Die to Sin, to Ourselves, and to this World

The following is a lightly edited transcript provided by a transcription service. Please check the video before quoting.

Die to Sin, to Ourselves, and to this World

When I was preparing to come here I got a text from Dr. Aiken saying, don’t forget to bring your gown. I can assure you that was the first time I’d ever received that text from preparing to go preach somewhere. So only for Dr. Aiken.

It really is an honor to be back here. I am just standing up here as we’re singing, just overwhelmed by God’s grace. I should be in hell right now and I’m like standing with brothers and sisters worshiping Jesus, our king, having received an education in his word and how to do ministry in the church under professors like Jim Shatick who’s down here like God is so gracious to us in this room.

What John 12 Says About Missional Living

So if you have a Bible and I hope you or somebody around you can look on with it, lemme invite you to open me to John chapter 12. John chapter 12. I know that has been Dr. Aiken’s pattern in fall convocation to wed exposition of a text with the story of a missionary’s life.

I’ve benefited from those messages both in audio and written form. So as I was praying about where to go this morning in God’s word, I thought to do something similar but not with a missionary’s life.

Serving in South Korea

I resumed recently from a trip to South Korea and I’d been there before, but God did an unusual unexpected work in my heart during my time there challenging, encouraging, and convicting me in ways that I didn’t see coming. So I would like to wed exposition of John 12:24 through 26 with the story of the church in South Korea, I hope in a way that highlights the truth in this text in God’s word.

So let me start by giving you a little background on the church in Korea with an emphasis, particularly on the last century. So Christian teaching goes all the way back to the early 16 hundreds, but it was more the Catholic church gospel.

Protestant teaching was scarce until the late 19th century. Robert Thomas was a missionary to China, but God gave him a heart for Korea. Foreigners were not welcome in Korea at that point.

On his second attempt to get there by boat, he took a case of Bibles with him. His boat was attacked when they got to the shore, so he just started throwing Bibles overboard, yelling Jesus Jesus until he was seized and killed.

But in 1884, the few Christians in Korea received official permission from the government to spread their religion, which then opened the doors for missionaries to come in and support them. And by the turn of the century in 1900, less than 1% of the Korean population was Christian, but there was an opportunity to grow and that began to happen in what would become known in Korean history as the Pyong Yang Revival of 1907, what many people have called the Korean Pentecost.

January 1907, there was a large Bible conference held with about 1500 Christian leaders that saw a lot for the state of Christianity in the country at that time. It included Koreans included missionaries from other countries in Pyongyang what is now the capital of North Korea.

In anticipation of that meeting, many of them were pleading before God. The country was struggling, the church was struggling, and they were desperate. During the meeting, the preachers, both missionaries and Korean pastors they preached, became personally overwhelmed by their own sin and need for repentance in their own lives.

They started confessing their sin publicly, including hidden sins before God, before others, and even bitterness they had held toward others in the church. Their confession led others in the audience to begin to do the same.

People started standing up just in a gathering like this, spontaneously confessing their sins, crying out for God’s mercy, many of them praying at the same time. Here’s how one pastor described that first night. He said the sound of many praying at once brought, not confusion, but a vast harmony of sound and spirit, a mingling together of souls moved by an irresistible impulse of prayer.

The prayer sounded to me like the falling of many waters, an ocean of prayer beating against God’s throne. Just as on the day of Pentecost, God came to us in Pyongyang that night with the sound of weeping. As the prayer continued, a spirit of heaviness and sorrow for sin came down upon the audience.

Korean Revival

Over on one side, someone began to weep and for a moment the whole audience was weeping. He continued that man after man would rise, confess his sins, break down and weep, then throw himself to the floor and beat the floor with his fists. In perfect agony of conviction, one man tried to make a confession, broke down in the midst of it, and cried to me across the room, pastor tell me, is there any hope for me? Can I be forgiven?

And then he threw himself to the floor and wept and wept and almost screamed in agony. Sometimes after a confession, the whole audience would break out an audible, and the effect of that audience of hundreds of people praying together an audible prayer was something indescribable.

Again, after another confession, they would break out an uncontrollable weeping. We would all weep, we could not help it. And so the meeting went on until 2:00 AM like this with confession and weeping and praying.

What happened that night continued the next day and the next and the marks of Korean revival were born study of God’s word, confession of sin, collective audible praying, and crying out for God’s mercy. And in the days to come, that movement of God’s spirit spread into village after village and church after church, and people started coming to Christ left and right.

Churches were being planted, and Christians were praying early together. Every morning they would gather for all-night prayer gatherings. Northern Korea specifically was becoming a stronghold of Protestant Christianity in Asia and Pyon Yang.

So the current capital of North Korea became known as the Jerusalem of the East. It was affecting the entire culture. Christians were starting hospitals and schools. Union Christian College and Yang was the first four-year college in Korea.

In the middle of it all though the country was experienced in all sorts of turmoil. Trial first from Japanese occupation and then war that eventually led to the division of the country and the implementation of communism in the north. I’ll tell you more in a minute about the effect of Japanese occupation than communism on the church.

But many Christians fled to the south where today, so in 1900, Korea was less than 1% Christian Christianity, practically non-existent A century later in South Korea there were over 10 million followers of Jesus, 10 million. The church I was preaching in recently has over 60,000 members. It’s the largest church and it’s one of many churches like that. It’s not the biggest one.

Sending Out Missionaries

Our megachurches are many churches and so South Korea is second right now only to the US in the number of missionaries being sent around the world, which is pretty startling when you realize its population is only the size of California and Florida combined in one century, South Korea went from having hardly any Christians to being a global center of Christianity. How does that happen?

We Must Die to Live

John 12:24, Truly, truly I to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit according to Jesus. What is the key to a seed-bearing fruit? It has to die.

Hold a grain of wheat in your hand, keep it there, won’t do anything. You plant it in the ground and it dies. It bears all kinds of life that you could have never imagined before. Jesus says, in order to live, you have to die, period. Death is necessary for life.

Now the context here is Jesus is about to go to the cross. Jesus is literally physically about to die and he’s talking about the life he’s going to bring to others through his death. This is the gospel at the center of our faith, our lives in this room, even on a seminary campus, I don’t assume everyone in our room this size is a follower of Jesus.

So let me just make sure the core message of the Bible is clear. We have all sinned against the one true holy God. We are separated from him in our sin and destined to be separated from him for all of eternity in our sin as a result.

Yet the one true holy God loves us and has not left us alone in our sins. He has come to us in the person of Jesus. Jesus has lived the life. None of us could ever live a life of no sin against God the Father. And then though he had no sin for which to die, he chose to die in our place.

He lived the life we could not live and he died the death we deserve to die. And then the good news keeps getting better because he didn’t stay dead for long. Three days later, he rose from the grave.

He has conquered sin and death and he has made eternal life possible to anyone anywhere who turns and trusts in him who repents and believes in him. Like, don’t assume just because you got enrolled that your name is written in the Book of Life.

Jesus Died So We Might Live

Have you turned and put your trust in Jesus Christ? Jesus died so we might live. This is the gospel that brings us together, the reality that death precedes life. But now follow this in this passage. Jesus is not just talking about what he was going to do on the cross.

He is talking about every follower of his. Listen to what he says next in verse 25. Whoever loves his life loses it and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. So Jesus is clearly here, not just talking about his death, he is also talking about our lives.

Jesus is saying to us in this passage right now through the word in this room, if you want to live, you have to die. You have to die. That’s what Jesus means when he says hating your life in this world and know-how.

We Must Hate Rebellious Living

He says in this world, we’ll talk about this more in a minute, but Jesus is not saying to hate life. Ultimately he’s saying to hate life that is caught up in rebellion against God and his word in his ways. Don’t love life like that.

Die to live like that, which is what Jesus says to every potential follower of his. Luke 9:23, 24, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross on the instrument of death daily and follow me for whatever save his life will lose it. Whoever loses life for my sake will save it. So this is not advanced Christianity.

This is basic Christianity. This is not for the mature. This is an introduction to following Jesus. In order to become a Christian, you must die. Galatians 2:20 is the testimony of every follower of Jesus. I have been crucified with Christ.

I no longer live. Christ now lives in me. I don’t live anymore. I died with Christ. He now lives in me. Jesus is my life to live in the next world. You die to this world and you bear fruit to last when you lay down your life.

Death Precedes Life

Now, the reason I go to this text is because I believe this is what happened in Korea. Now when I read about stories recently about revival in Korea, it wasn’t like they discovered something new in the Bible. No, they realized in a fresh way that death precedes life.

That in order to live you have to die in at least three ways that I see both in scripture and in Korean history. They’re pretty simple, but all of them are hugely significant. So number one, in order to live, in order to live, you have to die to sin.

You Must Die to Sin

In order to live like real eternal life, you have to die to sin. Life in this world is set up against God and his word in his ways. Jesus says, which obviously doesn’t mean you don’t ever sin. I just finished preaching through one John where it’s clear that as long as we are in this world, we are prone to sin.

But that’s just it. We hate that. We hate that we are prone to sin. We don’t want sin. And when we do, we confess it before God and others and we repent. We turn from it. We don’t toy with it. We don’t treat sin as trivial.

That’s what happened in 1907 at Pyongyang. God, by his grace, opened their eyes to see their sin and they hated it. Church leaders, pastors, and missionaries confessed their sinfulness spontaneously, people crying out for forgiveness with tears weeping, falling on the floor, they hated their sin.

Be Honest About Sin in Your Life

They were tired of glossing over it. Don’t miss it. Revival in South Korea didn’t happen when all these people in the country started getting right with God. It started happening when the pastors started getting right with God when the missionaries started being honest about sin in their lives.

And I can’t help but think that we are missing this. I look at the church in our country today and not just generally. I look at the church I pastor and I don’t see this kind of hatred for sin. I don’t see it in my own life.

I want to see it like a hatred of sin such that when we gather for worship, we weep over our sins. When was the last time that happened in your church on a Sunday morning? When has that happened?

For many of us ever in the church, many of us have been Christians for decades and we have never been in a church setting where people were on their faces weeping over sin, crying out an honest confession.

Do we realize what kind of church culture we have created where we pastor and members, attendees alike have grown pretty content to go week after week in church, watch what happens on a stage, and then go on in our lives as normal or to do the same thing in the chapel for that matter? What would happen if at some point we just stopped and said, what are we doing all across the room like this?

Confession In Church

We just started crying out in confession of sin, uncovering hidden sin, confessing. We sin, sin. We even harbored others’ pride. And what would happen in this gathering if we started confessing sin as they did in Pyong Yang all across this room, like hating it, bringing him to the open, crying up for mercy, falling on our faces before the holiness of God?

Why does that seem unusual for us? Where are the Ezra and ministry, the Ezra in our churches who rise before God and fall to their knees with faces on the floor, hand spread out saying, I’m too ashamed, disgraced to lift my face when I see my sin in the sin of your people. What will it take to bring us to that point?

And I hesitated in one sense to even ask the question because it’s not something we can manufacture right? Something. Only the spirit of God can make happen in hearts, which leads to the second death I see in the story of Korean Christianity and all over scripture.

You Must Die to Yourself

In order to live you have to die to self. You have to die to self. Deny self. No longer I who live. Remember, remember why did this revival break out? Because the Church of Korea was desperate for God.

They saw their country struggling. They saw their churches struggling. They said we need to come together and cry out for God’s help. They were praying and pleading before God and he answered, and this has been the story of the church in South Korea ever since.

It is a story of prayerful desperation for God every morning. And when I was there every morning, the church I was preaching in, they were gathering at 5:30 to pray. Every morning they have all-night prayer meetings.

Most Christians in this room I would venture have never been to an all-night prayer meeting. Some of them have one every Friday night. I remember a professor of mine in seminary telling a story about having preached over in South Korea.

He was staying in his hotel and he woke up really early one morning like four o’clock in the morning to a loud sound outside. It was still dark. So we got up, went over to the window, opened it, and he saw a stadium full of people across the way and that’s where the sound was coming from.

There was this roar coming from the stadium and he thought, What kind of sports do they play? 4:00am in South Korea. He was frustrated. This is absurd.

So he closed the window, and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t finally, later in the morning got up when it was time to come down, it went to the lobby and he just asked the receptionist what sporting event was going on at four o’clock this morning in the stadium over there and the receptionist said, oh sir, that was not a sporting event.

That was the church praying to God the roar of Christians from a stadium crying out to God at four in the morning. We have all kinds of roars from stadiums around here, but it is for that which is in this world. And God teach us to pray like this and teach me to pray like this and I can picture it.

So each message after I would preach, one of the pastors would come up and God was, well, I don’t know. I’m not there all the time, but God was moving in some powerful ways so the password up and he would lead in a time of prayer.

So the word for and for Korean brothers and sisters in this room, I’m about to butcher the Korean language, so please apologize or please accept my apology from the very beginning. But the word for Lord sounds a lot like cheerio, so I know I’m not so cheerio.

So what would happen is the pastor would come up after we’ve walked through the word pastor would come up and say, we’re going to pray. And all of a sudden everybody across the room in unison would yell, Cheerio.

And then they would go for it all at the same time crying out to God, not like if we’re praying all at the same time, we’ve got a whispering hum, like we’re at a golf event. This was more stadium-like Cheerio, and they just started crying out to God.

We Need to Learn to Pray

I’m looking around the room and people in tears, people crying out to God, just praising him, thanking him, pleading for mercy, interceding in all kinds of different ways and they would just go on and on and on like this. It was awesome. Brothers and sisters, we need to learn to pray.

So I came back two Fridays ago, we just had our first all-night prayer meeting and that’s the first one I’d ever been a part of in a church. It was awesome. It was awesome.

I distinctly remember as I was going to it, I remember when I was a kid seeing my family go to a Wednesday night prayer meeting when I went to Wednesday night activities and they would go to a prayer meeting and one time I just asked, what do you do for an hour? And they’re like, we pray. I just remember walking away. I remember thinking, that sounds so boring.

Oh, I praise God for how he’s transformed my spiritual taste buds. It was awesome. And I just was thinking, why have I not led churches? I’ve pastored to do this before and we have so much fun to go.

We’re trying to grow and all these, I don’t know what this needs to look like, but I do know we spend hours doing all sorts of stuff in the church and relative minutes in prayer, and that’s got to change. I’m guessing there are hours and hours and hours spent in all of our lives and ministries and work and school and church doing all kinds of stuff and relative minutes and prayer got to help just to change because think about what is prayer.

Prayer is Death to Self

Prayer is death to self. If we don’t pray, we’re basically saying to God, we can do this without you, but we can’t. We can’t. We need God. And we realize, right? Prayer, prayerlessness at its root is pride. Prayerlessness at its root is pride. 

It is an attitude of a heart that says, I can do this without God. And it is utter foolishness and it is. I fear too much a part of our church culture. I’ll just say my life and ministry, need to change.

We can’t do this without God. We need God. We need God in our lives. We need God in our marriages, our parenting, and our kids. Our teenagers need God. Our churches need the grace of God. Our country needs the grace of God.

We have plenty of reason to pray. If we believe we need God, then we will pray, really pray, and cry out to God with passion because we can’t go on without him. God help us to die to ourselves in these ways.

You Must Die to This World

In order to live you have to die to self. What will it take? God brings us to death to sin and a death to self. And then third, in order to live. In order to live, you have to die in the ways of this world. You have to hate your life in this world Jesus says.

Which again means hate the kind of life that is caught up in the ways the pursuits and the pleasures and the possessions and the priorities of this world. In order to really live, you have to die to these things. And I saw that kind of death in South Korea, literally the day before I left, I was standing in a cemetery that the Korean church has preserved.

It’s a really powerful picture. The Korean church there has preserved a cemetery as a monument to missionaries who came and died there. Missionaries who died for the pursuits, pleasures, possessions, and priorities of this world who did what, looked like foolishness to the world and moved to an unknown country to learn an unknown language and live in a difficult place where you have to die daily to the ways of this world.

That cemetery is full of missionaries and their families like little kids, one-month-olds, one-month-olds, and six-month-olds who died of dysentery or other diseases. Wives who died and husbands carried on the work, husbands who died and the wives carried on the work, typhoid other illnesses.

One of the tombstones was Homer Holbert. He was a diplomat from England, been pretty successful in the world, but he had a heart for Korea and ended up spending his life with the Korean people there. There’s a quote from him over the grave. It says I would rather be buried in Korea than in Westminster Abbey.

That’s a perspective on the ways of this world. The cemetery was filled with students who came there when they were in their early twenties. Many from the student volunteer movement gave 40 years of their lives in Korea. And not just students.

Mary Scranton was 52 when she decided to come to Korea, started a school for girls, worked to share the gospel with women, spent with women, spent her last 24 years in Korea until she died at age 76. And it wasn’t just the missionaries, but those who supported them.

So following this, the Underwood family had four generations represented in that cemetery. Four generations of their family had served in the spread of the gospel in Korea. Do you know how their work there was financed?

So back in the early 20th century, there was something called the Underwood typewriter. John Underwood produced the first successful modern typewriter just before the turn of the century. And by 1939, he’d produced 5 million of them.

So picture Steve Jobs, the Apple MacBook, and this brother used his revenue to support his family in spreading the gospel in Korea. So the world would say to these men, and women, what are you doing? Giving up everything and going to Korea with no comfort where you’re dying of diseases?

Do You Hate Your Life?

Do you hate your life? And they would say yes in a sense, but in reality, they were finding life. They were giving life and yielding fruit that they never could have imagined. I couldn’t help but send out some messages, stand in that cemetery to brothers and sisters around the world who are serving in hard places, and don’t underestimate the fruit, the fruit that God will use in your death far after you are gone.

And it wasn’t just missionaries from the West who were dying in the ways of this world. It was our brother and sisters in the east. So I mentioned the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century, only to be followed by communism after that in the north, both of which wreaked havoc on the church.

So one of the main issues during the Japanese occupation was shrine worship. Japan set up shrines and required Korean citizens to bow down before them. Some Christians and pastors justified bowing down to them as an act. It’s just an act of patriotism, but many refused and it cost them.

Kids were kicked out of schools. Parents lost jobs with it. The ability to support their families. Many were thrown into prison. Nurses, farmers, pregnant mothers, teenage students. One young pastor of a large church, Chucho was arrested in 1938.

He was imprisoned for six months, then questioned and released as soon as he was. He stepped back into the pulpit at his church and went right back to preaching. The bowing at the feet of shrines was idolatry.

An undercover detective was in the congregation and he was arrested again. His young children crying as they took him away. His congregation met every morning at 5:00 AM even in bitter cold months to pray that God would help their pastor to stand strong in the days to come, was flogged and tortured many times as his captors tried to persuade him to bow.

But he never gave in. He withered in prison for the next six years until his body was wasted away. And he said to his wife, I’ve gone the road I was supposed to go. Follow my steps, we’ll meet in heaven.

One of two sons went on to follow in his dad’s footsteps as an evangelist across North Korea before he too was martyred. I was struck when I read this from one writer. He said, I’ve never met that son, but the crop of keen consecrated young men able in God’s word now serving in churches throughout South Korea who came from that young evangelist church during the time of his ministry is exceptional.

If It Dies, It Bears Much Fruit

Truly, truly. I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Kim Sup was arrested a total of 10 different times.

Every time they would torture him, he stretched back out on a bench with his hands tied underneath his head, hanging over the edge where they would pour water from a kettle down his nostrils to simulate drowning him, sometimes adding red pepper to increase the pain. They branded him with a hot iron.

They would use the back of a chair as a fulcrum to try to bend his body backward to simulate bowing to a shrine, but he would fight kicking and screaming. When they realized they couldn’t beat him into submission, they decided they’d release him for a short time, let him taste the freedom of life with his family, wife and kids, and his church.

But he would refuse to bow. They’d arrest him again, yank him away from his 4-year-old son crying uncontrollably before his 10th arrest and eventual death in prison. Kim was asked, how do you have the courage to keep going in the face of constant arrests?

And he replied, when I became a Christian, I died with Christ. And once you are dead, what men do to you cannot hurt you. With the end of Japanese occupation came the onslaught of communism, which unfortunately would prove far more brutal than anything the Japanese had done mass torture and executions of Christians.

At one point the People’s Police ordered about 180 church members to come to their church building for a meeting. When they arrived, they were locked inside. The wooden church building was set on fire with communist officers standing outside to shoot anyone who tried to escape these Christians knowing they were going to die no matter what they did, started seeing and worshiping until the burning building collapsed over them and they were consumed in the fire.

One last story that sums up both periods of persecution. Sun y Juan was a pastor in a leper colony and refused to worship shrines during Japanese. The occupation was arrested and imprisoned and then released when the Japanese occupation ended. But then during communist rule, his two oldest sons Tongan Inan were off at middle school doing well with hopes of moving on to a university in America.

One day though, in a communist revolt, a mob of students representing the communist party came onto the campus knowing these two boys were strong Christians, they brought them out and started to beat them, and eventually a student named the leader of the mob shot and killed both boys. News came back to the pastor soon who heard that the revolt had been quieted and heard that the killer had been apprehended.

Pastor soon, immediately sent a messenger to the court to plead for them to spare that student’s life. And pastor soon went so far as to offer to adopt him as his own son. The judge was totally shocked and agreed, and the pastor soon adopted his son’s killer.

Years later, when communists invaded the leper colony, he’d gone back to pastor. He refused to flee. Instead of staying with that church, he was arrested, imprisoned, tied up with 75 others, and executed where his adopted son wept over his body.

John 12 doesn’t make sense if this life if this world is all there is, if life is all about the possessions and pleasures and pursuits of this world, and these brothers and sisters totally missed it. They should have lived it up in this world, but they didn’t miss it.

If Anyone Serves Me, He Must Follow Me

We’re the ones who attempted to miss it. I guarantee you, every single one of these brothers and sisters, missionaries and martyrs alike doesn’t regret for a second hating their lives in this world. What did Jesus just say in verse 26? If anyone serves me, he must follow me.

And where I am there will my servant be. Also, if anyone serves me, the father will honor him. Lemme tell you where all of those brothers and sisters are right now. They’re where Jesus is and the Father is honoring them and they don’t regret for a second hitting their lives in this world.

They know life, a real life, eternal life. I’m walking through that cemetery just thinking I cannot wait to meet these people. They died in the ways of this world and others are following in their footsteps, martyrs and missionaries alike.

Like I stood one day on the border of North Korea, looking over to that country, realizing we have brothers and family on the other side of those mountains right now and labor camps languishing in prison because they’re followers of Jesus. They’ve died of the ways of this world and missionaries as well.

I mentioned South Korea has become the second largest sending country for missionaries in the world behind the US and they’re much smaller than us the founding pastor. So follow this, do the math. The founding pastor of the church where I was preaching pastor in 1993 when the church had 3000 members, he challenged the church to send out 2000 missionaries.

Like missionaries, like people who move somewhere else in the world for the spread of the gospel. Not like on a short-term mission trip, like moving 3000 members, 2000 missionaries. And this last year, 25 years later, they had done it.

They’ve sent out 2000 missionaries. They have close to a thousand on the field right now. One church granted it’s a large church, but they have over a quarter of the number of missionaries that 40,000 Southern Baptist churches have on the field right now.

Just think about that goal. 3000 members, we’re going to send out 2000 missionaries. Take your church size right now, whatever size it is, and then think about sending two-thirds of that number as missionaries moving somewhere else for the spread of the gospel. A hundred people in your church, your goal, 67 missionaries moving for the spread of the gospel.

The Church Must Die to Sin, Self, and the World

How is that possible? Here’s how you die. How’s fruit like that possible? A church dies to sin and a church dies to self and a church dies of the ways of this world and lives for what’s going to matter far beyond this world. And it all starts with a pastor.

When leaders in church die to sin, who die to self, and who die to the ways of this world. So brothers and sisters across this campus, I challenge us today as leaders in the church based on the history of our brothers and sisters in South Korea.

More importantly, based on basic Christianity. In the words of John 12, let’s die. Let’s die to our sin. Let’s hate our sin in this world. Let’s ask God to break us over sin in this world, to weep over it, to run from it, to repent of it. Let’s die to our sin. Let’s die to ourselves.

Let’s pray. Let’s start to pray like we believe we need God. Like we want God. Let’s cry out for his mercy and grace his power and his presence. Let’s ask God to move in our lives and our families and our cities and the world and our country in a way that can only be explained by his hand. Let’s die to our sin.

Do You Want to Bear Fruit?

Let’s die to ourselves and let’s die to the ways of this world. We’re not living for this world. We’re living in another world. A grain of wheat falls there dies, and remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Don’t you want to bear fruit?

Do we want to bear fruit from our lives our families and our churches? Do we want to see fruit for college glory here around the world like South Korea from 1% Christian to 10 million followers of Christ?

Just imagine, I hear even sentiment today like our country’s so far gone. There’s no hope for us. That is not true. But let it be clear that hope is not another election, any leader.

Our hope is in our God, and he alone is able to move in mighty ways if we cry out to him in faith and not just here, God is able to do in other countries what he did in South Korea. Just think of a country that today is less than 1% Christian, Afghanistan, Yemen, is it possible to see 10 million followers of Jesus in Afghanistan a hundred years from now in Yemen sending out missionaries around the world from Afghanistan or Yemen?

Absolutely that’s possible. When a seed dies, it bears not just fruit, it bears much fruit. So believe this, what fruit has gone, I want to bear it through our lives. When we die, whoever loves his life loses it.

Whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me Where I am there will my servant be. Also, if anyone serves me, the father will honor him.

These are hard words, but they are glorious words. It’s hard to die to sin and die self and die of the ways of this world, but it’s worth it, brothers and sisters, to gain eternal life, to bear fruit, not just in our lives but far beyond our lives and others experiencing life and it all to receive the honor of God.

I long for that, not just to be the story of the church in South Korea. I long for that to be the story of the churches we lead. Will you pray with me? Oh God, I pray that you would help me. You would help us to die to sin and to die to ourselves.

And To die to the ways of this world. And to live. We want to live and we want to bear fruit. We want to bear much fruit for your glory and for others’ good and for our joy. So help us to die. We prayed all these ways in Jesus’ name. Amen.