Such an exciting day for destination. Well, the other thing that we are doing today, I know it's not an announcement, but it's exciting. We are starting a brand new message series.

I'm excited for it. It is called One More. And the heart behind this series is that your yes to God has the ability to change somebody's life. It has the ability to help somebody find and follow Jesus. And through so throughout this series, if you stick around with us, you'll discover how God wants to use ordinary people like us to make a huge extraordinary difference.

Do you believe that about yourself, destination. Do you believe that God wants to use you in incredible ways. And this is this is the truth because change lives will change lives.

And I think for us what we are are charged with by God is after just one more person finding that hope of Jesus. Because maybe for you today or maybe at some time in your life this is true that the gospel the good news of Jesus made its way to you on the way to somebody else. I want to introduce that as the big premise of this series that the gospel made its way to you.

Maybe it hasn't yet. Maybe today is the day, the first time you're hearing about the hope of Jesus. And if that's you, man, I'm praying for you, okay. And and if it's not, maybe you've already found and and followed the hope of Jesus. But guess what.

That hope that has come to you, God now wants to use you to bring that hope to somebody else. So, let me explain to you what I mean. , when I was 15 years old, some of you have heard little bits and pieces of this story, but when I was 15 years old, , I didn't know a thing about Jesus. You could hand me a Bible and I couldn't tell you the difference between the Old Testament, New Testament.

I couldn't pronounce half the names. Still can't. , but I I I just didn't know anything.

But the one thing that I did know is that I struggled quite a bit. , I got diagnosed with ADHD, with dyslexia, and just a slew of other things. And as I shared even in this last message series, I was bullied a lot.

And so, I really didn't see what the big purpose or point was of life. And so, I started to have this reoccurring question in my teenage brain. Well, if life is this hard, why live it.

Like what is the point if it's just going to be endless hard times, suffering, disappointment, not feeling like I'm enough. And oddly enough, a new church was starting down the street from our house. That's why what we're doing here is so important.

And and we went on a Christmas service and it wasn't just it wasn't really that big a deal to me. It was like, "Oh, we're going to church on Christmas. That's just what people do, right. " and so the whole service I'm just going through the motions, but then they bring some guy up on stage who wasn't the pastor.

He was going to tell something called a testimony. I didn't even know what a testimony was. And what I found out it was a it's a story, but it's how God has transformed this man's life.

He starts telling his story and then he says this phrase, I kid you not. He says, "I used to think if life is this hard, why live it until that until I was at the edge of my seat. " Because he had something that I had not heard before. And he said, "Until I found and followed Jesus. " >> And so I heard the gospel, the good news of Jesus, for the first time in my life.

I didn't get everything. I didn't understand it. I still had doubts. I still had fears. I still had struggles.

But in that moment, I thought, I'm going to give Jesus a try. And I have never looked back since. Now, what is cool about this is that now that that moment happened years ago, I've seen the way God has used that story and other stories in my life to help somebody find the hope of Jesus in their life because the gospel made its way to me on the way to somebody else destination.

>> Do you know that the same thing is true for you. That you have that same God-given heartbeat in you to save somebody to bring them to the hope and transformation that Jesus has in their life. But the question is how do we do that.

How do we how do we really helped change one more life. How do we help somebody go from broken and hurt and hopeless and addicted and confused to changed. And that's what we're going to look at today.

How do we change one more life. And to do that, we're going to look at Matthew chapter 28. It's on page 857.

And by the way, if you do not have a Bible, please take that blue Bible on your chair home. And it's our gift to you, okay. We open up our Bibles every single week because we believe that change happens in scripture.

And so read that book and God's going to change your heart. He's going to change your life. And as you're finding your place, I want to give you some context because in a topical series like this, we usually go through like a book of the Bible, but this is a topical series. And in a topical series, context is crucial. And so here is your 30 seconds of context.

This is at the end of the book of Matthew. You'll see it at the very end. There's there's words that say the great commission. And what's happening here is Jesus has died. He has rose.

He has appeared to his disciples and various other people. And now he is about to ascend into heaven. But before he does, he's going to give his believers, his disciples, a commission.

Now, what this word commission means is it really is just imparting onto them authority to accomplish a mission. And this is God's plan is he's going to do this by his authority. You'll see that in the opening line of the great commission.

And if I've lost you, I just want to give a quick comparison before we read this. It's like when I leave my house and I leave my kids with a babysitter. I am giving them the authority of the parents. I'm giving them the my authority to keep my kids safe, to keep them fed, to keep the house to not start on fire, right.

Like I'm giving them the authority to do that. And so this is what Jesus says in verse 18, if you follow along with us. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

And so here is Jesus's big great commission. And there has been tons of sermons, books, studies wrote about every nuanced word in this commission. But I want to zoom in on just three of them as we look at this big question of how do we change lives.

And the first thing is this that we get from the great commission that we have to go. We have to go. There has to be an action.

The commissioning starts off with therefore go. Spoiler alert. Jesus isn't talking about going to the bathroom here.

He's not talking about that kind of go. He's talking about going and changing lives because Jesus was a God who would go for you. And what I mean by that is if you are new to this whole church thing, if you're new to this whole Christian thing, here is the good news of the gospel.

Here is the hope that I talked about in the beginning that Jesus left heaven. The glory and splendor of heaven on a rescue mission for you, for each and every one of you. When he died on a cross, he said, "I love you this much.

" with his arms stretched, his his hands pierced. That's what he did for you. That is the good news, the hope of the gospel that we have a God that went on a rescue mission for you. He says, Jesus says it like this in John chapter 6.

He says, "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my will, but the will of him who sent me. " And so Jesus went on this rescue mission from God the Father. He came down on this rescue mission for you. Therefore, for us, we should also emulate that and go and go and change people's lives and change our cities and help this world heal and be put back together and make it just a little bit better, right.

But here's the truth. We don't like to do this very first word. Sometimes it's not that that not that easy to just go like how do I help people find Jesus or follow Jesus. How do I invite them to church or talk about my faith or make this change kind of happen.

And we could sit up here with a whiteboard and we could workshop all of these different ideas. But I think if we were to boil it down to one word, that one word would be this fear. I think we are afraid of the uncomfortable conversations. We're afraid of the uncomfortable person. Maybe it's going to get awkward.

Maybe it's going to get weird. Well, if I share my faith with my neighbor and it doesn't go well, well, I got to live next to him. And there's a reality there, right. We're afraid because we might need to defend ourselves or explain something when somebody says,"Well, what about Noah's arc. Did he really take two of every animal or was that just like what about the dinosaurs.

" Like they you never know where somebody is going to go with it, right. And so you you start to get this fear of, man, I don't have an answer to every question. Maybe I shouldn't share my faith.

Here's the big idea. Never let fear stop you from going to the places that God has called you to go because God is there too. God is with you, which we'll talk about later. But I would rather have as your pastor, I would rather have you and myself risk maybe a slightly awkward moment than to miss an opportunity to introduce somebody to the hope that I found. Than to introduce somebody to their ticket to heaven.

And so I want people to know Jesus. Think about it like this. What if that guy who shared his testimony and led me to Jesus, what if he was just like, "Hey, you know, I don't feel qualified to go on stage and talk about my faith.

" Or, "I don't feel like I have it all figured out yet. " Which, by the way, none of us do. But he still came up. He still shared.

And that changed one more life. And that is the same power that Jesus uses in you. And for some of you, the question might then become, well, okay, if if that's the truth, then if I need to go, I need a direction.

I need to know where to go. And here's the big thing that I would ask back to you. Again, another thing that we're going to come back to throughout this entire series. Who is closest to you but furthest from Jesus. And I mean this geographically.

I mean this in your heart. Maybe you have a certain people group or a certain cause that you feel very passionate about. But God has placed you and positioned you and given you passions for people as you encounter them to know and love Jesus.

What if that really difficult coworker, the one that drives you crazy, just actually needs to meet Jesus. Like that's what I'm talking about. Because God has placed you in a spot where you can simply just say, "God, I'm available. God, use me. " But here's the second hangup.

What do we do when we get there. What do we do when we get to those conversations. How do we bring somebody to the next step.

And Jesus shares that in the great commission. He says, "Make disciples of all nations. " And then he talks about how to do that.

He says, "Baptize them in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit and teach them to obey everything that I've commanded you. " You see, Jesus doesn't give three disconnected assignments here. What he tells his disciples and shows us is that the mission is to make disciples.

And how you do that is by baptizing them and by helping them learn and teach and obey. Right now, let me break this down a little bit because as I was 15 and somebody said the word disciple or disciplehip, I had no idea what that mean meant. And so here's your short definition. A disciple is very at its simplest a follower of Jesus who makes followers of Jesus.

And so that's all discipleship is is that we follow Jesus's lead and we help other people to follow that lead. And how do we do that. Jesus breaks it down. He says first you baptize.

Now baptism is different than what we did with child dedication. Baptism is your public declaration of faith. We're actually going to watch a baptism a little later here today, but that is your way of saying, "I believe in Jesus and I want everybody to know about it and I want everybody to hear my story.

" That doesn't mean you have it all figured out. That doesn't mean you don't have any doubts. That just means Jesus has changed my life and I want other people to hear about it.

Jesus has changed my life and I want everyone to know. That is the first step. That is what it means to find Jesus.

And then he says to teach them to obey. Now, this can kind of hit the ear wrong depending on how we were brought up and and what our family upbringing was like because the word obey and teach kind of intimidates us, right. Obey kind of sounds like a but like I I have no choice.

But it's not that kind of teaching and obeying. You see, teaching becomes very intimidating to us because we automatically disqualify ourselves. And I've heard this so many times and it gets really just man, my my pastor heart kind of breaks when I hear it. When I hear somebody say, "Well, I don't have a degree in this stuff or you know, I don't really know any of these things or know you know all the nuance. " Yeah, but you know something.

God has changed your life in some way. And God wants to teach you while you're teaching others. And so listen to me. As you teach others, this beautiful thing happens in the kingdom in the context of the church where Jesus is teaching you.

And so everybody in this room, if you go and you share your faith and you articulate your faith and you articulate your hope that you found in Jesus and each person you are you are sharing that with each person you're teaching what a disciple is or what God's love means. Each time you're doing that, you are hearing your own words and you are almost cementing this belief into your heart that wow, I articulated that way stronger this time than I did the last time. And that doesn't happen unless you're doing it right. It's like working out. If I go and run like 17 miles right now, guess what.

My legs are going to be dead, right. But if I run a mile each week and add a mile each week to that run, what's going to happen. I'm going to build up my endurance. The same thing happens in your faith.

That as you share your faith, as you become on fire for God, like it will start to really make sense to you. But it doesn't happen unless you go, it doesn't happen unless you're willing to go and do those things. And as a church, I want you to not only be able to teach, but I want you to be able to learn. And so this whole idea of making followers of Jesus that make followers of Jesus is really what the church is.

It's disciplehip in action. Spoiler alert. What we're doing here today is not just church. This is not the only expression of church that happens at destination. It happens in the conversations that happen after service today.

It's happening right now in destination kids as they hear the love of Jesus. It happens in our growth groups. And this is why growth groups is so important. By the way, if I haven't stressed this enough, I want to say this.

This is really the meat of what we do. It's not just on Sundays. It's those conversations in homes. It's those conversations of where you hear how other people have figured it out or not figured it out in the ways that you can encourage and grow. And so, please don't miss the opportunity to sign up for one of these because your life will be changed.

You will grow in relationship. You will grow in your knowledge of Jesus and how to read the Bible and how to do a lot of these things. And we're going to talk about growth groups throughout this series.

But disciplehip is not just happening here on Sundays. I want to say two other ways that we're going to do this, too. In the future, I'm looking forward to Destination Church being able to disciple youth.

We're getting really excited about launching a youth ministry. And so if God's tugging on your heart that man, I don't know if I could teach an adult, but I could sure teach a teenager that probably forgot what I said. So that is the place for you to exercise that gift.

The other thing that we believe at destination about discipleship is we believe in resourcing you. And so when I'm up here and I'm talking, you'll hear a lot of things like you know, I want you to be opening your Bibles every week. And in order to do that, I want to give you guides and different ways of getting there.

So in all of these different message series, I'm putting together different resources to give to growth groups to give to you as you dive further into the gospel. We want to be a church that is ultimately finding and following Jesus. So to recap, here's the great commission is we have to go we make disciples and we do that by baptizing and teaching people how to follow Jesus. And lastly, Jesus leaves us with this last call. He says, "Know that I am with you, that God is always with you.

" He says, "And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. " Sit with this for a second. God is with you.

God is with you. And that should be able to be our weapon to stand against the fear, to stand against the unknowns, to say, "Well, I I don't know if I'm good enough or if I can figure this out or if God can really use me. " You need to remember that God is with you. You see, apart from God, none of these things are possible.

I would not have found the hope that I found away from my depression if it wasn't for Jesus. That man's story was void without the presence of Jesus, with God with him. And guys, God is with you.

Okay, this is the part of the message where we're allowed to get a little excited that God is with you. And I think that if that is true, then all things are on the table, right. If we have the creator of the universe, the one who makes breath in your lungs happen and he is with you, that means we don't need to fear about any of these things. You ready for it.

Ephesians says it like this. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine according to his power, his authority at work in us. At work within us. That means that the hope that Jesus gives, you have access to.

That mean the love that all of the things that the Bible talks about, we can tap into that because we have a loving God who wants a relationship with us, who wants to use us to change just one more life. Do you believe that about yourself. >> Do you really believe that about yourself. That God wants to use you.

That God wants to use you to build this church, to build the kingdom, because he does. And you can think of so many excuses to say, "Man, I'm too tired. Man, I got so much going on.

Man, I got" And it doesn't take much to know that the God of the universe is with you. To know that when you're too tired, you say, "God, can you give me the energy. When you're too upset, God, can you give me peace, like you can call on him because he is with you and he can do immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine.

And I know for for me up here, I I talk a lot about our mission statement, which is to find and follow Jesus. But I truly believe that each and every one of you has kingdom worldchanging potential. I believe that. >> I believe that God wants to use you in incredible ways.

And so I believe that God wants to use this church in incredible ways. So I've shared the mission of our church before, but for the first time from stage, I would like to share our vision with you. Now before you put it up, don't put it up yet. No, we're not. Okay, we're good.

, before I share this with you, I want to explain the difference. A mission statement is a direction. It's a destination, no pun intended, on where you're going.

A vision statement is the map to which we use to get there. And so, it is a checkpost to see what what are we really working towards, where are we going towards. And so this is your really easy vision statement. It is 10% in 10 years.

10% in 10 years. We want to help 10% of East Bethl, that's 1,500 people to find and follow Jesus by 2035. Now, I know you got a lot of different things going through your head. So, let me let me hit both of them. First one that you're going through your head, that's a big number, right.

But guess what. We got a big God. He can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. So he could do that in a day if he wanted to, right. >> He could do that in a day.

A lot of you see that number and you look around and you're like, we're in a school, right. Or you think, , we're, you know, , is this small church going to turn into something so big where I don't know anybody. Now, let me address both of those things.

First of all, the vision of a church is not to get a building because what happens when you get a building and and you've just you've gotten there. Okay, we're done now. No, because the building is just a tool that God wants to use. Do we want a building. Of course we do.

But it is just a tool. It is not the vision of the church. Secondly, what I would say to this is the big number represents multiplication.

Because the truth is is that we as a church plant have already put away thousands of dollars to start another church that is not associated at all with destination. And we'll send out people to go start that church. And so we will be quite literally planting churches and we will be sending people out into the mission field.

And let's be truthful that we will help people find and follow Jesus, but people will move away cuz for some reason half of you guys have talked to me about moving to Florida, which by the way, you're a part of this number. You're bringing the gospel to Florida. And so you are part of this. It isn't about keeping people in the seats.

It is not about your butt being in the seat. It is about you being equipped to go out and change one more life, to change one more person for eternity. >> Now, I want to just go back to this very simple theme from the beginning that the gospel made its way to you on the way to somebody else.

And I want to show you this vision in action. This vision that we are helping people find and follow Jesus and that Jesus uses the stories around here to bring somebody to eternity. So I want to share a story from a very good friend of mine named Tim.

Tim was given a timeline on his life. But before that timeline and that diagnosis, Tim was being moved towards God with different questions and different kind of wonderings and Tim got invited to destination and last November raised his hand to accept Christ. Later on, Tim would would go through some more complications and not be able to make baptism service.

As I mentioned earlier, baptism is this first step. And and Tim was was upset about this. But luckily, even with health restrictions in place, we went to his home and we baptized Tim. And while we were there, Tim shared with me just a little bit of his experience at Destination Church. And I just want to take 60 seconds for you guys to hear from Tim from this video.

>> Absolutely. You do a phenomenal job. All of you do.

And it's welcoming. You don't feel like, you know, just a fly on the wall. It's It feels like a family. And and as it gets bigger and bigger, I think it'll remain that way. It's not like the church that I went to when as a kid.

They had they had prayed over me. I just I had to go up there. I just had to. And that's when I knew that he was back with me or I was back with him.

I find more more joy now just the way that the word is received. Anybody can understand it. It's all based upon the Bible and faith. >> Tim, do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. >> I baptize you in the name of the Father, >> the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

>> All right. On August 18th, Tim passed away. And I got some moments with him in his final days. And he looked at me as I was leaving the last conversation that I ever had with him.

And he said this to me, and I don't think I'll ever forget it. I don't know if I would have the assurance of heaven and life with Jesus if it wasn't for this church. >> That is the life change. That is the one more that I'm talking about. So the big question for you is who is your Tim.

Who is the person that God has placed closest to you but furthest from him. And maybe you're here today and maybe you haven't found that hope. And I just want to tell you from experience that a life with Jesus is a life that you will never regret and a life that you will never look back on.

And so I just want to invite you to close your eyes and bow your heads. We're going to close here in worship. And I just want to pray for you.

God, I thank you so much that the gospel has made its way to everybody in this room. Now, God, we have two invitations. God, for some of us, the invitation is simple. It is just to declare you over our lives. That Jesus, we need your hope, that we need your grace, but most of all, we need you.

And so God, I pray for anybody who wants to make a first time decision to find and follow you this morning. And I pray for the rest of us that we would be people that go that are motivated to go and change one more life in Jesus name.