Matt Hagee - Why... You Make The Difference
When it comes to making a difference, you and I have a very simple commission to keep. In the New Testament, theologians have called it "The great commission". But when we were redeemed, we were drafted into the army of the living God. And in our redemption, here is the commission. According to Matthew 28, it says, "Go". Say that word with me. Go. "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit". Mark 16:15, it says it again, "Go". Say it with me. "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature".
This was not some special assignment for the 12 disciples. This wasn't a direct command that was isolated only to them. This commission was for all who have ever received Jesus. If you have received him 40 years ago, or you've only known him for four days, you've got the same commission, "Go". Go tell somebody else who Jesus is and what he has done. The commission is simple. You don't have to memorize a verse: just remember these three words. Your commission as a redeemed soul in the army of the living God is simply this: win the lost. Say that with me. Win the lost. No matter your denomination, no matter your tradition: win the lost. No matter your age, no matter your generation: win the lost. No matter the specific gifts and talents that you have, no matter the things that you feel purposely called to do: each and every one of us has but one job, win the lost.
No matter where you've come from, no matter what you've been through, no matter what you're going through: if Jesus Christ is your Savior, if he set you free from your past: if he's given you redemption over death, hell, and the grave: then you have one commission, win the lost. Winning the lost is how we make a difference. Why? Because when you win the lost, you've introduced the sinner to the difference maker. And he changes everything. How many of you can testify that Jesus Christ changes everything?
The Bible says so in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "If anyone is in Christ Jesus", "Anyone" being the best of us. "Anyone" being the worst of us. The moment that you come to Christ Jesus, suddenly you're a new creation in Christ. The truth is up until you become a new creation, all you can do is be a reformed version of your bad self. You can do a lot of self-improvement in this life. But without Jesus, nothing changes. The last verse of the book of Mark 16:20, it says, "And they went out and preached everywhere". Where did they preach? Everywhere. And then the next line says, "The Lord working with them". Say that with me. "The Lord working with them".
They received the commission in Mark 16:15, "Go into all the world and preach to every creature". And by verse 20, they had gone out and were preaching everywhere. They took the gospel with them to work. They took the gospel with them to the streets. They took the gospel with them to their homes. They told their friends what Jesus had done. They told their enemies what Jesus had done. They told their coworkers what Jesus had done. They told their neighbors what Jesus had done. They told the strangers what Jesus had done. And in doing so, they turned the world upside down! Why? Because the Bible says it in verse 20, "The Lord working with them".
When you go out and win the lost, God is working with you. Why? Because you're doing what he wants you to do. God is your source of life. "In him, do we live, and in him, do we move, and in him, do we have our being". You have an unlimited amount of potential in you, because your source is limitless! But the problem is sin has separated us from our source. The Bible says, "By one man", that man being Adam, "Did sin enter the world". And the Bible says, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". It also says that the soul that sinneth shall surely die. So sin has separated us from our source. And what salvation does is it reconnects us back to the source.
Let me show you what I mean. I've asked for some volunteers to come and help me this morning. And so I'd like to call them forward. Come here. I didn't really ask for the volunteers: I bought them. These fish right now are doing great. They're happy. They've got all that they need, because they're properly connected to their source. They were created for water. They're in water. They need food. I can tell you, between services, they were well fed. There isn't anything right now that they're lacking. And so in their contentment, they're just floating along. This bowl right here, let's say that this is the church. This is salvation. This is where people come to get in contact with their source, Jesus Christ. And as long as you're inside the bowl, as long as you're in salvation, as long as you're in Christ, everything's fine. I mean you couldn't want for anything, because our God, after all, is indeed more than enough.
But here's the problem: what happens when a fish gets out of its source? This fish right here is dead already. What? Do you want to save him? You know what's funny? You want to save him, but his friends don't. They're not jumping out of the bowl to come get him. They're not even aware that he's gone. They're not worried about him. Y'all were worried he wasn't going to swim: weren't you? You and i, in our sin, are just like a fish out of water. And it's just a matter of time. We're dead already. Receive Jesus Christ and you'll never thirst again. Now one thing I can tell you, there were more people in this sanctuary worried about the life and death of that fish, than you are about the eternity of your neighbor, than you are about the soul of your coworker, than you are about certain members in your own household. That fish has no soul. He dies: we make tacos.
This is a picture of a Sunday school teacher, who served in his church in Detroit in the 1850's. His name was Edward Kimball. He wasn't the pastor of the church. He was just a volunteer willing to take a group of boys and tell them about Jesus. Edward Kimball, in 1854, had a 17-year-old boy come to his Sunday school one Sunday. And at the end of the Sunday school, Edward Kimball extended the invitation for anyone who wanted to receive Jesus Christ. The young 17-year-old boy told Edward Kimball that he had no interest in knowing anything about Jesus and he left. And Edward Kimball, rather than just let it go, he was concerned about the young boy. So he found out where he worked and found out that it was a department store where he was the shoe shine boy.
And so he went the next morning to the department store, and he bought a shoe shine. And Edward Kimball sat in that shoe shine chair and simply explained to the young man, "I'm worried about you. I'm worried that if you do not receive Christ and you die without salvation, you'll go to an eternity in hell. I'm worried that you need to receive the love and the joy and the peace that only God can give". And as Edward Kimball, the Sunday school teacher, continued to share his concerns for the young man and his future, the young man began to weep, and he himself decided that he did want to know Christ. Why? Because Edward Kimball was willing to shine the light. The 17 year old that he led to Christ was a young man by the name of D.L. Moody. And D.L. Moody, as history records, is one of the most powerful evangelists of the 1800's.
As a matter of fact, D.L. Moody and the work that he did for the Lord actually is one of the things that changed the culture where there was a generation that no longer wanted to allow slavery. D.L. Moody is attributed with reaching more than one hundred million people with the gospel of Jesus Christ in his lifetime. Now think about that. The 1800's, there was no formal technical communication. There was no radio broadcast. There was no television. There was no widespread national media in print. And yet, without those resources, this individual reached more than a hundred million people.
One of the people that he reached in his life in ministry was a pastor in London, England by the name of F.B. Meyer. The members of Frederick Meyer's congregation, they heard about this revival that D.L. Moody was having in the United States. And they went to Frederick Meyer, and they said, "Pastor, would you bring D.L. Moody to London and would you let him preach for us"? F.B. Meyer sent word to D.L. Moody that his church wanted to hear him.
So D.L. Moody took the invitation. Now the interesting thing about this is that F.B. Meyer did not like D.L. Moody the minute he saw him. And the reason he didn't like him is because F.B. Meyer was highly educated. He had many degrees. He had sat in the finest institutions of England and in the finest institutions of Europe. And he was well read. And D.L. Moody had a fifth-grade education. And so because of their personal differences, F.B. Meyer immediately didn't think that Moody was qualified to preach. You know I'm glad to know that people with differences, 150 years ago, had problems with each other like people with differences do now.
And so here's what happened. F.B. Meyer looked at D.L. Moody, he said, "I want you to share three messages and they need to be your best three". And D.L. Moody got up, and the first night he preached a message entitled "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus". And the next night he got up, and he preached a second message entitled, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus". And I bet you would never guess what he preached on the third night. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus". Now the thing about these three simple messages is that whenever he offered and extended an altar call, the power of God fell, and people in F.B. Meyer's church began to get saved. And you would think that F.B. Meyer would be moved by this, seeing God work in their life, but he wasn't. He writes in his own journal, "I was insanely jealous".
Two weeks after D.L. Moody left London, pastor Meyer was going around visiting his Sunday school teachers. And he went to speak with one of his Sunday school teachers, who was teaching the teenage boys' class. And he knew it was a tough group of young men. And he asked them, "How is your class going"? And he said, "Pastor," he said, "You know you preach on a lot of subjects". He said, "But since Moody left, all I've taught my boys is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus". And he said, "Today, over half of my class gave their heart to Jesus Christ". When F.B. Meyer heard this, his heart broke. He fell to his knees. He said he confessed that he had grown distracted and that he wanted to refocus the rest of his life and ministry to just simply telling people who Jesus was and how they could meet him.
And so the rest of his days, he preached Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And in doing so, F.B. Meyer led a young man by the name of j. Wilbur Chapman to Christ. J. Wilbur Chapman came to Chicago in the late 1800's, and he led a very popular sports star, who was playing baseball at the time, by the name of Billy Sunday, to Christ. Now Billy Sunday was a baseball player. But then he became an evangelist. And Billy Sunday, in his revival, in the early 1900's was so impactful that he led the nation to the 19th amendment, which was the prohibition of alcohol. You see we believe that if we attack the behavior, we can bring them to the Savior. That's not how it works. You bring them to the Savior: he'll change their behavior.
Now Billy Sunday was a great revival preacher. And in the Chicago revival of the 1900's, one evening a young man by the name of Mordecai ham got saved. Mordecai ham was one of the first tent revivalists in the 20th century. He bought a used circus tent, and he would travel the nation and set it up for several weeks. And he would preach the gospel and see a lot of people won to Christ. And one night in North Carolina, in 1936, Mordecai ham had his tent set up, and there was no seats available underneath the tent. As a matter of fact, people were standing shoulder to shoulder and nose to neck, because they wanted to hear what the stout-built preacher had to say. Under that tent, a young man and his friend came to be a part of the service. They didn't go to church. Neither of them knew the Lord. But when they walked in and they recognized that there wasn't any seating available, they turned and considered it a good excuse to go.
As they were walking out, an usher came and tapped the two young boys, and said, "Fellas, why don't you sit in my seat and my wife's seat, because you need to hear what pastor ham has to say"? And the young boy even wrote that he didn't want to go to church. He didn't really feel like he belonged there. He said, "And as much as I was trying to tell the man that we didn't want to impose," he said, "He was such a large man that he threw his arms around both of us. And while it looked like a hug, we had no choice. We were going wherever he went". So this usher walks these boys to these seats. Could you imagine such a thing, somebody giving up reserved seating in church? And he sits them down. And they listen to Mordecai ham share the gospel.
And that night in 1936 in North Carolina, a 16-year-old, lanky boy from the hills of North Carolina, gave his heart to Christ. And you know him as Billy Graham. You see here at the ministry, we have this mission statement, "All the gospel to all the world and every generation". Why? Because the gospel lives long after you do. This is a picture of a young lady that was born in 1914 in Alice, Texas. Her father died when she was nine, and life was tough. But she met the love of her life when she turned 14, and his name was Jesus. That's a picture of her standing on the steps outside the church where she got saved. In the 1920's, women were not really encouraged to be in leadership roles anywhere. And they certainly weren't encouraged to speak in church.
But that didn't slow her down. She went and got a seminary degree, and she began teaching in the church. And she began teaching in seminary. She wanted to serve God with everything she had. She wasn't allowed to preach in church, but she was teaching people, who wanted to be preachers, how to go preach. Irony: huh? And then she married a preacher. He was actually the son of a preacher. And according to her, she said that when they started dating, he had galvation but needed salvation. I heard it said that she could preach better on accident than he could on purpose. And the truth is, when they started their young family, it was a problem, because when miss Vada Hagee would preach, everybody showed up. And when her husband would preach, few showed up.
So one night she stood up in a prayer meeting, and she made a public announcement. She said, "I am no longer going to speak publicly". She said, "It's creating division in the church. It's creating division in a number of places". She said, "What I'm going to do is I am going to give my life to raising my sons. And I believe that what I'm laying down for him today, he'll raise up in one of them tomorrow". Now everyone heard that and they, first and foremost, didn't believe that she meant it. They thought, well she'll take some time off and she'll be back in a couple of weeks. But if Vada said it, go ahead and set your watch: it was done. And everybody thought that the tall boy in the back was the one that God was going to use, because after all, bill liked being in church. Bill looked forward to getting involved in programs. It was the little guy standing in front of bill, John, that everybody worried about.
Now John not only loved football: he was good at it. And he got a football scholarship. And so each night when he would come in after late practices, he'd take off his shoes, because as tough as he was, he didn't want his mother to hear him walking down the hallway. But he could hear her and she was talking to God. "Lord, don't let my boy leave this home without being saved. Don't let him get out from under your covering without your blood on his life". For all of the sermons, for all of the services, for all of the revivals that pastor had ever been to, he couldn't tell you what night, he couldn't tell you what speaker. What he does know is that one Sunday in January during a revival, he hadn't listened to one word that the preacher said, probable like some of you here today. But suddenly he knew that he wanted to know Jesus more than he wanted to breathe. And in 1958, he gave his heart to Christ.
Now in 1958, John Hagee was nothing more than just a high school graduate and a football athlete. And when Vada said that she was going to lay down her ministry and that God would give it to another, I assure you that she had no clue what God was going to do through her young son. She had no clue that there would be more than 200 nations that would hear the gospel through a television ministry. She had no clue that there would be millions, who would receive Jesus Christ. She had no clue that this gospel would go all the way around the world, but she was faithful. She was faithful. And I can tell you this: every soul that this ministry has touched has her fingerprints on it, because she sacrificed enough to do what Jesus wanted, win the lost.
Can we stand? We're going to close this service by singing this one chorus. And I want you, who want to receive Christ, to begin walking this way as soon as we sing. Because I assure you: this step of faith is the step that changes everything in your life and when you come, I want to pray with you. And then I want to have the opportunity to tell you more about what Jesus is and what he can do. So if you want to receive Jesus this morning, if you raised your hand and said, "Pastor, that's me," I want you to come as we begin to sing. Ready? "Thank you Lord for saving my soul. Thank you Lord for making me whole. Oh, thank you Lord for giving to me thy great salvation, so rich and free". Church, I want us all to repeat this prayer today. I want us to believe that what we're seeing is a new birth in Christ Jesus. So raise your hands and bow your heads, and repeat after me:
Lord Jesus Christ, today I come to you and I thank you that you have given me the gift of your grace. Today I receive it, in faith believing. And I receive my redemption, my salvation, the forgiveness of my sins. And I thank you for making the difference in my life. Lord Jesus, today, and every day forward, you are my king, and I am yours. Thank you for setting me free, in Jesus' name. Amen.