Welcome to the Valley Baptist Church sermon podcast.
We're so glad you're here and we hope this message inspires you, builds your
faith and moves you toward a deep relationship with God.
Today, you'll find great insight into the Bible and learn how you
can apply it straight to your life.
So welcome and enjoy the message.
If you have your Bible, please open it with me to Genesis chapter 11.
Today, we're celebrating our church's 40th anniversary.
Now, the number 40 is a very significant number
in the Bible.
When God flooded the earth,
it rained for 40 days and 40 nights.
When Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt,
they wandered the desert for 40 years.
before they entered the Promised Land.
And when we come to the New Testament,
we see that Jesus actually spent 40 days and 40 nights
in the desert being tempted by the devil.
Well, today marks 40 years since some people of God right here in Bakersfield, California,
stepped out in faith to form Valley Baptist Church.
Now, sometimes I'm asked by other pastors, you know, what is the secret to Valley Baptist,
its growth and its health?
And my answer is always the same.
The secret is the blessing of God.
Today we're concluding our series on the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
And Genesis really is broken up into two major sections.
The first 11 chapters give us the history of ancient mankind.
The remaining chapters give us the history of the Jewish people.
Now, it could be argued that the main theme of the book is the blessing of God.
And so this morning, I want us to look at God's blessing upon a man named Abraham.
And then for our purposes today, this, our 40th anniversary,
I want to show you how God's blessing upon Abraham actually mirrors his blessing
upon the local church.
Now, we saw a couple months ago from Genesis chapter 3
that God cursed Satan.
And he said that he would put enmity between him and the woman,
between your seed and her seed.
He shall crush your head, but you shall bruise his heel.
Well, that was the first prophecy in the Bible of a coming Messiah who would come from the
seed of a woman, who would come from the seed of Eve.
And that coming seed would be our Savior.
He would be the King.
Now that prophecy or promise is sort of the thesis statement for the rest of the Bible.
In chapter 4, Adam and Eve's son, Cain, kills their other son named Abel.
And then they have a third son named Seth.
And when Seth is born, Eve exclaims, God has provided another seed.
Well, it's through the seed of Seth that the promised Messiah seed would be born.
And there's a number of genealogies that we looked at early in Genesis that show us the lineage of the chosen seed's ancestors.
He was of the line of Seth, and then of Enoch, and then of Noah, and then of Shem.
Eventually, he's of the line of Abraham.
In fact, the New Testament begins in Matthew chapter 1, verse number 1,
by saying this is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
So we're going to look at God's blessing upon Abraham.
But before we do, let's look at the genealogy from Noah's son Shem all the way to Abram.
Verse number 10, we read, and this is a lot, so stay with me.
It says, this is the genealogy of Shem.
Shem was 100 years old and begot Arpachshad, two years after the flood.
And after he begot Arpachshad, Shem lived 500 years and begot sons and daughters.
Arpachshad lived 35 years and begot Selah.
After he begot Selah, Arpachshad lived 403 years and begot sons and daughters.
Selah lived 30 years and begot Eber, which, by the way,
Eber is what most people believe the name Hebrew came from.
Eber, Hebrew.
After he begot Eber, Selah lived 403 years
and begot sons and daughters.
Eber lived 34 years and begot Peleg.
After he begot Peleg, Eber lived 430 years
and begot sons and daughters.
Peleg lived 30 years and begot Rehu.
After he begot Rehu, Peleg lived 209 years
and begot sons and daughters.
Rehu lived 32 years and begot Seru.
After he begot Sareg, Rehu lived 207 years and begot sons and daughters.
Sareg lived 30 years and begot Nahor.
After he begot Nahor, Sareg lived 200 years and begot sons and daughters.
Nahor lived 29 years and begot Terah.
After he begot Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and begot sons and daughters.
Now Terah lived 70 years and begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
Now, verse number 26, there's a break in the pattern of genealogy
that indicates to us someone very important has arrived on the scene.
Instead of it listing just one son in that lineage, it lists three sons.
Three are listed, indicating someone very important has arrived,
a man by the name of Abram.
Verse 27.
This is the genealogy of Terah.
Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
Haran begot Lot.
And Haran died before his father Terah in his native land,
in Ur of the Chaldeans.
Then Abram and Nahor took wives.
The name of Abram's wife was Sarai,
and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran,
the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah.
But Sarai was barren, she had no child.
And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot
and the son of Haran and his daughter-in-law Sarai,
his son Abram's wife, and they went out with them
from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan.
And they came to Haran and dwelt there.
So the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran."
And that's a lot of names, a lot of genealogy.
But it is all pointing to a man named Abram, who will become the focus of the next 14 chapters in Genesis.
I mean, we've been studying the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
It records for us roughly 3,000 years.
Now Abraham's life is going to get more attention than the history of the world before him.
So the question is, why is this man so important?
Well, he's the progenitor of the Jewish race.
And he's called by Jews and Christians alike the father of faith.
The Bible says that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.
Now, it's very important to know that Abraham was actually a very, very ordinary guy.
I mean, he wasn't a priest.
He wasn't a prophet.
He wasn't a preacher.
He was a simple businessman.
but he was a businessman who had incredible faith.
So much faith that you might be tempted to think
that he came from this great family of faith,
but you'd be wrong.
Abram was from Ur of the Chaldeans,
and his father Terah worshiped the moon and the stars.
And so Abraham's family was actually extremely pagan.
And it was out of that paganism that God called him
to himself and blessed him.
Here's our principle for our church family.
God blesses a church who recognizes that all of its members came out of darkness.
Sometimes churches get so buttoned up that they sort of look like no one's ever struggled
with any sin in their life.
Testimonies are rarely shared because then they'd have to acknowledge that sin exists
within their church family or has existed.
I've found that those churches don't see many people come to faith in Christ.
And the reason, I think, is because I don't think God blesses churches
who make themselves look better than what they actually are.
Remember in the book of Acts, when God killed a husband and a wife
by the name of Ananias and Sapphira, why did God kill them?
It says because they tried to make themselves look more generous
than what they actually were.
They lied about how much they'd given.
Pharisees were like that, always trying to ignore the fact that they too were sinners.
And Jesus called them and he said, you're a bunch of whitewashed tombs.
You're all pretty and polished on the outside, but inside are dead men's bones.
You see, the Christian life doesn't have to be fake because it's real.
You don't have to fake holiness.
God can actually make you holy.
So as a Christian, we should not act as if our past life before Jesus never happened.
In fact, if you do, that's going to put a spotlight on you instead of the grace of God that it only belongs on.
Now, I think one of the reasons that God has so blessed our church family is because we have been honest for the most part with the fact that every member in our church has been saved out of utter darkness.
All of us, all of us have a past that we're not proud of that God saved us out of, just like he did Abram.
Let's pick up the story in chapter 12, verse 1.
It says, now the Lord had said to Abram,
get out of your country from your family
and from your father's house to a land that I will show you.
I will make you a great nation.
I will bless you and make your name great
and you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
and I will curse him who curses you.
And in you, all the families
or the nations of the earth shall be blessed.
So Abram departed as the Lord has spoken to him.
Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldeans.
And God said, get out of your own country and go to a land that I am giving you.
Now, notice God doesn't tell him anything about the land.
Now, hundreds of years later, God would be kind to Moses, telling him about the land.
This is a land flowing with milk and honey.
In other words, it's a land that's prosperous.
But Abraham didn't know anything about the land.
Even at first, we know from the book of Hebrews, he didn't know where it's at.
Because Hebrews 11 says he went out not knowing where he was going.
God said, go.
And he went, marching right off the known map.
What incredible faith.
Here's our principle.
God blesses a church who is committed to radical faith and obedience.
When God says go, we go.
When God says do something, we do it.
For the last 40 years, Valley Baptist has been a church
of radical faith and obedience.
When God pressed it upon two churches to merge
and form one church with three senior pastors,
something that was unheard of, our church said yes.
When God led our church to relocate to Fruitville Avenue
at first from Airport Drive, we just had $24,000
in the bank on that day of that vote,
a $400,000 annual budget.
And yet we voted to purchase and build
the initial buildings on our Fruitville campus,
which costs $6 million at the time.
That would be the equivalent of us as a church
taking on $170 million project.
That sounds crazy, but it wasn't because it was faith.
Now, not everyone saw it that way.
There was opposition.
One deacon took my dad and Pastor Phil out to lunch.
He said, what you guys are doing, you are being reckless with the church's finances.
He left the church.
But you know what?
Radical faith risks looking reckless.
Radical faith, it risks looking foolish at times.
Our congregation, we chose to disregard fear
and instead to focus on the future God was calling us to,
to believe God and to follow where he was leading.
Some churches make decisions based on what they can calculate,
but that's not faith.
That's called math.
Faith is something very different than what we can calculate.
Business operates on what it can see.
Faith operates on what it can foresee.
Faith refuses to focus on all of the obstacles at hand.
Instead, it just asks the simple question, what is God's will?
What is the will of God in this situation?
Where is he leading us?
And wherever he leads, that's where we're going as a church family.
Here's another principle.
God blesses a church who's willing to step out of their comfort zone.
See, God called Abraham out of his comfort zone, didn't he?
He had grown up in Ur, the Chaldeans.
He lived there for nearly 60 years.
That was home.
Now, the Chaldean Empire was in the lower part of ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates River.
Between the years 1922 and 1939, the city of Ur was unearthed,
and archaeologists found an incredibly wealthy and sophisticated city.
It was an ancient civilization that in many ways rivaled the Egyptian empire.
In fact, archaeologists uncovered there
an ancient library in the city of Ur
that held over 10,000 volumes.
They unearthed these massive two-story brick houses
that had these big courtyards and these balconies.
Abraham's family, being who they were, I'm sure was very,
they were incredibly wealthy.
And so Abraham probably grew up in one of those big houses.
He had a very nice, comfortable life.
But God called him to leave the comforts of his home and to go to a land that God was giving him.
And so Abraham went.
We know from the rest of the story, if you were to read on in Genesis,
that Abraham became a Bedouin, wandering from place to place, living in a tent for the rest of his life.
Did you know that God still calls people out of their comfort zone?
Oftentimes when God's doing a new work,
that's when he will call his people out of their comfort zone
to accomplish a new work of God.
God blesses people.
God blesses churches who are willing to be uncomfortable for Jesus.
Now, I know as a pastor, that doesn't excite a whole lot of people,
but I have found being uncomfortable for Jesus
sure beats being uncomfortable without Jesus.
Now, in verse number one, we see exactly what God called Abraham to leave.
He says, leave your country and leave your family.
Here's our principle.
God blesses a church who puts God above family and country.
Through the years, I've talked with quite a few people in our church who had to leave their family behind in order to follow Jesus with believers baptism.
Because they said, well, I'm not sure what to do, Pastor.
What do I do?
If I get baptized, I know my family's going to disown me.
And guess what?
They followed Jesus instead of their family, and they got baptized.
That's sacrifice.
That's what incredible faith.
Now, the word country here isn't referring to a nation like we think of a nation.
It's referring to a land.
Leave the land you're from and go to the land I'm giving you.
Over 40 years ago, there were two country boys from Oklahoma
that lived in the middle of nowhere
who God impressed upon their hearts
to leave their families behind
and to leave the land of the Bible Belt
and to move to the mission field,
that crazy place called California.
And God blessed them.
He blessed their faith and their obedience.
And shortly after, Valley Baptist Church was formed.
And did you know that God is still calling a lot of people from our church family
to leave their family and country behind?
Think about our church planners who leave the comforts of Valley Baptist,
a wonderful, loving church.
They leave the comforts of Valley Baptist to go start a new church,
a new work of God that God is calling them to.
Think about our missionaries who not only leave our church family,
not only leave our state, they leave our country.
They leave to go to a foreign land that speaks a foreign language.
Why?
Because God calls them just like Abraham called.
They are called and they go.
Now let's read verse number two again.
He says, God says, I will make you a great nation.
I will bless you and make your name great,
and you shall be a blessing.
God says to Abram, I'm going to make you a great nation.
But there was a pretty big problem with that.
Abram didn't have any kids.
We saw, we read a moment ago in chapter 11, verse number 3, that it says that Sarai was barren.
I mean, she was not able to get pregnant.
Now, everyone else, we saw a lot of other people in Abraham's family were having a lot of kids.
But Abram and...
Sarai, they just kept aging without any kids,
and yet God said, I'm going to make you a great nation.
And later God tells Abraham, he says,
your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky
and the sand on the seashore.
But God never actually explained to him how that was going to happen,
and yet Abraham believed it.
Here's our principle.
God blesses a church that builds itself on God's promises, not God's explanations.
Sarai's inability to have children and God's promise of a child became the greatest sort of conflict in Abraham's life between seeing and believing.
Because decades go by with no child.
Sometimes we have the same conflict as individuals, but also as churches.
I mean, wouldn't it be nice if the will of God came in thesis form?
If God got out the map and he just mapped out our whole life from beginning to end of what's going to happen.
He explains, hey, you're going to lose someone.
that you love more than life itself.
But here's all the ways that I'm going to use it
to bless other people's life.
Here are all the ways I'm going to use it to make you stronger.
That would be nice.
Or maybe you break up with someone, the person
that you're with, and it's going to wreck you.
But don't you worry.
You're going to end up marrying someone who's even better
for you in the future.
That would be wonderful.
We all would love that.
But that's not what God does, is it?
Instead, God says, trust me today.
Trust my promises.
Trust my word.
The psalmist said, your word, O Lord, is a lamp unto my feet.
It's a light unto my path.
We want, though, God to get out the big spotlight to shine a mile ahead years down the road.
But that's not what God does.
Instead, I think so we're forced to remain dependent upon him each and every step.
He just lights what we need to see, the next steps.
Valley has been built upon the light of God's word, the promises of God.
Every week, we begin the message by saying, open your Bibles.
Now, why do we do that?
Well, because faith is built on the word of God, on the promises of God.
When I was ordained, my dad wrote a note in the cover of my Bible.
And it's a beautiful note.
But one of the things it says is, Andrew, people long to hear from God.
Preach the word.
People long to hear what God has to say.
You see, skeptics want reasons.
Faith claims promises.
God blesses a church who moves forward beyond what can be explained, trusting in God's promises and direction.
Now, five times in these three verses, God says, I will.
I will. He's the subject of blessing. I will bless you. Hey, remember, you're not going to
bless yourself. No one else is going to be blessing you. I am going to be the source
of blessing. Here's our principle. It's God alone who blesses a church and makes her great.
I already touched on this, and we're not going to belabor this point too much, but the key to
Valley Baptist Church, the key to our success has simply been the blessing of God.
For whatever reason, God has chosen to bless us.
I mean, when you think about it, we're all just a bunch of misfits in our own way, right?
Separated from God because of our sin.
And yet God chose to reach down his hand and to touch our lives one by one by one.
And he has brought us into fellowship with him.
That is the grace of God.
Now, in chapter 11, we read and looked at last week the Tower of Babel.
And there at the Tower of Babel, God judged the people for trying to make a great name for themselves.
And yet here, God says to Abram, I'm going to make you a great name.
So what's the difference?
Well, the difference is that those who are building the tower were trying to build a great name for themselves without God.
Their pursuit of greatness was rooted in their sin and their pride.
But with Abraham, God graciously gives him a great name because Abraham was trusting and yielding to God.
Valley Baptist Church, among the Christian world at least, has a great name.
And I thank the Lord for our great name, but that is not what we're after.
We're not after a great name.
We're after making known and great the name of Jesus, spreading it among the nations.
And if God chooses to continue giving us a great name, that would be wonderful.
That would be a blessing because it certainly won't be deserved.
We deserve the punishment of God, the judgment of God.
And yet he has been gracious to us and chosen to bless you.
Bless us.
God says, I will bless you.
and I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.
And then verse number three, he says,
I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you,
and in you all the families, all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed.
Here's our principle.
God blesses a church. Why?
Well, in order for them to become a blessing to the world.
That's why.
That's why he chose Abraham.
Sometimes we think and start thinking that the blessings of God is all about us.
Hey, this is wonderful.
I love this church.
I love life, the peace and the joy and the love.
And those things are wonderful, but it's not about us.
You see, God's desire is for everyone whom he touches and blesses,
for them to become a channel, a conduit of blessing to those that are around them.
a channel of his love and his mercy and his grace,
a channel of his word, a channel of the gospel.
Sometimes there are people who say
there's a little bit concerned
with how big the church is getting
and they'll ask, well, how big is big enough?
Or how many life groups is enough?
Or how many church plants is enough?
Listen and tell every man, woman, boy and girl
in our city and all around the world
has heard the gospel of Jesus and been saved.
It's never enough.
It is never enough.
My dad used to say that we exist at least on one level for those who are not yet here with us.
My question is, where are they?
Well, they're somewhere in our city.
And they have no hope.
They have no hope.
and they have no life, they're stuck in the misery
of their own sin and their own vices,
and we've got the answer for them.
And someday, someone from our church
or someone from one of the churches we plant
is gonna find them and meet them and get to know them
and start loving on them and share the good news
of Jesus with them.
Why?
Because we're always blessed in order to be a blessing.
That's God's design.
Now, when God told Abraham that,
That in you, all the families and the nations and the people groups of the earth will be blessed.
How was God going to do that?
Well, God gives a little bit more detail to Abraham in chapter 22, verse number 18.
He says, in your seed.
Remember that word?
Through our study of Genesis, in your seed, he says, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.
Because you have obeyed my voice.
Now that promised seed is a reference to the promise that God gave to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
It's a reference certainly to the nation of Israel.
But ultimately, the seed is a reference to Jesus.
Paul explains that to us in Galatians 3, verse 16.
He says,
Here's our principle.
God blesses a church.
through Jesus. Amen? That's always how he blesses the church. If you've been a part of Valley
Baptist very long, you've been attending, it hasn't taken you long, I can tell you, for you to come to
realize that we're all about Jesus. We're all about knowing Jesus and loving Jesus and serving
Jesus and making Jesus known. Why? Because Jesus is our only hope.
I'm telling you, Jesus is the only hope this world has.
And Jesus is our savior.
He's our wonderful Lord,
the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
He called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
So let me be very clear with you today.
Very clear.
If you want to be blessed,
you will only be blessed through Jesus.
You will only be blessed through him.
Now, every human being wants to be blessed.
That's a desire of ours.
You'll be blessed with money, fame, sex appeal, power, you name it.
But you just ask the very few people on the earth who have all that if they're really happy,
and you'll find out that they're not.
Why?
Because they have endeavored to be blessed apart from God.
And that is an exercise in futility.
That was the original sin of Adam and Eve, to be blessed apart from God.
Really, that's all of our sin.
Anytime we're sinning, we're attempting to be blessed apart from God's plan within our life.
Listen, there is no blessing, ultimately speaking, apart from God, apart from a relationship with Jesus.
Now, as we begin wrapping up today.
What is God calling Valley Baptist to today?
He is calling us to be ascending church.
By God's grace, our prayer and our endeavor is to plant or replant 100 churches all up and down the Central Valley,
all throughout Bakersfield, throughout our tenure as your pastors.
Now, that is a massive undertaking that's going to take a lot of resources.
It's going to take a lot of leadership development.
It's going to take a lot of faith.
But most of all, it's gonna take the blessing of God.
Robert Moffat was a missionary to South Africa
who labored there for many, many years
without a single person coming to faith in Jesus.
And after a number of years,
some people back home in England wrote to him
and said they wanted to send him a gift on his anniversary.
They asked him what he would like.
Well, he wrote back to them and he said,
"'I would like you to send a communion set
And they were dumbfounded by that because he was the only Christian around.
Why do you need a communion set if you're the only Christian?
But they went ahead and sent one on ahead.
And it arrived the day before they were scheduled to take communion with six brand new Christ followers.
That's faith.
To believe God and to believe his direction in our lives long before we can fully see it.
We believe that God is calling us to send out hundreds and even thousands of people from our church in the coming decades in order to plant churches.
Now, we felt God putting that on our heart just a couple of years ago.
And so we shared it with you really before we had a plan for how we're going to accomplish it.
Well, God started blessing long before we knew how we were going to tackle it.
In fact, in the last 13 months, we've sent out two teams, each with a pastor,
to replant some struggling churches here in town.
And both of those churches are doing very, very well today.
Amen.
Now here's the thing that we're finding out over the last 13 months.
We can't out-send God.
Now, as a Christian, I've always known that I can't out-give God.
I mean, you try out-giving God, he just keeps on blessing you.
But we're learning experientially, we also can't out-send God.
We send a couple pastors, several deacons, and over a hundred of solid Christian people out with those two church plants.
And right now, we are bigger than we've ever been in the history of our church.
It's almost like the Holy Spirit knows what he's doing, right?
As he leads us, it's almost like he's been ahead of us,
blessing us the whole time, which he certainly has.
In the last two years, we've had nearly 40 young men and women
come forward and announce to our church family
that they believe God is calling them into full-time ministry.
Now, if you add to that group all those who are talking with us about that possibility,
but have not yet announced it to the church, that number goes up to 58.
58.
God is doing something incredible in the life of our church.
What's he doing?
He's blessing us.
Do we deserve it?
I don't.
But he's blessing us.
And he's not blessing us so we can just soak it all up
and let's be fat and happy right here and just enjoy ourselves.
No, he's blessing us so we can be a blessing to the world.
To send people out as we disciple them and teach them how to love Jesus
and how to follow him and teach them about his word
and to equip them as leaders.
He's calling us to send them out from us.
so they can be a blessing to whoever God sends them to.
Now let's bow together in an attitude of prayer, both here and at Olive Drive.
This is a holy moment, a very holy moment in the life of our church.
This has been a message about how God blesses a church.
But a church is simply a collection of individuals who God has blessed through Jesus.
Maybe today you're in desperate need of the blessing of God.
You've wondered about God.
You've thought about God.
It's made sense in your mind that he exists, but you've never known him.
There's not any sense in which you've ever said, man, God has really blessed me in this way.
Maybe you're going through something very difficult.
A loss of a loved one.
an addiction.
Maybe you're going through something
where someone that you love so very much
has wounded you deeper than you ever could have imagined.
Maybe you're the person
who's wounded some loved ones deeper
than you could have imagined.
And you've come to a place in your life
where it's as if you almost have no more hope.
Ah, there is hope in Jesus.
Please know that God wants to bless you today.
He loves blessing people.
That's His specialty.
But He never blesses those who try to be blessed apart from Him.
You can try to be blessed in all these different avenues and different pursuits,
but you will come up empty every time.
He only blesses those who humble themselves before Him and receive His blessings.
By faith.
Now, by faith in what?
By faith in whom?
Well, by faith in his son, Jesus.
You see, the Bible says that for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son
that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
For by grace we are saved, the Bible says, through faith.
It's not of ourselves.
It's not of works, lest any man should boast.
The Bible says, whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
You see, God loves us so much that he sent his son.
He's eternal son.
who willingly came and died on the cross,
paying for the penalty of our sin
so that we could be forgiven
and have eternal life with him in heaven,
but also so we could have abundant life here on earth.
I want to invite you to get to know him today.
It might seem like that's a hard thing to do,
but really God's done all the heavy lifting.
He's given you a gift.
He's extending it to you right now.
you've got to receive it.
You've got to grab hold of it and take hold of it
and open it up.
And the only way that you do that
It's through faith.
You cannot work hard enough to earn God's favor.
You cannot do enough.
You must receive the blessing of God by faith.
I want to invite you to do that in just a moment at both of our campuses.
We're going to stand.
We're going to have pastors and leaders all across the front here.
And we're going to invite you as we sing for you just to step out from wherever you're at.
Walk down one of these aisles, walk down one of these staircases and say, I want to give my life to Christ.
These folks will know exactly how to help you.
They're not going to embarrass you in any way.
Now, some people are tempted to think, well, man, I can't do that because I got all this junk in my life.
I got to clean this thing up before I come to Jesus.
No, no, no, no, no.
You come as you are.
Burdens and weights and failures and addictions and all.
You come and you bring him to Jesus.
And you watch what Jesus will do as you give your life to him.
He'll come into your life and he will help you every step of the way.
Maybe you say, I want to be baptized like many others in our church family were baptized today.
Or I want to join this church family, you know.
Maybe for some time you've been kind of an outsider looking in.
But now you're like, you know what?
I want to belong in an official way
to become a member right here at Valley Baptist Church.
You come forward and you let us know.
We'd love to visit with you about that.
Let's pray.
Our Heavenly Father,
thank you
for Valley Baptist Church.
It's been my family.
for many, many decades.
Thank you, Lord, for our founding pastors.
Thank you for all the men and women that have gone before us
that are now with you in heaven in your presence.
Thank you for their sacrifice, their generosity,
their commitment, their service.
Lord, would you stir in our hearts collectively and individually a love for you and people
that will help us have the strength and the grit that it's going to take
to live out your mission and your vision in our lives?
And Lord, I ask that right now that you would go beyond what I've been able to say
and that you would touch hearts at a deep level by your spirit.
Lord, if there's anyone on the outside of you looking in,
on the outside of your intimate blessing in their life,
I pray, Lord, that you'd wake them up today to that reality.
And they'd hear your still small voice calling them to yourself,
calling them to a life that's blessed.
Please do that which we can't do.
We ask in Jesus' powerful name.
Amen.
Thanks for listening today.
We hope you enjoyed this message.
And if you did, we would be so grateful if you left us a review.
Also, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast
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If you feel the Lord calling you to take the next step in faith
through salvation, service, or giving, don't wait.
reach out to us by texting podcast to 88988.
That's podcast to 88988 or connect with us
on one of our social media platforms.
You can also visit our website, valleybaptist.org
to find even more great resources.
No matter where you are in your journey,
know that we love you, we're praying for you
and we can't wait to see what God will do in your life.