Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / August 16, 2015 | discovertbc.com

Transcript

August 16, 2015 | discovertbc.com · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, there's art.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Also, these children, other children, have done art.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: You'll see it out.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's posted today in both uh buildings.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Over in the cab building, by the way, it's in that uh little sort of a lobby area where and it had lists the names of the kids and so forth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have photocopies of their art uh in the Mulvaine building.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Check that out, you'll you'll enjoy the children's art.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there's also children's art displayed uh by the children's rooms in the cab building.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be up this week and next week, and it's highly entertaining, especially the uh snake on a plane one, which I forget what Bible story that is.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: TBC's always had quite a connection with children's ministry, our founding pastor, uh uh uh after about 20 years, this is 1939 to the 1950s, when he left, he be he left to become the president of Child Evangelism Fellowship.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I used to correspond with him before he died because my parents were head of Child Evangelism Fellowship in Oregon.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I I want to talk to you today.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is Discovery Day, and as I put in your bulletin, this happens to be the same day of the last great gold rush in the American West.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's the very day when gold was discovered by a guy named George, who was salmon fishing at the Klondike River up in the Canadian Yukon, and we're hoping that today on Discovery Day, our annual Discovery Day, that perhaps you'll go out to that tent and you'll discover gold.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: That is, you'll discover a place where you can serve, where where your passions, where your gifts, uh uh, the things that God has put inside you can help you.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're on a sort of a at TBC, we we've tried to figure out what it is that turns people into fully devoted servants of Jesus Christ.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And stage one is of course discovering, discovering Jesus, discovering God, and that changes your life.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then after that, we we want you to get in small groups, some sort of connecting group like Sunday school, whatever.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that enriches your life.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But eventually, if you're going to become a fully devoted follower of Christ, you need to serve.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have a purpose-driven life, and so we want to help you find a place for you to serve.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: This morning we'll especially emphasize children.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to introduce you to Jason Brent, who you saw on the screen.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Last week, and by the way, next week we get back into our Root 66 series.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you're just visiting, we're on a series going through the Bible, 66 books, 66 Sundays.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Next Sunday, we begin the second third of that series at the book of Isaiah.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Last week, this is a five-minute review, we asked the question: why is it that some Christians are always eager to serve while others aren't motivated at all?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in a message entitled, Why I Can't Not Serve, from my favorite passage on this subject, 1 Corinthians 15, 8 through 10, we found that Paul gave us a reason for serving, which, of all the reasons in the Bible given for serving, is my favorite.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: When you think about the half a dozen major reasons given in the Bible for you and me to serve God and serve others, one is at Malachi chapter 3, God takes notice of it.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: He writes it in a book, he rewards people, he cares for his servants.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, we become like the servant Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve, and who after he washed his disciples' feet said, You ought to do the same thing.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's the way to become like me.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's what I'd like you to do.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Third reason for serving in the Bible, it meets the needs of God's people, and then the Lord gets praised by those we help.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's another reason.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the Lord loves it when we praise him, when we sing like we did this morning, and when those children that we help, like on the screen, they thank the Lord that we showed up.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But my favorite reason for serving is this one that it's my response of gratitude for his grace in my life.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we talked about last week from the passage in 1 Corinthians 15, which concludes where Paul concludes, it's by God's grace I am what I am.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: God's grace toward me wasn't wasted.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I worked more than anyone else, but not I, but God's grace that was with me.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we we made three points.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: We noticed that Paul said, I worked more than any of them.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And by that word for work in Greek is I worked to the point of exhaustion.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he's saying I worked more than any of the other apostles, to the point of exhaustion.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: He served the Lord that much.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And our question was, why did he do that?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he answers, it's because of God's grace.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I served to the point of exhaustion because of the grace of God.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: When I began to grasp the reality of the grace of God in my life, that grace became such a motivating force in my life that it drove me to serve God to the point of exhaustion.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Which led us to the question, what is it about the grace of God in your life, Paul, that motivated you in this way?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we found that he was looking back primarily to his point of conversion.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: He was blown away by the fact that God's amazing grace had saved a wretch like him.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which, as you know, comes out of the song.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: That line doesn't come from the Bible, but out of John Newton, the slave owner's song, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound that saved a wretch, for saved a little slave owner, like me.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And where we find that in this text is in his first lines when he says, Last of all, as to one abnormally born, God appeared even to me.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now he's referring when he says, appeared even to me, to that moment on the Damascus road where Saul, Paul's former name, was Saul, where he was heading to Damascus to imprison and kill Christians.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And God appeared to him on the road, Acts chapter 9, and he was suddenly and soundly saved.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And as he thinks back on that, he says, I I that moment just amazes me because he says, I he appeared to me and he saved me.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we ask, uh, what does he mean as to one abnormally born?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we found out it does not mean what it traditionally is thought of to mean, which is that Paul was born again after the other apostles.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: He got a later appearance.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, that word abnormally born is just one Greek word, ektroma, which is a shocking word.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: It means the products of a miscarriage or an abortion.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he's characterizing himself as basically as a horrific human being in heaven's eyes.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: As the commentaries say, he's it's referring to something that in the Bible was considered horrible or freakish, what pagan people did with miscarriages or abortions, just heaving them alongside the road so that as you traveled by you'd you'd see these things.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it was awful.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we said, listen, to us who are pro-life, when we see this, this this evokes our compassion, not our horror.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: But we understand that what Paul is saying is when I look at myself and how I resisted Jesus, I was as horrifying as the product of an abortion to heaven.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: But when I think back at who I was and what I did, I was ghastly and disgusting.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm blown away by the grace of Christ in saving me, the freak that I was, in moving me from abortion to apostle.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, God's grace saved a wretch like me.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Ugliest dog in the world, winter 2014.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the point is grace changes everything.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I can't not serve, says the Apostle Paul, is my gratitude for God's grace.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then we illustrated that with a clip from that famous uh story, Les Miz, where Jean Valjean, uh deserving nothing but jail and perhaps execution for stealing the silver of the bishop, is forgiven by the bishop, saved by the bishop in that story, and spends the rest of his life in gratitude for that gratia, for that grace of the bishop.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I have to, I decided I would tell you why I picked this one picture of the Apostle Paul throughout this.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: That this is actually a picture that I've characterized the Apostle Paul, actually a picture out of Le Miz.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is Hugh Jackman, as some of you will know him from, you know, some fantasy movies he makes.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: But Hugh Jackman grew up in Australia, uh, a son of a born-again Christian whose father loved Billy Graham and always took Hugh as a boy to Billy Graham rallies, and Hugh is gonna spend his own money, come up with an Apostle Paul film in the next year.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And since he played Jean Valjean and will play Paul, I thought that would be highly appropriate.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: That that's extra, no blessing from that.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: So um well, what what I want to do is I want to I want to share that with you, our motivation for service and why we're here.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what I'd like to do now is I I want to introduce you to Jason Brent.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Jason, would you come on up?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to share with you one of the opportunities, the greatest, I suppose, opportunity for service that you can have at TBC, because well, there are more spots for children, you know, than than anything else.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you take one of these and I'll take the other?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh Jason, would you introduce us to the family that's on the screen?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Would you tell us about them?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, like Jim said, my name is Jason Brent, and this is a family on the screen there, and you probably recognize me as the biggest, tallest one there at the back.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But uh to the to the left there, uh my right in the picture is my wife Angie, and then uh to the from the from the right-hand side, if you're looking at it, yeah, from the right-hand side, uh, our oldest daughter Henley, who's nine, and then Athen is over by my wife Angie, who's seven, and then Enoch, who's five, that we just adopted last September from China.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Big.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when you were adopting him when you went over, what did you find out were the first words he said about you, your your adopted boy from China, when he saw you?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: When we first saw him, he was very terrified, and he kept saying him, Andrew and he's big, big, very big.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that was an interesting thing going to his province in China.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was definitely the biggest person that we saw the whole two weeks there.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's great to have you on staff, and at the same time, to use this as an introduction.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, in the adoption, as you were sharing with me and with Doug Will earlier, uh I love stories where you you can see clearly that God is working.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and to be honest, as I listened to your story about adopting him, uh, Enoch, I I just kept thinking, wow, this is like a God thing.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and can you can you cut that down a little bit?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, by the way, you can listen, I I can send it to you online, and it's just this wonderful story.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: He shared the lengthy story at another church in town.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: But but tell us some of the God moments.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: You you you it's been about four years since your wife and you actually it was in premarital you guys talked about adopting.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: My wife was uh God had placed on her heart a very, very early age as she was growing up that she would like to adopt adopt, give a home to a child that did not have a home.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we talked about that as we met, and then going through premarital counseling, and we kind of discussed, well, if we're gonna have if we if God blessed it and we could have a couple biological children that we would look at adopting.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was I was all for it.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I loved children, always loved working with children.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but you know, with the adopt with adopting and your life gets busy and that kind of thing, uh, you know, we had Henley in Athen, and then I we knew very clearly that God was telling us, okay, this time to start this process to adopt.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: But uh one thing about adoption is that it's a time-consuming process, it's an emotionally consuming process, but it's also a financially consuming process.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh they told us it would take about$30,000 to$35,000 to adopt.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you didn't have that money to do that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we didn't have that money.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: You have that few thousand.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh, but in faith we decided, okay, we're going to go ahead and start to adopt.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: How were you going to raise that money?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, we uh we kind of thought we'd do it the old-fashioned way and and and work and save and work and save.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I did a couple house painting jobs for people.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: But Angie had this idea.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Angie then she said, hey, let's let's have a garage sale.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if anyone likes garage sales here.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I mean we had a lot of money to raise, and she said, Well, I think that if we have a a garage sale, we could raise$8,000.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: $800?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: $8,000.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: $800.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: $8,000, which, you know, I thought a couple hundred.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I thought she was a little bit a little bit crazy.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but we went ahead and and asked people for donations and that kind of thing, and ended up filling our whole house with stuff.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we ended up having to start the the adoption or the the ground cell early, you know, a day early, and people came at six o'clock in the morning that we didn't know and said, Hey, this is for uh you're adopting okay, I'll help.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they helped set up everything and just one thing after another God used um to build our faith and in the adoption story.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the first grot cell we had, uh the first day we made$1,700.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I was super ecstatic because I didn't think$8,000 was even.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what did Angie think?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um she was crying, actually.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um she said, Well, you don't understand groud cells very well.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, you're right.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I Grod cells are not my favorite thing to do in the world.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I was ex ecstatic that we made that.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean you don't understand garage cells?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: She said, Well, everyone bought all our big items.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We lived on Gage Boulevard at the time, and so we had a lot of traffic going by.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so anyway, they bought all our good stuff, our good junk, you know.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so she was just worried about it.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I said, it wasn't a very truly spiritual thing, but I said, Well, let's just pray about it and see what happens.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so we prayed, and about five minutes later, uh, this older couple, which I found out was a brother and a sister, came and they said, Hey, you've got a lot of stuff.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, we had a lot of stuff.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then they said, Well hey, if you're raising money for an adoption, do you want some more stuff?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we said, Well, yeah, that's kind of you know, hopefully that we will get some more and raise money to to adopt this child.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so they took us to their parents' house.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: One was from California, one was from New York.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: They'd been coming back for years trying to trying to pick up the house and trying to get it ready to s to sell.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was in total disarray.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Their parents were gone by now?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they had passed away.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so they take you to their house, which is full of stuff?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Full of stuff, yes.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they just started throwing things in my truck, and uh then throughout the that next couple days they kept saying, Hey, we'll call you when we have more stuff.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'd pull into the in the driveway with my truck.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was kind of pandemonium.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people would be there at the ground sale, they'd see the truck coming, people would flock the truck, say, Hey, I want that one, I want that one, and start bidding for it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that it was just truly, it was truly amazing how much junk that we had, or good, I mean stuff that we had to sell.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that house that they that they were trying to fix up and everything at the end of our garage sale, they still had tons of stuff in the house.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they asked us, would you think about buying this house?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, I mean, the it was in really, really bad shape.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: It needed a lot of work.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: But my wife and I talked about it and thought, yeah, we really felt like that would be a good thing.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we went ahead and bought that house.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then we had to have another garage sale the next week because it was full of stuff, and this that's this garage sale here that you can see just stuff everywhere.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, long story short, we had about four big garage sales end up making over twenty thousand dollars for the garage sales.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and totally to God's glory, I agree.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Garage sales, twenty thousand dollars.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the cool thing about the house as well is that we didn't think we were going to move.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: We had a trashy new house.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that trashy new house.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a one-story house, it was a ranch style house that was as big as our two-story house on gauge.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And um in in the middle of our adoption, we had switched over to uh adopting a special needs child from China instead of uh from the African program.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that just really touched my heart about that story is that we decided to move into this new house, not even really knowing why, but God knew we didn't even have our referral for our son who has arthorposis and couldn't walk up can't walk upstairs and has to have braces on his legs.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So God knew what we needed even before we knew what we were needed.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I told you, isn't that a great story?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Just amazing.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you mention you mentioned it cost you 60,000 rather than so it ended up so since we it took about four years to adopt it, it ended up costing sixty thousand dollars.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, uh story after story, I had a youth pastor that kind of was my youth pastor growing up.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: He lives in Ohio.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: He called, heard about it, said, Hey, I've got a vehicle.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want it to sell?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh just people were so gracious, and uh, people just walk up and give us money or give us stuff to sell, and uh we ended up providing the money, adopting our child last uh Enoch last September, and uh totally without I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but but God's really had your back, you and and Angie and your kid.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, uh uh tell tell something else.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: I got about six, seven minutes here.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um your passion for children is something that's really impressed me.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you've had a passion for children your whole life, haven't you?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I say my my my mother, she was a first-grade teacher in the Seaman High School District in North Topeka.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you went to Logan and Seaman High School.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I went to Logan Seaman, uh Rochester, North Fairview over in the Siemens district, uh, North Topeka.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: No hand no hand clapping needed.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, uh so she she was she noticed at a very early age that I had a passion and an ability to work with children, be patient with children.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of energy.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm really kind of just a big kid.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so when I was in junior high, she would invite me to walk down from my junior high school down to her to her first grade classroom, and because my my school got out later than the elementary school, the junior high, I was able to, you know, read to the children, sing songs to the children, uh, help them, tutor them.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And really what she was doing in a very wise way was kind of you know stoking that fire of working with children, you know, at a very early age in my life.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Did you study this in college?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: So then I went to Manhattan Christian College, and I my my desire was to be an elementary school teacher at that when I first went to college.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I was going to class at Kansas State University and at Manhattan Christian College.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh my sophomore year, I kind of felt God's tugging and saying, Hey, why don't you think about ministry?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so I stopped taking my elementary education classes and just got a Christian education degree at Manhattan Christian.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: I've been impressed with how many places you've been in Topeka working with children.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: What are some of those places?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for the last 14 years I've been working in children's ministry at different ver different places.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I started out at Countryside Christian Church on K4 Highway in North Topeka.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh then I went and I worked as uh teacher and athletic director at Heritage Christian School, uh, then also a director of the daycare at North and Christian Church's Daycare in North Topeka, and then also children's pastor at Journey Church here in town.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: So well, we're really excited to have you.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now we've just built a children's building about a year ago, and our Awana program, uh, you probably know the figures better than I have.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: You've been hanging around with, you know, you've been getting tutored and hanging around and getting involved.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: How many do we now have in Iwana here?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh students.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And students we have I I found that this out this week.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have the the largest IWANA uh program in the city, and between 350 and 400 students that will come to the Iwana program, which means two things.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: It means we have a huge um ability to impact a lot of children for the gospel here at Topeka Bible Church.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Also means we need a lot of volunteers.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: So um yeah, over a hundred on Wednesday nights there.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now Sunday morning program is is also thriving.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we have uh the Orange Curriculum that is being taught uh from preschool through sixth grade.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh awesome curriculum, but we still need some people to help with it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I I did want to say uh, you know, I don't think there's anything more important than speaking and teaching foundational truths of Christ to children and to people at an early age.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: It can impact our world, it can impact their lives for their whole lifetime.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I did want to say, some of you here I know are like, well, children's ministry, I mean, they have a lot of energy, it's gonna take a lot of, you know.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you, I know there are some people here that are thinking, well, maybe, just maybe I might help if someone asks me or if just the perfect thing happens.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I would like to encourage you, if you think, ma'am, maybe I would be interested in working with children.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have training nights for Iwana and Sunday school uh workers.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you are at all interested, even if you just want to have a conversation about children's ministry, you know, I would really encourage you to come out to the tents out there in the children's ministry.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just sign your name up.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: It says on there you're signing up just for a conversation.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if you put your name down there, I'd love to talk with you or have our volunteers talk with you just to see if maybe that's something you like to do.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you say, I really don't know what I'd be good at, we can find a place for you.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And again, we have training nights so that we can help train you there.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we have needs in a lot of places.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I I hope that a lot of people would like to at least think about it.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, do that.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Do that.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh then you can go out to eat lunch with Jason too.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: So now um listen, something really interesting uh came up in the news this summer uh at our neighboring state, down in Oklahoma City.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they they were gonna put up whiteboards in the school, uh in the public schools this fall, and as they took off the blackboards that they'd been using, they found old blackboards dating from the early 1900s.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And they found, for example, it's one of the blackboards they found the 1917 blackboard with uh drawings on them of pilgrims and the Mayflower, and and as the superintendent of schools down in Oklahoma City said, we haven't seen penmanship like that in a long time.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and and and so they've decided they're they're removing those blackboards and and and they're gonna save them, you know.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and I thought of that, and I thought, how much a lot of us, you know, uh with nostalgia, we look back on the teaching a hundred years ago, you know, back back before we had to do all the sort of social and sexual and political correctness stuff.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And when it was reading and writing and arithmetic and penmanship and the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and coming for religious freedom to America.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was thinking, yeah, but every single Wednesday and every single Sunday, we do we do the same, we do actually better.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we go back to the early tree, earliest traditions.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: We go back to the first century, go back to Jesus, we go back to the stories those kids were telling on there about Moses and the bull rushes.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just so proud of the fact that that in our society we have a place where children can come, where they can learn ancient truths that still matter.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I thanks for coming up.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: No, thank you.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I'm gonna make you stay here, and I'm gonna make you lead us in prayer and then uh dismiss us to go on out to the tent.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's let's pray.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, I I do thank you so much for just being here with us today and and and blessing us.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray that every single uh person that's come here to church today has been blessed in some way and and gotten a little bit closer to you.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray as as we dismiss here and go out to see the different ministries that TBC has to offer.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray that you would just uh impress upon people's hearts to to sign up and get involved.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: I pray that they would be blessed by it.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray that it would not be just uh about running a children's program or running a church, but it would be about teaching others about you and about your son.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus' name I pray.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.