Wednesday Night, June 2, 2021 AM

Coming all the way from Georgia, be a blessing to Brandon. So it's good to be together tonight. The plan for tonight is that I'm going to pray for us. We're going to have a devotional briefly. Then we're going to sing a hymn together.

And then Roy is going to baptize Brandon. And we're welcoming Brandon tonight as a member of our church. And we're thankful that Roy can be here after investing so much into Brandon's life and pointing him to Christ.

As I know many people have done, but thankful that Roy could come. All right, well, that's the plan. Let's start off with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for this night. I thank you for just the unique blessings that you have provided.

Lord, I pray that you would bless our time together as we consider your son, Jesus Christ, and the truth of your word. I pray that you would help us to submit to your truth and that we would rejoice together with Brandon and his family and welcome him heartily into our fellowship.

And we pray all these things for Christ's sake.

Amen.

The Great Harvest and the Need for Laborers

OK, we're going to be in Luke chapter 10 tonight. We're just going to look at the first two verses of that chapter here in a moment. They are simple, clear, and important to guide us in our priorities and in our prayers.

Before we get there, I wanted to follow up on something. This is something you can thank me later. You can thank me now. It doesn't matter. This is something that I extracted out of the sermon for Sunday, thus got it under 10 pages long.

I've been exploring the ways in which we see pagan rising in our culture, as we've been talking about in the Book of Daniel. And one of those ways is how the calendar is treated. Have you noticed this?

And so they call this Pride Month, LGBTQIA plus month. And the plus is there for whatever else they deem fitting in the future. But it's Pride Month. It's National Safety Month. It's National Candy Month.

You probably did not know that. It's also National Great Outdoors Month. All of these happen at the same time. Interesting. On the 3rd of this month, tomorrow is World Bicycle Day. Aren't you glad? On the 5th is World Environment Day.

The 6th is Yo-Yo Day. The 10th is National Ballpoint Pen Day. Not fountain pen, just ballpoint. The 14th to the 21st is International Men's Health Week. And it starts off with World Blood Donor Day, which is also Flag Day.

There is Nursing Assistance Week, the 17th through the 23rd. Also, we have the first day of summer marked. The 19th is Juneteenth. We're likely to see lots of anything from parades to riots. And then we have Father's Day on the 20th, International Patriarchy Day, which I heartily approve of.

We also have International Day of Yoga on the 21st, Deuticians Day on the 26th, and Sunglasses Day on the 27th. Does anybody find that weird, somewhat pointless? What is the point? Why do we have to have so many different celebrations?

Why does a month have to stand for anything? Why do we have all these different commemorations on all these different days? Well, it's a pagan idea. And I'll show you this. If you go back to the days of Christ, what did their calendar look like?

What did their calendar look like for the month of Eunice, where we get June from? We get our word junior from that, actually. June, junior. So it was Youth Awareness Month, the month of, we'll just call it June.

And on the Roman calendar, there's all these names of gods and goddesses and all these different temples that had their anniversaries and commemorations and stuff. But you have to understand that these gods and goddesses all stood for something.

So it's not much different than today. I'm going to skip naming all of the odd gods and just tell you what the gods stood for. And so essentially, in the Roman month of June, or Eunice, on the very first day of Youth Awareness Month, they had awareness of agriculture, war, the weather, and a commemoration of hinges.

Yes, hinges, like for doors and gates and stuff. There was actually a goddess of hinges. On the 5th, it was a celebration of taking oaths. A good day to take an oath. On the 7th was Fisherman Awareness Day, the rejoicing, the act of fishing.

Now, this is interesting. The 7th through the 15th, they had the Fireplace Celebration Week, where everybody really rejoiced in their fireplaces. On the 8th, they had the Cognitive Ability Day. They celebrated the Temple of Mens, where we get Mensa from.

Cognitive Ability Day. On the 11th was Matrialia, which is the single mother or young mother awareness day. On the 13th, they rejoiced in Jupiter, which is basically a celebration of the imperial state.

The 13th through the 15th, they talked about the reproductive authority and power of women. On the 19th, they had a commemoration of spinning and weaving handicrafts. On the 24th, they had a celebration of luck and chance.

On the 27th, they had a celebration of ancestors. And on the 29th, they had a celebration of poetry. Why are these both a pagan way to approach the calendar? It's the plurality of the thing. When you put the inane and the insane all honored together, when you have the holy and the common, the honorable and the dishonorable all together, one after another, things overlapping on the same.

Every celebration and each honoring, just one more recognition, one more manifestation.

Of the whole.

Remember, pagan is oneness. This is all just little aspects of the great whole. And with Rome's calendar, so with ours today, depending on which gods are more popular, some holidays are reduced to merely a long weekend or canceled altogether.

So there are some holidays that fell out of favor because other gods trended more powerful than other gods. Well, Galatians 4, 8 through 10 says, but then indeed, when you did not know God, you serve those which by nature are not gods.

When you did not know God, you serve by nature those things which are not gods. But now after you have known God or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage?

In what way were they trying to be in bondage to the weak and beggarly elements, serving the things that are not really gods? He tells them. You observe days and months and seasons and years. It's a return to paganism.

It's a return to paganism. So I thought that was interesting. And I just, I cut all of that out of my sermon, so we're not gonna have to do that Sunday.

Amen.

Praise the Lord. Just a brief word on Luke 10 now, verses one and two. After these things, the Lord appointed 70 others also and sent them two by two before his face into every city and place where he himself was about to go.

Then he said to them, the harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. What's the most difficult thing about that? What do you think?

Finding laborers? Maybe finding laborers is the hardest. Hendrickson said, notice it's laborers, not loafers. We need laborers. I think perhaps the hardest thing is believing this, that the harvest truly is great.

I think that's where we have the hardest trouble, believing that the harvest is great. We need to believe it, that the harvest is great. And even if Jesus had 70 or 72 laborers ready to go out, as forerunners to all the places he was about to go, he says, we don't have enough, we need more.

And what do we do when we believe that the harvest is truly great? And what is required of us is beyond our abilities. Then we pray. We pray the Lord of the harvest, the one, remember he says he's building his church.

We pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. And that's what we need to pray. The harvest is bountiful, the harvest is plentiful. We need to pray for laborers. Yes, of course, this means ourselves being willing, but all on my own is too much.

We could look to the Lord, look to the Lord, ask him to send out laborers into his harvest. Laborers do a lot of different things. There are a lot of different ways to labor in the harvest of the Lord.

Some of them are not very flashy. Some, of course, when it comes down to it, some of them plow, some of them sow, some of them water, but God gives the increase. Rejoice in the salvation of Brandon Boydston.

And there's been a lot of people involved in his life, right? A lot of people praying for him, a lot of people laboring in his life. And we rejoice that he knows the Lord, that he loves Jesus. He's growing in grace and we're thankful.

All right, well, let's sing a hymn. We're gonna sing hymn number 231, Jesus Shall Reign. And after that, we are going to pray and then Brandon is going to share his testimony. And then Roy will baptize him and then we'll move on to our prayer service for tonight.

So hymn number 231, Jesus Shall Reign. Our lives, we thank you for the gift of your son, Jesus Christ, our savior and our sovereign in whom is our only hope. And we thank you for sending your Holy Spirit to empower us for the work that you call us to do, to be our comforter, to be our intercessor here, to bring our prayers to our intercessor there at your right hand.

So we thank you for watching over us. We thank you for your gifts, the gifts of salvation and the gifts that you have given to us that we may exercise dominion in the name of Christ and spread his fame and glory throughout our lives and throughout the world.

And now we pray that you would bless our time as we hear a testimony from our brother, Brandon, and rejoice in his baptism. We thank you for this time in Jesus name, amen.

Brandon Boydston’s Testimony of Conversion

Good evening, everyone. My name is Brandon Boydston. I am 27 years old and I am a sinner. Before coming to know the Lord, life was hopeless. This is all I knew it could be. In the life I was living, I was an extremely angry person, a broken person, a person who was beyond tired, a person with not much left to give.

The highlight of my emotions was anger. And let me clarify, I did not just feel angry. I was angry to my very core. The closer you were to me, the more I tried to hide what I couldn't, which was how deep the anger went.

And being an angry person, I believed not a single soul could be trusted fully, if at all. My will would not be broken. No one truly loves all people. Loved ones, family, friends are selfish. They do not care.

Give it time. All will be revealed. These are just a few of the many struggles I was operating with on my beliefs of what life was. I decided to get away and visit Georgia. I wanted to spend time with more of my family for the summer and just finally get a break.

Over the summer I spent in Georgia, the thoughts and beliefs I had about life were being broken down. The Turners were breaking down those beliefs through their example and how Christ is represented in every area of their lives.

They were slowly instilling hope back into my life of suffering by being an example of Christ's love. First Corinthians 16, 14, let all that you do be done in love. Hope was coming back into my life for the first time in years and I needed to know more.

One simple answer came forward. God, the time I spent attending their church was filled with convicting sermons, breaking down the idea of whom I believed God to be and revealing his attributes in a whole new light.

I moved back to Oklahoma in August 2018 to live with my dad and brothers. I was avoiding any real relationships, all the while carrying this heavy burden that I have had for years. It was just now becoming more and more unbearable.

That fall, a family situation arose which awoke a lot of my past, causing anxiety and added tension in my relationships. The weight of this family situation was adding to the already heavy burden. Later in November, most of our family was planning a trip to go down to Florida for Thanksgiving break.

I had no desire to go, but I went because I was floundering on my own. I could barely function and I was breaking by the second. I put my hope in just getting out of the state and being around the family to help lessen the pain and to distract.

At the end of the Florida trip, my burden was at an all-time high. My final hope was going to talk with the Turners. Within that hard conversation, it felt the same as the others. I was starting to crash under the reality that nothing was different.

The truth that none of life's struggles were to blame and I am the problem was once again hitting hard. That is the truth I had been running from for the past two years. I was now facing it again within that conversation and it was causing turmoil.

I started apologizing for the angry person I was in Georgia and how unbelievably sorry I was for what they had to endure. Their response destroyed my belief system. They accepted my apology, but conveyed they did not look at that time I spent down there as awful.

They treasured the time we shared and let me know they loved me. God used those words to break me. After hearing those words, I was officially broken and what I said next flew out of me. God is working in my heart.

I said that sentence aloud without even thinking. I had no control over the words that they just came out. At that moment, the Holy Spirit revealed the truth behind what I was feeling. God was working in my heart.

Romans 5 .5, and this hope will not lead to disappointment for we know how dearly God loves us because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love. It was not the family situation.

It was not my past. It was not school. It was not life. None of that mattered. God was working in my heart and for the first time, I believed it. From the moment that sentence left my mouth, I began to pursue the truth.

Learning of God's continued grace in my life led me into a better understanding of his love. He saved me from me. This is who God is, a merciful savior who sent his son to die on the cross. Galatians 2 .20, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

In the life that I now live in my body, I live by faith, indeed by the faithfulness of God's son who loved me and gave himself for me. This is what this evening is all about, God's love in saving me. I want to share one last thing from one of the books I have been reading.

This is a summation of my testimony, the reality that God saved me from me. Obedience never ends freedom. It is the evidence that true freedom has entered your life and liberated your heart. I have been liberated, set free and given new life, new hope, new motivation and new peace of heart and mind.

No, I have not been freed from the authority of another. I have not been freed to walk my own way, to write my own rules or do what I choose. No, I have been given the best of freedoms. I have been freed not from God's rule, but from my bondage to me.

Following, obeying, serving, submitting to God is the thing I was created to do. So it is the place where true freedom is to be found. Rebellion never gives life. Self-rule never brings freedom. So grace has worked to rescue me from me so that I can know the true freedom of serving him.

In light of your testimony and in accordance with God's command, I baptize you, my brother, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

All right, isn't that encouraging?

Amen.

The Lord is blessed mightily. All right, well, now is our opportunity to spend some time together as the people of the Lord in prayer. And this is a very important thing that we are to do. We have a lot of needs, a lot of concerns, and our heavenly Father knows about them all and he's concerned about them all.

We are to bring everything to him. So what can we pray together for tonight? How can we intercede? I'm gonna take a few requests and then I'm gonna pray for us before we're dismissed.

So what can we do?