Passion
From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Christine Caine
Date: June 20, 2010
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Transcript
Hello! How are you doing? I hope you can understand my accent. This is a real Australian accent, in case you’re wondering. I love this place. I love it already. I love that you guys are everywhere. I have to make sure I don’t preach too long so you’re not falling out of the window. As you know, my name is Chris Caine, and I am married to the most ravishing piece of masculine flesh on planet Earth. He is hot, my husband Nick, and we have two little girls, 8 and 4. We travel about 320 nights a year together as a family to many different nations. We help to build local churches. We are involved in a lot of church planting and leadership development in Europe and we are also involved in an anti-human-trafficking initiative where we help rescue the victims of human trafficking in Eastern Europe in particular. Many of you, when you think, ‘Oh gosh a Hillsong person is here,’ you’re hoping that I’m going to break forth into song or something, but I was thinking that if I were to sing Shout to the Lord, you would all cry to the Lord, so it ain’t gonna happen! We don’t all sing! I am on 21 albums, but in the section where there are no microphones.
I've been blessed to be part of that miracle for a long time. I started going to Hillsong when it was a little warehouse in the back of nowhere. We had a big dream and a big vision and now by the grace of God, we have seven Hillsong churches around the world and many family churches. God has taken our worship somewhere where only He could do it. So I get excited.
I love this church. I haven’t been here yet, but I feel like I know you because I read your pastor’s books. I’m a Mark Batterson junkie, so I’m pumped that I’m here in this church! Lora came over to London and we became best friends. She came to our Women’s Conference. So I’m part of you, like, we’re related whether you like it or not. You can pick your friends but you are stuck with your relatives. Even if I live 20 hours across the other side of the world.
I’ve always had in my heart, when I first picked up In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day, I just always had a sense that one day, our worlds would collide, and only God can do something like that, take a chic from nowhere in Sidney, Australia and I’m sitting in this coffee house in D.C. Only God can do that. I’ve been in D.C. since Monday. I had some meetings in the State Department on human trafficking on Tuesday, then I’ve been doing some other stuff. I love it! This is almost my favorite city in America, in the summer. I came here in February and it’s really not the same city. It’s like a different planet. When I came here in February, I had just come over from Vale, we were skiing, so I came here in a leg brace last time I was here. I hadn’t known what I had done. The guys had all gone on another mountain and my husband was with me, and I turned around as I was coming down the slopes and I said, “Honey, if you were not skiing with me, if you were with the guys, would you be going any quicker?” To which he said, “Yes, babe, if I were with the guys, I’d be going a bit quicker.” You don’t know me yet but I have a personality type that doesn’t really like anyone telling me they’d be going quicker if they weren’t with me, so I turned around and I faced down the mountain and said, “Well, babe, eat my snow!” And off I went. About 2 minutes later, I was eating my own snow. I knew I was in trouble on the second somersault and this was not part of an Olympics routine, and I heard the loudest pop, pop, pop and I had snapped my ACL and torn my NCL and my meniscus, so for all the guys, I’m about to get credibility at a whole new level right now because I went in for surgery and I came out and went the next day to my PT who had me bending at 90 degrees and in seven days, I was at 145 degree bend, and in 15 days, I was back here in America preaching. I was having treatment in Dallas with guys from the Dallas Cowboys who, four months later, were still using crutches and couldn’t bend their legs, and I thought, ‘Chic power! So much for football players!’ So, beyond all that, I want you to know that God still does heal today. My healing was definitely accelerated.
It’s nice to come back to D.C. not in a leg brace. I’m enjoying it.
I’m both Greek and a woman so I only speak three ways, hard, fast and continuously, so you’re really going to have to listen. We are going to get a lot done today. But I sense that the Holy Spirit has something for us. I love this church. All over this weekend, you are a little bit like God, omniscient and omnipresent, you are everywhere! I’m speaking to locations all over and I love that. Wherever you are, I’m glad we are together. It’s so awesome!
Because you don’t know me, I thought I might take an opportunity to let you know who I am and what we do. For the last 21 years, I’ve been part of the leadership team at Hillsong Church. I’m predominately involved in mission and evangelism and reaching the lost, and I guess in lots of ways, even involved in the human trafficking initiative, a couple of years ago, I was walking through the airport in Thessalonica, Greece and I saw these posters of all these women and children and I remember thinking, what is all this about, and I asked the host that was with me what it was about. She said, ‘Chris, these are the alleged victims of human trafficking.’ To which I thought, ‘As if.’ Like, this was the year before the movie Amazing Grace came out, so I’m thinking not a chance. So I went online and started to research and to be honest with you, I freaked out at the fact that there are over 27 million slaves in the world today, more than even in the history of humanity. I realized that I had been walking past these posters in Eastern European airports for years and I went home that night and I was reading through the Scripture and in Luke Chapter 10, the story of the Good Samaritan that many of us are familiar with. I’d always thought I was the Samaritan, the great one, traveling the world, doing missions and doing evangelism and reaching the lost and reaching the next generation, but I just felt the Holy Spirit say to me, ‘No, Christine, you’re not the Samaritan, don’t kid yourself. You are more like the Levite and the priest. You are the one who is so busy going to your next Christian activity and so busy doing your next Christian deal that you’re walking past the very people that I’ve called you to reach.’ Then I read a line in Luke 10, verse 33, that said: When the Samaritan saw the man, he had compassion on him. Then these words that really changed my life: So he went to him. I realized then that a lot of what I thought was compassion was actually emotion that I had had in my Christian life; that I was very emotional and very sad about certain things on the earth, whether it’s genocide, or people not having access to clean water, or whether there was famine or disease, I was very sympathetic and I was very emotional if someone showed me a sad DVD. But that’s very different to being compassionate, because true compassion is never compassion until you dare to cross the street and begin to give of every part of yourself, your time, your talent, your treasure, to helping a lost and broken generation. So that’s how I got involved. And by the grace of God, over the last couple of years, we have an office in Thessalonica, Greece where we have two lawyers on staff and counselors, and we have a transition home and we also have an emergency shelter in an area of the world where there had been no cases that had gone to trial, no convictions against traffickers, and people were saying, ‘This can’t happen.’ ‘You can’t do this.’ There is Russian mafia, there is Albania mafia, there is so much corruption, the church is so embryonic, it is so difficult to rescue anyone, but you know what? We have a shelter that is full, we have a transition home that is full, we are in the middle of a case that is at trial and if the conviction happens in the next month, it’ll be the first conviction. The thing I have discovered is what is impossible with man is possible with God! And greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world, and the church is created to be light in the midst of darkness, and we don’t need to fear, this is the moment we were born for. You and I are not a product of time, we are a product of eternity. God has plucked us out of eternity and He has positioned us time and He has given us gifts and talents for the purpose of serving our generation.
So I believe that this is the greatest hour for the church; that God has not called us to be this little thing on the side, but He has called us to be a mighty force on the planet. It’s going to make a difference in our generation. Nick and I were in Florence involved with a church a couple of years ago. I don’t know if you know Italy or not but it’s astounding and Florence is great. We said, “Here we are Lord, send us, we’ll go to the nations!” So if someone has to go, I’ll go there!
We had to pay 5 euros to go up to the top of a steeple and look across the city. I went into this amazing cathedral, which, in it’s hay-day, would have been so amazing. It probably housed 5 or 6,000 people. The artwork on the walls was absolutely stunning. The architecture of the building was unbelievable. But as I went up to the top of the steeple, I remember just beginning to cry, because I thought, how does this happen? How does a house that was built to worship God, a place that was built to see salvation, to see life, to see restoration, to see healing, to see hope, how does it become a tourist attraction? A monument to what God once did, a place where hundreds of people are paying 5 euros to go up and just look at a city. How does this not happen to our church? A church that everybody speaks about around the world. There is probably not a country that I got to, and we go to about 45 nations a year, where they are not singing Hillsong music, but how do I know that 100 years from now, people aren’t going to fly out to Sidney to see this building and this monument to what God once did? People saying, ‘I remember where that music came from, remember that church where people used to line up around the building to get into services.’ How do we know it’s not going to become a tourist attraction or a dead, empty monument? That’s when I sense the Holy Spirit saying to me, ‘Christine, that’s what happens when the church stops being the church and the church just starts doing church on a Sunday.’ As I travel the world, in North America and throughout Europe, if you were to ask me what I see, there is this thing that I call a passion deficiency syndrome has hit the church. There is this sense that we’ve institutionalized and we’ve bureaucratized our Christianity to a point where it is just something that we do. We just go through our little obligations and yet God is not calling us to just go through a religious obligation, He is mobilizing a mighty force to make a difference in the earth. You know when your Christianity is just a boring obligation because you just do what you have to, when it’s an obligation. But you know you’re passionate about the things of God when no one has to make you do it. You do what you want out of passion, you do what you have to when it is an obligation.
For instance, when my husband and I met, I went to Bible college a couple of years before him, so I was a lecturer in the Evangelism class when he went to Bible college. So I was doing a lecture and he tells this story that when I walked in, he fell in love with the teacher. Now, in our college, we have a rule that students are not allowed to date one another, but there was no rule about students and teachers! So he went on a mission to get me and he found out from my best friend that I swam every morning at 6:00 at our local swimming pool. I had never seen him there, then all of a sudden, I would go to the pool and at 6:00 already there is a guy doing laps up and down the pool. So after a week, we bumped into each other and I said, ‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ And he did that male defensive thing, ‘What do you mean? I’m always here at 6:00 every morning, I love swimming at 6:00 in the morning!’ I’ve been married to the man for 14 years and never once in 14 years has my husband ever got up at 6:00 in the morning to go to our local swimming pool to swim! So you know what I’ve discovered? You do what you want out of passion. No one has to make you get up, no one has to make you read your Bible, no one has to make you give, no one has to make you serve, no one has to make you worship, because you do what you want out of passion.
Did anyone see the movie The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson? If you notice, the name of that movie was not the boring, religious obligation of the Christ. It was the Passion. I remember two weeks after that movie was made, I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jim Caviezel was in the restaurant. I remember I was freaking out because I’m not normally star struck but I was so moved by that movie that I couldn’t believe I was in the same restaurant, so very inappropriately loudly over lunch, I turned to my husband and said, “Oh my gosh! There’s Jesus!” So the restaurant was freaking! But the guy that was with us knew him and asked if I wanted to meet him. My heart was beating as I walked across the restaurant, I’m thinking, I’m going to meet Jesus! I’m going to meet Jesus! So, then what happened was, he is sitting and I’m standing and we’re the same height, then he looks at me, and he didn’t say anything about what I did. My friend said, “Jim, this is my friend Chris from Australia.” So he stands up and I didn’t realize he was so tall, and he’s looking down and he goes, “You are from Australia, there are not many believers in Australia are there?” I couldn’t believe that Jim Caviezel was talking to me. I said, “No, there are no believers in Australia!” Then, I’m not joking, for the next 15 minutes, he full-on started witnessing to me, everything, the cross, the blood, the resurrection. I did not have the heart to tell him I was a Christian. He was so passionate. I’d already made up my mind about 10 minutes into that if he asked me to pray the sinner’s prayer, I’m doing it! Passion! What we need in the Church of Christ is this sense of passion, not a sense of obligation, that says we have the greatest message on earth, a message of hope, a message of justice, a message of life, a message of reconciliation. And we ought to be passionate. Do you know what you and I are? We are God’s spiritual GPS system. God wants us to be passionate about the very same thing that He is passionate about, and if you are wondering what that might be, that is about the lost. For God so loved, what? The world, a lost and broken world that He gave the thing that was closest to Him, his only begotten Son, so that whosoever would believe in Him would not perish but would come to everlasting life. God loves the lost. In fact, Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. You and I are God’s search and rescue team, and when our hearts beat for what God’s heart beats for, then the church becomes a potent force on the planet and makes a difference on the earth. The church has gotten so sidetracked with so many other things, but there is just one thing and that is the main thing, and when our hearts beat for what his heart beats for, it changes everything.
For the sake of our marriage, a few years ago, Nick and I bought one of those navigation GPS systems. We have a great marriage but whenever we were going somewhere, there would be times of intense fellowship in the car, and apparently I can talk to millions of people around the world but I’m not able to talk to one man and tell him where to go! My husband, no joke, he thinks that the 11th commandment is Thou shalt never stop and ask anyone for directions. So it was tense. So we bought this thing called a Nav-man and we put it on and it was a lie, it was false advertising, because it actually wasn’t a man, because when that thing turned on, the voice that was talking to us was a woman. It was a she, and she started telling my husband where to go. And you know what really ticked me off? My husband listened to this woman! I’ve given him two children but he is listening to her. So I called her Matilda and every now and again I’ll get in the car just because I want to show Matilda who is in charge of this relationship. So, I’m in the car with Matilda and she talks to you and says next exit on the right, and I look at her and literally go, ‘No,’ and I go straight past the exit and I love it because she starts to have a heart attack! The screen goes fuzzy, it’s so funny! Then I sneak and take the next exit. At that moment, she has a flat line, like she’s gone, then I hear – rerouting, rerouting! Every time I see those, the thing that I think about is that that is exactly what you and I are on earth to do. We are on the exit ramps of life and we are ready to reroute people back to their relationships with Jesus Christ. Whether you are at university or in a job or whatever your profession may be, our first and foremost obligation here on earth is to reroute people and to connect people into an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ. We are not first a student and then a Christian, we are not first some sort of corporate executive and then a Christian, we are first and foremost followers of Jesus Christ and we are God’s spiritual GPS systems.
God is consumed with the lost. In Luke Chapter 15, one passage of Scripture, three parables talking about one subject. You won’t find that anywhere in the Bible. God is trying to get our attention. Jesus talks about a lost sheep, He talks about a lost son and He talks about a lost coin. He is obsessed with the lost. In fact, in that passage of Scripture, He explains to us how people end up lost and what happens with the lost. For too long, the church has been pointing a judgmental finger at the lost and be negative and critical, and we’ve done everything except what we are supposed to do – seek and save the lost. We talk about lost sheep and I live in Australia and there are lots of sheep in Australia. You can be driving down the road and there is this paddock full of sheep, and then there is this other paddock with one little sheep in it and you wonder what happened. Well, that day, the sheep was very preoccupied with eating, stuck it’s head up at the end of the day and said, ‘Baaa,’ which interpreted means, ‘I’m lost.’ So it was lost. It wasn’t that it was a big evil sheep, it was just preoccupied. We have so many people on the earth who are not big, bad evil people, they are just preoccupied, trying to pay the bills and keep their marriage together and keep their kids off drugs. They are just preoccupied with life and they’ve ended up lost. Or perhaps, the woman with the coin, the coin didn’t get lost on its own, the woman was careless with that coin and the coin ended up lost.
We have a generation on the earth with which those who have been given stewardship over that generation have been quite careless with that generation. Whether it is in the media or politics or art or education, they’ve been careless and a generation has ended up lost.
When I was lost, I wasn’t a big, bad, evil person, but those that were given stewardship over my life were careless with my life and I ended up lost. I grew up in Sidney, Australia, second-generation migrant Greek, before My Big Fat Greek Wedding when it was not cool to be Greek in Australia, and I was constantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. I grew up in a culture that really demeaned women. Women were never encouraged to aspire to do anything in life other than just be one lean, mean breeding machine. So you have kids at 13, grandkids at 14 and great-grandkids at 15. I tell people everywhere that I’m a Greek orthodox mother’s nightmare, I didn’t marry until I was 30 and I didn’t have my first child until I was 35 and I’m a Pentecostal preacher! It does not get any worse for my Greek mother! So I was very much marginalized because of my gender. I grew up in the poorest local government area in the state in which I live. We grew up in a government housing commission house and every week of my life from the time I was three years old until the time I was 15, I was abused at the hands of four men for 12 years. Most young women with that kind of background don’t normally end up doing what I’m doing for a living. They end up either drug dependent or alcohol dependent with maybe two or three different kids by two or three different fathers, confused about their gender identity. There is a lot of pain and shame and guilt and condemnation. The reason why it gets so profoundly quiet, even in the coffee shop or wherever we may be this weekend, the fact is because you don’t need to be a prophet to work out that no doubt there would be people right in this meeting today that are very, very profoundly aware of the pain that comes with being abused, whether it is sexual abuse, or physical or emotional or verbal.
So I ended up lost, which is what normally happens to someone with my kind of background. I was a young woman full of shame, full of unforgiveness, full of anger, full of pain. Then when I was 33, I got a phone call, two weeks before my 33rd birthday from my brother, George, who was 35 at the time. When you’re Greek, all your brothers are George, Nicko, Spiro, ya know, so George called me and he said that he just got a letter from the government department and it says that I’ve been adopted. When he said that to me, I laughed, because you know when you’re growing up, you think you’re not related to your siblings, like your mother is from Mars. I said to him, “George I know you are weird, but obviously the Department of Community Services has made a mistake, so call them back and tell them they’ve sent this letter to the wrong person.” So he called me back about 10 minutes later and he was sobbing. He said, “Chris, it is true, they have a whole file on my life, when I was born, my immunizations, where I went to school, they know everything.” I was freaking out, thinking this is a family secret, 35 years. My father had died when I was 19, my mother at the time was 61 and I don’t know if you know anything about Greeks but they are extremely emotional. They act first and think later. So I’m thinking this could blow up big time and really bad, so I raced over to my mother’s house and I walked in just at the moment that my brother was giving my mother this piece of paper. My mom took the paper and I saw this moment of hesitation in my mom’s eyes, and I thought oh my gosh, this is true. And my mom started balling and she said, “George, I’m so sorry but all the adoption laws in Australia 35 years ago, they were all closed adoptions and we never thought you would find out and the last thing I promised your dad was that I would never tell you and I tore up all of the paperwork.’ Now, you’ve got to imagine, this is a 35 year secret. My brother is balling his eyes out, my mom is crying, the dog is crying, snot is flying, it is a Greek moment. About 10 minutes later, my mother looks up across the kitchen at me and this is what she said to me. She said, “Christine, since we’re telling the truth, do you want to know the whole truth?” And I just looked at her and I said, “I’ve been adopted too.” And she said, “Yes.” Church, I was stunned. I just stood there and after a couple of minutes, I went, “Am I still Greek?” I was called a lot of names for a lot of years at school and I wanted to know there was a reason for it! So I asked if I was still Greek, and the very next thing that came out of my mouth, right there in my Greek Orthodox mother’s kitchen, I said, “Oh well, before I was formed in my mother’s womb, whosever womb that was, He knew me. He knitted together my innermost parts. He fashioned all of my days before there was one of them. I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” And church, that day, every fact that I thought to be true about my life changed. What my name was, where I was born, every fact changed. And to this night, I still don’t know the facts surrounding my conception. I don’t know if I was the result of some one-night stand. I don’t know if I was the result of an ongoing adulterous affair, I don’t know if I was the result of a rape. But let me tell you something, I’ve discovered something on the planet that is far more powerful than the facts, and it’s called the truth of the Word of God. And Ephesians 2:10 does not say that I am the workmanship of a rape; it doesn’t say that I am the workmanship of an adulterous affair, it says that I am his workmanship, recreated in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand that I should walk in them. And if you are wondering why I’m so passionate about this gospel, it is because I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the most potent force on the planet is not some cruise missile, it is not some nuclear bomb, the most potent force on the plant, always was and always will be the blood of Jesus Christ because it sets people free. It sets us free to be all that God has called us to be and to do all that God has called us to do. You can rise up above the obstacles and the hurdles and the challenges of your past and you can catapult into the destiny that Jesus Christ has for you. There is nothing more powerful to set people free than the truth and the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of his Word. If you are thinking we are sitting in some little basement in a coffee place or wherever we are in church across this great city today, let me tell you something, we are not here just going through the motions, we are here because Jesus Christ is alive and that same Spirit that raised Him from the dead lives on the inside of us and He has given us a purpose and He has given us a destiny and no matter how careless someone was, if you and I would reach out to a lost and a broken generation, we can see people restored and reconciled to relationship with Jesus Christ. I don’t know about you, but that gets me pretty pumped!
People were careless with my life, and out of that carelessness, I ended up lost. And there are people all over this city who have ended up lost because people are careless with them. God hasn’t called us to judge or to point a finger but to go and seek and save that which was lost. Or maybe perhaps like the young man that went to his father and said he wanted his inheritance. I don’t think that that lost son just ended up in a pigpen, as that was his goal. I think he simply miscalculated. He thought that a life without the father would be better than a life with the father, and because of that, he ended up lost. I think that Scripture teaches us that no matter what, whether you have ended up lost because you’ve been preoccupied, or because maybe someone has been careless with your life, or maybe somewhere along the line, you just miscalculated. The point is that they’ve ended up lost, and our job is to be God’s search and rescue team and do whatever we need to do to seek and save that which was lost.
In fact, in Matthew 4:18, the Bible says that Jesus said, ‘Follow Me,’ when He was calling the disciples, ‘And I will make you fishers of men.’ Not keepers of the aquarium but fishers of men. I will put something on the inside of you that makes you become magnetic, something that makes you be able to be a fisher of men. A lot of us get so caught up with so much other stuff and we get diverted with so many other things when it comes to the faith, but I’m telling you, there is a divine recalibration happening on the earth and God is drawing us back to our first love and our first works and He is calling us, his church, to be a bridge to a lost and a broken generation. He has called us to go and reach that which was lost.
If you are wondering why I’m so passionate about rescuing the victims of human trafficking, it is because He has rescued me, and I, the rescued, now have a responsibility to be a rescuer to a lost and a broken generation and every one of us has that responsibility.
Let me end with this one poem that I read. I better go to my notes. It’s called The Pit. It says:
A man fell into a pit and could not get himself out. A subjective person came along and said I feel for you down there. An objective person came along and said it’s really logical that someone would have fallen down there in the pit. A Christian scientist came along and said you only think that you’re in a pit. A Pharisee said only bad people fall in the pit. A newspaper reporter wanted the exclusive story on the pit. A fundamentalist said you deserve your pit. Confucius said is you had listened to me, you wouldn’t be in the pit. Buddha said your pit is only a state of mind. A realist said that’s a pit! A scientist calculated the necessary pressure to get him out of the pit. A geologist told him to appreciate the rock strata in the pit. An accountant asked if he was paying tax on the pit. The Council Inspector asked if he had a permit to dig a pit. An evasive person came along and avoided the subject of the pit altogether. A self-pitying person said you have not seen anything until you’ve seen my pit. A charismatic said just confess that you are not in the pit. An optimist said things could get worse. A pessimist said things will get worse. Jesus, seeing the man, took him by the hand and lifted him out off the pit.
We need a church that understands that God has called us to lift a broken generation out of the pit.
Let me leave you with this Scripture from Luke 4:18
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
Church, we’ve got a big job to do. We’ve got a big city to reach. God’s hand is on you in a mighty way. There is a reason God has breathed on your pastors, and that Mark’s books have gone around the world. Let me tell you, I’m from Australia and I’m here in D.C. with you all. I was in a cab in Copenhagen and I was going on and on about how beautiful the city was and the cab driver pulled over on the side of the road, and I had evidently gone on a bit too much because he was quite emotional and he looked at me and he said to me, “Do you really think this city is so beautiful?” I said, “Absolutely, it is amazing.” And he looked at me and said these words to me, “Sometimes you can be right in the midst of it and not even see it.”
My prayer is that for NCC, whatever location you are at this weekend, that you are not in the midst of something and don’t see the amazing thing that God is doing in and through this ministry, and that your influence has gone far and wide. When the Queen of Sheba came to King Solomon, she said, I have heard about you and the half of it it wasn’t even told me. There’s a reason when God breathes on a church and breathes on a ministry and He takes your name and He makes it known and it’s got nothing to do with your name and everything to do with Jesus, but it is because He wants to make him name famous. God has plucked you out of eternity and has positioned you here for a purpose and He has planted you in this house for a purpose and He has got a great purpose and a great plan for this house.
Don’t ever take it for granted. Become part of the core of what God is doing and understand that there are millions that need to be reached with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if we, the church, don’t do it, there is no hope for the world. We and Jesus living on the inside of us are the hope of the world. He did it for me and He can do it for you. That same Jesus that worked an awesome miracle in this chic 20 odd years ago in the back of Sidney, Australia, that same Jesus is right here, right now, today. Wherever you are, Jesus is here. Let me tell you, He wants to give you forgiveness for your past, a brand new start today and a hope for the future. No one but Jesus can wipe our slate clean and give us a hope and a future. I am living proof that miracles happen. I am living proof that you can start bad and finish good in a true relationship with Jesus Christ. I wonder if you know Him today. Not do you know about Him, but do you know Him. If you don’t, right here, right now, where you are sitting or standing, I want to give you the opportunity to address the spiritual condition of your heart, the opportunity to put Jesus Christ first in your life. It is one thing to know about God and a whole other thing to surrender your heart and your life to Jesus Christ.
It is amazing how many people go through the religious motions but never step over the line from religion to authentic relationship with Jesus. Tonight I want to give you the opportunity to do that. Maybe a friend invited you into this place tonight. You were not even sure what you were coming to. Maybe they lied, they said let’s go to a night club, and here you hear some 5-foot little Greek yelling at you and you’re thinking is this a Monty Python show? You know what? You are not here by accident. You are here by divine timing and the divine planning and the divine purpose of God. God has brought you here to draw you into relationship with Himself. If you surrender your heart and your life to Him, friend, you can know what it is to have a fresh start, forgiveness for all the junk of your past, and a brand new life today.
Just for the closing few seconds of this service, let’s have every head bowed and every eye closed. I want you to take a moment to consider where you are spiritually. Do you know Jesus? If you don’t, friend, right now, right here, I give you the opportunity to make your peace with God. Friend, if I’ve flown nearly 30 hours across the world so that one of you can be authentically connected to Jesus tonight, that’s worth it. That’s more than worth it. And if you say, ‘Chris, I want what you are talking about. I need forgiveness. I want a fresh start today. I want hope for the future,’ then I want to pray with you. A very simple but powerful prayer, a prayer that will connect you to God through Jesus Christ his Son. And friend, if you want to be included in that prayer, you want to know Jesus in a real way, you want a fresh start with Jesus, either for the first time or you’ve been away from Him and tonight you recognize that you need a fresh start with Jesus, then wherever you are sitting, just so that I know who I am praying for tonight, would you raise your hand right now, just high enough and long enough for me to see, thank you, thank you, thank you, that’s fantastic. Anyone else, that is awesome. I can 16 hands, I hope I’ve got you all, I’m just going to pray for you.
Father I thank You. I saw 16 hands, Lord but however many were raised here, Father I pray in the name of Jesus Christ that each one of those people that surrendered their heart and their life to You would truly know what it is to have forgiveness for each and every one. And Father, a brand new start tonight and a hope for the future, Lord, let this be a defining night, Lord where they will never look back but only look forward following You. Father I pray that they would know your grace and your love and your mercy in a real and a tangible way, in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
