I am absolutely convinced after having lived my life to this point, that there is nothing more powerful than a vision. Every great institution, every great invention, every great innovation known to the human race has been the result of somebody’s vision. This past month we have asked you to envision a church filled with followers of Christ, who give everything they have and everything they are to doing three things 24/7: Love God, Serve Others, sharing Jesus. It all begins with loving God. We have learned that is the Great Commandment. Everything we do ought to flow from a love for God. We believe if you love God you will serve others and you will share your story.

We talked about serving others—that is the great commitment, because Jesus himself said he “did not come to be served.” Just as the greatest joy of Christmas comes not from getting, but from giving, the greatest joy of life comes, not from being served, but serving. It is our determination to help every person at Cross Pointe find a place of service, whether it be inside this church on Sunday or outside this church during the week.

Today, we are going to talk about the last part of our mission as a church which is sharing your story. We believe if you love God, you want others to know about the love of God, so they, too, will love God.

It was in Vacation Bible School. A young boy was six years old in the first grade and was taught a song that has stuck with him ever since that time. In fact, every time from that day forward that he read a particular verse in the Bible, he remembers this song. First I will give you the song and then I will give you the verse.

I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.
I will make you fishers of men if you will follow Me.
If you will follow Me, if you will follow Me,
I will make you fishers of men, if you will follow Me.

That is the song. Some of you might remember the melody. It is based on this verse:

"Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” (Mark 1:17, NASB)

Honestly, I didn’t understand what that meant as a child, but it was not long after I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ that I began to ask what that did mean, because Jesus said that being a fisher of men would be a characteristic of every follower of Christ. I want to repeat that—being a fisher of men is to be a characteristic of every follower of Christ.

With that thought in mind, I want to ask a couple of questions.

(1) Do I believe that the presence of God through Jesus Christ can radically change and transform a person’s life? Honestly, you have to believe that if you are a follower of Christ. When you decided to become a follower of Christ, He did change your life or else you would not continue following Him.

Here is the second question I want to ask.

(2) Do I actually believe that my relatives, my friends, my neighbors, and my co-workers would be better off if they truly knew God and had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? Now if the answer to that question is “Yes” then I want you to hear this next statement. If you answered “Yes” to those two questions and you really believe in the life changing power of God’s presence in a person’s life through knowing Jesus Christ, then the single greatest gift you can ever give anyone in this lifetime is an explanation of how to be rightly connected to God.

There is a reason why we have brought you to this point in this series, because the single most important thing to God is people. Think about this. Not one earthly commodity is going to make it from this world into the next— not land, not homes, not bank accounts, not trophies, not titles, not achievements, nothing. The only thing that is going to make it from this world into the next world is souls—people. Unless Jesus Christ is an absolute liar and the Bible is completely untrue, every human being that dies is going to be resurrected either to spend eternity with God in heaven or in isolation from God in hell.

That is why God wants every one of His followers to be joined together in a single quest and that is to look for people who do not know God and in a loving, sensitive, gracious way point them toward Jesus Christ and His life changing power.

That is why Jesus did not leave the church’s job description to chance or to some human committee. Before He left this planet He told us exactly what our number one responsibility is, both corporately and individually.

“And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’” (Matthew 28:18-19, NASB)

That is why we celebrate those who do make that discovery of the life changing power of Jesus Christ. That process is called baptism. When you see someone baptized, you are seeing their story. You are seeing them die to sin, be buried, and be raised to walk in new life. In Bible times they baptized by immersion, going completely under the water. That’s a picture of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. When we are baptized, we’re saying to others, this is my story. I’m surrendered to Jesus and I’m going to live a life becoming more like Jesus.

[Pastor’s Note: Dr. Merritt’s background is Southern Baptist, and our practice is to baptize by immersion. If that is not the practice in your church, you may want to adjust the previous paragraph slightly to fit your particular mode of baptism.]

How do we get to the point where God can use us to simply share our story with other people of how Christ changed our life so Christ can change theirs?

I. See The People Who Need God

Most of us at some point in time have been to a hospital. We’ve visited someone or been there ourselves. A hospital is a place where people go to get well. Usually we stay a few days, and then we’re home. Now there’s another kind of place where people go when they are sick and it is called a “hospice”. Most of you have been to a hospital, but I doubt if many of you have been to a hospice. If you don’t know what a hospice is, it is a place where people simply go to die. It is the one place where if you go into that place, alive, you know you are not coming out the same way.

A hospice is not a pleasant place. There are rooms upon rooms and each contains the shriveling bodies of people who were dying and knew they were dying. It’s a quiet place, and a somber place. It’s a depressing place. If you go to visit someone in hospice, it’s often hard to be an encouragement. When I think of a hospice, I think “That is exactly the way this world is spiritually.” The vast majority of this world is people who need God. They are spiritually dying and they need the eternal life that Jesus Christ can give.

I want to share with you some extremely encouraging news. Dr. Thom Rainer, one of the foremost church growth and evangelism experts in the world, worked with fifteen research assistants and spent two years going to all fifty states and Canada. He interviewed hundreds of unchurched people in every major age and ethnic group. He discovered five faith stages that people are in. They go from U1 to U5 with U standing for unchurched. Here is the scale. Keep in mind these are specific to people in the U.S. and Canada:

U1 Highly receptive to hearing and believing the Good News. 10% of people
U2 Receptive to the gospel and the church. 27% of people
U3 Neutral, with no clear signs of being interested, yet perhaps open to discussion. 36% of people
U4 Resistant to the gospel, but with no antagonistic attitude. 21% of people
U5 Highly antagonistic and even hostile to the gospel. 5% of people.

As you look at this scale, I am going to be extremely brief in explaining it and cut to the chase. The people that we fear the most are people who are highly antagonistic and even hostile to the Gospel. They found that of the 160 million unchurched people in America, only 5% are in the category. In other words, only one- in-twenty people will be completely hostile to the Gospel.

Then there are people who are resistant to the Gospel, but they are not antagonistic. They really don’t want to hear the Gospel, but they won’t be belligerent about it. In fact, this will shock you – 62% of these people would go to church if someone invited them, but as it is they only make up 21% of the population so you will only meet this person 1 out of 5 times.

Let me put it another way. Seventy-five percent of the people that you meet will either be open to discussing the Gospel, open to hearing your story about Christ, very receptive to hearing your story about Christ or highly receptive to hearing your story about Christ and ready to accept Christ. With that picture in mind, listen to the next point.

II. Seek People Without God

Jesus himself said in Luke 19:10, "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." (Luke 19:10, NASB)

We are to do the same thing as Jesus. We are to seek out people who do not know God, believing that God will use us to help them know God. Here is the sad truth. The longer a person attends church, the fewer discussions they engage in with unchurched people, because they have fewer friends who are unchurched.

What does that mean? That means that people who follow Christ have to be more intentional about developing relationships with unchurched people. That is one of the things we are committed to do here at our church. We have means to teach you and train you in how to build relationships with unchurched people. Sometimes when we spend money as the church on strategic events, food, games, youth events, children’s and family activities, summer programming, people may ask, “Why do we do that?” I’ll tell you why. All of those events and ministries help us to connect to unchurched people. They are opportunities for you to invite and engage people in your community, your neighborhood and your workplace. to say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing at our church I think you would enjoy. How about joining me and my family?” That isn’t just a simple social invitation. That is opening a door to share the Gospel!

We want those of you who work outside this church, to begin to see your corporate office as your mission field. We want you to begin to understand that you are in the ministry just our staff is. Your ministry just happens to be on your one street where our ministry happens to begin at the church building.

We are going to ask you to begin to look at your home as a place that God could use in an incredible way to reach your neighbors and your friends for Christ. We want you to get this mentality in your heart that it is everyone, everywhere, everyday.

Believe it or not, it is not that hard. How difficult is it to have a cook-out at your home and invite your friends and neighbors over, just to get to know them? How hard is it to simply take your next door neighbor out to dinner just for the purpose of building bridges? How hard is it to take an opportunity just to invite your coworkers, your neighbors, the people that you know where you live, work and play to church?

The point is every day, just like Jesus Christ, we ought to be intentional and purposeful in seeking out people who do not know God and have no relationship with God. I want us to stop and pray, right now, and ask God to begin to give us a heart like His that would seek after people and find people and discover people and build relationships with people who do not know Him.

[Pastor’s Note: At this point, lead the church through a time of prayer to develop a burden for the lost in their homes, their communities and neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and elsewhere.]

III. Share With People So They Can Know God

Let’s suppose that you do want to get involved in being used by God in your own way to bring other unbelievers into becoming a follower of Christ. Let’s imagine that you do see people who need God. Let’s imagine that you do seek people without God. Let’s imagine that you’ve cultivated a relationship with your next door neighbor and you built a friendship over the last several weeks or months. You have tested the spiritual waters. You both know that you are in different spiritual places. Your neighbor understands that you are really in to God and believe you have a personal relationship with God, but your neighbor, on the other hand, does not and is willing to admit it.

Now imagine that magic moment comes when your neighbor says something along these lines, “How can I know God?” or “How can I have a personal relationship with God?” or “Why is all this stuff about God important to you?” When that moment comes, and it will, that moment will be the defining moment in that entire relationship and it is the moment that God wants to drive every relationship to.

You can pour yourself into developing friendships with unchurched people, building relationships, finding out where they are in their spiritual journey, but then completely lose the god moment and the opportunity to see someone come to Christ if you don’t know how to share with people effectively so they can know God.

We are going to help you do just that thing both today and in the future. We are going to give you a tool—a simple tool. It is your story, your testimony, that we want you to write down, in hopefully, one hundred words or less that is simple, clear and understandable that simply conveys four things:

What my life was like before I met Jesus
How I realized I needed Jesus
How I surrendered my life to Jesus
The difference Jesus has made in my life

To give you just one example of this let me share with you one story as an example. This story is ninety-six words and takes me less than a minute to tell it. If you are a follower of Christ you have your own story. This is one example:

“I grew up in church. I was very religious and a ‘good kid.’ I knew a lot about God, but did not know God, nor understand that I had a sin problem. I did not have a real personal relationship with God. Then in a movie theater, watching the story of how Jesus Christ died for sinners, I realized I was one! I wanted complete forgiveness and to be right with God. I surrendered my life to Christ and I live every day with the joy and peace of a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.”

[Pastor’s Note: You should substitute your own personal story for the example story above.]

I want you to take these four questions with you and spend time writing out your own story. You might ask, why is this important? I’ll tell you. The fact is, you will not share Christ if you do not have a plan to share Christ. If you have a plan, and you have written out that story of Christ and what He has done in your life, and are confident in that short story and ready to share it, I guarantee you that Jesus will give you the opportunity to tell it to someone else. Notice here too that it’s not memorizing a bunch of Bible verses or a specific technique or gearing up to battle someone in apologetics. Sharing Christ simply begins with sharing what He has done in your life. If you can get your story on paper, think it through, and say it in a few sentences like the example I gave you, God will use that to draw others back to Himself!

Think about three words: anyone, anywhere, anytime. See whether or not you agree with this. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can have their life eternally changed through the power and grace of Jesus Christ. Do you understand there are people where you live, work and play who are one prayer away from becoming your eternal brother and eternal sister and a part of God’s family? Envision what could happen in our church if every real estate broker, airline pilot, lawyer, homemaker, CEO, business owner, manager, or salesman said “I love my job, because I realize I am in the people business. They may pay me to do their work, but my job is really my mission. I am here to see others who need God, to seek others without God, and to share with them so they can know God.”

I love the way Bill Hybels puts it. We need to become “seed sowing fools” sowing the Gospel of Christ everywhere that we can.

I am going to do something a little unorthodox for us right here at the end of the sermon. Most of you will take those four questions and slip them into your purse, or the front flap of your Bible or in your pocket, and you’ll probably forget about them this week. So we’re going to take a few minutes right now, and let you get started on your story right where you are. We’ve provided some pens and paper if you need them, and we’re going to take time right now to let you write out that story. After a few minutes, I will close us in prayer. But this will give time for each of you to get a good start.

For those of you looking at that blank piece of paper and saying to yourself, “I don’t have a story like that,” let me encourage you to come see me or one of our other staff ministers either during this time or after the service. We’d like to share our story in Christ with you, and we’d like to lead you to know Jesus by telling you His story of redemption and forgiveness. Let’s get started.

[Pastor’s note: If you do the exercise above, be sure to have paper and pens ready for people. This is best done by having a blank page in your Sunday bulletin, and pens in your seat-backs or pews, to keep people from having to move around. Also, some soft music playing under this time in the service keeps it from being a ‘dead spot’ of silence. Finally, practice briefly writing out your own story so that you can determine about how long is needed to get started. We recommend about 4-5 minutes at minimum.]