Good to see you all. We came from Sydney, Australia a few weeks ago, where it was over 100 degrees. And we came here to below freezing temperatures. So we're still getting used to it. But we're glad to be here. And we're glad for the occasion that we're here to see Andrew and Nina get married and start their life together as husband and wife. We're really excited about that. I hope you are too. And we're glad to be with you. We'll introduce our family. I'm Paul and that's Rachel. We're the Webbers, in case you haven't met us yet. We are missionaries to Sydney, Australia. So we'll talk about that a little later. I'll have Rachel come up and we'll share a little bit about our ministry. But right now, I feel like I'd be amiss if I didn't share a little from God's word with you. So I'm going to, let's see, is this mine? Yes, okay. I'm going to read from you the great mission passage from Psalm 66. If you want to turn to Psalm 66. We'll just cover the first couple of verses very quickly here. Psalm 66. Now back in the early 90s, I went to Tennessee Temple University. It is no longer in existence anymore, but I think our records, at least our seminary records are now at former Piedmont University. Carolina University? Okay. But one of our textbooks in our Bible college there was a book by John Piper. And you may know this book. It's a book entitled, Let the Nations Be Glad. You've heard of it? Okay, some of you, okay. And Piper starts out, the very first paragraph of his book starts out by saying this. Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. Now here in Psalm 66, we have a psalm of worship that involves the believer's witness about God to others. And I hope you have a chance to read it. I'm only going through the first couple of verses, but I hope you do have a chance to read it later on this week and get the gist of what he's talking about. But we have a psalm of worship here. And what it shows, this psalm shows, is that the heart that truly desires to praise the Lord The heart that truly desires to worship Him and to give Him glory always wants company. In other words, whenever you find yourself desiring that God would be praised, you desire that other people would join you, would come along beside you, and that you would praise Him together. And that's why the psalmist summons us. I'm actually gonna go to verse five really quick. The psalmist summons us in verse five, come and see the works of God. In fact, he calls everyone in verse eight, which really is the key verse of this entire chapter here. Oh, bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to be heard. And like the psalmist here, the witness of Christians ought to be aimed primarily at drawing others to worship of our God because of his awesome deeds, his awesome saving deeds in Jesus Christ. Now the Psalms will often call all peoples of the world to come and praise the Lord. In fact, Psalm 66 is a very notable example of that. Now look at the first couple of verses here. The psalmist begins the whole psalm with a universal call to worship. Because verses one and two say this. Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands. Sing forth the honor of his name. Make his praise glorious. So you see, since our God is in fact the God of all the earth, it's only fitting that every person on the face of this earth, every man, every woman, every child, every human being on the face of this earth ought to know God and worship God as they ought to. Now, according to the Bible, the chief problem of mankind is we don't want to do just that, do we? Now we don't want to worship, we don't desire to worship the Lord. And this is at the very heart of the sinful state of mankind. And even though Romans 1 tells us that God has revealed himself to mankind through what? through creation, right, through nature, so that men are without excuse, they still fail to honor Him as they should. They still fail to give Him the thanks that He so deserves. And instead, they choose to make gods to serve their own purpose, to serve their own desires and their own lusts. And since mankind rejects that revelation that God has given him in creation, God has for that reason commissioned His people, commissioned you and I, to be people who would summon the world to Him by proclaiming His Word. And that's what we see in Psalm 66. The proclamation of God's Word to summon mankind into worship of our God. Now that's what we see in verse two. It says this, sing forth the honor of his name, make his praise glorious. Now this points out, we're gonna give three very simple points. We're gonna talk about the purpose. First of all, the purpose of our worship. And the purpose of our worship is that God's name should be exalted in all the earth. I mean, let's think about that. That is the purpose in which we are gathered here this morning, isn't it? We're not gathered here this morning necessarily to evangelize the lost. We're not gathered here simply for our own edification. In other words, what we can get out of it. Now those, yes, if it's true worship, those things will happen, right? The lost will be saved and we will be edified as believers. But that is not the reason, that's not the real purpose for which we're gathered here this morning. Because we're not gathered here for us, right? We're gathered here for him. That he would be magnified, that he would be glorified, that he would be lifted up in all his splendor and in all his majesty. That is the purpose for which we are gathered here this morning and none other. Well, let me just conclude here by giving you a couple of other points. We'll conclude by just pointing out that at the very heart of Psalm 66 is the psalmist's plea that's found in verse eight. He says, O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to be heard. That is our key verse. That's the key verse of Psalm 66. And in that verse, we see now the motive of all true evangelism, the motive of all true missions, because this is why we do what we do. The passionate desire that God would be known and blessed and praised by more and more and more people. Particularly the people in our own lives. Particularly the people in our own circles. That is the motive of our evangelism. That is the motive of our missions. But we also see in this expression our God. And we see the goal of our evangelism. And the goal of our evangelism is that others all around us would come and see and know what God has done, especially through Jesus Christ. And together, together we would worship Him. Together we would praise Him and say of Him, that is our God. We've come to Him. We've surrendered to Him in faith. We've found forgiveness. and then they with us will humbly be able to tell others about the great deeds that God has done in their lives. So let that be our goal. May we humbly be able to tell others of the mighty works that God has done. May God grant us boldness to proclaim his word and his greatness to the world around us. I'm gonna have Rachel come. We're gonna tell you a little bit about our ministry now. And that is what we do. That is our motivation. That's why we do it. To glorify and honor our Lord's name and to find people to worship and glorify God with us. Just wanted to say first off, if I don't crack up saying it, I wanted to thank you for your kindness and your love to our son. And thank you for taking him into your congregation and thank you for making him one of your own. We love your pastor. We love Pastor Reggie. We love his people for what they do. And their love for others, their love for fellow believers is seen and it's noticed. So thank you for what you do. Keep up the good work. Well, I want to introduce our family. I'll introduce the boys, I guess. Well, I'll introduce us and the boys. You can introduce the girls. But we are Paul and Rachel Weber. Of course, I'm Paul. That's Rachel. And we have a family of seven. We have five children. Our first born, of course, there in the sound booth is Andrew. Andrew, let me see, Andrew just turned 30 years old. Wow, hard to believe. Hard to believe we're that old, let alone he's that old. But Jonathan is, let me see, are you 27 now? You're 27 years old. Benjamin, you've met Benjamin, he's married to Natalie, and they're expecting their first child here in just a few months. Benjamin is 24. Is he 25 now? He'll be 25 in June, won't he? He's 24. I'm correct. I always get that wrong. So those are our boys. You can introduce our girls. Anna is 21. Anna was here the other day, nursing major at BJ right now. And Sarah is 18 in March. So just about. In Australia, you're an adult when you turn 18. So she's just bumping the ceiling of being an adult. And Sarah is in year 12. She's the only one still left in regular school, I guess you'd say. And she'll be graduating in September of next year. So we've lived in Australia long enough that you'll hear us use terms that maybe year 12, she's in 12th grade. 12th grade, yeah. She's a senior. But when we say senior, our kids say, what does that mean? So she's in year 12. But we have been missionaries in Australia for over 21 years now, hard to believe. Do we look that old? Don't answer that, please. But we've been missionaries to a tiny little out of the way unknown place called Australia. You ever heard of it? Okay, tiny little out of the way unknown city called Sydney. Well, actually, Sydney is a city of about 5 million people, so we've got our hands full there. We've been working in the suburbs, the western suburbs of Sydney. Sydney is Australia's largest city, and Sydney contains about a quarter of the population of Australia. and just some fun facts about Australia. I'll give you some fun facts. In Australia, the days are reversed. So they are currently 16 hours ahead of us. So what time does that make it? It's 10.30 here. It's probably 2.30 in the middle of the night there in Australia tomorrow. So if you ever want to know how your day is going to go, you can give us a call. We'll tell you how it went. But the days are reversed. But also, being on the other side of the world, you know, we're up here, kind of on the top of the world. Australia's here on the bottom of the world. You've heard of Australia called the land down under. That's probably because it's down under the bottom of the world, so to speak. The seasons are reversed. So like I told you, we just left in the middle of our summer there in Australia. You know what season Christmas comes in, right? Comes in Christmas. It comes in summer. You know what we do for Christmas? We might go to the beach, we might have a barbecue, we might have a picnic, you know, go outside, enjoy the great outdoors, take a holiday. A lot of Australians take a holiday during Christmas time. We kind of missed the snow. We were hoping to see some snow this year, but it didn't happen. But the seasons are reversed as well. So we're looking forward to getting back to some warm weather. We have some photos, family photos of the kids sunburnt for Christmas Day because it's such a hot time by the time Christmas comes. Paul did mention that we are very multicultural or at least Sydney is very multicultural. About one-third of the people who live there were not born there. And we read a statistic recently that the average Australian person is a 30-year-old Asian man. Because they're just very, very multicultural. And that does come into our churches. And there was one Sunday we were singing together, and I could hear all these different accents around me singing the hymns. And I thought, this might be a little picture of heaven. Because in heaven, we'll hear every tribe and tongue sing praises to God together. And that, to me, is very what our multicultural churches feel like when we're together worshiping. In the 21 years we've been in Australia, we've been involved in five different church plants. And all of those church plants have had a different flavor to them. Our first church plant was mainly Lebanese, which was interesting. Our second church plant was mainly Italian and South American. Our third church plant was actually Filipino and Chinese. Our fourth church plant was actually our all Aussie church. They were the trouble, of course. They are trouble. And the fifth church was mainly Lebanese. And our fifth church plant was interesting in the fact that we joined with a Lebanese pastor to plant a church right next door to a Muslim mosque. That was interesting. We never had any trouble. They offered to buy us out once, but we refused. You can get a picture of some of the multicultural aspects of our ministry there. We really enjoy immigrants. We really enjoy, especially the Filipinos. Filipinos have a great respect and a great love for their leaders and their pastors, and we appreciate the way they treat us. Sometimes the Aussies, a little differently. Our strategy has been not to plant churches in the traditional American way. And what I mean by that is, the traditional American way might be to plant a church to raise it up to the point where maybe they could take on an Australian pastor, a local pastor, and to bring that pastor in and have that pastor take over the church and move on. Well, that hasn't worked well in Australia, mainly because Australians are very relational people. They get attached to their pastors. As mean sometimes as they are to their pastors, they do get attached to their pastors. And the person who comes in from the outside is not always accepted. And so Australians have been very hard on pastors that have come later on. And our churches have floundered sometimes and had to come back under mission leadership. And so our strategy has been to team with an Aussie from the very beginning. Find an Aussie who feels the calling to be a pastor, who feels the calling to come out and start a church. We team with them, whether we lead the church plant or whether we kind of lead from behind, kind of push him forward as the pastor, either one. But from then, that pastor, that Aussie is there from the very beginning. And so when it comes time for us to pull out of the church plant, they have someone still there who's been there from the very beginning. And it's worked a lot better. So those are our church plants. So you mentioned we've been there 21 years. Our cycle is that we are in Australia for four years and then we come back for one year and we travel and report to the churches that support us. And I know that's a very different system to what your denomination does. So just to give you a glimpse of it, we have 55 supporting churches and we visit all 55 supporting churches in that year that we're back. There are 52 weeks in a year. It's tricky. 55, yes. So we come back and we report to all those churches, which means we are in and out of different people's homes and in and out of different churches. And we have five children with very differing personalities, and for some that was beautiful, they loved meeting all these new people, and for some that was a real challenge, and it would be very difficult. one more new church, and I dropped Jonathan off at one more new Sunday school where everybody would stare at him for the hour we were in there. And he just fell over on the floor and curled up in the fetal position. And I felt awful, but I knew that this was what God had called us to do. And so sometimes God calls your children to do very difficult things that are hard to watch as a mom, but it did grow them into who they are, and I am so grateful that God used that. But Andrew also, when we were getting ready to go on one more furlough, that means that everything we own gets put into a storage unit and we live on other people's things for the year. That also can be a challenge, all their favorite toys. Anyway, Andrew wrote this poem called I Hate Moving. And it was passionately written. And it wasn't rebelliously written, but he was up to here with moving. And so I wish I could have found it. We would have loved to read that to you today, because it was very clear how he felt about the whole thing. So it's been an interesting journey, but I'm very grateful that the Lord has used the difficult and the fun. Because as we traveled all those years, we would find fun things to do. If there was a museum off the road or fun spot that you could take a time to go and visit and learn interesting things. We would take the time to do that. So our children have had some difficult road, but they've also had a privilege of seeing things and being in different parts of the, all the world that many children don't get to experience. So it's not, I'm not belly aching up here. It's been a challenge, but such an incredible blessing. How many of you young people have been out of the country? A few. It's a different experience, isn't it? Well, a typical term varies. We've told you a little bit about our church plants and sort of the way we go about church planting. But we've had several ministries even outside of our churches. Some of the things we do in our churches, of course, I preach and teach. I oftentimes will lead the men's ministry. I've led a young adult group. Well, actually, the current church we're in is actually not a church plant. That's an interesting story as well. When we got back in 2019 from our last furlough, A pastor approached us and told us he was wanting to get a second job and he was going to decrease his workload at Fellowship Baptist Church in Blacktown by half. So he's gonna be pastoring part-time. So he asked us to come in and kind of cover some of that workload and the preaching load. And then in, what, March of 2020, The world just kind of went crazy, didn't it? You remember what happened? A worldwide pandemic hit, and we were kind of stuck. We actually had a partner. We were ready to go out and plant another church, and everything stalled. And for the next two years, Australia was in lockdown. Literally in lockdown for three months and four months at a time. Once in 2020 we were locked down for three months, and then we had a kind of a relapse of the COVID pandemic in Australia and in 2021 for four months. We got locked down. We couldn't go anywhere. We were stuck in our homes. We were not allowed to go anywhere except for essential things like shopping, grocery shopping and things like that. But we could not leave our home more than five kilometers from our home in a five kilometer radius, about three miles for you. And so it was tough. You know, how do you minister to your people? How do you counsel? How do you stay in touch with your people when you can't even get out of your home? Well, one of the exceptions they had was that you could go out and exercise with people. And so we'd invite our congregation to go out and go for a walk. or we'd go for a bike ride or something like that. And that's kind of the way we stayed in touch with our congregation. But one of the things that Fellowship Baptist has promised us is that if we would come in and help them out for this period, now Mike is now back full time at the church, and we feel like it's time for us to move on. So in the future, it seems like we have a church plant opening. a couple of families in Bathurst. Now, Bathurst is actually a three-hour drive from Sydney, so it's a ways out there. It's farther than we've ever gone. And a couple of families there have asked one of our fellowship churches if somebody would come and plant a church there. for them, a good Bible-believing church. So we are good friends with this particular fellowship church's pastor. He said, I know just the people. He contacted us and asked us if we'd be willing to go out and plant the church there. So probably by September, Sarah will graduate high school in September, and then we'll probably move out to Bathurst and try to get that church plant, God willing. off the ground. But those are our future plans. Fellowship Baptist has promised us support in that. This other fellowship church that asked us to get involved has promised us support and even people to come along and help with that church plan. Back to our outside ministries, like I said, we've had several church planting ministries, but we also had several ministries outside the walls of our church. And one of those ministries I was involved in is I was a teacher at a small Bible college called the Sydney Institute for Biblical Studies. Now, SIBs, we call it SIBs for short because it's a long name. Everything in Australia has a long name. I don't know why. Our fellowship is called the Association of... I missed it up. The AFBC, the Australian Fellowship of Bible-Believing Churches. We call it the AFBC. Everything has a long name. But in SIBS, I taught what many would refer to as the freshman courses, you know, the first-year courses, the basic Bible doctrines, the Old and New Testament survey, church history, different courses like that. And it's an interesting ministry, raising up the next generation, teaching the next generation of preachers in our churches. And we need them. I've taught as many as five students. I've taught as few as one. So we are one of the very few premillennial Bible colleges in all of Australia. So we are a rarity and we actually have a small pool to draw from because the majority of people in Australia are amillennial. But it's a challenge because pastoring in Australia is not something that many Aussies aspire to. It means you're going to have a small church. It means you're going to have to get a second job. It means a lot of hard work. And so not many Australians aspire to be pastors. So if you can pray for something, pray that many, or at least a few, good Aussie men will be raised up, trained, and become the leaders of our churches tomorrow. We have a number of our fellowship churches. The pastors are getting up there in age. They're wanting to retire, but there's nobody there to take their place. So this is an important ministry, training up leaders to be the leaders of our churches in the future. couple of other ministries that we've been involved in. There was, as we mentioned, quite a bit of immigration in Australia, and these folk are away from home, and they're lonely, and they're looking for connections, and so we started teaching English classes, and we did that for about 10 years, and then we got kind of taken over by some folks who could do it with free babysitting as well. But we're looking at some new options. There's a gal who would like to start them up again. But we, for 10 years, we taught English classes to new immigrants. And it was mostly Korean and Chinese, but there was such a variety. We had a Buddhist monk at one time. We've had Indian. We've had African, just pretty much if you name the country, we've probably had students from there. And it was an incredible opportunity to make relationships and build friendships, but we were able to use the Bible as part of our curriculum. And we would, I remember one week I explained a Bible story and this little Chinese gal who was, I knew she was a believer, she raised her hand, she said, can I just, because I had to teach at a very childlike level. And I said, all right, go ahead. And she, in Chinese, spoke for several minutes. And she finished the story, because it was driving her crazy that I had to keep it so simple. And so we had a beautiful time with that. We have come from Indiana, where everybody looks alike, and we sound alike, and we eat the very same food. And so what a privilege to be a part of a ministry that involved all these different cultures and to be able to learn just how big our world is and actually how small. And that no matter who you are or where you're from, you need the Lord. And so that was a very exciting ministry that we got to be a part of for a long time. But my favorite ministry, and one I could tell you for another hour about, is that I get to go into the public schools of Australia and I get to teach the Bible. And I'm allowed to give. I'm given a great deal of freedom. I certainly can give the gospel. I cannot call for a decision to be made. If a child comes to me and wants to pray and wants to know the Lord in a deeper way, I can then speak a little further. But I'm allowed to present the gospel and to tell them about the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation. and it's an incredible privilege. I love it. I miss it when I'm here. I teach the primary levels, so I have taught kindergarten through sixth grade. My favorite is about third and fourth graders, but I've taught every level and it's It's an incredible privilege. I have so many anecdotes I want to share, and I know he's not letting me. Time is not letting me. You'd like to finish at what? 1045? Andrew, we're not going to play the video. We were going to show you some pictures of some of the things that we did, but I think what we want to do for the next five minutes, it's your turn. I know what we've said hasn't answered all your questions or all you want to know about us or Australia or even our kids, what it's like growing up in Australia. So you can do it to them too, but I want you to have some time to ask any questions that you want, whether about the country, about ministry in Australia, about growing up in Australia, you can ask any one of us. Anybody have a question? Maybe we'll show the video. Yes, question? Is most of the water there dirty or is there really clean brooks there? That is a beautiful question. We actually have really clean water, so you can get off the plane and drink right from the tap, just like you can here. And the waterways, because it's an island, it is a beautiful, beautiful place of water around the country. The rivers themselves are quite small, and they often go dry. So it's a very dry country as well. But outside of it, just around, beautiful beaches. It is very dry. Now, while the water's good, there's not as much water in Australia as there is in the U.S. here. No one has asked us that before. That's a great question. Oh, we do, yes. In January of 2011, on Australia Day, which is January 26th, we became citizens of Australia. So we did not forego our U.S. citizenship, so we're dual. Takes a little doing, have to carry around two passports and things like that. That can get expensive, but we are dual citizens, yeah. And one of the things that does for us is that tells the Aussies that we're there to stay. We're not going anywhere, and so that goes a long way in building relationships with them as well. Yeah? I don't know if you'll have time to answer this fully, but would you share a little bit about how you felt called to Australia? Oh, boy. So I was called to missions when I was 10 years old. And I was headed to the mission field with or without anybody. And Paul was called to missions in Okinawa in the Marines. And he wasn't sure he wanted to go by himself. So a little bit different personalities there. But when we met, that was it. We were to go together. And he wanted to go to an Asian country, because that's where he'd been called to missions. And I wanted to go to a European country. because I'd been in France for a summer, so for me it was Europe, and for him it was Asia, which doesn't marry, right, very well. And when we went to ABWE to train for the mission field and to figure out where the Lord would have us, we discovered that there was a European country full of Asian people, and that God had done that on purpose. Yeah, I was called to missions in, actually, in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Marines sent me. Whether I knew it or not, the U.S. Marines sent me on a mission trip. So I got to see the foreign field, and God called me to missions there in Okinawa, Japan. And again, I thought it might be back to Japan, but Lord had other plans. One or two more? Yep. We have, yes. And we've also been as low cultured as we went to see a circus in the opera house. Believe it or not, complete with a cage of death, you know, one of these big balls where the motorcycles go like this, you know, on the stage of the opera house, can you believe it? So they have all kinds of stuff there. And it's not expensive. Somebody had one. How did I get into the Marines? I was a big strapping boy. He wanted to leave his parents' rule. That's right. I grew up, got sick and tired of my parents bossing me around, telling me what to do. So I showed them I went off and joined the Marines. And I was a radio repairman. So these guys that went out to the field and played with their radios, you know, with the big antennas, and they broke them. They sent them back to me in my shop, and I used my little test equipment and fixed up their radios and sent it back to them. Now, oftentimes, they'd break them on purpose, but yeah. That was my job. All right, shall we pray and then give you some time to prepare for the service? Lord, thank you again for the work that you're doing in this world today. Lord, we confess that it is your work, it's not ours. This is not the whims of men, but this is the very command, this is the very heartbeat of God. Lord, that we go out and we find people and we summon the world to come and worship our God. So Lord, give us that good success as we go out into our community here. Lord, as these dear people witness and evangelize in their own city of Winston-Salem, and as they, again, look to support and to pray for people who are in foreign fields and places where they can't go themselves, Lord, help them to be faithful in supporting financially and praying and encouraging these missionaries in any way they can as well. Lord, give us fruit from our labors, and Lord, may we see people that we witness to, that we give that word of testimony to, worshiping alongside us here at Grace, even in the near future. Lord, bless our efforts. Give us fruit. Lord, we know we can plant, we can water, but Lord, you give the increase. So Lord, give that increase in Jesus' name, amen.