Taylor, Tom: Fellowship-02 ~ Fellowship In The Gospel

This harmonica is about to be retired to the old harmonicas home. I could hear a couple notes wheezing more than they should, and of course it's a giant investment. They cost four and a half dollars, those things do, so I think it will soon be replaced and will go to the gallery of used harmonicas. You never throw one away, fellas. You just put it up on a shelf and you assure your wife that someday you'll want it again. So I have a considerable quantity of old harmonicas. Tonight I want to read to you in Philippians chapter one and in chapter four. I've been talking about the concepts of fellowship, last night about divine fellowship, and this morning about the working fellowship. And what I've been trying to say is, is that we are a people through faith in Jesus Christ. We are a people that are gathered together. First of all, that we should enjoy the worship of God and the fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and with one another. And we should enjoy also the fellowship of working together, serving God together. And tonight I want to talk about the fellowship of witness, how it's our privilege to witness for Christ together in many, many practical ways. And I will have to hit and skip on some of the scriptures, so I will tell you where I'm going, and you'll be patient with me, and you'll know that we'll soon be done. Isn't that nice to know? But anyhow, that's what I want to work with. I've emphasized the fact that we are a body of believers who enjoy the worship and fellowship with God, and a body of believers who, with one mind and common concern, ought to be concerned for the service of God, and then for the gospel and the promotion of the gospel of God. And so in Philippians one, I'll simply read verses one through five immediately, and then I'll go to chapter four. Paul and Timotheus, the servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi with the bishops and deacons, grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making requests with joy, for your furtherance in the gospel from the first day until now. And then in chapter four, Paul says, therefore, at verse one, my brethren, dearly beloved and longed for my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. I beseech you, Odius, and beseech Syndicate, that they be of the same mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also, true yoke fellow, help those women which labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow laborers whose names are in the book of life. And then back in chapter one, at the end of the book, at the end of chapter one, verse twenty seven, Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ, that whether I come and see you or else be absent, I may hear of your affairs, that you stand fast in one spirit, with one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel. There are other scriptures that come to my mind too, and I will mention some of them as I go. But here's the important thing. There is a fellowship of the gospel, and that's where we are. And the fellowship of the gospel is that we are people of a common life to tell others of the glorious truth that Jesus died to save sinners. If you've never believed that for yourself, you ought to trust him tonight and be born into the family of God. But if you have believed it, do believe it, know the truth of it, then you ought to be concerned with being part of the fellowship that witnesses to that particular thing. And in a sense, we are part of it, but some of us become rather inert parts of it from time to time and don't really have a very heavy involvement in it. I'm not talking about becoming a great personal evangelist or anything like that. I'm simply talking about being a fellowshipper in the work of the gospel, and in any work that has to be done, there are some things that are done on one level and some things that are done on another. What the sisters did in Philippians four, we don't know. We're pretty sure he didn't send them out preaching. We don't know, but they helped him somehow. And he says, I just wish you'd all get together and help me like those women did. And I want you to understand, he says, that there are other workers with me too, like Clement and whatnot. I'm not the sole worker that God has. I'm not the only important person. The Lord has an army of people, and we are a fellowship. And so in chapter one, he says, I just thank you, Philippians, for being part of the fellowship until this day. I thank you for that. And at the end of chapter one, he says, and what I want to pray is that you'll continue to be that, so whenever we hear of you, you stand fast in one spirit and one faith, preaching, proclaiming, and sharing the gospel. The fellowship of the gospel. When I was thinking about these fellowship things, I outlined five particular fellowship areas, and in my mind I could outline probably a dozen more, because fellowship means people in common cause, working together, serving together, doing whatever together. But I just selected these three. that the divine fellowship whereby we stand in the presence of God, and we enjoy the truth of God and the fellowship with him and with the Lord Jesus Christ. And the working fellowship, whereby we understand that there are things to be done, and we all put in our part and do those things. And the gospel fellowship, where we all have a stake in the promotion of the truth of Jesus Christ. And there's the witness of many that accomplishes these things under the grace and under the power of God. Nobody has himself the power to convert people, so we live in accord with God's will and God's work and the work of God's spirit, but we are all a part of that thing, and some people play a more overt part, and some people play a kind of a hidden part. The important thing to know is you're part of that fellowship, and Paul not only thanks the Philippians for that in second Corin- and second Corinthians eight, he thanks the Corinthians church for that, and he thanks many other people along the way too, because Paul knows that the work of the gospel is not a one-man show, it's not a one church operation, it's the cooperation and the union of many believers under the direction of the Spirit of God, reaching out and testifying that Jesus Christ is the way to know God. So in looking at that, I mentioned four particular things, four particular things. First of all, in this fellowship of the gospel, I mentioned the matter of prayer. It did not show up in my four scripture readings. I usually go back to Ephesians six nineteen, where Paul tells of his desire that they would remember him, that he'd be able to be clear and plain in his preaching of the gospel message. But the concept has to be there, the concept of prayer, praying for workers and praying for the work, praying for the lost. Sorry about that. I'll try to be nicer. I almost ruined the one at Pittsburgh the other night. I slapped it, and it growled at me for the rest of the night. I apologized later, said I was sorry, promised never to do it again, and it just made a gurgling sound. So after that, I shouted like I was at a street meeting, and it came to work out better. Where was I before I ran off in this rabbit trail? Uh, yes. The concept of prayer for the workers and for the work, praying for the loss, certainly. I want to tell you something about our prayers, and I'm not going to be critical here, I'm just going to tell you something. The enormous share of prayers in my world are rather selfish prayers. Well, you can't say selfish, maybe that's the wrong word, but they are taken up with things that concern us. So I'm getting ready to come here, and I pray that the Lord will, will guide me in some ministry activity. I don't think that's wrong. Then they pr- pray for others, the sick and all sorts of things. All of those things are right and good, but somehow, somehow the lost do not take a very big place in the prayers of many of us. Now, it may be different with you. Praise the Lord, we don't all have the same problems or the same hang-ups, but sometimes we get very general about the lost. We say, Lord, pray, save the lost in Charlotte. You know, it's kind of an easy thing to say, and sometimes we don't get very fervent about praying for them, but we also sometimes don't get very fervent about praying for the workers. My wife likes to take the Missions Handbook, you know, that CMML puts out, and she reads through that, praying for those people regularly through the week and on the days. I occasionally think of some of them too, but she does it very systematically, and we're praying for the workers there. We ask for their health, yes, but we ask for the effectiveness of their message and pray that their gospel will touch the hearts of many people. If you're not careful, you'll find that you're so self-centered in your prayers, and you may pray a long time or a short time. Time isn't the factor, but if you're not careful, you'll find that you're so self-centered in your prayers that the great bulk of them are for your personal welfare. And if you say, well, my personal welfare is important to me, that's right, that's right. But there are a lot of other things that are important too, and the lost happen to be one of those things. The Apostle Paul will tell us in First Corinthians nine, which I will mention later, I think too, but he'll tell us how he did everything possible that by all means he might save some. And his prayer for the lost as well as for the saved is a notable thing. So we need to pray for the workers and for the work, to pray that the work will be accomplished, that people will be saved, and to pray for the workers that do it. Up home in Pennsylvania, up in the north, I have for a number of years been the guest lecturer at the Word of Life Bible Institute. I'm the guest lecturer in church history because that was my professorship in the seminary, along with other things like washing the blackboards and stuff like that. See, in Christian schools, in Christian schools, the stat- stratification of duties is rather different. And I always said that in the seminaries where I taught, if you just happen to be passing by the office at lunch and the telephone rang and you answered it and suddenly the secretary died, the administration would come by and say, oh, you can take care of the telephones too for a week, can't you? They're just great at putting all sorts of things on you. But in that particular circumstance, we would meet and pray week by week for the evangelism teams that would go out under the, uh, program of evangelism that the seminary used in its classes. Anybody could come, and you could stay for twenty minutes or thirty minutes or, or an hour if you wanted to, but we would pray particularly for the work of evangelism as men went out into the different marketplaces round about where we are to give out tracts and literature and to tell other people about the Lord Jesus. And here's a funny thing. Every now and then, somebody would be saved. Praise the Lord, don't you think? But when somebody would come back and bring us the name of somebody we've been trust- we always followed these things up, incidentally. They were not just names picked out of telephone books. When somebody would come back and tell how they'd witnessed to someone they'd trusted Jesus, you know, we all felt a special glow. Those of us who just stayed there and prayed felt especially good. Don't you understand that? Because we felt we'd had some little part in that thing, and our part was prayer. We hadn't been out giving out the tract, we'd been praying, and our prayers had been answered, and God had done a work of grace in somebody's heart. Now, I know you know this too, there are people sometimes who make professions that don't mean very much, but I'm speaking about professions that were made, and then follow-ups were given to them to see how they went. And you just kind of felt the truth of being part of a great team that had reached out and done something in that situation. I enjoyed the prayer meetings a great deal. Sometimes we had students that didn't feel that they could go and give out tracts and other things because different people have different skill. But if they were going to get a degree, they had to do it. Didn't have to do it forever. If they didn't want to get a degree, then they could do anything they wanted to, but that was part of the required curriculum, and I think still is, although I've been retired ten years, and it's hard to tell what blunders they've made since I wasn't there to control everything. I'm just smiling at that. Yes, to pray for the workers and for the work. Very important thing, to lay it out before God. And if you have neighbors, you can pray for them, need to know Jesus. You can pray for people you never saw before to know Jesus. But the idea is, is that Paul said, I want you to pray for me as I go about this ministry, Ephesians six. and that's how I will have an open door, and that's how I will have an open mouth to speak to it. So that's what I mentioned, first of all. Secondly, practical help. Now, I said a few moments ago in Philippians four, we don't know what these sisters did, but if you want to do something interesting on your own, read Romans sixteen and list the names of all the women that are mentioned in Romans sixteen. You'll have to go by the feminine form of the names, and sometimes men have feminine names too, but where they identified as our sister and so forth, then you don't have to worry about it. But go through Romans sixteen and mark down all the feminine names and what Paul thought of them. Note how they helped him. Note how they assisted. Note how they provided. Know how, by the grace of God, important they were. And then when you come to Philippians four, you say, I don't know what Eoides and Syntyche did. I know Paul wants them to be of one mind, and he wants them to serve like the other women did and be helped by the community because somehow they were a vital, vital part. And it may have been like Priscilla and Aquila that provided him food and lodging from time to time. We don't know, but practical help is a very big thing, and practical help exists in lots of areas. I've often been blessed by people cooking for me. I like to cook for myself, but when we're traveling around sometimes, people invite us to their homes, and we've been very well treated here and very well treated at Titsboro. In fact, I wonder if I should even bother going back to Pennsylvania. Maybe I should just hang around and sponge on the community. You understand it. You understand my note of humor, I hope, but I'm very thankful for those things, practical help. And I was out in Ohio one time, preaching, and I'm there, there are a number of things that I'm not good at, and one is I'm not good with the neckties. I love to wear them. They save my shirt from getting spotted by soup and other things. Love to wear them, but I'm not really good at them. I was getting ready to go visiting for the day, and the lady where I was staying looked at me, and she said, Mr. Taylor, she said, are you going to wear that tie with that coat? Now, Ruth normally picks my ties out, but this was years ago, and maybe I had snuck out. Snuck is the past perfect participle of the verb sneak, in case you worry about it. So, so maybe I had just gotten out of there, and she didn't know where I was. I don't know. And I said, well, I thought I would. And she said, do you know, she said, that makes you look ludicrous. She said, that is a totally ill-fitting tie, color-wise, for that coat. Well, I wasn't going to leave my coat, and I didn't, I just kind of looked helpless. And she said, do you have some other ties? Well, I did have a couple of other ties, and she looked at them with disgust, and she said her husband's name was August. She said, I'll get you one of August's ties. And so just in a few moments, as a matter of time, she had ripped off my necktie and was tying August's tie. Now, I don't know, August was his name, see. I don't know if I look better or worse because I don't understand things, but I've always thought of that bit of practical help. Do you understand that? Just a practical help. Since I'm going out visiting and calling on people I've never seen, she didn't think I should look like a circus clown if I didn't have to. So she gave me one of her husband's ties, and that night I gave it back. And when I got home, I said, what did that old bat know about neckties? No, no, no, no, that's not what I said at all. I said, thank you, Lord, for providing somebody who could help me that. Ruth often helps me with those things, and I'm glad for that. She's supposed to do it because she's my helper, but she often does that, but just strange things happen, practical help, and a lot of other things along those lines too. But you look out and say, well, is that part of the gospel? Well, it's part of helping share the gospel. And when you reach out to help someone who needs the gospel, somebody who doesn't know Jesus, and you do something nice for them, when you reach out to show the love of Christ, you're really a worker in the gospel as much as any evangelist is. When we were in Philadelphia, I attended the Germantown Assembly. I think I can talk about these people pretty freely. I think they're with the Lord, but I think I can talk about them pretty freely. But in the Germantown Assembly was a family named Patterson. They still have children living in New Jersey, but the Pattersons were solid people. You never heard much out of them. They didn't make much noise. But in the community where they lived, if anybody was moving out, Mrs. Patterson would look at them as quick as she could and say, why didn't they come and have dinner at her place before they left? And if anybody was moving in, Mrs. Patterson was over with a cake and wondered if they wouldn't like to come and have dinner at her place on a moving day. In the course of the time we were in Germantown, the Pattersons are responsible for, by the help of God's spirit, responsible for bringing three families to know the Lord Jesus. They did it because they showed practical help, and the people became attracted to them. Mrs. Patterson did not say, I'm going to give you a cake if you promise to believe in Jesus. She did not do anything like that. She simply did nice things and practical help, and when people would ask her about it, she would tell them about her faith in the Lord Jesus, tell them about her fellowship. And we saw one family that I know pretty much to this day, off and on, they just came to find out what everything was about at the little assembly. In about five months, they found out what it was really about by trusting the Lord. Believe it or not, that's the fellowship in the gospel. And when you show the grace of God to others about you, whether they respond positively or not doesn't make much difference. When you show the grace of God to them, you are fellowshipping in the work of the gospel. You may not have the gift to speak or to say much, you may not know what to think or do, but in reaching out and showing the goodness of God's mercy to you and others, you're fellowshipping in the gospel. See, we get confused, and we only want to concentrate on really big things, but big things are not everything in the picture. It's the Holy Spirit that works, and the Holy Spirit touches lives through the kindness of believers. And if you doubt that, then you go and read First Peter two verses eleven and twelve. And Peter says, I want you to make sure that your conversation is honest among the Gentiles, that when times of trouble come, they, remembering your good manner of living, will think about God and turn to God. And it may not always work ABC, but God does it in powerful, powerful ways. So first of all, in the fellowship of the gospel, we become people who pray. We pray for the work, and we pray for the workers. And then, in this apostolic mode, we become those who share practical help. And you can see the practical help in two Corinthians eight in a wonderful way. Paul talks about how they gave themselves to the Lord and them to them. Then he tells about how they arranged out of their poverty to bring a great offering for the blessing of the saints in Jerusalem, who had tremendous needs. It wasn't that everybody in Macedonia was rich, but they were willing to practically help with what they had for the benefit of the saints. And in seeing the love that they had for the saints, the love of God, as we sang in one of these hymns, is something that accredits us in the world round about us. Jesus said that before we had the hymn. He said it in John thirteen, on which that song is based. He said, this is how people will know that you're my disciples, because you love one another. In the third place, in the third place, encouragement. Excuse me. It's a hungry frog. He just shows up every now and then, and I just have to bite him once and forget about him. You understand how it goes, maybe. But encouragement, and Galatians two nine has always struck me in a kind of a striking way, where Paul is talking about his experience. Galatians two nine, he says it beautifully. He's gone to see the leaders after he believed. He said, when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision. The right hand of fellowship, that they were commissioned with the gospel to the heathen while these men continued to work with the circumcision. It didn't mean that Paul couldn't preach to the Jews, because he does. He says to the Jew first and all with the Greek, he does it regularly. But he had a particular ministry to the Gentiles. God gave it to him. And those in Jerusalem, when they saw it and heard about it, extended to him the right hand of fellowship, and in effect they say, go to it, go to it. Encouragement is a big thing. Encouragement can be given in lots of different ways. Over at Burlington, we were at Burlington last year, some, some, yeah, I guess last year. I can hardly remember one year from the other, but the last time I was in Burlington for any extended stay, they were getting ready for a big literature outreach someplace and something like that, and they were going to put together these packets of literature that you hang on the door, and there's all kinds of stuff in those packets. They're just tons of stuff, and it's all assembled by hand. Nobody brings an assembling machine to Burlington, all assembled by hand. And so they said on a, on a Saturday morning they would put all that stuff together. So Ruth and I went to help put together because Ruth and I are geniuses at assembling. I've assembled hundreds of syllabuses, and she's worked with me like that, and we know how to work with both hand. We don't have to pick up this page and put it there and that page, brother, we snap along like that, and we are geniuses at assembling. I hate to tell you that because it seems boastful. It's just true, that's all. We are geniuses at it. And when we assemble with other people, we wind up wishing that they, well, what we wind up doing is to let them work on that table and give us our own table so we can go around it quickly and all that sort of thing. Well, I can't remember the exact number, but there were about twenty people that showed up to assemble things at Burlington. And the man who was going to help preserve it, he said, isn't this encouraging? He said, I thought it would take us days to get these all together, but actually we had the whole job done in about three hours, time to eat a grizzly lunch and a few other things in about three hours. So just the fact that we met to help assemble things was an encouraging act to those who were going out with the gospel along those lines. And you'll find many interesting ways like that to encourage. A word of encouragement is helpful. And sometimes, if you know that someone is going to visit and you volunteer to go with them, that can be enormously helpful. I can only tell you that encouragement is one of the great ways in which we show the fellowship that we have with the Lord Jesus. I mentioned a hunting illustration. Uh, you may not enjoy hunting. I can't do it anymore, but I always enjoyed it as a younger man. I didn't hurt many things because I wasn't a very good shot, but I tried, I tried, I tried, and occasionally I would find a rabbit who was old and ready to give up the ghost, and and I would bring him home and make a rug for my daughter out of his fur and make a rabbit stew out of him. Never told the children it was rabbit stew. They ate it and enjoyed it. But if I'd told them it was rabbit stew, they would have died in their chairs. My wife is, you can check with her, but I haven't heard anything for years and years. But I had a godly friend who was a great personal worker, and he loved to hunt. And so I went with him because he also had property that you could hunt on. So I went with him, and we're hunting one day, and we're working across a field, you know, hoping to see some innocent critter in it. We're working across the field. I've got a double-barreled shotgun. We're working across the field, and as we worked across it, three hunters came out of the woods, coming towards us. Well, you have to be careful in a situation like that, lest you shoot each other accidentally. And so as they came towards us, I opened the breach in my piece, so there was no tenant, and my friend said to me, he said, see those hunters, Tom? He's got a loud voice. See those hunters, Tom? And I said, yes, I see them. I said, I'll be. He said, no, no. He says, I don't want you to be careful. He said, I want you to go over there and give them a Gospel of John. They could have hurt him two blocks away. Well, I didn't happen to have a Gospel of John, but my friend had a whole hunter's pack full of them. So he handed me a, a group of Gospels of John's and tracts. He said, go over there and give them to those people, Tom. He said, they need to hear the gospel. They shouldn't just be out here shooting things. They need to hear the gospel. And I went over, I went over and came to the first hunter and said, I'd like to give you a Gospel of John, and, and he said, oh, thanks, thanks. I went to all three of them. You, you don't really argue with men that are carrying shotguns much anyway, but I gave all three, and I came back to my friend and, and I said, I've done that. He said, well, he said, I'm sorry I had to boss you to do it, Tom. I hope no more hunters would come out soon. But he was right, and he encouraged me, and I did it. Would I have done it if he hadn't encouraged me? Probably not. Did any of those men get saved? I don't. But they all had a Gospel of John and a couple tracts stuck in their pockets. And maybe they would throw them away at the first bus stop. You can't know about those things, but they had them. Like the man when we were hunting, and he drove up as we were crossing the road. This brother, I could tell you stories for two hours on his ministry, but we were getting ready to cross the road, and a car pulled up and pulled beside us. We'd opened our pieces because you don't cross the road with an closed piece, so we'd opened the guns, and this man drove up, and he said, he said, can you tell me how to get to New York? We're about seventy miles from New York. He said, can you tell me how to get to New York? And my friend said, are you in a hurry to get there? The man said, well, I'm not sure. Well, my friend said, would a minute make any difference? And the fellow said, a minute wouldn't make any difference. My friend said, and I'm going to take a minute and tell you how to get to heaven. That's more important anyway, he said. And he gave him a nice, crisp, clear gospel presentation, gave him a Gospel of John, a couple tracks, and then he said to him, he said, this road right here goes to New York. It's about seventy five miles. He said, stay in this road, you'll be at New York in about an hour and a half, he said. And the fellow drove off. Did he believe the gospel? I don't know. Did he have a tract in the gospel? He did. And my friend said, you know, he said, it's not, you don't have to work at witnessing. He said, it's as natural as falling out of your bed, which, incidentally, I don't do very often. But he said, all you have to do is have some ammunition, just pass it out. That's encouragement, believe it or not. Well, I've been teaching a word of life, as I told you a few moments ago, and I was up there one time, and two or three preachers were there. Jack Wurtzman was still alive. Two or three preachers were there and were sitting having a general talk. And this one man said, he said, the difference between Jack Wurtzman and the other evangelists that come to my church is this, he said. The difference is this. He said, men come to my church to preach, and they say, let's pray, let's pray for the lost. He said, Jack Wurtzman comes to church, and he says, let's pray, and then he kneels and says, thank you, Lord, for the souls you're going to save tonight. And he said, you know, he said, we see people trust Jesus. And what he was really saying was, a lot of times we don't give the kind of encouragement to ourselves and others. I'm kind of a big guy too. Lord, I hope some unsaved person straggles in here tonight. Maybe, maybe he's just cold, who knows? Maybe he'll straggle in, he'll like us, he'll hear the gospel and believe. It's not the way Wurtzen prayed. He said, Lord, we thank you for the souls tonight that will hear the gospel and trust Jesus. That's known as praying positively. And if you say, well, if nobody answered, he would say we pray it in the will of God. We can't make converts anyway. You can argue with people till the end of time. We cannot make converts. It's the work of the Spirit in our heart, but the work of the Spirit is through our witness and through the gospel and through the presentation of truth. So we can encourage. And in the case of missionaries and other Christian workers, you can encourage them enormously by a letter. That's a simple letter. You can say, Dear Brother Snirk. Just made the name up. Don't have any idea who you are or whether you're a good worker or not, but we are praying that God will bless you as you share the gospel. I will tell you that Brother Snirk will be thankful, and you'll soon be on his missionary letter list. I will tell you that without batting an eyelash. Encouragement is a big thing, and the apostle says, these women helped me in what I did, and he says, these brethren met me and they said, we're not going to solve all these issues that people want to argue over. We're just going to shake hands with you, and we're going to say, go to the ministry that God has given you, praise the Lord, and execute that ministry. And we can be encouragers along those lines too. When you see the people going to take care of the nursery, pray that God will help them to have an impact on the lives of little children that will make them feel welcome and strong where they are. Well, you say, you say the children are babies. Yes, sometimes they're babies. Sometimes their fathers are babies, but they're babies. Yes. But when you go to second Timothy three and you read that Paul says to Timothy, from a child you've known the Holy Scriptures, you want to go back and have somebody check that word out in Greek for you, because the word that's translated child in the King James is the Greek word brephos, which is a babe in arms. He says, from your earliest days, you've heard the scripture. And I can see Paul's, I can see Timothy's mother and grandmother, who are godly women, I can see them reciting the scripture to him in different ways when he was just a baby. And that kind of encouragement is a big help in all that we do. In the fourth place, personal witness. The Apostle Paul tells us in First Corinthians nine of his own exercise in those things, and I've read this chapter many times, and it's always been challenging to me. Paul says, I want to tell you that a dispensation of the gospel is given to me. And finally, he says in verse nineteen, he says, though I be free from all men, yet I've made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And in verse twenty one, he tells us how he confers in life with others. He says, I do these things that I might gain them that are without law. And he adds to that in verse twenty two, that I might by all means save some. Now, Paul knows that it's God that saves people, but he's the agent and use of God, and God commissioned him to do it. And the result is, he says, I make myself all things to all men in order that I might present the truth of the gospel to them and save some. Now, he had a particular calling from God, and he had a particular ministry, which not all of us have, but the concept of the truth of redeemed life, everybody who's born again has. I have flubbed more personal witness attempts than I could tell you. I would be embarrassed if, you know, the big overhead screen started to show them. I would be embarrassed, humiliated, and all that sort of thing. And sometimes when I thought I had great opportunities and tried to seize them, uh, things haven't worked the way I thought they would work. But personal witness is, first of all, the way you live your life, and secondly, the way you talk about it. And if when you talk about it, your life behind it is sorted or not right, your words do not have much effect. I never liked that poem that said the Bible, you know, you're the only Bible the world will ever see. I thought that was kind of absurd in detail, but I understand the sentiment of it. The sentiment is that the world watches the church. And that's why Peter says in First Peter two eleven and twelve, that's why he says, keep your lifestyle honest among the Gentiles so that when they see your behavior, they'll be impacted with the truth of God, and if trouble comes to them, they will be touched and think about God too. Personal witness, the way in which we live and the way in which we express it. And here's the interesting thing. We're not like individuals, one here and one there somewhere else. We are a family connected together by the Spirit of God. We are that people brought to know Jesus Christ and brought into a family relationship with God, and therefore we have a fellowship, not only with God and with his son and with one another, we have a fellowship in the work he wants us to do, and we have a fellowship in the witness that he wants us to give. We have a great fellowship in the gospel. I won't mention any of these sales pitches that come to my house, but there are people who sell stuff door to door. I did that once. I sold products door to door. It was the most miserable job I have ever had in my life. I hated every day of it, but there wasn't anything else I could do, and I was making enough money to at least... Anyhow, it was a long time before we were married, so Ruth didn't have to agonize with this, but I'll tell you, I woke up every morning with a burning headache, but I had to do it. So going door to door was a tremendous chore to me. I did learn things that have helped me in Christian work. I learned that not every house has a pet lion that's waiting to eat you alive. I did learn that. And not every home has somebody with a gun ready to shoot you. I learned those things. In fact, I learned that if you're decent and polite and all that, there are a lot of people that are kind of glad to see you. So for nine months, I made a living that way, and it was torture every day, brother, sister, it was torture every day. But there's some people who have great ministry along that line, but there are some who can't do it very well at all. You just have to understand that. And that's because God deals out the ministries, as I said this morning, and he gives particular and unique gifts to different people. And this fellow I used to hunt with has gone to heaven, so I don't see him anymore. I hope to see him in glory, of course, but he's gone to heaven. But, but I've only known a few people in my life that had that kind of a concept and that kind of ability. Praise the Lord, they're there, but they were enormous encouragers to the rest of us. Yeah. The fellowship of witness is the fact that we are one people brought together in the knowledge of Jesus, and we have the responsibility and the joy of reflecting him to the world about us. So by our prayers, by our practical help, by our encouragement, by our personal witness, we are fellowshippers in the gospel. And when folks say, as they do, when they say we don't see many people saved anymore. I don't argue about that. I don't have all the answers to it, but I have a feeling that the community does not really take much fellowship in the gospel. It becomes kind of a slogan, but it doesn't go much beyond that sense. And fellowship is something that you not only have, but you live it out and express it and enjoy it. So we had a great dinner here last night. I enjoyed it. I'm still thinking about it. I enjoyed it very much, but you know, I could have taken my food and sat at the table and growled about everybody. I could have just been miserable and wretched and made other people feel bad too. I could have been part of it, but a ruinous part of it, but that's not what the Lord wants us to be, to be thankful and to be considerate and yielded to him. Well, I want to thank you for letting us be here on this weekend. Thanks for your kindness, and nice to see you too. Pray that the Lord will bless you very much. But I pray that for you and me too, we'll remember the fellowship of the gospel, that we are a people in common cause to let others know that Jesus Christ died to save sinners, and that all who believe on him are given eternal life and are kept by God secure and sound for all eternity. It's a great message, and we have a great God who empowers us and authorizes us to share it and to let others know what it is too. So I need to keep it in my mind and thank God for the beauty of the fellowship that we enjoy with God, and the fellowship in working together, and the fellowship in the gospel, and seeing people know Jesus. I stopped one time in Indiana and spoke to the man who had led me to know the Lord. Pretty much God used him, and I wanted to thank him for that. And he said, Tom, he said, if you had to thank everybody that had a part in that, there'd be several hundred people. Because he said, there are people that prayed for me and people that witnessed to you and you didn't even know it, and other things like that. So he said, it's nice that you stopped by to thank me, but he said, just thank the Lord and tell somebody else what Jesus means to you. So let's pray, and let's exercise ourselves in the fellowship that God has given us. Gracious Father, we thank you for your mercies to us tonight. We thank you for your blessings. We thank you for saving grace. Lord, I pray that you'd help me to be a more fervent and honest witness for Jesus, with lives that back up the words that we say. And pray, Lord, you'd help me too to be an encourager and a prayer partner and a helper for those who serve you and to those who need you. Pray God that you'd help us to see the beauty of salvation and the joy of seeing others know Christ. We thank you for this fellowship. We pray God you'd bless the brothers and sisters here. We pray you'd help them to grow in grace and in understanding of your will and your ministry. And we pray God that your blessing would pour out from here and touch many lives with the gospel and with the truth of the will of God for the lives of the saints. We just thank you tonight, respectfully, honestly, in Jesus' name, amen.