This sermon discusses the potential future challenges Christians may face in a changing world where public forums could be restricted and labeled as hate speech. Drawing parallels from history, it highlights the importance of empowering ordinary believers to lead and teach others in their faith, emphasizing the need for personal spiritual growth and discipleship regardless of external circumstances.

Because, here's the thing, and I'm not trying to be prophetic right now, I'm just using my logic and I'm going, I think the way the world is going, the way the U.S. is going, I think there's going to come a time, and it's probably going to be sooner than later, when what I do in a public forum is going to be labeled as a hate crime. There are a lot of things that we teach will be labeled as hate speech. And will these public forums even be able to take place? And as we get closer to that, and there becomes this little war of whether we can do it or not, we'll be so consumed with winning this war that we'll forget about preparing for the future. And again, let me just throw a couple examples out at you, and I'm not saying this is where the U.S. is going, understand me, I just want to throw a thought out at you, and again it's from history, which I'm terrible at history, but this I do know because I read it in a book. We had these communist revolutions in China and in Russia. In both revolutions, they were trying to kill the church, right? I mean the whole point is we're going to destroy the church. And now in Russia, everything was built around cathedrals and these priests. Everything was centered around these buildings and these teachers. The moment the government took away these teachers and the church assets, the people didn't know where to turn. They didn't know how to grow. They didn't know how to disciple. And so the church basically died. In China, same thing happened. And under Mao Zedong, they got rid of all the buildings. But there was something different about the church in China. See, before all that happened, they had empowered the ordinary Christians. And the ordinary Christians knew how to lead others to the Lord. The everyday church attender knew how to teach others how to grow in their faith. So when they took away the leaders and they took away the church buildings, the church was fine. The people were fine. In fact, under Mao Zedong, the church, the persecuted church, grew from two million to an estimated about 80 million in these underground gatherings. Why? Because the people, they understood how to minister to other people. They knew how to teach other people. And I just want you to look at your life and go, okay, which camp would I fall into? Would I be one of those that's just lost? Like, wow, what do we do now? The building's gone. The leadership's gone. Or do you just go, we don't really need a building. And I know the Word of God. And I know how to lead other people. And when I look at what God's doing with people craving this type of leadership and this type of movement, I go, it could be the Lord preparing us for the future. And it's pretty exciting to be a part of that. And I hope you get excited about that. And I hope you go, okay, what would it look like for me? And am I this leader? Am I making a disciple? Because regardless, biblically, that's what we're supposed to be doing.