Taking a Risk

SERMON: 2011-07-03--ac1163--taking-a-risk SOURCE DURATION: 00:44:30.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the speaker setting up the sermon topic (Sermon exposition). The recording ends during a sustained acoustic music interval (Music), which is authoritative evidence of music and dictates the boundary. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:41:41.420-00:44:29.660 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, we've been talking a little bit in recent weeks about what it looks like to speak the word of God boldly, and I've been pointing out that for our purposes speaking the word of God boldly has at least three components. Let me quickly review them with you. The first is to hold firm to our convictions despite the harm or loss that can come to us. That's, of course, the context here in Acts chapter 4. Peter and John have been dragged before the Sanhedrin. They have been forbidden to speak in the name of Jesus, and Peter's response is what? We must obey God rather than men. Then secondly, to speak boldly is to dismantle intellectual strongholds. We dismantle intellectual or mental arguments then that keep people from faith and obedience, and so far we've looked at two of those. We've looked at how science gets used by many people to nullify the teachings of scripture and produces doubts in many people's minds, and we've looked at the fact that Christians don't always live consistently to their faith, and many people use the excuse of hypocrisy to say that they don't need to submit to the claims of Jesus. Well, that brings us this morning then to a third aspect of speaking the word of God boldly, and that is the importance of being prepared to take a risk. That is to say to step out in obedience to the Lord and speak into situations when you have no guarantee of success, and you might in fact even run the risk of failure. To speak boldly is to be able to take a calculated risk in the name of the Lord. Now, as you know, there are many stories in the Bible that illustrate what risk taking by faith looks like, but there's one story particularly that I'm sure we're all familiar with. It's one of the parables of Jesus. It's the parable of the talents. The parable of the talents occurs in two places in the New Testament Gospels, once in Luke chapter 19 and once in Matthew chapter 25, and I want to take a moment with you and read through all of the verses of that story with you, and then just talk about it briefly this morning because it is a profound parable that really illustrates the importance of taking a risk and what happens when we let fear dominate our lives and self-interest as opposed to the truth of scripture. So let's read that together for a few moments. This is in the context of Jesus' teaching on the end of the age when he comes back again and he holds the whole world accountable, and Jesus says the coming of the kingdom of God will be like a man going on a journey who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also the one with the two talents gained two more, but the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master's money. After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. "Master," he said, "you entrusted me with five talents; see, I have gained five more." His master replied, "Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness." The man with the two talents also came, "Master," he said, "you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more." His master replied, "Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness." Then the man who had received the one talent came, "Master," he said, "I knew that you were a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you." His master replied, "You wicked lazy servant. You knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." What a story, really. Hardly Jesus, meek and mild, as we often think of him. But what's really the point of the parable? If you were in my place this morning and you were going to talk about this parable a little bit, what would you say? Well, there's a lot of elements there, of course. There's the whole idea of the master going on a journey. And we know from scripture that represents the Lord Jesus going back to heaven, waiting until he comes again. And then there is the fact that he hands out talents to his people. And we know that those are gifts, they're resources of time, talent, and treasure. And the fact that he gives one five and another two and another one represents the fact that he gives his gifts according to his own sovereign choice, according to the ability that we have to handle them. And of course the fact that at the end of his journey he comes back to hold an accounting, that is a representation of the day of judgment when all the nations will be gathered before Christ and each will give account of what they have done with the resources that he has given them. But that said, what's the main point of the story? What's Jesus really trying to drive home? Well, I believe the main point is this. On the day of judgment we're going to be judged by what we have done with the resources entrusted to us. And the question will be this. Have we been faithful stewards on Christ's behalf? Have we placed his interests as the number one priority of our lives? Or have we made our own comfort and security the primary goal that was driving us? What have we done with the resources entrusted to us? Have we been interested in the master's business or have we been primarily interested in our own business? See, and that is the difference between the man with the one talent and the man with the two talents or the man with the five talents. Think through this story with me just a little bit. Why does the guy with the one talent choose to bury his talent? Well, offhand I can think of at least three reasons. Number one, he's probably annoyed, annoyed because he's only got one talent. The other guy has two, the other guy has five. Isn't it true that very often in life you and I look at somebody who has got more than what we have and we become envious and we say to ourselves, why this person and why not me? Why is this person honored, respected, or given a position and why am I overlooked? One talented people particularly are prone to that. I like the way the 18th century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke put it many years ago. He said, "No one could make a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could only do a little." This man's annoyed because he only has one talent. But more than that, and the story makes this very clear, he's got some amazing resentment against his master. Listen again to verse 24, "Master," he says, "I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed." He's resentful of his master because instead of understanding that his master generously gives gifts so that his servants can enter into the joy of investing with the master, he has this kind of small mindset that says, "You're just taking advantage of me and I resent you because you're just using me so that you can make more money." It's a misrepresentation of the master's motives and the master's heart. That ties into still a third reason, and that is the fact that he's afraid of getting into trouble. "I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground." What you see here is what belongs to you. Why does he bury it? Because when you bury it, you don't run the risk of losing it. And if you don't run the risk of losing it, then the boss can't get mad at you because you lost his money. And I can imagine this guy went away from here patting himself on the back and saying to himself, "You know, you're a pretty smart dude. You played it cleverly because the master can possibly fault you because you haven't taken the risk of losing your investment." But did he ever miscalculate? Because you see, he didn't understand the master's heart. Because why is the master so furious with his servant when he comes back? And the answer is that in burying the talent, he had no interest in the master's well-being only in saving his own hide. Because if his motive was really to make sure his master didn't suffer any loss, what would he have done? He would have put the money in the bank and gained interest. Here's how Jesus said it, "Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it with interest." As it is, Jesus calls the man wicked and he calls the man lazy because the man is not interested in the master's business. He's only interested in covering his own hide. And there's a lesson here that I think we can sum up this way. The Lord Jesus would rather have us step out and take a risk and suffer potential loss than to play it safe, if playing it safe is primarily for our comfort and our security. Do I need to say it again? The Lord Jesus would rather have us take a risk in obedience to him because he knows our heart in looking after the business of his kingdom than for us to try to play it safe because we're afraid of getting into trouble and we have as our highest value our own desire to protect ourselves. I don't know about you, but I made up my mind many years ago when I gave my life to Jesus that the bottom line in my life could never be simply my safety and my security, but that the bottom line of my life would have to be surrender to Jesus and obedience to his will. And I trust this morning you share that passion because you see, the world is filled with churches where the primary goal and value is that of keeping themselves safe and secure. But when we become followers of the Lord Jesus and he sends us out into the world to carry out his mission, you sometimes get into trouble because the world is not very friendly to the grace of God and God's desire to bring people to salvation. So let's put this into practice now in terms of what this looks like with regard to speaking boldly. Let me backtrack for just a moment and point out how serious an issue this is from Jesus's point of view because notice how the parable ends with verse 30. "Throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Why is the servant worthless? Because he's only interested in his own well-being. He is not interested in the well-being of the master. Throw him out into the outer darkness, whereas the other two men, having invested themselves and taken the risk in the kingdom, received those incredible words, "Well done, good and faithful servants. You've been faithful over little. I will put you over much." I don't know about you, but come that final day of judgment, those are the words that I want to hear. Don't you? "Well done, good and faithful servants. You've been faithful over little. I will put you over much." At the end of the day, whose opinion matters? The opinion of Jesus Christ, who is Lord over all. All right, now let's put this then in the context of what it means to speak boldly because we're not all gifted to be evangelists. We're certainly not all called to be preachers, but we are all called upon to bear witness to Jesus as time and opportunity allow. In fact, the genius of the early church in Acts chapter 4 and later on is that all God's people carry on in ministry. Listen again to verse 31, our text, "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly." In fact, the book of Acts, as you read on in the book of Acts, makes it very clear that the mission of the church spreads not because of the apostles, but rather because of the lay people, because you'll recall later on persecution breaks out. And when persecution breaks out, the church is scattered all over the place. The apostles, they stay in Jerusalem. But the rest of the church, they spread all over speaking the word of God boldly. And the gospel goes to Judea and Samaria and ultimately to the uttermost ends of the earth. And you and I are here because historically somebody took the risk of stepping out of their comfort zone and taking the gospel to lands that had never heard the gospel before. So practically speaking, how do we do that? How do we step out of our comfort zone, take a risk, and speak the word of God boldly? A couple of examples just really quickly. Number one, we can identify with Jesus publicly. Jesus puts it this way, you will recall, in Matthew 10, 32 and 33, "Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven." And we do that not only when we make public profession of faith and we tell the whole world and all the spiritual principalities and powers that we belong to Jesus, but we all rub shoulders all the time with saints and sinners alike, don't we? And to identify publicly with Jesus is sometimes to say to my friends, "I can't do what you want me to do. I can't go where you want me to go because I belong to Christ." That's a difficult thing to do, particularly for a young person, and peer pressure matters a lot. It means that sometimes you say to your boss, "I respect you. I want to be a good employee, but I cannot do what you're asking me to do because it places me at odds with who Jesus is." If God's people would stand up when the opportunity presents itself, they would discover what it means to take a risk and what it means to speak out and to speak the word of God boldly. Another way is to engage in faith discussions with people. Now it's true of course that in today's culture and society, nobody wants religion stuffed down their throats as we often hear it said, but you know fact remains that we live in a world where people have many fundamental questions of life. Why am I here? Why is the world the way that it is? Why can't people get along with each other? What happens after I die? And if you and I are open to being led by the Holy Spirit and seize those moments and those opportunities, there are times and places that we can speak into a given situation and bear witness to Jesus. I love the way Peter puts it, 1 Peter 3, 15 and 16, "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." But then he adds this, "Do it with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander." How many of us can find ourselves in situations where there's an opportunity to engage in a faith discussion and people are hungry to hear about the hope that is in us? Well, not everybody is an evangelist, not everybody knows how to put it into words, but you know, almost anybody can do the next one and that is invite people to church or to a particular church activity. One of the reasons the Billy Graham Crusades historically have been so incredibly successful is because of a technique called Operation Andrew. You invite your friends, your neighbors, those whom you have been praying for and you invite them to an activity that is geared for them and you pray like crazy that maybe the Holy Spirit will use somebody else's speaking or somebody else's presentation to get through into fertile soul. And you know what I've discovered over the years, you could never predict ahead of time whose heart is ready to receive. We have so many preconceived notions about this person's not interested in the things of God, this person is and then we discover that the ways of God are much higher than our ways and all of a sudden you discover the person you were least likely to believe could meet up with Jesus as a place in their heart that is hungering for truth and when they come into the presence of truth, it registers deep at their core and you begin a life changing transformation. Never be afraid to take a risk and invite a family member or a friend or somebody that you know to an activity that you think that God can use to speak to them with. Then there is the ability to speak the truth in love, faithful are the wounds of a friend says the book of Proverbs and I love the way Hebrews puts it, Hebrews 3.13 encourage or exhort as another translation has it, one another daily as long it is called today so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Contrary to what many of us think we are our brother's keeper and while we live in a culture that prizes everybody's right to live the way they want to live, it is not an act of love to let somebody live in sin when you know come the day of judgment God is going to hold them accountable. A lot of people think love is just standing by and saying well you know I may not approve of your lifestyle, I may not approve of what you are doing but I am going to let it go because you are just going to get mad at me if I speak into your life. But can you imagine knowing that the road is washed out up here and cars are speeding along and you are just standing by the road and you are going to watch them go knowing they are going to go to their death and destruction in the wash out. Wouldn't you do everything that you can if you really believe that that road is washed out? Wouldn't you do everything that you can to stand there and flag the traffic to a stop? And if we do that over temporal death then how can we just stand by and watch the whole world go to hell without at least waving a flag and saying there is no way into eternal glory short of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Are you hearing me? This isn't just me saying this, this is Jesus saying this. Well one more quick example, initiate an evangelistic campaign. God continues to be a missionary God and throughout history the church struggles with two opposing forces. The one force is to gather in itself and to protect itself from the world. And there's a lot of people who are happy just doing that, don't let me get polluted by what's out there. The other is to fulfill the great commission and get yourself dirty with the nations of the world. And so throughout the course of history God by His Holy Spirit when the Spirit is poured out on the church there is always a reawakening with a mission effort. And because society is constantly changing and people's needs are different what worked yesterday may not work today. Billy Graham's organization no longer calls their missions crusades, you know why? Because it has bad press because of the emphasis on crusades against the Islam people many hundreds of years ago. So now they talk about mission and celebration and they've changed their language. And so God is always at work raising up new wineskins to contain new wine. And the question is then are you and I open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit says hey here is a new and a better way in order to reach the world and our present society. Now we saw a little bit of that with mission 33. You've heard the story how mission 33 started with Wendy Anderson who felt the Lord speaking to her in response to a need and then she went to the different churches and shared the vision and the vision caught fire and the result was that on Easter Sunday morning all around this city churches experienced an influx of people who had been reached with the gospel. And I asked Wendy this past week what were the results of this and she said that the latest reports are that there were 57 requests from this area for the 7 days with Jesus booklet. There were 550 visits to the website and there were 29 people who indicated they had prayed the sinner's prayer. If only half of those sinner's prayers were to stick that's still more than a dozen people whose lives will be changed eternally for the kingdom of God. Now understand that each of these things that I'm talking about involves taking a risk. When you stand up and identify yourself publicly with Jesus whether at work or at school or in your family you run the risk of being written off as a holy roller and you might lose your friends that's a risk you take. And if you try to engage somebody in a faith discussion they may well walk away from you, refuse to be in your sphere of influence because you've made them feel uncomfortable. And if you invite somebody to church they may turn you down or worse yet they may come and then tell you they didn't like it at all. Now you're really embarrassed and you're mad at the preacher and everybody else who led the service. Don't tell me that never happens to you. You ever notice how sensitive you are about the environment when you've invited somebody to church with you? I've learned to relax about that by the way because God knows who are His and if people's hearts are open to God He'll get them coming or going because He knows how to reach His own. It's not our job, it's His job. We just cast out the net and He will do the work. And if you confront a brother or a sister chances are they'll turn against you, become angry with you, throw stones at you because you stirred up their sin and they know that you know and so now it's all about you. And if you launch a campaign sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But you see without taking a risk you'll never know. And God is more pleased with people who take risks even if they fail than at people who say, "Well, I can't possibly do this because I only have one talent and my one talent really doesn't matter." It's not going to cut it on the day of judgment. He's going to say, "What have you done with the opportunities that I've given you?" Now just to draw this to a close and to put some flesh on these bones, I've asked two of our staff this morning to share with you some of their insight into initiatives the Lord has led them into. First person is John Roper. Ask him to come up and talk a little bit about what transpired with the John Elefante concert that weekend of Easter. Backtrack to last fall we had a glimpse of heaven event here. Some of you might have attended that with the BCM churches and it was actually a pretty good event. And some of us who were involved in that event got together afterwards and were talking. And I wouldn't say we were lamenting but we were just recognizing that this event that we had run was really for the church. And that was a good thing. It wasn't a bad thing. It wasn't like we had intended to reach out and didn't get to anybody. But we also recognized that what we were doing was really in the church, by the church, for the church and started to ask each other what kind of things could we do to really reach a predominantly non-church population. And so we started dreaming and brainstorming a little bit and talking amongst each other. And at the same time, Wendy had already started this process for Mission 33 and she shared her story the one night about the fact that just a small prayer that she prayed, not expecting a whole lot to happen and how things unfold. And you think that that one small prayer that she did ended up unfolding in a city-wide campaign with like 17 churches and 29 organizations or something, I don't know what it was anymore. And you hear the result of that there. And to me, that kind of landed in my heart. And then New Year's had come and we were sort of pondering, looking back and looking ahead and I thought, "Lord, I don't want to sit still and do nothing while the world is waiting for You." And so I finally decided, you know, I'm just going to send out an email and we had talked about a couple of individuals and one of them was John Elefante, who I had happened to like as a much younger man. And I sent him an email a second week of January and didn't get anything back and then I sent another email back and right away the next day I come and there's an email in my inbox. "Hey, it's John. Yeah, I'd be happy to talk with you sometime, this sounds good." So I thought, "Oh, okay." But nothing happened. So I sent another email and said, "Hey, you sent this email back saying you'd like to talk. Do you really mean that or was that just being polite?" And right away I get back an email with a phone number, "Here, call me such and such a time." So pick up the phone, call him, we ended up talking for an hour about some of the ideas and things that we'd thought about and when the hour was done, he said to me, "Can I call you back? I have to drive my daughter to a basketball game and I got to do this and this, but I said, "I don't want to stop where we are, is it okay if I call you next week?" And I thought, "I guess that's okay." So he called me back and we kept this discussion going and originally we were thinking about maybe something at Waterfront Festival or downtown or something, but then this Mission 33 was unfolding and got the brain child to say, "What if we put that together with that service and use that as an opportunity to invite people to something that they would never otherwise come to?" So then we took that to senior staff and then we went to council and talked about somehow that might look and they were very responsive to the idea and we decided to go for it. And in the end, I don't know what the long-term effects will be, but all I know is I was able to invite somebody to that event who hadn't been to church for 30 years and they came and brought their son and his girlfriend or whatever along and when they left, they picked up four CDs when they left here and I thought to myself, "There it is." They have just picked up four sort of gospel messages in a CD format that they're going to now go home and put in their CD player over and over again and hear the words of Christ in a different package than they might otherwise hear. As we sort of reflected on it, we just all had a sense that this isn't really the one-off or the last of. This is really just the beginning of maybe more opportunities that are like this to reach out to a community that otherwise wouldn't come to normal invitation. So that was my experience and just all along, our thought was, "Lord, if you open the doors, we're going to walk through." And if you close the doors, that's okay. If there's something where we're not supposed to go, that's okay, but if you open the doors, we want to walk through. Yeah, and that's ended up with John coming here on Easter weekend and we still have an ongoing relationship. So we're not sure where that's going to end up, but that's my story. Thank you. Thank you, John, asking Juliet to come up and she's going to talk a little bit about her web blog. Good morning. For as long as I can remember, I have loved to write. When I was a little girl, I would write on any scrap piece of paper I could find. I wrote on hunks of birch tree that I would peel, much to the sorrow of the tree. But a number of years ago, after a period of probably about 18 years of not writing a single thing, just because my own hurt and my own pain and places where the things I had been writing were used against me, it just was too costly. And so when the Lord started mending my heart and bringing me back to life in places, I really just sensed that writing was coming again. And it started with a lot of poetry, which was also sad, but also just really reflected the things that God was doing in my life. And in 2004, I started writing again, and that's the time when I started writing In Spite of All the Damage, which was the book that I later published. Initially, it was published online, and there were a lot of complications with that, and it was really scary for a while. And just that fear that I'm putting words out on paper and everybody can take them and judge them and know me in places, and all that kind of stuff freaked me completely out. So for a couple years after that, I hid. And even though I'd written the book in 2004, I didn't publish it till 2006. Especially because I was absolutely terrified that people would see something of me. I often have felt in community, pretty much everywhere, and some of that was my own stuff, and some of that was coming from community, that just wasn't safe, and that it was better for me just to kind of hold everybody away. But writing was really letting people in. And so when I wrote In Spite of All the Damage, I didn't really know what to do after that. I just wanted to go back home and hide. So years passed, and I had been keeping a blog online where I kept in contact with some of my friends around the world, and mostly in the States. And most of them were not Christian, and I enjoyed just writing sort of what God was doing in my life, little by little, and allowing them room to see something of my Christian faith without being churchy or because they were so far away, without bringing them into our midst. And then a number of months ago, Valerie and I were talking one day, we were talking about the Serena Woods stuff, and she said to me, "You know, your writing's really good." And she really challenged me and said, "You know what, like if God has given you a gift, you need to use that. You know, this is not a time in community where I feel like I want to be exposed any more than I already am." And yet, it really struck with me. So I said, "Okay, well, I will do this then. I'll build a website and I will sell my books," which is something I've also held back. I spent a lot of my life with sort of this thing being echoed to me, like, "Who do you think you are?" You know, and so when you're out there saying, "Hey, buy my book," you're saying, "Hey, look at me," not my thing. And so I did. I set up a blog and I thought, "Okay, well, the first thing I will do then is you want to look at me? Look at me." So I made this blog post. You can go check it out. And it just said, "Okay, these are my scarlet letters. If you are looking to find the dirt on my life, then here you go." And so I just listed out a gazillion things. You can go check it out and then explained, "You know what, this is what Jesus did with all my stuff." And the response to that was overwhelming. There were some not good responses and I expected that, but on the other hand, there was just a tremendous response from a lot of my non-Christian friends, but also from a lot of people that I knew who were Christians who said, "You know what, that's my story." And that gave me a little more courage. So I wrote some more and I wrote some more. And over the passage of time, it occurred to me as the Lord sort of spoke into that place in my own life, this is what I said, "I was not created to sell out. I was not created to live up to anyone's measuring stick, but the one that Jesus sets before me. I was not created to stuff myself into a box so other people can feel comfortable. I was not created to reveal my heart's deepest secrets like a child giving bullies lunch money. I was not created to be sized up or deemed disposable. I was not created to be measured like cattle or compared in size or weight or height to anyone. I was created to live as me. Jesus died so that I could live." And so suddenly it dawned on me, I could hide and I could write little things in little notebooks and hide and just have nothing or I could take the chance that there are other people who feel like me, who need Jesus like I do, who maybe will never hear hope if I don't put it out there. Then one day I got this little letter back from Apple. You get this report and it scared the daylights out of me because on average about 5,000 people read what I put up every day. So then I didn't write anything for about three weeks, but it astounded me. My website is regularly accessed from Canada, the USA, France, India, Australia, Iceland, Netherlands, Thailand, Uruguay, Spain and just a number of countries and that just overwhelmed me because to me that's taking a chance at saying, "Okay God, I won't bury it and I will trust that you'll keep my heart safe even if the things I put out there are incredibly intimate to my heart, incredibly intimate about my relationship with Jesus, my relationship with my family, the world that I live in and I would trust that in that God would keep me alive and safe and thus far he has." Thank you. Let me end with this. What resource, what gift, what talent has the Lord given you? And where do you feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit? And where is he inviting you to step out and take a risk? You can sit around forever waiting for it to feel safe and to feel right, but it will never happen. It's as you step out in faith, risk failure, experience failure, because you know the advantage of failure is that it is as important to learn what doesn't work as what does work. Do you know how many planes crashed before the first one flew? Or how many helicopters crashed before they got the first one off the ground? Anybody who has accomplished anything in the world almost always has gone through failure, but learned from their failures and received grace from God to step out again and the world has never been the same. So I end with this. Where is the Holy Spirit nudging you? And where he is nudging you, are you willing to step out and take a risk? [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:41:41.420; remove through 00:44:30.000] Raise up an army, O God. Awake your people throughout your world. Raise up an army, O God. Proclaim your kingdom, today you will learn to be your own army, O God. Our hope, our art, our vision, you see in every land, your chosen people coming forth. Fulfilling your holy mission, we lie in as we stand, pledging our lives unto you, Lord. Raise up an army, O God. Awake your people throughout your world. Raise up an army, O God. Proclaim your kingdom, today you will learn to be your own army, O God. O God, our glorious major, we marvel at your brilliance, that you would use our Savior's plan. Rejoicing at your favor, delighting in your brilliance, we'll gladly follow your command. Raise up an army, O God. Awake your people throughout your world. Raise up an army, O God. Proclaim your kingdom, today you will learn to be your own army, O God. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:44:30.000; resume after this marked segment]