Open—Sam Ludvicek
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Praise God.
It's clear.
It is so many places.
Our gold and my heart.
Whatever. **** I don't know what it is.
So much.
Better so I won't let you go.
Linda McDonald's.
I have something glued in the flap of my Bible that has some quotes on it that I like.
00:05:04
From Mr. Kelly and Mr. Ballot, Mr. Darby, a few things I want read a couple of them.
But I get asked by Christians I meet that aren't amongst the gathered Saints and some to amongst us. Sometimes I don't know what my ministry is or what my gift is. Well, when somebody asks me what my ministry is, I can tell and you can tell them too. Well, I know one that you have.
And the Bible calls it the ministry of reconciliation. We have all been given that.
And to participate in in some way, shape or form.
And I want to honor a dear lady here who pursues in that ministry to the end of her days back home in our little gathering in Cedar Rapids. Her name is Betty Bellison.
And if you think you have a difficult time finding a way to serve the Lord in the ministry of reconciliation, do you know what that dear lady still does? As her time is winding down, she goes through the phone book and randomly picks a name.
And then she writes a letter to that person sharing the gospel, and in that letter she will include a gospel tract.
She's still.
Pursuing the ministry of reconciliation and participating in something that the Lord has given her to do, does that encourage your heart?
Last Lord's Day Betty was able to come out to meeting, and every time I hear her voice as she comes in, greeting everybody, I tell her she's the lady with the smiling voice. It lifts my heart, thrills me that this dear St. though faint, is yet pursuing. And what an encouragement this dear lady is in our little assembly there.
And I know she wants to go home soon, and perhaps she'll get there ahead of the rest of us and the Lord, unless the Lord comes today. But I hope you don't mind that I honored your mother that way because she means a lot to us.
My brother Paul has been recently restored to the Lord. He still struggles but when he walked into the meeting room and saw dear Betty, he teared up and he said that reminds me of our grandmother who was too a faithful St. who sought to win souls till the end of her days.
Once a year, my grandmother used to get on a bus and she would go around Iowa to the different relatives, distant relatives, some of we didn't know very well, but her mission was to make sure that they were all saved.
Ones who attended different churches and so forth, but their children and their grandchildren. She wanted to make sure that they knew the Lord Jesus as her Savior. Another good example of a dear St. And she did that.
Up until she wasn't able to do that anymore, even when my father was a bit concerned about her going as she got older. But she wanted to do it, and the Lord honored it because many of those relatives did come to the Lord Jesus as their Savior.
We have enrollments 11/29.
It says for the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. In Scripture, when we look at the word calling, sometimes it refers to a secular calling, a job of some kind. Sometimes it refers to the calling that we have as Christians, that we've been saved, we've been called and redeemed.
And sometimes it can refer to that calling we have to serve the Lord.
And here gifts as well. We've been given natural gifts. My wife is an artist and she's honed and developed it over the years. But anybody looking at what she can do will have to say that gift is from the Lord and there are natural gifts that are from Him.
00:10:01
And he does not recall them. Now, it might be your secular job might change, but the bent with which God has made you and the natural talents that underline the strength of your body and all that that is set. And God may have you adapt them to do whatever secular work you do. And we've talked a bit about that.
Some of us were talking about it at lunch, but those gifts and callings are there.
And the vessel that God makes to put the gift in is part of his doing as well.
2nd Corinthians 518 is the verse that I was thinking about.
The ministry that we all have.
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation.
I hear his quotes in the flap of my Bible.
I'm going to read it carefully.
William Kelly wrote.
Reconciliation is the full establishment in a relationship with God according to His nature and according to the nature of that which is reconciled.
It now acts in redemption and a new nature and as regards all around us, a new state of things.
John Darby wrote.
God acting in Christianity according to the active energy of His love towards sinners.
Christian ministry becomes the expression of this activity.
It has its source in the power of this love, whether it be in calling souls or in nourishing those who are called whom Jesus loves. And one more from Mr. Darby in another place.
The principle of ministry is the active energy of love, of grace, flowing from the faith by which we know God.
To touch this is to overthrow the hole in its fundamental principle. In its essence, ministry flows from individual knowledge of the masters character.
I love that grace known and strongly felt, becomes active grace in our hearts, the only true and only possible source in the nature of things of a ministry according to God. We see, moreover, that it is the sovereignty of God who gives as He sees good.
Either natural capacity as the vessel to contain the gift.
Or the gift according to the measure, the gift of Christ.
Out of those treasures which are found in him, which he has received for men.
Paul told Timothy to make full proof of his ministry.
He also told him to stir up the gift that was in him.
So my primary thoughts are with regards to those younger here.
We had talked a little bit about a father who had a son who was content to live in his home and.
Not very ambitious. And how did he get him out? And that's really complacency. It's not contentment.
But what about spiritual things as a young person? And you're thinking about how you will serve the Lord in your life, and you've come some way along. Maybe you've begun to discover that you have a particular gift. Maybe you don't know.
Hopefully others will begin to see in you something and will seek to encourage it because that's one way of discovering it and what you find in spiritual things, pleasure doing that is an indication as well. But regardless of a particular gift, this ministry of reconciliation goes from winning souls to Christ and bringing souls along that are already one to Christ.
And somewhere in there, God has a purpose.
For you, we were talking at lunch about the secular job that we have in some places in the world. You have no choice. You're born into something. That's what you do. And if you're a Christian there, you find a way to do it and honor the Lord and be content in that.
00:15:12
We had read before us that if you can be free from something that you may be forced into, seek it. Go ahead, be free. Be free to serve the Lord is widely and broadly as you can.
If you can work for yourself and control your hours and so forth, if that's something that God can bring you into, then that will give you maybe more opportunity to serve Him in other cases, not having the responsibility of a business.
But working for somebody?
And maybe with the opportunity to have lots of vacation and lots of opportunity to go on weekends and control some of your time, that might free you up from the headaches of running a business so you can be freer to do something that the Lord will have you to do. But those should be things that you think about at a very young age. What? And how I can pursue the gift that God has placed within me. Are we going to be someone? And I know Christians that are.
This Whatever talents they've had, like in the parable, they just bury it in the sand.
Whatever church they go to, our religious organization they belong to, as soon as they got saved, they got put in the bus ministry or in the soup kitchen or someplace to keep them occupied. And there's little opportunity to see any spiritual gift really develop. Well, if you have the gift of health, that's fine to be in those places.
But often the gift of helps is combined with something else.
That ability to go and be there when somebody needs you and you just have this, this delight to go and help. And while you're there helping, that word that you can share in the gospel, our word of encouragement to a dear St. of God or somebody that needs instruction. I know some brothers like that.
My dear brother Lemoyne Smith is like that with these carpentry.
How many times he has told his stories of being on a job site, working with somebody and having the opportunity to share something in the gospel or share something with a dear child of God that is maybe starving because of where they're at. Brother Phil and others, carpenters, I know, Brother London used to do those kinds of things, used his hands and do some kind of work and at the same time have the opportunity to speak to somebody.
We talked about entertaining strangers unawares.
That opportunity to see something my father taught me whenever he was in business, in a crowd, at a meeting or at a Bible conference, he said I would look for the loneliest face in the place.
And then I would go make that person my friend.
His whole idea was to go and encourage them. Why is that face sad now? If you do something like that, you go to somebody and you say.
You're looking a little down in the mouth. Is something wrong? Well, you might have an opportunity to really do something, win a soul to Christ, encourage somebody along the way. Maybe you'll find a dear fellow believer that's just struggling and they need you to be that Angel that came along at just the moment.
But what is your spiritual gift? What draws you in the things of the Lord? Is there something that actually excites you?
I was asked to give a meeting in Tampa years ago addressed to young people, and I had a message in mind. But after the the meal that day, I was outside and I heard a bunch of young people there, some from Canada, visiting in the winter, and they were all talking about how bored they were.
And I said, boy, oh boy, here in America, with all that we have and it's easy to be bored, maybe they didn't have access to their video games or whatever else. But I got to thinking about that. And I said the message I had on my heart is not the message God wants.
So when I got up there, I said the exact thing I just said I've changed my message and I said you're bored.
I'll tell you how to have excitement go in a soul to Christ. You want to get excited. You want to have a thrill that's that's hard to find on this earth in any other way. People take drugs and do all kinds of things. They do extreme sports to get some kind of a thrill.
00:20:16
Ask God to give you a soul to win for him. Just one in a year. Ask Him for that. Have you ever done that? Give me a soul to win for you. Just won this year at least one.
And I want to be there for the birth Lord. You think he won't answer that? I guarantee you if you ask him, he'll do it.
Now when that happens, you'll have a thrill like you haven't had before. If it's never happened, I tell people it's like being a midwife.
I've talked with actual midwives. One of the reasons they do it is they're usually women who love that little baby that comes into this world and taking that little baby and that miracle of life and watching it happen, and they just love that and they get a thrill from it. Well, you catch your first born again child of God in your hands.
You'll have that thrill yourself, and if you want to not be bored, seek that for a summer. If you're a young person, seek that opportunity. I'm not telling you to force yourself in some way, shape or harm or go out and do what somebody else does. Just ask God.
You have not because you asked not. Ask Him for that and then ask Him to help you to pursue it by His spirit and He will lead you in ways. Ask Him to drop it in your lap.
I've had God do that, drop things in my lap more times than I can count, and that's exciting. The Christian life need not be boring at all, but some people think of it that way and some young people that drift.
Way that are the Lords drift because they get bored with it and really they've drifted and they're not really walking close with the Lord, they're not enjoying.
Who they are in Christ, they've forgotten that a little bit.
Yes.
They know they're saved and they're not going to hell, but they're they're bored.
And maybe sometimes that's our fault. Because if I ever pick this book up and say anything from it and read anything from it and bore you, you come and rebuke me because I am not do that. I never bore you with this book. If I were to speak from it, better that I shut my mouth.
But there are exciting things in the Christian life, and that's one of them is to win a soul to Christ.
Maybe.
You like to help people understand things and justice. Maybe you have the ability to hear a message.
And if you're like me, every time I learn something, my immediate thought is how do I explain that to somebody else? Maybe better than how I heard it, Maybe I dug it out myself. How do I explain that to a new Christian? Because early in my Christian pathway in my 20s, I was involved with a lot of young believers that needed to learn things, and I was their immediate teacher.
In the early things of the faith, how do I explain this truth to that young person?
Or that new Christian that's young in the faith. How do I do that? And then your mind works.
And the Spirit of God works with you and, you know, a story or an illustration or some way that you can express that and even a better and more simple way to help a dear child of God, you know, that's the development of teaching. And there are different measures of teaching gifts.
In the past, as we think about different ones, all of us remember people like Charles Hayhole, people like Albert Hayhoe, people like Gordon, those who can remember. I don't remember Harry Hay Hall, but I've heard him talked about those who remember different ones, Ron Reeves, who I did grow up with, Brother Whitaker, Brother Anderson, different ones, The different measures of gifts that were there and the different styles that were there.
The wonderful Penelope of it all. God had chosen each vessel and prepared each vessel and put a gift in each one. So what is that thing that's in you that God has placed there? Discover what it is not for yourself, for yourself in the sense to know what you're about, what God's purpose is for you.
00:25:07
You're the man who broke the the book The Purpose Driven Life.
Some of it's OK, but the idea that people grow up and don't even know what their purpose is, and even if they find certain secular employment and a career, unsaved people not having a purpose is a dangerous thing. And if you're a Christian and you don't understand what your purpose is before God?
That can set you adrift, but you can ask Him. He can help you and hopefully your brethren will help you and guide you with that.
Irwin Sutherland in Des Moines, IA If I saw a Bible dictionary that said gift of helps, his name would be next to it. That brother was always there, right there when somebody needed help. Icy nodding heads.
There are people like that. Is that you?
Well, glory in it, rejoice in it that you can do that, and you can take pleasure in doing something like that for your Savior.
Because he created you for that and to do that.
If you delight sharing the gospel with people, we should all delight in that. But if you have a little extra something special within you that just wants to go out and win souls to Christ, then you ought to think about that as well.
And maybe naturally speaking, it doesn't look like that. And maybe early on you won't get encouragement. I don't know how many of you know DL Moody's story.
But DL Moody was born in, I believe, 1937.
Not 1837.
He was not born in a Christian home. I don't think he got beyond the 6th grade.
His uncle had a shoe store in Chicago.
And his uncle was a believer and he invited DL Moody to come at 17 years old of age and work in his shoe store. But he required one thing of him if he was going to get the job.
He must go to church and he must go to Sunday school. And he did.
In one day a Sunday school teacher came to the shoe store and he put his hand on DL Moody S shoulder, and he was burdened to come to the store and talk to him. He had shared the gospel with him before, but there he pressed it in. In his heart he felt that was the moment to come to DL Moody and tell him and urge him and plead with him to trust in Christ as his Savior. And he did.
DL Moody wasn't, couldn't hardly read.
But something sparked within him, and he wanted to tell others.
My favorite Sunday school song is The Gypsy Boy because he immediately goes tell it again, tell it again, tell it again.
That was his desire. That's what DL Moody. Go tell it. I'm going to go tell it. I don't know if he rented it or how he got it. He got this old shack. It was part of a.
Behind a bar, a part of a maybe for whiskey storage or whatever it was.
And he put some candles in there and he set it up and he started inviting children to come.
Nowadays they they come and arrest you if you try to do something like that. What are you doing in an old shack with kids?
And one man who came to see what DL Moody was doing, as this young teenager said, he walked in and there were 3 candles and he had a little African American kid and he was reading from the King James Bible.
And he skipped words because he couldn't read them, but he was seeking to win that soul to Christ. And the man observing it said, how could God ever use this guy for anything? He's worthless.
Outwardly, it didn't appear that there was much there, but do you know, within a year's time, there were 600 kids in a Sunday school that were started by DL Moody, and he had a bunch of assistants helping him that could read better than he could, but he learned to read.
He pressed on and that ability that outwardly didn't look like much God had put within him. It was from the Lord, and that gift was developed.
And DL Moody began to preach the gospel more and more, but it started as a Sunday school work. Do you know that the news of that Sunday school work reached the White House? And when Abraham Lincoln became president, he came to visit that Sunday school, and he spoke at that Sunday school.
00:30:17
There's nobody from nowhere from Hicksville. No talent, no gift. The vessel looks like nothing.
That God had a plan for that man. Now something else happened. God was already working with the desire of his heart. He had planted the gift. He was molding this. He was shaping it. He was taking maybe the lack that was there, the education he didn't have, and he was filling in the gaps.
But at one point, I think in the 1850s, it was DL Modi was in Scotland at a conference.
And while he was there, he sought the advice from an evangelist. An English evangelist just sought advice from him and seeing an older brother and he sat with him.
And one of the pieces of advice this man gave to Mr. Moody was this.
He said the world has yet to see what God can do with a man totally consecrated to God.
And justice at Ottawa, all the counseling got that phrase hammered away in his brain, said when he got on the ship back to America, he said, and he walked a deck of as if every plank on the deck of the boat said those words. When he got back to Chicago, walking down the cobblestone streets, it's as every stone, he said, had those words carved into it. And he got before the Lord and he cried out and said.
With your help.
Oh God, I will be that.
Man.
There's nobody from nowhere with no talent, no our ability, seemingly nothing God raised up to speak and preach the gospel to over 100 million people without modern technology that we have today.
And when DL Moody came into contact with early brethren, God used him and the Keswick Conferences that time.
To spread the truth about prophecy and about the identification truths.
And who we are in Christ to the broader part of Christendom at the time amongst evangelicals.
On nobody from nowhere, with no talent, no ability was used of God in a mighty way.
That story of DL Moody has inspired me.
In my life.
Encourage me, others have too. But imagine what God could do with you if you were to knowing the full truth of Galatians 220.
Your identification with Christ, who you are in Christ, knowing something about a little bit of a gift that God may have implanted in you and you are to get before Him, knowing that without Him you can do nothing and to ask God to help you.
To participate in the ministry of reconciliation in whatever capacity it has for you. And you were to go forward and you were to then mold your secular job around that.
And see how that could further. We don't know how much time we have left.
Let's say the Lord does leave us here for a little while. He's going to allow persecution to hit the church in America if that's his plan to wake it up because it's fast asleep.
And the thing about being fast asleep and being deaf?
Laodicea doesn't know it, and sometimes that spirit of Laodicea can affect us and we can ask God in whatever measure we might be, depth, whatever measure we might be, blind, that he would open our eyes and open our ears so that we can see clearly. Then in the power of the Spirit of God, knowing the truth of who we are in Christ, we can step forward.
Counting on him when Scripture says we can come boldly before the throne of God because of that blood.
Yes, we intercede there, but we can come there and we can ask His help to go forward in His service and we can say, each one of us, I must be about my father's business because we have our father's business to be about, don't we?
00:35:21
John Darby wrote.
As the main springs and sources than of all ministry there are these two things.
The love produced in the heart by Grace.
The love which impels to activity.
And the sovereignty of God, who communicates gifts as seems good to him.
And which he has received for men.
And the sovereignty of God, who communicates gifts that seems good to him and calls to this or that service.
Can you say I must be about my father's business?
Do you know what that business is and your portion in it? That's a good question to ask before the Lord.
And you will, in pursuing that, have the thrill of your life.
When I was out at John Leben's camp.
This year been out three times.
One of my thrills there is watching a man who is living in the middle.
Of what he knows is God's will to serve God's people in that time and in that place.
Thrilled to the bottom of his soul to be dead tired every night, stressed to the Max in that service, but filled with joy and singing with joy. During that time Jonathan lost his voice for a while and brother Danny Weeks had to pick up the slack with the singing and the guitar playing. But one of the thrills of being there is just looking at this dear man who loves the Lord and loves the Saints who is just.
Running and feeling God's pleasure as he serves him. Will he be the first one to tell you how imperfectly he does that? But it's a thrill to watch that. And when you see that, we talk sometimes about these dear old ones. When I was three years old, my parents would tell you if they were still here when Albert Hayhold came to our little meeting and he preached the gospel.
Some of you have never seen that, but those who remember it.
Did not his face shine? I told my dad, I said when Moses came down from the mountain, his face shined. That's what must been like. You know why his face shine? Because his father's face was shining on him and he was reflecting it. He was in the joyment of his Savior, his relationship and what impelled him.
Is, Mr. Darby wrote. Was that love and the grace that he felt?
And when he used to do this and that smile shine as a three and four and five year old, I'm transfixed because I saw something real and I saw a man who believed what he was saying and I saw a man who was enthusiastic about what he was saying. He wasn't bored.
He loved preaching the gospel. He had found his Father's business to be about. My dear fellow believer, I trust and hope you have found.
The bit of the father's business you are to be about.