Hello and welcome back to the PHSA podcast.
My name is David Bigford.
I'm the pastor here at SalmonArm.
This is a very special podcast series where I'm going to be sharing with you messages
from our most recent conference in Prescott, Arizona, the Beyond Limits Conference with
a theme of to preach the gospel in the regions beyond from 2 Corinthians 10-16.
I'm going to share all of the sermons from this conference series to include Greg Mitchell,
our head pastor, Joe Campbell, Richard Ruby, Tom Payne, and many, many others during this
series.
So I'll be sharing these with you over the next couple of weeks.
And I hope you really enjoy these messages.
If you'd like to see these messages in a video format, you can go to PrescottPottersHouse.com
where all of these will be available for you to view in a video format.
So without further ado, I'm going to pass, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the messages
and I hope you enjoy them.
God bless.
Thank you.
Thank you for that wonderful welcome.
I appreciate once again the fearful privilege of getting behind this pulpit and preaching
to you.
If you have your Bibles, Matthew chapter 9, Matthew chapter 9.
I've had a conversation with a number of my friends through the years and we are all
in agreement that when we stumbled into this fellowship, we struck gold.
And that when we found ourselves under the care of our pastors, we hit the mother load.
It's an incredible privilege and blessing to have a pastor in your life.
And I want to think about that with you.
I don't speak about our fellowship and our pastors with a sense of pride.
It's more of a sense of wonder and of gratitude that we were able to hit this spiritual lottery.
Amen.
So we're going to be hearing from pastors this week.
We're not going to be hearing from administrators.
We're not going to be hearing from celebrities.
We don't have any guest speakers from the cover of Christianity today.
There's no flavor of the month here.
We are going to hear from full-time, hardworking pastors.
And that's appropriate.
Pastors are the deliberate product of our fellowship.
That's what we do.
And that suggests that maybe we should give some thought to these that are called and
these that are functioning and these that are doing their best to serve you.
And so let's think about this.
Matthew 9, beginning with verse 36.
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless
like sheep without a shepherd.
Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.
Let's pray.
Father, I thank you for your word.
I pray for your anointing on it in the preaching and in the hearing of it.
And I pray above all, God, that it will be received in the spirit in which it is spoken.
I pray for grace, blessing, salvation loosed throughout these morning seminars.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Sheep without a shepherd.
What a heart wrenching condition.
Sheep without a shepherd.
Can you feel the weight of that as Jesus did?
The Bible says he was stirred with compassion.
That's the Greek word, splonk, nosomai.
It literally means to be deeply moved.
It's a word that's associated with your bowels, the inner man, the depths of your being.
And it's talking about a deep inner agitation.
You know, a really profound concern that's reaching deep into the heart of Christ as
he's looking at sheep who have no shepherd.
Christ was greatly disturbed by this proposition.
And the spiritual landscape hasn't changed.
The reality still exists that there are countless sheep without shepherds.
How else do we account for all of the misguided souls that we encounter on a daily basis?
We talk to people.
And there are nominal Christians out there who wouldn't know Luke the physician from
Luke Skywalker.
Strange, woke, hybrid religious creatures who are as confused about Jesus as they are
about their gender.
And I understand that a percentage of these are just sinners carrying Jesus around in
their pocket.
They have no desire to follow Christ, and that's why they're so deluded.
But I dare say that a greater portion of them are the consequence of having no shepherd
to care for their soul.
They just go to church, some mega thing, some, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what the kind of church they're in.
The problem is the kind of spiritual leadership they have.
We see this throughout the Scriptures.
There's always been this problem.
Isaiah 56 verses 9 to 11.
Listen to this.
This is a terrifying passage.
Oh, come, all you beasts of the field.
Come and devour all you beasts of the forest.
Israel's watchmen are blind.
They lack knowledge.
They are all mute dogs.
They cannot bark.
They lie around and dream.
They love to sleep.
They are dogs with mighty appetites.
They never have enough.
They are shepherds who lack understanding.
They all turn to their own way.
They seek their own gain.
Jeremiah chapter 50 verse 6.
My people have been lost sheep.
Their shepherds have led them astray and caused them to roam on the mountains.
They wandered over mountains and hills and forgot their own resting place.
These are descriptions of a breakdown in spiritual leadership, men that are supposed to be helping,
guiding, and serving, and they're failing to do so.
They're consumed with their own issues and they forget the sheep.
Jesus called them, in his day, blind guides who made people twice as fit for hell as they
are themselves.
This is an ongoing problem.
This is descriptive of our generation.
Sheep without shepherds.
They are lost prey.
They are harassed and helpless according to our text.
This is what Jesus says a Christian is who doesn't have a pastor who cares for his soul.
He's harassed and helpless.
He's a four-legged happy meal set for the slaughter.
You have no idea what a high caliber bullet you dodged when you found yourself in a church
full of born-again believers who had a pastor who actually gets up in the morning and prays
for them every day.
Who labors in the word and in doctrine, who is actually saved by grace himself.
It always helps if the pastor is saved.
Who understands the spiritual struggles of the sheep because he has faced them and does
face them and is in the trenches with them.
We are incredibly blessed to have such a pastor.
Jesus said he was the door to the sheepfold in John 10.
He goes on and says, most assuredly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold
by the door, which Jesus just claimed to be, but climbs up some other way, the same as
a thief and a robber.
But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.
So your pastor came into the kingdom the same way you did.
Conversion.
God did something supernatural in his life.
He didn't graduate from a seminary.
He doesn't have a string of letters behind his name.
He didn't climb over the wall.
He came through the door.
And thank God that that's the way your pastor came into the kingdom because now he has a
living relationship with Jesus.
He's not just filling a slot.
He's answering a call of the divine.
He's doing something that God says must be done because if we don't have this, we are
lost sheep.
You know, we could have fallen down any one of a thousand spiritual sinkholes that clutter
the religious landscape.
We could be laughing, swimming, cockroach kicking, banner waving, butt shaking, guns smoking,
mid-tribber, saboteurians, waiting for the comet Halbop to take us to the planet Golob.
Any one of us could be that today.
You could be the guy we see on the side of the road with his dog and his knee-length
beard who hasn't had a bath in 30 years and is convinced he's John the Baptist.
Instead, we are blessed to be Spirit-filled saints walking in the truth by the grace of
God.
And we are not filled with vision and purpose.
We are not clothed and in our right minds because we are such spiritual giants.
We are not those who God didn't make us like other men.
That's why we're so together.
We are not more virtuous than others.
We are not more upright.
We are just incredibly lucky.
Amen.
We are the ones who got a shepherd.
I am a shepherd with a shepherd over me and I thank God for that because if I didn't
have that, my whole congregation would be smoking ganj.
I know what I'm capable of.
And the bottom line is sheep always need shepherds.
And it's because we have shepherds that we're not wandering in the desert without direction,
without guidance, without a snowball's chance in Arizona.
Many of us have heard Pastor Wayman Mitchell's story about being out hunting and seeing a
lamb out there in the middle of the desert.
And the first thought in his mind is that lamb is not going to make it through the night.
And that was an absolutely true observation.
In the desert without water, without guidance, pray to everything that's out there.
He's coyote bait.
And Pastor Mitchell knew that and that would be equally true of us if we were doing this
on our own.
But we live in a pagan Christian culture where churches and pastors are unwanted anachronisms.
The spiritually hip have no use for them.
I was thinking about how the Egyptians hated shepherds.
Genesis 46, Joseph says, for all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians.
That's what pagans think about shepherds.
And unfortunately there's some pagans here this morning.
Pastors are detestable.
They're just, you know, they're baggage.
I don't need this in my life.
Some of you guys would rather have a root canal surgery than get counseling to fix your
marriage.
Your wife is desperate.
She's contemplating murder, suicide, or divorce, or all three.
And you're sitting home contemplating your navel and refusing.
Oh, go ahead.
You go talk to him.
I ain't talking to him.
Amen.
Some of you guys would rather die than hit an altar because your pastor preached one
right down your chimney.
Now that's the last thing you're going to do is let anybody know that that sermon was
custom delivered.
Your pastor probably didn't even know it.
He's just preaching the Word of God.
But the Holy Spirit's got his eye on you.
And he has moved this to bring deliverance in your life, but you'll never get that deliverance
because you can't hear.
Because you're so busy, as Pastor Mitchell preached last night, complaining about your
pastor.
Complaining about people who all they want to do is get you to heaven.
That's all they want to do.
Because we have to give an account to God.
We're going to stand before Jesus.
He's going to say, what happened to Mary?
And you're going to go, Mary, let's talk about Mary.
You got a couple years we could talk about Mary.
Right?
You know, it's all we're trying to do is help you live for God.
Somehow that's an offense.
Somehow that makes us detestable.
Amen.
Some of you pastors that are shepherds, you still have a shepherd, you know.
You don't want to be a shepherd-less shepherd.
A sheep-less shepherd sheep.
Shepherding sheep without a shepherd.
You don't want to do that.
I'm sorry, but I have to go with Jesus on this one.
Not having a church and not having a pastor specifically that will preach the truth, that
will call you out when you're going sideways, that will counsel your marriage, counsel your
children, counsel your home, that will care about you when you don't even care about yourself.
To try to live as a Christian without that reality in your life is a recipe for spiritual
disaster.
Jesus looked at it and thought this is cause for grief.
This is cause for mourning.
To have sheep from the pastor of God who have no shepherd to care for their spiritual well-being,
their soul.
Ephesians chapter 4, we're all familiar with it, verse 8 says, when Jesus ascended on high
he took many captives and gave gifts to the people.
And then on in verse 11, so Christ himself gave the apostles, prophets, the evangelists,
the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ
may be built up.
Paul says Christ himself gave gifts, including pastors.
Now he might be talking about the spiritual gift of pastoring or he might simply be talking
about pastor as gift.
Here is a gift to the church.
Here is a man that will step in and will help you.
Here is something that will equip you for your destiny, for your purpose in Christ.
You know one of the greatest losses in the kingdom of God is service less saints.
Whole lives wasted without direction, without clarity.
Saints who have no idea why they're saved, no idea what they should be doing with their
lives, who are never challenged for regions beyond or even regions close by.
Never given vision, never given marching orders.
Their time, their money, their very lives have no eternal dimension to them.
They are not doing anything for the kingdom, just a pointless, mindless consumerism.
They're not evil, at least no more than me, no more than most of us.
They just have no idea what they're supposed to be doing.
They'd like to do something significant.
They're simply sheep without a shepherd.
Here we are on fire.
Here we are touching the world.
Is it because we're so great?
No, it's because we got blessed with men who have vision, who cast that vision, who spoke
that vision, who had the temerity to stand behind a pulpit and challenge you to do the
will of God.
We hit the mother load.
I've been saved for 50 years.
In 50 years I've had exactly one born-again Christian knock on my door to share the gospel
with me.
I've had countless JWs, tons of Mormons, but one Christian.
How many doors have you knocked on?
How many people have you spoken to?
In my 50 years of being a Christian, I have had one Christian try to hand me a track.
I was in a crowd.
I think we're coming out of a baseball game, if I remember correctly.
One guy standing out there alone.
One guy.
Whenever I fly and I fly way too much, my arms are tired.
I have never, in all of my years of flying, never had one fellow passenger strike up a
conversation with me about Jesus.
I'm always the one who initiates it with varying responses.
I'm always the one to start the discussion in the grocery store, at the gas pump.
Nobody's ever started a conversation with me about Jesus.
Why do I do it?
Because that's what I've been trained to do.
That's what my pastor taught me to do.
My pastor gave me permission to live the great commission.
There you go, all you rappers can steal that line.
Your pastor birthed something in your heart that most pastors never birth.
Think of some of the other things your pastor's done for you.
Things that are called out in scripture.
Isaiah 40 verse 11, he will feed his flock like a shepherd.
He will gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom and gently lead those
who are with young.
It's such a picture of pastoral care who is dealing with each person based on what he
knows about them.
This is a weak one, I have to carry him.
This is a ram that needs his butt kicked.
This is a pregnant lamb that needs to be led slowly and gently.
Pastor Mitchell, he was that guy.
And Pastor Greg is that guy.
They know their sheep, they care about them.
When I started to be a serious disciple, when he brought me on staff, you know, I had watched
him.
You know, he had pointy cowboy boots.
He could do damage.
And I would do the stupidest things.
And I have no scars.
And I always used to ponder that.
Why did I get away with things that I saw him rip some guys for?
But he knew the difference between me and that guy.
And he knew that if he did that to me, I would just kind of, like the wicked witch of the
West, I would just kind of dissolve into a puddle, right?
That would be all that would be left of me.
He knew.
He knew his sheep.
He knew them by name.
He knew their families.
He cared about us.
He always did.
Pastor Greg Mitchell, he's keeping a more furious pace than Pastor Wayman Mitchell.
But I can call him anytime.
I can reach him.
Where are you now?
Do you hear that funny little long distance kind of sound in the conversation?
Yeah, well, you know, I'm over here in Botswana somewhere.
But he cares.
Your pastor cares.
First Peter five, two and three be shepherds of God's flock.
That is under your care, watching over them.
Not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be.
Not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve, eager to take a lower place to lift
somebody up.
Not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.
I thank God for the example ship of Pastors Mitchell.
I thank God that their ministry has served me and has helped me and has brought me to
the place where I am.
I didn't get here on my own.
Right?
The old saying, is he a turtle on a fence post?
You know, he didn't get there by himself.
And the truth of the matter is, I didn't get here on my own.
I had shepherds and have shepherds.
And those shepherds have ushered me into my destiny.
And that's how it works.
That's why God gives us pastors to equip us to fulfill our destiny.
Amen.
Acts 20, verses 28 to 30, keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the
Holy Spirit has made you overseers.
Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.
I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.
Even from your own number, men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away
disciples after themselves.
I have seen the wolves come.
I have watched our pastors protect us.
I have watched them go to bat for us.
I have been saved by my shepherd's staffs and their slings.
They have brought me to reason and to truth and have given me clarity when I couldn't
find clarity.
That's what shepherds do.
And I might add that those who are closest to their shepherds are more likely to find
protection when the wolves show up than the ones who are out on the edges, kind of going
their own way.
I don't say any of this to curry favor or to kiss up to anybody.
I pray you understand this is not a self-serving sermon.
I am offering a much needed perspective in this day of rabid individualism, of mad narcissism,
of wanton rebellion.
God has put a man in your life to help you.
He's a gift.
If Jesus is to be understood correctly in our text, sheep without shepherds is a losing
proposition.
It's a real bad idea.
So Hebrews 13, 17 in the New Living says, obey your spiritual leaders and do what they
say.
Their work is to watch over your soul.
And they are accountable to God.
Give them reason to do this with joy and not with sorrow.
That would certainly not be for your benefit.
What a blessing it is.
We hit the mother load when we found a pastor who cared for our souls.
Amen.
So with all of that in mind, in that context, Jesus said pray for the laborers.
It was in the context of shepherdless sheep.
And so there's more at work in that statement than just pray for men and women who will
bear witness of Jesus.
Though certainly that is elemental.
That's essential to the kingdom.
And I'm not detracting from that.
But what Jesus really was talking about was the need of shepherds.
There is a great dearth, he said.
I'm looking at multitudes of people, he said, who don't have shepherds, who don't have
anybody caring for their spiritual welfare.
He's disturbed by this and he says you've got to pray about this.
You have to pray about the need that is obvious and present.
We need shepherds for the sheep.
Our conference theme is beyond limits to preach the gospel in regions beyond.
One of the early lessons that Pastor Wayman Mitchell learned was the ineffectiveness of
sending invasion teams to places where we didn't have church.
We could go in, especially in the early days, down to Phoenix.
We could see dozens upon dozens of people get saved on our outreach, but they had no
church to go to.
They had no shepherd to care for their soul.
And so the truth of the matter is the Great Commission wasn't being fulfilled.
But souls saved didn't play out to disciples made.
We could get them saved, but they needed shepherds.
So Pastor Mitchell started planting churches.
Our calling is not simply to preach the gospel, but to make disciples and to reproduce and
to send them out.
What we need is Timothes who will teach this gospel to faithful men who will then be able
to teach it to others.
We're all aware of this.
This isn't a difficult concept, as Pastor Mitchell said last night.
This is what we do.
Jesus said in John 10 verse 16, I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen.
I must bring them in.
I know he's talking about Gentiles, but the principle holds.
Jesus has a lot more people to save.
Country after country, city after city.
I was gobsmacked to hear that we actually have four states in America that we don't
have pastors in.
That was a bit shocking for me.
It's like, how is that possible?
Well, it's always been a problem, hasn't it?
There's always been sheep who desperately need a pastor.
The problem is getting pastors to go, getting sheep to become shepherds.
There are regions all over the world that need shepherds.
These conferences that we hold all over the world are not simply gatherings to scratch
your religious itch.
They are recruitment campaigns.
You thought you were being invited to come have a nice week of preaching, a free hotel,
get some meals, enjoy yourself.
That isn't what we have in mind.
That's not why you're here.
Conferences are deliberately calculated to facilitate calling, to put pressure on you
to respond.
We are here to disturb you, to incite you, to pry you out of your comfortable place.
To blow up your stony fortress and to get you to respond.
We are here to expose you to the light of an irresistible call.
We are here to preach that God wants you to rise up and go.
To be a shepherd, be it here, be it overseas.
But that's what we're doing here all week long.
Every one of you.
I constantly tell my church, you hang around here long enough, I'm sending you out.
The bottom line is don't come to these conferences saying, yay, we're sending churches.
Don't come saying, here am I, send them.
What about you?
Why not you?
Amen.
What has to change in your life to fit you for the work of ministry?
What do you have to pay attention to?
You need to develop some people skills.
You need some self-discipline.
You need to learn liberality.
You got to deal with your own anger issues.
You got fears and insecurities.
That's what's holding you back.
We could go on.
The list is probably endless of things that we recognize in our lives that this is what
stands between me and destiny.
This is what stands between me and calling.
I could never.
I'm not capable.
And I get it.
Not everybody here is called to be a pastor.
But I'm looking at a pretty big crowd.
And I'm thinking to myself, why not you?
We as a fellowship are only as limited as your heart, as your vision, as your surrender
to what God wants from you.
Can you look at this generation without getting disturbed by what you see?
Can you talk to people who claim to be Christians, who are completely clueless and not feel for
them an empathy, a concern?
It's like, dude, you are lost.
There are so many religious people in the world today that think they're fine and they're
going to have a rude awakening.
Where are the shepherds?
Will you let God stir you this week?
Will you let him do that?
Will you let God bother you?
Splunk nizami.
I like that word.
It sounds like something's wrong with your bowels.
Can you let God trouble you?
Trouble you.
I became a pastor because of pressure from on high.
I had no intention.
It wasn't on my bucket list.
It wasn't on any list.
And I watched him go and I said, have a wonderful time.
I'll see you in a couple of years.
I had no intention and I honestly really didn't think that it could possibly work.
I said to my dear friend, Scotty Flickcroft on my way out of town, I'll be back in six
months.
Don't worry.
Any one of you can do this.
Isn't that what Pastor Mitchell always taught us?
You can do anything that I'm doing.
He meant that.
You can do this.
You just have to have a want to.
You have to let God disturb your bowels.
Good luck.