Happy New Year everyone. It’s the first Sunday of 2007, a great year to be alive in, a great Sunday to be at Life Church. Today, I’m beginning a brand new message series that can change your life. And not just your life, but the lives of people around you that you love and care about. I’m not just talking about superficial change, but a change that will last into eternity.
What I’m going to begin talking about today is outreach or sharing your faith with someone else. Some of you may already be tensing up and thinking. What are we getting into here? Are they going to send us all out going door to door, pushing my beliefs on someone else? No, that’s not what I’m going to talk about, that type of outreach doesn’t work very well anymore. How many here today became a believer by someone knocking on your door and telling you about God? My guess is probably around zero.
Think for a minute about how you became a believer? No, not the first time you heard about God, but when you committed your life to following Jesus Christ. Now, my educated guess is that for the vast majority of you, your decision was influenced by another person. Perhaps a friend or a family member who told you about Jesus or gave you a book or invited you to church. When you didn’t have a relationship with God, someone, as it were, walked across the room to where you were and introduced you to Him.
That’s what this four-week series is named “Just Walk Across The Room.” As easily as someone went out of their way to tell you about God, you can do the same for someone else. As a believer, your obligation to God is not to break the chain, to not be a dead-end link. Every believer is to pass their faith on to others, some to a few, others to many. Paul writes to Timothy, his child in the faith. NIV 2 Timothy 2:2 And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. Do you see the chain here? Timothy was to tell others about the things he had learned about God and they in turn would teach yet others. The chain would not be broken.
Today my message is entitled “The Greatest Gift You Can Give.” The person who influenced you to give your life to Jesus gave you the greatest gift they could give. Nothing else in life compares to it. Jesus said in NIV Mark 8:36 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? To forfeit your soul is to spend this life and eternity without God. To gain your soul is to enter into a relationship with God called eternal life that will last forever. To introduce someone to God, you just need to walk across the room and begin the process of giving that greatest gift. In this series, we’re going to unpack what that means.
To hear more about this topic, listen to my January 7, 2007 message entitled The Greatest Gift You Can Give