Video Transcript: Connection 6 - Kingdom

All right, welcome back. We are in the effective communication class. And we've been looking at the seven connections, your most important connections in life, but also the most important avenues, where you can learn how to communicate, especially from others, we looked at our personal communication to God, our communication with a spouse if you're married, communication within the family, communication among friends and support groups and small groups. Last time, we looked at the whole communication thing, in the church, preaching all the different ways that communication happens in a church. And I hope you can see that the circles are getting bigger and bigger, your personal walk with God, marriage, family, friends, church, and now we're going to the next one, which is the kingdom. So you perhaps belong to a local church. There's services every Sunday, there's activities, you're part of this group. But God is doing more than just what is happening in your own church. In fact, within your own city or village, there might be other churches, and maybe you get together once in a while with some of those. And then in your country. And then in the world. There's, there's actually, billions of Christians all over the world. In virtually every corner of the globe, there might be a small little group or a large group of people worshiping God, doing sermon doing service projects, all the different things that churches do. So how do we connect to not just what God is doing in our own local situation? But how do we communicate or in which is a two way street? Listening. So if you look at it, look at it. Okay, I gotta learn how to work this thing. Basic Communication path for the kingdom is talking, listening, repeatedly, it's the same three things that we've learned with all the other connections. If you want to connect to God, it takes talking, listening repeatedly, you want a connection with your spouse, talking, listening repeatedly, your family, your church, or friends, it doesn't matter how big the circle is, it's the same communication path, talking, listening repeatedly. Well, what specifically does that mean when you start thinking about the kingdom? Well, one way of talking and listening in the kingdom is to be a part of ecumenical events and conferences. So every time you go to a conference, where other leaders from other churches are there, then you're involved in this whole kingdom communication. Or you go to an ecumenical events, or maybe it's a joint service, in your town, or wherever it might be online resources. When you go to the internet, and you listen to a YouTube sermon, or you connect to someone else's website, ministry that they're doing somewhere else, via online, you're, you're going beyond your own church, and at least listening to what others have to say, church history. God has been doing things I mean, God is working right now to two plus billion people all around the world right now. But God has been working for, you know, 1000s of years, and you can connect to what God has done. And learn from it. By looking and studying church history, denominations. Christian leaders Institute Christian leaders Institute is a world wide ministry. It's not just in your local situation, all over the world, over 180 different countries. So when you connect to CLI, you're connecting with the kingdom. So we're going to look at each one of these a little bit. So ecumenical events, and one of the things you can do is visit other churches. I have a local church, and so I preach almost every single Sunday. And so my ability to get out there is somewhat limited. So when I do have a free Sunday, I like to go somewhere else. And I listen to someone else, and I experienced a different kind of service. Back in the 80s, I planted a church in Vancouver, British Columbia, but before I did that, I had like a three month period where I didn't have to preach every Sunday. And I spent my time visiting other churches and seeing what they did. And I learned a lot about preaching. And I learned a lot about how churches are organized and how I might do things. Sponsor joint services. If you're in a village or a town, try to unite all the pastors in the churches together and have a joint service, we're going to be doing that in our city or our town. This July, tried to bring all the churches in our town together. And we're going to have an outside service. Be a sister church to another country, my son married a girl from Ecuador. So he is living there with my two grand children. And I was there with my wife in December. And the local church situation is not that great. So I'm talking to my son about how can we how can I help you plant a church there or something. And if that works, we could actually be a sister church with our church here in the United States. And we can even Skype in some Sunday mornings. And you know, I have to refresh my Spanish, and who knows what might happen, but what an opportunity for our church, what an opportunity for whatever we get started there. Online resources, listen to sermons of respected preachers. Today, it's so easy, you can just Google anyone that you might have heard of, and there's online resources, you can listen to my sermons if you want there, I think you can YouTube them, or Vimeo, I forget what it is. But you can just Google someone, and you can listen to almost anyone that you've ever heard of. And people you haven't heard of research sermons by looking at what other respected preachers have done. If you use their ideas, make sure you give them credit. Okay. That's the one thing that sometimes people don't do. They grabbed online resources, and they copy paste, and they don't give credit to a person. Make sure you give credit. And you know, it's not a big deal. And I know the tendency is to think, well, you know, then people won't respect me because I use someone else's material. Actually, people will respect you, they'll respect you more like I did. This is this idea is not original to me. I first heard it from a pastor in California. And then you say it is not a big deal. Church history, study the sermons of preachers in the past. Luther, Calvin, Billy Graham recently died. Now Rick Warren and TD Jakes. They're not preachers in the past. They're still preachers, but I don't know why I put them there. But I remember in the 80s. So this is in the past, I was in California for some conference, or I forget why I was there. But it was just before we planted a church. And I heard of this. Rick Warren person who was meeting in a school had started the church a couple of years before their meeting in a school. So I went and visited, and I got to know him a little bit. And I listened to his sermons. He had cassette tapes at that time of his sermons. And I listened to a bunch of them early on. And, and he really taught me how to make an outline. I know we've had a whole session on making an outline for your communication, speeches, and sermons and so on. But, but and I'm not sure I told all of this, but he really helped me understand the power of the outline, because he wrote them all out, and he had filled in the blank, and he handed them out to the people. And so I did that for eight years. I made outlines and I really understood the power of making an outline. And I can see from a lot of the pastors and preachers that I've heard, that, that a lot of pastors and preachers and speakers are all over the place. And they're all over the place because they don't have an outline. They don't have, they don't have an organizing principle and people in the audience need something to organize your speech with. So you need something that says, for example, five things that the Bible says about parenting. Number one, do not embitter your children. That's one thing. Encourage your children. Don't be like Samuel and Eli and put your ministry first and your family last you You can find five things. But all five points, go back to five things that the Bible says about parenting. And every point goes under that. And the second thing that I learned is people like to know where they are at in the speech. You know, a lot of sermons are rambling, they go here, they go there, they, and people have no idea when we're going to get home. It's like you're driving down the road. And the pastor is describing this and this and that, and you have no idea how long this is going to go. And people like to know, when they travel, they want to know, are we halfway? Are we three quarters? Are we close? Are we getting there? And so it's so very simple. We're talking about five things that the Bible says about parenting, number one, number two, number three, where are you were on number three, how many more points are there? There's two more. So people know where they're going. Now, a lot of times pastors, they just can't figure out what what is this organizing principle. If you if you can't figure it, if you can't sharpen it and get it down to something very specific, then go broad. I mean, you could have a sermon like this. The today's sermon is five random things that I found in the Bible. Five random things. So random thing number one, random three, thing number two, random thing number three, people don't care. It's all fitting under this random, this big topic. And they just need to know what the guide posts are along the way, and how far we are, and they'll be happy. So I learned that from Rick Warren, I learned that from getting outside of my local situation, outside of my denomination, into the kingdom, and to see what's going on and how God is blessing other people. And I could learn from them, TD Jakes, a whole different culture. I've listened to a bunch of his sermons, and he's alive. And it's a whole different style, the organizing principle is, is more like there's a thing at the center. And we're talking here we're talking here we're talking, it's not a logical progression. I grew up in a real logic world, this point, follow this point, this, this, this, this leads to this. In other cultures, it's like we have this topic. And we're just going to shoot around it. We're going to here we're going to be here, we're going to be here, we're going to be here, but we're surrounding this one thing that we're trying to say. Alright, read biographies of Christian leaders of the past. If you were raised in a Catholic situation, and now you come to the Protestant way of thinking, you have to read “Here I Stand”, which is the story of Martin Luther is, it's not a very big book. But it gives you the whole background of the whole Catholic the whole reformation. And your whole view on on the whole thing will be enlightened. “This Was John Calvin” is just a small little book. I don't know if you can find it anymore. But John Calvin was one of the premier influencers in the Protestant Reformation. Very smart, intelligent person he wrote, it's called “Calvin's Institutes”. It's a classic thing on doctrine and thinking about the church. But here, this book, this was John Calvin is the story of his life, his personal life, his personal walk with God, it's an incredible story of an incredible man. And it builds, you know, reading that, you know, I studied the doctrine, long before before I knew the man and getting to know the man makes all the difference. East Malaysia, I was in the Bible league for six years, the Bible League was a large organization trying to get the Bible into countries all around the world. I helped start the ministry of the Bible League in Malaysia. And while I was there, I met indigenous churches that were started by missionaries from England 60 years before I read the biography of one of them, a person no one has ever heard of, but an incredible, incredible story. He and his wife. They did their devotions together every single morning. They were interned by the Japanese during World War II. I mean, they, they gave their lives to the people of Malaysia and to see the sacrifice and when you read a book like that, it was you know, and I love How he, I love how he ended if he's, you know, towards the end of his life, he's sick, he's dying. And the last little bit in last little paragraph is, I have been blessed with a mate to go through all of this. And I've been blessed to do. So to work in God's kingdom, and doing the thing I really enjoyed doing. And it was, you know, when I read that it was like, Yeah, that's what I want. I want to I want to serve God. And I want God to use all the gifts that he's given me to do that, and that's a blessed life. It might be hard, it might be a struggle. But that's a blessed life, what reading that empowers me for my ministry here, getting out and listening to something that's happening out there. And this is a thing that's even in the past, blesses my ministry in my life. Now I study church history and doctrine of the past to help you communicate better God's Word in the present. I didn't understand that, you know, when I was growing up, and I was going to the college and then later seminary, I'm part of a denomination. And I was like, let's just just just read the Bible, and do what the Bible says. And in my denomination, we have all these doctrines, and all this church management, all these traditions, all this stuff, that's not necessarily in the Bible, and in church history, and what does John Calvin say, and Martin Luther and all this stuff, and I thought, why don't we just read the Bible and do what it says. Then a wise person, one for one of my professors, said to me, he said, Okay, of course, we want to do what the Bible says. Of course, that is the thing that we're following. But the problem is, when you open the Bible, you don't just read the Bible, you have glasses on, you know how when you wear sunglasses, if you have, if they're pink, then everything has a pink hue. If they're blue, then everything is blue, is the green, everything is green, or blue, or whatever. So it takes on the color of your glasses. Whenever you read the Bible, you read through glasses, and what are these glasses, your personal experience, the church that maybe you grew up with, or the church that you first went to the friends that you have, the language that you speak, your experience, is the glasses that you look through, and you're not aware of the color of the glasses, you're not aware of how the culture you've been raised in is now you know that you see the words of the Bible. And so what this professor said is, so instead of just reading the Bible, with your own glasses, with the limitation of your experience, your one little life, why not try to read through the glasses of other Christians, people who have walked with God, people that God has spoken to people that God has used, both in the present, and in the past? See the Bible, read the Bible, not just from your little myopic view. But the Combined view, people that God has been working through for many, many years. That's what doctrine is. That's what church history is. It's taking you out of your own little self absorbed, arrogant view of things. So, of course, we want to read the Bible and do what the Bible says. But don't limit what the Bible says by what you alone. Think the Bible says. So I learned that in the communication with the kingdom denominations, why be in a denomination that denomination is is when the Protestant Reformation happened, Martin Luther started thing. He was from Germany. And so the followers of Martin Luther in Germany were called Lutheran. I'm from the Netherlands. Originally, my family came from there. And John Calvin, who lived in Switzerland sort of got the Reformation going in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, though although As countries, and they tend tended to follow Him, and that they are called, they have the word reformed in their name, the Reformed Church of America, I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church. John Knox, Presbyterian. All the all the different denominations really follow some local situation in Europe than they came to America. And they continued on. And so in the Protestant world, we have all these different groups. And some of them have different slant on some of the doctrines. But generally, they sort of hold together, the differences aren't that great. So all these names really came from the local situation of how the Protestant Reformation started. And then others have been added, now we have independent churches, and on and on and on it goes. But but but denominations are a group of churches that have sort of banded together to form a place of encouragement is to hold each other accountable to sort of like a league, you know, football, I'm talking about the world football, here in the United States, we call it soccer. But there's leagues and championship things. And it's done by countries. And so those are organizing principles, to put band people like minded together, so why be in a denomination. You have the combined wisdom of many other godly people, both in the present age and before banding together, you have an accountability system that will help to keep you from arrogantly doing your own thing. And, you know, that's what I was telling you before. My experience was I wanted this, let's just follow the Bible, which meant, let's just follow what I think the Bible says. See, that's arrogant. No, let's follow what let's follow the combined wisdom of a lot of people, not just one person. So that's the problem with some independent churches where a pastor stands up and he goes, God has told me the truth. And now I'm going to tell you what it is. So God only works through one person. God hasn't been at work for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years through hundreds of people through different countries lands experiences, let's learn from all of them. Christian leaders Institute is a kingdom enterprise. It's not a local church. It's a support system for local churches, all around the world. It's a support system for leaders in churches, it's a kingdom thing. Take the preaching course. Okay, if you if you want to learn how to communicate better, we have a preaching course here at CLI, take that course. And the combined wisdom that has been learned that courses, many examples from different preachers all over the world, you will learn a lot in taking that class, take as many classes as you can. So that you will be equipped with great content. Whenever you do have the opportunity to speak, preach, lead a Bible study and or share the hope that is in you. With anyone that you meet. So CLI, Christian leaders Institute has all kinds of courses, all kinds of topics. The more you learn about these things, and stuff that's been happening in the kingdom for hundreds of years, that's what you'll learn. You will take all of that learning and now you actually have content with which you can communicate to others. Join the CLI network. So there's a directory. When you go to the website, you can look up. You can look up people in what degrees and what certificates that they have, where they're from. The little town that my son lives in, in Ecuador is Pujili, which is only two hours outside of Quito, which is the Capital. And so I was talking to my son and my daughter in law about you know, maybe we should start something here because the church there is dead. There's 20,000 people in the town and the cathedral right at the center of town. At Christmas time we were there. And I went and there were like 200 people. The whole thing was dead as a doornail. I like it was so negative that there's some Protestant churches there too. But they're negative, negative, negative, you know, the people need something positive. So I was talking to him about doing something. And then when I got here, the director of our new CLI Spanish department said, is just getting started, there's courses and people are starting to take these courses in Spanish, some of the same courses that you're taking, but now they're in Spanish. And the director Wally De La Fuente said that we actually have a student in Quito. So, you know, so you can connect to other students, there might be students from right in the same town that you are, or close to you. And if you connect to that person, see, it's the combined wisdom, you're going to learn how to communicate more if you can connect with people that are doing things around you. So that's one of the areas that you can do as well connect with CLI graduates that I was telling you about. Start a mentor center, we're starting to think about that. It's very difficult to take classes like this, that you're doing this, you're online, you're listening, you have to take these quizzes. And there's no one telling you to do that tomorrow or the next day. It takes a lot of self discipline, as you probably well know, even to get this far in the class. So what if you could be surrounded by people who are doing the same thing. So you might start something like that you might look and see what students might be near you, or you yourself, you're starting CLI, talk to 5, 6, 7 people, get them going and commit to helping them and you will become like a mini seminary. You'd be starting your own little mini Institute, wherever you are. And it becomes a great joy to help other people. But I guarantee you if you're helping other people, you will be helped as well. So get out into the Kingdom don't sit in your one little place. God is doing great things all over the world. And today, more than any other time in the in the history of Christianity, the ability to get out there in the world is far easier. So get out and do it.