The Church: Outreach and sharing the gospel

Hey there, and welcome to our Sardis Fellowship sermon podcast. My name is Tim Voth, and I'm the community life pastor here at Sardis Fellowship. To find info on our speaker and series, please check the podcast description. Thanks for listening and enjoy. Alright, awesome, it is great worshiping with all of you here. Let's give it up one more time for a youth band. It is so awesome to see the youth leading and participating in our worship in this way, and so it is good. It's good to be here. It's good to be part of the church, and I don't know if you ever stop and reflect on how it is that you got here. How did you get here? Not like did you drive or did you walk, or not how did you get to the church building, but how did you become a part of the church if you are in Christ? How did that happen? And my guess is probably that somebody reached out to you along the way, along your journey, probably somebody or a few people reached out to you in order to draw you to Jesus. And so if I go far enough back in my family lineage, I go to my grandparents, and they lived in Chihuahua, Mexico. So they grew up in Mexico, they lived in a little Mennonite settlement there, and so did my parents. And this settlement, it was kind of a very strict legalistic settlement. It was, there was no gospel, there was no grace, it was a lot of rules, a lot of laws, and you didn't know if you were saved or not, you just kind of hoped you were a good enough person. So that was the feel of their little settlement, until missionaries from Canada went to Mexico. And so they went to this little town of Chihuahua, Mexico, I know it's a funny name, right? Chihuahua. I don't know if that's where they breed Chihuahuas, I don't know what happens there, but they went to Chihuahua, Mexico, and these missionaries, they stayed at my grandparents' house. My grandparents actually hosted them, that wasn't a very popular thing to do, but they didn't care. They kept the missionaries at their house, and the missionaries preached the gospel to my grandparents. And there was a living faith in that home suddenly. They preached the gospel of what we've been talking about and singing about, that Jesus came into this world, and that we can know him in a personal loving relationship. We can be assured that he forgives us and cares about us, and so they preached that. And then when my parents, or when my grandparents, no, my parents moved to Canada right before I was born, they also brought that living faith. So missionaries reached out. And so now you know that I'm kind of, my culture is kind of Mexican, Mennonite, and Canadian all at once, and you'll get to taste that later, because I'm going to try to combine those three cultures in the international potluck. I'm going to bring a dish, it's going to be wild bacon, maple syrup, enchiladas, all in one. It's going to be amazing. You should come try it. No, it's, I'm not going to do that to you. But then, yeah, my parents had a living faith, and so somebody, missionaries reached out to them, but then in my own personal story, I had friends and family members reach out to me. Help me get drawn to know who Jesus is. And so all throughout my story, there has been people reaching out. There has been outreach. That is what we're talking about this morning. And we might wonder why, why do Christians care so much to reach out? Why do they not just stay in their little bubbles and stay ingrown? Why do they actually reach out? Why do missionaries fly around the world? Why do friends reach across the room or reach over barriers and try to reach people? Why does that happen? Why do Christians do outreach? Well, we can trace it all the way back throughout history to the apostles and then before that to Jesus himself. Jesus himself did outreach. Jesus was actually God reaching out to our world. Jesus was God incarnate, reaching out to the world, not staying in glory, not staying on his throne, but actually coming to our earth, incarnating himself, accommodating himself to that culture. Why? To seek and to save the lost. To reach out to a world that was hurting and dying and broken and to actually save the world. And so Jesus practiced outreach. He was the first one who did outreach. And when we come to know him, when we're saved, we kind of have that same DNA in us, that same discipleship DNA lives in us, and we too do outreach. And so you might go, no, no, no, I don't do outreach. I'm not, you know, I might be a believer, but I don't have the gift of evangelism. I'm not extroverted. I am not, you know, good at conversations. I'm not eloquent. I can't, I can't, you know, have arguments to prove God's existence. I can't get in debates. I don't, I don't do outreach. And so you might disqualify yourself, but I think sometimes our disqualifications for outreach come because we might misunderstand what outreach is. We might picture the only way to do outreach is to fly around the world, or you might even have some different connotations. You might think outreach is holding up a sign at a street corner and shouting. You might picture outreach as having a really heated argument with somebody who's not a believer and trying to convince them of something. I would say that except for flying around the world and doing missions work, none of those are necessarily a good picture of what outreach is. And so I think we need to look to Jesus for how to do outreach. We need to look to our Savior, Lord and Savior, Jesus, to actually understand how to do outreach. And so that's what we're going to be doing this morning. So in order to do outreach, we need to learn from Jesus, but we also need to have some basic farming principles. Okay, a bit of a left turn. So we're all, many of us are Chilawackians, right? Come on, Chilawack, born and raised in Chilawack, anyone else? Let's go. Okay, so we should have some farming knowledge here. For all you farmers out here, I'm sorry, I might butcher it, but this is my simple understanding of farming. So we're going to do a little experiment here. Okay, this is a field. Can you harvest this field? No. Good. We're on the right track. Okay. What is like the first step you'd need to do to harvest this field? Plow it. Yes. You could also use the word cultivate. So we're on the right track. Okay. You've plowed this field. Now what? Can you harvest this field? No. Yes. We're doing great. This is amazing. Okay. All right. We can all be farmers. Okay. So what would you have to do next? Plant seeds, water, yes. All that stuff. We're doing great. The arts family is proud of me. Okay. So can you harvest this field? Maybe. Yes. I'm going to say yes. I just Googled, you know, harvestable field, so that's my working knowledge. So it's corn, I think, but yes, you can harvest that field. So why am I talking about harvesting? Well, good job, by the way, you all did great. So harvesting is an analogy that's used all throughout Scripture for bringing people into the fold of God, bringing people into the love of God, and it's not necessarily a negative image. Like we have the negative image in our culture of the guy with the sickle. You know, maybe you've seen a lot of that this weekend, but it's actually a positive image in the Bible. A guy who's actually harvesting is someone who's drawing people into the love and into the fold of God, into the kingdom of God. And so we want to learn how to outreach and do harvesting. So that's what we're going to be looking at. And there's a principle built in here, which is we just said it, cultivate, plant and reap. What you might say, we're going to learn how to do spiritual CPR. Okay. So I didn't come up with that. I'm borrowing from David Lee, our pastor, Meredith here. He used to run a seminar that he called spiritual CPR. So I'm borrowing that from him, but I think it's a good principle. And I think if we look at this principle, and if you look at how Jesus, I believed, did this, then I think that we can actually be encouraged in outreach and not just disqualify ourselves, but go, you know what, I think I can do that. And hopefully we can be inspired to actually be people who reach out. And so we're going to be talking about this. And in order to do that, we're going to look at one story of Jesus that is found in John chapter four. And so we're just going to jump right there. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. It's also going to be up on the screen, or if you use an app, maybe use you version or some other Bible app. You can pull that up. I'm going to be reading from the NIV version here. And we're just going to jump right into the story. So John chapter four says this. Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was going and gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. Although in fact, it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. So he's going from southern Israel up to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son, Joseph. Jacob's well was there. And Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Okay, so we'll pause there. Also for context, there are a lot of barriers here in this relationship that is taking place. Between Samaria and Judea, there are a lot of cultural boundaries. If you look at Israel's history between Judea and Samaria, there are a lot of theological issues. There are a lot of racial divides. There are a lot of cultural divides. There are a lot of divides that are separating Samaria and Judea. But Jesus goes into Samaria and he tracks down this woman and he begins to have a conversation with her. He begins to actually push through all these barriers, push through all these boundaries that the culture at that time was saying, no, no, you can't associate with that type of person. You can't do that. And so it says in the text, for Jews do not associate with Samaritans. It's really a taboo thing what Jesus was doing, crossing cultural boundaries and doing things that in other people's minds he shouldn't be doing. And so this actually characterizes almost all of Jesus' ministry. He's working on cultivating the ground, building relationship with people. And he does this, it says in other Gospels, by eating with people. So Mark 2, 16 to 17 says, "When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?'" And on hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners." So you can see Jesus' whole heart, his whole attitude is, I'm not just going to stay comfortable, I'm not just going to stay cozy and hang out with my own people that I'm comfortable with and everyone says I'm allowed to hang out with. I'm going to go across cultural barriers, I'm going to talk to the people that I'm not allowed to talk to. It was even strange in that context for a man to talk to a woman the way that he was. And so he's crossing all sorts of barriers to talk to this one woman. And so who is this woman? She's a Samaritan. I think it's pretty clear that she has her own barriers, right? I mean, she says, "Why are you talking to me? What are you doing? You're breaking the customs. What are you doing?" So she's very standoffish, right? You can kind of tell that in the text. And if Jesus had just gone in there and just said, "I'm the Lord, believe in me," I think she would have gone, "No, thank you, you know, not right now, go away please." But he doesn't do that. He doesn't just barge in and start telling the truth. What he does is he starts by cultivating a relationship. He starts cultivating the ground. He starts building a relationship because he cares. That's why he came into the world, the verse Rod read, "God so loved the world. God loves us. He cares about us. That's why he wants to enter into a relationship with us." So he starts this relationship with this woman with care. I don't know if you've heard the term, but I heard this quote the other day and I liked it. I might be getting it slightly wrong, but it's something along the lines of, "People don't care what you know until they know you care." Have you ever heard that? People don't care what you know until they know you care. So we can come into, I got it right, okay? Someone gave me a thumbs up. You can just say what you know and it falls on deaf ears. But if you care, if you actually lead with genuine care, often people are softened. Barriers come down. Bridges are built. Like, I don't know if you've noticed, but in our culture, people have a lot of barriers against Christians. A lot of barriers against the church. You can look at Canadian history and people go, "No, the church is this. The church is that. I don't want anything to do with that." They hear about Christians. They see hypocrites everywhere and they go, "No, you're a Christian. I don't want, you know, forget it. I don't want to hear what you have to say." And fair enough in some cases, right? But I think if we walk like Jesus and we actually lead with care, we lead with kindness, we lead with good deeds, we lead with actually helping people and loving people, often those barriers go, "Okay, I know I think all Christians and all churches are like that, but that one's not." You know, and it kind of starts to lower a barrier, and so I think that's what Jesus is doing. I think he's cultivating the ground, getting it ready for some seeds of truth. And so there's two stories that I just want to share in the life of our church about cultivating the ground. And the first is about an individual in our church, and I asked if I could share this. And so this person likes to do martial arts, and so they go to a martial arts place in town and they actually view it like outreach. And so they're there. They're doing the martial arts. I'm sure they're enjoying it and loving it. But they're also trying to build relationships with people out of there. They're trying to show good, godly character. They're trying to make friends with the people around them on the sidelines. They're sitting and having conversations and listening and going, "Okay, tell me more about your life." So they're building a relationship, and then that leads to an open door to actually plant some seeds of truth. And some of these guys have been coming to church and coming to faith, and he's starting a Bible study in the gym, or dojo, I don't know what you call it, but he's there. And so you can see that progression, right? He didn't just kick the door in and put someone in a chokehold and say, "You gotta believe in Jesus." You know, it might be effective, I don't know, it might be one form of evangelism, but it's not the right way. It's not what Jesus did. So he's cultivating the ground, planting seeds, and people are coming to know Jesus. It's amazing. So that's individually, but we're also a collective here as a church. And so I think collectively, one of the main ministries that I think we do that is a cultivating ministry is afternoon adventures. And you've probably heard us talk about afternoon adventures, but I just want to take a minute on it because I think it's important, and I think it's at the heart of what we do with outreach. And so there is a real need in our community. Afterschool care is a massive need. And so we look at our community and go, "What's a real need that we could actually meet that would make a tangible difference in somebody's life?" Afterschool care. It's an afterschool program on Thursdays. What this does for often a lot of parents, both parents are working two jobs, or there's a single parent, and just to have that relief of an afterschool program means the world to them. Maybe they can work a little bit more, make a bit more income, and stretch their dollars so they can make ends meet. I don't know, but it helps the parents. It also helps the kids because you're running an afterschool program. You're coloring with them. You're painting with them. You're running outside with them. You're teaching them life skills. Here's how you plant garlic. Here's how you do this. They actually feel love. They feel cared for. There's another positive adult influence in their life. That has a ripple effect in the school because these kids we've heard from the teachers, they actually behave like way better the next day after they've received a lot of attention and care from adults. The teacher's job is a little easier, and then that makes the school a little less stressed. It's right. You can see the ripple effect. If you're curious about this, I've actually invited the principal from Evans Elementary, Sean McLeod. He's going to be coming in next Sunday, so he's going to be here next Sunday. He's going to be sharing about the effect of Afternoon Adventures in his school. I think you should come to that and hear what he has to say because it's a really positive influence. Then we also try to bring coffees to the staff once a month, and we try to give them sushi before summer break. We're trying to lead with care. You can tell that some teachers might be like, "Christians, churches, no." When the coffee comes in and everyone's just celebrating and excited, "Oh, the church did it again." It's like these little barriers are lowered. People soften a little bit. If you're interested in this ministry, there's many ways you can help out. You can come and actually be part of the after-school program, two to four on Thursdays. You can also help bring snacks throughout the week if you'd like. There's one other thing that you can do, which we're going to be doing, a honey fundraiser this Sunday and next Sunday. If you would like a one kilogram tub of honey, unpasteurized, it's harvest in the southern foothills of Alberta by the Rocky Mountains, white clover honey. It is amazing. I love it. If you buy one tub for $20, $10 of it goes to helping afternoon adventures. You can, I'll be out in the foyer after the service, and you can sign up, and then next Sunday you can pick up the honey. It's amazing. I eat it with my breakfast. It's my toast, sourdough toast, butter, honey. It's amazing. I'm trying to sell it. You should want some. It's a tub around that big, like there, and it'll go to afternoon adventures. A sweet opportunity, because what's it saying? You win more with honey than with vinegar, right? You get more bees with honey than vinegar, so it all fits together. Outreach. It's amazing. No, we just happen to have honey. I'm trying to connect dots, but there we go. All that to say, we cultivate the ground. It's a few ways how it can look. When we're practicing outreach, we cultivate the ground. And then what? Then we can plant. So then we can actually start to plant. So let's watch what Jesus does. He's established a relationship, and now he's going to plant seeds. And in this next section, there's a lot here. I'm not going to be able to get into all the theology, but I want you to just watch the interchange. I want you to watch the dialogue between Jesus and the woman, and just see what happens. See the interchange. See the ebb and flow, the give and take of the conversation, and see how Jesus leads this time. So Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." Sir, the woman said, "You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep." Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father, Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons in his livestock? Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give to them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." So he's dropping hints. She's not quite getting what he's talking about. He told her, "Go call your husband and come back." "I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said to her, "You are right. When you say you have no husband, the fact is you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true." He's getting pretty close to the heart here. This conversation is getting pretty deep, pretty sensitive. And she says, "Sir," the woman said, "I can see you are a prophet." So a convenient topic change. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. "Woman," Jesus replied, "Believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know. For salvation is from the Jews, yet a time is coming and has now come when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit, and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said, "I know that Messiah called the Christ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us. Then Jesus declared, 'I, the one speaking to you, am he.'" So you notice the kind of interchange there, where there's different layers of the conversation, different depths that they go. They kind of banter back and forth with some kind of subtleties, and then he gets right to the heart of one of the issues in her life. It's very sensitive. And then they talk about theology again, and he's planting seeds all throughout. He's planting seeds of truth and seeds of the gospel. And then he gets to the end, and he plants the main seed, "I am the Messiah. I'm the one that you're seeking. Put your trust in me." And so you can see these little seeds all throughout the conversation. And I think the principle I take away is that Jesus was never pushy. He didn't push himself on people. He didn't force himself on people. He kind of led the conversation, but he was also willing to go where it was going to go. She changes the topic about the husband thing, and he's like, "All right, he doesn't bring it back up. He doesn't force it. He just keeps going with the flow of what she says." And I think that's a principle for us. I think when we have built a relationship with someone, there's a cultivated ground there, and we kind of know somebody, and we have a rapport with them, we start to plant seeds of truth, but we don't push it, right? We wait for opportunities, and we share little things here and there. And so I have a few examples from my life, I'm sure you do as well. A while ago, we did the art of neighboring sermon series that Rod led us through. And so my radar for my neighbors has gone up a little bit of interacting with them. And throughout the course of interacting with my neighbors in the complex that I live in, I've had varying results, varying reactions. Some people where they're really curious, and some people where they're like, "No, thank you." And Jesus did that too. You can see that when the story of the rich young ruler, where a young man comes to Jesus and he says, "I want to follow you. I've done everything. What do I do to have eternal life?" And Jesus says, "One thing you lack, sell everything you have, and then follow me." And then the guy walks away sad, and Jesus chases him down, and he says, "I'm so sorry, actually, never mind. You don't have to do that. Just forget it. You can follow me." Or, you know, Jesus chases him down and says, "No, you have to believe," and he forces him and pesters him until he begrudgingly believes, "No, he doesn't do either of those things." He lets the man walk away sad, just lets him walk away. And so I think in our planting with people around us, there are times where people are really receptive, and there are times where they're not, and we cannot force ourselves. I remember there was one neighbor that I had that we were building a relationship and a rapport with each other, and I started to try to plant some seeds. You know, "Hey, our church is doing a family movie night. We were connecting over our families. Would you want to ever come?" And very resistant. No thank you. Okay? Okay? So then, you know, a while it goes by, and I, "Well, we're doing a soccer camp. You've got kids. They're the right age. Do you want to come?" No. Very, no. And I actually knew that this person didn't like me because I was a pastor, and so they just, they did it, it happens as pastors. People just, um, so I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to push it," because when you push it, you push people away. And so back to cultivating, right, and just see where it goes. But I've had other neighbors where I remember I was packing for a trip once, and the vans all packed up, and they're like, "Oh, I hope you have a good trip," and I say something like, "Yeah, you know, I just hope we get there safely." And they said to me very nicely, "You know, you'll get there fine. You're good people, and God is good to good people." Like, "Okay, what do I say to that?" Like, "Yes." And, but I kind of said something like, "You know, he is good. I'm just glad he's good to everyone, good and bad." So something simple, right? Just like, you know, I'm not just going to say, "Yes, he's only good to good people." But what that did is it opened the door, and we actually had a couple-minute conversation about God's character, about, "You know, actually, you're right. Bad things do happen to good people, and good things do happen to bad people, and is God just?" And it was actually merciful and gracious, and it was probably like a three-minute conversation about that, and then it kind of fizzled, and that was that. So I would consider that some seeds planted, and an open door. And then from there, we actually did have a few more faith conversations. He eventually moved away, and I don't know where that landed, but seeds were planted. I think that's the point, is you cultivate, and then you plant seeds. And then what happened was he got interrupted. So that happens in conversations too. Have you ever had that, where you're having a good spiritual conversation, and then someone just interrupts it, and you can't go back to that topic again. It's just, it's done. You kind of just have to trust that God's in it. Kids often interrupt conversations like that. They're great. I love my kids. But they, you know, you're having a conversation that's interrupted, and then they walk away and say, "All right, God, I just have to trust you with that." And so Jesus doesn't keep forcing it. He's interrupted by his disciples, and this is what it says. Just then his disciples returned, and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. So again, there's those cultural barriers he was pushing through. But no one asked, "What do you want, or why are you talking with her?" Then leaving her jar, her water jar, the woman went back to the town, and said to the people, "Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Should this be the Messiah?" So you see those seeds are planted. She's starting to wonder. They came out of the town and made their way towards him. So then they, he talks with his disciples a little bit more, and then he says this. This is the analogy that Jesus uses in this section. Don't you have a saying? It's still four months till harvest. See I'm not making it up. He talks about harvesting, right? It's right in this passage. I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields. They are ripe for harvest. Even now, the one who reaps draws a wade, and the harvesters a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying, one sows and another reaps is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor. So I think that's pretty cool. There's a principle in there, okay? So what he's saying is one person might reap, but there has been people all throughout that have actually been doing the hard work. And I think what I want for us here this morning is to see that we can all participate in outreach. We can all participate in cultivating and in planting, and we can actually rejoice together. It's not just the one person who has the conversation where they say I want to believe in Jesus and they lead them to Jesus. It's not just them who gets the credit and glory. Everyone who's putting in the hard work. And sometimes that happens. Like in this conversation with this woman, he goes from cultivating to planting to reaping, all in one go. And sometimes that happens. You hear about people who have the gift of evangelism, they sit on an airplane, the person beside them before it takes off is an unbeliever, and by the time they land, they've come to accept Jesus. Right? That happens. I don't know if that's the norm, and I think a lot of us would go, oh, I'm not like that. I can't do that, but you actually, you actually can. And I think if we look at reaping, actually drawing people into the harvest, drawing people into the love of God, I think we all play a part. Paul picks up on this as well. I planted the seeds, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. And so I look at outreach more like a spectrum, like a continuum. So if that line is one person's life, there's cultivating, planting, and reaping, there are people all along that time frame of their life who have contributed to them coming to know Jesus. Right? We might just give credit to the one person at the end who leads them into conversation, but all throughout, there have been people maybe cultivating for years and years and years, maybe planting seeds for years and years and years, you know, it could look different as well. There's many ways it could look. Maybe someone who's 70 years old, and they've had a whole lifetime of people cultivating in their lives, but there's never really been a belief in Jesus, but near the end of their life, they come to know Jesus, all those people have played a role. And so you might just be one of those people on the spectrum, one of those people in someone's lives. And that's, I think we can rejoice about that, because we've actually played a role in somebody coming to know Jesus as their Lord, just by our character, by being loving, by being kind. Right? You can see that, that you might actually be more involved in outreach than you realize. And so we cultivate, we plant, and we reap, and it's teamwork, and we can be encouraged. And so this is what happens. Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony. He told me everything I ever did. So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with him, and he stayed two days. And because of his words, many more became believers. They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you have said. Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world." So there's the harvest, tons of people coming to faith, because of one small act of Jesus reaching out and care to somebody. I think I want us to catch that too, right? We never know what one small act of love done in the name of Jesus can actually do. It can have a ripple effect, or maybe that person eventually believes, and then maybe that person believes, and other people believe, and then there's a whole harvest that happens. We might never even know about it. Somebody just knew that we were a believer, and we did something kind, and that kind of stuck with them. A barrier was lowered, and someone else planted, and someone else reaped. And so there's the harvest, and I think we're all called to that. And you might go, "Well, I, again, disqualifying yourself. I can't. I can't do that. I can't be a cultivator. I can't be a planter. I can't be a reaper. What do I do?" Maybe you think, "I'm too new to the faith. You know, I need to learn a little more, maybe year five, year ten. Maybe I'll start harvesting then. Maybe I'll start doing outreach then." Honestly, a lot of us who have been in the faith a little longer, we've become complacent. We're actually sometimes way worse at this than brand new believers. Look how long the woman believed, like a couple seconds, and she went and ran and told the whole neighborhood. And you might go, "Okay, I'm a new believer, but I don't actually know how to do this. I'm not equipped. I don't have the right passages. I don't have anything memorized. What did she have?" She had her story, right? From that time believed in him because of the woman's testimony. So you have a testimony. You have a story. You have a story of what God has done in your life, and that's enough. Just share your story openly and honestly, and you don't have to be a perfect person. Don't get the wrong idea that you have to be this excellent person out in the world and be this attractive presence that people come to discover Jesus. You can actually be yourself. You can be weak. You can be broken. Let the love of Christ shine through your brokenness even. But it's like the man who was blind, if you remember that story. Jesus heals him, and then Jesus goes away, and the guy doesn't really know that much about Jesus, and the Pharisees are pestering him with questions, and he says, "Look, I don't know much about this Jesus guy. All I know is I was blind, and now I see." That's all I know. So even just leading with your own story, sharing your story with people, you know, I don't know every answer to every question in the world. All I know is when I was 18, I was super depressed, and I met Jesus, and he saved me. And God's good. Like sometimes that's enough. That's your story. And use it. Share with it with people in your life. And so this woman uses her testimony, and she shares, and people come to believe. And so I think the one thing I want to say is what Jesus told his followers, "Open your eyes and look at the fields." So all of us, let's open our eyes, look at the fields. What does that mean? Are there people in your life that you can actually work on cultivating the ground? Are there people in your life that aren't believers? You know, maybe you've kind of insulated yourself and isolated yourself and just have a bit of a Christian bubble around you. Are you out in the world? Are you out hanging out with people that maybe the church people say, "Oh, you shouldn't hang out with them." Are you actually going out like Jesus into the world? And you can do this in any way. If you love martial arts, maybe pick up a hob, maybe pick up pickleball. I'll recommend that one. Are you out in the world encountering people who don't believe in Jesus? Maybe you have co-workers, maybe you have family members, maybe you have friends, maybe you have acquaintances, maybe you have pickleball buddies. Who knows? There are probably people in your life that don't know Jesus, and you can start by just cultivating the ground, loving them, leading with compassion, leading with care, giving a listening ear. Or maybe you do have people that you're building relationship with and you're just a little nervous of planting seeds. Just try it. Just in a genuine, natural way. Try sharing some truth. Try seeing where the conversation goes and trusting the Spirit with that. And you never know what God is going to do and how He's going to use your life to have a harvest. And so that's our prayer, that's my prayer, that we would open our eyes and look around to see who it is that's actually around us. So I'd like to lead us in prayer at this time. Lord you say to come to you and to pray to the Lord of the harvest, that you would inspire workers to work the fields. And so Lord I pray right now that you would inspire us to be people who look to the fields, that look to the people in our lives, and go Lord help me reach out, help me be somebody that loves you and knows you and that people could see that and be drawn to you. Lord we are all here, those of us who believe because somebody reached out, and Lord how amazing would it be if somebody else in our lives who trusted in you could say, yeah it's because of that person that I'm here. So Lord I pray for us, I pray that you would just cover us in your love, fill us with your Spirit and help us to go out into this world that needs you with the love of the Gospel cultivating planting and reaping. So commit ourselves to you in Jesus' name, Amen. Thanks for listening to our Sardis Fellowship Sermon podcast. If you'd like to learn more about our church please check out sardisfellowship.com and wherever you go from here may you go with the grace and peace of God.