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Lesson number 10, conserving the results. Lesson number 10, page number 10. Let's start with prayer. Heavenly Father, Lord, again, thank you. Know it's been a long day. Everybody's probably a little tired and ready to go. I pray that you just bless the time that we have as we go over this last lesson and just some few last minute things. In your precious name I pray, amen. All right, we're at lesson 10. Number one, conserving the results means following up on our converts. Letter A, once somebody has been saved, that's your feeling, once somebody has been saved, we do not want to just leave them at the door. Letter B, we want to do everything in our power to follow up with that person after salvation. Number two, why we follow up. Letter A, because they are our spiritual babies. They are our spiritual babies. 1 Peter 2 says, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby. Letter B says to fulfill the rest of the Great Commission. Because remember the Great Commission, sometimes we get confused and we think the Great Commission is soul winning. And listen to me, soul winning is important. I emphasize soul winning a lot and I talk about soul winning a lot. And one of the reasons I don't preach a lot of topical sermons is because the problem with topical sermons is you end up just hitting your hobby horse of what you like and I'd just be preaching on soul winning all day long. I sometimes have to force myself to preach through books of the Bible just to make sure I hit other things. So soul winning's important. I'm very passionate about soul winning. I believe in soul winning. But soul winning is not the Great Commission. Soul winning is just the first part of the Great Commission. And we want to follow up to fulfill the rest of the Great Commission. Remember Matthew 28 19 says, go ye therefore and teach all nations. That's talking about soul winning. Going out and preaching the gospel. But number two, we want to be baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. And then number three, verse 20, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you in law and with you always even unto the end of the world. So number one, it's salvation, teach all nations. Number two, it's baptism, baptizing them. Number three is discipleship, teaching them to observe all things. That is the Great Commission. The Great Commission is not soul winning. The Great Commission is soul winning, reaching people, getting them baptized, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you. Let her see, let's talk about when we follow up. Number one, generally we follow up with people after they have been saved. Generally we only follow up with people after they have been saved. Number two, generally we do not follow up with people who have not been saved. Generally we do not follow up with people who have not been saved. Number three, the exception is if you really feel like somebody who did not get saved is likely to come to church, is likely to get saved, like maybe they didn't get saved, but they're very likely to get saved. If you could continue to have an influence with them, they're very likely to come to church. But you wanna be very careful with this because people have a tendency to waste their time here. If they just rejected the gospel, don't try to get them to come to church. If they don't reject the gospel, they're not gonna accept anything else. So generally we only wanna follow up with people after they have been saved. Generally we do not follow up with people who have not been saved. There are some exceptions. If you're like, this person didn't get saved, but they weren't rejecting it, they just needed time to think about it. Or I really feel like they're open to it. They're very likely to come to church, but just wanna be careful with those situations. Number three, how to follow up. Page 25, how to follow up. Letter A, invite them to church. Invite them to church. And you can say something along these lines. Would you be interested in coming to church on Sunday? Or if they need a ride, if we came by and picked you up for church on Sunday, would you come? You wanna just invite. So number one, the best time to invite them to church is immediately after they got saved. The best time to invite them to church is immediately after they got saved. Number two, the best time to get their information is immediately after they agreed to come to church. The best time to get their information is immediately after they agreed to come to church. Number three, the best person to get their information is the person that got them saved. The best person to get their information is the person that got them saved. Letter B, get their complete information. Get their complete information. That means number one, first and last name. Number two, full address, including apartment numbers and zip codes. Number three, phone numbers, preferably the person's cell phone number, something like that. And use the New Believers Follow Up Card. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. When you came in, you should have received a packet. And in that packet, you should have got a New Believers Follow Up Card. And let's go ahead and talk about the New Believers Follow Up Card now. And let me grab mine. I don't know what I did with my follow up card. Can I get one? Yeah, brother Vadio, that's great. Appreciate it. I must have dropped mine. I don't know what I did with it. Thank you very much. Okay, so here's the point that we're trying to make when it comes to following up. People have this tendency, and I'm not mad at you if you've done this. Okay, I'm just trying to teach you and help people understand this. People have a tendency of getting somebody saved, and then they want me to follow up on them. Okay, because I'm the pastor, and they're like, this is not your job. Okay, so here's the thing, all right? Our church has, on average, 130 people here every week. And those people have problems and get sick and go to the hospital. And I do a lot of following up with just our own church family. On top of that, last Saturday, last weekend, we had 50 soul winners from our church, all right? Multiple salvations, all right? If every single soul winner gave me their follow-up card and expected me to follow up on their visitor, I would not be able to preach, okay? I would be busy all day long just following up on people's salvation. So I cannot follow up on everybody's salvation. It's just not gonna happen. And sometimes people give me these cards, and to be honest, I'm not trying to be mean or rude. They just end up getting thrown away because I don't have time, all right? So we need you to take responsibility for the spiritual baby that God gave you, all right? You got them saved, you connected with them. They let you give them the gospel. You're gonna be the best person to get their information. You're gonna be the best person to follow up. Now, we're gonna do everything we can to help you. We're gonna do everything we can to come alongside you. And once they come to church, once they actually come to a service, then we have a follow-up plan here at our church for all our guests. And we get them put into that system, and that's fine. We follow up on our guests. But as far as getting people to church, your convert to church, that's your responsibility. So what we have done to help you is we give you a follow-up card. When you come soul winning at Verity Baptist Church, we give every group one of these cards. You should have one in front of you right now. It's called the New Believer follow-up card. Let's just go through it real quick. The first thing is there's a date of first contact. So that's when you first met this individual. You can write that date there. Then you have a place for their information, name, address, city, zip, phone number, and any notes that you might want to take about this individual. They told you something interesting you want to remember about them or whatever, you can write that there. You know, how many children they have, whatever. Anything they might have said to you. They're going through a divorce, whatever. Something, anything you want to remember. On the back, you've got a place for two different dates. The date they got saved and the date they got baptized. Now, more than likely, the date of first contact will also be the day they got saved, but maybe not. Maybe they'll get saved later on, that's fine. We also have a date for when they got baptized because we want to see our converts get baptized, all right? Then you've got three boxes there. Phone calls, handwritten notes, personal visits, and it's got a place for dates. We want you to follow up on your visitor and try to get them to come to church, but we also want you to keep track of what you're doing. So if you call them, you can write the date. I called them on this date. You write them a handwritten note, you can put the date. I wrote a handwritten note on this date. If you go there personally and visit them again, you can write the note. Here's when I went by and visited with them. There's a place here. Did you send them a new believer's packet? Yes or no? If so, what date did you send it? We'll talk about the new believer's packet here in the middle in a little bit. Let me read the instructions for you on this card. Number one, pray for your new convert every day for one week or during the time in which you are actively following up with them. The saddest thing you and I do is we get somebody saved, we bring them the gospel of Jesus Christ, we bring them to a place where they accept Christ as their savior, and then we just blow them off. And totally forget about them. Never pray for them, never even think about them. You can't even remember their name. And we need to get away from that type of Christianity. And we need to get back to a place where, look, God gave me, God, I labored together with God, and we had a spiritual baby. I'm gonna take responsibility for that baby. I'm gonna write their name down. I'm gonna pray for them. So try to pray for your convert at least for one week or during the time in which you are actively following up with them. Number two, attempt to fill in each one of the above boxes at least once before moving on or giving up, okay? Now, you know, you see these boxes, you see all these things. I don't expect you to call them three times. I don't expect you to write them three handwritten notes. I don't expect you to write them three, you know, go by, do three personal visits. But if you could do at least one of these, before you say I'm done with this person, they're never gonna come to church, if you could just call them once, write them one handwritten note, write them, you know, visit them one time, that would be great. And sometimes you don't wanna throw them away, you just wanna keep them. Sometimes what you can do is you can, like let's say I get somebody saved right now and I tried to get them to come to church, they seem really interested, but they never actually came and they just, it never happened. I called them, I wrote them a note, we're still in communication, they're still being friendly, they still seem like they're interested, but it just kinda became this awkward thing. But guess what, Easter's coming up. And during Easter, we're gonna have postcards inviting people for the Easter. Everyone's looking for somewhere to go for Easter, so maybe you can go back and grab your card that you put in a file somewhere and then send them an invitation to the Easter service or something like that. So you wanna kinda keep these and that's where you would continue to write, you know, I wrote them another note inviting them for Easter or whatever. Number three, use discretion and discernment in assessing their interest in coming to church. You just wanna be discreet and you wanna just try to use some discernment. I've told this story before, but let me tell it to you again. Years and years ago, when I was in the Air Force and we were going to a church and the pastor of that church was training me for the ministry. And he confronted me with a thought. He said, you know, how many people have you brought to this church of your comrades? And up to that point, I've been soul winning literally since I could walk. I mean, every week with my dad, I went out soul winning. I've been giving the gospel since I was 12 or 13 years old. Here in a few weeks, I'm gonna be 30. So what is that, 17 years that I've been actively soul winning in my life, you know? And at this time I'd seen hundreds if not thousands of people saved, but I could only think about two people that I had actually gone and saved and got to come to church and got baptized. And I was confronted with this idea and this is what this pastor said to me. If you can't bring people to this church, you know, and that church had like 400 people in it. He said, if you can't bring people to this church in a nice building, you know, with all the programs and things that we have here, what makes you think you're gonna bring people to your house? You know, like when we're talking about me starting a church, you know, in our house. So I decided like, I'm not gonna start a church unless I can prove that I can bring people to church, you know, and I just set out on a mission. And even the guys that we train here for the ministry, I've told, I'm not sending you out if you can't bring somebody to church, because what's the point? You know, you're not gonna, if you can't do it here, you won't do it anywhere else. So when, you know, so I got on this mission, I'm gonna bring people to church. And, you know, I'm happy to tell you, praise the Lord, my wife and I saw multiple people come to that church, and multiple people got saved that we reached. But that first time, we went a little too extreme. You know, my wife and I, we were maybe a little naive and a little zealous. And, you know, that first convert that we had, we were just like following up and we were calling them and we were sending them stuff and we're like trying to get them to come to church. And it literally got to the point where they called the pastor and they said like, can you tell your church people to quit stalking us? Okay, because it just kind of got that bad, you know. And I have to figure out like, okay, first of all, I was here, now I went all the way over here, so we have to learn a balance and we figured out. So I'm just saying, use some discretion, use some discernment, and, you know, don't take it too far. If they're calling me saying you're harassing them, I'm gonna go up to bat for you and I'm gonna say, okay, I'll talk to them, because I get that. But, you know, just use discernment, pray about it. You know, think about what can I do or how can I reach out to help these people? But you're not gonna be able to follow up if you don't get their information, if you don't know where they live or where to send the letter. Now, something we do for you here at Verity Baptist Church is we offer what we call new believers packets. Now, these new believer packets, we're changing them up a little bit. We used to put different resources in here. We're not doing that anymore. But a new believers packet basically looks like this. And inside of here, it has a few things that would help a new believer. The first thing it has, a letter from our church, kind of just, you know, talking to them about that we're glad that they accept the Christ as their savior and explaining what's in this package. In this package, they're gonna have a CD with a sermon that I preached called New Steps for New Believers. And it kind of just explains to them what a brand new Christian should be doing. They need to get baptized, they need to get connected in church, they need to do those things. Also in this package, they have a flyer about baptism. And it kind of just explains what baptism is and talks about baptism and tells them that the first thing that they should be doing is to get baptized. Of course, there's an invitation to our church with our church information on it and stuff like that. And there's also a little coupon that says free Bible. Redeem one at the church service at Verity Baptist Church for a small free Bible. It has our address and our website. And people have came. They've came and said, I'm here for my free Bible. You know, and if they show up with this thing, we give them a free Bible, you know? And that's fine. Anything we can do to help them out. But here's, this is meant to be a resource for you. And here's what we do. And look, I have never gone, let me say this. First of all, our church is extremely spoiled and you guys don't know it. And I wish you did. Cause I never went to a church where they had a soul winning seminar. I wish I would have had a soul winning seminar. I never went to a church where they did anything like this. You know, and I'm not, I'm just trying to tell you. We're helping you out. Here's how easy we've done it for you, okay? We make these, we put the stamps on them. We put the return address on them. We seal them up. We have them ready. All you have to do is come to us and say, I got somebody saved. I want to follow up with them. I need a new believer's package. We hand this to you. You put their address and put it in the mail. That's all you got to do. We pay for the stamp. We pay for everything. All you got to do is put their address and put it in the mail. You say, well, what is the purpose? And here's the purpose, all right? A lot of times people don't want to follow up on someone because it's kind of awkward. You know, it's like you're calling them and it's like, hey, remember me? I talked to you on Saturday. Do you want to come to church? You know, it's kind of this awkward thing. So what we do is when you get somebody saved, you basically go to them and you, you know, you talk to them or whatever, you get their information. And then what you can do is you can put this in the mail for them and then two or three days later, you can call and say, hey, I'm calling because I put that pack in the mail. I just want to make sure you received it. Did you get it? And then they're like, oh yeah, that was really nice of you. I appreciate you sending that. And then you can kind of just say like, oh, well, do you think you want to come to church, you know, this week or whatever? So it kind of gives you a reason to call. Does that make sense? So that's why we, we do that. When, when, when you're following up with people, if you go back to your lesson there, page number 25, look at verse number, look at point number four, letter E, I'm sorry, letter A, number four, tell them why you are asking for their information. So, you know, I would like to pray for you and mail you some information from the church. Would you mind if I wrote down your information and then mail them the new believer's packet? Number five, do not be afraid to ask. Number five, do not be afraid to ask. The worst thing they can do is say no. So look, after you got somebody saved, just tell them like, hey, you know, I like to, I want to pray for you and I want to send you some information from our church that might be helpful to you. Would it be okay if I write down your information? Most people are going to say, sure. And then just, you know, your name was Bill, right? What's your last name? You know, what's your address? What's your phone number? I'm going to send you something in the mail. Is that okay? And then, and tell them that, and tell them you're going to call them, you know, I'm going to call you and make sure you got that. Is that fine? Just tell them what you're doing, and that way they're not surprised or shocked when you do it. And then, you know, again, the worst thing they're going to say is no. And it's very rare that someone, if you got them saved, you brought them through this whole thing, it's very rare that someone's going to say no. So number four, let's talk about when to stop following up. A, if they did not get saved, you probably don't want to follow up. B, if they got saved but do not seem interested in coming to church, you probably don't want to follow up. C, if they said they would come to church and after a few attempts have never actually made it, you may want to follow up. If you look at the note there, it says, remember that when we're out soul winning, we want to get the gospel to anyone and everyone who's willing to listen. When we're following up, we want to only follow up on people who are likely to come to church, okay? When we're preaching the gospel, anyone, everyone, want to get in the gospel. When we're following up, meaning we're spending money, sending them packets, we're calling them, all those things, you want to focus on the people that are actually interested. So how do you find out if someone's interested? You invite them to church. Here's what I do. I get somebody saved, I went through the whole thing, the next thing I ask them and say is, hey, would you be interested in coming to church with me on Sunday? And if they're like, yeah, I think I'd like to go. They're like, great, let me get your information. I'm gonna send you something in the mail. I can call you, make sure that we're ready to go for Saturday or maybe I can pick you up or whatever. If I ask them, would you like to come to church with me on Sunday? And they're like, oh, I don't know. Then you know, probably they're not gonna be a great person to follow up with and you just kind of praise the Lord they got saved, but move on. We don't want to spend energy following up on someone who's not interested in being followed up on or coming to church.