CP & Evangelism - Session 6 - Strategic Planning Tips

well welcome back to outreach methodologies as you remember from the previous session I stopped right in the middle of giving you some strategic planning tips and we're going to pick up there and share some more with you before we get into Communications now one of the important strategic planning tips is to penetrate existing networks go to where people are and connect with them there H here's what I mean by that and I'm hopefully going to get the illustration to work well for you uh but imagine you've got a new church represented by this circle here

and this new church comes into a community where there's already other things going on in the community maybe there's a PTA a parent teacher Association or maybe there's a chamber of commerce or there's a boys and girls club or there's little league there's all these different communities things going on in the community and those are represented by the other circles now those circles are all in are intertwined but what we try to do a lot of times is we go into that community and we try to draw people out of those groups to our church

and the community actually ends up resenting us when we do that because what they see is that we came to a place where people were giving and serving and we take them into our church and take their resources and their time and they never see see or hear from them again well that's not the way it should be instead what we want to do is as a new church we want to go into the community and we want to find somebody in that community that will connect with us we open the door to us and

remember we talked about lydian the person of peace that person that knows people that will introduce us to others and we start to know more and more people well through that process we end up knowing somebody who's in another group and we get to engage with that group and we start to connect with that group and it expands and through that maybe the next group and the next group till eventually what happens is we've taken this church and it's become an integral part of the community we want to penetrate the networks and communities that are

within our larger Community another thing that we want to do as a strategic planning tip is we want to look at our church as a lost person would how do you do that ask a lost person have somebody to say hey could you be a secret shopper could you come to my church and tell me what your experiences like don't tell anybody you're my next door neighbor but could you come and just kind of engage just don't try to do anything or trip them up but just go there and let me know how do people

do it greeting you and and what's your impression of the place and how do you feel about what we're doing and did you understand what was going on and and so if you would do that then I'll you know I'll take you to lunch and and I'd love to hear what you have to say about our church uh so understand how the Lost perceive who you are as a Church of Jesus Christ another thing you want to do is create a culture of serving and sharing you want it to become normal now I talked about

common cause groups before uh in the church that and the church planer first introduced me to that is one of your professors that's Timothy Moore and when he first introduced that idea to our church plants his church Church which serves so much in the community it grew from a handful of people and it grew to about 70 people in his church and at that point when they were only running 70 people which is a good siiz church for a new church start they were having over 100 points of serving in the community every single month

and if you were to ask somebody hey tell me about the church people would go oh that's that church that helps people what a great image to have because you're serving and you're telling people why you're serving you're sharing the gospel and people's lives get changed through that kind of thing another thing that we need to think about when we're doing strategic planning is budget time and money to do it when I was a young Church planner I remember I was in seminary at the time and a guy who was in seminary at an established

church he said you know Gary if I if I had the kind of money you did to spend on Outreach I could do all that cool stuff you're doing but I just don't and I said to him I won't say his name but I said to him I said your Church's budget is four times as big as my budget we just have different priorities now I wasn't trying to be mean I knew he had a building to pay for and staff and all that stuff he didn't have any money for outreach because it was so

busy spending the money on other things in order to create that opportunity if you're a new church plant do it from the beginning if you're an existing Church figure out what you can do without so that you can do what you're really there for which is to share the gospel another strategic planning tip concentration is better than shotgun if you only have so much to do and communication to the community you'll have so much funds to to put the word out there or you can only do so many events uh it's better to put them

closer together to build on one another to build an image in the community over a concentrated period of time than to spread them out and go well we're going to do once one a quarter if you only can do three or four events and a year and three or four Outreach engagements probably put three of them or more right there together so that one can build on the next and on the next and so on um another thing to think about when you're doing it is multiple touches multiple modes so don't do communication and don't

tell people all in just one way don't go we put everything into Google AdWords which by the way can be a really good tool um and we'll talk more about that but but don't put put it all there don't put all your eggs in that one basket so to speak spread them out and so that everywhere they go they are being impressed and touched by your church both in what you're doing and in how you're spreading the word another tip is don't ever stop thinking like a church planner whether you are one or not once

your church goes yep we've arrived we don't really need to do that stuff anymore that's when you can plateau and start to decline another strategic tip use Mission groups um I won't tell you the long stories because of time but uh we were when I was a church planner we were really one of the first ones to use Mission groups on purpose use them consistency consistently I can't even talk to it consistently and use them for a variety of events and what that allowed us to do was have them do the things like flipping burgers

and busting tables and stuff and they still got to share the gospel and sing and do some things but it allowed us more time to engage with people and that Le to the next part which is don't let the mission groups do the event without you a lot of times a mission team will go well we're self- contained you guys don't need to do anything we're just going to come in and do it the problem with that is they build relationships with your community and you don't they build they get Facebook friends that they'll be

friends with for life but that doesn't really help your church engage the community if you're not involved so what that means is when you have a mission group coming to do a backyard Bible club or day camp or Sports Camp or clean the park or whatever you need to take vacation just like they did to come you need to take vacation and do it with them and you need to make sure that you have visible opportunities for your people in that they tell a Bible story they lead a craft or a game don't just have

your people in the background watching the mission group do everything the mission group needs to know ahead of time that they need to incorporate your people so that your people can connect with the community another idea is to partner with another local church so it's very similar to the mission group idea but you go help at their events and they come help at yours and another idea is similar only in reverse to the mission trip take your church on mission trips uh what'll happen is they'll be like hey we can do this at home I

discovered this when I was a young youth Minister I mean I was like the ripe old age of 19 barely out of high school myself going to college and uh I I took some youth leaders and we did a mission trip to Creston and Salo British Columbia and I saw young people who really were all into their own stuff their own world I saw them come out of their shell they LED worship they did uh day camps and vacation bible schools they cleaned in church they did all sorts of service stuff and it got them

really excited on the trip home on the bus they were talking about all the ways they could do it when they got home uh of their own accord when we got home home they adopted nursing homes teenagers adopting nursing homes saying these a lot of these people uh their kids or grandkids are too far away they don't come see them or maybe they don't have any what if we're their grandkids and we just go hang out with them and we sing for them and we we visit with them we listen to them and we have

a meal with them and so they just started doing on their own because I took them on a mission trip to serve somewhere else um strategic plan planning tip the next one is always promote your next event at your current event now it may sound like events are the only thing that matter that's not what I'm saying but you need to understand that you reach a lost person the way they will be reached not the way you think they need to be reached uh I have stories I could tell you but I will tell you

there are some people that all they did was come to our events sometimes for years and we get a little bit of the Gospel in to the point where they got radically saved and on fire for Jesus um I mentioned barbecue first that's the idea of start with the party I just remind you of that as an overall planning tip and then another one you may think I need to do it right now but allow seasons for catching your breath what I mean by that is take a pause and celebrate if your church planner is

anything like me uh he will wear is people out doing the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and we need to celebrate what God has done we need to celebrate to let people know we appreciate all they sacrificed and all they've done now it's important that um we don't celebrate the moment and event is over and here's why I'm going to tell you the next thing we want to plan for and ass and Implement assimilation and discipleship plan for and Implement assimilation and discipleship here's what I mean by that um you

don't want to move up to have this big launch of your church happen and then I go okay we made it and everybody just goes great I'm taking a break well now's the important part to engage with people in relationships if you haven't properly prepared people they they're all worn out they thought that was the Finish Line the big event is actually the starting line the important part is the next 24 to 48 hours and the following week when you're going out and having a coke with somebody or going to lunch or maybe you work

at the same place and you catch up on a break or you have them over for dinner whatever they're willing to do to do you need to be ready to implement that opportunity to build a relationship so that they can be invited into your groups invited into your worship they are assimilated or they made a part of your church and then discipleship goes on in the plan of reverse engineering we want to look out there as starting multiple churches and work back from that in order to start multiple churches we need to raise up Church

planners in order to raise up Church planners we need to develop leaders in order to develop leaders we need need to make disciples in order to make disciples we need to take those that we're connecting with and assimilate them or bring them into the church which means we need to go engage with them so we work backwards in our plan to plant and give ourselves some mile poost that we want to engage with and that's one of the things you need to be doing is developing some mile poost uh for all these things we've been

talking about so as part of all that you want to track results you want to compare where you are this year to to the same time last year you want to see what certain Outreach events in the community did in terms not only of making good impressions in the community but did they result in people becoming a part of your church all those things are important and another thing I want to warn you about or encourage you about is be aware of Community Regional National and even International calendars I have a good friend who is

my pastor that it seemed every year he would always schedule a business meeting on what was the first Sunday in February now the first Sunday in February in the evening it moved a little bit later but used to be when the Super Bowl was now it's like a week later and so he would always have to cancel the meeting because he realized he scheduled a meeting on top of the Super Bowl and nobody including himself was going to come to a business meeting when the Super Bowl was on so we need to know what kind

of things are happening that are important in the community so we're not conflicting with them and sometimes we need it as an alternative like there was one community that has one of the largest state fairs in the nation and but it's super expensive and all the local kids would want to go and the parents are like we can't afford to take you to that so they would put on their own block party at the same time as the fair and they'd have like couple of thousand people come to this event and they were so grateful

that the church would put this on as something they could have their kids be excited about instead of being disappointed they couldn't afford the fair and they were able to afford it because they got all sorts of local businesses to sponsor the different uh bounce houses and games and snacks and hot dogs and all that kind of stuff and they'd put up signs thanking those businesses around the things they had sponsored and other ways they would thank them which then engaged the business Community as well as served the greater public so those are some ideas

uh one of the things that we want to focus on as well is getting using all those things to not only build a build a core group and build some small groups but eventually many of our church plants want to launch they want to start a new church and so I want to talk to you about what that might look like so I'll give you an example of one Church um they they would do like some initial Outreach events and from that they would start building small groups they started a men's group a women's group

and a couple's group and as those groups got stronger then they started to have like a Sunday night core group meeting at the pastor's house and they they got so big they had to have the kids at another house teenagers at another house they would come together have a very simple meal for about a half an hour and he would share uh biblical truths with them he would tell them Bible stories and and share gospel with them um and then for like the last 10 or 15 minutes he would take time and talk to them

about the new church they were going to start and just kind of give them a little more of the vi the vision and from that he would start to see people emerge that we going to be leaders in this church that we going to be serving in this church and um uh one of the things that some did early on would even do what we call a look and service so when they're in this early phase they would they would put on a worship service saying we're not at this point where we can do this

now but they would borrow some musicians and and children's leaders and stuff and they would bring them in and and let them come and say as we get launched later on this is what we're going to be about right now we're focusing on making disciples and sharing the gospel and growing these small groups so come join us and do this with us well as things would grow a lot of these um these churches would do what they call preview churches preview services so a preview service is the idea that you have a service it's going

to be just like your grand opening you're going to advertise it it's you're going to pull out the stop all the stops and do it as nice as you can but you only do it one time in in a month and then so they so you have your your core group Gathering and your small groups going you do a big preview service and then the next week you go back to the Core Group phase but what happens is you're going along at a certain rate of growth and you have the preview service and maybe you

have a couple hundred people come maybe it's a hundred but then it'll drop back down but it'll drop down at a higher level than it was before the preview service then you do the next preview service same kind of bump and so on and so on one of the churches we had early on did this and they started with 40 people in their Core group and grew it to 70 and then they started doing preview services and they had over 200 in each of their preview services and their their group just kept getting larger and

larger to when they launched over 450 people came to their grand opening then from that they did a series of services that were special events for the next few Sundays so maybe it was a parent child dedication or it was a family fund day or they had a guest speaker or guest artist so they would have these things so that people would come week after week for a few weeks and kind of get in the habit of coming and eventually build relationships remember that's what it's about they would make some connections build relationships and then

the more and more the church would become their own and they would continue to grow as disciples so that's kind of the it would involve a followup process like I talked about being ready to go hey hang out with people and take a step towards them as they take a step towards you connecting further and and getting to know them better and then over time you develop them not only as disciples but as leaders and church planners and reproduction happens that's the process that we're aiming for now that you've paused again and made some more

mile posts I want you to consider a couple of the specific Outreach ideas we've had that have shown a lot of results a lot of fruit uh one of those is what we call a reverse door hanger now a reverse reverse door hanger might sound kind of funny uh we don't mean by a reverse door hanger that you take a door hanger and hang it on the inside of the door a reverse door hanger is the idea of you have these door hangers and you might have a little gift with you like a little bag

of coffee or or a coupon for a free latte and you knock on the door and when they open the door you say hey um I know you don't want to stand here and talk to me but we are trying to find ways to serve the community so if you would be willing to take this survey you can do it anonymously or you can give us your information it's up to you but if you do this quick survey and hang it on your door we'll come back and pick it up within the next hour or

so and as a thank you on the bottom there's a coupon here you can tear it off and you can go to Mom and Pop coffee shop down the street here and you give that to them and they'll give you a free drink of your choice on us we'll we'll cover the cost of that so we'd appreciate you doing that and if if you do want to uh let us know more you can put your information on here and you'll be entered in a drawing to win a free iPad we're going to give this iPad

away uh on such and such a date uh once we've finished doing all this and you can go to our website uh to see who won and if you want we'll also reach out to you directly um but if you want you're just curious who got it you can go look at that so if you'll do that for us uh that would be great now that reverse door hanger that we give to them has um has different questions on it like what's the greatest need in this community How could a church help meet this need

are you involved in a local uh church or faith group at this time and if so which one um there could be other questions if you have a question about what name you you're looking at for the church you would like their input uh but you can also have a question that's like which of the following would interest you and you could list a number of things like mother of preschoolers group a Recovery Group a women's uh Bible study or a men's group or a father father son or you know whatever you could list a

variety of things it's important don't list something you're not going to do don't list something that you're not willing to do or not able to do and so you put those things on there and if they if they give you your information uh and and one of them might even mean I'm just interested in future events uh they've given you permission to follow up with them and it's just a great way to find what I call lwh hanging fruit there are people out there that if they knew about you and what you're doing they would

be interested and uh we've had really good results with this and there was at one point we studied and about 16% of the people that that we knocked on the door they actually did this and put on their door we've had some people that have done as high as 50% of the people that they met would hang this on the door and you can connect with so many people in a short period of time and one of the things that's really cool about it is as you're doing it you may find somebody who's really interested

like man we just moved here and we're trying to figure out what tell me about your church it's important when you do that don't rush on just stay there and talk to them it doesn't matter if you don't get the rest of the door hangers out if you found somebody who really wants to engage with you about the church or about Jesus take the time to do that and uh that's that's one of those cultivation kind of events or or seed sewing kind of events it really kind of depends on how it goes in your

community that can help you lead to the larger Gathering now I want to tell you about what's been probably our most fruitful Gathering kind of event where people have actually join the church and that is uh what we call the community dinners now the community dinners involve a lot of marketing if you will to get the word out there that we're doing them and one of the phrases that we use on a lot of the uh marketing pieces that we do it'll say something like this meet lifelong friends for the first time and have dinner

on us and then we'll have something on there that says for every family that comes you get free to tickets to the Mariners game or if you have restrictions on using that you could say to a major league baseball game or to a baseball game you know you find the ways that are legal to do it but we actually worked with the Mariners and got tickets so we could say two free tickets to a Mariners game and so whether they found about you through social media or online or a mailer they can go online to

register or they can call in and we use what's called a smart number now the smart number it would uh it would go in such a way that when it called it it would go through a list of people that you trained and it would try each one of them until somebody picked up and when you they answered the phone they would hear the name of the church in their ear so they knew they were answering for their church so they don't go hey this is Johnny they would go hello this is Johnny from Pathway

Church how may I help you and they say hey I was calling about this free dinner I want to know more about this what's the catch oh there's no catch we just want to show the community we love you we want to show you God's love in a practical way so we're buying dinner for the community and uh how many how many would you like to have come to the dinner you can have as many as you want see a lot of times when they see the mailer they think it's only two because of the

two tickets but they can actually have the whole family they can have a lot of people come to the dinner and so we want to give them that opportunity to come and bring their whole family to it now where we normally do the dinner is at a Mexican restaurant and I'll talk more about that in a bit but it's it's not at a church it's not at a school uh unless there's just no place that could host you but and even if you do that you let them know that you're catering from a nice food

place Mexican or Italian or whatever so they register and then we follow up with them when we follow up with them close to the event we say hey I'm just confirming I've got you down for four people at the at the uh 5:30 dinner on such and such a date and uh and we do that so it's a reminder we do that so that they know where we really care about them being there we'll usually do two dinners a night um and some and sometimes we just do one night sometimes we'll do two or three

depending on how many people we're trying to reach you want the dinners to be anywhere from 30 to 50 people in size in a room that you have all to yourself and the reason we do Mexican is it's somewhat affordable although things are expensive in our area but they're more affordable than some other options and it's quick because we do the whole event in an hour and a half and there's so much more to this I'll give you some brief ideas but there's a ride up on it in the uh in the link to the

Outreach methodologies and uh it's you'll see some descriptions of it but what we do is we have greeters that welcome them we have people checking them in the pastor and his wife are there at checkin they engage in conversation learn some about the couple the family the individual they connect them with somebody who gets starts talking with them that person say hey why don't you come sit at my table and they know that hey I'm going to be at somebody's table and that person's their host who spends time getting to know them as much as

they're willing to share and they go ahead and they get to eat right away they don't have to sit there for a half an hour waiting for everybody show up uh we either do a buffet or they can order off a menu that we've got sitting there ready for them to go and as they get their food they have the conversations then after everybody's had a chance to eat the the pastor gets up and says thank you for coming uh uh we're really glad you're here uh we're going to bless your meal afterwards tonight so

I'm going to pray and thank God for our time together and he prays and he says now let me tell you about the new church and he talks about the the vision and Mission and values of the church very briefly he talks about his team he talks about the small groups he talks about coming events talks about their worship all these kinds of things and in the advertisement we've told them that they're going to get a 15minute presentation about a new church but he does it intend so in their minds he's delivering better than he

promised because there's some guy out there timing him and when he gets 9 minutes and 49 seconds they're like wow this guy's a man of his word and then he he'll close by saying now that I've told you about our church uh let me tell you how to get tickets to the Mariners game and they they go they put down how many they want tickets and we put on there where they can buy extra tickets and we show them the price to let them know value uh what we actually had to pay for them so

this is costing us some money we want them to know that we're investing in them but the other thing is we say look we want your family to be there so if you have more people you want to bring and you can't afford the tickets um just just check that little box down there and it's just a box doesn't say just check the box and that tells us uh you would like us to scholarship you with more tickets and we'll be happy to do that and so then after all that takes place then at the

dinner the host says well do you have any questions about the church and they engage in conversation about the church so you start by focusing on them but you conclude by talking about the Ministries that are available in the church all this time we've got stuff for the kids if they want their kids to go over and do some activities and games and stuff where they can still see them but they're over in a in a corner with some kids workers having a great time and we've given them we've given them prizes and we've got

it a gift bag for the families that have come just a number of ways to bless them and uh and normally we do them the game two or 3 weeks later and we have a series of events between them where that are like family or adult events that they can go to as well as each of our new groups starts with a barbecue or in theory it could be a bowling party it could be whatever but they party first and they launch a new study and we invite people to engage in one of these studies

so what happens by the time I almost left one part out when we go to the Mariners game we tell them to meet at the place where we do worship and we get them on buses and we travel to the game together and we make it a party bus not an alcohol party bus but a party bus where we're doing prizes and engaging with people and uh We've we've already learned some stuff about them our group shared and debriefed after the dinners and we're now engaging with them on the bus when they get to the

Mariners game they're strategically placed by people they connected with their tickets are next to maybe their table host or somebody else somebody else they really hit it off with and they they have that time together at the game kind of party on the way back and say hey we'll we'll see this coming week and then we have something special going on that Sunday so the important thing is that in just a few weeks we've gotten 8 to 12 hours with each of these people and by that point they've decided if they love us or they

can't stand us if they're in or they're out and that's why our retention is so high and then about half of the people and sometimes more uh will become a part of the church we had one time where 27 families came it was a military setting and they were they were looking for places to engage because they're new in the community 27 families came and all 27 families joined the church so that's what it is about a community dinner that we do now what I want to encourage you to do is go back to the

appendices that are are in the notes and here's the link again but I want you to go back and study that and I want you to read through different Outreach ideas I want you to read through different communication ideas and uh put together a strategy uh for what you're going to do in your church PL in a little bit of time we have left I want to talk about some different communication methods these are ways to get the word out about your church um there's a variety of things you can do a lot of them

have to do with social media and internet you can be on Facebook and have people send people in your church the event for what you're doing and have them post it as their Facebook profile picture have them post about it hey I'm joining this event hope you can go with me and post it on their feed or send it to their friends you can do Facebook ads where you can pay for ads that will pop up when people are searching or reading things on Facebook you can do Google AdWords as a matter of fact Google

will give nonprofits if they're still doing it they'll give you as much as $10,000 towards doing advertising using Google AdWords we had one Church planner that was doing this and he was spending very little amount of money and had multiple families join his church when they St studied for the things in his community so he'd put in church and family and community and he list the name of his community neighboring communities and he would put uh movies because he met in a movie theater things like that as people would search those words it would bring

up his ad and I think it was seven families they gained in like four months just from doing Google AdWords more and more we're going to see people uh not only through doing Google AdWords and Google searches but chat GPT and other AI tools uh over time that's likely going to grow well it is growing but it may even pass Google at some point because more and more people are turning to J chat GPT and other AI tools when they do their searches um there's also ways that you can get it out there with podcast

or posting your sermons online using social media things like Twitter whatever ones they might be uh meetup.com which is where people can connect to different interest groups and you can join those groups and if there's not the kind of group that you like to do start a group you can be the host of it and through that you can meet people and and engage with them in the gospel uh you can post things on Craigslist and and other ways to get it out there about your church uh there's other tools that you can use that

you can put in advertising on signs on websites on people's on your Facebook page all this stuff and that's using short codes which is what I've been doing in this study like when I do bit. lcpr resources that's a short code well I made that for free at bitly.com you can do the same thing with QR codes there are many QR code generators out there that will do it and a lot of them will even let you put your church logo or something like that right in the middle of the QR code I hope my

son do something like that for his junk removal company uh and so it has his logo for his company right in the middle of his QR code uh mailers still can be used in strategic ways in some communities um having having a website most people will check out your website before they ever come to your church uh the last study I heard was over 80% of the people will check out a website before they go try something uh doing door hangers advertising events as well as reverse door hangers that we've already talked about so those

are some of the communication ways there's so many others but nothing is better than Word of Mouth the number one way that people find a church or find Jesus is through family or friend a study that was done years ago said 79% of people come to Faith because of family or friend only 8% come to Jesus because of a pastor or priest or something like that so it's up to you to engage with people and communicate the gospel have you ever wondered what is the best way to maybe share the gospel with someone uh listen

this has been a conversation that people ask and that we talk through often here at Greenacres because we believe that every follower of Jesus should be active in their evangelism and active in sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ because uh this is truly the hope of the world and I'm going to tell you uh for me personally I love using the three Circles of evangelism and the three circles are are really simple because it helps you not only illustrate but navigate in a very succinct way uh through the gospel so that someone can understand because

the begins where the Bible begins in Genesis chter 1 that everything was good in fact God said that uh the creation of man Adam and Eve was was very good but there was something that took place only two chapters later um there was a moment where Adam and Eve that they were deceived by the serpent uh that all of humanity was disrupted from that very point the Bible teaches us that this is sin now we know that that sin is Not Just A disruption in our lives but sin is something that we have to deal

with in every portion of our lives and all creation and what we see is this second Circle because sin always leads to Brokenness time and time again uh you and I can turn on the news you can look at the world around you you can observe culture and you can see Brokenness you can see Brokenness in your own life you can see the moments in your life where you are missing the mark with God himself now this is what sin actually is sin is a term uh that was used in archery this term that was

not just doing something bad okay you made a mistake or you did this wrong instead of doing the right thing although that is sinful sin is more than that sin is the totality of who we are in fact the gospel of uh John is very clear about our sin nature Paul in Romans is very clear about our sin nature and it's because of that fall from Adam that all who came after Adam has this seed of sin and we see that it's not just what we do that Sinners that is who we are and I

think that that um that often times that we kind of misinterpret what sin really is sin because it is who we are it takes this unique change outside of ourselves and the Bible teaches us that if we were to repent and believe well then that sin can be taken from you why well this is our next Circle the third circle is the gospel and I want to notice this about in The Gospel is that you have these arrows uh you have one arrow pointing down to a cross and you have another arrow pointing up away

from the cross because the Bible teaches us that Jesus not only did he come and live this perfect life but he died on a cross now why did Jesus have to die on this cross well the Bible teaches us in Romans chapter 6 that that the penalty of sin is death but the free gift of God is is eternal life you see this is exactly what the gospel really is is that it took our sinful life the penalty that we owed to God himself to make us right with him Jesus came and he paid that

penalty on the cross for us this is called the atonement of God the atonement that our sin can be erased why because Jesus didn't stay on the cross the Bible teaches us that it was 3 days later that he rose from the grave and when he rises from the grave it's not that he just uh came out of a grave and it was no big deal he conquered death there was Jesus that not only conquering death but he conquered sin for us for our lives for our sake so that we may have eternal life and

the Bible says that if you were to repent and believe in this that it would lead us to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that if you repent of your sins meaning that you turn away from your sins and you believe in the grace the mercy the atonement and the covering of Jesus Christ the Bible says that all those who confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that you will be saved you know what what is interesting about those who uh confess their sins they believe in Jesus they're saved this is really the beginning

of your journey the Bible says that we are to recover and pursue if you were to take that last circle of the gospel and draw a line and go back to God's design because this is ultimately what the cross of Jesus does for us that the cross doesn't just save us and then leave us but rather Jesus saves us so that we may recover and pursue a life in Jesus this is what Paul talks about in Romans chapter 7 because this is where you and I live as followers of Jesus that is this Romans 7

type dilemma that in Romans chapter 7 Paul has this schizophrenic moment where he says that I do the things I don't want to do and I don't do the things that I do want to do well that is where you and I live we are living in this tension of fighting against our flesh and recovering and pursu in God's design for our lives in the spirit this is exactly why in Romans 88:13 that Paul talks specifically about this um killing off of sin that we want sin to die in our lives meaning that on the

daily that we take up our cross and follow Jesus in fact that was Jesus's exact instructions to his disciples he said that we must daily take up our cross and follow him Paul says this in Philippians chapter 2 it says for it is God who is working in you who is enabling you both to desire and to work out his good purpose this is the journey that you start as you become a follower of Jesus that you recover and you pursue God's design in your life and you can do that today you can confess your

sin you can repent you can turn to Jesus and you can trust in him for your salvation everything else leads to Brokenness so let me just encourage you you don't have to be a Bible scholar you don't have to be the greatest Theologian to share the good news of Jesus Christ because it's not just good news it's the greatest news that mankind could ever know so to help you along your Evangelistic Journeys and sharing the hope with the world around us we've discovered that having a simple tool like this can be extremely helpful and help

build your confidence in sharing the gospel so right here we have the three circles track and you can pick up this tool right here in the foyer at Green Acres you can take as many as you like and I pray that you will start take that leap of faith and start sharing the gospel with [Music] others for