Intro:
- For the past few weeks Jack and I have been preparing the study guides for our next Sunday Night Bible Study.
- The book we are using for the study seeks to describe the lives of missionaries with one key Scripture.
- After preparing several of these study guides I am amazed at how great each of these missionaries lives impacted the world for Christ.
- In the midst of great persecution and trials these missionaries did not relent.
- The faith of these Christian missionaries seems unbelievable and heroic.
- That faith propelled them into dangerous and difficult missionary assignments.
- But in each one of the studies that we have prepared, the missionaries we studied would not have looked at themselves and seen heroic efforts.
- For instance listen to a quote by Jim Elliot.
- If you were not aware Jim Elliot is the missionary that the movie The End of the Spear depicts.
- He went to Ecuador and tried to reach the Huaorani Indians and was martyred by them in the 1958.
- He says in his journal, “Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God.”
Hook:
- If Jim Elliot’s faith was ordinary either I do not know the definition of ordinary or my faith is paltry in comparison.
- How about you? How dangerous is your faith?
- Could you say that you were thinking of souls as you were being prepared for surgery like one of our members was this week when I visited her?
- As a church, where is the next Poland partnership or church that we feel led of God to support?
- What ministries do you sense God leading you to participate in, and perhaps give your time and talents to start?
- As our world and country become more hostile to Christianity, how long will you identify yourself openly as a believer.
- This morning we will examine three exercises can begin to develop a more dangerous faith.
