I had the opportunity to speak to our staff and their spouses on Tuesday night. In my preparation I asked God to guide me to what He wanted me to share. As soon as I prayed, immediately I heard God say, "I'm doing a new thing." I felt led to Isaiah 42:1-17. As I read it I felt led that God is going before us to prepare the way for His vision to be accomplished in us. It was a great word of encouragement and I was glad to hear it and share it.
It is easy to think that the new thing is the work in Gardner but I think it goes beyond that. I think it is a new work that has to start in our hearts. It is a Philippians 2 kind of work that puts God's mission and others needs above our own wants and needs. It is a work that leads us to value multiplication over our own desires. It is a work that leads us to apprenticing, to reproduction, to giving ourselves away to help people find their way back to God.
In the talk I shared a memory from 1995 when we were at Olathe East. We were a congregation of about 350 adults and we had to raise $330,000 in cash for the down payment on a loan of $2.5M to build our first facility. We were coming off two years of flat growth and after ten years in the school I felt like positive momentum was slipping away. I remember pitching the challenge to a group of about 250 in the lunchroom and I had plenty of questions about whether the grade of the hill was too steep. They stepped up big time and we raised the money, found a loan and got the first phase built. As soon as we did we hit a growth spurt that lasted for the next seven years. The faith of a few opened the door for thousands.
I shared an old fable as a part of my talk. The story is told that a young and arrogant man went before the sage of a town with a question. The sage was blind but more than compensated with great wisdom. The young man wanted to prove the sage wrong so he brought a young bird with him and asked the sage if the bird was alive or dead. The sage thought for a long time because he knew that if he said the bird was alive the young man would crush the bird in hs hand. If the sage said the bird was dead then the young man would open his hand and release the bird. Finally he said, "the life of the bird is in your hands."
I put these two stories together to remind us that the future of the vision God is giving us in our hands. We can give it life or we can crush it. We are living at a very strategic time. Any new thing starts out kind of fragile and vulnerable. If you can crush it in the early days before it gets strong you can kill it and I think that's what our enemy wants. But we can give it life by opening our hands and letting the vision get wings. The vision of reaching 5,000 and launching multiple reproducing campuses will bear fruit and gain strength if we give it life and exercise faith in these days. In the future thousands will thank God like I'm remembering and thanking God for that small group in '95.
This is a great time and place to be available to God.
I heard good reports of people who got it that God is the Owner and we are the stewards of His resources. When is the last time you heard positive comments about a message that included tithing? Here is the message if you'd like to read the electronic version. Click here 








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