ASI Southern Union 2024: His Capital Gains

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ASI Southern Union

Kameron DeVasher

Our Soul-Winning Bottleneck

It has been a blessing to be with you this weekend here at ASI Southern Union.

And in a brief nutshell, I want to review where we've gone in our messages and tell you why we're landing where we're landing this evening.

In our opening message, we talked about the concept that God is a giver.

In creation, he gave generously, and in redemption, he's given sacrificially.

In our second message, we looked at, okay, what does Lord expect to get in return for that great payment, for that great sacrifice?

He didn't just pour it into a vacuous hole, he actually wants to see something come out of it.

And what he wants to get out of it is you and me reset back to our original creation ideal.

And through us, to yield a great harvest of souls to build up his kingdom.

God's return on investment is us, and through us, others into his kingdom.

And this morning we looked at plant-based evangelism.

The idea being that God has a way that he wants this message to go out, and that method was modeled by Jesus himself.

And that Christ's method alone will bring true success in reaching the people.

And it wasn't just scattered and chaotic and random, but it was purposeful, it was intent, it was strategic, and it was a process akin to the agricultural cycle.

There's a cycle of evangelism where you minister to people's needs and you win their confidence.

You introduce spiritual things and with that confidence, by God's grace, their hearts have been softened to receive the word and they feed on the word of God and grow till the point of decision and the harvest Commitments to Jesus are made.

And then finally, the preservation phase where retention in the church is not our only goal.

We want to be grounded in Christ and then engaged in his mission as well.

So this evening, We're gonna go from the conceptual, I don't know if you've noticed this, but the intent was to have a broad, overarching, theoretical beginning and winnow it down to a practical close, to go from conceptual to practical.

All right, I heard this concept, but now I wanna go do something with it.

When I go back to my own ministry, my own home life, my own local church, what can I take away and put into action?

Where am I most needed in the cause and what can I do for the Lord to help the movement?

So tonight our message is entitled, Our Soul-Winning Bottleneck.

Some parts of the phases of the cycle of evangelism are going great guns, but yet we haven't seen that great harvest.

Is there some part of this work that's lagging behind or is slowing down the system, if you will.

There's 1 point where everything is bogged down and it's slowing down the whole production.

Is there a bottleneck in our own ministry in our local churches as we seek to do the Lord's will and what can we do about it as we leave tonight.

So we're going from conceptual to practical.

We're gonna have a message entitled Our Soul Winning Bottleneck, but before we do, Let's begin with a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, again we thank you for the time that we can spend together.

Thank you for your wisdom in giving us Sabbath even before there was sin and how much more we need it now.

And Lord, as we commune with you as the Sabbath hours come to a close and we look once again at this concept of not only the message that we have to bear, but the method in which you'd like it shared, help us to know what to do, Lord, and help us to do it as best we can through the power of your Holy Spirit so that a great harvest of souls can be seen.

Our message tonight is our soul-winning bottleneck.

So as a brief review, just as agriculture is a process, the cycle of evangelism involves sequential steps that are each essential for true success in reaching people.

Hearts have to be softened, seed has to be sown, that has to grow through a study of God's Word.

Now people will say, well I never went through a Bible study.

No, but you probably went to an evangelistic campaign, but by the way, that's a Bible study just in a public setting.

Well, that was Doug Batchelor helping you out.

Or I listened to the, there's some, everybody comes into the Seventh-day Adventist church learning the message in some way, applying it in their lives, and then making a decision affirmative for Jesus.

So there's different variations of approaches to each of these phases, but the phases happen nonetheless.

The heart is touched, the mind is activated with the truth of God's word, it's built through study of God's word, decisions are made, and then you become a member of the body of Christ.

Now, to make genuine disciples of Jesus, we need to embrace the whole cycle of evangelism, and I've added this now, both personally and corporately.

So if there was no local Seventh-Davenist church, but you were called by God to do a work, you would go through the same, I'm gonna start reaching out to people, I'm gonna mingle with them, sympathize with them, I'm gonna win their confidence, then I'm gonna introduce spiritual things, I'm gonna follow it up with the study of God's word, and we're gonna call for, you would do that in your own personal walk, whether it's with your family members, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your acquaintances, your neighborhood people, whoever is in your life, This cycle is the blueprint for how ministry should work, even in the individual level.

But corporately, as we start looking at a local church, we remind ourselves in Acts of the Apostles, page 9, the church was organized for service and its mission is to carry the gospel to the world.

And the church is simply a collection of individual soul winners working together for greater results.

The church is the people of God committed to the mission of God to hasten the coming of God.

So this cycle works as an individual template and also as the model for the local church ministry.

Now if we were to take those points on the, you know, the cycle and turn them into a graph and chart the progress and the activity of your local church, you would probably find that some areas we are stronger at than others.

Some local churches, for instance, if you're taking your local church growth potential and take that cycle and plot it out, you might see that you have different strengths and different weaknesses.

Some areas of activity you're doing a lot of, some you're doing a little of.

And everyone's going to be a little different.

For instance, there might be a church who makes sure to do a public evangelistic campaign with regularity, but there's really not much Bible study going on.

There's a little bit more seed, so I maybe do some literature distribution, but we don't have a lot of activity and the acquainting ourselves with the needs of others and winning their sympathy.

So we do this 1 thing well, and the other things are off, and so it's not a fully balanced approach.

Another church would probably look like this.

We do a whole lot of getting to know our friends and neighbors and disinterested benevolent outreach, temporal needs, Adventist community services, those types of good good ministries, and then in the fall we'll hold an evangelistic campaign and say, all right, we're touching their hearts, and we're preaching the message.

Yet when we don't see a lot of results, we'll say, well, evangelism doesn't work.

There are still in that model elements that are still missing.

If you're not distributing literature or sharing your testimony or inviting people or introducing spiritual things to the individual work of the members and following up with Bible studies, well then what you're really doing when you come to a harvest campaign is you're trying to do all those phases of the cycle in 3 weeks' time.

Well let me become friends with him, introduce Bible truth, and start building this relationship with God, and then call for decisions, and when they don't make a decision, we're like, well evangelism doesn't work.

There's a bottleneck to our growth in there.

And so the key is to recognize that every phase of soul winning is essential.

And we can't just focus on 1 or 2 areas and neglect others and say, well, our church does this.

We've heard it oftentimes, especially with the prepare phase.

And we're just gonna be really, really kind and nice and sweet, but at some point you have to be confronted, I would say, with the truths of God's word and call for decision to stand on 1 side or the other.

And this results in a bottleneck that limits church growth.

And most of our churches today probably function like this graph here.

There's probably, for instance, the Preparing the soil of the heart work is very in vogue.

You don't have to be theologically sound at all to do that.

Everybody knows that it's really good to be nice to people.

Nobody's offended when you're nice to them.

And then, like I said, maybe we'll do an evangelistic campaign once a year, maybe every few years or something like that.

And so we're doing all of this and we're doing this.

And when we don't see results, we say, you know what, we need to do something more.

So we just keep doing more of what we're doing.

We amp up, we gotta do more of this work and get a better evangelist and spend more money on.

But we're still recognizing, we're still not recognizing the bottleneck, We have to address the bottleneck.

And that is the burden of our message tonight is in most cases that I'm aware of, the bottleneck to church growth is not the disinterest benevolent phase, Nor is it necessarily the public evangelism phase.

There are a lot of good resources out there, a lot of good ministries are helping with that, but it's that middle phase of that individual soul winning labor that takes time, the transitioning from temporal to spiritual, and then leading them through Bible study.

That is the bottleneck for church growth in most cases, and that's the burden of our talk tonight.

Now remember soil preparation, we talked about this.

Building friendship and trust opens the heart for the reception of truth.

We do this by drawing close to people through being kind, again intentionally social, purposefully, strategically, yes, I want to have a contact with you so I can introduce spiritual things, and ministering to practical needs.

And that, of course, the whole purpose of preparing the soil is for the next phase of sowing the seed.

Our Soul-Winning Bottleneck

Transcript

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