Look, God wants us to be fruitful. God wants us to succeed. I don't sit here and bite my
nails and worry about whether or not the church is going to succeed because I know Jesus said,
I will build my church. Obviously, we have a part to play in that, but I don't really worry
about it. If we have a low day, I just focus on the people that are there, and I don't
wonder why other people aren't here. People get sick. People have other things going on.
I always just focus on who is there and just leave the rest up to God. That's what our approach has
been the last three years. Praise God, we've steadily grown. We've seen more and more
salvation, people getting baptized, so on and so forth. Look, Jesus said that He had ordained
us that we should go and bring forth fruit and that our fruit should remain. That's what
He told His disciples. He said, look, I ordained you to do this. This is what I want to happen.
I want you to go forth and bring forth fruit and that that fruit should remain.
He's not just like, well, I hope this is what happens. He's ordaining it. He's saying,
look, go do the work. That's the big part of the problem with a lot of churches.
They forget that one little word, go, right? He says that you should go and bring forth
fruit. They want to stay and try to bring forth fruit. They want to just plant. You just
stay put, not reach out to anybody, and just hope everybody somehow magically finds them
and just filters in and walks an aisle and gets saved. No, Jesus said, I want you to go
and bring forth fruit, and then your fruit should remain. That's the big part of the
equation. So the goal is always going to stay the same here. It's always going to be to go
and to bear fruit, and as we do that, the Lord will build His church. The goal is fruitfulness.
He said a big part of that, being fruitful, sticking by the stuff, being one of the people
that are going to be here for the long haul and have a life that brings forth fruit unto the Lord,
one of the major requirements is patience. You're going to have to have patience.
That's one thing I've learned in just the short three years is that it takes patience.
It takes time for things to grow. We don't want to be a church that grows overnight.
If that were the case, we would probably be doing something wrong.
There's churches that spring up overnight, and why is that? Because they're not biblical in their
approach. They are just going to try to appeal to the world and just bring people in for the
rock and roll music, and they're going to use Hollywood movies to illustrate their points,
and they're just going to be a feel-good message. It's just going to be whatever you
want to do. God's not mad at you. That's a popular thing to preach, and that will bring a
crowd, but is it biblical? Is it going to bear spiritual fruit that lasts? The answer is no,
so we want to be biblical in our approach. We have to understand that requires patience.
I had to go to Colossians, right? I should have had you go to 1 Thessalonians,
but just stay there. The Bible says in 1 Thessalonians, we give thanks to God always for you
all, making mention of you in our prayers, remembering without ceasing your work of faith.
Right? So what are the requirements for this church to grow and to expand and to be filled? Well,
one, we're going to have to work without ceasing, right? That's what he said, remembering without
ceasing your work. Paul thought about the Thessalonians. He thought about a group of
people that worked, that went out there and did the work of the ministry, going out into the
highways and hedges and preaching the gospel to every creature, and that's something our church is
about. That's what we endeavor to do, to do the work, and people could say, well, you know what?
That doesn't work anymore. Going out and preaching the gospel, you can't reach people
that way. There's better methods. That's why he said your work of faith. There probably are
better worldly methods, so to speak. There probably are things that we could think, well,
rationally it would make more sense to do this or to do that. It would be easier just to
send out a bunch of mailers and hope everybody comes in. It'd be easier to just have the postman
do all the work for us, but we believe that the gospel works here. We believe that soul-winning
works. That's why our work is a work of faith. A lot of people believe that. They say, I agree
with that. Yeah, the gospel works. Going out and confronting people with the gospel of Jesus
Christ and asking about their soul, that works, but you know what? I just don't feel like it.
That's not my thing. I'm not into that. That's not my gift or my calling. Well,
that's not a spiritual gift, soul-winning by the way. It's something that we're all called
to do, but it goes on and says there, look, we remember without ceasing your work of faith and
what? Labor of love. See, why is it that there's some people that just stick by it,
week in, week out, do the door knocking, learn how to give the gospel, get people saved,
get people here in church, get people baptized? Why is that? It's because they love people.
Look, it's not just a work of faith. It's a labor of love that we do here.
And I'd like to say that it's always going to be easy, that it's always going to be a
simple thing, that building a church this way is just going to be the smooth sailing,
but it's not. That's why it's something we do by faith. It's something we do out of love,
and he says, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in sight of God and our Father.
So again, patience is a big ingredient when it comes to
seeing God, bringing forth fruit for the Lord, right? We have to have the work of faith. We
have to have the labor of love, but we also have to have patience. Every time we go out there,
we're not going to come back and say, six saved, seven saved. Sometimes we're going to get that
goose egg, or it's going to be one person. Or we're going to go months and inviting people
out, getting people saved, inviting them out, and no one's going to show up. And then all
of a sudden you'll have six visitors show up. You'll have three or four visitors. You'll have
a bunch of baptism. We were just talking about, we kind of went without some baptisms
for a while, and then all of a sudden we had three. And then it's another one. There's going
to be three more this morning if my math is right. I'm pretty sure I can count that high.
It is our third year anniversary. I got that right. So we'll have three baptisms today,
right? But look, that's not always going to be the case. There's going to be seasons where
there might not be baptisms, where there might not be a lot of salvations. But you know what?
There will always be Bible preaching. There will always be the fellowship of the Spirit.
And look, there will always be the fact that we have to do these things with patience,
by faith, and in love, okay?