Now, I come from a ranching family out in West Texas, and both mother and dad come from ranching backgrounds. My father was in the wool business for years, and I can tell you this. If you have a hundred sheep, and let’s just say that they’re all ewes, if you have a flock with a hundred sheep, and they only give you one or two lambs a year, you’re bankrupt in a season.  You’re out of business. Are you hearing me?

Why is it that Great Britain has gone in a century from being a great, towering, sending base for evangelism and missions, and today, less than seven percent of its population can be found worshiping in a church, or even a mosque or synagogue, which are not Christian. But the statistic is seven percent of the nation’s population.  Make it five and a half or six percent if you want to make it just Christians that are going to church on Sunday. What happened?

A century and a quarter ago, Spurgeon was having to knock the walls out of the church building to have bigger crowds, and yet today, that isn’t true. Why the decline in the faith? Why is it if you go to Europe that you find very few believers struggling small churches? Are you feeling this at all?

Canon Brian Greene came to Florida some years ago.  I was there, and he stuck out that long, bony finger. I’ll never forget his piercing blue eyes in his 70s as he scanned a crowd of about 1,700 of us, mostly pastors and laymen, and said, “mark my words, you American Christians, if you do not change your methodology, your great church buildings will be as empty in the future as the cathedrals are in Great Britain today.” And I made a beeline for England as fast as I could go to study the problem and try to figure out what went wrong.

I want to bring you some good news today. I also want to be a stark realist with you. Change is not always for the good, but there is some change that is desperately needed and can be done in this coming decade that can alter the history of Christianity.  We have not come here to talk about Tweedledee, Tweedledum. We’ve come here to talk about the most serious business in the world, and that is reaching the world.

England was dependent upon its pulpits.  Hear it again. We haven’t had anybody that preaches as good as Spurgeon. Now let’s just admit it.  England was dependent upon great pulpits, eloquence.

But the first Christian movement was not based upon eloquence and great preaching, although there was preaching and there was teaching. It was a lay movement.

It was the people of God telling the story of Jesus. It wasn’t one percent doing the work of a hundred percent. It was a very high percentage doing the work of a hundred percent.

We don’t know what that percent was, but it was very high. And there was a difference in the way they went about doing things from what we’re doing today. We’re depending upon pulpit and on small group exclusively.  They did something else that we’re not doing.

Now I’d like for you to think about what I’m going to say. Jesus went about his ministry in three ways.  One-on-one, one-on-some, and one-on-many. He preached to the multitudes. He taught the twelve, sometimes the three.

But he also won individuals to Christ and ministered to individuals. One-on-one. And when you have somebody that’s going to be in a position of responsibility and God wants to prepare them for leadership, any kind of leadership, do you know what happened in the early Christian community? It was a reflection of what we see in the Old Testament.

Let’s have some fun with this for a minute…

How do you think the world would have been affected if God would have spoken to Elijah and said, Elijah, I want you to take some time to train a young man named Elisha. And Elijah said, Father, you’ve got to know I’m too busy for that.

I’ve got bigger things going on that I’ve got to do. I’m a busy man. I don’t have time for Elisha.  Look at all this public ministry that I’ve got going on.

Or if God had said, now Moses, I want you to train Joshua. And Moses said, Father, you’ve got to know I’ve got thousands of people I’m looking after.

I’m a very busy man. I don’t have time to train this young man named Joshua. How would that have impacted Hebrew history? How negatively would have it impacted it?

Come further…

Barnabas, there’s a young man…

Oh, he’s a knothead. Strong spirit, hard-headed, highly intelligent.  Going to be a challenge, but I want you to take your life and pour it into this young Saul of Tarsus. I want you to go down to Antioch and I want you to spend about a year with him. Every time you preach, let him be there.  Every time you teach him how to share, you listen and critique it.

I don’t know what God really told him, but I’ll tell you what, he wasn’t sitting around twiddling his thumbs for a year. And the great Gentile awakening took place in Antioch, and that’s where we were first called Christians, by the way.

And that’s where Barnabas poured his heart, life, and his wonderful encouraging spirit. You know, that’s what Barnabas means is encourager. Poured it into the life of this young man, Saul of Tarsus.

Now, y’all, when you get to heaven, if you got up there and somebody said, “Barnabas, how did you invest your life?”

He said, “well, I was a farmer down in Cyprus. I sold my farm, gave the money to the Lord’s work, and I decided to invest my life in ministry.” He said, “what’d you do?” 

Well, he said, “I didn’t do a whole lot, but I sure did spend a lot of time with a little guy down there.  Wasn’t very tall. He was young. He’d been kind of tough.  He was beating up Christians and putting them in jail. But you know, he turned out pretty good. He could write pretty good.  Wrote most of the New Testament.”

How many of y’all feel like it’d be a good day’s work to have trained the Apostle Paul? You see, there’s nothing more significant that we can do than obey God. And when God says that we need to disciple some folk, we better get after it.

And if you’re too busy to be obedient, you’re too busy to succeed. Don’t give me any excuses about being too busy.

If Moses could do it,
Elijah could do it,
Barnabas could do it,
and then Paul could do it.
But who else did it?
Our Lord.

(continued in part 7 of the series)