So here on our last, last message in this year-long series, we've made it. Congratulations. Some of you have only started attending partway through this. Some of you have been here the whole time. Some of you have barely missed a week.

Some of you, your attendance could be a little bit better.

Very shrewd.

We're looking today at the Great Commission. I titled this one kind of just "Epilogue," like it was actually almost an afterthought. I kind of moved all the way through everything and then said, wait a second, we need an epilogue, something that says, okay, now put this into practice. Put this to work. And so looking at, of course, the Great Commission of Jesus Christ, the mission that He gave to His believers starting with the disciples that were with Him and then spreading throughout all the church, He gave that to them in the end of Matthew chapter 28, and so that's kind of our primary text, but I'm going to be looking at several different scriptures because I want to make a bit of a buildup to that, a biblical case building up to that about what Jesus was doing and therefore what it is that He's calling you to do.

As He says, "Go out and make disciples of people from all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit." He also says, by the way, He says, and I want to translate a little bit, "And don't worry, I'm with you always." See, I think when we hear Jesus saying like, "Okay, it's your job to go out and make disciples," you're like, "Uh-uh, that's the pastor's job, you know, isn't there a Sunday school teacher for that, or a discipleship group leader, or something?" Like, those are people from the church, so you might be one of them, you know, you just might not have realized that yet. But God has called you, if you're a believer in Christ, He's called you to proclaim the message of the hope of salvation on this earth. And so we're going to get into that near the end as far as practically what that looks like. I want you to know, like, I'm going to try to give you just as simple as I can some practical tools tools and steps for you to use. It's not like a, "Hey, do 1, 2, 3, and then it's done." It's just, I want to give you some tools to put in your toolbox for that.

But before that, we're gonna look kind of going all the way back to the beginning of time and creation. God had created the world. He ordered it. He brought order out of the chaos, and as He did that, what He did was He created something beautiful, something good. In fact, At the end, He says that He looked at it and it was very good.

Has anybody ever made something, baked something, done something, you're like, "Man, that's good. That's very good." You're just sitting there kind of like enjoying the work that you've made. God did that, like, on a much grander scale than you could ever imagine in your own life. And so He makes this beautiful and glorious thing, but He also made beautiful and glorious people, human beings created in His image to reflect God, to to show the goodness of God and the nature of God to all of creation. He gave human beings dominion over creation.

Too many times we take that and we abuse it, we overstep our bounds that we're supposed to have, and we actually abuse creation rather than have dominion over it. Having dominion isn't a bad thing, it's not a power trip, it's something to say, "Okay, I'm putting it under your control, so you must take care of it, you must make sure that this is a place that you can keep living in. And sometimes we're not good at that. Sometimes we're getting better. And so, like, I'm not one of these people that harps on it, and I'm not one of these people that says we've done nothing.

Like, we're guilty, but we're getting better, right? And so, like, here we go. But God gave us dominion over the earth. He told us to subdue it, to learn about it. He told us to populate it, to refill it, to spread out over the whole face of the earth.

There were times where human beings decided They didn't want to spread out, like Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel. They said, "Hey, you know what? Let's just kind of come together here and go upwards and maybe overthrow God out of the heavens rather than spread out over the face of the earth." And God came and changed that. But God also created, besides just the beauty of earth and the cosmos, He also created divine beings, other rulers, things that we think of, typically we think of as angels. But I want to help you shift your thinking over, especially a series that we'll get into in a few weeks, not right away, that angels is— we've kind of categorized a lot of divine beings into the category of angels and done it incorrectly.

Like, angels aren't— they're not the only divine beings that are out there. Now, when I say divine beings, I don't want you to think that I'm saying they're on par or on level with God. These are things that He has created and given them a purpose and a job. They're what we might call, they're in the unseen realm, they're in the realm that we don't see, but we know that they're there. And He gave them a purpose, He gave them a job, and one of the, like, chief ones was Satan.

Satan was created as an angel of God, and he was actually a beautiful angel. If you were to read in Ezekiel 28:12-19, you would see a description of something that sounds fantastical. And it's a little confusing because at first it says he thinks he's talking to the king of Tyre, a nation that was around at the time. But then you see this description and you're like, that's not of a human being. There's no way.

And so it talks about this, this created being that was covered in all these jewels and, and he had like musical instruments and all this stuff. And you're thinking, wow, this is crazy. But then it says that he wanted all the beauty and glory for himself, and he overstepped his bounds, and that he was cast down from heaven. And so God is speaking through the prophet Ezekiel, is talking about Satan. He also says in Isaiah 14:13, he says of Satan, "You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven.

I will raise my throne above the stars of God. I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.'" See, Satan wanted all of God's glory to himself. And in fact, he actually convinced a third of the angels in heaven to mutiny against God with him, except they were thrown down out of heaven. And so what they desired to do was to harm God's most treasured possession, the human beings that He created in His image. So what Satan and his fallen comrades did with these fallen angels, what they did, or divine beings, sons of God, they're called some places in Scripture, these sons of God, they're not the sons of God as Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Scripture isn't saying it that way, but it kind of uses the same word, so I can understand it gets a little confusing.

But these sons of God, they were cast down to earth, and they roam looking for people to devour. Scriptures tell us that that's what Satan is all about, looking for someone to devour. And in Revelation 12:4, it talks about a third of the stars being swept out of the sky. That's a metaphor for Satan kind of taking a third of the angels with him. And it's 1 Peter 5:8 that talks about Satan seeking to devour someone.

Sometimes that's been you, hasn't it? Sometimes you felt like Satan was just trying to attack you. Sometimes you've gotten into sin on your own, and you've done a bunch of dumb stuff, and you blame Satan for it. You say, "Satan's really attacking me." No! You need to read the Word of God, and you need to live according to how God's called you to live, okay?

Some of it is your own fault. Sorry, I know you're not supposed to do that. Like, you're not supposed to tell people, like, victim blame or whatever. I'm not saying you're a victim. I'm saying you're a victim of yourself, okay?

And I am blaming you. How do I know this? Because I've done it, okay? Like, I know from my own experience that this is true, and I figure I'm not the only one. Just the law of averages, some of you have done this.

But there is a truth that Satan sometimes does attack you, or one of these, one of his kind of demons or fallen angels, whatever you want to call them, they that they will attack you, because what they want to do is convince you that God is not good, that God doesn't love you, that God doesn't have your best interest at heart, and they want you to turn your back on God. They're trying to devour you. They're seeking, roaming through the earth seeking someone to devour. And so there's this war that's been raging in this unseen realm. There's this battle that's been going on since the Garden of Eden.

Since Satan started there, he had been cast out of heaven. His likeness, his image was changed, and so he's described as a serpent in the Scripture. He's slithery, he's slimy, he's just kind of like this thing that sneaks up on you, like, "Where did you come from?" Satan's right there though. And ever since then, he's been trying to get at God's most precious possession, His people. And so there's this war that's going on.

Satan and his minions against the people of God. And the good news is we're not fighting this battle alone. In fact, we don't have the power alone, but God does send His angels to protect us. He does send His angels to guard over us. He sends His faithful ones that are in that unseen realm to work on our behalf and to carry out His will and His mission on this earth.

And so we do have that protection. We also have the blood of Christ, and the blood of Christ is something that is actually a fearful weapon against these demonic forces. When you start proclaiming the blood of Christ, they get scared because they know there's power in His blood. They know that the blood of Christ that was shed on the cross was the blood of a righteous and just man, the Son of God, and that they know that it has power and dominion over them, and that it has sealed their fate eternally. In the Bible, you see evidence of this battle raging all the time, though, this this unseen realm war that's going on.

You don't have to turn too many pages through after the fall of mankind, you see one brother murdering another, you see a man striking a young man down because he injured him, you know, you see people taking multiple wives, you see people building cities so that they can have a defense against God, is what their plans were. You see in Genesis 6, the lead-up to the flood, how there's this group of beings that are called Nephilim, they're giants that were created by the union of angelic beings, fallen angelic beings, and human women. Sounds weird. It's in there. Like, everybody does backflips trying to figure out some alternate example to explain what it says there.

It's the most cleanly, plainly obvious thing. And I'm guilty, like, I've been like, "Well, they say this, they say this, I don't know." I'm pretty well convinced of it, guys. The more I read, the more I'm like, "Yeah, that's what it says. That's what it means." Like, I'm pretty good being a literalist on that, you know? So they have this group of people that's set up opposed to God, like it's a hybrid race of beings that are the seed of angels and of women, and they were living on this earth seeking to overthrow God and to overthrow His people and to steer people away from Him.

In fact, it says that those were men of renown. They were the ones that people looked up to. They were the cultural giants, the heroes. If you've read the Book of Enoch, Enoch 1, it's not a biblical book, but it kind of talks about some of the things in the Bible and helps maybe give an explanation for some of them. We talked a little bit about that last week.

In Enoch, he talks about how there were some of these beings that were given— they had knowledge of different types of sciences and different types of advanced learning, and that they were giving that out to the people. And that a lot of the knowledge that was given to mankind was from them. They were also the ones that were really trying to influence people away from God. And so they had quite a, like a cult following, if you will. And so it was through all of that, the corruption of all mankind, that God sent the flood to wipe all that away.

But at the same time, He saved people through the ark that Noah built. How would you like to be Noah? "Hey man, I want you to do a building project." "Okay, what do you want me to build?" "Well, it's a big boat and it'll take you 100 years to build it." Some of us are thinking like, "I'm not even going to live 100 years, you know? Like, I can't imagine doing that." But he did. And it was one of those times where God provided the salvation, but he still had to work for it.

Now I want to tell you, you don't have to earn your salvation. You don't have to work for it. God has done it for you. But there are times where you have to work alongside what God is doing to see the effect of that salvation in your life. In other words, it's easy for you to fall into sin, right?

Stuff that you've been doing for a long time, it's easy for you to go down that road. There's times where you have to say, "Okay, God, I know You're calling me away from this. I'm going to put up some guardrails in my life." You know, like, "Okay, God, I've been watching some stuff that's a bit racy and it puts my mind in the wrong spot. I might have to unplug the TV. You know, I've been on my phone too much, I might have to put a screen time thing on it that eliminates how much time I spend on my phone and put a password where somebody else has to put the password in and I don't even know it, like a spouse or somebody like that, you know.

There are guardrails that you might have to put in place. Sometimes the work that we have to do is not to earn or obtain our salvation, but it's on the path of holiness God is calling us to work alongside what He's doing to get us to that place.

These divine beings that had rebelled against God, even though their human offspring was wiped away in the flood, Enoch tells us that the spirits that were in them were these spirits that became the evil spirits, the demonic spirits that were roving about throughout the world after that. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, I want to read it to you. Says, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord's portion is His people Jacob, His allotted inheritance." See, what we see here in these verses, it's real short, it's real simple, and yet it packs a lot in there. God had given these people, these beings, before they had rebelled against Him, He had given them the oversight of the nations.

They were each one assigned different people groups to watch over and to protect. And what God did was He gave that over to them, but then they rebelled against God. They wanted the glory, just like Satan had wanted the glory in heaven. And so they worked against God, they set themselves up, and they convinced the people to believe that they were the gods that provided for them and protected them and had put them into being. So when you see all these cultures throughout all of time, I know a lot of people will tell you about, you know, Roman gods, and Greek gods, and Sumerian gods, and going all the way back, Egyptian gods.

And for so long, and the way I grew up, we were taught, "Well, those are just false things. They're not real. There's nothing behind them. It's just an idol." That's not what they believed. They believed that they would create the idol, and then this being would inhabit that.

It would receive their gifts, their praise, their prayers, their petitions. But that they had to make it happy, they had to appease it a little bit so that it would go well with them. And these nations, the people of these nations believed that there was a force and a power behind these deities. And what it seems like in some of these places in Scripture is it's saying, yes, there is something behind that, but it's evil, it's demonic, and you shouldn't do it. Just like today, people will go and maybe they'll get a palm reading, tarot cards, they'll buy stuff that has to do with Reiki and Wiccan and all these things, and they'll say, "Oh, well, it's good.

I can, you know, it's nothing that's harmful." Oh, really? Really? It's not harmful? You don't think that there's demons backing those things? You don't think that there's demonic forces that are backing that and that you're inviting them into your life?

You don't think that if you start messing with dark arts that you're going to have dark things enter you? You've turned yourself into an open and willing vessel. Man, you guys are not really that excited about this. It's some dark stuff, right? You're like, "Please move along." No.

God had given control of these nations to these divine beings. They rebelled against Him, and now they got the people to worship them and to offer them sacrifices. Over and over throughout the Scriptures, though, God has these showdowns with them and shows that they are really no gods at all. Think of times like when the man Joseph gets sold into slavery in Egypt, And then he ends up rising to the place of second in command over the whole nation of Egypt. And then the people are there for all this time, but they get enslaved, and then Moses comes along, and he starts doing all these, like, little tricks, you know, with the power of God.

And then eventually the 10 plagues. And what God is doing is each one of those plagues is showing that all the gods they've worshipped have really no power at all. And He's kind of poking a finger in their eye. And so He leads His people out, He parts the sea, they go across on dry ground. God is showing who He is and that there's no power in all those old things.

But the people of Israel keep wanting to go back to Egypt. "We had good food there. It was safe there." It's like, "You weren't free there either. They put whips on your backs. Like, it's not a good life.

God is leading you to something new, something big." Throughout time you see things like You know, the prophet Daniel, he goes as a young man, he's carried into exile in Babylon. He is made to be one of their magicians, wise men, enchanters, and yet he's still faithful to the Hebrew God that he's been serving his whole life. And what God does is He starts giving dreams to the kings there, and the king is like, "I don't understand the dream." And he says to the wise men, he says, "Tell me what my dream was and then interpret it for me." And they're like, "No one has ever asked anyone to do that. It's impossible." Daniel says, "Aha, but there's a God in heaven who gives the dreams and the interpretation, and He will give me the interpretation of your dream." So there's all these times throughout Scripture, those are just a few examples, but all these times in Scripture where God is showing that He is the one that has the power over all of creation and all of earth. And what He's also doing is He's speaking through His prophets so that there will one day come one who would rule the nations with an iron rod, one who would rule for all eternity.

In the first century AD, there was a Jewish tradesman, and he's engaged to a young woman, and they're just simple folks, we believe, in a simple small town. And an angel visits the young lady, and later visits the guy as well. And what they're told is that she is going to bear the Son of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. And as she is told that, she says, "I am the Lord's servant, may it be unto me as you have said." God tells her that He's going to bring about His plan of salvation, the plan of salvation that He's had going all the way back to the time of creation, that He had this plan and that He was going to use her to bring that about.

As Jesus grows up and He begins His ministry, He calls some disciples to follow Him. What a disciple is, is somebody that's a learner and a follower of another person. So a disciple of Jesus would spend pretty much all their time with Him. Their whole goal was to be just like Him. So if your rabbi eats a certain way, you want to learn to eat that way because there might be some significance in that.

If your rabbi likes to, you know, to stop every so often on a walking journey, then you learn to stop every so often on a walking journey. If your rabbi wears a weird thing, you wear that weird thing. Whatever it is, you want to do everything your rabbi does. And so you learn to be just like your rabbi in mannerisms and actions, but also what your main goal is, is to learn his teaching. The Scriptures call it the yoke.

Jesus says, "Take My yoke upon you." The yoke was the wooden beam that would tie two oxen together so that they could pull as a team, and the chain would hook to that and pull whatever plow or implement was going behind them. But when rabbis talked about their yoke, it was the bulk or entirety of their teachings. And they called that their yoke, and they said, "When I put My yoke on you, you're bearing the load or the burden of My teachings, of how I interpret the Scriptures and the Old Testament Law." Jesus said that His yoke was easy and His burden is light. It's such good news for us because there's so many things in the world that want to tie you down, weigh you down, and I want to apologize for any leaders, any pastors, any Christians that have tried to make it difficult for you and said, "Okay, here's all the rules, here's all the things you have to do, here's the way you've got to look, the way you've got to dress, the way you've got to sound," all this stuff. Most of the time they don't even get that in Scripture.

They make it up for themselves. They make it up themselves. They might have a little bit of a basis in a little tidbit of Scripture, but they take it and they stretch it so far that they do what Jesus said to the Pharisees. He said, "Woe to you, you are shutting the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people's faces." And then He says another time, He's like, occasionally somebody makes it just barely through, like they just barely get in the door, and you turn him into twice as much a son of hell as you are. Can you imagine Jesus saying that to the religious leaders, calling them sons of hell?

Wow. He was really laying it down, saying, "You guys are following something, and it isn't God, and yet you're leading the people." Now, He did also say that there were times where they still got it right. They still taught the things because they were still teaching from the Scripture. And He says, "You have to listen to them. You have to do what they say.

Just don't be like them." Can you imagine being a parent? I mean, sometimes maybe you've said that, you're like, "Hey, listen, don't do the things you see me do, just do what I tell you to do." No, you don't have any right to say that to your children. How can you expect that? That is hypocrisy. And we see that you can't do that personally, we can't do that with other believers.

Like, you have to say, "Okay, I'm going to live a life that matches what I teach, matches what I believe." Amen? And you're not there yet, right? Like, I know that there's gonna be times where you struggle and fail along the way, but that doesn't mean you're just using that as an excuse to continue on in that sin. You need to say like, "Hey, listen, I know I got that wrong," especially if you're raising kids or grandkids and they see it. Like, "You know what?

I'm sorry about that. That was a bad example. I've repented to Jesus, but I want to repent to you too and tell you that that is not the right example that I'm teaching you." to live. I'm not trying to lead that in front of you.

Jesus spent a lot of time healing people. It was part of His ministry. And in fact, He sent His disciples out also to heal people. They were amazed by it. He sent them out, He drove out demons, these unclean spirits that had been roaming the earth and looking for people to dwell in, people that— and I want to tell you, by the way, if you are a Christian and you have the Spirit of God living in you, there's no room for you to be demonized.

You cannot be oppressed by a demon as far as one demonizing you or clinging to you or dwelling on you. They might kind of come along and try to throw stuff at you all the time. They might try to oppress you in some way, but they can't— you can't be what we call demonized or demon-possessed. If you're possessed by the Spirit of God, you cannot be possessed by an unclean or evil spirit. And yet there are people who, they still invite them in, you know, there's people that maybe they got into some occult things, they played with an Ouija board as a kid, whatever it might be, you've opened up gateways and pathways for these evil spirits in, and you have to proclaim that the blood of Christ covers you and demands that they would leave your life.

Jesus would cast these demons out of people, and He did this mostly in the area of Galilee. There's a whole reason behind that that we don't have time to get into today. We don't find Him casting out demons in Jerusalem, just in Galilee. The short story is it was the people that Joshua had failed to drive out of the nations when the Israelites moved into the land of Canaan were still indwelled by these people that were following demonic spirits and forces. And so Jesus goes and He starts clearing them out as He's going there.

In fact, Jesus told His followers, He said, "You know, if you want to bind up the strongman, if you want to plunder his house, you have to bind him up first. If you want to take what belongs to the strongman, you can't just do it while he's guarding the house. You have to bind him up first, and then you can plunder his house." What Jesus was doing was He was going into the territory that Satan had claimed, Satan's house. He's binding him up one thing at a time. He's casting these demons out, He's setting people free, and in effect He's binding Satan up.

There's a great story in Mark chapter 5 where Jesus goes across the Sea of Galilee to meet one man that's possessed by a whole bunch of demons, and He casts them out of the man. The guy says his name is Legion because there's many demons in him. He cast the demons out of him, and as they leave, the man is set free. He's in his right mind. They found some clothes for him somewhere.

I don't know if Jesus packed an extra set or made one of the disciples take theirs off. I'm not sure. He's like looking at the guy and like, "Hey you, you look about his size, you know, give him your clothes." I'm not sure how it worked, but those are the things that I think through when I'm studying Scripture sometimes.

Jesus taught His disciples to go out and cast out demons out of people too, and they did as well. They were even shocked by it. They're like, "We've never seen this before, and You've given us the authority to do it." He says, "Don't be so excited that you have the power to cast out demons. Be excited that your names are written in the Book of Life," like we talked about last week. So Jesus, He's landing these decisive blows on Satan.

I want to read to you a Scripture from Colossians 2:13-15. There's at least 3 things that Jesus did in His sacrificial death. This verse says this: When you were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. That's one thing He did. He forgave all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us.

That's the second thing. So He's made you alive in Christ by canceling your debt. He ascribed— He canceled the debt that was ascribed to us and the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross. And the third thing is He disarmed the powers and authorities.

He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Don't miss that third part. See, we talk about the work that Jesus did on the cross was about salvation, it was about canceling our sin debt, it was about making us new in Him. But also it says that He triumphed over, He disarmed the powers and authorities. We're not talking about people that are working in government, people that are elected, not those kinds of governing authorities.

We're talking about the ruling spiritual forces in the unseen realm that we can't quite see with our eyes, and yet we recognize that they exist all around us. And what He was doing was disarming them with His death. What He was doing was setting up His kingdom. What He was doing was acquiring for Himself the right to rule all people, even though that right should have belonged to Him. We already looked in Deuteronomy 32 how God had given over the ruling of the nations to these beings.

They turned against God, and now they've been working against Him all this time. Jesus now has disarmed them. He says, "I'm taking it all back." That's worth an amen, I think, but whatever. What Jesus did then is He ascends into heaven. He ascends to the right hand of the Father.

He receives His coronation as King. He receives the authority that is now rightfully His, even though it was rightfully His all along. He has earned that by His death, and now it all belongs to Him, and He receives all power, dominion, and authority. He sits at the right hand of the Father, and He's preparing a place for you and I one day. He's preparing a place for us to go to be with Him for all of time and eternity.

So what it is, is that Jesus is now— He has the authority of the nations, and He's teaching, He's telling us to teach people to obey Him. Telling us to teach them to be His disciples. And so our question is, when we look at this Great Commission, you know, go into all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Spirit, making disciples out of them, teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus, what does that look like for you and me? This is the practical part. Like, we set up this whole thing to tell you this.

There's a really practical side of it. If you're in Christ, you're a new creation. Amen? You're a new creation. You're an ambassador of Christ's Kingdom, and your job is to go and to share that with everyone else.

So how do we do that? I want to take a moment to pray, and we're going to get into it for just a few minutes. Lord, I ask right now that maybe in light of or despite anything that I've said so far, that everyone here would hear with clarity, with simplicity, the work and the mission that You've called us to do.

Call us, guide us, challenge us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

I want to read this verse from 2 Corinthians. Well, a couple verses. It's in 2 Corinthians 5, starting in verse 14. The love of Christ controls us, since we have concluded this: that Christ died for all, therefore all have died. And He died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and was raised.

So then, from now on, we acknowledge no one from an outward human point of view, even though we have known Christ from such a human point of view. Now we do not know Him in that way any longer. So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. What is old has passed away; look, what is new has come! And all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and who has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

In other words, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting people's trespasses against them. Thank You, Lord. And He has given us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were making His appeal through us. We plead with you on Christ's behalf: be reconciled to God.

Because Christ has dominion over all of the earth. This good news. It's a proclamation that goes out that He's the King. When we proclaim the name of Jesus Christ, what we are doing is saying that Jesus Christ is King over all on this earth. And every— that means every place, if we're an ambassador of Jesus Christ, that means that every place that we set our foot, every place we tread, is proclaiming that ground and that territory for Jesus Christ.

If you walk these sidewalks, you're proclaiming that that is the realm of Jesus Christ. If you work in a business, you work in a job someplace, what you are doing when you go to work is you're saying, "This belongs to Jesus Christ. He is in charge here." Even if people don't fully recognize that yet, they will one day. If you go to school, if you teach in a school, if you do whatever it is, what you are doing is saying, "This ground belongs to Christ." This is His domain, and I'm proclaiming that here. Now you might think, "I don't know, I'm not very good with like understanding the theology or the big deep stuff." It doesn't matter.

Just know that you carry the name of Christ wherever you go. So first of all, that means you better be in the Word of God, you know, learning from it and listening to the Spirit of God speaking to you and telling you how to live so that you carry His name well. In fact, in the Ten Commandments, there's one where it says, don't take the Lord's name in vain. And we think that means don't say, like, you know, God's name as a cuss word, which is true. Just don't do that.

That's a terrible thing. Like, why would you take the name above all names and eliminate it to a common cuss word or just a common expression or something like that? If people say, "Oh God," why would you say that about some simple little thing? No, don't say anything else. I don't care.

But don't take the name of God and use it in a common way. In fact, the Jewish people, they don't use, they won't write it, they won't say the name of God because they want to make sure they don't do it improperly so. And I have some respect for that, although I don't abide by that. I'll say His name, I will write it, I'll speak it, but I try to make sure that when I say the name of God, I'm not saying it in a casual or some cavalier manner. But there is another understanding of the Ten Commandments when it says, "Don't take the name of the Lord in vain." It means don't take it with you in a vain way.

Don't use the name of the Lord to build yourself up. Don't use the name of the Lord in an improper way, in a vanity way. That's what it means to be in vain or to be in vanity. Don't use the name of the Lord as a vanity thing, saying, "Oh, I'm a Christian, look at me." No. But when you carry the name of the Lord well, when you're living according to the light that the Holy Spirit has given you to live in, when you're following God in that way, then what you're doing is you are working as an ambassador for Jesus Christ into all the world.

So wherever you go, you are proclaiming His dominion in that place. See, when I tell you you're part of this unseen war, this spiritual battle that's going on around us, when you carry the name of Christ, wherever you go, you are proclaiming His dominion there, and that those evil powers don't have dominion in that place. As you do that though, You'll find people that are curious about why you're living how you're living. You'll find people that say, "Man, there's something different about you." "Sweetheart, there's some way that you're different from everyone else. What's going on?" And you have to be able to share that with them in some way.

You have to be able to formulate it into words that says something like, "Well, I'm a Christian and I just believe that Jesus Christ is in charge, He's in power, and I just want to live my life to please Him." That might be all you get out in that moment. Like, you might think, "Oh, I'm supposed to have something eloquent." I'll confess to you as a pastor, like, I'm not great at that. I can sit up here and teach for 3 more hours until my voice gives out, I guess, but if you told me, like, "I want you to share, like, this, like, really brilliant, like, convincing 30-second elevator pitch that nobody can say no to and they're gonna become a Christian every time," I ain't got it, okay? Now, don't get me wrong, there are times where I'm speaking to somebody and the Holy Spirit says, "I want you to push on this one. I want you to really share with this one." And he'll give me the words to say in that moment.

I'll be like, "Wow, that was brilliant. That must have come from God. Like, that wasn't up here," you know what I'm saying? Like, "That's great. Thank you, Lord." There's times where God's got you on this because you're going out as his ambassador, as his emissary, and so he will give you that.

But there are times where I'm like, "Man, was I supposed to have said something there? Was that a divine appointment and I messed it up? Was I supposed to have really kind of like helped get that person over the line to salvation and I didn't push hard enough?" Have you been there before?

I want you to know two things.

One, God's not mad at you for that. He's not mad at you for missing that moment. My prayer is that even though those times happen, that God is sending somebody else as backup for when I mess up. And I believe He will. Because as imperfect as I am, the holy and perfect Savior of the world can't just be relying on me to get it right.

Amen? So I want you to not worry about that.

But also, you need to have the gravity of it in front of you. That there are times that God is putting somebody in your path. It might be a coworker, it might be a neighbor, it might be somebody who works in a doctor's office. I know some of you like to go to those quite a bit. Sorry.

And it might be whatever it is. I'm not trying to be offensive. It was funny. Sorry. And There's times where God's put those people in your path because you have the message that they needed to hear, and He's calling you to be the one to share it with them.

So that means you need to prepare beforehand. I don't just mean in the morning say, "Okay, Lord, who's the person You're going to send me to today?" Although there are some of you that are like that. Like, there are some of you that have that evangelist calling, and you know that every day God's got a divine appointment to talk to somebody about Christ. And praise God for that. He's specifically gifted you for that.

There's some of you that don't even realize that that's who you are, but that that's what God is calling you to do and to be. But there are some of you that you think, "Well, I'm just kind of your regular, ordinary, everyday Christian. God hasn't called me to anything spectacular." Great, that doesn't let you off the hook. You're still called to make disciples. So here's where the practical tools come in.

First of all, we've got a website for this church. That's crazy to think of in this era that we would have a website, but we do, and a lot of you never go to it. We try to work to make it simple and practical, and there's a couple tools on there that you need to know about. One is Bless Every Home. I didn't tell Michelle to put any of these on the screen, but they, they're always up on the announcement scroll.

But Bless Every Home is something that— it's an app you can download on your phone or a website you can go to, and but every day you'll get 5 of your neighbors. You have to sign up for it and put your name and your address in there, and it'll give you 5 of your neighbors every day to pray for. And if you get to share the gospel with them or help them in some way or share a meal with them or something like that, you can kind of record that. And so what it is, is our church has what we call lights within it. Each one of you can be a light in this congregation, and as you do that, it'll actually show how many people collectively we're praying for and ministering to.

And so that's one simple thing, and on their website it gives different tools for witnessing and sharing your faith that you might be able to utilize in your, in your life. Another tool, and this is also on our website, these are, these are right up at the top, or if you're on your mobile, on the phone, there's a little menu button in the top right corner, and so it's like the right in the main menus. Also, these are the scanner things that are on your pews, the little white dots. If you just tap your phone against them, you can do what it shows on the screen. It's pretty cool.

Well, anyway, the— there's another thing on the website. It's called RightNow Media. If— who's familiar with RightNow Media? Who's got their log— okay, see, it's been a while since we like kind of pushed this out there. RightNow Media is a collection of thousands upon thousands of Christian videos that are useful for teaching, training, learning, growing, studying the Bible, increasing your faith, increasing your understanding of Scripture, all kinds of stuff.

And it's free, the church pays for it so that you have a free membership to it. Isn't that great? You know, it's not like Netflix or whatever where you've got to pay for it every month. We do that for you. It's also a lot cheaper than buying Netflix for every single one of you, so But it's a great tool because what it does is it— if there's something that you're going through and you're like, "Man, I really need some help.

I need some guidance," it's probably got it. And it's got a great search feature where you can just type in something and you'll find all kinds of teaching series on it. There's a ton of different churches and ministries and things like that that record really good quality teaching series and produce it and put it on there, and so it's available for you. One of the things you can do when you go there, I know I'm giving you a lot to remember. At the top of the page, you'll see either our little logo, which is like the little window panes, it's like 2 blue and 2 green.

That's kind of our logo colors. It'll either have that on the mobile site. They also have an app on your smart TVs and Roku things and all that. So you can download that or on your phones, they have an app or you can just go to the website. So if you're on the website, it'll say First Nazarene Zephyr Hills or on the phone, it might just have our little logo icon.

If you click on that, it'll have some, what we would call, like a curated channel or library of videos that we have posted that are just kind of to help guide you through the season that we are in here collectively as a church. And so what you can do, Bless Every Home is going to put your focus every day on praying for your neighbors and on looking for those opportunities. Right now media is going to give you some things that you can use as you say, "I want to learn how to share my faith." We've thrown some videos in there that would help you in doing that, in making disciples. The other thing to do, kind of going along with bless every home, is pray. And I don't just mean praying for your neighbors.

I mean praying specifically that God would teach you and guide you and show you who to talk to and how to share your faith. And the fourth thing, the fourth kind of practical tool, is that you have a testimony. You have a story about what God has done in your life. You have a story about maybe who you are, where you were, and where God has brought you. You might have a, you might have one of those kind of like really colorful histories, and your life now is so different from that, that people will be like, "Wow, really?" Yes.

You might have one of those stories though where you're like— we were just talking about this on Wednesday, like José and I were talking, we're like, "Yeah, we kind of are the same, like grew up in church, never weren't in church, Christian at a young age, didn't go off and do a bunch of weird and crazy stuff. What's my story?" Some of you are in that same thing and you're like, "What's your story?" Well, the story is God has saved you from a whole bunch of sin that you actually were doing. We think, "Oh, I was so good." Yeah, along the way, God's also revealed to me that I'm not that good, right? Like, when I was young, I probably thought, "Man, I'm not doing all this and this and this. I'm a pretty good kid.

I'm a pretty good young man." And then God keeps revealing to me, the more I read His Word, the more I spend time in prayer, He's like, "There's these areas in your life that I got to get rid of." See, I have a testimony that I'm not the man that I was, and praise God, I'm becoming the man that He's called me to be.

You have a testimony that you can share with people. Not to say, "Oh, I'm a holy roller. I'm better than you." Nobody's trying to do that. What you're trying to do though is to illuminate what Christ has done in you because as He has dominion and power in this world, He has dominion and power in your life. And part of your testimony is that you have given authority in your life over to Him.

It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Galatians 2:20. Amen? ¡Viva Cristo Rey! So you're ushering in the reign and rule of God.

On His return, Jesus said He's coming back, He said He's bringing a place for us to all dwell with Him, right? He will complete the battle against the evil powers and forces. And the neat thing is that battle's already been won. They think there's still a chance, and there isn't. And so while they still have a little bit of room here on this earth right now, and we still see them all around us, their dominion will come to an end, and Jesus will come in and put a finality to that.

Until then, what we do is we share the good news of the Gospel with people who aren't following Jesus. Everywhere we go, we're proclaiming His dominion. So if you're a Christian, this isn't optional. Jesus didn't say like, "Hey, some of you guys, I want to make disciples and share the Gospel, and the rest of you just kind of like do whatever." He never said that. He said, "Okay, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to Me, so now you go." The understanding is in that power and authority.

"You go and make disciples of all nations." He didn't give you an option. There's no sidelines, no third string, there's no waiting list. You're in the game. Like, you are active in this. And so if you are a Christian, you have a job in the Kingdom of Heaven.

You have a job in Christ's Kingdom to proclaim His salvation to the world, and there's no greater joy than seeing the joy of your Master saying, "Well done, my good and faithful servant." That would be a great place to stop right now, wouldn't it? I just got one more thing to say though. Like Inspector Columbo, "Oh, there's just one more thing." Some of you, maybe just a couple, maybe a few, maybe half of you, I don't know, you have a special calling from God. Like, beyond just the, "Hey, share your faith with someone else." You have a calling from God to work in a very specific way, and I don't know what that is. But I'm telling you right now, a couple of you have been running from it.

I don't know who you are, I just feel that. You've run from that for a while, saying, "No, God, you know what? I'm kind of comfortable where I'm at." God's got a calling on your life to do something specific for Him, to work in a specific way, to work in a big way.

Some kind of devoted service within His Kingdom. Something, you know, it might be that He's called you to evangelism. He's calling you to go out and to share the Gospel in a very devoted and specific way with people. It might be somebody that He's sending to be a missionary. It might be somebody that He's calling to be a a teacher, or a pastor within the church.

It may be that He's sending people out to plant new congregations and new churches. It might be that He's just calling you to say, "How can I volunteer every single week in church to do something that helps bring people to Jesus Christ?" God's calling some of you to devote your life to His Kingdom in a very specific way, a vocational-type way. If that's you, I don't want you to run from that. More importantly, God doesn't want you to run from that. Respond to that calling today by saying, "Okay, Lord, what is it You want from me?

I'm ready and willing to serve You no matter what the cost, no matter what it takes." For sure, we all have a calling to share the Gospel with others. And if God's calling you to do that in a specific way, then don't run from Him today. Amen? I want to help you. I'm here for you along the journey.

Whatever you need, especially those comment connection cards, write down if there's something you need help from on that and put it in the basket later, and we'll make sure to get back with you. But whatever it is that we can assist you on this journey of making disciples in the nations, don't hesitate. Respond to Christ. Amen.