Transcript

Hey look. We're in part three of our series going verse by verse through the book of Haggai. We've entitled this series it's time. It's time to be strong, do the work and be fearless. We get it from these verses in Haggai.

These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord. Yet now be strong, work. For I am with you, declares the Lord. My spirit remains in your midst. Fear not.

And so the people were saying, it's not time, but God said, it is time. It's time to be strong, do the work and be fearless. Now, I hope you stopped by our it's time table as you came in today. If you haven't already picked one up, hope you've picked up a journey guide. In the journey guide, you can keep your sermon notes together in one place.

As we're going through this eight week series verse by verse through the book of Haggai. Of course you can take your notes in the bulletin as well, but this gives you another place to keep them all in one place. You can read about our vision. We have a six week devotional in here where there's five devotions per week and that gives you the weekends off that you can catch up or go back and look back over it. If you're here for the first time and you want to get on the journey with us, you're welcome to get one.

As you leave, pick up one with the bookmark and get an it's time pen and start journaling. You can start at the beginning and just catch up with us, that's fine. There's five a week for six weeks and we're starting week three tomorrow on that place to keep your prayers. Frequently asked questions about the it's time generosity initiative and a commitment guide. So we hope everyone has one of these.

If you didn't get one, drop by the table as you leave today and pick one up and we want to put that in your hands. We spend a lot of time and effort on putting that in your hands. And so I hope you'll pick one of those up so you can stay on the journey. Because we're on a spiritual journey together right now, asking God to help us to reach the people in our city with the gospel. Now, over the past couple of weeks, this is week three, we've covered the majority of chapter one.

We're in the final verses of chapter one of the book of Haggai and in the previous verses we heard this repetitive phrase, God speaking to the people of God saying, consider your ways. And in week one, we said, it's about your priorities. Consider your priorities. Are you putting God first? Are you putting your house first?

And we talked about that. And then last week we said, consider your purpose. Do you know who you are and whose you are? Do you know your identity and your purpose in life? And we talked about that last week.

Now in week three, we've entitled this. It's time to respond to God's call. You've considered your ways. Now it's time to get moving. God is saying, and as I think about that today, and I think about those that are seated before me and those that are next door watching on the screens next door, and those of you that are watching on our streaming service online today, I think about all of you right now.

There are at least two kinds of people in the room. And I want to speak to the first kind of person that's in the room. And the call that's on your life is you've never given your life to Jesus. You've never answered the call of salvation where Jesus is calling you to give your life to him, to repent of your sin, to turn from your sin and to turn to God and to trust Jesus for your salvation as your Lord and Savior. And I pray today, most importantly of anyone, I'm praying for today, I'm praying for you that you would answer the call of salvation to come to Jesus.

That's why we exist as a church. That's why I answered the call to preach. It's so that people far from God could be brought near. Because people are hurting, people are lonely, and people are far from God and they have a Savior, if only they would call on Him. So that's the first type of person.

Now here's another type of person in the room. You're a Christ follower. You've given your life to Jesus, but you've gone spiritually dry. You've lost the joy. You feel stuck in your growth spiritually.

And there could be many reasons, but might I propose to you, for some of you, it's because he asked you to do something and you were afraid to do it and you turned back from it. He asked you to go somewhere and you stayed home. He asked you to give and you kept it. He called you to something and you didn't really say no. You just said, it's not time, it's later.

Maybe when I have more, maybe when I'm more gifted, maybe if I learn this first. And. And you're like the people of God here in the book of Haggai who are saying, it's not time yet, Lord. Maybe later. And I would propose to you that if that's you, the reason you're going through this extended spiritual dry spell is because you need to revisit the place where you said no to God.

He called you to give, to do, to go. I don't know. You know, you're out there, you know, and he's called you. But Jesus hasn't left you nor forsaken you. He's still with you, believer.

But he can't fully bless you because you are refusing his blessing by your no. Okay, that's serious stuff. You may be stuck right now, but you don't have to stay that way. The people of God that we're reading about today, they finally wake up and they finally decide to respond to God's call. He was so tender with them.

He was so patient. Consider your ways, he said. And then finally they heard the Lord. In the book of Haggai, chapter one, verses 12 through 15. That's where we'll be today.

The people of God faithfully responded to God's call to rebuild the house of God, the temple. And I believe today that we can look at how they responded and it informs us how we might respond to God's call on our lives. And as we look at the text, I think we'll see three ways, three faithful ways that we can respond to God's call on our lives. Let's read the text and let's ask the Lord to speak to us from his word. Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him, and the people feared the Lord.

Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord's message. I am with you, declares the Lord. And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the Lord of hosts, their God, on the 24th day of the month in the sixth month in the second year of Darius the king. This is God's word.

Amen. We're looking for three ways we can faithfully respond to God's call. Here's the first. By obeying God's call, By obeying God's word. Indeed.

I want to go ahead and show you the three ways by looking at the three responses of the people. Sometimes people will ask me, how do you decide how to preach a passage? And we always begin with an inductive Bible study where we do a grammatical structural diagram. We look up all the words, we look for repetitive phrases, but we often look what's God saying? What's God doing?

And how are the people responding? So in this case we looked, oh, God told them to do something, look how they respond. And we saw three verbs of how they responded. Verse 12, they obeyed the voice of the Lord. So that's what we're going to talk about in just a second.

And then it says and the people feared the Lord so obeyed, feared. That will be our second point when we get to it. And then you get all the way down to verse 14. It says they came and worked on the house of the Lord. So our third verb is worked.

And so can you see how we got there? The thing I want you to always know, Church, I'm not preaching my opinion, unpacking God's word. I'm trying to be a good chef and lay out the buffet, okay? And I cut it into bite size pieces so the little ones can chew it. And I cut in some bigger hunks of meat in there for the more mature to have something to really gnaw on.

Okay? But I try to get the bones out so you don't choke. But that's what I do. That's what you've asked me to do, Church, that you've set me apart to do. That's what God has called me to do and it's my joy to do it.

And so that's what we're looking at, three faithful ways we can respond to God's call. The first is by obeying God's word. Now let's unpack who these people are. Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel. Zerubbabel is born into the line of David.

He would have been king of Israel if the Babylonians had not overthrown Jerusalem. And so he grew up in Babylon. Indeed. His name, Zerubbabel means seed of Babel. Born in Babel, that's what.

So he's got a name that's pretty unique in terms of Jewish names. Born in Babylon. And so he's the governor of Jerusalem. He's the governor. He's under Darius the Great, the king of Persia, whose forebearer Cyrus the Great had overthrown Babylon, released the remnant, the captive Israelites that were there for 70 years of captivity in Babylon.

And now they've come back to the land of Judah. And now Darius is, he's, he's favorable towards them. And he, King Darius wants them to rebuild the temple. And this is, this is the time period. Then we have Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest.

Joshua is born into the line of Aaron. He's. He's the high priest, but he's a high priest with no temple. He's a priest without a temple. He's a preacher without a church.

And so that's what's going on right here. But they're ready to obey the voice of the Lord. They're finally. And then we see Haggai the prophet. And Haggai boy, he's a good datekeeper, isn't he?

I mean, his diary, he makes sure you know the date. He's like the most precise datekeeper perhaps of any author that God used in the Bible. And so he gives us those great dates at the end. We'll unpack that in just a second. By obeying God's word.

Let's work that out a minute. The word obey has the idea to hear and respond obediently. Now, you can't respond obediently until you hear. Until you read. But once you've heard God's word, once you've, once you've verified what he's asking you to do, it's not enough just to hear it.

We must be not only hearers of the word, but doers of the word. The book of James teaches us. I think God would rather for you if you only knew one verse of the Bible and you did that verse. I think God would prefer that over you memorizing a hundred verses and not doing any of them. God cares about your obedience.

And they'd been disobedient. They had been back in Judah, back in Jerusalem for, it looks like about 18 years. And when they first started, they started rebuilding the temple, they laid the foundation, but then they ran into opposition. There were people there against it. If those Israelites rebuild that temple, they'll rebel against Persia.

And so they sent word back to the king of Persia at that time, and he stopped the work. But now Darius has been there for two years and he's released them to do the work. But they hadn't got back to work until now. Now they're ready. Now they're ready to hear the voice of the Lord and obey the Voice of the Lord.

I really like that Haggai's the one speaking. But they recognized it says that he was sent. You see that in verse 12, they obeyed the voice of the Lord their God. And the words of Haggai the prophet as the Lord their God had sent him. They recognized him as a prophet of God, as one sent.

He was sent. Did you know that you're sent, believer? Did you know that Jesus has sent you, that you've been sent? You have been, and you've been called to obey his call, and you've been sent. Luke 11.

Jesus replied, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it. That's who God blesses, the ones who come under obedience, obeying his word. And then he said to his disciples, in the Gospel of John, chapter 20, Jesus said, Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. What?

As the Father sent Jesus, now he sends me and you. That's what he said. We're to live incarnationally in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, in our families, the schools we attend, that we are the body of Jesus in those places, we are Jesus to them. The only Jesus they're going to see, the only Jesus they're going to hear is us, because we're the body of Christ. We've been sent.

We've been called and sent. If you're a believer, that's your purpose, and you're called to it. And so the Jewish exiles had been disobedient. God had. He had released them from captivity and brought them home.

And, oh, they were talking, oh, we're going to build the temple. That's the first thing we're going to do. We'll live in tents and we'll build the temple. But then we read chapter one and we find out, no, they are already installing Jacuzzis at their house. They're already putting paneled house.

It didn't say Jacuzzis. I threw that in. But it did say they were paneling their houses and they were putting luxurious features to their homes. And they had forgotten God, but now they're ready to obey. They had experienced a drought from God because he loves his people.

And sometimes the only way to get our attention is to allow us to go through a dry spell, to allow us to go through a wilderness in order to return to him and to put him first. Now, during this series, I believe each of us is on an individual journey that we're all called to, an individual journey that we're to be thinking about what's God calling me to do. What area have I not given to God in my life in terms of my time, in terms of my talent, what I'm good at, am I serving in terms of my treasure? Because those really the three things we all have, time, talent and treasure. Am I giving to God generously a portion from those three arenas in my life?

And then I think he's saying something to us corporately as a church. So individually we're sent, but as a church we're sent. And we're. I'm part of a group of pastors here in town that we call our group Christ Together for Wilson. And our goal is gospel saturation so that every man, woman and child in Wilson county has repeated opportunities to see, hear and respond to the gospel.

That's going to require an army of people that recognize that they're sent. So it's going to require people, resources, it's going to require financial resources in order to plaster the gospel on every source of media that we can think of. We're not even scratching the surface yet. And so part, a big part of the benefit of our generosity initiative is to go towards this community engagement to strengthen our community engagement because we're sent by Jesus and giving over and above our normal giving towards such a value to strengthen our outreach. How will we do it?

Just throw a few ideas out to you. Maybe you don't think about these things, but. But we that are really serious about trying to reach people. We think about how do we reach people. And one would be traditional media.

Billboards, radio, tv, direct mail, all those things cost a lot of money, by the way. We haven't been doing any of those. We do new movers. We send a postcard if you just moved to town. And that cost a certain amount of money.

But we've been, you know, we've been running a tight ship financially. So traditional media, digital and social media, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, a lot of that stuff you can do yourself, but to really penetrate. And I'm getting older now, so I don't know what the kids are doing now. So it gets harder and harder to keep up with how to reach the next generation. So we want to get better at that.

We want to keep on doing the kind of stuff we're actually pretty good at. And that's high labor, low cost. We're pretty good at high labor, low cost. What that is is stuff like wear T shirts. You know, if you.

We're like the T shirt church. If we're going to do something, we're going to give out T shirts. And so now you're wearing these T shirts. I hope if you're at the Walmart wearing your it's time T shirt or your Eastgate T shirt and somebody comes up to you and says it's time for what you'll say to them. It's time to be strong, do the work, and be fearless.

Well, that's a cool idea. Where's that from? It's from the book of Haggai, where God told the people to get serious about his kingdom. Well, where are you getting all this? It's from our church.

We're over there talking about Jesus. You ought to come. If you'll say all that, then we spent good money on giving you those T shirts. Now if they say, what? What's it time?

What's it time for? Oh, it's just this thing we're doing at church. If you do that. Give me the T shirt back, please. We'll give it to somebody else.

So that is what you call a lower cost, but your labor goes into it. Or when we do a food drive and we hang door hangers on doors and we collect food and we give it to the Hope Station to feed the hungry. These are kind of things we can do events like we already do, like whirligig and we can do other kinds of events where we. But we're brainstorming all the time, how can we get the gospel in front of more people? And that requires human resources and financial resources to do it.

So that's what we're thinking about. I want you to think about how we can obey God's call to reach our city, to actually stretch and think about your part of that. That's the first. Here's number two. By honoring God's name.

By honoring God's name, We're still in verse 12 and we're dealing with the Word. The people feared the Lord. I chose the word honor because it's a close synonym. And the word feared here sometimes gives the wrong connotation to the believer. It doesn't mean to be fearful that he's going to destroy you.

Because if you're a believer, your life is sure, you have eternal life in the Lord, but you should fear his discipline and his displeasure. Because the scripture clearly teaches in many places, especially in Hebrews, that he will discipline his own. And so you should fear that. And I think I talked about this briefly last week. My mother was the spanker of the family.

If you did something wrong, she got after you with a switch a little maple switch that she would switch your legs. And I was never afraid of that because I would be like, go ahead. You know, I was a hard headed little booger, you know, and my mom would switch me and I wouldn't cry. And so I got more switching. My brother Barry, he's four years younger than me, he was actually.

I thought he was a wimp, but he was actually smart because as soon as she came at him with the switch, he started crying. So she just like hit him once and he was done. I got switched all over the house. I was hard headed, I wouldn't cry. But my daddy, he liked to talk to you.

Talked about this last week. And he would sit me down, he'd say, now boy, look at me. Look me in the eye like a man. Why'd you do this? It's not like you.

I'm really disappointed in you. I'd cry like a baby. I feared his displeasure. I feared my father's displeasure. You know, honor and fear are closely related here as we speak about God.

It's a display of deep reverence and awe, recognizing God's holiness and authority, recognizing how high and holy he is. That our fear of him is wisdom because of who he is. That he's Yahweh, all caps L O R D as we see in our text today, shows that it's Yahweh, Jehovah the Great, I am that we're talking about. The book of Proverbs helps us see how fearing and honoring are related. Proverbs, chapter 3.

Be not wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your your bones. Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of your produce. Then your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will be bursting with wine.

Notice how fear and honor. He uses them kind of synonymously in this passage. If you fear the Lord, then you'll honor him with your time, talent and treasure. If you look up to him and you worship him, you won't hesitate to honor him with who you are and what you have. I had an unexpected phone call this week.

Earlier this week. Someone I haven't talked to in years. It's a blast from the past, from my corporate days when I used to run drugstores for the Eckerd drugstore chain. It was my boss, Mike, who? I never called him Mike.

Even. Even now I feel funny calling him Mike. He called me at home. He looked me up and called me as soon as I Heard his voice on my phone. I said, hey, boss.

And he goes, hey, boy. Don't you call me boy. But it felt right for him to call me boy. He's older than me. He was my boss for nearly the whole 12 years I was with Eckerds.

And when he first became my boss, I'd only been there a little while. I was a management candidate before I kept getting promoted with that company. And when he first came on, he's like 6 foot 5, big old guy, real direct and kind of had a bad temper. And I started praying, God, I liked working here before he came, would you get rid of him? Like, move him to another district or another company or something.

He's making my life miserable. He's on me all the time. And instead of God getting rid of him, God changed my heart and gave me a love for the man. And you know what? I look back on it, and I told him this on the phone.

Guess how long he and I talked this week? My wife kept coming in the room going really like this. Two hours. We were on the phone for two hours. We were more than co workers.

We were more than boss. And, boy, he's more like a father, and I was more like a son is what happened. Because, see, my daddy died when I was 8 years old, and I was undisciplined. I had a lot of potential that I wasn't living up to. Not show up late for work or I'd let something slide.

And he would not. Man, he would hammer me. And I always felt like he was harder on me than anybody else. And as we were talking on the phone, he says, I always saw your potential. Yeah, I was hard on you because I knew that great things were in store for you.

And so when we got ready to hang up the phone after two hours of talking, of telling every story we could remember about our 12 years together, he said, tell Robin and the kids, Sandra and I sure do love y'all. That was my boss, the one I prayed to get rid of, that God saved two years after I left Eckerds. And he called me on a Sunday night and said, hey, boy. Hey, boss, I got saved today. And he started crying.

You're the first person I'm calling, because I know you were praying for me all those years, and I was. And he knew that's fear. I feared that, man. But it turned to respect and awe. And you can't call me boy.

But I like it when he calls me boy. I had a bunch of people line up after first service trying that Out. I rebuked them, except for a couple that were older than me. And I went, you can call me boy if you need to. Are you awed by God's holiness?

Are you moved to repentance and worship as you consider his greatness and all he's done for you? Do you fear the Lord? Because true fear of God leads to transformation and wisdom. Do you honor God with your giving of your time and your talent and treasure? Do you fear the Lord?

That was the second way they responded. And here's the third. By working in God's power. By working in God's power. We're in verses 13 through 15 now.

And, boy, look how God moves in whenever he sees them. Obey, and he sees how they respond in fearful honoring and worship. It says, then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord's message. I am with you, declares the Lord. The Lord says, I'm all in now with you.

Now, he had never left them. He'd never forsaken them. But he couldn't bless them because they were disobedient. But he was patient with them. He said, consider your ways.

Wake up. Wake up. Come on, follow me. But now they're ready, and. And he gives them the promise.

I'm with you. But then, more than that, you'll see it. In verse 14, it says that he stirred them up. He stirred him up. And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel and the spirit of Joshua and the spirit of all the remnant of the people.

He stirred them up. He gave him zeal. He gave him passion. He got him fired up. Remember when you were fired up for God?

Remember back when you were fired up for God? Remember when that was? Remember when it stopped?

And sometimes we go, you know, I've just lost my passion.

You know, I've just lost my zeal. I'm just not gonna be able to do this work anymore for the Lord. I'm not gonna be able to do this. And now you can't. You can't stir yourself up, but you can decide to obey and honor and then ask the Lord to stir you up.

If we, you know, if the mama out there who has that newborn crying in the middle of the night and you go, you know, it seemed like a good idea to get pregnant and have this baby, but these multiple feedings during the middle of the night, I've lost my passion for it.

Don't let that baby starve. I just don't feel like feeding that baby. No, you obey the call of being a mom. And it changes you. You become more like Jesus as you put others ahead of yourself.

And that's just an example that popped in my head. But if you only do what you feel like doing, man, I probably wouldn't get out of the bed most days. But no, you obey God's calling on your life and you fear his displeasure. You want to honor him with your life so that your life honors him in all that you do. And so that stirs you up.

If you just seek the passion, it seems to me you miss it. But if you obey and respect and awe the Lord and worship the Lord, he stirs you up. I'm stirred up right now, in case you didn't notice. Then it's him. He stirs me up.

Oh, it's great. It's the best thing to be stirred up by the Lord and to have passion for life. And that's what he did for him. He was excited. The Lord was excited because his people were obeying him and they were worshiping him and honoring him.

And they came and they came and they said, let's get to work on your house, God. He goes, I'm going to stir you up. And he did. Are you dry? You get stirred up.

Only God can do it. But you got to get moving. It's hard to drive a parked car. Get moving for God. Do what he told you to do.

Ask him to stir you up. Remember when Timothy got discouraged, Paul wrote him the letter? Paul said, fan into flame, the calling that's on your life when the laying on hands were given to you. Come on, Timothy, get your passion back.

Get to work. They came and worked. He says, I'm with you. He stirred them up and they worked. They worked for God.

And then we see Haggai, who's really good with his diary at keeping dates. He this happened on the 24th day of the month, in the sixth month in the second year of Darius the king. And so they didn't have the Gregorian calendar. So we could say 20, 25 years after the coming of Jesus, which is how we build our calendar. 2025 AD in Odomne, since our Lord, the year of our Lord.

That's how we do it. Everybody followed a calendar based on what year the king had become king. So Darius had been king for two years. It's in his second year. It's the sixth month.

That's the Hebrew month. That would be the Hebrew month of Elul, which would correspond to August, September in our calendar. And it's the 24th day of Elul. And if you go back to verse one, he started writing on the first day of Elul. So it's 23 days have passed since Haggai started preaching.

He had preached for 23 days before them. People woke up, but they Woke up. It's 23 days later. It's the 24th day of the month. And the people got busy.

They didn't get busy to earn. We don't work to earn because salvation is free. Jesus has earned it. We cannot earn it, but we can work out of it that because he saved us, we can do good works. It says in Ephesians 2, for we are God's handiwork, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

And so we don't earn, but we work in God's kingdom because he made us for that purpose. And we do it out of joy and out of honor and out of obedience. And then we have this command from the Lord. Corporately, what is the church called to do? I remember when I was in the business world, we would go off to leadership retreats all the time, and we would read all these great leadership books.

I still have shelves of leadership books from my corporate days. I remember one of the big gurus that we would listen to had these two principles. Peter Drucker was this leadership guru from the business world. But he had two questions. He called them the most powerful questions.

The first question was, what business are you in? And the second was, how's business? And so as a pastor, I've not forgotten those two things. And I go, okay, as a church, what business are we in? Well, Jesus tells us he's the boss In Matthew chapter 28, he says, Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe everything.

I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you to the end of the age. There it is. I'm with you. What business are we in church?

We're in the disciple making business. That's what we're called to as a church. We're called to make disciples of Jesus Christ. And the way we say it here, we're called to make disciples of Jesus Christ who have a growing heart for heart for each other and heart for our world. That's what.

And then the second diagnostic question is, okay, that's the bit. We're supposed to be making disciples of all nations, of everyone. How's business? Are there still people in your neighborhood, when you back out your driveway and come to church, that their cars are still sitting in the driveway? They are in my neighborhood.

When you come back on a summer day, how many people are mowing the grass? Because that's what they do on Sundays. Did you know the majority of Wilson county people do not go to church? The majority of Wilson county, they do not have a relationship, a personal relationship with God. Oh, yeah, we're supposed to be the buckle on the Bible Belt, but that was years ago.

Times have changed. People are far from God. People are hurting, people are lonely. People are looking for answers in all the wrong places. And here we are.

We have the answer. He's called us to make disciples. Every Sunday morning, we gather in this room, which is behind the gathering place. And you come out this door, we gather the two worship teams. Because we have a worship team next door, a worship team in here.

We have two tech teams that are running our technology. And we go in there to pray for the service. And invariably I have an opportunity to pray. And I'm always thinking about, who's God going to trust us with today? That's the first time.

And they came in on a thin thread. They're hurting, they're looking, and they're far from God. And I'll pray. God, we've prepared. We studied for a sermon.

We studied to play our notes and to sing. And we've prepared, we've worked. We got here early to get everything ready.

But we can't save anybody. Only you can save. Only you can touch.

And I pray something like this nearly every Sunday morning. God, if you don't show up, nothing happens. God, if you don't show up and inhabit our praise, speak through our preaching, touch through our guest services, teach the little kids with our teachers if you don't show up, this was all just a big nothing. Lord, if you show up, if you show up, if you show up and stir up, revival might break out in Wilson County. Wouldn't you like to see that?

And the way we see it, church, is when we let revival start in each of us. We say, lord, stir me up. Stir me up about your business. Lord, I want to do your work. Lord, if you don't show up in my life, I'm going to keep having nothing happening.

I'm just going to keep on doing what I've been doing. And it's not bringing me fulfillment and joy. Are you stirred up for God today? Have you experienced the way he shows up when you serve and work for him? Have you Seen how he gives you strength even when you're weak.

But you step out and do something that. They asked me to give a testimony at church, but I don't like speaking in public. Well, they asked me to talk to people. They asked me to teach kids, and I've never done that before.

And you're acting out of fear, and God's calling you. He's saying, I've made you for a purpose. I want you to work in my kingdom. I want you to be a kingdom citizen, to stretch out and to move into those places. There's something we've been doing.

We started this last week, and we've done this one other time in our church. We have these. It's time cards. We've got them on all four tables down front. We've got them on the tables next door.

You can see them in the container here. You might be wondering, what in the world is that? We did this last week, but we're going to leave it up now for the next three years. And I want you to think about when you come in on Sundays, have you thought of somebody new that needs to hear the gospel? Maybe you just met them this week, maybe you put one in here last week, but you met a new person at the grocery store or at the workplace or in your neighborhood.

And you go, you know what? I'm going to write this person's name down. I'm going to write John Smith right here. And here's Sally, his wife. And I'm going to pray for them, and I'm going to walk forward and I'm going to prayerfully drop it in here.

And the saints that come forward and take the Lord's Supper and respond to God on Sunday morning. I'm going to invite you, if you would, to just touch this as you go by and let it represent your prayer for people that are far from God. Because that's why we are called to generosity, so that we could make disciples of Jesus Christ. That's why we exist. That's our purpose.

That's why we're still here. I'm not dead. God's not done, right? That's why I'm still here. That's why you're still here.

And then if you know of somebody, it would be a miracle for them to come to Jesus. And you actually used to pray for them, but you stopped because you lost faith. Write it right here where it says my long shot. Write that name right there and watch God. Watch God show up.

Drop that in there. We're going to give you an opportunity to do that in just a little while. For some of you here might be your name. You need to put down that you've never come to Jesus. Maybe that's your response.

Today we're going on a spiritual journey together. We're going through the book of Haggai verse by verse. But we're also talking about how to reach our community in fresh, new and challenging ways. I'm challenging you to stay on course, to keep coming out and hearing the sermons, to keep praying the prayer. God, what do you want to do in me and through me?

To be thinking about February 16th when we're going to ask for commitments of giving above and beyond your normal giving so that we can reach every man, woman and child in our city, in our Jerusalem? I'm going to ask you to faithfully respond to God's call on your life by obeying, fearing and working for God. Let's pray, Lord. First of all, I just want to pray for that person that I mentioned at the beginning. The one who came in today far from you.

Is that you, my friend? Maybe you're in this room or maybe you're next door. Maybe you're watching online. You've never given your life to Jesus. You can do it right now.

Why wait? Take care of it right now. You can talk to the Lord right now in prayer. Pray with me. Dear Lord Jesus, I'm a sinner, but I repent of my sin and I give my life to you.

I believe you died on the cross for me and that you were raised from the grave and that you live today. Come and live in me by your spirit. Make me a child of God. I want to follow you all the days of my life as my Lord and my Savior. If you're praying that prayer faith believing he'll save you, that's the first calling, then I would just prayerfully ask you to consider today that you would pray that prayer.

Others are here and you're of Christ follower, but you're feeling that spiritual drought and maybe the Lord showed you why today as you were listening. Maybe he touched that place where you've said no to a calling. Maybe it was out of fear, maybe it was some other reason.

Would you yield to the Spirit right now and say, holy Spirit, stir me up to do the work, the purpose that you've called me to. I want to live into everything you have for me. Stir me up, Lord Jesus, set me a fire afresh for you in Jesus name. Amen.