Men's Luncheon - Pastor Greg Addison - September 23, 2025

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for today.

Thank you for a beautiful day outside after some of the rain and all that.

And thank you for a chance for us to be together.

Pray that you will bless those that prepared lunch for us.

Thank you for them and what a what a wonderful job they do for us every week.

And so we pray your blessings on them.

We pray your blessings on our time.

We ask that you'll be our teacher from your word today.

We thank you most of all for the gift of salvation in Jesus.

In his name we pray, and everybody said, Just a word.

I warned y'all a couple weeks ago about Saturday, didn't I?

Yeah.

Get to the preaching part, right?

I can do it.

Huh?

Yeah, something happened on Saturday.

I play, I got to hear lots of the two best fight songs in college football.

Rocky Top and the Tigers.

I think the hogs have the best.

Victory cry, huh?

I can sing Rocky Top.

I love Rocky Top.

Some stuff you're not supposed to sing in church.

Folks that live on Rocky Top, in essence, you can't grow corn.

The ground's too rocky by far.

That's why folks who live on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.

That's how we roll in Tennessee, right?

All right, let's uh we'll get started.

We are uh doing our uh brew study.

We're on our last week, and this week I think is particularly important.

Where's where did it go?

There it goes.

Uh this is particularly important because we're praying for salvation and we're praying for folks to be saved.

One of the tables we were talking a little bit about the uh funeral service, memorial service that happened on Sunday for Charlie Kirk, and not going to get into a lot of stuff, but I do think it's important to recognize, boy, that is an inflection point for the advance of the gospel.

So there was a lot of uh, you know, a lot of discussion about him as a Christian or on another side of the aisle, a Christian nationalist or whatever.

Uh there's a lot of discussion about how he engaged college students in spiritual conversations as much, if not often more times than he did on political deal.

And then Sunday, the gospel was clearly presented.

People stood up and got saved in that service and the whole, and there's a lot of discussion going on culturally about people asking questions, people returning to church, uh, young folks on TikTok, stuff like that, they'll tell you there's a lot of people posting testimonies that they've gone back to church for the first time, um, that kind of a thing.

Uh it the uh statistically, even before he, even before that moment uh of his assassination, um there there was a lot of discussion coming out that uh you know church attendance has been declining, the rise of what they call the nuns N-O-N-E-S, like they have no religion on a statement of a census, they'll say they have no religional religious affiliation.

And the rise of that over the last six, eight months, there has been a very steady um uh change in those statistics, and that had bottomed out, and church attendance uh across the board was beginning to climb.

The rise of the nuns was not rising anymore.

That had plateaued and was starting to decline and all of that, and then you hit this moment where you have this uh cultural experience following uh his assassination, and so there's a lot of discussion going on.

There's a lot of searching going on, there's a lot of spiritual discourse going on, which makes our study this week in praying for evangelism and praying for evangelistic impact, I think, very, very timely.

We as the church do not need to miss this moment.

It really can be an inflection point, or it can be like a lot of other things, and we just blow past it and not even pay attention, right?

So, as the church, it's inherent on us to really be aware of our role in society in moments like this where we are really praying for uh the gospel to flourish and for churches to have opportunities to share Jesus and the chance for the gospel to flourish.

And so that's what the study this week is on.

As we have been doing, you get your prayer journal, and each day you're going to have uh, like today was um 2 Peter chapter 3, verse 9.

2 Peter 3:9

So as we approach this, this is just a method to help us learn how to um meditate on scripture, pray scripture, learn from that scripture.

We believe that God has something to say to us.

So we go to that verse and we pray and say, Lord, I believe your word has something to say to us.

Lord, will you please teach us from your word?

Then we read and repeat the verse, we read it several times until it begins to become familiar, comfortable to you.

It begins to get that flow in your mind, in your heart.

I'm getting this verse, I'm understanding it.

Then you slow down and you take each word and you pay attention to what each word says, and you begin to break it down and define those words.

As you unpeel those layers, then God begins to speak to us through his word.

And as he does, he'll reveal things to you, challenge you, grow you, you'll be reminded that he loves you, convict you of sin, teach you something, give you insight in some area, and he speaks to you through his word, and then we want to write down what he says to us.

If we approach the creator God of the universe, the author and finisher of our faith, and say, I believe you have something to teach me, and I want you to teach me from your word today, and he does that, it's shameful not to write down and capture what the creator God of the universe, the author and finisher of our faith taught us in that time.

And so that's let's look at that today.

I want to take day four that's coming up, and I want to take it specifically because of you guys and who I'm talking to.

Most of you guys are in church, and many of you are leaders, and all that y'all are here faithful.

It's a great crowd.

And this is one that is near and dear to my heart.

It's something that we depend on as pastors, but a lot of times pastors don't ask for this.

We don't teach this because it feels a little self-serving at times.

Because we're talking about praying for the pastor and leaders in the preaching of the gospel.

But you guys, we have a great time in here in Tuesday, and this is a free environment, so I don't really feel bad or selfish about teaching this here, and I think it's a great verse to brew, especially in light of the cultural things we're talking about.

So here's what the Bible says.

Now I want to give you the verse before that.

Devote yourselves to prayer.

So this is one of those commands where God is just commanding us to pray, and he says, devote yourselves to prayer, stay alert in it with thanksgiving.

Some of our verses we looked at last week had that concept of staying alert and that concept of devoting.

So, in essence, what that verse says, devote means, it's a verb that means to wrestle or to contend with or to grab and not let go, and then it adds a pronoun to it that elevates that to a consistent basis.

So literally, that word devote means grab a hold of something, keep a hold of it, and don't ever let it go and keep wrestling with it.

That's what it means.

Devote yourself to prayer, stay alert in it.

That means paying attention in prayer, what's happening, what's happening around me, all those kinds of things.

So, again, now for us, that's a particularly good verse given what's going on in culture.

Then he says, at the same time, at the same time that we're devoting ourselves to prayer, our prayer life is a grab a hold of Jesus, wrestle with him through that, don't let go, stay consistent in that prayer, alert what's going on around us.

In the middle of that praying time, he says, at the same time, pray also for us that God may open a door to us for the word to speak the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I should.

So that's what Paul says, and he asked for that prayer.

Now, you know, specifically it's Paul, because he says, I, for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I should.

So he is the lead person.

He is asking for that prayer.

He is telling the church, in the midst of your devoted prayer life, I need you to pray for me and my preaching of the gospel.

But he also says that God may open a door to us.

So it's not only him, but it's us.

If you read on a couple of verses later, he enters into his closing part of the letter that we call the book of Colossians.

And there he lists all these guys that are serving alongside him.

And so these are all his leaders, all his supporters.

And so, this verse, if you take us and I, it's Paul and the other leaders.

You want to translate that to us here at First Baptist?

That's me, and then it's all the staff guys and all the Sunday school teachers.

That we're all teaching the word every week.

And so what he says is to this entire church, now remember, the letter like this to the church at Colossae, the city of Colossae, they'd stand up and everybody in church, and they would read Paul's letter to the entire church.

And so here's what this is to the entire church, he says, at the same time that you have a devoted prayer life and you are alert in your prayer life, pray also for us, me, Mark, Aristarchus, Onesimus, Epaphras, all these guys he lists, pray for all of us, that God will open a door to us for the word to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I should.

And so he's telling the whole church, this is the obligation of the church, this is the command of the church that you're praying for the preachers and the leaders who are teaching the word of God.

And so, how often do we do that?

How often do we actually do that?

Now I'm blessed.

We have a praying church, so it's really good.

And I have people who write me notes, and I have people who stop me and send me texts, and they'll say, Pastor, we are praying for you, and here's what we're praying.

And I cannot tell you what that means.

That we have people that understand this.

But think about how much better my preaching would be if all 586 people or whatever came to church on Sunday, all of them were praying for me.

It's in your self-interest for you to pray for my preaching to get better.

I knew I'd get an amen right there from the whole crowd.

That's awesome.

So think about that.

But he gives some specifics to how this works, and that I think is what's really helpful.

Pray for us, that God may open a door, a door to us for the word.

Now, I think that's important that God may open a door.

First of all, God is the Lord of the harvest, and he's the one that opens the door.

We are praying to him that he will open a door.

Now, this idea of the door is a pretty obvious illustration.

We all know what that means, right?

A door means something is closed and it gets open.

That means you can enter into it and walk into it.

We talk about that.

And our culture sometimes will say there's a window of opportunity.

He would say there's a door of opportunity, right?

And that concept is repeated all throughout scripture in the book of Acts multiple times.

He talks about a door was opened to us in Troas or somewhere like that.

Uh, he even talks about there's a door that was shut to us, the Macedonian call.

Paul comes to a place, y'all have heard that phrase, and he finds that the door is shut.

And then he's at night, he's been praying about what to do, and the and the Bible says that a vision comes to him from a person in Macedonia who is saying, please come here and help us with the gospel.

We need your help.

And we refer to that sometimes as a Macedonian call.

Come to Macedonia.

It's an open door.

And so you see that concept, that that idiom being repeated throughout scripture.

And he's saying, Listen, y'all know what open doors are and closed doors.

We are praying that you open a door.

There's a lot of people who've been praying consistently for revival in our culture, and they view this inflection moment following the Charlie Charlie Kirk thing as a time when people are searching and other things going on in the culture and of part of that.

People are searching.

It's an open door.

It's an open door.

I believe for us at um at in the Chaffee campus and the opening of that, I believe that's an open door that God has opened for us as a church.

Just the incredible responses that we've seen already when he started church yet.

We Matt got an email uh a couple a week or week and a half ago from one of the uh bouncy house vendors that we use as a church, and he said, Hey, I saw your advertising that you guys are starting a campus, and I want to, I'm we're excited for y'all.

We want to offer you a free bouncy house at one of your events there.

We've had, Dave has had multiple radio stations and TV stations, and somebody else, I forgot where that was from.

Hey, we see your advertisements.

Would you like to advertise with us too?

I mean, people are seeing that stuff.

Sunday we had our preview service, and um we uh we had sent out a direct mail card last week.

Some of you may have gotten that.

It's targeted in that area.

This was kind of fun.

So the way that postcard is supposed to look, if you're looking at your prayer journal, would be just the color things.

Well, the company that we hired didn't chop them down to the color part.

So when they sent it out, it had this white sort of border thing around it, which was fine, but it wasn't how it was supposed to go out.

Well, they called and apologized, and they said, Hey, we're sorry, we did that, we messed that up, that's on us.

We're gonna send a second one out for y'all free.

So we got a second direct mail out there.

Now that nobody's that smart, nobody can plan that.

That's God doing that.

God is stirring those things out there.

We actually had a visitor on Sunday, a nice lady came in, and so we're just having a meeting.

I mean, you know, we're practicing, we practice set up, we got it all set.

We had a meeting, nobody's even greeting at the door.

We're all sitting in the room, like having a meeting, and this lady comes walking in and just found her way in and sat down.

And then she kind of looked around, and one of our ladies grabbed, you know, kind of talked to her and let her, and then she waves at me, said, Pastor Greg, we have our first visitor.

And she says, I'm sorry, I got the card, and she held up the wrong one and said, I just didn't read the date, and I'm sorry I'm here on the wrong date.

And we said, You are totally here on the right date.

We are glad you're here.

I mean, nobody's that smart, right?

God opens doors.

He opens doors.

And so when we see things like that, it stirs our heart to think about God opens doors.

There's all kinds of ways that he opens doors.

He opens doors in the minds of individuals.

We're praying for them to be receptive to the gospel.

Listen and ask to that.

We're praying for open doors.

God, bring me to someone who's been searching and give me an opportunity to share Jesus with them.

We're praying for open doors, like with our campus out there.

Lord, open that door.

We're working on a new advertising plan for across a river in Oklahoma.

We love our folks across a river in Oklahoma.

And so we're praying for open doors on there.

And how are we going to reach?

And we have like 40 something people every Sunday that attend from Oklahoma.

We got great families.

Some of our leaders in Oklahoma come.

And so we love that.

So how do we, how do we, that's more open door, right?

We're praying for open doors.

So when we're praying, we are asking God for those open doors for the gospel to flourish in that, right?

And God is the one who opens those doors.

Those don't happen because we fling an advertisement out there.

They can land flat as easily as they can land on fertile ground.

And it's the Lord of the harvest who opens those doors.

And so we are praying for Him to open those doors for us.

And that's what he says.

To us, to us.

I love our churches.

We got a lot of different churches represented on Tuesdays.

You know we love that.

It's great.

We're coming together.

It's great.

I pray for open doors for all those churches.

And I have times where I pray for the churches all around.

But listen, I'm praying that God is opening doors for us at First Baptist for people to be saved.

And in your church, you need to pray for God to open doors for your church to see people saved.

Like, imagine what happens with revival if lots of churches are baptizing on the same Sunday.

Like, praise God, something's happening, right?

But we're praying, not just generically, but we're praying specifically for God to open a door for us, for our ministry, what he's called us to, what he's put in front of us, the commission that he's given us, and we're praying for that open door.

Now here's what he says to speak the mystery of Christ.

What does that mean?

That is a phrase that Paul uses often.

Now remember, when Paul was preaching, Paul didn't have the book of Colossi because he hadn't written the letter yet.

Holy Spirit hadn't told him to write it yet.

Paul's scripture is the Old Testament.

And what Paul is doing, and we have evidences of his sermons in Acts and some of Peter's and whatever, and they are taking the Old Testament and they're showing the prophecy of the Redeemer that God promised to bring, and how Jesus lined up with those promises and proved himself to be the Redeemer that God had promised.

And so the Old Testament is pointing to the Redeemer that would come, and the gospels are showing us that Jesus fulfilled all of those hundreds of promises that God used and set in place to identify Jesus as the Redeemer.

And then Paul is saying, give your life to Christ because he is the one that God has revealed.

And that's why he uses that phrase mystery.

God has revealed his Redeemer as Jesus from his word and the culmination of who Jesus is and how he came and the ministry that did it, and he died for us and then he rose again.

And so that's what Paul's saying.

Now I want you to see this part here, and I'm going to focus on this at the end.

For which I am in chains.

We know that when Paul wrote this letter, he was in prison.

Most scholars believe he was in prison in Rome, but there's another possibility or two, but most people believe he was in Rome, and he wrote several letters when he was in prison.

Philippians he wrote in prison.

This letter was written along about the same time that Philemon was.

Many people believe it they were sent to the church at Colossae at the same time.

I'm in that camp.

I think that's true.

So, and there's a couple others he wrote in prison.

So he's in prison for the gospel.

Okay?

But here's what Paul uses, this idea.

When he's in prison, he uses this idea as like a double meaning.

He is in prison, but even more so, he is chained to the gospel because he was saved by the gospel and he was called as a preacher and a missionary of the gospel.

So when he's in, he says I'm in chains, that's more than just he's in prison.

He is bound to the advance of the gospel.

In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, he says this, I am compelled, and that word is the idea that you're in the grip of something and you can't break it.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

He is compelled as an ambassador of the gospel.

And so Paul is saying, listen, I'm asking you to pray for open doors because I can't do anything else.

I am chained to this need, calling, passion, and desire to tell people about the mystery of Christ because he will save them like he saved me, Paul.

And then here's what he says.

So that that means causation.

Pray for me so that, cause me to, help me to be able, I may make it known as I should.

And that's a fascinating thing right there.

As I should.

What does that mean?

What does it mean?

I should do it this way.

I should do it this way.

When we say that, we're talking about this is the way it must be done.

This is the proper way to do this.

This is the right way to do this.

This is the correct way to do this.

If I really had a passion for something, I should do it this way.

It's that idea of the highest elevation and quality and excellence and drive that we should do it.

And I think there are three ideas about how we should preach the gospel in this passage.

The first is this Paul wants to say, I want to preach it properly.

I want to preach the gospel properly to speak the mystery of Christ.

He gives a very specific phrase about the gospel and the Old Testament revealing Jesus and preaching from the Word, the identification of Jesus as the Christ.

He uses the term Christ.

That is an official title for Jesus.

That means the anointed sacrifice.

And so he's saying, help me to unpack properly the mystery of the anointed sacrifice of the gospel, that I'll take the scripture and the word and I will unpack it exactly as God wrote it to point the way to Jesus.

And so when you're praying for your Sunday school teacher, your pastor, staff guys that are doing whatever, pray that we'll preach the gospel properly.

Won't just try to manipulate people.

We won't mess it up inadvertently.

I think our guys all have a passion for the gospel and the word, and we have great teachers here, but sometimes you speak enough, you mess up stuff, right?

I mean, it just you want it to be clear, you want it to be proper, you want it to be the gospel.

It is not my stories that save people, it's the gospel.

I want to unpack the depth and beauty of God's word so that the mystery is revealed to them when God opens a door in their heart and they see Jesus in that process.

So pray that we'll preach the gospel properly.

Pray that we'll preach the gospel purposefully.

Look at what he says.

Pray for us that God may open a door.

So what Paul is saying is, listen, we are looking for the doors that God is opening.

I don't want to just fling it out there or go do what I want to do.

I want to go on purpose to the doors that God is open because the Lord of the harvest opened those for us to go in and properly preach the gospel.

And so we are looking for how we're going to connect with that, and we're looking for where we're supposed to go and what is God's leading, and how does that direction work for us?

I want to be in the place, I want to preach in the place, I want to preach in the way, I want to preach in the vein, we want to do the ministries that God has opened a door for.

We don't just come and do church to do church.

Where is God pointing our mission in reaching people?

And we want to go there.

We want to be purposeful in reaching who He's called us to reach.

And finally, we want to be passionate.

We want to be proper, we want to be purposeful, and we want to be passionate.

Paul says, I am in chains for the gospel.

God saved me on the road to Damascus.

He says to Timothy, when he writes him, I am the chief of all sinners.

I was a blasphemer, I was a rotten man, I was a persecutor of the church, and in Jesus' grace, he saved me from that.

When you think about the fact that all of us were on our way to hell and our sin would be judged, and God, with no reason other than his grace, no need, we don't add anything to God or anything else.

Out of his grace, out of his love, the mercy of his character, Jesus stepped out of heaven, went to the cross, died in our place, and rose again so that by his grace he could offer us forgiveness that we did not deserve simply because of his heart of mercy and love?

God did that for us.

Man, how can I not be passionate about that?

I mean, how can I not be, as he said in 2 Corinthians 5, compelled, gripped by what the gospel means?

How can we not be passionate about the fact that Jesus conquered death and sin?

If the door that's being opened is people who are asking questions and looking for answers and they have needs that need to be met, Jesus has the answer.

How could that not be passionate for us?

And Paul, I think, is very clearly in this saying, listen, I'm in chains for the gospel.

I am driven to this, I'm called to this, I was saved by this gospel.

I've got to do this.

And he says, listen, I want you to tell Jesus to empower me to preach as I should.

And if we're driven by passion, we should preach with passion.

As I should, properly, purposefully, and passionately.

Let's pray.

Lord, we do ask these things.

Not just for me, but the pastors of the other churches in the room.

For our staff and all that they do, for the Bible teachers that are teaching all of our church, people are teaching children and students and adults, men and women, all of them.

Lord, I pray this for them.

They'll preach properly, they'll preach purposefully in the place where you've called them to teach.

And I pray, Father, that their passion for you will be unleashed as they teach.

We pray these things in the saving name of Jesus, and all God's people said.

Thank you guys for being here.

Great to see you all today.