Good afternoon.
This afternoon is going to be a little bit different from uh our typical sermon because
it’s going to be kind of a combination of things.
It’s going to be a combination of evangelism training, a combination of kind of what you
might think of as a mission report, and a combination of some insight into some of the
things we’ve been doing and some of the results that we’ve had here at Collierville that
will expand into a vision of
some of the things that I’ve been involved in and the congregation has been involved in
for quite some time.
But I want us to cement all of that together with Scripture.
So we’re really going to discuss evangelism, technology, and the Word of God.
And what role, what part do they have to play with one another?
What does God have to say about
them and what we should be doing or not doing with them.
One of the things that’s important is to realize as we go through life that every
seemingly good idea of man is not a good idea in the eyes of God and is certainly not
approved of in the eyes of God.
Hence many of the things that
Men have come along and thought were great ideas, they were great things that would help
more people be more faithful or more spiritual end up being the exact opposite.
So we should always test everything we do, everything we say by the Word of God.
Paul teaches us that.
In Colossians chapter 3 verse 16, says, you do in word or deed, do all
by the authority or in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Paul is making it clear if you don’t have the authority of Christ behind you, the thing
you’re saying, the thing you’re doing should be put away.
And so when we do anything, when we evaluate anything, when we begin to practice
something, we should first ask, is this approved of by God?
Another point that we need to understand is that God has set an expectation.
before his church and before Christians that we are to utilize his resources.
My favorite passage in all of scripture is Ephesians chapter three, verses 20 and 21.
Not because of the breadth of the doctrinal deepness that’s there, but because God tells
us what we’re capable of,
if we’ll simply trust Him.
In Ephesians chapter 3 verses 20 and 21, Paul writes to the church at Ephesus and he says,
now to him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly, now the Him there is God.
He says, To God who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think
according to the power that works in us,
to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever amen.
Paul, as he writes these words to the church at Ephesus, he instills within the message
that Ephesus is to learn that they are to stop limiting their expectations by their
abilities.
They are to stop limiting their expectations by their resources.
They are to cease limiting their expectations by their knowledge and insight and wisdom.
And they are to start measuring all of those things by God’s.
And then He tells them and He’s going to do it through you.
So many times as we evaluate what we as a congregation, what we as an individual, what we
as a family might do, can do, we often fail to ask, what is God capable of doing with us?
If we would stop evaluating what we’re capable of and start evaluating what He is capable
of.
but then consider not only God expects us to use his resources, but God has used
technology from the very beginning.
In Genesis chapter 3, when you open up the text of Genesis chapter 3, which we discussed
this morning, you’ll remember that Adam and Eve sinned and that God puts them out of the
garden.
But one of the things that God tells Adam is that he is going to spend his days in toil
and the sweat of his brow.
that he is going to have to plant and he is going to have to take care of those things
that he plants.
He’s going to have to do so in the midst of all of the struggles that will come in life.
And yet as God presents this picture of someone who’s going to have to endure the
difficulties of life, the expectation is if you’re going to be, for instance, a shepherd
or you’re going to be a person who has a field,
you’re going to have to do something other than use your hands to keep the sheep and use
your hands to plow the field.
I don’t think when Adam walked out of the garden, Adam thought, well, I gotta do it all by
hand.
Can’t use any of those newfangled inventions, because there weren’t any.
except you might picture that the same person who could name every animal also could
figure out how to make a tool to plow the ground.
And so Adam would begin in the very earliest of history farming.
We know that because his son is going to be a farmer.
He’s also going to be one who will keep flocks and herds.
We know that because he has another son who, by the way, keeps flocks and herds.
No indication anywhere in that that God disapproves of the use of the technology they
would have created to accomplish those.
But then let’s go a step further, Genesis chapter 6.
God tells Noah that all of humanity has only participated in every thought of their heart
being evil continually and as a result of that God says I’m going to destroy the world
with a flood.
And then he gives Noah the instruction to build a boat.
not a little boat, a great big massive boat.
He says you’re going to build it to this dimension, you’re going to build it to this
dimension, you’re going to build it to this dimension, but you can’t use any tools, no
technology allowed, certainly not any measuring tools.
No, God didn’t do that.
As a matter of fact, there’s every expectation that both
Noah and his sons and his family all utilized tools available to them to build the ark.
Why?
Because God gave them a command what to do and it was their responsibility to use the
resources they had to do it.
Then you consider Babel.
Over in Genesis chapter 11 when God looks down on the situation amongst the people and
they have created this vision of themselves and their grand abilities and they’re going to
build a uh tower up to heaven and they’re going to certainly show God exactly how great
humanity is.
God is going to take language and God is going to disperse humanity.
Now it’s interesting to point out that God
approved of the use of technology, but not every use of technology.
For when humanity used technology to accelerate themselves into a position where humanity
thought they were equal with God.
God said, actually, let me convince you you’re not.
Tomorrow, you won’t be able to understand a word said by the person next to you.
So beginning in Genesis chapter 11, you find that in spite of all the technology they had,
in spite of all the learning and education they had accumulated, now one person couldn’t
talk to another person, effectively limiting the production output of all of humanity.
forever in the future through language.
But then consider as well that God used technology throughout his communication.
There was a day in time when Moses stood before God on Mount Sinai and God had Moses bring
two tablets of stone and God wrote on those two tablets of stone.
What is that?
Well, that would be technology.
That would be taking a form of rock
and writing on it so that you could have written communication.
And God inscribed on those two tablets of stone the Ten Commandments.
And then Moses carried those two tablets of stone and as a result of sin, dashed those two
tablets of stone into pieces.
The next time Moses came up onto the mountain, he again had two tablets of stone except
this time he had to do the writing.
We consider as well that in out of Egypt came the new technology of papyrus.
The Egyptians had figured out how to take these papyrus plants and to be able to dry them
in such a way as to write on them.
And so when Paul will describe in Timothy as he’s writing to Timothy as he is sitting
there in a Roman prison, he’ll say to Timothy, bring with you the books and the
Parchments.
Now if the utilization of new technology, like new forms of writing material, was wrong in
the eyes of God, Paul would have been in trouble because Paul would have been using
something evil to do his own study.
But we understand that God utilizes technology all throughout history.
You begin in the book of Genesis and you find in the history of the Israelite nation, God
is going to use the Hebrew language.
He’s going to communicate to them in the language that they know that they understand
coming away from the Tower of Babel.
And so God will speak to them in Hebrew and yet when you get over into the book of Daniel
and some of the later prophets you’re going to find that the text of the Old Testament was
written in Aramaic.
Why?
Because the people began to learn Aramaic under the Babylonian captivity.
And so God would speak to them in one language and then God would speak to them in another
language and then we get over into the New Testament and guess what?
another newfangled technology has come along in the form of language and that is the
Grecian language, specifically the Koine Greek as we refer to it, common Greek, and
Alexander’s mission in not only conquering the world was also to take the Greek language
around the world so that there would be a single unified language for commerce and for
productivity.
And so when Jesus comes on the scene in Matthew chapter 1,
Jesus is going to grow up in a nation of Israel that predominantly spoke Greek because it
was the trade language of the world.
We could further discuss other things that we learn about, things that we learn about uh
from history.
We know that the Romans would build roads.
Now, did God put roads on the planet when He made it?
No.
So who thought of the idea to use technology to build roads?
Well, many people throughout history, but the Romans were very good at it because they
wanted to get their military from this side of the empire to that side of the empire if
they needed to.
And yet, what did the first century church use when they began to be persecuted in
Jerusalem?
And the text tells us in the book of Acts that they went everywhere preaching the word.
They use those Roman roads.
to go to those places to take the gospel.
God has always used technology.
God has always approved of the using of technology appropriately to carry out his mission.
So when you think about travel, another area where technology has changed, there was a
time in the world where predominantly travel occurred via foot, and then travel occurred
via camel, and maybe via horse or donkey.
But then you come along further and chariots come along and travel occurs via chariots.
Do we have a God approved example of travel via chariots?
Well, certainly we do in Acts chapter eight.
Philip is brought to a man who is traveling from Jerusalem back home to Ethiopia and
Philip will join that eunuch in his chariot and teach him the gospel.
And Philip doesn’t tell the eunuch, now you need to get rid of this chariot, this is not a
God approved form of transportation God designed for us to walk on feet.
No, not at all.
Philip joined him in that chariot, taught him the gospel through the luxury of them being
able to read instead of walk.
He was able to be taught the gospel as they went along and was baptized and then when he
was baptized he rose, came up out of the water and got back in the chariot and went on his
way rejoicing.
Paul will numerous times find himself in a boat.
And as a matter of fact, there was a man named Jonah who was also commanded to take the
message of God somewhere.
He ended up in a boat, though God’s approved method of his transportation was a fish.
See, God uses technology.
And if we understand that God uses it, then we should too, appropriately, righteously,
correctly.
But then consider there is a difference between good technology and bad technology.
So let’s maybe evaluate what is good technology.
First, it is that which increases production.
Believe it or not, Paul could reach more people and teach more people if he wrote a letter
than if he only communicated by person-to-person vocal interaction.
When Paul wrote the letter to the church at Colossians, Paul informed the church at
Colossae that when they were done reading the letter that they were to pass it on to the
church at Laodicea, yet Paul wasn’t in Colossae, Paul wasn’t in Laodicea, yet his message
was…
because Paul used technology to increase production, to increase the amount of output for
the same amount of input.
It should be that if we’re using it properly, which fights devaluation.
We ought to use technology to make things better, not worse.
And sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between the two.
We should use technology that is appropriate.
There are often discussions about whether or not this building is an appropriate use of
technology for the meeting of the church, whether or not a PA is appropriate use of
technology for the church, whether or not a pitch pipe to properly pitch a song would be
appropriate use of technology for the church, and the answer for all three of those is
yes.
For instance, we have a God-approved example of Christians meeting in a building.
We find when Paul assembled with the Christians in Acts chapter 20 that they assembled in
an upper room where there were lights.
So not only did they have approval to meet in a building, they had approval to meet in a
building where there were lights because they met at night.
Unfortunately for one young man who it was quite warm in the upper room where they were
meeting at night, he fell asleep at a window and fell out of the window and died.
So be careful with your use of technology, might kill you.
especially with lights, electricity, not good.
All right, so we should uphold biblical principles and commands.
We should never use technology to subvert the word of God.
For instance, turn to Ephesians chapter five.
In Ephesians chapter 5, Paul writes beginning in verse 15, And see then that you walk
circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.
Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the LORD is.
Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit,
speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody
in your heart to the LORD.
giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ
submitting to one another in the fear of God.
Paul as he writes to the church in Ephesus says, want you to be filled with the Spirit.
I want you to be filled with an understanding of the will of the Lord.
I want you to be filled with a circumspect walking as Christians and when you do that as
you assemble together I want you to teach one another.
uh
Paul, we’re gonna all take turns preaching a sermon?
No.
He says, I want you to speak to one another in Psalms, in hymns, in spiritual songs,
singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.
And somebody comes along and says, well, that sounds great, but you know what would make
it sound better is if we just added a little banjo.
And somebody else says, well, I can’t really play the banjo, but I can bang on the drum.
And somebody else says, well, but I’m not
good with all the rhythm stuff, but I have a great skill with a harp.
See, what’s the problem with the use of the technology?
Is it subverting the command?
The command is to speak to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing
and making melody with one instrument, and that is the heart, not the harp, not the
guitar.
Not the banjo and not the drum.
You see, if we substitute technology for God’s command, we’re not using technology
properly.
But then consider that we should use technology that is either moral or amoral.
There are some technologies that are amoral.
You wanna know how I know?
We used plates during lunch today and those plates are amoral.
You can use a plate or you can pile all your food in your hand.
One of them is a little more convenient and a whole lot less mess, but it’s up to you.
You decide.
The technology and invention of a bowl or a plate is not something we need to argue about
whether or not it’s appropriate in our lives.
It is amoral.
It has no discussion on moral or immoral.
But in matters of morality, we better make sure that the technology we use is not
immoral technology.
And certainly there can be scenarios where technology is such.
But also we must never make technology an excuse for not obeying God.
some individuals have a mindset, well you know what, I’m just gonna spend some time with
the Bible and then I’m gonna go fishing on Sunday.
And I think it’s good, you know, because I get relaxation, which I need because I work
really hard all week, and I get God’s word, so you know, that’s good enough.
You see, we cannot use the availability of technology to substitute
or make an excuse for not obeying what God has told us to do.
God has given us commands and we are to follow those commands and we are never to say, you
know what, now that I’ve got this new technology I just don’t need any of that old-fangled
obedience.
So when you think about effective use, when you’re thinking about how to use technology,
when you’re thinking about using technology within religious matters and within ministry
or evangelism as we kind of fade a little bit into some of our instruction about
evangelism, we should be using technology but we should test it before committing to the
change.
Some technology is more disruptive than helpful.
I was just recently having a conversation with some good friends and they were talking
about a congregation that had done a major upgrade in their sound booth.
And now the sound booth controlled the presentation and a bunch of other things that it
had never done for them except the problem was they had problems with it every single
week.
And every single worship experience that the people had in the assembly was disrupted
because of the complexity of the sound booth.
You know, test before you make a change.
And if the change doesn’t work out, roll it back and get rid of the change because it
needs to be helpful, not harmful.
But also, do not sacrifice done for perfect.
We all realize when it comes to technology, it changes a lot, You you get used to one
thing on a phone or one thing on a computer and pretty soon the buttons change, it’s moved
to a new place.
Well, the reality is perfect is almost never achievable in terms of technology.
But done is.
So don’t trade done for perfect.
Then also measure the cost in your most scarce asset.
This is one of the ones that I really want us to
to emphasize as we go through here because your most scarce asset is never money.
Your most scarce asset is never the availability of a place to use the technology.
Your most scarce asset is time.
It’s the only thing you can’t get more of.
So if the technology is helping you with your most scarce asset be more effective in your
most important mission, then it’s a good use of technology.
because you only have so much time in this world.
It’s also important to learn from professionals when you can without trying to be one.
I learned a long time ago that I am never going to be the best in anything in technology.
I’ve always met somebody who’s better than me.
And I’ve always been okay with that too because I know it’s not my mission to be the best
technology professional.
It is my mission to be effective in ministry.
then also put people with time to work.
One of the things that you may have noticed is America has a little bit of an anomaly
happening in recent history.
It’s called the entire baby boom generation is retiring.
I don’t know if y’all noticed that, but the people are retiring and suddenly they have
time on their hands they never had before.
Now there’s a couple of things you can do when you have time on your hands.
You can sit and watch television forever.
Trust me, they will make another show you’ve never seen to put in front of you to keep you
sitting there.
But that may or may not be the best use of suddenly having time on your hands.
Too many of us have probably known somebody who got done working, retired, and was dead
within two years.
Because they didn’t have anything left to do.
Well, suddenly we have in the church
congregations filled with people who have time that they’ve never had before.
And quite often they have time and frankly, they’re not really in need of an income.
So technology is a way to help those individuals utilize their time for ministry, if we
think of it properly, and then trade teaching thousands of nominal hearers for teaching 12
committed disciples.
This is a principle from Christ.
Jesus, when he,
had fed the 5,000.
He’s the next day found on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
And the crowds and the multitudes come around the sea and they find him where he is.
And Jesus there in John chapter six is going to discuss with them the concept of the bread
of life.
But Jesus through the course of his instructions concerning the bread of life and as well
concerning the Lord’s Supper that would later be instituted will declare to them teachings
which they will say, this is hard, who can accept it?
and many of them, the text says, will walk away and follow him no more.” Now Jesus had
pointed out to them that part of their problem was they didn’t come find him the next day
because they wanted to hear more teaching.
They came and found him the next day because they had eaten of the bread the day before.
And it is important for us as we figure out and as we evaluate how to do ministry,
evangelism, and utilize technology that we do not substitute sound, faithful, strong
Christians for lukewarm, disinterested people being entertained.
And too many congregations do that with technology.
Jesus said, I’d rather have 12 disciples that will follow me to death and carry out my
mission after my death than to have thousands of people following me wanting bread every
day.
We cannot substitute through technology faithfulness for mediocrity.
But then consider some of the things that we can use and that we do use.
Maybe if some of you are wondering why we use some of them here, these are the reasons
why.
We use the website here at Collierville.
We use live streaming, and it’s for a lot of reasons.
It’s because it’s a window for someone who’s never walked through those doors to
understand what they’re going to see when they walk through the doors, because we
understand this, people are generally more satisfied with an experience when they know
what they’re going to get before they walk through the doors.
One of the reasons why people go to Chick-fil-A,
That’s because when they go to Chick-fil-A, they get pretty much the same experience every
time, and it’s pretty good.
And the places they go to where they get a poor experience some days and an okay
experience other days and a really good experience once in a while, they quit going to.
They know what to expect when they go to Chick-fil-A.
They expect to leave and somebody to say, my pleasure, and the food to be hot.
We use podcasting.
We use internet radio through Truth FM.
I personally use a lot of AI in both research and brainstorming.
One of the things I love about AI technology, and it’s really machine learning, but Chat
gbt and other tools like that, is sometimes the AI, when I ask it about something in the
Bible, will come up with a passage I never would have thought of initially on my own.
And so I’ll ask it for a whole list of passages, give me 50 passages on this topic.
And suddenly I’m looking at a text that, you know what, I would not have remembered that
text buried in the book of Jeremiah, but the AI does.
And so I use those technologies as I’m formulating lessons and as I’m studying.
And sometimes I utilize them because my grammar when I write comes out like I talk.
And my wife will tell you that’s not always good reading.
So I’ve been using AI technology for years to fix the way I write so that people can read
it and not cringe.
It’s cut down on my use of my wife for editing for which she is grateful.
But then consider another text.
Turn to Nehemiah.
I wanna spend just a little bit of time in Nehemiah.
I wanna notice something.
And this is one of the reasons why I’ve been involved in something since 2015 that we
utilize here.
Some of you know it and probably most of you know it, but if you pay attention to the
announcements, you see it.
And it’s Truth FM.
Back in 2015, myself and another brother down in Alabama who’s now passed away, Bob
Strickland, and a brother in Virginia, Tom Hoover, started Truth FM as I was still working
with GBN and we started it to build internet radio stations, to take the concept of a
radio station and deliver it through the internet.
And then in 2017, I was at the Memphis School of Preaching Lectureship and I met a
preacher from Louisiana.
And he came up to me because I had the Truth FM booth there and he said, Aaron, I would
love for us to use Truth FM at our congregation, but we’re a small congregation and we’ve
just taken on supporting two additional missionaries and we just don’t have any budget for
it.
But I’ve got a missionary that I need you to talk to.
So as we get into the book of Nehemiah for just a few moments, I want you to think about
what it would have been like in Nehemiah’s day and the struggles that Nehemiah faced that
we read about in the text.
Let’s start in Nehemiah chapter one, verses one through three.
The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hacaliah.
It came to pass in the month of Shislev in the twentieth year as I was in Shushan the
Citadel that Hennani, one of my brethren, came with men from Judah, and I asked them
concerning the Jews who had escaped, who had survived the captivity, and concerning
Jerusalem.
And they said to me, The survivors who are left from the captivity in the present, or in
the province, are there in great distress, and reproach the wall of Jerusalem is broken
down, and its gates are burned with fire.”
Nehemiah serves in the court of the king and Nehemiah inquires of his brother when his
brother returns from Jerusalem.
How is the situation in Jerusalem?
Now Israel had been in captivity for 70 years.
The time of the Babylonian Empire is over.
You’re in the time of the Medo-Persian Empire.
Nehemiah is serving underneath of Medo-Persian King and he finds out that Cyrus having
allowed Israel and some of the Israelites to go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the city, to
rebuild the temple.
things are not going well.
In verse 11, Nehemiah prays, Lord, I pray, please let your ear be attentive to the prayer
of your servant and to the prayer of your servants who desire to fear your name and let
your servant prosper this day, I pray, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.
For I was the king’s cupbearer.
Now I want us take some concepts that we’ve gathered.
throughout the lesson and string them together in the text of Nehemiah.
Number one, Nehemiah did not have the resources to solve the problem, but God did.
And Nehemiah happened to be in association with a man who had the resources of God at his
beck and call, and it was the king.
So as Nehemiah is faced with the scenario of the plight of Jerusalem and desiring to do
something about it, Nehemiah asks for God to be with him as he goes into the king because
the king has the beck and call of God’s resources.
And Nehemiah knows if he’s going to make an impact in the lives of the people in
Jerusalem, he’s going to need the king.
Then consider what else we read, chapter 2 verse 1, and it came to pass in the month of
Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when the wine was before him, that I took
the wine and gave it to the king.
Now I had never been sad in his presence before.
Therefore the king said to me, Why is your face sick, since you are not sick?
This is nothing but sorrow of heart, so I became dreadfully afraid, and said to the king,
May the king live forever.
I’ll get my words out here in a minute.
Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father’s tombs, lies waste
and its gates are burned with fire?
Then the king said to me, what do you request?
Notice the intelligence and the intuition of the king.
The problem’s been presented, the scenario of Nehemiah’s demeanor has never occurred in
his presence before, and the moment Nehemiah expresses what’s going on, the king says,
what do you need?
So I prayed to the God of heaven.
And I said to the king, if it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in
your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father’s tombs, that I may
rebuild it.
Then the king said to me, the queen also sitting beside him, how long will your journey
be?
And when will you return?
So it pleased the king to send me, and I sent him a time.
Furthermore, I said to the king, if it pleases the king, let letters be given to me for
the governors of the region beyond the river that they must permit me to pass through till
I come to Judah.
And a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he must give me timber to
make beams for the gates of the citadel which pertain to the temple for the city wall and
for the house that I will occupy.
And the king granted them to me according to the good hand of my God upon me.
Now notice what Nehemiah says.
Nehemiah says, knew I couldn’t do it by myself.
I knew I was going to need the king.
So what did he do?
He asked the king.
There’s a principle from the book of James.
where James tells the Christians, have not because you ask not.
And when you do ask, you ask to spend it upon your lusts.
Nehemiah wasn’t doing that.
Nehemiah asked for the king, the king gave him what he asked for.
And we don’t have time to go through all of the text, but I want us to go to chapter
seven.
In chapter seven of Nehemiah,
We find beginning in verse 70, as Nehemiah has arrived, the work is commencing.
We know some of the story and we’ve recently gone through the book of Nehemiah.
We read beginning in verse 70 of chapter 7, and some of the heads of the father’s houses
gave to the work.
Notice they didn’t just expect somebody on the outside to give the work.
Now once Nehemiah is there, the people begin to give to the work.
And the governor gave to the treasury 1,000 gold drachmas, 50 basins, 530 priestly
garments.
Some of the heads of the father’s houses gave to the treasury of the work 20,000 gold
drachmas and 2,200 silver minas.
And that which the rest of the people gave was 20,000 gold drachmas, 2,000 silver minas,
and 67 priestly garments.
So the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, and some of the people, the
neth and them, and all Israel dwelt in their cities.
So notice as Nehemiah arrives, the work commences, the people sacrifice of their
possessions to provide what’s needed for the work.
But then consider chapter 8.
When the seventh month came, the children of Israel were in their cities.
Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of
the water gate.
They told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law Moses which the Lord had commanded
Israel.
So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could
hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month.” Now notice this, they’re
going to read the law.
Ezra, as we’ve read before in the book of Ezra, was one who had prepared his heart to seek
the law of the Lord and to know and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.
This was the perfect man, but guess what?
He was going to need help.
Notice what the text says.
Verse 4,
So Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood which they had made for the purpose.
And beside him in his right hand stood Mattathiah, Shimeah, Ani, Uriah, Hilkiah, Messiah,
and at his left hand, Padaiah, Mishael, Malkudja, Hashem, Hash-Bedana, Zechariah, and
Meshalam.
And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the
people, and when he opened it all the people stood up.
And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God.
Then all the people answered, Amen, Amen, when lifting up their hands, and they bowed
their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
Also, Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkab, Shavathai, Hodaija, Masiach, Kalita, Azariah,
Jozebad, Hanan,
Piliah and the Levites helped the people understand the law and the people stood in their
places.
So notice verse 8, so they read distinctly from the book in the law of God and they gave
the sense and helped them to understand the reading.
Now back before I went to the school of preaching I would have read that and I wouldn’t
have an understanding at all of what that meant.
But our teacher in Nehemiah helped us understand what we read.
You see, what it’s telling you is, here’s a group of people who don’t understand what’s
being read.
Wait a minute, what do mean they don’t understand?
It’s just hard concepts, maybe they needed some teaching and it’s, no, no, no.
This is a group of people who had spent 70 years in captivity in Babylon, who came out of
Babylonian captivity speaking Aramaic.
And the laws written in Hebrew,
They don’t understand what’s being read.
Have you ever sat in an auditorium or sat in a room and had somebody speak French or
Spanish to you and you don’t speak French or Spanish?
How about Filipino?
Guess what?
You sit there and you go, I see them moving, their mouth moving.
I think they’re happy.
I don’t know what they’re saying.
The people are gathered around all day long to listen to Ezra teach and read from the law,
but the law is in Hebrew and they don’t speak Hebrew anymore!
So the priests are there translating.
They’re giving the sense and helping them to understand what the law was saying in their
own language.
Because they now don’t speak the language of the law.
But then consider this wasn’t just a scenario in the Old Testament.
In Acts chapter two of the day of Pentecost, what do you find?
When Peter and the other apostles get up to preach, what is it that the people hear?
Of the 17 languages that are present, they heard every one of them in their own tongue.
Why was that necessary?
Because all of them were Jews, but 17 nations were represented in that location on that
day.
Now I want you to notice something.
On day one,
the very first day of the opening of the doors of the church, as Jesus had handed to Peter
the keys of the kingdom and Peter begins to preach the very first gospel sermon, the very
first barrier to the gospel going out was that which originated at the Tower of Babel in
Genesis chapter 11.
They didn’t all speak the same language.
which leads us to one of the things that technology can help us with today in a way it
hasn’t been able to for years.
And that is that there is now technology to be able to allow people to teach in their
language and take it throughout the entire world.
But one of the problems you have is that I meet missionaries on a regular basis that can
teach in a language.
What they’re not are technology professionals.
So let go back to my story in 2017.
I was introduced to Curry Montague, who some people know, some people who are related to
him.
He lived in Somerville.
I didn’t know it at the time, because I was introduced to him by somebody in Louisiana.
But Curry was a missionary and is a missionary in Budapest.
So I got on the phone a few months later because of some family things that were going on
with Curry.
We waited a little while and then we got on the phone and he said, Aaron, I’ve been told
by this brother that you can help us.
He said, I don’t know how you’re going to help us, but here’s what we’re trying to do.
We’re trying to start a radio work here in Budapest, but we have a problem.
All of the radio stations in Budapest are owned by the Catholics and they won’t sell us
any airtime.
They won’t let us broadcast.
on the air in Budapest.
And it doesn’t matter how much we pay them, they won’t sell it to us because we’re going
to broadcast the truth.
And he said, so we’ve tried for six months to buy airtime and we can’t get any.
And he said, brother so and so told me that you can help.
He said, I don’t know how you can help, but I’m open to hearing it.
So in 2017, we started utilizing Truth FM, which we had already been running for two
years, to take
sermons and Bible classes that were recorded in Hungarian in the local congregation in
Budapest and put them on the air, on the internet, streaming 24 hours a day in Hungarian.
But we ran into a problem.
We can’t speak Hungarian.
We didn’t know what was being said.
So we’d get an audio file and it was audio only and it’s all in Hungarian.
So we needed Curry.
to translate it or at least to edit it.
So I spent months trying to teach Curry Montague how to edit audio.
And it was not a good experience.
He’s not technologically adept and I’m trying to teach him how to do something in a
language that I don’t even understand what’s being said.
Through the course of time, we’ve been able to advance a number of things and we’ve used
some new technology at Truth FM.
But one of the things we’re now doing
is we have a brother in Albania, his name is Altin.
He works with a small congregation of about 20 people and a large part of his ministry is
actually to a blind community there in fear.
He also happens to have been educated as a technology developer, he writes code, but he
has started working with technology that we have at Truth FM.
He is now recording his Bible classes and sermons in Albanian and through a
technology platform that we have, he uploads them, he edits them, he records them, a lot
of AI tools do a lot of the work, and then he publishes them in Albanian.
Just the other day, he published a video on YouTube and had a thousand views in an hour.
But it’s only possible because of the technology we’re bringing to the table and helping
him use it.
Here’s a problem we have in America.
99.9 % of all of the content and material published by the Churches of Christ is in
English, and 20 % of the world speaks English.
You see a discrepancy?
I do.
It means you can go listen to a live stream from a thousand congregations today if you
speak English, but if you speak Portuguese,
you may not be able to find one.
You can listen to sermon after sermon after sermon and watch video after video after video
if you speak English and you can learn the gospel in no time.
But if you speak one of the few thousand dialects in India and you don’t speak any of the
main languages in India, you may not be able to find the gospel in your language at all.
So what are we trying to do?
We’re trying to fix that.
Truth FM, we are trying to launch in the next two years 50 languages where the content and
the material is streaming 24 hours a day.
There’s podcasts or social media content in all 50 of those languages coming out every
single week.
And then in five years, we want it to be 150 languages.
And we want to keep pushing and keep pushing until the gospel can be heard in every
person’s language
anywhere in the world.
I want to play just a couple of things for you, but I want to leave you with this before I
do that.
Curry wrote, for 20 years I tried to reach my mother-in-law who didn’t speak English and
lives an hour and half away from me by train when I was preaching in Hungary.
We launched the internet radio station and she started listening.
She was converted by listening to the sermons in Hungarian from Brother Peters.
He says, I recommend Truth FM.
For 20 years, Curry had been preaching in Budapest, trying to reach his mother-in-law who
lived an hour and a half away and never could because she’d only come over by train on
occasion when the grandkids were there.
And so she was never converted.
But as soon as they started the Truth FM station, even though it wasn’t Curry preaching,
it was another man in the congregation that was recorded on there, she started listening.
and curry firmly believes that it’s because of the work they did with truth FM since 2017
and still ongoing today that she’s now a christian in hungary because she could hear in
her own language
Here’s an example.
stereo one and two on the, okay.
Now that may not mean much to you, because it’s in Hungarian.
But it means a lot to people all over Hungary.
who can hear the gospel in Hungarian, but not only do we take the audio material and
create audio streaming content, we also build websites in their languages so that somebody
can go to their church website who only speaks Hungarian, who can find the church, and now
they can not only hear the gospel be converted, but they can get connected to a local
congregation.
But then we also, this one will go next, have made it possible
to help them take the content that they do have and turn it into social media content,
just like we’re doing.
I gave the men a report that through the work that we’ve done with social media, hopefully
this one won’t play yet, through the work we’ve done with social media here at
Collierville, in 2024, we had had 237 views of videos
on our Facebook page.
Because we started posting the shorts and the reels because of the evangelism program,
because of the decision we made to emphasize evangelism this last year, in 2025, we’ve had
237,900 views of videos on our Facebook page.
237,000 in a year.
And a large part of those come from our direct community in the greater Memphis area.
But we’re also, through Truth FM, reaching and taking the gospel in the countries we can’t
get to, including Iran.
We have a brother in Greece who is Iranian, who was a refugee out of Iran, who is now
teaching and preaching after having been taught in a school of preaching in America.
He’s back in Greece and he’s reaching the nation of Iran with the gospel.
and we’re him.
uh That’s the language Farsi.
That is the language of Iran.
It’s not a predominant language anywhere else in the world.
But through the work being done through Truth FM and the use of the Gospel is now on the
air and available online 24 hours a day for those who speak the language of Iran.
See, God rebuilt the wall in Jerusalem with the king’s resources and the people’s
willingness to give.
God solved the language problem of the first century church with a miraculous gift.
Now, we don’t have that luxury today.
God told us to take the gospel to every creature.
When God told Noah to build a boat, he didn’t say, is what tool to use.
He said, build a boat and build it to my specification.
When Christ told us to go and all the world and take the gospel to every creature, He
didn’t give us all the hows.
He just told us to fulfill the command.
But in order to do that, we have to make sure they can hear it, that they can learn it in
their own language.
Paul writes, how then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?
And how shall they believe in him in whom they have not heard?
And how shall they hear without a preacher?
And how shall they preach unless they be sent?
So, practical application as we close.
Aaron, that’s great.
The gospel’s going to all the world.
How can it help me?
Well, for one, as all of you notice, one of the struggles that we have is meeting with
someone, meeting someone in the community and getting them to walk through the door.
And when they walk through the door, getting them to come back a second time.
So one of the things that you can do is you can grab out your cell phone and you can
download the Truth FM app.
On the Truth FM app is the gospel streaming 24 hours a day.
365 days a year.
And when you meet someone in the store who you may only have five minutes with, if you can
find a way, help them to download the Truth FM app so they can start listening on their
own.
Help them to start studying on their own.
You find someone who says they love to listen to Christian radio and they love to listen
to K-Love and they love to listen to all this denominational nonsense.
Introduce them to the Truth FM app where they can listen to the truth 24 hours a day.
If you meet someone who speaks Spanish and you don’t speak Spanish, introduce them to the
Truth FM app, help them download it, and then connect them to the Spanish station that’s
broadcasting 24 hours a day.
And every language where you meet someone that speaks a language that we don’t yet have a
broadcast, come tell me and we’ll start finding a missionary who can start teaching in
that language.
but the use of technology is approved by God and we should be using it.
We’re trying.
And I encourage you, if you don’t do anything else, pray for our efforts, both here in
Collierville and around the world, that the gospel goes to every creature in the world in
our generation.
If you’re here this afternoon and you have need of the invitation, I appreciate your
patience throughout this lesson, but also I encourage you to remember.
Our work is to take the gospel.
Our work is to spread the seed.
Our work is to introduce people to the message and then to allow them to be willing to
accept it if their heart is open and they’re willing.
If you have need of the invitation of Christ, the invitation is open to you today.
Why not come as we stand and as we sing?
