Well, welcome, Antioch family and friends. And it is 2014. So, Happy New Year. Here we go. And as always, we as a leadership team are committed to, "God what are you saying for the year? What is your word to us and then how do we live that out? How do we respond?" Actually, that is a good way to live life personally as well. "Lord, what are you saying?" and respond to it.
Well, we know some things that God is saying for sure - that this is going to be a season of fresh encounters with Him. He's inviting us in to give Him a little more space, a little more room to bring us in to those deeper places in Him. Second thing, which actually correlates to it is that, it's to be a season of strengthening our family. That would be personal lives, that would be our church family, and our personal families -- that God is wanting us to go deeper, so that he can take us wider. Key scripture for this year is Ephesians 3:20 and 21, "Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we could ask or think, according to his power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, forever and ever, amen." That's a good word, by the way. God wants to do above and beyond all that we could ask or think in 2014 - obviously corporately, but also for you personally. You can take that corporate word and apply it to your own life.
Well, this morning I'm going to lay a little groundwork for where we're going, and what God's speaking to us, but tonight is all the good stuff. Ya, I'm not going to tell you any of the good stuff except tonight and that's hopefully a primer to get everybody to come be a part of it. God's been speaking some incredible things to us. And we're going to be talking about that tonight at 5 o'clock. There will be children's ministry available. We're going to have some fun. We're going to talk about where God has taken us and where he's taking us in the future, and so please, I encourage you to be a part of that this evening, 5 -- I'd say probably 6:30 is going to be as late as it goes. It could go a little shorter than that.
All right, well, let me bring you into this morning, as we lay the groundwork, let me take you back to 1968. Not many of y'all in this room can go back that far. But, 1968, I was four years old. And as you could imagine -- hey, was that a good, bad, I don't know what that "wow" was about. So 1968, I was four years old, and I was an active kid, as you could imagine. And so, of course, anything that I could climb or move or run around with -- the only fear I had though, was of two-wheeled bicycles. Two-wheelers -- those were a little intimidating. At least, maybe they didn't have them back in those days, they didn't have them at our house --they didn't have training wheels. And I was five years younger than my next sibling up, and so Mom and Dad must have forgotten that we did have a tricycle up there in the attic. And so they pulled out the trike. And so this tricycle, though was not -- this wasn't one of those little, red things. This was a big trike. This was a four year old man's trike. And I, I loved that thing. I mean I can still in my mind's eye just see me riding down the driveway as fast as I could. You felt so stable and ready to go, but you felt big because it was a bigger trike, not a small one. Well, actually, my parents one Easter, that Easter, right after I'd gotten the trike and was trying it out, they decided to get out the old 8mm camera after Easter Sunday and catch me doing my thing down the driveway. I want to take you into it right now.
I still got it. I can still ride the trike. I can still ride the big trike. That girl sticking her tongue out -- that was my sister, by the way. I had to grow up with that, all the time. She could hula hoop all day long, if you noticed that. So the trike! I mean, I'm looking for a comeback for the trike. This is a good deal right here, and you know, there are so many different things I love about the trike, but the main deal is that it's stable. It's stable but you can also move forward.
Now, have you ever been driving down the highway, and you come up on a motorcycle, and you're thinking, "Man, that's two wheels. Those things are pretty shaky there."? But, then you come up on a dude that's got the motorcycle with the two wheels on the back and one wheel on the front, and you're just riding alongside him, waving at him. It's no big deal because he's stable. He's on the three-wheel deal, not the two-wheel deal. And the other thing is, you know, about a trike that I would love about it was that I could not only ride it, but I had a big -- mine wasn't a basket -- I had a little platform. I could take two or three kids on the bike. I mean, you could take people with you on this thing, and never fear falling over. The trike needs to make a comeback.
Well, what I wanted to do with the tricycle was kind of, put it in the form of where we're going as a people. And today's message is called, "The Tricycle Church" -- the three-wheeled church that has stability and forward movement. How 'bout it? All right. So let's break it down. You've got wheel one right here, the big wheel. This is the thing that makes this thing go. If this wheel's not secure and ready to go, we're going to be in trouble. And that first wheel represents what I'm going to call this morning, encountering God. Of course it means loving Jesus, it means honoring God with our lives, but encountering God -- I specifically use that word because God is not to just be thought about, He's to be encountered. He's to be walked with. It is not just the knowledge of God, but it is also the intimacy of God that He calls us to. Jesus said it this way, "We're to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength."
So let's break that down a little bit. All of our heart: Our affections, our reasonings, our desires, that emotional center of who we are. We're loving with all of our soul: Our unique personality, the way that God expresses Himself through us. There's a way that each of us uniquely connect to God. Our mind: We're to renew our minds with the word of God and the knowledge of God. With all of our strength: We're to live with Him all the time. In Him we live and move and have our being. It's not for this little space of time, or that little space of time, it's God all the time. We're to live in His presence. That first wheel is the wheel of encounter. I love what the apostle John said in 1 John 1. He said, "What we have seen, what we have tasted, what we have heard, these are the things that we proclaim to you." It's not just about Jesus. We have felt, tasted, touched, interacted, walked with Him. And he ends this little phrase, he said, "The reason I'm writing you these things [about feel, taste, touch] is so that your joy may be made full." God wants our walk with Him to be a delight, and not simply a duty. And to be a delight, we've got to be able to say, "God, we're yours all the time, 24 hours a day. We're in, we're with You, living and moving in and through You.
Well, I want to take you Old Testament to New Testament to demonstrate our kind of our tricycle church today. And on this encounter one, I want to take you back to Moses. Now Moses was the leader of the people of Israel. He brought them out of Egypt and into the wilderness and got them all ready to go into the Promised Land. And Moses had an encounter with God. It began with an encounter with God. He was just doing what he normally did as a shepherd, and he was up in the mountains and all of a sudden he looks over and he sees a burning bush that's not being consumed. And he thinks it odd, and so he pauses and he turns. And the Scripture says that when God saw that Moses stopped and turned, God spoke. And God said, "Moses, the place where you are is holy ground. Take off your shoes. I have something to say to you." And then God speaks to him about his calling.
Well, 2014 is about doing just that -- stopping and pausing, looking the Lord's way. It's not enough to just know that He's over there. Yes, God speaks, yes, He's over there, but we have to stop and turn and give Him our attention. Who knows the wonders of what God might say? I actually think it will be above and beyond what we could ask or think. Moses was just doing a job. He paused and God spoke. He encountered God. Well, later on we read in Exodus 33:11, Moses would have these encounters often. And it would go something like this, "The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend."
I remember as a young believer reading the Bible and wondering, "Can people experience God like they are in the New Testament? Or in the Old Testament? Is this for me, or is this just something we read about to learn lessons from?" And then I began to read a few stories of people's lives, modern day lives -- people who had encountered God and were living out some of those similar experiences. And then I remember reading Exodus 33. I was with a small group. We were talking about what Jesus is doing. We were reading Scriptures and I read this Exodus 33:11, and it just hit me. The a-ha of God, the revelation, "Oh my goodness, God has this for me." And I mean, I fell over on my knees and wept for over an hour. I'm sure people thought, "What's wrong with this dude? Is he OK?" People were praying weird stuff over me, and I was really, "Leave me alone, leave me alone! God's talking to me -- that He wants to be my friend! He says that I can know Him just like Moses!" And that wasn't because I'm unique, it's because that's God's delight for everyone. He wants us to know Him face to face as a man speaks to his friend.
Right after this encounter is documented, then Moses prays this prayer, he said, "I now therefore pray you, Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, let me know your ways, that I may know you, so that I might find favor in your sight. Consider too, this nation, Israel, is your people." And God said, "And my presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest." My presence will go with you. He asks, and immediately the next sentence he gets it. "God, I need you. I've tasted of you and I want more." And God says, "My presence will go with you. And because my presence is with you, I'll give you rest. You're going to be at peace wherever you go because my presence will be tangible and real." A couple of verses later, Moses identifies it this way, he said, "God the way that everyone will know that we are yours is by your presence. It is the distinguishing factor between us and everyone else." It's the presence of God.
God has His presence available for us. In the Old Testament, actually, it wasn't just for a few. God really did offer it to the rest of the Israelites. In Exodus 20, He called them to the mountain and He was trying to get them to understand that He is the absolute authority, and so it was a little scary there, on the mountain it was thundering and lightening, but God wanted to speak out of the mountain, and the people drew back and they said, "No! Don't let God speak to us. Moses, you speak to us and we'll do whatever you say that you hear from God. God speaks to you, you speak to us, but we don't want to talk to God ourselves, it's too scary." All right it goes something like this --this would be the Old Testament model: "God, you speak to Moses, and then Moses will speak to us, and then we'll follow Moses." Well, you know, that never really works. Y'all ever notice that? I don't care how godly the Moses in your life is, or how many books they've written or whatever. In the end, you've got to hear from God to walk with God for the long haul. You'll never live off somebody else's revelation of God for the long haul. The way the church works is when everybody's hearing from God, everybody's engaged with God, and together we walk forward in the grace of God. That's the "now" way of God.
So let's just jump right there. In the New Testament, Jesus shows up so that we might know who God is. He said, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. I'm here to demonstrate and to show you who God is and what it means to walk with me." It won't be just knowledge or looking at one person, a prophet, or king or a priest, but now you will see it in the person of Jesus. I love in Mark where it says, "When He called his disciples, He called them to be with Him." Not just to learn about Him, not just to follow Him around, but to be with Him. And Jesus walked with His disciples, He talked to them. Everyday life, coming and going, He ate with them, He laughed with them, He cried with them, He prayed with them, and He demonstrated His power not only for them, but then gave His power to them. Man, it was holistic. It was 24/7, walking and talking with Jesus, and basically everything about this we read of the gospels of Jesus walking and talking with the disciples, He's saying, "This is that, this is what I want you to live like. I'm going to eventually go to a cross. I will rise again. I will ascend to the Father. I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, so that what you see happening here will be yours forever, always."
Well, Jesus did exactly that. You know the story. He had told them I [He] would have to go to a cross, there would have to be a sacrifice because there was a veil between God and man, and that veil had to be rent; and that man could not get rid of the veil on its own because of his sin, so Jesus became a sacrifice. He became sin on our behalf. He bore our sin so that, that veil between God and man could be rent. There's now a sacrifice so that we can enter in to God's throne room. It didn't end there. After three days -- He was buried -- and the Father reached down and raised Him from the dead. He appeared for forty days and spoke to them about the kingdom of God. Now this God who demonstrated Himself, had sacrificed Himself, and now He was risen again, and there was no doubting, no denying that Jesus is who He says He was. He ascends to the Father. He then sends the promise of the Holy Spirit, so that we would know that God is with us always. So no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, by coming to Jesus, your sins are forgiven, and you enter into a relationship with Him by the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Jesus for the "now" that you have promised.
Second Corinthians 3:16-18 captures this really well. It says, "But whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. We all with unveiled faces beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into that same image from glory to glory even as from the Lord -the Spirit." The veil's been taken away. We enter in. We get to enjoy the context of this passage in 2 Corinthians. It precedes it, talking about the life of Moses. And it said in Moses' day, he would meet with God and the glory would be so powerful on him that he'd put a veil over his face because it would blow people away. They said, "But in the new covenant, that veil has been taken away and that glory is now for everyone, and it's even greater than it was on Moses." So however God met with Moses is nothing compared to how God intends for us to meet with Him. So as we talked about, the diagram has changed a little bit. Now it's: God speaks to all people and God speaks to Moses, and they walk together. Right? God is speaking always through His people if we would listen. He chooses leaders to serve us, to what? Help us hear God better, and walk with God. It's all about Jesus now being the head of the church. Jesus being the centrality of our lives, with everyone having full access to Him, and in this journey He wants us to know Him more than we could even ask or think. One more passage on this thought, Hebrews 4:14-16, "Therefore since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so we may receive mercy and help in our time of need." Jesus is waiting! He is wanting to encounter you with His goodness and His loving-kindness. Won't 2014 be a year that we come like never before!
Well, as I talked about, I had a fear of two-wheeled bicycles. Eventually, I got over that and learned how to ride a two-wheeled bike; and we spent a lot of time on those bicycles. And one of the places we loved to go was what we called the Callwood Hills. I lived in Beaumont, Texas, everything was flat, but somehow a bunch of dirt had gotten piled up in this particular area near some woods and we had made trails through there and jumps and the whole deal. And so we were always working on our little Schwinn bikes so that we could go faster, jump higher or whatever. And one day we worked on our bikes, and then we headed off to the trails. And we got on the trails, and the first jump was always the best one. It would go down, and you'd jump and you probably went about 10 feet, 15 feet in the air. I thought it was 30 or 40 at the time, but it was still a pretty big jump. And so I've got my little Schwinn bike, man, pedaled as fast as I can, go down, I go off the jump, and "whoo!" and the wheel just "choomp, choomp, choomp, choomp, choomp." Yep-- I'm in there looking cool, cross up with no wheel on the front. It's slow motion, man. You know it's about to happen. So it's like, "Noooo," and I'm thinking -- stupid in retrospect -- "I think I'll turn the handlebars so they won't hit me." Well, that was dumb. You turn the handlebars; you just set yourself up, right? My ribs hit the handlebars; I go flying, rolling, skidding down the path, strawberry from head to toe, bruised ribs, the whole deal. And what I realized is that we were messing with the front wheel, and when we did, I got a little distracted and had not bolted it down tight. Catching the illustration here, right? The front wheel is encountering Jesus. If this thing ain't bolted down, man, this thing ain't rolling. And when you get out there in the great adventure, this thing better be tight. You need it to land right. Meeting with Jesus is everything, encounters with God. And I don't mean that in some super spiritual just emotional way. I mean that in a very real, tangible presence of God that He promises throughout the Scripture by the Holy Spirit.
We're going to be giving a little more space and time once a month on Sunday nights. We're going to be meeting for a worship night that's going to kind of be unending. A little more opportunity for us corporately to engage God, and our hope and prayer through that is that will feed over into your personal lives, your family lives and the spontaneity of the Spirit in our midst like never before. God wants to do above and beyond.
All right, we've got wheel one -- we're encountering God. Now the back part of this is stability. Stability - wheel number two -- is discipleship. Of course we talk a lot about that, but really it's just intentional investment in one another's lives to learn more about Jesus. It's helping people learn more about Jesus in such a way they can help someone else learn more about Jesus. We are made to do things together, and not apart.
In 2012, Rick Warren from Saddleback Church, the guy who wrote Purpose Driven Life, challenged his church to lose weight for the year. Let's glorify God through our bodies, and so they created this Bible study and this Daniel plan and it was a pretty cool deal, and they kept great statistics. And here was one of their statistics after Year One. One of their statistics was people who did it with a partner, or a small group of people together lost twice as much weight as those who tried to do it alone. Those who tried to do it alone were three times [more] less likely to finish than those who did it with a partner or with somebody else. Now for all you New Year's resolution people, there's a little clue, just helping you out. But the reality is, is that we're not made to run this race alone. Discipleship is not just what we ought to do, it's what we're made to do. And when we're walking together with one another, it is where the grace of God dwells; to be able to enter, and to do the things God has called us to do.
Well, let's go back to the Old Testament. Is discipleship just a New Testament model? No, absolutely not. Moses was called to disciple people. Now Moses, you know, he was the man. He met with God on a mountain, I mean he's meeting God in fire, he's writing the Ten Commandments. I mean he's got some things going for him, that maybe the other guys didn't. But, God had called him to impart what he had to others. If you remember the story, once he's leading the people of Israel, he's overwhelmed, his father-in-law, Jethro comes to him and says, "Moses, you're not going to make it, man. Everybody's coming to you to hear from God. What you need to do is you need to find leaders of 10s and 50s and 100s and 1000s, and what anointing is on you, you need to put on them, and they need to lead and care for the people, because you're not made to do it alone." Even a guy meeting that powerfully with God was still not called to do it alone. So he does the deal, and all of a sudden, they're able to flourish, he's able to survive, and actually it's better for the people than meeting just with Moses.
Everything we're about in this church when we talk about Life Groups, when we talk about discipleship, it's all about ministering to one another and multiplying out the ability to serve each other, so that there's always enough bread. If it's just a few that have to mentor everybody, the church will never be the church. But everybody has an opportunity to care for somebody else. So Moses' father-in-law Jethro tells him how to do it. He institutes this system, but then specifically there's always people that God calls you individually, to carry in your heart. People that God's called you to believe for, and Moses had a buddy named Joshua. Joshua would eventually lead the people of God into the Promised Land. He actually would become greater than Moses. He would conquer more lands, he would be a better leader than Moses, and that's the goal. God puts people on your heart to invest in them and make them better than yourself. That's what Moses did with Joshua, and we see that because they wrote a whole book just on Joshua and how God led him, and his exploits. One other deal about Old Testament discipleship which carries over today is that Moses knew that the central discipleship had to be the family. It's better to build something than to reconstruct something. Right? And if we build well on the front end, then we don't all, somewhere in the middle of our lives have to be reconstructed from all the complexity that wasn't dealt with early.
So the admonition first and foremost is disciple your family. Deuteronomy 6:6-9, Moses speaking, "These words which I'm commanding you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and daughters, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates." We're to be diligent that all of life that we are imparting to our families, everywhere we go, we're talking about Jesus, we're helping people know Jesus. Discipleship begins at home, even as it does in individuals' lives. So Moses learned to disciple.
Now let's fast forward obviously to Jesus. It's the model, it was His plan A. He called three, He called twelve, He called the seventy, [and He said, "Listen, if you'll invest"] He modeled it, then He told us to go and do the same, to go and to make disciples. My favorite part of the discipleship journey of Jesus was when a guy named Andrew, one of His first disciples was called. He called, he met with Jesus, and he realized, "I've got to go get my brother. He needs to meet Jesus." He goes and gets his brother Peter, and he says, "Come, see the Messiah. Come see the man who told me what we need to know, how we need to live. He's for real. He brought Peter to Jesus." Sometimes we feel a little insecure in discipleship, "I mean, I've got my own problems, man. I can't help anybody else." But you know what it is -- it's fellow strugglers helping fellow strugglers get to Jesus. That's what discipleship is. It's not just about you and what you know, it's about helping people get to Jesus, and everybody can do that. Andrew brought Peter to Jesus, and Peter ended up being the head of the church. It works. The Apostle Paul says it this way in 2 Timothy 2:2, "The things that you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also."
Well, we've had so many lives transformed through basic discipleship, helping people get to Jesus, that we really could take days to talk about the goodness of God. But, one particular guy came from the Midwest as a college freshman. He had come to know Jesus when he was 12 years old, and it was kind of a unique deal because he was walking around a lake with his sister and somebody just walked up to him and asked he'd ever heard of Jesus. They ended up sharing the gospel with him, went back and told their parents. Their parents came to know Jesus. They got baptized as a family, and the parents got involved in church. But they didn't know much about walking with Jesus, and the particular church they were part of, didn't necessarily help them on a personal level, just helped them in the big picture. So, as most high school students, if you don't have somebody to walk with, if you don't have somebody that you're walking closely with and being honest with, you're going to drift, you're going to kind of live a dual life, and that was this guy's experience. So he ended up coming to Baylor, and he comes to Baylor, and some friends initiate with him to come to a Life Group. They invited him to a community, so they were really nice, but he said what was really the game changer was -- he had a good experience in the group -- and then they asked if he'd like to meet afterwards. And they said, "Hey, we want to help you out. We want to help you walk with Jesus." And so, they helped him learn how to meet with Jesus. He said, "I never had a time alone with God in my life that I really understood the Bible, and could pray and read." They did it with him, changed his life. They told him how to help other people, how to reach out to other people, how to pray for other people, how to believe God for others to be reached with the good news of Jesus. They taught him how to deal with his own stuff. He got healed of brokenness in his life and got out of some sin and different things. We call it look up, look in, look out. He has worked through those basics. Well, it stuck and he began to invest in other people, began to lead Life Groups, began to lead groups of Life Groups, eventually came on our staff, and we've worked together for the last 26 years. That Baylor freshman from the Midwest -- Jeff Abshire, 1988. There he is. I tell ya -- our staff stays looking young. He looks just like that today.
The most basic things that God's called us to do -- if we just do them, long in the right direction. If we just stay with it, and we invest in others' lives, if we carry people in our hearts, God will use us to be part of changing the world.
All right, we've got: Discipleship, Stability. Last piece of stability here on our bike/trike, the tricycle church is mission. Mission. God has called us all be on mission. My experience in life tells me this: There are certain aspects you will never know about Jesus until you're on mission. There are certain aspects about God you'll never know unless you see yourself as, what the Bible calls, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the ambassador of Jesus, or a witness for Jesus. We're all called to be on mission. And when we engage the mission, there are aspects of the kingdom of God that open up like nothing else does.
One of my favorite Scriptures, Acts 1:8, you're very familiar with it, hopefully. "But you'll receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you. You shall be witnesses, both in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and even to the remotest parts of the earth." That word, witness, is the message that we speak , and it's the life that we live. Witness is not just one dimensional. It's not just sharing the gospel, it's the way you live your life holistically. In the Old Testament, back to Moses in Israel, how were they witnesses? How were they salt and light? How were they on mission? Well, God said to the children of Israel, "You guys will be my glory on the earth. You will represent who I am in every aspect of life." And so the reality of the Old Testament, you see God speaking to them specifically how to run government, how to run law, how to run health care, how to run education, how to run social justice issues, how to run business. Every aspect of life, God goes to the painstaking detail to tell the children of Israel how to live life in such a way that they will experience God and glorify God through their lives. And nothing has changed. We are still called to do the same. We're called to glorify God in every aspect of our lives. But we have to see ourselves on mission as we go to work every day. We have to see ourselves as on mission as a mom or as a dad, we have to see ourselves as on mission- as a student -- whatever sphere God has you in, you are to re-present God, represent God for the glory of God. You're made for this, and when you're alive and on mission, Jesus is glorified, and you come alive because that's what you were created for.
This past week, I was studying in Panera Bread, kind of hiding in the corner there, and was observing a family, and I said, "I have seen them before," and I thought, "I've met the guy before." I just couldn't remember his name. And they had their three little girls, kids, there with them, and her mom was there, and so as I'm walking out, they initiated and this was Nolan and Sarah Schaeffer, a couple who's been in our church about three years, and Sarah introduced herself for the first time. Nolan reintroduced himself, and I said, "Well, how'd you guys get involved at Antioch?" And Nolan said, "Well, I met Nate Bobbett." Nate's the head of one of our training schools, but you may not know Nate's also a policeman. He went through the Police Academy, and for his field training, Nolan was his mentor in field training with the Woodway Police Department. So, a couple weeks into their field training, Nate shares who he is, what he's all about. Nolan's interested, but the earthquake happens in Haiti, and we ask Nate if he could lead our third team. Within three days we were there, and we sent teams every week. So, Nate was going to lead the third team. He found out Nolan was an EMT, and he said, "Nolan, why don't you come to Haiti with me?" And Nolan said, "I don't know why I said it, but I said, 'Sure!'" And within days, they were on their way to Haiti. And Nolan described it this way, he said, "I had a great time, you know obviously using my skills to help people, but," he said, "what was so amazing was the dynamic of prayer and ministry to people and one another, and I called my wife and I said, "Hey, you need to go to Antioch. You need to go to this church and check this out. If it's anything like we're experiencing here, they'll be great!" And it wasn't quite the apex of Haiti, but she did have a great time, and they said, "We've been here ever since." You know, we just, it was the mission of God that pulled them in as a family.
I can tell you that it is the mission of God that will pull you in to whatever God has for you. See, you've got to be about your Father's business, as well as looking for an encounter and intimacy with Him. One last illustration on this I want to communicate is, I had a good time over the holidays with a friend named John Reed. He and his wife Linda are coaches in an assessment called StrengthsFinders. Maybe you guys are familiar with it. StrengthsFinders is basically a test that you take, gives you 1-34 on words that describe, you know, what your talent themes are, and how you work, and the top five are kind of the drivers for your life. If you're a Baylor student, you took this test. But, what they discovered -- it was the Gallup poll people that did the research -- and they'd done 50 years of research on how are people motivated, how do people optimize who they are? And they realized most of the help they were giving people was helping people with their weaknesses. So, what? You get better at your weakness, you're just strong at your weakness.
But what if we actually took your strengths, and said let's help you with your strengths? So therefore came the little test, the StrengthsFinders. Millions of people have taken it. And here's one of the things that John said was the big turning point for his life. They said in the Strength Finders, again remember there are 34 words that describe a person, and you get your top five, and that kind of is what they work with to help you move forward. So, what are the chances of my top five and your top five being the same -- out of 34? One in 278,000. That you and I have the same top five -- not even in the same order -- 1 in 278,000 that we are the same as far as these motivations, these gifts that we have. The next question was, well, what about the same order? What's the likelihood of having them -- the top five strengths -- in the same order? It was 1 in 33 million. What were the chances of -- we'll stretch it out a little bit -- the top eight being in the same order? It was 1 in 77 billion. What were the chances that our top ten would be the same? It was 1 in 44 trillion. So John, he's a lawyer, and he said he was looking at this, as his buddy was describing it, and he said, "You know, I mean, I tried to help people the best I could, " he said, "I thought my personality was kind of boring. I'm just kind of a discipline/focus guy, I do my job, I take care of my family. I'm responsible, and I didn't even like my five words that they came up with on my StrengthsFinders." But he said, "When they laid it way out this way, I realized I want to make an impact in my generation, and you know what? If I don't show up, God doesn't show up. I'm 1 out of 278,000. If I don't do what I'm called to do, if I don't be who God's called me to be, then 1 in 278,000 people are not going to be blessed and helped. And, man those that are exactly that unique way that God made me, the same 1 to 5 in order in way of motivation, that's 1 in 33 million." He said, "If I want to impact my generation for the glory of God, then I've got to believe that I have something to offer, and I've got to do it with all my heart."
Well, it was a game changer for John, and he began to engage his law practice, it's a large law practice, begin to see people move closer to Jesus, see lives changed. He said, "Well, this is so good, why don't we teach other business leaders and friends of mine, and do this well?" Not just StrengthsFinders, but how do you help people be on mission at work? And they begin to meet, and pray, weekly prayer meeting, then they would go on what they call SWATs. That's not a business analysis. They called it Spiritual Warfare And Tactics. They would go into a business, large business or small business, of Christians and they would meet early in the morning, they would pray through the hallways and everything else. They would get words from God. They began to see breakthroughs in companies in Omaha where they lived. Then they began to help other business leaders, say, "All right, how do you activate your life, [and everything else]." And John became one of the leaders of that, because he finally believed that he mattered. Today, John and Linda help out our teams in the United States who serve in different locations, and they are today in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where we're hosting a conference a hundred of our missionaries from ten different nations. And they are helping them understand who they are in God, and how they can be more powerful around how God has created them. They're touching the nations because they believed that they mattered.
We need you on mission. Mom, Dad, people that are called to Waco, people that are called to the nations of the earth, whatever it is that God has you doing, we need you. We need you. We need everybody to encounter God. We need everybody investing in each other's lives. We need everybody to be on mission, because when we are, the water level rises, not just for some outcome of good, but the water level rises so that we can be who we are called to be. And when we're who we are called to be, we're going to be alive! It won't be boring, I promise you, because God has a great adventure for all of us to glorify Himself. So we talked about the three wheels here on the tricycle, but what about the frame? Well, the frame is the church. I mean these wheels need something to ride on, and God's decided that He's bringing the kingdom of God in through His church. That's you and me. And when we literally get these wheels clear and stable, then we'll be able to ride into whatever God's called us to do and be.
Let me end with one last thought. The tricycle was invented in 1680 by a watchmaker named Stephan, and he'd had an accident, and it had left him a paraplegic, but he knew he still had a mission. He still had a job to do. He needed work so he prayed, and he thought, and he prayed and he thought, and he said, "If I could create something that had three different wheels that I could use with my [what I could, I think he could use parts of his fingers], if I could get that, then I could get around the watch shop, and then I could make watches. I could still be a contributor to society." The tricycle was invented by a paraplegic because he needed to know how to move forward, and not just be immobilized. That's what the church is all about. It doesn't matter if you're broken, it doesn't matter if you're young, it doesn't matter if you're old. We're all called to be a part of this together. There's a place for you, and there's a way to get there, by us trusting, believing and gathering around one another, as we pray to see His kingdom come and His will be done here in our city, and around the world. Let's stand together.
