Word & Deed: Stepping into Kingdom Power

Scripture References: Matthew 4:23-25; Luke 9:1-2; Luke 10:1-9, 17; Matthew 28:18-20

Introduction: Welcome to this week's sermon! Today, we hear from guest speaker Scott, who served with his family in North India for over 20 years. Scott shares his personal journey from a background skeptical of supernatural gifts to embracing the power of the Holy Spirit in evangelism. He begins with his own testimony: finding purpose and joy in Christ at 17 after a period of loneliness and depression, sparking a passion to share Jesus. He challenges us: do you have a story?

Key Points:

1. Early Encounters: Despite a conservative background, Scott soon experienced God's voice and words of knowledge for strangers, leading to ministry. This sparked his passion for evangelism.
2. Missions & Need for Power: Called to India's unreached, training highlighted "Church Planting Movements" fueled by "signs and wonders." Initially hesitant, Scott saw the need.
3. Power of Demonstration: A key moment: praying for a sick child whose mother had heard the gospel message repeatedly without response. After the child's miraculous healing, the mother declared, "I know your God is powerful," and followed Jesus. Proclamation plus demonstration was key. (80-90% of local conversions involved supernatural encounters).
4. Biblical Mandate for All: Scripture shows this power isn't limited: 
   • Jesus proclaimed, healed, delivered (Matt 4).
   • He gave the 12 authority to do the same (Luke 9).
   • He sent the 72 with the same commission (Luke 10) – not just apostles.
   • The Great Commission (Matt 28) gives all disciples authority, empowered by the Spirit, to teach obedience to all Jesus commanded.
5. Stepping Out Everywhere: Scott saw God work through prayer for healing/needs in India, the US, and the UK – proving it's not just for "over there." God works powerfully through willing believers anywhere. The fields are ripe here. 

Conclusion: Jesus commissions all His followers to both proclaim the gospel message and demonstrate its power through healing, deliverance, and other gifts of the Spirit. This isn't just for missionaries or pastors; it's for you and me, empowered by the Holy Spirit. People in our communities are hurting and waiting for an encounter with God's love and power. God is ready to work through ordinary believers who are willing to step out in faith.

Call to Action: Let's respond to this message. Are you feeling stirred towards greater boldness, a call to take risks for the Kingdom? Ask God for compassion that overcomes fear. Pray for eyes to see the needs He wants you to meet and the people He wants you to engage. Ask for discernment. This week, intentionally look for an opportunity to share about Jesus and an opportunity to pray for someone's need, expecting God to move. Trust that He is with you and wants to demonstrate His power through you. Holy Spirit, come upon us with boldness! 

Transcript

a guest speaker here with us this morning. 

 Yeah, which is exciting. 

 I first met Scott in India, 

 where he spent over 20 years with his family serving in North India. And he's gonna share a little bit about his journey with us, but at the conclusion of our time, we just really feel like with what the women shared and with what he's carrying, there needs to be a response this morning, 

 where we make space to pray and minister to people. So what's gonna happen at the end of our time is we're gonna get to pray for Monica and Grace Stahl, who are headed to India for three weeks. So we'll get to pray them off. We'll also get to pray off the Mexico team, because we won't see them next week, because they leave on Palm Sunday. So we're gonna pray for the teams that are going out on the mission field. So Scott, would you come? 

 (Audience Applauding) 

 (Audience Applauding) 

 I should have said, I mean, I talked about India and I should have warned you, Scott's very white. 

 (Audience Laughing) And like, not just white, like Oklahoma white. So we're talking about Oklahoma white here. So, but I love him, and I won't take any more of your time with an introduction. 

 Just a long prayer. 

 Lord, we come before you now. 

 And thank you for Scott. Amen. Amen, Paul. 

 Sorry to disappoint with my whiteness, Travis. 

 Awesome. Hey, thanks so much for the opportunity. You know, there was a time in my life when I was lonely, I was depressed. 

 I continually heard this phrase in my mind, you're worthless. 

 And then when I was about 17 years old, God did a radical work in my life. 

 I began to follow after him and everything changed. 

 And all of a sudden I found purpose and joy and just a passion to wanna tell other people about all that he had done in my life and what he could do in theirs. 

 Do you guys have a story like that? 

 (Audience Laughing) How many of you all were here on Wednesday night? My hand is not up. How many of you all were here Wednesday night for the, I don't know if you called it, the kind of evangelism, training, what was that? Kingdom Come. Kingdom Come, I like that, that's good. The Kingdom Come time. So I was supposed to be here for that and I was not, had a difficult day, many hours in airports and didn't make it in time. 

 But I heard it went over great. I know Travis did a great job with that. And some of you recognize what I just did as we started, we call that our 15 second testimony. So just a real simple tool that we often do when we're doing some evangelism training, just how to start spiritual conversations, how to take your testimony and kind of simplify it down in a real short version that you could use as you're out and about. So I just thought I would lead out with that. When Travis and I were talking about me coming, 

 one of the things he mentioned was just my journey of being on the mission field with a Baptist mission organization. So typically when we think Baptist, we think very conservative. We think often cessationist, meaning not believing in the continuation of the gifts, the supernatural gifts for today. And I did grow up in a church like that. Even all those years of being lonely and depressed, I was regularly in church, 

 but I really hadn't met and encountered Christ in the Holy Spirit at that time of my life until I was 17. But shortly after I became like a true on fire, spirit filled believer, 

 I started experiencing some strange things. God began to speak and I began to recognize his voice. And there were times I would be out in community and I would see someone and it was as if I had this download of information and I just knew stuff about them. And I don't know how I knew it, but I would approach them and say, does this make sense? I felt like God showed me this. And there would just be these big eyes and kind of the shock, like, how did you know that? And I remember a couple in particular experiences where the person is just weeping in tears and I had a chance to share with them about Jesus. Now I had never heard of words of knowledge and prophetic words. Those were bad words where I was from. 

 But I'm like, this is just the normal Christian life, right? God speaks to us. The word says to sheep hear his voice and God showed me something. I don't know how it works, but that became something that was kind of a part of my life and just, I remember praying on a daily basis in the morning before school, like God, give me at least one person today to talk to you about you. Please give me at least one. And I continued in that for a couple months and then I began feeling really convicted. Why am I only praying for just one? 

 No, God more. And he just put a real passion and a hunger for evangelism. I met my wife around that time, Susan, 

 and she was even more evangelistic than I am, just on fire and we connected because of that. We end up in the same friend group and we're both sharing the gospel. It's like, hey, she's kind of awesome. 

 That's how we got connected. And we started talking about missions early on at an early age. The fact that there were places around the world where people didn't have access to a church, even if they wanted to go, they didn't know any other Christians or believers. They didn't even know the name of Jesus. If you walk into many villages today and say, hey, have you heard of Jesus? Their response will be something like, no, he doesn't live here. Why don't you try the down the road? Like they have no idea what you're talking about. And that just was like not okay with me. And so just began praying, God, 

 here I am, kind of Isaiah six, like here I am. Do you have somewhere you want to send me? I want to go. And that, I won't go through the full story, but God eventually led us to serving in North India. 

 As we looked around the world and saw we're the highest numbers of unreached peoples and unengaged unreached people groups were, we kept getting pointed back to India. And so my wife and I were like, I don't know, can we go there? That's a tough place. But we just felt like, yeah, this is what the Lord asked for us. Signed up for two years, you know, to try it out, get our feet wet. We did more than that. We dove in, fell in love with it. I had our first child. We end up having four kids on the field there in India. 

 And our hearts are still there. We were there for 20 years. I do remember going through the training as we were about to be sent out. And they started talking about this thing that they were beginning to notice happening around the world in many places called the church planting movements. 

 What is that? You know, in our minds, we had always envisioned missionaries just, you go and you move into some village, you live in a hut, and you just like talk to the people in the little tribe or whatever. That's just what we envisioned as missions. 

 And we were challenged in this training to begin to ask the question, not what can you do to impact the people where you're going, but what's it gonna take to see these people reached? And that may be a subtle difference, but it actually is a huge difference. What's it gonna take to see this place reach? How many churches need to be here? What do we need to do to get the gospel to every person in this place? And that's bigger than ourselves. That takes more of a broader, wider strategy. It takes partnering with others, training a lot of people so that you've got people running with you. And so when we were trained in this church planting movements, they gave us a list they'd been doing research on, like what are the common characteristics or the universal characteristics in all of these movements? And there were things like abundant prayer and massive seed sowing, like obvious stuff. And one of them was abundance of signs and wonders. 

 And I remember whenever they shared that, I remember thinking, oh man, we're gonna have to find us like a national partner that's into that kind of stuff, because I wasn't gonna do that, right? Like even though I had been here in God's voice, I still didn't quite know where I landed on all these things. And so I was gonna try to find somebody else that could do that, because we needed that. That was one of those things I wanted to check off the list so we could see that church planting movement, right? As long as we follow the 10 points, right? Anyway, it's not a formula. I figured that out real quick. 

 Yeah, so we went to the field, it was tough. It was hard in those early years, a lot of the language learning. But we got pretty good at sharing the gospel and sharing our testimony. Early on in our language, we learned the right words to say it. Sometimes we didn't even know all the words we were saying, we had just memorized what to say. So there was a family that lived or didn't live, I'm sorry, they sold vegetables right outside of our house. And there was a lady there, she had two little kids. So my wife made friends with her, and that was a great place to practice Hindi, that was the language we were learning. And she'd sit out there with them, and then they would come in with the kids and just play in our house. And so this lady became a person to practice Hindi with. It also became a person for my wife to share the gospel with. And she would share the gospel with her regularly, using different methods. She shared her testimony, we showed the Jesus film. I think we used those different ways to share, like the bridge illustration, Romans 6, 23. 

 She just went through all these different ways. And every time she shared the gospel with this lady, the lady would say, "Oh wow, yeah, thank you, that's really nice, that was about it, okay." 

 So one day though, we hear that her son is really, really sick. He'd been sick for about a month. They'd gone to multiple doctors, lots of medicine, he wasn't getting any better, she was getting really worried. We actually had a volunteer team, a small team that was there with us. And one of the girls says to my wife, "Hey, let's go over and pray for her son, Rahul." 

 My wife says, "Yeah, great." They go over, 

 they pray for him, nothing happens. Okay, well cool, she felt loved and cared about, they were prayed for, but then the next day, we took that team back to the airport in another large city, came back a few days later, saw this woman again, and said, "Oh, how's your son, how's Rahul?" 

 "Oh, you wouldn't believe it." The next morning he woke up and he was perfectly fine, like nothing wrong with him. And my wife says, "Well, what do you think about that?" And she says, "Well, I know your God is powerful, "but I don't know the way to him." 

 So she begins, again in her kind of slow, broken Hindi, to walk back through the gospel message. And this woman was finishing her sentences for her. She knew the information, right? She actually knew the gospel and could even finish my wife's sentences faster than she could get through them, 

 but now she was ready, and what was the difference? 

 Right, she knew the information, that she had seen the power of God, she understood the power of Jesus, and that he was powerful, and she was ready to follow him now. And so we began to recognize this dynamic of the importance of both the proclamation of the gospel and the demonstration of the gospel. 

 Again, we were kind of growing and learning. We started hearing statistics. There were a number of really large movements of Indians coming to faith, and these church planting movements were beginning to happen. And I would go around and meet with the leaders that were overseeing these movements and say, what's happening? What's your method? How are you sharing the gospel? And they would say, man, 80 to 90% of the people are coming to faith because of an answer to prayer, or they've seen someone demonized, be released of a demon. It's all through these supernatural wonders that are happening. And it wasn't just one place. We were seeing this all over the place. And that statistic, that 80 to 90%, 

 we were like, okay, we need to really press into this. So fast forward a little bit. And that lady that we met that came to faith, we ended up going to her house, met with her husband. He came to faith. And that actually became the start of our first church right there in our town where we began meeting. And then soon we started seeing some other churches crop up from there. But fast forward, again, I'm kind of walking through a little bit of this journey of us coming to really walking in the gifts of the Spirit and believing in them. 

 There was, I heard about this healer guy coming into town. And the prosperity gospel was really prevalent. A lot of, especially outsiders, a lot of Americans would come in and bring this junk with them. And I'll just say junk, it's junk. (Congregation Laughing) They would come in and I thought, man, there's another American guy coming to town and he's gathering everybody up in our city, our small city of two million people, by the way. It was a small city for North India. 

 They're coming to town, gathering the existing believers, and he's gonna bring all this bad teaching. I'm gonna go to this meeting and I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna confront him. Because I'm gonna protect, these are our sheep here that we've been pouring into. 

 And so I went in with that mindset, I'm not letting any more of this stuff come in here. And when I got there, I was pleasantly surprised. That is not what he did. He actually started off and he said, "Hey, we're gonna gather here for the next two days and we're just gonna open our Bibles and we're just gonna walk through Scripture. We're gonna mostly the gospels and into some of Acts. And we're gonna look at Jesus' life and we're gonna see what did he do and how did he heal people. And we're just gonna look at example after example. 

 And then at the end of the week, or maybe a few days later, we're gonna have a big healing crusade. We're gonna try to get as many people as we can here. And at the end of that healing crusade, we're gonna preach and then we're gonna call people forward to be prayed for and healed. And you know what, he said, "I'm not gonna pray for anybody. You guys are gonna be the ones that pray for people." And I was like, "Oh, this is kind of awesome actually." 

 So he began to walk us through Scripture and I wanna just take a couple of minutes to look at, these aren't the exact passages he used, but I felt like we probably should open the Bible this morning while we're gathered for church, right? So Matthew chapter four, I'm gonna read a couple of these. I didn't tell the guys, I don't even think we'll have it behind me, but I'll just read them out or you can open your Bible or your Bible app. Matthew chapter four, verse 23. This is a great little passage that just, I'd say is a good description of Jesus' life and ministry while he was on the earth. 

 I'll read 23 through 25. "And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics and healed them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan." 

 So would you say this is a pretty good, just simple description of kind of the life of Jesus during that three and a half years of his ministry? I mean, yeah, there were other things he did, but he was moving around from place to place. And what does it say he did? If you look back at the passage, he healed every disease, so he was healing people. 

 Every affliction says something about evil spirits in there. He was casting out devils, casting out demons. 

 And it says he proclaimed the kingdom. Today we might say proclaim the gospel, but he proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. So you see this proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom and you see this demonstration of healing and casting out demons. 

 Well, yeah, that's Jesus. We've all read about Jesus. We know about Jesus. Of course he was God, right? He could do that stuff. Well, going forward, I'm going to actually switch over to the book of Luke, chapter 9. 

 We see another example where Jesus now has these 12 guys following him around, these disciples, 

 and he's going to actually send them out. And let me read again, Luke 9, 1, and 2, just two-- oh, I'm in the wrong-- 

 two scripture verses here. "And he called the 12 together, and he gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. 

 And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal." 

 OK, cool. So Jesus has these guys that are his closest friends, followers, and disciples, and he gives them authority. And what authority did he give them? 

 It probably sounds familiar to what we had just read, right? He gave them authority to proclaim the kingdom, 

 preach the gospel. He gave them authority to heal and to cast out devils. 

 So wow, that sounds really familiar. It seems like the ministry that Jesus was doing, he was modeling for his guys-- or more than just guys, for the people following him. And then now he's sending them out to do the same thing. OK, well, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, they're the founding apostles, right? These are super spiritual people. They have a special place in history and even in the future kingdom. 

 But let's turn the page, at least in my Bible, to the next page, Luke chapter 10, one chapter further. 

 Here, Jesus has gathered how many? 

 Your Bible will say 70 or 72. 72 are now gathered. 

 And he begins-- gives a message to the 72. It says, "After this, the Lord appointed 72 others and sent them on ahead of him two by two into every town and place where he himself was about to go." OK, the crowd's enlarging now. He says to them, "First of all, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." 

 So awesome. So Jesus now has this group of 72 people 

 that are followers of his. And he is going to now send them out. So he starts-- he himself is doing it. Then he sends out the 12, and now he's sending out 72. And can you imagine you've been in the 12, and now there's 72? I mean, this feels like a huge crowd. And the first thing Jesus tells them to do is what? Pray for more, 

 right? Pray for more. Like, yeah, we're a good-sized group here, but pray that the Lord will raise up harvesters to go out into the harvest field. So that's how he begins his little talk. Then he begins to walk them through some simple instructions. I'm not going to go through this just for lack of time. This whole passage is a great one to study, though. 

 And then going down, I'm going to skip to verse 8. 

 "Whenever you enter town and they receive you, eat what is set before you." 

 That doesn't necessarily apply to the message today, but I just like that verse. 

 No, there's something about gathering over the table, commuting over a table, having meals together. "And then nine, heal the sick in it and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near to you." 

 OK, so here it is again. We see Jesus is now giving authority to the 72. 

 He is sending them out two by two. They're going to the places where he's about to go, and he's given them authority to what? What does it say? "Proclaim the gospel," or "preach the kingdom," and then two, "to heal sickness." Was he giving them a medical kit and asking them to do medical stuff as they went? 

 I don't think so. Nothing against doing medical healing, but I do believe in this passage he's talking about supernatural praying over people and seeing people healed just as Jesus has been doing. And we can kind of prove the whole medical kit thing, because he also tells them not to carry a bag. So there you go. 

 So jumping forward, he doesn't say anything about demons, though. So maybe he had kind of limited the authority with this group. I don't know. Well, hang on. Jumping ahead to verse 17, the guys are all coming back, and they've given their report. They're all excited. It says, "The 72 returned with joy, saying, Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name." 

 Awesome. 

 So here we see this pattern. Jesus has authority over sickness, over demonic spirits, and authority to preach and proclaim the kingdom. 

 He then takes his 12, he sends them out, and gives them the same authority. 

 And then now here we are. And a lot of people think-- and again, this was my upbringing. Oh, those gifts and the miracles and all that stuff, that was for the early apostles. And that died off once the apostles died off. Well, here's Jesus sending out 72 of the large group, giving them the same authority. 

 And then many of us know Matthew 28-- I have to say this. This is like the missionary verse, right? The Great Commission. Matthew 28, 18-- 

 can't get through a message without bringing this one up, right? 

 Matthew 28, 18 through 20. 

 And I want to start with 18, because it says-- 

 this is the last, by the way, the last message Jesus gives before he ascends into heaven. 

 "Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 

 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all have commanded you, and behold them with you always to the end of the age." 

 So here it is again. He's saying, I have all authority. 

 And this isn't the small group. This is a larger group gathered. And he's basically commissioning all of us, all of us who are followers of him, who are disciples of Jesus. He's saying, I have all authority, and I'm giving you authority to go, 

 to reach the nations, baptize, teaching everything I've commanded you. And don't forget, I'm with you, right? He's going to go and bring-- and the Holy Spirit's going to come. And so we, with the power of the Holy Spirit, are now empowered to go and be his witnesses and mimic the person that is who's our ultimate disciple, or Jesus. We want to be like him. And so that is what he's commissioned us to do. So back to my story. 

 Seeing these things, I was like, man, this is amazing. He kind of walked us through some practical, like how to pray for people. And I go home, and my wife's there. We've got our youngest, was maybe one at the time. And she's waiting for me to tell her the report of how I stood up to this healer guy. And I was like, no, it was awesome. And I sat down and walked her through what I had learned, and walked her through this kind of method for just praying for people. And she's like, awesome, let's go do it right now. OK, so we get out the stuff for the baby, and we're getting packed up. And we're just going to go walking and find people. And we go to an area that's not too far from our house, that's a pretty poor area. And we start walking around, and we see this lady. She's kind of limping. And my wife's like, there's one. 

 (Laughter) Let's get her. 

 So we hurry over to this lady. And my wife's like, hi, how are you? What's your name? I'm Susan. 

 I notice you're limping. What's wrong with your knee? And so the lady tells her what happened. And my wife says, can we pray for you? We'd like to pray for you. And the lady's like, sure. And so my wife gets down, puts her hand on this lady's knee, and just says, Jesus, come. I just command this pain to leave and just heal this knee right now in Jesus' name. That was it. 

 We're like, OK. And we stand up. And the lady's still kind of confused like what's happening. And we say, well, test it. See what happened. And the lady does this like, 

 what? And this is all in Hindi, but it's like, basically, she's saying, what in the world? What's going on right now? Like, there's no pain. Like, what did you do? 

 I think we were more surprised than her. I don't know. 

 I don't know. Like, Jesus healed you. 

 And then that led into a gospel presentation right there, because we were like, telling her about Jesus and how he's the one that healed her. And she was super thankful. And we moved on. And like, let's keep going. And we ended up going to this little area that was kind of a common area with homes around the square 

 and saw somebody else and began to pray. And I remember seeing a lady come up-- because everybody's kind of wondering what's going on. There's these white people here, foreigners, because we do stand out a lot, by the way. We were in a city of 2 million people. We were literally the only white-skinned people in the city. We commonly caused auto accidents, like drive their scooters and bam. So it was like-- 

 yeah, it was-- yeah, that was normal life for us. Anyway, we go into this area, and we just started praying for people and seeing some cool stuff. The story I remember the most was there was a lady that came up and had this little infant, maybe two-year-old, laying on her shoulder. And you can tell when a kid has a fever, and there's just no life in their face. And I said, I'd like to pray for your child. And so she told me that fever. And when I put my hand on this child's back, it was hot. I mean, we're talking-- as a parent, you kind of learn that temperature, like, whoa, this kid has a fever big time. And I just began to say, fever, leave right now in the name of Jesus. I command you to go. And I could physically feel the temperature change in my hand. And as it got to normal, this kid pops up, looks around, and does that shimmy thing when they want to get out of their parents' arms, wanted to get down, shimmies down, and runs off. 

 And I was like, OK, there's something to this. 

 And so from that point on, we began to say, hey, maybe we need to not just practice this. We should begin training our leaders in how to really engage the lost, both to proclaim the gospel. We want to continue-- because we'd already been teaching that-- but how do we engage them and teach them how to operate and walk in the gifts of the Spirit? And so that began our journey. 

 Where are we at on time? 

 What's that? 

 We want to take some time here at the end. 

 Couple minutes? 

 Yeah. Thank you. 

 Travis has a good question. And I was going to get to that. We were talking about making some space for ministry time. What the ladies shared this morning was so powerful. And I was like, we need to make space to respond to what they shared. And so cutting out a little bit here. But I really just want to encourage you all. We saw this stuff happen in India. And I've heard that before. Like, oh, yeah, that works there. We ended up-- again, I won't go through the whole story-- coming back to the States for about a year in 2016. And while we were in the States, we decided to take the School of Kingdom Ministry course, where we kind of learned to operate in these things and see how this stuff works. And man, the stories were incredible. I remember one of the first times I went out, we ended up getting into a pretty rundown apartment, getting into a home of a man that had been in the hospital for about two months. They finally just sent him home, unhealed. He was bedridden. He hadn't been out of bed for a month and prayed over him. And he gets up and walks with a walker. I wish I could say he skipped like the guy in the Bible. But he didn't. But he had his walker and ends up walking around the apartment complex. People are coming out of the apartment like, what in the world? How did this happen? My wife tells a story of a lady in Walmart, in one of those little scooty carts, 

 getting prayed for and getting up and walking up and down the aisle and jumping up and down and just hugging her. I mean, just like cool stuff God was doing as we began to really step out and practice and try. And we had some fails too, but like we just started seeing some really cool stuff. We then moved to the UK and spent a year there. But before we moved there, we were passing through on our way to India, stopped in the UK, kept hearing stories like, oh, this is postmodern Christian. You know, that stuff's not here. People don't respond to that well here. OK, so we're driving by a grocery store. And my wife's like, hey, let's go over there to that grocery store and let's just go try it out. Let's see what happens. So we meet in the front of the store, look at our watch. She's like, OK, 30 minutes. I'm going that way. You go that way. Let's meet back here in 30 minutes, see what happens. And so I go. I meet with a guy. I get to pray for him. I see like an old British guy walking with a cane, pray for him. He experienced some relief. I mean, he wasn't fully healed, but he experienced some relief. We get back. My wife's like, yeah, I met-- I talked to three different ladies. All of them were responding. One lady is just weeping and hugging me in the aisle over there. And we were like, OK, yeah, it works here too. 

 It's good. So yeah, when Jesus said the fields are ripe for harvest, like he wasn't just talking about their historical Jerusalem or only on the front lines of the mission field. Like that's where God's working and doing this stuff. No, he's doing it right here. And you guys have stories as well. But kind of my goal today is even just to raise our level of faith of what God wants to do and can do. There are people all around this community that are hurting, that are lonely, that are hearing voices of you are worthless. 

 And they just are waiting for somebody to pray for them. And you'd be surprised how rare it is to get like a hard rejection. Went out with a team a couple of days ago in San Francisco with the church up there. And there was a little bit of fear. They said, this is the first time we've done this. 

 We came back. And they were just story after story. I think we had five team pairs that went out. And just some really cool stories of people receiving prayer. Nobody received Christ that day. We didn't have any salvations. But they were like blown away about how easy this was. We're going to get the rest of our church doing this. So just want to encourage you guys too to consider, to be intentional about getting out, making times to engage with your community, and to love on people. That's what I often say. I get like tightened up in my chest when I hear the word evangelism. I'm going to talk to random people about spiritual things. That sounds scary. 

 Well, no, change your thinking a bit. Like how can you love on, how can we love on our community and care for them? The most loving thing we can do is introduce them to Jesus. But you don't have to every time. Every encounter you have with someone, they should feel loved and cared for when you walk away from that. And so that's really what we've done. We're now in Oklahoma City working at a church and been doing this stuff there and seeing some cool. I can share a lot more stories, but I think that'll suffice it for now. 

 Hey, thanks Scott. 

 (Audience Applauding) 

 If you're a part of the team headed out to Mexico, would you go ahead and stand where you're at? 

 And Grace and Monica, would you guys also stand? You guys are headed to India. 

 Maybe Scott could pray for you to receive Hindi. 

 (Audience Laughing) 

 And if you're near those who are standing, would you lay a hand on them if you're not near them, you can extend a hand. 

 (Audience Chattering) 

 And if you're here and you're just stirred by what Scott shared, stirred by what the women shared this morning, you're wanting more boldness and you're feeling God's calling you into greater risk. Would you go ahead and stand? 

 You know that God's calling you to risk in greater ways and sharing the word and also being gutsy enough to pray for the people you see and run into. 

 If you're next to one of these people, would you lay a hand on them as well? 

 Jesus, we want to right now as a church, send these. 

 They're not just going or leaving for a week. 

 They're being sent, they're being commissioned. 

 And I pray that you would send them with great authority. 

 I pray that you would send them with power. 

 You would send them with a heart of compassion 

 that we would feel for the people that we see and it would cause us to move past our fears, 

 that compassion would bring us past our risk, our fears, Lord, and invite us into risk. 

 We ask that signs and wonders would follow. 

 Those who proclaim your word, 

 pray for an opportunity this week to share, pray for an opportunity this week to pray for someone and just pray that you would come upon us with boldness, that we would step out and risk in the ways that you're inviting us to risk. 

 Jesus, would you give us eyes to see? 

 Not just every need, but the needs that you're wanting us to meet, 

 that you would show us who you're wanting us to talk to, not every student in the class, but you're probably wanting us to speak to one or two students in the class. Would you give us the gift of discernment? 

 And would we bear much fruit, not just operating in your gifts, but also bearing the fruit of the Spirit, 

 love and peace and the joy that Jenny proclaimed over us, that our very faces would be a testimony to the people around us? Would you lift our chins? 

 Would you help us to trust that you are who you say you are and you're gonna do what you said you were gonna do? 

 We trust you for this. Holy Spirit, come. 

 Jesus, thank you for sending the Spirit. And thank you, Spirit of God, for sending these into their workplaces, 

 into their neighborhoods, and to the nations of the world. 

 We bless what you're about to do. And everyone said, amen.