A Call For Labourers To Win Souls For Christ by Rev. Christie Bature: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

I thank God that He saved me when He did — otherwise I would not be here, and I don't say that as a cliche. My father and my mother had eight children; we were a family of ten. Somewhere along the line I gave my life to Christ. Some of my sisters also gave their lives to Christ, but began to make choices that did not honor God. Today that family of ten has shrunk to a family of two — I have buried eight of them, and what ate up my father's house threatened me too. But I am here because of Jesus, and He did not leave me here for show. He left me here because my work is not done. I refuse to slow down, I refuse to let up, I refuse to give in, I refuse to give up, I refuse to die without fulfilling purpose.

Defining Purpose

If you don't define purpose, your life will waste, and you will stand before God unable to look Him in the eye. One of my most powerful and potent prayers is: "Father, Lord, I want to stand before You when my time is up and look You in the eye and not be ashamed. I don't want to hang my head for any issue You will raise. I want to be able to look You in the eye and boldly say, I did Your will, oh God."

Paul was confident at the end of his life to say he had run his course and finished his race, and that henceforth there was reserved for him a crown. He was bold to say that because he knew what God called him to do, and he did it with the strategies God gave him — and then he could stand before God without shame.

The Work of God Guarantees God's Work For You

One of the ways you can open the pathway for people to come into your life is to do the work of God. When you enter into the service of God, God will do the things you are crying out for.

A daughter was gravely ill in a hospital in California, about to undergo a bone marrow transplant. Someone had promised to pay all the bills, but after one month of a six-month stay, that support was withdrawn, leaving monthly bills of about twenty thousand dollars and a total hospital bill of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to face. In prayer came the answer: "Reach out to the people you have served the Lord with." One letter was written and sent out, and within three weeks everything needed for the first stage — about thirty-eight thousand dollars — came in, much of it from people never personally known, because the letter had been passed on from person to person. Doing the work of God is what guarantees that God will rise up for you.

• A minister arrived a day early for a two-day conference, having fasted before and throughout his stay, expecting a powerful service. The man scheduled to preach the first day arrived that same morning, played golf, ate a full meal, and preached that evening — and the power of God was unmistakable. The fasting minister assumed his own day, the next day, would be even more powerful. Instead the move of God was comparatively light, and he was angry with God, protesting that he had fasted while the other man had not. The Lord answered him: the other man's great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all preachers — four generations of service — while he himself was the first Christian in his family, with a father who had been a native doctor. The measure of attention was a matter of generational service, not merely of that day's fasting. The man said, "I closed my mouth." We do not serve God in vain — God never owes.

God Does Not Owe

My father was a polygamist who resisted the gospel his whole life, saying he would not give his life to Christ if it meant sending away his second wife. He resisted Jesus until he was on his deathbed, slipping into a coma before help could reach him. Word came that he could not be reached in time by natural means, so instructions were given to seek help locally and to trust God to meet in the moment. The following morning, before travel could even begin, word came that he had died — and the grief was compounded by the fear that a life of preaching to other people's fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters had somehow failed to reach his own father in time.

But the full story had not yet been told: when help was sought, the pastor originally asked for was on his way out of the country, but sent two other pastors in his place. On finding my father in a coma, they did not hesitate — they spoke the gospel directly to a man who could not respond audibly, "Papa, Jesus loves you. He died for you. He came for you. Do you want to give your life to Christ?" He woke enough to nod, some prayers were spoken for him because he could not form the words himself, and he nodded along in agreement. Immediately after they left, he returned to the coma and died that same day. Jehovah saved him at the very last minute, and the sting of death lifted, because there would be a reunion to come. God said, "I don't owe. God does not owe. God is not a debtor. God does not use people and then leave them high and dry. God does not send you and leave you to your own devices."

A friend, hearing this testimony, was not as excited as expected — because ten years earlier, this same friend and her husband had brought a pastor to a dying man's bedside though asked simply to be present, not to minister. Directed by the pastor to minister to the man herself, she sang over him, and though he was a hardened man who had never shown emotion before his grown sons, he broke down in tears, nodded when asked if he wanted to give his life to Christ, and mouthed the sinner's prayer with eyes opening and closing in agreement — despite the fierce opposition of a second wife who tried to stop it. He died without waking again, but he had been saved. What had been sown for another man's father ten years earlier, the Lord returned in the saving of my own father years later. Whatever you sow, you reap — God doesn't owe. We don't serve Him in vain.

Saving Is God's Work, Not Ours

Ephesians 2:7-10 makes clear that God has us positioned, in this world and the next, to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is entirely His idea and His work, so those who hold back from preaching because "when I preach to people they don't give their life to Christ" must understand: it is not our work to save them, it is entirely His work. All we do is trust Him enough to let Him do it.

• We neither make nor save ourselves — God does both the making and the saving.
• God creates each of us in Christ Jesus to join Him in the good work He has already gotten ready for us to do. The work is already fixed; we don't need to learn it from scratch, the way a new employee learns the ropes in a new office. We only need to walk into it.

Identity Determines How You Live

How you identify yourself shows up in how you live. If you identify as royalty, you carry yourself accordingly — royalty does not extend a hand to be greeted first; royalty extends the hand. Some identify by relationships, by status, by achievements, by experiences, and those things shape how life is lived. If your conscious self does not identify as a Christian, there is a way you will live your life; if in your consciousness you identify as a Christian, there is a different way you will live.

Rushing to catch a connecting flight through a smaller, quieter airport, an unusually long security line caused a missed flight, with the airline offering nothing sooner than the next afternoon — which would mean missing the entire program. The first response was anger, a full tantrum — until the Holy Spirit asked plainly, "Seriously, is this you?" Identity was recovered in that moment: a Christian, sitting down and saying, "Father, forgive me," and asking, "Lord, what next?" The answer was to check another airline, and a different flight was found — later departure, but still landing in time for the ten o'clock program the next morning. The ticket was purchased, the funds were already available, and options had existed all along. The tantrum changed nothing; how you identify yourself determines how you live.

If Jesus says to preach the gospel in season and out of season, and you do not identify yourself as a disciple of Christ, that instruction will not carry weight for you — you will try to rationalize it, explain it away, extricate yourself from the responsibility. Your primary assignment, your primary purpose on earth, is to do the work God has called you to: preach the gospel, tell people about Jesus.

Out of the Ashes of Addiction

What ate up my father's house was addiction — my father was an alcoholic who began giving his children alcohol from the age of two, simply to see how they would behave when drunk. We had no choice; we were sabotaged. All my siblings drank everything; I drank only two things — brandy and whiskey — poured from gallon-sized bottles so that no one would notice the level dropping.

One Christmas Eve, having secretly been drinking, I still stood in line with my sisters to sing at a midnight service and made no mistake in the singing — but afterward stood frozen in place while everyone else returned to their seats, until it became obvious something was wrong. The next day, sober and told what had happened, the mercy of God came in the form of a simple realization: if I could drink and go to the house of God and misbehave, then drinking could not be good. That was the day the decision was made never to drink again — forty-eight years without touching alcohol.

My siblings continued drinking and ultimately all died from the effects of addiction, except our mother, who died of a broken heart from burying her own children, and our youngest sister, who died at age nine before she was ever old enough to make those decisions. Six others died from addiction. If we don't do the work of the gospel, souls will be lost.

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Out of the ashes of that story, God said: "You have dealt with addiction, you have seen the destruction, you have experienced it — I am sending you into that field to do the work of My kingdom." A rehabilitation center was opened. Having been unable to help my own father, mother, brothers or sisters, there is now the work of helping other families, stopping the enemy in his tracks in the very area that once had full-blown control over my house.

• A young man who had joined four cults and failed out of four universities without graduating arrived at the rehab violently, breaking doors, fighting everyone — and was sent home as not yet ready. Two weeks later his father called: the boy, who had been brought in the first time by two policemen with a gun, wanted to return of his own will. Asked why, he said, "I have never heard anybody talk about Jesus the way I heard Him talked about here. I came back to hear more." He came back not to be free of addiction, but to hear about Jesus.

God has put His word in your mouth. Many hold back from preaching because they say, "I don't know many scriptures" — but you don't need many; He does the saving Himself. John 3:16 is enough. The Word of God is quick and powerful.

• Seated beside an arrogant, learned man on a flight who began pontificating in the language of occult philosophy, and knowing an intellectual argument could not be won on those terms, silent prayer in the spirit brought the answer: "Sir, when I speak as a Christian, I speak by the authority of Jesus. Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh to the Father but by Me.' On whose authority do you speak?" The man went silent, his shoulders dropped, and he said nothing more for the rest of the flight — because he could not answer on whose authority he had been speaking.

The Signs of the Times

Jesus is coming soon. The most profound of the prophecies about the end of the age was fulfilled in 1948 when Israel became a nation; other, smaller prophecies are being fulfilled as though the book of Revelation is being acted out as a script. When the devil wants to sell an ideology, he starts with what is called a precursor, so as to normalize it — children's entertainment shifted over the decades from wholesome cartoons toward imagery of demonic figures, so that when actual demonic activity is encountered, there is no reaction, only familiarity, even calling such things "imaginary friends" instead of rebuking them.

In a similar progression, peace treaties were signed between Israel and several Arab nations in the years leading up to the pandemic, normalizing the idea of Israel signing treaties — precisely as scripture describes Israel signing a seven-year peace treaty with the one who will later break it after three and a half years, triggering the war of Armageddon. The pandemic itself served as a precursor to the reign of the Antichrist, with restrictions in various places tied to compliance, foreshadowing a future where refusal will mean forfeiting far more than convenience — refusal or compliance with eternal consequences. It is our responsibility to reach out to people and tell them about the love of Jesus, because eternity is eternity — it is for the rest of their lives, and the whole of an earthly lifespan is only a brief plug compared to the eternity that follows.

A Call to Labourers

Who will take the shield of faith into the ghettos and witness to the street gangs? Who will tell the exploited that the love they crave is found in Christ? Who will take the helmet of salvation into the schools and preach holiness to every boy and girl? Who will stand and speak against what has been legalized in defiance of the sanctity of life, and confront leaders who deceive, knowing heaven will not let liars in? Who will take the breastplate of righteousness into the streets and teach that true wealth is more than possessions? It is you and it is me who will bear the lamp of Calvary and be the light of Jesus to the world.

When was the last time you witnessed to your neighbor and told him Jesus is the way? People are trapped in bondage of every kind, chasing fame, caught in addiction, and someone must walk this gospel of peace throughout the nations — no television program or entertainment will clear out the prison house.

Altar Call

Is there anyone who has not given their life to Christ? This is where you start. I gave my life to Christ forty-eight years ago, and Jesus has kept me — everything pertaining to life and godliness, He has given to me.