And then another important milestone in 2007 was we got on YouTube.
Now, why was that a big deal?
Well, who heard about our church through YouTube?
Put up your hand if you found out about our church because of YouTube.
All right, that's why YouTube was a big deal, all right?
So lots of people have heard of us through YouTube.
Go to Ephesians chapter 3.
Did I have you turn there?
Here's a theme verse for 2007.
Ephesians chapter 3, verse 20.
The Bible reads, "Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that
we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church
by Jesus Christ throughout all ages, world without end, Amen."
You know, God truly did exceedingly above all that I could ask or think by allowing
us starting in 2007 to literally start to reach millions of people through the internet.
Literally millions, even in 2007 because back then YouTube was in its early days and my
sister Ronnie said, "Hey, you need to get on YouTube," and I was like, "What's YouTube?"
And back then you could only put a 10-minute video on YouTube and so I got in there and
I put up some videos and a couple of the videos that I put up got over a million views within
a few months.
One of them was called "Why Billy Graham's Going to Hell" and the other one was called
"Joel Osteen Exposed."
So I put up some hard preaching where I was preaching from the Bible against Billy Graham
and against Joel Osteen and those videos got a million views each.
Now I didn't even have a camcorder when I put those up.
It was just a slideshow of pictures of Billy Graham and it was just me preaching, just yelling
and it was just from my sermon and I just threw them into Windows Movie Maker and just
spat them out and uploaded it to YouTube and got over a million views.
Those were the days on YouTube when YouTube was sort of a Wild West frontier and you could
get away with anything, you know, and just put up sermons.
Nobody else was really putting preaching on, so it just right away got a ton of viewers.
Now the reason that I say it's above all that I could ever ask or think is that when I started
the church, my vision was to see a powerful, soul winning church established in Arizona.
I thought of it as we're going to reach Phoenix.
I never thought of it as we're going to reach America or reach the world or change the world
or start some new movement or start a whole thing.
It was just limited to we are going to do something in Phoenix.
So I was disappointed by the slow growth of the church, you know, running 20 after a couple
of years, but I was pleasantly surprised with the way God opened doors for us to reach literally
millions of people on YouTube and we started consistently having like 20,000 MP3s downloaded
per month from our church website even back in 2007 and 2008 we were having 20,000 a month
downloads.
So it was just amazing because I never even dreamed of that.
I remember the first time somebody emailed me and told me they were listening to my sermons
from another state I was blown away because I thought to myself oh you know we're handing
out invites and they have the church website maybe somebody will listen to a sermon and
that will make them want to come but this old man this 80 year old man contacted me
from Washington state and said I'm listening to your sermon every week I was like whoa
who is this guy and I was like this is great somebody in Washington is listening to my
sermons it's not just the people I'm preaching to it's this other guy that's listening you
know so I had no idea I had no vision of you know reaching millions of people through the
internet but God did that and so that was a blessing in 2007.