In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of responding to God's message and the role it plays in the lives of others. He encourages the congregation to prepare themselves for a worthy response to God's word. The speaker also highlights the significance of music in expressing our response to God even after the meeting is over. He then references the book of Luke, where Jesus opened the minds of his disciples to understand the scriptures. The speaker emphasizes the need for the Holy Spirit to open our minds to the scriptures and emphasizes the importance of studying the word of God.

Would you bow your heads for a moment, in a moment of quiet, and process what you just heard. Thank you, Father, for your Holy Spirit, who takes the things that are yours and brings them to our mind and to our heart. Shows us how you want to make a difference in our life, and how to respond. Thank you for the thousands of ways in which you communicate your will and your heart to us. And certainly one of them is through music. When the words and the music come together in a great crescendo of praise and everything within us responds, Father, I thank you for that, for so often it can become the pace setter for how we respond to you long after the meetings are over. The song will remain, and the joy will remain, and the commitment and the trembling before you and the hatred of sin can all be manifest in our lives long after the meeting is over. So, Father, we continue before you for these moments to understand more of your incredible purposes and how our lives have been included. So bring us in this final time to a very defining moment, a moment of our relationship with you. To that end, we open your word and we hear the words of your Son. We see your activity through the early Church, and we bring ourselves before you that our Church and our lives with your people will continue to see you mightily at work in this our day. To that end, we release ourselves to you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. You'll notice in our time tonight, there is a closing moment, a commitment time. So I want you to be allowing the Spirit of God to be preparing you for the kind of response that is worthy of the Lord we met. I believe that when God chooses to speak to us, he waits for an observable response. And sometimes he moves on our hearts to respond to him. And in that process, our response to God is strategically important in the lives of others. And so when I see someone on their knees before God, and I've heard the same messages, and I have been aware of the same kind of moving of God in my life, that I find that my corporate relationship to my brothers and sisters begins to move my heart also. And I want to kneel beside them. I want to stand where they stand. I want people to know that as for me in my life, I have met the Lord. And there's a new freshness in my life, a new commitment, a new surrender, a new release of my life to God. So when we come to the close of our time tonight, without any emotional press other than what comes from the Spirit of God, I'll give you an opportunity to kneel, to come before God, or to come and stand. And in that moment, you will acknowledge to God that you have heard him, that from the first session to the last, God has spoken to you. He has clarified his will to you. He has brought you as a couple to a fresh, defining moment for your future. And somehow you don't want to leave without letting the Lord and the Lord's people know that there is a whole new beginning in your life. You do that not only for encouragement, also so that others can pray for you. And before you leave, I hope you will communicate with those around you, because these are family, to say, Please pray for me, because the Lord did meet me, and I now sense that I'm a part of the corporate life of the people of God. And when you intercede on my behalf, there's something that God does when we pray for one another that he otherwise does not do. He waits for that interdependence. So tonight I want to lay before you several dimensions of the purposes of God that are being unfolded here in the Northwest, in your life, in my life. Certainly the hour in which we live is creating, by the Spirit of God, an unusual alertness that business as usual has brought us to the hour that we're in. And to continue business as usual would be an affront to a holy God, that we have never heard a word that he said. And I know that I have made some fresh commitments. I've written them down. There's some things that God has brought across my soul that I will process on the rest of my time away from home. Through the night, I will not be the same. And I'm asking the Lord to show me how to make the strategic adjustments in my life to what he's been saying to me. So I just alert you to that moment that we'll all have together. Now there are several things that you see revealed in the Scripture about the purposes of God, or the ways of God. Is it not true that in Isaiah 59, 8 and 9, or 55, 8 and 9, he says, My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts aren't your thoughts. Now, what figure of speech did he use to help you to understand how different his thoughts are from yours? Did he not say, As high as the heaven is above the earth, so far removed are my thoughts and ways from yours. And then when you look into the Scripture, you see what he meant. Because how he goes about some things, we just need to come back and say, Lord, teach us your ways. Forgive us when we have presented to you our ways. And one of these certainly is found in that first church that he seemed to put together, the church at Jerusalem. He said some things to them that if you were in that church, you would, I think, take a second gasp and say, Lord, how can these things be? For instance, in the last chapter of the book of Luke, he did several things to that church. He opened their minds to the Scriptures. Does that alert you to anything? You will never personally or corporately as a local church, or as a convention, you will never understand the ways of God apart from the Word of God. And you cannot understand it by studying. I'm not against studying, but the things of God have to come from the Spirit of God. He has got to open your mind to the Scriptures. And when I read this, I said, Heavenly Father, don't let me ever come to the Scriptures and not ask you to open my mind to the Scriptures. So it says, verse 45, And he opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. And once he had opened their mind to the Scriptures, then he summarized. He said to them, Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer, to rise from the dead the third day. And then notice, after the resurrection, God then implemented his eternal purpose for the rest of the world. And that repentance and the remission of sins should be preached in his name, how far? I mean, how many nations? Have you taken that seriously as a local church? Have you said the same assignment was given to our church? We need to ask God, how in the world is that going to be possible? Do you think the early church asked the question? Well, Lord, we're just a group of Jewish people here in Jerusalem. Are you saying that we're to be involved in taking the gospel, the good news of repentance and the remission of sins to all the nations on the face of the earth? And in Mark's gospel, he adds an even more significant moment. He said, and you're to preach the gospel to every solitary creature or person. Do you honestly believe that God has asked us to take the gospel to every solitary person? When you do your strategic planning, if you plan anything less than that, you're planning disobedience. But we look at what we think we're able to handle, or what did we do last year. Do you know that your assignment is to make certain that every solitary person, especially Oregon, Washington, western Idaho, every person has an opportunity to hear the gospel? Now, for you to plan anything less than that is planned disobedience. Now, when I was in the province of Saskatchewan, I had to face that. And I had to say, Father, at least I sense the beginning point for us is certainly Saskatoon, the city of 135,000, 40,000 people. And then every person in this entire province, and that province was larger than the state of Texas, and most of it you had to fly into. People were all up in the far north, but there's no roads there. Now, do you think it would be acceptable to God for us to say, no, Lord, you just understand, we can't do that. Matter of fact, Lord, we're only ten people. Great commission doesn't apply to a small group, does it? Some of you are coming from a small church, and you're saying, I can't do the great commission, we're just a few people. I don't know about you, I couldn't say that to him. The fewer the people, the greater the revelation of God. I always wanted to go to a tough place, because I wanted to go where no one else wanted to go, because whatever happened next, everyone would know it was God. They'd know it wasn't me. But I began to ask the Lord, not how do you want us to take the gospel to every person, but how do you intend to do it? Because throughout the entire New Testament, it is God who is at work, and it is God who is doing the work to take the gospel to every nation. He just had to have a people who believed him, and then responded to him, and I'll give you one clear picture of that. But I sat with our people and said, for us, it has nothing to do with the size of our church. It has nothing to do with whether we've ever started a mission, and that church had never started a mission church. And I had never started a mission church. The question was a matter of obedience, and it throws you into a relationship to God where he begins to tell you how he wants to do it. Now, what I did, and did with our people, we gridded off the province into grid areas. And then we said, Lord, would you show us where you're at work? And would you cause us to know somebody in every one of the grid areas? And would you help us to then understand you're trying to start a church there? And we will then talk to the people in that grid area, and open the scriptures, and trust that you will tell them that they now have the responsibility of taking the gospel to every solitary person in their grid area. You know what began to happen? One after another of these grid areas, God crossed their lives with us. Saskatoon had a major university, so people coming from all over the province would come to that university. Do you suppose God knew that? And we had three major hospitals, and anyone with major surgery had to come to that city. Do you think we could find out where God was bringing them? And you know that every time God was ready to start another mission church in another grid area, he brought someone to Saskatoon, crossed our lives with them. Now, what did we have to do? We had to believe that that was God's strategy. And we had to then make a commitment that we would obey him, and watch to see how God was planning to take his good news to every solitary person. That included language groups, that included the native Indian people across the north. And it was astounding. In the twelve years that I stayed there, there was just a crescendo of mission churches starting. And we would start the one in Prince Albert, and that one would take the responsibility to take the gospel to their surrounding area. And they started at least eight new churches. And almost every solitary mission church we had, they took the responsibility of taking the gospel to every person. Now, I don't know how you do your work here in the convention, but every local church has the responsibility to take the gospel to every person. Now, you can't do it alone. And as you look at the New Testament, you discover how God goes on mission by putting his people into a dynamic relationship to himself and each other. And God added the people together in that solitary church in Jerusalem. But he bonded them together, and every time there was a new church, they were bonded together. And God's strategy is to place us in the middle of the people of God. And where I cannot do it personally, I can do it with the rest of God's people. And the larger the assignment, the more diverse is the group of people that he puts together. And he starts to match the kinds of people that he wants to hear the gospel. For instance, do you suppose that if God wants to reach a particular kind of people or group of people that nobody else is touching, that he might add someone from that group into your church? Now, I taught the people that God adds members to the body as it pleases him. And the best way that we can possibly know what God is up to is to watch to see who he's adding to the body. And so one prayer meeting, a lady who had just become a part of our church family several weeks before started to cry. And I said, Kathy, why don't you share with us what's on your heart? You know why I was asking that question? I wanted the whole church to know what God was doing. I wasn't concerned with what she was doing, I was concerned about what God was doing, and I knew that God had added her. Well, she had a mentally handicapped sister, and she had watched the pain and the suffering in her parents. And she did not know of any church in the whole city that had a ministry to the physically, mentally, or emotionally handicapped. So she just poured out her heart, and she said, I have a burden for some people who need to hear about Jesus, and no one is caring. Now, you know what my response was, biblically? Folks, why do you think God brought Kathy to our church? Did we have to take a survey on how many have ever worked with mentally, emotionally, or physically handicapped? None of us had. But you know the verse that we see in Ephesians 4? When God is about to do something, he adds prophets, evangelists, pastor, teachers. For what? Now, we misquote that verse terribly. We say, for the equipping of the saints for their work of ministry. That's not what it says. It says, for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry of building up the body. Until we all come in the unity of the faith, until we all come to the knowledge of the Son of God, until we all come to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. The evangelist is not to come and let us help him be successful. The evangelist, biblically, is to equip the church to do evangelism. And so when this lady came, I asked the church family, do you think God brought her because there's a whole segment of our city that he wants to hear the gospel, and we don't know how to do it? And they all, of course, the Baptist church has to vote on it, doesn't it? So I said, how many of you sense that God has brought Kathy to our church so that our church can be obedient to God to take the gospel to a group of people that God wants to hear? Then I turned to Kathy and I said, Kathy, you're not to do the ministry. You're to equip the church to do the ministry. The church has the corporate responsibility of the ministry. You know how to do it, so I want you to equip all the rest of the church. You know that it wasn't long after that, probably five or six months after that, we must have had 15 to 20 of the emotionally handicapped, and many of them were Down syndrome. And when I'd finish preaching and I'd come down off the pulpit, those Down syndrome young adults would just converge in the aisle, and with one voice, and a loud voice, they would say, Pastor, we love you! And I want you to know, the whole church took a quantum leap in its capacity to love everyone else. God did something. What he did was, he put us together. And he put us together to be on mission with him. And what we cannot do alone, we will be able to do together. And so God bonded us together and began to help us to understand the ways of God. Now, I want to take you into a pattern in the New Testament, and if you have the book of Acts, I just want you to follow it with me for just a moment. And you're going to see my understanding of Acts 1-8. I don't believe that Acts 1-8 was a command. I believe it was an announcement. It was God's announcement of what he was about to do. And so in Acts 1-8, here's what you hear. We had it read earlier, didn't we? It says, And you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is come upon you, and you shall be witnesses, again, not for me, you shall be witnesses unto me, or to me, in Jerusalem, all Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. I believe that was God's announcement to the early church. I've asked you to take the gospel to every solitary person. I've asked you to take the gospel to every nation. You just need to know, that's what I'm going to be doing, and I'm alerting you to that so that when you see me doing it, I want you to join me. And I'll equip you. Now I'm going to read some verses out of the next few chapters. And I want you to see how the gospel was taken to Jerusalem, all Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth. Just like God announced it. And they kept joining God. And God kept thrusting them out. I don't think they would have sat down and said, now let's take each of these one at a time, and you know how we mostly do it. Now you need to understand, we've got to start with Jerusalem. That's not true. God says, I just want you to watch, I'm going to be doing all of it. And I just want you to get involved with me, and I want you to do it, in an ever-increasing number of my people. So the first verse that I look at is chapter 8 and verse 1. Here's what it says. Now Saul was consenting to his death. At that time a great persecution arose against the church, which was at Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria. Except the apostles. Now I've tried to say to the International Mission Board, the apostles did not do church planting. They stayed in Jerusalem. And they taught the believers to practice everything Christ commanded. And then God scattered the believers everywhere, and the apostles stayed in Jerusalem doing the teaching. And then the whole world began to feel the impact. It came from ordinary folk like my dad, thrust up into a northern city. No church, no pastor. So what does God do with my dad? Just what he did with the church at Jerusalem. He took the people and said, the gospel needs to be shared with every solitary person. Wherever I put you, share. So he started that church in a dance hall. Then we had a summer home 400 miles away. And we would go down there every summer, and people would walk out from the town four miles. They'd walk out to our house, because the only Bible study they had for a whole month was when my dad taught the Bible to them. In that place. Everywhere my dad went he taught. Just like they did in the church at Jerusalem. And dad was concerned that wherever he was, every solitary person needed to hear. So he simply set about to do it. Now it took us eight years before anyone wanted to be our pastor. So do we put everything on hold until we get a pastor? No, no, no. The great commission is given to the body of believers. And that body just says, Lord, you haven't brought us a pastor yet, but that doesn't mean that Christ isn't the head. And as long as the head is in place and the body is in place, this body can function. And so we did. And there were three or four different places that heard the gospel, including Native Indian people. And people would come to our prayer meeting, Native Indian people from the Indian reserves, all up and down the West Coast, close to Prince Rupert. And we didn't know to do anything other than what the Scripture said. Repentance and the remission of sins will be preached and proclaimed to every person. So we just did it. Now I want you to go and watch what God did in the early church. The first one is the one we just read. Now look at 9.31. It says, Then the churches throughout all Judea. I thought Jesus had announced that. All Judea. Galilee. And Samaria. Had peace and were edified, and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied. He means the churches now existed throughout all Judea, Galilee, Samaria, and it was continuing. There's one other verse, and that's the 11th chapter, and verse 10. Now those who were scattered, we could add, except the apostles, those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, Antioch, preaching the word to no one but the Jews only. You begin to see that God's strategy was to put his people together, and that together they were to go on mission with God. And God was the one who was going to be on mission, and he would guide them. He would tell them where to go. He would show them where to go. He would... How in the world did the apostle Paul get over to Philippi? Was God at work over there? He was. Paul was going to go east, and God says, Paul, why don't you just learn what I told you in the beginning? You're going to take the gospel to the Gentiles, but you're not going to strategize it. I want you to go and sit down, and I'll show you where I'm at work. And he had a vision of a man saying, please come over and help us. So he did. I wish I had time to tell you how many, many times that happened when I was pastoring. I remember a man, Ben Bonney. He was from the North American Baptist congregation on the other side of the city. And he happened to show up with his wife and three children in our church. And he looked at the bulletin. And in our bulletin we had listed five different places to pray for. And Ben, who had never been in our church before, had no intention of going, but he was late that morning and couldn't make it all the way over to the other side of the city, so he dropped into our church. And he turned to me and he said, Pastor, what's this all about? And I said, these are mission churches that our church has started because somebody in each of those towns has requested that we come and start a church there. That they wanted everyone in their town to hear the gospel, so we've gone. He just started to cry. Tears came down his cheek. He said, Are you saying that if anybody asks to start a church in their town, you'd go? I said, absolutely. He said, I've been praying for 11 years for somebody to come and start a Baptist church in our town, but nobody has been willing to come. I said, can we come tomorrow night and meet with you? And we did. We started the church there. And they gave us some property on Main Street, and they bought an old schoolhouse and they moved the schoolhouse all the way across the country and deposited there. And both of his boys have called into the ministry. Ben has become a lay pastor, and they have started at least five other congregations because everywhere they saw there was a need for the gospel to be preached, they chose to go. Now, how in the world did I know to go to Young, Saskatchewan? I didn't. God did. And God had heard the cry, and he had one church that believed that if he ever showed us where he was at work, we'd join him. Because the Great Commission says God will put people together, and you can't do it alone, but he'll show you where he's going, and then you just go together. You just find a way to do it. Now, in the church at Jerusalem, he simply said, I want to make an announcement to you. You're going to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and you're going to be witnesses unto me. And wherever I'm at work, I'm going to put you there, and you can bear witness unto me until everyone in that area has heard. Then I'll take you to someone else. Now, did Philip talk with someone on the road, an Ethiopian eunuch? How did he know to go down there? The Spirit told him. And what was he told to do? Put their witness unto Christ. And the man was reading from Isaiah, and he said, Do you understand this? I'm glad you asked. I understand all about it. And the Ethiopian eunuch was saved, baptized, and then the whole of North Africa began to hear the gospel. St. Augustine came from that conversion, and the whole of the Christian community was affected. But how did he know to go? Well, that's where God knew that the Spirit of God was at work. Now, he goes back to Jerusalem, and the church keeps getting involved in all of these beginnings of new churches. Now, I want to apply it to you. One of the greatest focuses of foundation for evangelism is to believe that God knows what he's doing, he knows where he's at work, and he's trying to find a corporate group of people called a local church who are committed to take the gospel to every person just like God told them to. And they know at the beginning they can't do it, and they don't know where to go, and they don't know how to do it, and they don't have any means to do it. But they have a mandate from God, and they have a picture in the New Testament of how God chose to do it. And they're willing to stand before God and say, we've always said we'll set a goal, but we've never set the goal to say we will obey what Christ commanded, and that is to take the gospel to every solitary person. We'll do it as much as we can through our church, then we'll join with other churches called an association. And what we can't do alone, we're going to put our hearts alongside of the other churches, and we're going to make a commitment as an association that every solitary person in our geographical area will hear the gospel. And then we'll think about our state convention, we'll put our life with them, and we'll ask God, how do we take the gospel to every solitary person? The foundation that God laid was to do it corporately, not everyone doing what is right in his own eyes. But in the life of a local church, that group of people make a decision to be obedient to God and to let God take them until every person has an opportunity to hear, and you don't set a goal any less than that. Now you can do it then through the national convention, and you can do it through our worldwide fellowship of churches, and you can do it in the kingdom, because God is working through a great number of his people, and we can put our lives alongside and watch God take his good news to every solitary person. Would you make a commitment tonight to be obedient to the simplicity of the assignment that God left? Let him open to you the scriptures, and during these days he has done that, has he not? Suddenly the scriptures have come up. Why did he do that? Because he's going to follow it up by saying, and you are witnesses of these things, and this good news, repentance and the forgiveness of sin will be proclaimed to every nation and to every person, and you need to be filled with the spirit of God and be obedient. I'll show you where to go, I'll go with you, but do not set your heart to anything less than what I've asked you. Take the gospel to every nation, take the gospel to every person. Now, there's enough people in this room, there's enough churches in your convention that could see the beginning of a mighty, mighty move of God in the Northwest, in the nation, and to the ends of the earth. But it starts with the simplicity of absolute obedience. Would you say to God, I for one am determined tonight, whatever it will look like, however impossible it may seem, I believe that when you said, take the gospel to every person, you meant what you said, and that you would initiate and you would announce where you're going next, and wherever you wanted us to go, we'll go. Now you can make that kind of commitment, and then let God take you and shape you personally, shape your church, shape your family. When I said that to God about my life, and then asked God to bring me a wife who had the same kind of commitment to missions, long before I knew her, she was a summer missionary in Vancouver, British Columbia, before I even met her. Did God know that? He did. Did God know he was going to bring us our family and knew there was a commitment that would affect each of their lives? He did. Did God put me among Northwest Baptists on purpose? He did. And I have found that the more we understand God's strategy of putting us together in a local church, and putting our local church combined with other churches, and putting those churches in a wider circle, until every solitary person in the world has an opportunity to hear. It starts right here. It starts with a commitment on your heart and mine. So I want us to take a moment of personal response to God. You're not responding to a message, you're responding to a person who has given the message to God. And so in the next few moments, I want us to have our heads bowed. I'm going to give you a moment of quiet, but surely God has spoken to you. And somehow, to Him alone, you just want to put your life with a new kind of freshness. And you want to come and just kneel and pray. Or you want to just come and stand. And by that you're saying, Lord, I will not go from this place the way I came in. You did speak to me. I know what you said. It doesn't take long to say, I surrender all. But it has a world of impact on the heart of God. I have a feeling in my heart that with this strategic moment in our nation's history, He has a special place for Northwest Baptists. I have a feeling that He wants to take you, small, insignificant, and say, I'm going to turn the nation upside down. But the timing, the timing, is so crucial. Did you hear Him? Just a quiet, moving, I found in my own heart when God speaks, there's an incredible divine compulsion that says, Henry, I want you, even symbolically, to change. So I want you to move from where you are somewhere before me that says things will not be the same. I've decided. And it may be He wants you just simply to kneel at the place where you sit, or to stand quietly just where you are. Just a movement that says, Lord, here's where I've been. I just want you to know it's different. You have met me, and there's a change taking place in me. We're not going to wait long. It's your Savior, isn't it? It's your Savior. He says, I told you what I wanted you to do. You can't do it alone, but you can do it with my people. Would you release your life to me to let me put you among my people? I may take you across the world. I may take you to the next town. I may take you to some people who are in the prisons, but they need to hear. I may take you as a teenager to your high school. They need to hear. God knows what we're about to face, and he wants his people in place. So when he starts to guide, even if it's under persecution, if he scatters us, we'll have a heart full of a message that will transform lives and establish churches of his people who will take up the responsibility themselves. I'm going to exercise the awesome privilege of praying for you from this very spot and be a radical change. Lives wholly yielded to him. Oh, Father, you see the heart. You have broken some hearts, and we thank you. You have suddenly interrupted some hearts, and they're not the same, but they know it's you, and with trembling, they're releasing their lives to follow hard after you. None of us know what our tomorrow will look like, but we do know you, and we're just going to follow you into our tomorrows. We know that you're not willing that one solitary person perish, but that everyone come to repentance. And so you told us to go to every person. We just automatically said, we don't know how to do it, so we dismissed it. But you have not. And you're reminding us one more time, will you go with me? Will you come and follow me? And Father, with one voice from our heart, we say, yes, Lord. We will leave our fishnets. We will leave whatever's been holding us back. We'll leave the comfort of our local church, and we'll go to a logging camp and to a mining center. We'll go to the truckers going up and down the roads. We'll go to the fish camps. Father, we'll go wherever there's a person who needs you, and we'll share. Father, you said we'd need to wait until we're endued with your Holy Spirit, and so we together with one heart ask you to guide us until we know that we have been filled with your Spirit for the enabling assignment that what we have said yes to, your Spirit will enable us to. And that is what we wait for. But Lord, we know it's not going to be long, because some will go out into eternity before we've gotten around to them. And you don't want that. So open to us your Word and cause us to believe and then to obey and then to know the joy, the incredible joy of going with you on mission with your people in our world. Hear the cry of every heart and confirm in each one that you have heard and you're pleased. While we're still on our knees and my own heart is bowed before the Lord, I'm going to ask our leader if he would come and say a word, however God has guided him.