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[ Silence ] >> This is Mission Scope. Home mission features for July, August, and September 1979. This quarter features highlights of the home missions portion

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of the Bowl Mission Thrust Rally at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. You will hear testimonies from Scott Appleton and Cherry Chang, and special music from Russell Newport. You will also hear a stirring mission sermon from Dr. William G. Tanner,

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Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Home Mission Board, and the prayer of dedication for Mission Service Corps volunteers by Ms. Carolyn Weatherford, Executive Director of the Woman's Missionary Union. I'd like to introduce those who will be helping us tonight in the Home Mission Board section of this service

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in the order that they'll be presenting their testimonies both in word and song. Scott Appleton, who is seated on the platform, is an all-American football player. He was at the University of Texas and he returns tonight to the Astrodome where he played, as many of you know, with the Houston Astros in professional football.

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He serves as a Mission Service Corps volunteer, serving with the Home Mission Board in San Antonio, Texas. Scott Appleton will be speaking in just a moment. Cherry Chang, who will also bring a testimony,

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is a native of Suzhou, China. She's a graduate of the University of Shanghai and serves under appointment as a missionary associate with the Home Mission Board,

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and she serves in Los Angeles, California. Just before we bring the report message, Mr. Russell Newport, layman from Springfield, Illinois, will bring our special music.

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So we'll hear from Scott Appleton, Terry Chang and Mr. Russell Newport. - In 1963, I was the number one football player on the number one team in the United States.

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We'd won the national championship and everyone was applauding me and cheering me and worshiping me. I was on top of the world and I was 22 years old.

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The six years of professional football that followed were a materialistic bonanza. fortune, fame, females, but my problems begin immediately about who I was supposed to be and who I really was. I'm just an old country boy from Brady, Texas

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and I was supposed to be some kind of hero and I didn't know how to act like that so it quickly got to the situation where I was drinking heavily in just about every situation. And this continued till 1969 when I devised a plan to get out of football. I was going to make a million dollars in the stock market and

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would have, but the market crashed and lost all my money plus a lot of banks money and lost a job in professional football and a couple of months later family so lost everything in the course of just a few months and I didn't know how to handle this so for six years I drank whiskey I developed an

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overwhelming inferiority complex and the applause and the support of the fans tell me how great I was all these years was gone. By 1975 after several unsuccessful attempts to stop drinking I went to a doctor over in in Eden, Texas, a medical doctor named Dr. Richard Hall.

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And I said, "Help, please." The first thing he said when I told him my problem was, "Do you have a minister?" And he got in touch with Dr. Jimmy Allen in San Antonio,

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and Dr. Allen and I started meeting and studying the Bible. And we talked about a flash of light that I thought I'd been expecting all my life. And he said, "Forget about that.

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"In your case, it probably won't go like that." So we continued in this process, and I was studying and praying a lot, and the picture of Jesus started coming through

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clearer and clearer to me. In this process, I was set free, totally set free from alcohol. Jesus said in John 15, 16,

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"You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you "and ordained you that you should go and bring forth fruit." That's why I'm here at this moment. I wouldn't choose this,

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not in front of all these people, no way. But, and that's the reason I'm in the Mission Service Corps. I'm with the Fourth Street Inn at the First Baptist Church in San Antonio,

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the street ministries, and we're trying to get the word to these people on the street that God will meet them at their level, whatever that is. And I never dreamed just even a few months ago that my skill as a restaurant manager could be used by God.

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But God has a purpose for everyone's life, and everyone here tonight has some gift or talent that can be used of God to help us get this message to the world, and I'm living proof that this is true. And that is when doctors fail, when psychiatrists fail, when all other efforts of men fail,

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Jesus Christ can come into your life and bring hope and peace and salvation. [applause] >> Greetings and gratitude to each Southern Baptist here. love and a commitment for the great commission that is before us to engage

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ourselves in the bold mission thrust. In California, the largest state in the Union, we have more than 51% of the population are ethnics. They are here with diversified purposes and status. Some are just visitors, others are on a two-year program as visiting scholars. Still others are just research and visiting, and then also

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others are immigrants. They are here in different in their education, language, culture, and sociological standings, but their physical and the mental needs are different also. However, their spiritual need for the gospel of Christ is same. Today, may I share with you, it is worthwhile to do missions among these people.

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A well-established businessman in Los Angeles became Christian only three years ago. He has been so enthusiastically working in the church, the life has been changed. A Vietnamese Baptist pastor started a Baptist church in Florida, now in California as a computer technologist, helping to start youth organizations, also teach and preach in our

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Vietnamese Baptist church. If we want to start Korean work, we can start one congregation each week. However, you Southern Baptist mission spirit is catching. We have people are studying very hard to work, start missions, establish churches, and they

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are also willing to go out as mission volunteers. burdens are, the need to provide more ethnical theological education workers. May the Lord bless us that we may come to the realization of a bold mission for us, that everyone may run to Christ.

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[MUSIC] ♪ Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ♪ ♪ Never have I heard a name ♪ ♪ That thrills my soul like a vine ♪

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♪ Jesus ♪ ♪ Jesus ♪ ♪ Jesus ♪ ♪ Oh, what wondrous grace ♪

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♪ That links his lovely name with mine ♪ ♪ I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus ♪ ♪ Since I found that he, my friend, was so strong and true ♪ I would tell you how he changed my life completely.

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He did something that no other friend could do. No one ever cared for me like Jesus. ♪ There's no other friend so kind as he ♪ ♪ No one else could take the sin and darkness from me ♪

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♪ Oh, how much he cared for me ♪ ♪ For me ♪ ♪ It will be worth it all ♪ ♪ When we see Jesus ♪

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♪ Life's trials will seem so small ♪ ♪ When we see Christ ♪ ♪ One glimpse ♪ ♪ Of His dear face ♪

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♪ All sorrows will erase ♪ ♪ So bravely run the race ♪ ♪ Till we see Christ ♪ (audience applauding)

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- Jesus said, "I must work the works of him that sent me "while it is day, for the night is coming, but it will be quite impossible for a man to work. I'd like to speak to you for a little while this evening,

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and I know I'll be on time, because they have a lot of safeguards built in this evening. They look pretty tough, too. Get out your Gideon Bible

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that you've taken out of the hotel room. Turn with us, if you will, and follow along as we think about Mark 1, verses 36 through 38, and John 9, 3.

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I'd like to talk to you for a little while this evening on the subject, "Hurry Before Sundown." That seems reasonable in the light of our scripture. I must work the works of him that sent me.

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Lost planet Earth, some people still on it, man overboard in the sea of space and the man is every man. Lost the faith of our fathers in a bottomless pit of suspicion and skepticism. Lost late last night, I'm afraid, up the megaton streets of science, somewhere near the mushrooming

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mountain of nuclear power. in the killing pace of progress, the runaway race for status. Lost carried out to the sea by a flood tide of pleasure, deluged by the jaws of secularism. Lost last seen somewhere east of Eden, a man whose name is Adam.

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Lost his God, his garden, and his way. Mark's gospel speaks to the lostness and the urgency of our hour. I think his gospel might well be called the gospel of the holy hurry. It's full of words such as straightway, immediately, and driven.

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And I think in many ways it is a commentary, not only on our convention theme, but the age in which you and I are living. I work the works, he said of him, that sent me while it is day for no man, for the night comes when no man can work.

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You know, Jesus was also under the compulsion of the holy hurry. If you had read a few minutes ago Mark 1, you know that Simon said to him, "Master, there are many people." They'd been searching for him for quite some time.

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"Master," Simon said to him, "there are many people that want to talk to you." Jesus sadly replied, "There's no time, Simon. We need to move on to the next town." You know, with Jesus, it was always the next village.

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God lost, under-evangelized, that beckoned him on in his mission impossible. And the nemesis that hovered over him like a dark cloud was indeed the fact of a shadow of death that followed him all the days of the life, and I think it constantly reminded him

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that time was running out. And I'm wondering this evening if this imperative of immediacy concerning world evangelization could be the one missing ingredient

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in bold mission thrust. We have the right objectives. We have the right resources with 34, 35,000 churches, 13 million members, and I believe tonight

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a denominational unity second to none on the face of the earth. But has there been and is there now that sense of urgency about our mission to America and the world? How can we claim urgency when it takes 35 of us to bring

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one person to Christ in discipleship? When almost half of our membership is either non-existent or non-resident? When we've lived so long with sliding statistics in our organization that we never bother to even make excuses? When we give more money to lending institutions in the interest on all of

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our church properties than we do to all mission causes. Are we really like our Lord in the nowness of our commitment? Isn't it true that he was eager, we are reluctant? He was zealous, we're apathetic.

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He was enthusiastic, so many times we're unresponsive. He filled his days with endless toil and nights with sleepless prayer. We fill our days chasing financial security and our evenings, I suppose, with love, boat, and animal house and Saturday night live.

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You know, the moment of history is ours. We stand at a pivotal point between two decades of history. This is a day, I think, for Southern Baptists to exhibit in our sacrifice and in our servicehood

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and in our commitment the exciting, reconciling awareness that Jesus Christ really lives. Let me suggest three words tonight. And according to Southwestern Seminary,

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having those three points makes it homiletical. The first word is urgency. That relates to people. The second word is emergency.

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That relates to the time factor. And the third word, fervency, relates, I believe, to our response. The urgency I'm talking about is not geography, or nations,

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or counties, or cities, or even self-survival. The urgency is people. In the first chapter of Mark, the mission to evangelize our world, strangely enough,

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was begun by opening a peripatetic clinic for the sick and the suffering. The Son of God demonstrated urgency and taught compassion, not by lecturing from a platform,

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but by establishing a walk-in emergency room among the people. He showed them the ulcerated sores of leprosy and taught them how to touch a leper.

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He let them see the writhing body and glazed eyes of an epileptic and showed them how to quiet in comfort. He gently raised the arms, the useless limbs

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of a paralytic and showed them how to touch the man. This, he said, is the world and this is what's wrong with our world. It's hurting tonight.

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But these, he said, are only the outward symptoms unto the sickness unto death that we will heal in man. The sickness, he said, I cannot show you. It's the worst sickness of all.

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Fear it more than any other disease. The diseases I have shown you can kill the body. But the master went on to say, but the root of sickness and alienation is unbelief

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because it can throw, it can toss both body and soul into hell. And immediately, Mark says, they launched their mission of world evangelization.

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I can imagine the master saying on an occasion like this, "Let's hurry, let's hurry before sundown." You know, we've tamed him. We've domesticated him.

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We can live with him in fairly comfortable disobedience. Seems to me sometimes we keep him shut up safely in the church when he was always free in the streets. We've kept him shielded from commerce when he was ever in the markets with men.

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We've sought to keep him wrapped in a grave napkin when all he ever wanted was to get into a man's spiritual bloodstream. We've limited him to dealing with sin only when he preferred to start with darkness and demons

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and let sin die as he passed by. We provided him with a round of religious philosophies, but all he ever wanted was someone to trust him. We've ensconced him safely in the niches of churches

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and compartments where he's worshipped, but he still prefers boats and houses and street corners and mountainsides and Solomon's Pool. We forced him to peer through the slatted windows

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into the tiny compartments of our lives, never bothering to open the door, when tonight, as you and I well know, he would roam the whole dwelling of our existence. He literally must be loose in our lives if he's to be loose in our world. Have we felt and responded to the

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urgency of the people of our communities in this land and our nation and our world? Modern man lives in a world of machines, money, and media. And at least in Atlanta, Georgia, he's insulated from the earth by his basements, from all sorts of immediate experiences through a buying of services and a

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religion of privacy. He's not dependent on the weather or his neighbor or even his faith. He doesn't wonder about his destiny, he manufactures it. But at the same time, he questions the validity and the worthwhileness of his setup. Something seems to be missing. Life is irrevocably corporate, it's mechanized,

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It's swift and noisy. It's headed wildly into outer space. Instant food, the ghetto, the commuter kite, gas rationing, credit cards.

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But you see, the thing is that we sometimes miss. God is at home in this variegated montage also. I wonder tonight if we can feel the mind-blowing, gut-twisting, heart-rending urgency for the people of our land.

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We think of our mission in terms of programs and money under evangelized counties and unchurched cities. But I suggest again tonight that the real urgency is in terms of persons.

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Urgency written in the blue-black bruises on the body of a battered child in Phoenix. Urgency fleshed out in the painted face of a teenage prostitute,

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cruising near Tenth and Peachtree in Atlanta. Urgency distilled in the killing loneliness of an aged couple in Miami, waiting for letters that never arrive

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and calls that are never completed. Urgency vocalized in the screams and pleadings of a drug addict in Chicago, without enough bread for another fix.

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Urgency incarnate in a young black man in Oakland who searched for a job, ended in frustration and he stands before the proprietor of a convenience store with a loaded gun in his hand.

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Urgency etched in the face of a young mother in Dallas, alone with three small children, no light, no heat, no water, no food. The man who promised her heaven

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led her into hell is long gone. Suddenly before my inward open vision, millions of faces crowded up to view. sad eyes that said for us there is no provision.

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Give us your Savior too. Give us, they cry, your cup of consolation that never to our outstretched hands is pressed. We long to know your Savior and oh, we die.

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We die so fast. The second word is emergency. And it refers to time. The church is not only driven to evangelize every person,

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but I believe personally that the church is driven to contend to the end of time. The compulsion under which the church completes its mission is to reach the ends of the earth, that means all people,

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and to extend itself to the end of time, that means we're to be in business until the Lord returns. The present age is to be characterized as the era of missions in which

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every believer is implicated. And here is the emergency of the unfinished task. By the decree of God, it is the missionary preaching of the gospel that is to fill and span the interval

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between the cross and the resurrection on one side and the return of our Lord on the other. And we can't cop out on that. For nearly 2,000 years,

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we've known the good news of salvation, yet enjoying it for ourselves, we've failed in so many respects to propagate it. I think the one thing that all professed Christians

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are called to do is to share the good news. That's what we're talking about tonight, to be on mission for Christ, to accept Christ as a personal savior.

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And my judgment is to enlist under a missionary banner, whether, as Scott Appleton said, it leads across the street or across our world. Seeing is for the purpose of telling.

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And if our experience with Jesus Christ is not of sufficient importance to recommend it to someone else, then I suggest tonight the whole structure

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of the kingdom of God is in jeopardy. As Roy MacLean stated so clearly, sitting until morning, waiting for the campfire to burn itself out, may be too late.

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You know, Jesus knew there were some things that could not wait. Everything he did was characterized by a consciousness of immediate sin.

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regardless of what you think about last things, the fact remains, man's going is imminent. Whether Christ comes tomorrow or whenever, and that meeting in judgment

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is the most certain rendezvous of time. An urgency about a world's preparation ought to be the consuming interest of every believer on the face of the earth.

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When bold mission thrust becomes personal, it will become purposeful. I think a qualifying epitaph for any decadent religion, Dr. Cawthon, would include the fact that that people stubbornly refused to missionize their faith.

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Summing up the history of Christianity from any vantage point, the answer of its amazing spread consists of the fact that the invitation at the open tomb, "Come and see," was always followed without exception by the missionary imperative, "Go and tell." Missions is not man's scheme for influencing a world.

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This is God's plan for redeeming the world. And whatever time you may ascertain it to be tonight, my friends of the convention, this is no time, and our friends listening and looking in around our nation, this is no time for us to bail out.

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We have our work to do to make persons of this world to be fit in a kingdom that is already on its way. Last summer, Ellen and I spent two weeks in Soviet Russia. Among other things, I learned that the Communist Party maintains an extremely rigid discipline

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on the lives of its party members. And when our Baptist pastor guide explained that there were only 13 million Communist Party members out of a population of 260 million, the thought struck me. This is the same figure that I had been hearing frequently in connection with our denomination

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a long about 18 months ago. We passed the 13 million mark amidst a great orgy of self-congratulation. You know, I spent a good bit of that time in the rest of that trip pondering what 13 million party members in Russia had brought about in our world in comparison to the present

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generation of Southern Baptists with their 13 million believers. And you know, a searching, almost devastating question keeps ricocheting through my mind that can it be possible one day we'll stand before Him who has the print of nails in His hands and confess to our eternal shame that we lost the battle of our age not because

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we were outnumbered, but simply because we were outcommitted. The last word of our theme is the word "fervency." That means working up a sweat. That's what I'm doing now, by the way.

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And it relates to our response. Paul defined it as "blazing enthusiasm." That's what it's going to take to win our land and our world, blazing enthusiasm. What then is our response before the frontiers of our land?

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only two emotions are viable, a willingness to risk and a willingness to cry. You know, it seems so often that we get captured in the positions of comfort and security. We are surrounded by a world of frailty, and yet we whisper our message and act surprised that nobody's touched.

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From the safety of our cushioned pews, our conditional commitment that says maybe, maybe not. Even from behind our stained glass mask, we shout into the fury of the storm and we're puzzle that so few people ever understand.

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Our land will never be won to Christ if all we ever evidence to missionize our nation is a spectator mentality. We've got to get involved. A long time ago, before the inland China mission was overrun by communists, there was an old

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man brought in who was blind. He had been blind for 50 years, a half a century. They determined after a few examinations he was suffering from cataract in both eyes. They examined, operated, and with the aid of the corrective surgery and the lenses,

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the old man regained most of his sight and for the first time in 50 years he could see. But he not only became seeing physically, he became seeing spiritually, a believer born again in Christ. And then one day the old man was gone and they wondered about it, but they forgot about

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him. He just vanished. And then the old man came back. And those who saw him tell it this way.

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The day the old man returned, he had a piece of rope slung over his shoulder, about two inches in diameter and 125 feet in length. And holding on to the rope, stumbling along behind him were nearly 50 blind old men. As they put together his story, the old man had gone back to his own province in inland

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China. He'd gathered up every other blind old man he could find who would listen to him. He had put their hands to his rope. He had become their eyes and He brought them back to the place

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where He had found sight. My friends, it's time. It's time to find those who are blind in sin. It's time to hold the rope.

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It's time to become their eyes. It's time to bring them where we found the place of spiritual sight through Jesus Christ. I must work the works, He said, of Him who sent me while it is day,

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for the night is coming when no man can work. God help us to hurry before sundown. - Our dear heavenly Father, we love you with the love that you first gave us.

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We thank you that your love expressed itself in giving thy son as our savior. And we praise your name and thank you that you have sent us around the world

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to carry the good news that Jesus saves. We pray this night, Father, for these who have been called of you to go to another place, to cross a barrier with the good news,

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and we thank you for each person who also has said, Lord, I will send this person by praying, by giving money, and I pray that during this service tonight that each person here will come to the point of commitment

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where we will either say, "Lord, I will go," or "I will send somebody." And just now we want to commit ourselves to you for the work that you've called us to do.

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And again, we pledge ourselves to do all that we can to give every person in the world the opportunity to hear the gospel. Bless these in a special way who are your appointed and anointed.

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Give them wisdom to make decisions in times of pressure. Give them the knowledge and the understanding to let every ministry opportunity be also a witnessing opportunity. We thank you, our Father, for filling us with Thy power and enabling us to do Thy work.

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In Jesus' name, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]