Compassion Sunday

Can separate us. We'll not defeat the sun, too strong and mighty. Against us, if our God is a strong and mighty fortress. Raise your voice against us, if our God. Thank you for singing this morning. Have a seat.

Church Announcements and Upcoming Ministry Events

Amen. A couple announcements. We have a congregational meeting tomorrow at 7 o 'clock, right here in the sanctuary. Anybody is welcome to attend. Members are able to vote on things like new members and things of that nature.

On Tuesday, there is a women's Bible study. So women, if you're free on Tuesdays in the day, 9 .30 until 11, Jill Deegan will be teaching the women's Bible study every other Tuesday, beginning this Tuesday, June 8.

Number three, the men are not to be outdone. On Monday nights, we have a men's Bible study, studying manly things. On June 21 is when we begin on that. So it will be 7 PM on Monday nights. Drew Deegan teaching that.

And you guys may not know, you know that Phil is a musician. You see this is Phil back here on the bass guitar. What you do not know about Phil is he is also an artist. He makes pottery. Guys, look at this.

These pieces were all made by our own Phil. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because next Saturday, our church plant, The Rock, is having a block party. And Phil has made four pieces. You have more than that, Phil?

I have many more. Okay, how many do you have? About 70. 70 pieces of pottery will be for sale at the block party in Rancocos Woods. And all of the proceeds are being donated to The Rock, the church plant.

So we would love for you to go out to Rancocos Woods, enjoy the day, there's games for kids, and there's some pottery for sale. Good news, church. Remember a couple weeks ago, we had a baby born, little Walter?

Well, there is another baby that was born, a little girl named Audrey. Bob and Katie Dipold have a little baby named Audrey. I don't know anything other than it's a girl. So praise the Lord, a baby has joined the church.

Guys, thank you for anybody, men and women, who showed up for the work party yesterday. I was at a smorgasbord in Lancaster just eating all the food I could possibly eat while you guys were here working.

So thank you. We were there, by the way, because we went to see the show Esther. Anybody seen Esther at Sight and Sound? Absolutely incredible. It will bring the book of Esther to life in a way you just can't even imagine.

So if you get an opportunity to go to the book, if you go to Sight and Sound, I would recommend that highly. Praise God for what they're doing there. But thank you guys for the work that you put in yesterday.

Next Sunday, we are recognizing graduates. So if you are graduating from elementary school or middle school or high school, nursing school, whatever it may be, we wanna recognize you next Sunday. So let us know this week so we can make preparations.

We just wanna honor you and pray for you next Sunday. Both services. You can come to either. There is a men's breakfast tomorrow morning at 6 a .m. So guys, you gotta be soldiers if you're gonna do this.

Get up at the crack of dawn, come study God's word. We will have some food. So 6 a .m. for the men. Next Sunday, baptism at the lake in Marlton. I think we have like eight or nine. It seems like they're all young men this time, from maybe 13 years old to 20-something.

But it's eight or nine young men who are getting baptized in the lake. Thank you, Eric, for preparing them for that, by the way. And so please come if you like from 12 o 'clock till five o 'clock. We have the lake.

We're gonna be canoeing, fishing, having a blast on the beach. So everybody, please come hang out for any part of that time that you can. Marlton Lake next Sunday. And the baptism itself will be one o 'clock.

And last but not least, if you guys look out the window there, is anybody taking advantage of it yet this week? No, not yet. It's too hot this week. But we have an overflow area. If you wanna be outdoors, or if you come late and you can't find a seat, you're going outdoors.

But we have, it's just the same service going on there with the screen and a speaker, so you'll be able to hear what's going on. But if you wanna worship God in the great outdoors, still be part of the family, that's the overflow area as we're anticipating.

The church is growing like crazy, and we don't want it to stop. We want God to keep bringing people. So when all the rest of these seats fill in, people have to be out there. That's our plan. So praise God for what he's doing here at Cornerstone, and we're thankful that you all are here.

Let's keep worshiping the Lord. Yeah, I should pray before. I just got on a roll there, and I gotta dedicate this to the Lord. So Father God, you have overheard everything that we've said, and we wanna say to you, God, that you are the one who deserves all the glory and all the praise for the incredible things that are happening here at this church.

The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy. We praise you, Lord God. Thank you for what you're doing. We pray now, Lord, that you would take what's about to happen this Sunday morning in this space, and that you would receive glory from it.

We dedicate it to you and ask that you would come and take over, that you would speak through Edgar, speak through myself, speak through Rick. We ask that you would use mere jars of clay to show that the all-surpassing power comes from you and not from us.

Receive glory to your name. Be lifted up in this worship service. In Jesus' name, amen. Let's stand and worship.

Worship Through Song and the Glory of God

You may have had an easy week, an easy month. Some of us have struggles and things that we're dealing with, but this morning, we're gonna focus our minds back on praising the Lord. Let's sing together to God be the glory.

Be the glory. Great things he hath done. So loved he the world that he gave us. Be atoned for sin, and open the life in that all may go in. Praise the Lord. Hear his voice. Let the people rejoice. Jesus, the Son, and give him the great things he hath loved.

That chorus again, just our voices. Praise the Lord. Our Heavenly Father, that we offer our sacrifice of praise. The Son cannot compare. Compare to the glory of your love. There's no shadow in your presence.

Would dare to stand before your throne. Before the Holy One of Heaven. It's only by your blood, and it's only through your mercy, Lord, I come. I bring an offering of worship to my King. No one on earth deserves the praises that I sing.

Jesus, may you receive the honor that you're due. Let's sing that first verse again. The Son cannot compare. This is your prayer. Cannot compare to the glory of your love. There is no shadow in your presence.

Would dare to stand before your throne. Before the Holy One of Heaven. Only by your blood, and it's only through your mercy. I bring an offering of worship to my King. No one on earth deserves the praises that I sing.

Jesus, may you receive the honor that you're due. Oh, Lord, I bring an offering. I bring an offering.

Christ the Great High Priest and the Lord's Table

The only reason that we are able to bring an offering of praise to bring our very lives to God is because God himself has made an offering that atones for our sin. We have a great high priest whose name is Jesus.

He came to this earth, dwelt among us, tabernacling here among us. He lived a perfect life that we should have lived, but didn't. We all fall short of God's glory. But Jesus lived a perfect life, and then he gave his life for our sins.

He laid down on the cross as a substitute for our sins. They nailed him to a cross. They lifted him up, and he died the death that we deserve. But on the third day, he rose from the dead, and he ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he ever lives to make intercession for us.

By the shedding of his blood, he has opened a new and living way. We were separated from God, and that was pictured by the curtain in the temple. No one could go in behind the curtain except for the great high priest, and that just once a year.

But Jesus, in the breaking of his body, he tore the temple's curtain in two from top to bottom to show that it was God who opened the new and living way. Now, if you're not quite familiar with some of these things, it might be difficult to follow, but understand this.

Jesus is the one who died for our sins. He is the great high priest. And before he left, he gave us a way to remember him, to draw near to him until he comes back for us. And that is to take of the bread and the cup on the Lord's table.

So if there's someone in the back there that could grab, thank you, Stan, I appreciate that. If you guys didn't get one of these, this is our communion cup. We're just gonna use this one more time, by the way, then we'll be back to our old method.

This has both the juice and a little cracker on the top, and this is how we take communion. Guys, communion, the Lord's table is for believers. It's for those who have been born again, who trust in Jesus Christ, and we're not to take the cup unworthily.

What that means is not that you have to earn the right to take the cup, but rather you must come with a humble and contrite spirit, confessing sins and taking seriously what the Lord did for us. You have to examine your heart.

So if you haven't gotten one of these, the ushers are gonna pass that out, but what we're gonna do before we take it is I'm gonna give you guys just a minute to pray. Remember, Jesus is the great high priest.

Where is he right now? At the right hand of the Father, and when you speak to him, he is interceding for you at the Father's right hand. You confess your sins, and he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

So brothers and sisters, just bow your heads, take a moment, and confess sin to God. Know that he is a forgiving God. He hears our prayer, and he listens to the confession, and he washes us in that precious blood.

So let's ask for forgiveness. You know the sins of your own heart, so confess those things to God. So Father, we are here before you, not by any merit of our own. We have no righteousness to bring to this table.

We have no good works that could appease you. We have but one plea, and that is the righteousness of Jesus Christ. On the basis of the shed blood and the broken body of Jesus Christ, we come to you. We ask that you would forgive us of our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness.

Thank you for this table that we can come to, to remember your body and your blood. In Jesus' name, amen. So at this time, if you would take just the top piece off and take hold of the bread, we'll take this together.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me. And now if you would take from the cup. In the same way also, he took the cup. After supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

Let's pray. So Father, thank you so much. Thank you so much, God, that you gave your one and only son. As we take this cup and bread, Lord, we remember and we give thanks. We remember Calvary. We remember the cross.

We remember that gift that was given to unworthy sinners like us. And we thank you, God, that you so loved the world that you gave your one and only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

In Jesus' name, amen. All right, brothers and sisters, we have a special treat this Sunday morning. The Bible talks about how when missionaries are sent, we are to receive them. In 3 John, we're told how diatrophies wouldn't do that, and so he was condemned.

But we are going to do that this morning with grateful hearts. We have a visiting, I'm gonna call him a missionary, because in a sense he is. We have Edgar Benitez, who was born in the Dominican Republic and now lives in Texas.

And we are going to invite Edgar to come and join me. We are going to have a conversation. Come on up, guys, give a hand clap.

Good morning, and thank you for the warm welcoming.

Yes, and I'm not gonna give you your background story because that's gonna be part of what's about to happen right now. So, Edgar, here's your first question. You can have a seat. Tell me about your life before Compassion International.

Yes, so I was born to a teenage single mother in a rural area of the Dominican Republic. And my mother, when I was about a toddler, or three years old, some of the vague memories I have, she decided to move to the city, the Santa Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, to pursue a better life for the both of us.

And some of the memories that I still have is that we just showed up to the city unexpectedly. Nobody invited us. Nobody was expecting us. We just showed up and started knocking on doors to see where we could stay.

And graciously, some people opened their doors. We were bouncing from place to place, just crashing at distant relatives, acquaintances, or anybody we would just meet, sometimes for as long as several weeks or just as short as overnight.

That went on for about a year. And finally, my mother was able to find a small place for the both of us. But it was in one of the poorest and most dangerous, crime-filled neighborhoods of Santa Domingo.

That was where the poorest of the poor lived. It was a neighborhood sandwiched between a very polluted river and the city dump. And while my mother and I were happy that finally we were just not bouncing from place to place, we had our own small place we could call home, that brought up a whole new set of struggles and challenges, primarily for my mother, as now she had to endure the stress of making rent every month.

And she was consumed by not knowing where our next meal was going to come from, besides that the constant threats that we received from the landlord of being evicted because my mother was still unemployed.

And occasionally she did some domestic work that earned her some money. So that went on for about a year. Fast forward, I am five, and I am now ready to be enrolled in elementary school. And my mother reaches out to my father for financial assistance.

I didn't see my father too often. He was not involved in my life much. And when he offers a few coins at that time, my mother said, well, that won't be enough. We have to cover registration fees. We have to cover tuition, school uniforms, books, supplies, backpacks, and all of that.

And he said, well, give me that. If it's gonna take more than a notepad and a pencil, school is not for him. Let him grow up to be literate. He won't be the first one, nor he will be the last one. That tremendously infuriated my mother.

And she told him, no, he will go to school. I don't know how, but we will find a way of enrolling him in school. We went home, and that night I saw her weeping. I just got close to her and I asked her, what are we going to do?

And she said, God will help us. And I think that was the first time that I heard the expression God. As we were not a very religious family, we did not, or my mother did not speak about God too often, but I heard the word God at that time.

So soon after that, my mother investigated and found out that there was a church around not too far away from our neighborhood that operated a private Christian school, and they partnered with this international ministry called Compassions.

We quickly went over there. We completed an application. They interviewed my mother. They took a photo of me to create a profile, and the director of the center said, well, we'll prioritize him and see how often we can find a sponsor through Compassion.

Just pray for him. And as she's giving the application to the secretary, I heard she say, a child raising another child, referring to my mother and I, because my mother was about 20 at that time, or 19, and she looked like a teenager, basically.

So we went home, and a few weeks later, we received news from the center that a God-fearing man from Florida, his name was David Rayner, he came across my Compassion profile, and I don't know if there's a photo of me that can be shown, and he decided.

So that was my Compassion profile photo. He decided to sponsor me, and that changed, that started my journey of being released from poverty, and started my walk with Christ.

Wow. Okay, so you're growing up in the DR. You're in dire straits, and somehow, you come across the Compassion program in Santo Domingo. Let me ask you this. Once you got sponsored, what difference did that actually make in your life?

You will come up short in guessing the many ways that the Compassion sponsorship changed my life, and I could take an extensive amount of time to list them all, but I like to highlight four, and to put it into perspective, let me just share this.

The prospects of me even completing elementary school were only a fraction compared to the probabilities of me being forced into child labor and joining a life of crime. But here are the four main ways that the Compassion sponsorship changed my life.

Number one, it prevented me from being forced into child labor, so it disrupted the path of going into child labor. That was a big deal in the Dominican Republic, and many underdeveloped countries at that time, and still nowadays, it is.

Young boys are forced into child labor to help, very often, their single mothers, and the Compassion sponsorship disrupted that. Number two, and let me just add something to that. So, the source of employment for your children in my neighborhood was the city dump, right?

That was our backyard. That's where many children went, and adults as well, to dig up scrap metal and to resell it, or other valuables that could be resold, and even food that restaurants will throw over there.

Many of those children, sadly, didn't make it back home at the end of the day because they were run over by a bulldozer, or they were attacked by other adults that did not want competition, or when they found a good piece of metal, it was taken away from them for other adults, or going to the streets to shine shoes or perform any kind of other labor.

In some cases, even just robbing tourists or stealing, et cetera. Number two, it provided me with a good quality of education while keeping me healthy and nourished with all the necessary books and supplies that I needed to successfully graduate from high school, and it set the path for me to become the first one in my family to ever attend and graduate from college.

Number three, having an education opened doors for me to work for multinational corporations in the Dominican Republic, and eventually to relocate to the U .S. and work for Fortune 500 companies that not only enabled me to provide a better life for myself and my family, my wife and children, but also to substantially improve the living conditions of many of my relatives in the Dominican Republic, primarily my mother, my grandmother, aunts and cousins, and many others, and also to be generous in giving in many areas of need for other people and institutions.

And the final one, the number four, and the most important one, the other three are meaningless without this one. It brought the gospel to me. It brought the gospel, it trained me to be a disciple of Christ, and through it, I have been given the gift of salvation.

But not only me, my entire family, both of my parents, my mother, my father amended the relationship with my mother and myself, accepted Christ, and is now dedicated to plant churches in the Dominican Republic and runs a ministry to help incarcerated fathers to connect with their sons and many other things.

So without compassion, I have very little chances or want to, first want to overcome extreme poverty and to receive the gospel in the way that I did. Wow. Do you have a picture of your family? Thank you.

Indeed, we do. I don't know if they can show it there. There is, that's one of our photos. I think that there's another photo where there's my five children, small family. I have a small family. Yeah, very small, yeah.

We're just getting started. There they are. There they are, so that's my wife and our five children. That's actually at the Compassion Headquarters in Colorado Springs. So our small family of five, we're just getting started with that.

I mean, we have to fill the church and that's a great way to make disciples. So yes, that's my lovely family. Praise the Lord. Okay, well, you mentioned earlier,.

And I'm just kind of in my mind, just picturing how, what a sponsor experiences here and what that actually means for a kid. Like when I, in 2000, I was at an event like this. It was actually a concert and I saw a compassion table and I just glanced down and I see this little kid from Indonesia whose name is Jeffrey.

And I said, oh Lord, why did you make me see that name? Because my name is Jeffrey. So I felt like, all right, I got to do this. I grabbed it and I started sponsoring a kid back in 2000. And now he's aged out of the program.

It's been 12 years I sponsored him and with my wife as well. So it was just, it was a wonderful thing, but you don't know unless you've lived it, what it means from the other side. So now you've shared that with us, what it was like for you.

So why don't we flip the script? Tell us about your sponsor. Tell us about who sponsored you and his story. Yes, absolutely.

So just to give you an idea, my sponsor, Mr. David Rayner, he had the greatest positive influence in my early and teenage years through letters. Wow. He sent, wrote me letters often, and I think we just displayed one of them.

And I treasure those letters. I still have them with me. I often read them again. I have memorized some of them. He started with encouraging me always to trust and to depend on God. He often quoted Bible verses for me.

He told me that God had a major, big plan for me and just a great destiny. If I just surrender to him and trust in him, he quoted verses, just Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, there are plans for good and not for disaster to give you a future and hope.

And he was the first one ever to tell me, I love you. I never heard the expression. I've heard it, but not addressed to me directly. He was the first one to ever tell me, I love you. And I'm sure my mother didn't say it to me, not because she loved me.

I am convinced that she loved me tremendously, but it was just not the culture of telling children from parents, I love you, that the way for them to demonstrate love and affection was through provision, like making sacrifices, or we did not get enough to eat, the both of us tonight, so you will be the one to eat, whereas I won't have dinner tonight.

That was kind of the way that she loved. And Mr. Rainer had this profound impact in me that I could actually dream about being someone escaping from poverty if I just surrender myself to God, allow him to fulfill his plan in me by just trusting and obeying.

And I started dreaming about it. I started thinking that maybe I am not destined to be in this neighborhood where generations after generations continue to live there. These neighborhoods don't get smaller, they get bigger.

You find five generations there, people don't move out of there, they continue to live there, and I started thinking that maybe it is possible for me to become a doctor or an engineer or something else, and he will pray for me often about it, that God will fulfill his plans in me.

So I went on to graduate from the program. We did not connect after that, we lost contact. I relocated to the U .S., and I started looking for him for a long time, and I didn't find him because there were many people with his name.

And just as I was about to give up, and I kind of realized that I may not find him, it's been more than 15 years and I can't find him, I decided to honor him. My wife was pregnant at the time with our youngest son, and we both talked about it and decided we're gonna name him after David, my sponsor, so I can remember him, I can honor him, and every time I call my child, I can say, well, your name is David because this story.

But I didn't quit trying to find him, just not as intensively as I was, and God put it all together. So in August of 2018, we reconnected. I finally found him, I persisted, and I went to meet him. That was one of the happiest days of my life, because I was able, it had been a dream for me just to give him a big hug first, and then look at him straight in the eyes and say, Mr. Rainer, thank you for allowing God to use you as a tool to release me from poverty, and primarily to bring the gospel to me.

My life would be completely different had you not answered that calling from God. And since then, we've done life together, we text daily, we pray together, we do Bible studies together, we hang out together.

A few weeks ago, we were together, hanging out in Georgia and in South Carolina, serving compassion, the two of us together. We have a vacation planned together in August of this year in Tyler, Texas, and we're inseparable.

Many plans to do many things, but primarily continue serving compassion, because we both know in our testimonies that this truly works.

A Life Transformed by Compassion and the Gospel

Wow. Okay, so tell me about your life now.

Not in my wildest dream I could have ever even imagined the life that I have today. So God has blessed me abundantly in every aspect of my life, beginning with giving me a wonderful family. You saw the photo.

I have a beautiful wife, God-fearing, dedicated to our family, and five great children. We dedicate all the time and energy that we can to train them to be disciples of Christ, to learn about God, to obey God, and to serve God.

In our free time, we both serve compassion, which is our second ministry after our family, doing events like this one. We often go all together, including my mother, who lives in Texas now, close to us.

We all serve compassion in events like this one, and volunteering. We sponsor three children, and today our family is growing as we are adding one more from your list to four. So Andy will receive the blessing of having a fair chance in life, being released from poverty, being disciple, and receiving the gospel.

Praise the Lord. That's the fourth child? That's the fourth child.

Praise the Lord. So you're not just telling us to do it, you're setting an example.

I am setting an example. Praise the Lord. Yes, amen, and professionally, God has blessed me abundantly. I work for a major financial institution where I am vice president of business controls, and I co-lead technology, multi-million dollar technology projects.

And by the way, I want to publicly thank one of my teammates, who's a mentor to me, that came over to join this event and participates. Mark, Mark, thank you so much. He works with me. Yes, and not in a million years I will have imagined the wonderful life that God had prepared for me.

Wow. Do you play baseball? I did play baseball, but I settled for softball. Oh, okay. Okay, I'm gonna throw a curve ball at you. That's why I asked that question. You ready for this?

Compassion, Social Justice, and the Victim Narrative

All right, we've been in a conversation here at Cornerstone with the culture, and the issue that I want to raise to you is the question of social justice. Now, here's what I'm gonna ask you. You know, whenever you have issues of poverty, there will be people who come in and push a victim narrative, and teach that the reason that there is poverty in the world is that there's an oppressive class that's making the poor poor, and then they'll push that narrative on all areas of differentiation between people, whether it's the color of their skin, or gender, or sexuality, or any number of things.

They push all of these things under the banner of social justice. Here's my question for you. What's different about Compassion International from that narrative of social justice?

Okay, I only speak Spanish.

He says he only speaks Spanish, all of a sudden.

I cannot get out of this question, so please don't cancel me. I ask you, so here's what I will say about that. In the Compassion Program, what we were taught was that we were not victims. We were precious children of God, that God had designed plans for all of us, and if we just obeyed him and surrendered, he will fulfill his plans.

We were destined to inherit the kingdom of heaven, along with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We were prepared to use our gifts and our talents and to earn a living from ourselves, rather than depend on anybody or any institution.

We were not taught that the government was the answer to our needs or any institution. We were taught that the answer to all of our needs came from God and not from anybody else, and that we needed to use the gifts and talents that God has given us to earn our lives and to provide for our families.

Wow, amen, amen. So you didn't believe a victim narrative. You believed that by the power of the gospel, the same God that raised Jesus from the dead now working in you, and you working, you are able to do whatever he calls you to do.

So that's quite the opposite of the victim mentality. It is rather hard work, and the education that you received was something that you educated yourself by taking advantage of the opportunities given you.

The empowerment that was taught to us in the compassion program with the plans, the gospel, the instruction from the Lord, was a liberation from the poverty. Jesus came to us, and poverty left. Not just the physical poverty, but the mental poverty, the spiritual poverty.

The empowerment that we received that we could accomplish just about anything that we wanted if we prayed to God, we allowed God to do that, it was possible, and not was in the hands of a government or it was not, we were not limited because we were part of a specific social class or we came from humble origins.

Amen. And brothers and sisters, just so you know, we've spoken on Zoom, so I knew how he would answer that, if not the exact words. It wasn't just like a shot in the dark. We became fast friends over Zoom, and I thank the Lord for what God has done in your life.

Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give you a final, just wide-open talk about whatever you want, but before I do that, let me share just another aspect of God's providence in all of this. We, in 2020, early 2020, had a new member class here where there were some people in it from the Dominican Republic.

And meanwhile, I was contacted by Rick, or he contacted me, one way or the other, from Compassion International, and he was on his way to the DR. So we began to talk about a mission trip to the Dominican Republic.

Long story short, what we've done is all of the child packets, where you're able to sponsor a child, that we have in the foyer today, are from the Dominican Republic. And we are planning a mission trip to the DR for whoever's able to go, if you know the Lord and you're able to preach the gospel and to serve and help, we're gonna bring a mission team down to the Dominican Republic.

And we will meet many of the kids that this church will be sponsoring individually. So even if you don't go on the mission trip, we can come back and report to you, yeah, we met whoever it was that you sponsor, and this is what he's like, and this is what he loves to do, and this is what he needs, and here's how you can pray.

So we're gonna have an actual connection with the people in the DR. So praise God. I'm gonna ask Rick to share a little bit more about that when you come up in just a moment. So just awesome things happening.

And then just the fact that you're from the Dominican Republic, that wasn't even planned either. It was just all God, and Rick was on his way. So just what God is doing just blows my mind. So final word of exhortation to the church.

Yes, thank you once again. A compassion sponsorship is truly a blessing that multiplies exponentially, not just in the life of the child that is sponsored and their future generations, but also in the life of the sponsor himself or herself.

I heard many stories where nonbelievers actually became to Christianity just because of their sponsor child prayed for them, and they ultimately received and accepted the gospel. So today, I stand in front of you as a testimony that a compassion sponsorship truly works.

It did for me exactly what it intended to do, and even more. It released me from poverty, and it brought the gospel to myself and my family. So I remember in the gospels, you'll find the passage of when the Jesus are coming to Christ, and the disciples stop them.

And he says, let the children come to me. Do not stop them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to those that look like them. Today, these children are being stopped from coming to Christ, not because of disciples, but because of extreme poverty, and not just physical poverty, not material poverty, but just mental poverty, psychological poverty.

The lack of encouragement, the lack of love, the lack of being told that they can succeed in life, the being hopeless and thinking that their surroundings, their circumstances define who they are and who they will be.

And what I ask you is that you do just what I will do today, lead by example. As I am sponsoring Andy, we will be giving Andy a fair chance of succeeding in life through the Compassion Sponsorship Program and receiving the gospel.

I ask you to be faithful and obedient to the calling of Matthew 10a that says, give us freely as you have received. My prayer is that after you have seen what happens in the life when a child gets sponsored through compassion, God touches your heart and you decide to fulfill the great commission, sponsor a child, and create another wonderful story.