Conrad Mbewe explains in this video that it can be easy to forget about the lost. We can surround ourselves with likeminded individuals and neglect the Great Commission. We need to grow a desire to spread the Gospel and share the good news with others around us. It is one thing to robotically follow a command, but we ought to pray for a love and a earnest desire for souls to be saved.

2 Timothy 4:2 (NKJV) - "Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching."

Good morning, everyone. It's only a Christian church thing if we have coffee, right? That's how it is our church. Welcome. I'm so glad to be here with all of you.

My name is Bobby Moss. I'm from Chicago. And just here with you this week to come in and talk about Lagos. In Chicago, that's where I live with my wife and our two awesome children, Bailey and Jackson. I'm a pastor there.

And just trying to love Jesus and bring the gospel to the city and really excited to be able to come here and talk with you a little bit about how to get equipped for better Bible study. The idea of Lagos Bible software is we want to help people get into the Bible more often, more consistently, but also deeper and more thoroughly. What's happening with Lagos is you have a whole Bible theology library. All the books that you would want for Bible study and for devotions and research and everything you would want to get into the Word on your computer, but not just the books, it's a huge library, all full complete books on your computer, but also the tools that you need to get in and use those books, the resources that you would need to be able to search and look things up and do word studies and do devotions and all those different things. So I'm just going to take a couple of minutes here just to show you the software.

And then once we get done, I'm going to be here for the rest of the day, actually up until about 3.30. I would love for you to come over to the vendor hall and talk with me there, and I can just talk to you a little bit more about the software. So if you guys could switch it over to the computer there, and I'm going to bring this up for us. It looks like the signal's a little different. Sorry, we're just going to make a little change right here.

Our Screen got a little adjusted. Okay, so this is Lagos. This is what it looks like when you open up the software. And again, this home page is really meant for a quiet time, for just that alone time with God that we spend every morning. And what's going to happen here, as you see it coming up, is that this is a Bible study newspaper.

So it's like every day, when you open up the software, you're going to have different information. A lot of us have a flow, something that we do every day as far as Bible study and such. We know what we're doing, but some are just starting out. They need some help. So every day here on this home page, there's going to be different pictures, there's going to be different articles, different devotionals that they can come to.

I actually have a reading plan that I'm doing going through the Bible in one year. I'm also going through My Utmost for His Highest, where all I have to do is come here, hover over those texts, read through those every day and it helps keep me on track and my wife has hers as well and these sync to all of our phones and computers and everything like that so it just kind of keeps you along in the scriptures. The power of Lagos though is this box right here. And if you can get this box down, this is really what transforms Bible study. This is really what helps us get into the Word a lot faster, but also like I said a lot deeper.

Just by a show of hands, a little bit of curiosity, How many of you can use Google? Can you raise your hand if you're able to use Google? All right, if somebody doesn't buy you doesn't have their hand up. You just reach over and pray for them for a second Because Google is really really easy, right? The instructions for Google are pretty simple Put whatever you want to know in box and hit go.

There is no number three. It's very simple. And the Lagas isn't Google, but it's as easy as Google. Whatever topic you want to study, whatever passage you want to study, put it in this box and hit go. So that might be marriage, that might be anger, that might be forgiveness.

You might need all three of those. It might be sanctification. A couple married people got that joke, thank you. It might be sanctification. It might be creation, end time, whatever that might be, put that topic, whatever the passage is.

So Romans 8, Galatians 2, 20, Psalm 23, put it in the box and hit go. So just to illustrate that, I'm going to put in the Great Commission. Since we're at a great commission conference, it seemed a little appropriate to use that passage. So I'm gonna put Matthew 28 in here, and like I said, just hit go. And what Lagos has done is it's taken Matthew 28, It's taken that verse, when I hit go, it goes through and it goes through all of the books that I have on my computer and looks for Matthew 28 and looks for the books that mention Matthew 28, finds that information, and then brings it up to the screen and organizes it in a way that I can use it.

Now see, I am, let me just confess, I mean I know I'm talking about computers, but I'm a book guy, I like holding a book. I like, people call me crazy, I like the smell of a book. You know, I'm a hardcore book guy. But I'm also, I like to do things efficiently. And for me, the fact that I can carry hundreds of books on my computer wherever I go and be able to do my studies in half the time that I normally would, that's worth it to me.

And that's what's awesome is that everything that I need is right there. And one thing to point out, and just to clarify, is I'm not on the internet right now. So this isn't dependent on the internet or any cloud or anything like that. It's all on my computer and I get all of this information. Well, what information am I getting?

Well, you can see here in the top in the middle, here's my Bibles. And I like the ESV version, but you can see if I go through and click on these tabs, there's also my King James, my New American Standard, NIV. If any of the translations that you like aren't there, those are just the ones I like, I can click this little plus sign and you can see there's a ton of other translations that I could go through and add. All your Greek and Hebrew stuff, all your standard English translations. And we wanna get into the text.

We wanna start learning more about the scriptures or asking questions and such so if I go down here to the Great Commission And Jesus says all authority and heaven on earth has been given to me. What did Jesus mean when he said authority? I mean my kids know what I mean when I say authority but what is Jesus talking about when he uses that word right there? Well all I have to do is click on that, not click, but point at that word and you can see over on the right in this information box I'm getting a bunch of information to explain that word to me. So it doesn't matter how big or small the word is, all I have to do is point at the word and I immediately get word study information explaining the Greek, explaining the Hebrew, helping me really understand what's going on in the scriptures.

What information does it give? Well first off there's the English definition. Below that is the Greek word with the Greek definition. So here it's freedom of choice. So all freedom of choice and heaven on earth has been given to me, and I choose you to go and make disciples.

That's pretty good, right? That is, as they say, that preaches. So that's pretty good. And that's just pointing at one word. You can see next to the Greek word, there's this little speaker right here.

If I click on that, exousia, exousia, exousia, It's going to pronounce the Greek word there for you. And the reason why we put that in there is we want to equip you. We want to make sure that when you're talking about God's word, you're talking about his agape, not his agape. We want to make sure that you have it on track. As I scroll down, you can see it's gonna parse the Greek if you're doing those type of language study.

There's also a Strong's number. How many of you have ever looked up a word in a Strong's Concordance? All right, if your hand's up, you've prayed that prayer. Dear Lord, let it be a short list of verses, right? Some of you have prayed that.

Well, you can see as I scroll down through the information panel, those verses are looked up for me. So again, it's getting me to the same information. It's not a crutch. It's just helping me do my work faster. It's helping me get to what's important really, really quickly.

Over here on the left, you can see my passage guide. And this is like a team of people helping me get into the Word of God. And first off are the commentaries. So all I have to do is click on these books. And as I'm clicking on them, you can see that they're opening up down here to the passage that I'm studying.

So I don't have to go and gather books and lay them out all over the table. All of my books are in one place and all I have to do is click on the tabs to go through and read those and get into the word. My cross references are there, just that middle column of our Bibles. And you don't have to go back and flip back and forth there, just hover over the verses and they automatically pop up. But then it gets into the historical cultural stuff.

And that, excuse me, the handout. The handout, you can create your own handout within Lagos. So for family devotions, there's Bible studies, sermon notes, whatever that might be, you can customize a handout based on the text that you're studying. Within the historical cultural stuff, any person, place, or thing that's mentioned in Lagos, it's going to take you to the books that tell you who that person is, tell you how they fit into the story and the narrative of scripture. And right to the books, It's also going to give you images how are people connected and such and my wife and I use this with our kids all the time because I mean as they're learning to read and everything we're trying to tell them the stories of the Bible and here we can come in and show them pictures and try to really help them grasp what's going on within the text So it really illustrates what's happening.

It also gets into the maps and such. So you can see as I come down here into Galilee, it's going to take me to the books that explain, well, what were these people like? What were they known for? How has that helped me understand what's going on in the word? And you can measure between distances on these maps.

You can click on any city. It's going to take you right to the books that explain, you know, this is what Galilee was like. This is what they were known for. Cultural stuff that helped me really understand what the scriptures are talking about. Flying through this, there's more items and biblical things, so the props that are used in the Bible, more pictures and media resources, songs that go along with the text that you're studying, and you can see with the sheet music right there.

So you can just, well, what songs go with this? It's gonna help you figure that out and get you equipped with the music. The topics that your passage studies, you can see those. A ton of illustrations for teaching, ton of illustrations for teaching. Words for word studies and also comparing the versions.

And over doing it, there's a lot of kids and there's a family conference. So one other thing that's really cool in Lagos If I come up here to file you can see I can choose word find puzzle And what this does is I come in here I can put the passage that we're looking at just Matthew 28 in the Great Commission and then long us Automatically create one of those little word find things. So if you're dealing with younger children, kind of keep them engaged on what we're talking about. Maybe it's a Bible study or something like that. Lagos will help with that as well.

So there's a ton of other things in here. I don't have time to show you all of them. But what I wanted you to point out is that Everything that I just went over, the Bibles, the different word study information, searching, the comparing versions, word studies, illustrations, topics, the music, people, places, and things, the cross references, the commentaries, everything that I just did came from putting in Matthew 28 and hitting go. That was it. If you can use Google, you can use Lagos.

And think about what that's going to do for your Bible study. For our family, it's changed everything. We want to make sure that you can get equipped with Lagos. And we're really excited to be able to come in here and partner with you at the conference and just come alongside and minister. The way Lagos works is that there's over 30, 000 books available in Lagos, Bible study tools and reference tools, but also histories and people of the faith and people from our church history and such, but you don't start off with 30, 000 books, you start off with a base package, a couple hundred books, 200, 300, 500, up to a thousand that you start with, and then you can add on a la carte as time goes on.

I was looking at the different posters that you had in the lobby and such, and all those great men and women of the faith, you can get those books in Lagos and they're part of the system that you're able to search through. All of these different base packages are 20% off here at the conference, which is the biggest discount you can get on Lagos, just to show you a couple of these. The Leaders Library has almost 350 books that are worth 5, 500 in print. It doesn't have any of the Greek and Hebrew, not a whole lot of the Greek and Hebrew stuff in it, but like the name suggests, it's gonna give you men's ministry, women's ministry, pastoral care, life type things. With the discount, it's $259.96 or $29 a month.

Logos knows that the $259.96 might be difficult for some families on the front end, so they allow you to put it on your debit card or your credit card over 12 months. And it's not a forever subscription, it's payments, but you're getting the software right now. That's the thing to realize is this isn't something that you order online later on to get the discount. You do do it here at the conference, but you're able to spread it out over 12 months. Scholars is the most popular one.

It's the one I was just using, and I would recommend at least starting here if you can, because of the almost 500 books, this is where you're really getting the books that get into the languages, the history, the culture. You might not be a Greek or Hebrew person, but this has the books that are gonna explain those things to you. It's 503.96 or 51 a month, And then silver adds 300 more commentaries. This is really popular with teachers or pastors and such. It's $799.96 or $78 a month.

It goes on everything. So if you have a PC or a Mac and iPad you can see it on here a phone a droid you're doing all these different things on the devices and for families it's really important to realize is that the license covers everything so your desktop your laptop if you have a PC if you have a Mac If you have a computer your spouse does if they all break put it on the new ones It goes on all of your stuff. You have 30 days to try it out There's the payments you have customer service and training and like I said you do get it here So I'm the thing to make sure you realize I'm only gonna be here today till about 3 3 30 So, please make sure that you're able to come and see me during lunch or during one of the breaks. All you have to do is fill out the form, and I hand you the software, and you're off to the races. So this has been the thing that's helped us in our family's Bible study more than anything, and I know it's gonna do the same for yours.

So thanks so much for listening. Hope you have a great rest of the conference. Thank you. Please stand with me. Let's sing together, oh for a thousand tongues to sing By great redeemer's praise The glories of my God and King The triumphs of his grace Jesus, the name that charms our fears, That pits our sorrows at ease.

His music in the city, till his life and health and peace. He breaks the power of cancelled sin, he sets the prisoner free. He sets the prisoner free. His blood can make the foulest plea. His blood avail for me.

Hear him, ye deaf, his praise ye dumb your lucid tongues in joy be blind behold your Savior come let me be lame for joy Hold your Savior come, heavenly be they for joy. My gracious Master and my God, assist me to proclaim, assist me to proclaim, to spread through all the earth abroad the honors of thy name. You may be seated. Now please join me in welcoming Scott Brown to introduce our next speaker. Before I introduce and bring up Conrad and Bayway.

They're just a couple of housekeeping items. One, we're going to have a panel discussion at the end of the conference up here in the afternoon. If you have any questions that you'd like us to answer, If you could write them down and take them to the registration table and we'll sift through them and we'll try to answer your questions if we can get to them. Secondly, if you take out your program, there's one change on this program. If you look to the far right at the 930 breakout session section, Revival and Revivalism explaining Ian Murray's book, Craig Houston.

As many of you know, as many have been praying about Craig Houston's daughter Anna was just discovered to have cancer and he's there, you know, being with her and, you know, beginning her treatments. And so he's not here but there is a replacement speaker for him Scott Dix is going to come and give the same message It's a fantastic message everybody needs to know about revival and revivalism and the impact that that has had on us And so I recommend that to you as well And now I like for us to prepare our hearts to hear Conrad and Bayway I'm so grateful that he has agreed to come and especially to give this message. I think that this principle that he is going to bring before us has to be one of the most important issues before us in our lives. We don't need more training. We don't need more clarification about what God has commanded.

Those things are really simple. What holds us back so often? Love. Love for the lost. I know that there have been so many missed opportunities in my own life, and you can trace those missed opportunities back to one single word, love, and the lack of it.

And so Conrad, I thank you for coming and laboring with us in this very important subject. And while he's coming up, I just want to also pray for if you could just keep coming on up, Conrad. I would like to pray for him during the session. Almighty God, you are the author of all love. And oh, that we would have such a heart within us to love you with all of our hearts.

And that love would spill over to those that we see, even those who hate us, even those that are displeasing in our sight, that you would give us your love for mankind. And oh Father, I pray you'd bless this man in his travels. And Father, I pray for great protection for the churches that are so dear to his heart in Zambia. Oh Father that you would pour your spirit out on these churches that you would that you would send the wolves to flight, that you would give the pastors such love and such urgency and such clarity, such beauty of holiness as they lead their flocks, that you, Father, would Give them armies of volunteers to go and and do your work Oh Father. I pray that that there would be 80 and a hundred and 200 churches as as the decades pass here that you would That you would pour out your spirit upon Zambia that you would transform it through lights that are existing in all the cities of Zambia, where a true gospel is preached, Lord, where the prosperity gospel is destroyed, and there are true converts.

There are people who have bowed down and who truly are not being healed lightly But heavily and deeply and beautifully now father. I pray you to rest on Conrad I pray you would rest on us and that you would give us understanding in our hearts, that you would give us hunger and attentiveness, that we would now find ourselves under the voice of your authority as we listen. Amen. Amen. Thank you.

Well, if you would please turn with me to the book of Romans and chapter 9. Romans and chapter 9. Bearing in mind that this is really my last session with you, let me use the opportunity to express my gratitude for the invitation that I've had to be with you on this occasion and also for the fellowship, the wonderful fellowship that I've had opportunity to have with a number of you. Some of you have been familiar faces from the past, and so it's been great catching up with you. But many of you have been, but new faces.

All the same, it's been good to meet with you and to share something of the common bond and experience that we have in our Lord Jesus Christ, especially around the kind of subject that we are dealing with, that of the Great Commission. It's one of those issues that we need to keep reminding ourselves about again and again and again. It's so easy for us to become insular, to become inward looking, to turn the church into a place where we are feeling nice and enjoying ourselves and everything is cozy. When really we are soldiers of the cross, we are to be planting the cross of Christ in more hearts and further afield. We are to seek the kingdom of God to spread.

And so reminding ourselves about that is something we can never do too often. Romans 9 and the very first three verses are the ones that I will read to you. The Bible says there, I am speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.

For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh." In dealing with the subject of the great commission, it's always important every so often for us to pause and specifically ask ourselves questions related to the whole issue of motives for a number of reasons. First of all, it's because it matters to God that we are not only doing what He commands us to do, but that we are also doing it with the right motives. It's very possible for us to do what God wants, but to do so primarily because of some immediate benefit that's going to come to us in a very selfish way. For instance, elders in the church are exhorted to shepherd the flock, but never because they've got an eye on their paycheck. It ought to be because of higher reasons and better motives.

But another reason why motives matter is because if we have wrong motives, often we run out of energy. We may have begun on a right note in terms of our engines revving and wanting to go. But before long, we settle back. We are exhausted. We are in a miserable state, all because the motives that we had to begin with were absolutely unsustainable.

So what kind of motives ought we to have in order that the work of evangelism, the work of missions may continue in our lives and in our churches to our dying day? Well, there are quite a number that I can draw your attention to. For instance, I think the greatest and highest motive ought to be the glory of God. God receives glory as souls that were once upon a time in rebellion and sin are drawn into a place of submission to him and ready worship of the living God. And therefore, because we want to see this, we engage in the task of bringing souls from the wayward paths in order for them to join in the great assembly worshipping the living God.

The Great Commission itself, the very fact that our Lord has given us a task, And out of obedience to him, therefore, we want to carry out his responsibility. That in itself is a motive and an all-important one. I can add to it the very reality of hell, the fact that souls must perish. We need to do something in order to rescue them from an eternal damnation. Well, closely related to that last one is what I want to deal with this morning, and it is a love for souls, An affection that is in itself a combustion chamber that moves us to play our role in our day, in our generation, to bring men and women to repentance and faith in Christ.

And what a supreme example we have of this in the great Apostle Paul, and especially in the passage that I have just read to you. Because Romans 9, as most of you will be aware, is a chapter that deals with the doctrine of election. And if there's any subject that is often referred to as killing evangelism, it's that very subject, that of election. Paul was wrestling with the question, why is it that my own kinsmen who have been exposed to the Old Testament writings that have all been pointing towards Jesus Christ, why have they almost altogether rejected this message of salvation in Christ? His two answers essentially are in chapter 9 that God chooses those whom He saves and in chapter 10 it is the fact that they had a wrong notion of the way of salvation and were stubbornly hanging onto it.

But what is interesting is the way in which Paul begins to deal with this subject. He begins by bearing before us, bearing before the readers of this book in Rome, the state of his heart as he addresses this subject. And as he takes this key and unlocks his heart, what we find there is love and faint love for the people about whom he is going to speak. And brethren, let's do the same as we pause together this morning. Let's get a similar key and open up our hearts.

And let's ask ourselves the question, is this what we are going to find there? As we imagine our own involvement in evangelism and missions, as we hear the call from the harvest field, pointing out that the harvest is ready, what kind of response are we finding in our own hearts? Paul begins by calling God as his witness. I think the reason why he does that is to show the seriousness of this matter, the seriousness of this matter. Our love for souls, whether it is there or not, is a serious matter before God.

Love matters to him. And look at the way in which he uses three phrases, basically saying the same thing, basically amounting to this. I am being very honest with you when I say I love these people that are rejecting this message. Rejecting this message. He says there, first of all, I am speaking the truth, and I'm speaking the truth in Christ.

The Lord Himself, who is the way, the truth, and the life, the Lord Himself, whose eye is able to peep into the inner recesses of my soul, I'm speaking this, looking as it were, into his face, and that's how honest I am. He says there, I am not lying. There's no hypocrisy about what I'm about to say. There's no deception. There's no giving with the left hand, knowing that I'm going to take back with the right hand in what I am saying to you.

This is in black and white in my soul. It can never be clearer. No equivocations in this. And finally, my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit. In other words, even as I speak these words, as I write them down, There isn't a pang of conscience within me.

There isn't. The spirit of the living God himself bears witness to what I'm about to say. Brethren, what a challenge. What a challenge. It points us to the kind of heights that we ought to be seeking after when we are thinking in terms of the whole subject of evangelism and missions.

Can I honestly stand before God in this way and say that there is a burning in my soul that cannot be quenched, that others may know the salvation that my soul has come to know? As was said earlier on by a brother Scott, often the issue of evangelism is not a lack of knowledge. As somebody has quite rightly said, the Great Commission tells us to go. Very few Christians are going. Which part of go don't they understand?

Can anything be simpler than that? The issue partly lies at this point, that in our hearts, there's no fire, no blaze that can be defined as love. The way the Apostle Paul defines or describes this love is a good litmus paper test for us. Because you see, love is emotional. Affections are not a philosophy.

They grip us at an emotional level. Look at his description here. Paul says in verse 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. That's what I'm finding there because of this love for their souls. A friend of mine who is a pastor shared once upon a time concerning the way in which he went to try and reclaim a wayward church member, a young lady in the church that was in an unequal York situation.

And he said that he spoke to her in the home trying to persuade her, and she was still using every excuse to hang in there, reducing important things to next to nothing and blowing out of proportion that which, in fact, ought to be next to nothing. And he knew that her heart was gripped in this relationship with the non-Christian young man. And he said that as he left the home and he got into the car and tried to start the car, he says, I couldn't. I just broke down and started crying. By the steering wheel, He just began to cry.

He was alone in the car, nobody witnessing this situation. It was now nighttime and he just wept. What is that? It's love. It's love.

He was a shepherd who loved his sheep. He could not just begin the journey back home. He was heartbroken. He wept. And you find this again and again in the scriptures.

When God's people are filled with love for those who are not working in the ways of the Lord, they weep. They are filled with anguish. David in Psalm 119, If you could just stand there with me, verse 136 feels this way about those that disobey God. Psalm 119, verse 136, listen to this. As you know, this is a great psalm concerning not simply the word of God, but love for the word of God.

Love not so much for the black and white page, but love for obeying this word. But look at the way he puts it. Psalm 119 and verse 136, my eyes shed streams of tears because people Do not keep your law. I have many times, David says, when my pillow is drenched with tears, not because human beings are being killed in battle, not because a disease has broken through the land, a plague is killing them in the thousands, but because day by day I have opportunity to see men living in drunkenness, sexual immorality, foul language, not caring about your law. It breaks my heart.

I love them. I love you, O Lord, and I would want to see an end to all this. And then we have the example of Jeremiah, don't we? Referred to as the weeping prophet, wishing that his head was but a bucket full of tears, that he would weep and weep and weep for the slain of his people, who were under the judgment of God because of their disobedience to him. That's love.

Perhaps one of the most moving accounts is that of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And this one we need to tend to Luke 19. Verse 41, and when Jesus drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace. But now they are hidden from your eyes, for the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation." Jesus wept as he looked at the city. He wasn't just seeing physical structures.

He wasn't just seeing a people making mirth. He was seeing a perishing people. He could see that this God of holiness, this God of justice, who is indeed true, who must punish sin, His wrath was hanging over their heads. It was a matter of time. It would fall upon them and consume them.

And he was affected by it, the Son of God wept. Brethren, beware of mere head knowledge of the Christian religion. Beware of it if it never moves you to the very depths. Beware of a Christianity that can speak and read and hear about men and women stealing from God's glory, dragging God's name in the mud, men and women trampling upon the laws of this thrice holy God, men and women, heading headlong into perdition, into hell, in the thousands. And after that, go on to enjoy an ice cream.

As if it was simply the death of a pesky mosquito. Beware of it. Beware of it. There's something seriously wrong there. When God's servants across history, including him who is the altogether lovely one.

God himself in human flesh would break down and weep. These things must affect you. They must. All you need to do is to be human. That's enough to be affected by this reality.

If you believe your Bible and you must, you should know that hell is real. If you believe your Bible and you must, you ought to believe that hell is eternal. Surely if you have but a shred of affection and love in your soul, There must be moments when you want to shut out the rest of the world, fall on your knees by your bedside, fail to find the right words, and just weep. Where there is true love for souls, It will not remain at an emotional level. You will want to do something about it.

You will. It brings you to the point where you are willing to give up anything and even jeopardize your life for the salvation of others, and especially for those that you know personally. Paul puts it this way, Back to Romans and chapter 9. He says there in verse 3, for I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. That's one aspect of love that you invariably will admit as a litmus, pepper test.

You men who are here, if you were in a shop that sells flowers and a gentleman walked in to buy flowers for his wife for their 25th anniversary. And as he asked the shop attendant to do with prices, and was given the price of one, and then he goes, ah, that's too expensive, another one please. And he's finally given one which looks good, but is dead cheap. And he says, yeah, yeah, that one. Let me have it.

I'm quite sure you would be disgusted. That a man should want to be a hypocrite, to give the impression of cost, which isn't there, that he wants to give the impression of love, but at the cheapest possible level. If it wasn't for politeness, You probably would say to him, as he's about to go out of that door, you terrible hypocrite. If your wife was my sister, I would punch you in the face. Or the point has been made.

The first. Well, the point has been met. Where there is true love, You don't keep your eyes on the price tag. You don't. It's what needs to be done that ends up being done.

And hence Paul here uses the strongest possible words, wishing himself to be accursed, to be thrown into hell itself, to be condemned by Almighty God, to be in that place where the worm dieth not and the Fire is not quenched for all eternity, if only, if only, oh Lord, if only my own kinsmen, my brothers in the flesh, would Walk over me to safety into your heaven. I wish, if it were possible, that would happen. Reminds you of Moses, doesn't it? When God was, as it were, sick and tired of Israel's ongoing waywardness and sin, He came to the point where, in the face of their idolatry he says to Moses, come on, step aside. Let me just get rid of all these people.

Let me get rid of them. Moses' response in Exodus 32, 32, basically amounted to the same. Lord, I would rather you bloat out my name from the book of life. Bloat out my name, Then destroy these people. I know they have broken your laws.

I know they deserve wrath from heaven. I know it. For in my own soul I felt something of that divine wrath burning within me. But Lord, have mercy. Lord, be gracious.

Do not destroy. But instead, show yourself to be a God of mercy and love. Here's my question. Do you know anything of that? Do you?

You know when evangelism and missions become something we do because we've got nothing else to do, when it becomes something we do because it's convenient to us, it's just the right time, the right period in the year and so forth, it's the right temperature on the outside, it's warm, it's just the right environment, the people are friendly. They are almost in the kingdom. Therefore, there is no price to be paid. When it is reduced to that, God pinches his nostrils and looks the other way. It stinks because when he expressed his own evangelistic zeal, It cost him the best of heaven.

His own son, His own dear Son, the darling of heaven, was laid upon that cruel cross. God, for the sake of the salvation of the elect, took forth his sword and put it through his breast, so to speak. What a sacrifice. What a sacrifice for the sake of souls, souls, souls. And even when his own son, knowing that he was about to drink in the wrath of an almighty God that was going to, as it were, reduce him to a pub, fell on his knees and pleaded with the Father, Father, If it be thy will, take this cup of suffering away from me." Three times over he pleaded with him.

The Father but sent an angel to go and strengthen him for the last mile of the way. It has to be done, son. The price must be paid. This is everlasting love. In the light of that price paid, you and I can't come to start dealing with the issue of souls at our convenience, God forbid.

God forbid. God forbid. If I was preaching this message back home, I would have added the price paid by the pioneer missionaries that kept coming into this mosquito-infested, malaria-infested heart of Africa. And I visited some of those gravestones and seen how some of them arrived. You see the day of their arrival, and within a year they are dead.

And yet the Christian church did not say forget about Africa. More and more of their best sons got into those vessels and went across the Atlantic, over onto the shores, in order to bring the everlasting message to a perishing people. Love, love, love, it pays the price. There is the litmus paper test. This is not a philosophical subject.

This is not about crossing T's and dotting I's. This is very practical. Are you willing to pay the price for souls? Are you? Because if you're not, Let's forget the issue.

We can have 10, 000 conferences on the great commission and nothing will happen, nothing. We'll enjoy our fellowship, enjoy our food and get back home. We need love. We desperately need love. And oh, thank God for the kind of examples that we have here.

A love that doesn't fight with doctrines like election. No. Now, a love that says no contradiction because in the same God who elects is the very love that we are speaking about here. So brethren, as we think about this all-important issue, we need to do some serious soul searching. It's not about the person sitting next to you.

It's not about us as a couple, us as a family, us as a church. It's about me. Standing before Almighty God, The God who made me, the God who's given me a heart, the God who's given me the capacity to love, the God who has shared with me this glorious truth concerning salvation in Jesus Christ and made me a beneficiary of it, changing my destination from hell to heaven. It's about this God who has given me the task to love others as I love myself. So stand before him alone And answer the question, do I love souls?

Never dying souls. Souls that must spend eternity in hell and a fire that cannot be quenched. Do I love them? Is to ask the question, do I weep for souls. Does it affect me?

Have I ever come away from the careless, the stubborn, the careless, the stubborn, the vile, and gone into my room and just broke it down. Nobody else seeing it but my God, my God, my God. Can you honestly say that you've known those seasons where you are willing to pay a price, to undergo danger to undergo danger for the sake of a soul, a precious soul, coming from sin, coming into God's kingdom. That's the issue here. That's the issue.

All of us will have to admit that we are not where we ought to be. All of us. And therefore, all of us have a basic responsibility to go before God and ask Him that His heart might be ours. That he may so fill us with his Spirit, that we too will know something of the chemistry that was in the soul of Paul at this point. Not because we are cranking it up, not because we are beating ourselves into it, but because God by His Spirit living within us is giving birth to these affections.

And we want to do something. We want to do something about it. That's where a message like this ought to leave us. Broken before God. Weeping because we are not weeping.

Shedding tears because we are not shedding tears. And asking God that within the combustion chamber of our souls might burn, ablaze, love for souls that will only be quenched on our deathbed. Let's pray. Oh, great God of heaven, examples such as the apostropole make bare the lowest levels of spirituality in our own souls. Father, Visit us we pray.

Visit us. Fill our hearts with your spirit Until these realities become true of us, oh God, tear away professionalism from our Christian professionalism from our Christian faith and help us to be something of you in this life. For Jesus' sake, amen. I hope you recognize how kind God has been this morning to send a man here.