[0:00] Well, good morning. Absolutely a wonderful privilege for me to be with you this morning. I want to thank Pastor Wayne and for his total openness.
[0:12] I did throw a surprise at him right now, I think. When I came into your church, I had this necktie in my briefcase wondering, do they wear ties here or don't they wear ties?
[0:24] And I looked around. Pastor wasn't wearing one, Pastor Wayne. And I said, well, that fixes it for me. But another gentleman, where is he? I'd like to see him. Came in. There he is, standing.
[0:35] Look around. Look at him, okay? Give him a hand. I said to him, I'm the only one wearing it.
[0:46] I said, I have one in my briefcase. But I said, your pastor wasn't wearing one. So I said, you know, I don't need it. You need to set an example. So thank you for helping me out with this.
[0:57] I need to tell you a story, Pastor. I'm going to go in about a pastor whom you know quite well, I think. Pastor Peter Fair from the Countryside Church in Lacrete. We were sitting in the front row here, waiting for the preliminaries to be done with.
[1:12] And he was cleaning his glasses with his tie. And when I got up there, his folks said, I just discovered something amazing. I've always wondered why people wear this, because what's the use?
[1:25] There's no point to it, is there? You agree, don't you? I said, I just found out why. It's for cleaning your tie, your glasses. And I got Peter.
[1:35] I said, you're a good teacher, Pastor Peter. I said, keep it up. Anyway, it's so good to be with such a happy crowd. And I want to compliment our Sunday school teacher for bringing out the word. I thought you touched on some controversial issues for Mennonites.
[1:50] It kind of got into this thing. But I was so proud of all your people, because the ladies and the men were willing to speak up. And I thought that was one of the greatest Sunday school classes I've been in for a long time.
[2:01] And I want to thank you for not moving away from the facts. And you faced them dead on. Thank you very much. That inspired me very much. There's a lot of things I'd like to say that are not really directly related.
[2:14] But how do you get to know a church if you don't talk about things? I'd like you to learn to know my wife, Susan. Susan, would you please stand up? Now, on the surface, Susan's very quiet, very subdued, very gentle, and very submissive.
[2:33] We're only married for four years, so I don't know everything about her yet. It's still coming, you know. We both lost our spouse some years ago. And Susan and my wife, Anne, were stepsisters.
[2:45] So we had this, the four of us used to get together. So when our spouses passed away after some time, I thought it was time to go and connect with Susan to see how she was doing. But I didn't know that God had different plans.
[2:57] And amazing plans and wonderful plans. And things happened fairly quickly. And we were married. And so one day, we were on our way to Winkler, Manitoba, to do exactly what we were doing here.
[3:11] And Susan said, I'll take a lunch with us so we don't have to eat in restaurants all the time. Because it's a long trip to Winkler from Calgary. Well, we came to a little campsite just as we got into Saskatchewan.
[3:24] We stopped in and had a picnic. And Susan opened up the lunch thing, and she had all kind of nice things in there, some of which were boiled eggs. So I had my first boiled egg, and it was very nice.
[3:39] I said, I think I'll have a second one. When I cracked the other one, I found out it really cracked. It was actually raw. And I had yolk in my hand.
[3:50] And she said, the yolk's on you. She hasn't, to this day, confessed that it wasn't deliberate, intentional. And you will never get it out of her.
[4:03] So she has a little mischief in her, too. And she loves it. And I do love this about her. And she's been just an incredible, wonderful spouse. I just, I'm so thankful.
[4:14] God has, I always say God has blessed me twice. That doesn't happen to everyone. But this is just, and I want to thank her for being part of this. She fit into this work immediately and jumped in and helped with the sponsorship in the back.
[4:28] And I just wanted to say to you that God was just working in her heart and getting her all excited about coming here to see this church. So she's become the partner that God wanted me to have, and we're very thankful.
[4:41] So I want to just go a little bit into the sponsorship. Some details that I think will help you later on if you decide to come and visit us at the table there. But the sponsorship program, if you don't know much about childcare, if you know about Compassion Canada, it's very, very similar.
[5:00] In fact, it's almost identical to Compassion. We do the same thing, and we also have the same goals. Every child that is sponsored is brought to faith in Jesus Christ as at least given the opportunity to come to Jesus.
[5:17] They're given schools, given fresh water, food, clothing, uniforms for a school, and of course a church and an opportunity to develop into a Christian person.
[5:30] We feel very strongly about sponsorship. The reason we feel that way is because a child is given an opportunity at a young age. We feel that way because these sponsors are found in the worst places, in the gutters where very often they don't even have parents.
[5:49] And their life has changed. Now, when you see the little pictures in the back, you'll say, well, that child doesn't look too bad. It looks nicely dressed. Yes, we dress them up before we sponsor them.
[6:01] We give them dignity even before they come to know you as a sponsor. Another reason we're very passionate, especially at this time in history, about sponsorship, because poverty is so rampant in many of these countries.
[6:19] We're in about nine different countries. Poverty is so rampant that sometimes these families have, couples have large families, 78, nine children, and they can't feed them all.
[6:32] And someone will come along and say, look, we'll buy one of your children from you, and they will actually sell a child so they can feed the rest of the children. These children are sold into the most despicable places of pedophilia and horrible things that are done to these children.
[6:53] And I'd like to remind you that some of the children that will be sponsored here might have been a child sold if they had not been sponsored. So the church is really the only place we can go to to find a Christian influence.
[7:09] We can go into the world, we can advertise on TV for sponsorship, but we will get non-Christians sponsoring children. We want these children to know Jesus.
[7:20] That's a passion that we have as a mission, and it's a desire that we have that every child who is sponsored would learn to know Jesus as Savior and grow into faith.
[7:30] And, you know, the truth is many, many of these children have gone through the sponsorship program, have finished high school, gone to college, gone into different vocations like medical vocations, nurses, doctors, sometimes lawyers, preachers, missionaries.
[7:47] They do everything we do, and God has a call on individual lives just like He does with us. And that's exciting. We've seen some amazing, wonderful things happen as a result of sponsorship, and these people who see the need of changing their own country.
[8:04] And so we have this little slogan, changing one child at a time. There's an old saying that I always liked. You know, Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
[8:20] Sometimes going into all the world means staying right here. And some of us like that. I would have loved that when the Lord called me to go to Africa. It took me a little bit of a problem to make that decision.
[8:32] But you know what? When you sponsor a child, I want you to understand that you are doing missionary work. Absolute raw missionary work. If you were to go into some of the places we've been to and seen the children, and a mother coming, I remember a mother came to my wife one day, and she said, my little girl came home the other day, and she says, I asked Jesus into my heart, what does that mean?
[8:57] Her mother didn't know what that meant. She came to us and said, what does it mean? And, of course, we were able to explain the gospel. And this is a duplicating situation where parents are coming to know Jesus Christ through the lives of their little children who come from the project and say, Mommy, Mommy, I know about Jesus.
[9:15] And you were responsible for that amazing decision as a sponsor. So I want to just, you see, I'm quite bold about this because it's not about me.
[9:26] It's about the children. And so we have a lot of scenarios. There's a lot of children in this church, I noticed, a lot of teenagers here. Not a lot of grandparents.
[9:37] I see the only one that I really am convinced is a grandpa. But it's so nice to see such an amazing group of people. I mean, your church is full. You're only a few years old, right?
[9:47] God bless you. So, Mom and Dad, if you want to help your child grow up to care about others, many parents that we come across, even in the last few weeks, they have taken their children to the table and said, look, I'm going to sponsor this child for you.
[10:04] And you can write the letters and so on. And kids are getting excited about learning to know another child in another country. They can communicate with them. And you know what? It feeds into their spiritual walk with God.
[10:16] So there's many ways of doing this. Sometimes we come across businessmen who say to us, you know, I have my fridge full of pictures of sponsored kids, but I'll give you a donation.
[10:27] So we do that as well. There's different ways of helping us out. But Susan and I are passionate about the sponsorship. So everything we get, whether it be in cash or in checks or in sponsorship, is for a focus on sponsoring a child.
[10:42] So that's what we do. And we want to thank you for bringing us in. And we want to encourage you, if it speaks to you, perhaps, about being involved. We'd like to invite you to come to the table.
[10:52] Susan is going to be there, and I'll try to be there with her. And maybe I'll even appoint one of your very capable young people to help us out there. I didn't think of it sooner, but Pastor Wayne, maybe you could help us out with that later.
[11:04] Thank you so much. So we want to get into God's Word now and talk about something that I think is quite unique, quite important, and quite practical. It's a story tucked away in Mark chapter 14.
[11:19] I'm going to read that passage for you. Before we do, would you bow with me in prayer? Gracious Lord, I thank you for this amazingly lively group of your children who have met here to worship.
[11:32] We pray that this word for them may be something that all of us can benefit from, be inspired by, and challenged by, and spoken by, but through the Holy Spirit.
[11:44] And we pray that your name will be lifted up. Lord, we would step aside and let the Holy Spirit move in, do his work for the glory of God.
[11:56] We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Now we'll read from Mark chapter 14, beginning in the third verse, talking about Jesus here, and being in Bethany in the home of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment, of spickenard, very precious, and she broke the box and poured it on his head.
[12:22] And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor.
[12:39] And they murmured against her. And Jesus said, Let her alone. Why trouble you her? For she has wrought a good work on me.
[12:50] For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you will, you may do them good. But me you have not always. She has done what she could.
[13:02] She came aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say unto you, Wherever this gospel shall be preached throughout the world, this also that she has done shall come up as a memorial to her.
[13:23] I always chuckle at the disciples' behavior at times. When Jesus was trying to teach one of the most amazing lessons, it seemed that they were able to stand in the way and try and change his mind.
[13:39] Even to the point when Jesus said, I'm going to die on the cross, and Peter starts rebuking him, the Son of God, God himself, in the form of flesh, telling them, announcing them, I'm going to go and I'm going to die for you.
[13:54] And Peter had that gall to say, Never, I won't let this happen to you. You don't tell God what to do. It doesn't work, does it? I remember when my first wife and I were engaged to be married, I was in my last year of Bible school, and we had one of the driest chapel speakers one day, and he talked about going to Europe to help with a rebuilding program for refugees.
[14:19] And I kind of ignored it, but for the next two weeks I lived in agony because I was trying to tell God that for him to ask me to go there was a mistake. Well, I found out very quickly it's not how good it is.
[14:30] We are his servants. We are his people who have committed to serve. Jesus made that point right throughout the Scriptures, especially to the disciples.
[14:43] He taught them time and again that your job is not to tell me what to do. I'm God. And, you know, Peter tried that, and here again we have this just amazing scenario.
[14:54] As this woman pours this ointment on Jesus' head, they show some very strong contempt. I think sometimes this lady, Mary Magdalene, also shows us that we don't have to be conventional.
[15:16] I see her act of kindness as a bit of an unconventional act of compassion that most people would have said, well, that's a little over the top, no pun intended. In this amazing story, we have a woman sacrificing an expensive jar of perfume.
[15:35] In fact, another story, Matthew, I believe it is, says it was worth a year's wage. That's a lot of money put in it. So this woman, Mary, we just have to say, wow.
[15:54] So she went far beyond the minimal accepted level of commitment to Jesus and went and poured a whole year's wage on top of his head as an act of worship, as an act of admiration, as an act of great appreciation for who and what God had done for her.
[16:15] What made her so passionate? What made Mary Magdalene so... It seems to me in the stories I read in the Gospel that you find her almost everywhere where Jesus was. There was Mary Magdalene.
[16:26] She always showed up in amazing circumstances. She loved her Savior and found a tangible way of expressing her love for him.
[16:40] What made her this way? Well, you know, there's a verse in the Bible that says, whom much is given, much is required. And who has received much has greater appreciation for it.
[16:52] She did receive a lot. Jesus cast demons out of her. She cleaned up her messy, immoral life. And gave her hope and excitement and a purpose.
[17:04] And it was found in her relationship to Jesus. So she was going to show this to him, but anybody thought she just did what she could. I want to discuss with you the reaction of Jesus' disciples, first of all.
[17:18] Then I want to talk about Jesus' reaction to the disciples. The disciples have an amazing attitude here.
[17:28] It caused them to show, first of all, that we have disapproval. And then we also read that they were indignant.
[17:42] Marx says that they gave her a harsh rebuke. Now, I think we have a real problem here. And our first reaction would be, well, in the culture of the day, that's how people behaved, right?
[17:57] That's men were men and women were only women. That's really what was going on here. And Jesus is about to teach a lesson that he tried to teach them on other occasions that's extremely important.
[18:14] And so here we have the disciples strongly disapproving of what she did, and they gave her this harsh rebuke. The prejudice against women was part of their culture.
[18:33] The question I have for you, who introduced this type of attitude towards the opposite sex? What caused the disciples to believe that they were entitled to rebuke a woman who showed an act of kindness to her Savior?
[18:49] What made them think that she was wrong? How did they weigh this? I think at the very top of the list here is the fact that they already had an attitude towards this lady.
[19:00] They were preconditioned to criticize anyone that didn't follow their line of thinking. Oh, we could say this was Jewish culture.
[19:15] It was. We can't deny that. But again, I ask, who created this culture? I'd like to go back and say maybe it started way back at the fall and it just continued to grow, and it was a terrible thing to be a woman in those days.
[19:32] You were just made to serve and to obey. Jesus didn't, or God didn't make us like that. He made us equal. He made us partners.
[19:43] Paul says we are heirs together in the grace of life. Is there a protocol? Is there an order? Yes, there is.
[19:55] But that does not endued inistic attitudes. It does not show prejudice. In fact, the opposite is true. Paul teaches us, Jesus teaches us, to love our wives as Jesus loved the church.
[20:10] Now, you go to the cross and figure it out. You cannot fight what God says in His Word. And so these men were totally on the wrong side of Jesus' teaching.
[20:26] It seems to me that Jesus was constantly raising the bar of equity between the disciples and especially women. The bar of tolerance towards the women.
[20:39] And, of course, we also have another area here that we talk about quite freebly is the area of their attitude toward children. We know that in Matthew chapter 18 and 19, we have several stories where children were brought to Jesus.
[20:56] And in each case, the disciples were there jumping in and saying, send them away. I know that in, some of you may come out of the old colony church.
[21:06] I did. And I remember when my parents had company, the living room was always the warmest room in the house. And once in a while, I'd sneak in and stand beside that little poker stove and warm myself.
[21:19] And I remember one occasion, I remember one, there were many. When my father saw me, they had company, they were visiting. And he gave me one look, and he turned his eyes to the door.
[21:32] I will guide thee with mine eye. I think there's a verse in the Bible about that, isn't there? But anyway, I knew what he meant. And it was a very, very top-down family relationship.
[21:44] That was accepted. That was the culture of the situation I grew up in. Nowadays, after I discovered the value of children, I just, I jumped for kids.
[21:56] We're in a motel here in Grand Prairie, and we met a lot of kids. We had more fun, Susan and I, with his children, because they're so special. I love kids.
[22:07] Even when they scream. Mothers, don't feel bad if your child screams. It's okay. We're okay with that. We can handle that. My goodness, they're going to grow up, and they're going to have to have their battles to face, too. So let's just love them the way they are.
[22:18] So Jesus says, it's not right what you do. Don't send them away. Mary Magdalene, don't be so hard on her.
[22:30] Let's look at her from another angle. So he says, no, I'll tell you what I think. Quite different. How did Jesus respond to this woman's good deed?
[22:42] First of all, to the disciples, he says, why are you bothering this woman? He rebukes them. Then he says, she has done a beautiful thing to me.
[22:55] What was this beautiful thing? She honored him. And what she did, perhaps even beyond her own knowledge, Jesus explained that her act was, it was historical.
[23:07] And he says, wherever this story is told in the future, her story will be told. Well, we're doing that right here this morning, aren't we? Then about her deed, what did he say about what she did?
[23:20] Well, he says, her deed of pouring this ointment was actually preparatory for my burial when I'm crucified. The disciples had not even yet comprehended the fact as many times as he told them that he was going to be crucified.
[23:35] They were still fighting back and resisting all the things that Jesus told them. It goes on. Jesus goes on. He says, her deed will be told throughout history. And then he made that classic statement that I want to highlight as the thing that I like to apply to us here this morning.
[23:52] And it's in a form of a question, but also in a form of a statement. Jesus said, she has done what she could. I ask myself when I read this passage, how does that describe me?
[24:17] We used to sing a song as a duet, my wife Anne and I. By and by, when I look on his face, beautiful face, torn, shadowed face.
[24:29] By and by, when I look on his face, I wish I had given him more. I feel that's going to happen. Why was I not more passionate about the things that God called me to do?
[24:44] And so she said, Jesus said of her, she has done what she could. Obviously, she did it. So why is it in Scripture, my question, that when significant things happen, we don't find leadership people at the top of those good deeds very often?
[25:04] I want to talk about a few people in the Bible that give us examples of this.
[25:16] There's a story in the book of Kings, 2 Kings 5, if you want to follow it, of a young girl, an Israelite girl who was taken captive by the Syrians in one of their wars into Israel.
[25:34] And she was taken captive back into Syria, and she served her mistress, who was the wife of Naaman, the great army general. And one day she overhears a little story among the family.
[25:49] They say, our great general, Naaman, has leprosy. He's going to die. The little girl hears this story, and she's a very amazing believer.
[26:05] I loved her. Oh, she says, there is a prophet in Israel who does miracles, who can heal him. And this is coming from a little girl.
[26:16] A little girl who had become a captive. My thought is, if I were in her shoes, I'd have been bitter. I'm away from mommy. That's a horrible thing for, I don't know how old she was, she's a little girl.
[26:29] For a little girl to face being taken away from her parents. And living in a land where he couldn't even speak their language. She was so, so captive. My thought is that she must have been a very lonesome, sad girl.
[26:45] But it doesn't appear that way, does it? She's, hey, she says, there's hope. I love people who speak of hope. I love people who are never down, who always see the cup half full.
[27:01] It's really hard to hang out with people that are always negative, isn't it? I don't like it. Let's choose good friends, and let's make the bad friends better. We can do that, too. And so here is this amazing story of a little girl who said, there is hope.
[27:17] I want Naaman to be healed. And long story short, she sends him out. He goes out there with his entourage and big thing. And long story short, Naaman comes back healed.
[27:33] That's not all. You know what he said? From now on, I am going to serve the God of Israel. Now you tell me who occasioned the conversion of Naaman.
[27:47] Who? A little girl. I hope you don't mind me giving you a story of my little daughter.
[27:58] It just touched me. I remind her of it now. She's a mother of two girls. But when she was a little girl, before she went to school, we were in grassy plains, British Columbia.
[28:10] We built a new house there. And just before we were ready to paint it, the whole thing burnt to the ground. We had a faulty seltzer chimney that had allowed the flames to pop through, you know, and we lost the house.
[28:23] I was cleaning up the ashes, and an atheist friend came by. He was a German fellow, very tall man, very intelligent man.
[28:33] And he came by, and he said, I want to help you with your new building. And I said, what? I hadn't seen any Christians come around yet, but here was Gary. And I said, what's your arrangement?
[28:47] There's only one arrangement. He says, I want to help you build a new house. He didn't want any money. He wanted nothing. And I was so amazed. And we were cleaning up the ashes. And come lunchtime, I said, Gary, I think Ann will have a sandwich for us.
[28:58] Let's go down and see. So he came with me. We sat down to eat. And Bonnie, our daughter, outside him, and I said, Bonnie, I says, would you like to give thanks? And so she said, you know, thank you, Jesus, for this food.
[29:11] And I pray for all those that don't have Jesus in their heart. And they're, whoa, whoa. And here's Gary, my atheist friend. Or would I have had the guts to do what she did?
[29:22] Do you think? No, you know I wouldn't. It's not how we operate. We're too wise and too careful and too cautious. A little child doesn't care. That's why I love these kids so much.
[29:34] They can tell me things that you wouldn't dare tell me. And sometimes I need to be told those things. It's okay. I learn so much from children. I marvel.
[29:45] Sometimes they bug me. And sometimes they're bratty. But it's all good. It's all good. They're growing up, right? They're in the process of something. And so here's this little Bonnie, she says.
[29:57] And Gary looked at her, and he says, whoa. What do you know about church, I said to him. He said, what I know about church in Germany is that you walked into a building, was stashed full of guns.
[30:12] And they had a prayer that said, dedicate these guns to the enemies. That's what I know about church. Well, I said, you need to know about someone else. You need to know about Jesus, that Jesus Bonnie was talking about.
[30:25] You know, it took two years. It took two years. Gary came to know Jesus. And he was a marvelous convert. He had no fear of anyone.
[30:35] And it took a little girl. I remind Bonnie now, even to this day, when we're teasing each other, she's a wonderful daughter. She loves Susan, by the way.
[30:46] Her and Susan get along really well. And I says, look, you know, it was all your fault that Gary came to know the Lord. Yeah, I said, I'm really excited about that. But, you know, he has carried on his faith in a wonderful way.
[30:58] You know, there are other people in the Bible that really touch our hearts. You look at King David, for example. He was a young guy. He was despised by his brothers. They were giving him a hard time whenever he came to bring them goodies from home in their army work.
[31:13] And yet, David was God's chosen. When Samuel went through all the list of the boys he had, he said, in the end, he says, Isn't there yet another son?
[31:25] There is another son, a young kid who doesn't know what he's doing, according to his brother. And God chose him to save the nation of Israel. They were at their wits' end. And Goliath was standing and ready to plunder the whole Israeli army.
[31:41] And one young lad, hardly a teenager, knew how to use a sling. But more than that, he knew that this came from God. And he told this man, God will get you.
[31:52] And he did. If you look at the prophet Samuel, he was a little boy in the tabernacle serving his master, Eli, the judge in those days.
[32:07] And he got a message from God as a little boy. Now, why did God choose a little boy to go and talk to Eli? Because maybe most adults wouldn't listen. And he changed the nation.
[32:21] So, there's many other examples. We have these people in the Bible who stand out as heroes. But the question I would have asked them, ask you and ask them is, what was the defining character in the lives of these people?
[32:41] And Mary Magdalene and David and the little girl from Israel in Syria and Samuel. What was it in their hearts that made them who they were?
[32:54] I want to give you an example of what could have been the case if they hadn't obeyed God. If you look at Mark chapter 6, you have the feeding of the 5,000.
[33:10] And it took Jesus a little work to break through the lack of faith, but they did it. They fed these 5,000. A few days later, he feeds 4,000.
[33:21] And after the feeding of the 4,000, they have now had two examples of tremendous miracles that Jesus performed. They were in the boat with Jesus. And these guys were whispering among themselves.
[33:33] And Jesus said, what are you talking about? Well, they said, we've forgotten to bring bread. Good heavens. I mean, they had just witnessed Jesus feeding 5,000 with a few loaves.
[33:44] And then again, 4,000 with a few loaves. And they were worried about not having brought bread. Who did they think Jesus was after all this? And you know what he said to them? Here's the point that I want to make.
[33:57] Have heart yet hardened? The issue is hardness of heart. And God has had to rebuke me so many times about hardness of heart. I remember a song that one of my students sang in the Christian school.
[34:12] Don't let your heart be hardened. Don't let your love grow cold. This morning, we heard a little bit about sanctification.
[34:23] I could hardly stand not getting up, but it was your Sunday school. But I wanted to say, if you have, God says, a broken and a contrite spirit, broken and contrite heart, I will not despise.
[34:40] In Isaiah, he says, to this man will I look, to him that is of a broken spirit and trembles at my word. I believe that these people had a tender consciousness about who God was.
[34:52] They reached his heart. And that's why they were able to perform the way they did. Mary Magdalene caught that. She caught that in such a way. And now Jesus, I don't know of whom he could say a better compliment than what he said about her.
[35:06] She has done what she could. So the question this morning down here is this. Have I done what I could? By and by, when I look on his face, I wish I had given him more.
[35:22] We're all going to go to heaven as God's children. We were saved. We're born again. But there is a passage of scripture that says we will answer to God for our works.
[35:35] It's not about our sins. The sins are covered. But did I do my best for Jesus? And I have to tell you, folks, that I wouldn't want to brag about my performance.
[35:46] But I sure wish I would give him more. And that's why I'm still doing this. I just want, maybe I'm trying to catch up. I don't know. But I sure love doing what we're doing. And God is so good. And I wanted to share with you that when you help us, partner with us, to take on a child or several children, whatever God asks you to do, that you will be blessed.
[36:10] But more than that, you're going to change the life of some very needy children in the world. And that's why we're here this morning. It's not about Susan and me. We're glad to do it.
[36:20] We love doing it. But it's for the children. And thank you again, Pastor Wayne and Pastor Peter. We appreciate your having us.
[36:31] And I expected to come to Grand Prairie and meet a couple of dozen people. I didn't know anything about your church. But this is amazing. So God bless you all. And we're going to be praying for you.
[36:43] And please pray for us that God will make us a blessing and have the tender heart that Mary Magdalene had and to be able to listen to and hear when the Holy Spirit touches our hearts about any given issue.
[36:58] And that will give us the credibility of having a brokenness and contrite spirit that God will not despise. So thank you again. We're going to have that second video.
[37:09] But before we have it, I'd like to pray with you. Okay. Father, it is just so amazing, powerful to see such a large audience in a young church as this.
[37:22] And I just pray for every individual, whether it be a boy or a girl, a little child, even a little child that cries. Lord bless them. I pray for Mommy and Daddy.
[37:32] As they raise these lovely kids, what a challenge. And I pray that you would encourage them and give them all the patience they need to raise their families for the glory of God.
[37:44] Lord bless all the children in this church richly and encourage. And we thank you for the pastors, for the leadership. Thank you for what they've done here, for obviously demonstrating here the audience we have as to how they have served this church and blessed it.
[37:59] And we commit everyone into your hand, guide them, protect them, and encourage them. In Jesus' name we pray. We pray in Jesus' name that all people here, and should there be someone here who has never yet invited Jesus into their heart, Lord, could this be a great day for someone who still hasn't made that decision?
[38:23] We pray that you will help them to be humble and willing to say, Lord, I need Jesus. Let them come to the pastors or to some leader in the church and just make that decision today that they may be able to go from here knowing that their life is in the hands of Jesus.
[38:40] So Lord, we thank you again and commit the day to you. Amen. Amen.