you get discussed with people about anything in life, but it's something that's worthwhile. It's where lives are transformed. You mark a place, sorry, your Jerusalem requires you or me to be open to His leading. And ultimately, and at the end of it all, brings glory to God. The only reason this building exists is not because of the forefathers who set up camp on Moorrafield Road. It's because God planted the church there for the ministry in Cabulcha and Moorrafield. And so our Jerusalem starts out here. The 200 people odd sitting in, odd 200 people, you're not odd, you're awesome. 200 people in front of me, you're just your Jerusalem, your workplace, wherever it is. Let's pray. Father, we thank you Lord that if you go into mission month, Lord you speak to our hearts and minds about what it means to be, a person who has a relationship with you. Father, we pray also Lord for the opportunity you give us to just be part of our community. Well, whether it's the neighbours or whether it's the people in the local shop or in the shopping centre, Father, we thank you that you called us into our Jerusalem. And Father, for those folk who are here today who want to know what this is about, why are we so intent on this? Father, I pray and continue to speak to their hearts that Lord you won't give them rest until they know what it means to be reconciled with you. Father, we know that in this world there are lots of people who have weird answers to things, but your truth is full of grace and mercy. And Father, we pray as we go on this week. Lord, into this month, Lord, into the rest of this year help us to really, Father, connect with you and understand what our Jerusalem is. Father, we're looking forward to hearing from the other pastors as the month goes on. Lord, to see what revelations you bring and the glory of your kingdom, Lord, and the good news of Jesus Christ, Lord and Saviour. We commit these things to you in your name, Amen.