Planting Seeds of Faith for Kingdom Growth

Planting churches means that we take the best people that we have in our congregation and we send them away. Rather than holding on and using them in our congregation, allowing God to use their lives to multiply our congregation, we choose to have a multiplication of smaller churches around the world rather than a very few amount of bigger churches. [00:55:59] (29 seconds)


The thing about seeds is this. You can eat the seeds if you wanted to. You can eat the seeds if you wanted to. You can eat the seeds if you wanted to. If you have a bag full of seeds, seeds on their own have nutritional value. You could survive on seeds if you wanted to. If you have a bag of apple seeds, it's, you know, it's not that much, but you could swallow the seeds and you could get enough to survive. [00:57:29] (25 seconds)


And so the wise farmer must plant. But guess what? Planting is a lot harder than eating seeds. Planting requires investment of time and energy over generations. A tree does not grow in one season or in one year. A tree takes at least four to five years before it begins to bring forth a harvest. [00:58:25] (27 seconds)


We need people who are givers and not takers. We need people who are on the field, in the game, and not only spectators. Hello? So often the church falls into this unfortunate ratio like there is at a football game where you have 22 football players on the field at any given time, and they are the ones doing the difficult things and playing the plays, and then you have 10,000 fans who are eating hot dogs. [01:04:24] (32 seconds)


Every one of you have a gift, a skill that you can offer to the church. You have something in your hands, just like Moses. When God called Moses, He thought that he had nothing to offer. He looked at himself and said, Lord, what can I do? I'm a man of slow speech, slow of understanding. What am I going to do? I'm a has-been. I'm a washed-up, old Egyptian. [01:05:36] (26 seconds)


And the Bible says that as they prayed and as they fasted, that the Lord called them. Did you see that? Verse 2, while they were worshiping, and worshiping the Lord and fasting, it's the Holy Spirit who says, Can I ask you? First of all, before we continue, does the Holy Spirit have the right to redirect your life? [01:09:33] (28 seconds)


This is not about the will of where you want to live or where you want to go. This is about obedience to the Holy Spirit. And there are times when the Holy Spirit will say, set them apart so that they can do the work to which I have called them in our fellowship. We believe in church planting. We believe in the principle of sending the best that we have. [01:11:33] (31 seconds)


And if that happens, God is going to need a church to be in place in local communities where new believers are able to receive the revival that God pours out and be able to do the will of God. It's the Holy Spirit who separated Barnabas and Saul. Now think of everything. This is only the beginning of Saul's ministry. But if we focus in on Saul for a moment, just think about all the things that Saul went on to do. [01:12:47] (31 seconds)


I want to tell you, this is true in the story that we read in Acts. It's true in my life. It was as I surrendered my heart, as we, my wife and I, began to pray, and fast, and lay hold of God, and seek His direction, that we responded to the calls that were set before us. [01:14:47] (23 seconds)


I want to close with this idea that planting churches expands the kingdom of God. Our scripture says, You know, often when couples are planted, when we have our Thursday night and our Friday night church planting services, it is not uncommon to see tears. It's not uncommon for the couples that are going, as they're walking up to the stage to be announced, announced and prayed for, it's not uncommon that you'll see tears streaming down their face. Why? [01:21:49] (44 seconds)


Church planting ensures that the gospel continues to expand where Christ is not yet known. I believe that the Holy Spirit in these last days, the Holy Spirit still has a plan for the United States of America. God still wants to save Americans. You know, there are places where we do not have fellowship churches. We were just looking on the map yesterday, a couple of days ago. [01:23:17] (27 seconds)