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Living Hope SDA Church

Christian Martin

Becoming Useful for God

Oh, that our prayers would be, Lord, I am willing.

My message today is entitled Becoming Useful for God.

You've prepared our hearts now to receive the living word, a message that comes from you.

Lord, we we choose to humble ourselves and pray that Your voice would be heard and understood.

And Father, we pray that as we leave this place, we would be inspired to know that there is a God that wants to use me for his glory.

Thank you Lord for speaking to our hearts through your word in Jesus name amen.

The place the city of Jerusalem and I'm certain that eyewitnesses described the marvelous scene that they saw with their very own eyes as astonishing, exciting, awe-inspiring, and even hair-raising.

And what ignited this moment, this unprecedented scene, was a fiery display of divine power.

As the third person of the Godhead literally descended upon 12 men and others in the form of tons of fire coming down from above and they were given the gift of tons.

As a result these these Galileans who are by the way were known to have a very strong accent.

You could pick up on someone from Galilee right away.

And not just a strong accent but they had poor language skills.

And when they began to fluently speak a variety of foreign languages.

You can only imagine the reaction of the people.

And according to the record in the book of Acts, all this took place on the day of Pentecost.

Interestingly enough, did you know that Pentecost is a Greek word?

So it's no coincidence that the miracle in Jerusalem took place precisely 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus.

And it was nothing short of breathtaking.

You know, we're asked at times, if there was a story in the Bible that you could just be transported back to and be able to experience firsthand.

I have often, I have often been tempted to say, Day of Pentecost, that's the day I would want to witness in person.

I mean, First of all, Peter, the Apostles Peter inspired speech was epic.

It reviewed the life of Christ and with conviction He proclaimed that their friend and Lord was risen and enthroned at the right hand of God.

The Bible says that they were cut to the heart.

That means that strong conviction overtook them.

But from an evangelistic perspective, I think the most exciting that day would have been the amazing result.

The apostles and others witnessed about 3, 000.

3, 000 people not only gladly received the message that they heard, but they chose to be publicly, publicly give public testimony that they would be disciples of Jesus Christ.

I've even seen 30 plus baptisms at times in my lifetime.

But the closest that I came to an experience like this was when Heidi and I traveled to Kenya.

And there I preached an evangelistic series in the country of Banana Hill.

If you're going to have, you know, a village where you're going to go and be a missionary and preach the gospel, You want it to be Banana Hill.

We went there and there was about 300 people that came to our series of meetings and out of those 300 people About 50 of them made decisions for baptism.

We were outdoors preaching our hearts out, out there under the night sky, and people came and they listened.

We were 1 of several sites throughout the city of Nairobi.

And on the closing weekend, over 20, 000 people gathered together in Uhuru Park.

It was 1 of the central parks there in the city.

And they came and we worshipped together that day, that hot, sunny afternoon.

And I'll never forget that as we were worshipping, that they invited everyone who had made decisions for baptism to come forward.

And what a sight that was as he sat there and you literally saw like this massive, massive crowd of people coming forward from near and far from all directions coming to the very front.

As you can see in the top left picture, you'll see that they're holding this card.

Every card that you see up is someone who's making a commandment for baptism.

And on that day, they affirmed their baptism by affirming their baptismal vows.

That you hear them here at the Living Hope.

And as they raised those cards, tears came to our eyes as we saw how the spirit of God was moving in hearts in such a powerful way.

And once we affirmed their baptismal vows, well, it was time for the baptismal celebration that was gonna happen at that university swimming pool.

So I remember us grabbing our bags because we're gonna walk by foot on foot to the university and so we literally picked up and there was thousands of us walking to the university all at the same time, creating traffic jams throughout several city blocks until we finally arrived at the pool, Olympic-sized pool.

And you can only imagine, as we witnessed with our very eyes, hundreds of men and women.

In fact, there were 1, 800 who were baptized that day.

The largest baptismal service I've ever seen with my eyes.

Like I said, many of us had tears in our eyes as we saw the Spirit of God moving in such a powerful way.

And we hear about these stories, reports coming from Asia, from Africa, from all over the world.

But The burden that should be in the heart of every modern day disciple of Christ is this.

Especially those that live in the western culture, in the western society.

If we have the same message, right here, that the first century church preached and if we are promised the same divine power that the first century church received, can we not expect the same results as in the day of Pentecost in the 21st century?

If we have been given the same precious promises that we will receive the power of the Holy Spirit When we ask, and if we have the same Scriptures, the same teachings of Jesus, that we ourselves can proclaim and preach and teach today, And if we have the capability to communicate in some way or another, then why don't we see more of the same results that the disciples themselves saw on the day of Pentecost?

Each 1 of us ought to ask ourselves, since the day that I became a disciple of Christ, Since the day that I made a profession to follow Jesus, have I been used by God to lead somebody to salvation and to a knowledge of the truth?

After all, Jesus revealed his will in the Bible.

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Becoming Useful for God

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