I am amazed!
I am literally trying to find the words to describe what took place today at NewSpring…better than that…what has taken place over the last several weeks. Let me see if I can recap…
Two weeks ago I did talk on personal evangelism…about how many of our friends and family members are one conversation/invitation away from coming to church and eventually meeting Christ. At the end of the service we had people write the names of people down that they wanted to see come to Christ and walk them forward and place them on the alter…a total of 3,814 names were placed there…and the prayers began.
Last week the message our team put together was simple—Jesus is not just AN option when it comes to getting to God—He’s the ONLY option. I did a talk about our need to receive Christ and then challenged people to walk forward and do just that—and we saw 214 people respond.
Then today I did a talk on the need to go public with Christ through baptism. So many times we think that our faith in Christ is a personal, private issue—when in reality He has called us all to go public…and the main way we go public is through our baptism. I challenged those in our church who had received Christ but had never been baptized to do so…I told our morning crowd, “We are baptizing tonight…you have no excuse.” And I told our crowd tonight, “We have shorts, T-shirt, and towels for you…you have no excuse.”
Well—tonight we saw 402 people baptized! YES, you read that right—402 people stood and said, “Jesus Christ is my Savior and Lord.” 402 publicly identified themselves by being immersed in the water grave as a symbol of what Christ did for them on the cross.
It literally took an hour and a half to baptize everyone…one of the pastors baptizing had to get someone to relieve him because he nearly dehydrated…people clapped and cheered all through the night…it was amazing.
To the pastors reading this—let me be very clear…this was not a “come if you want to feel better about yourself” baptism. I clearly explained that baptism is something done AFTER salvation…and that you only need to be baptized if you have not been baptized since receiving Christ. As people responded we had counselors meet with them individually to make sure they had received Jesus and that this was not some type of “re-dedication.” We are SERIOUS when it comes to this stuff…
And yet 402 people were baptized.
I told our church this tonight…and I will say it here…I believe this is only the beginning! If you study the Great Awakenings in church history—the started in unknown places among unknown people…they started at a place where only God could get the glory for what was going on…and that is exactly what is happening here.
I believe we are going to see more and more amazing work—more lives changed—more marriages saved—more kids get their mother and father back—more brokenhearted healed—more poor people served—more excluded become included—more addicts being set free—more of the presence of God…and I believe that our community is going to be continually changed.
If you are a member or regular attender of NewSpring…please…stop sometime today and do two things…
#1 - Tell God “thank You!”
#2 - Ask Him to continue to use our church as a place where people are drawn to Him!
Yeah God! WOW—I am so pumped!!!
If you want to hear the messages I referred to earlier—you can download them all here…
If you want to see a picture of what our atrium looked like tonight—check out Ken’s blog here.
DON’T MISS FIRST WEDNESDAY—IT’S GOING TO ROCK!!!