God Wants to Use You

Welcome back to Ignite, everybody. Have a special friend, a new friend, but he feels like an old friend, Victor Dawson. And I met... I was actually at a prayer breakfast, speaking at a prayer breakfast in Colorado Springs. I don't know, a month or so ago. And I was told there was this Victor Dawson that wanted to carry me to drive me to the airport in Denver. I said, well, that's beats having an Uber, so I guess he's a Christian, is he excited? Oh, yeah. Well, you have no idea. So again, the car Victor, and Victor, welcome to our show. And I'm going to tell you, that was like the quickest ride I've ever had. It felt like it went like that. We are back and forth having so much fun sharing stories. We are soulmates, and so everybody, and what should we do, a soulmate of mine, a new friend, and now a dear friend, Victor Dawson from Colorado Springs. So I think your experience was similar to mine on that car ride? Yeah. Well, Barry, it was great to see you there, and it's great to be with you again today. We had to ball on the trip up to Denver, sharing our stories, and just laughing and having fun. But I have to confess something to you. You may not know, I drove especially slow getting to the airport. I've made it to the airport in about 30 minutes faster than that, but I'm just wanting to spend more time here over at the U. Come on. Oh, my goodness. It just flew. I didn't want to get out of the car. I mean, I remember as we were approaching Denver Airport, I was saying, oh, no, this conversation is going to end. I mean, I see Victor again for a long while, so, uh, various things. I mean, I always have so much fun talking to fellow faith shares. There's a lot of us around. It's hard to find each other, but when you finally hook up, I mean, sharing the stories back and forth as we were doing, and, well, that reminds me of the story when I was over here. Well, I had another one of those over here, and it's just, is it, is it not fun to share your faith? Oh, it's absolutely so fun and so enjoyable to see their benefits. That you, that you get. And I want to commend you, first of all, for leading the charge, because there has never been a more important time for us to be sharing our faith with a hurting world. And so few people, you say 1%, I say maybe 3%, in my book, are doing that. That's a dismal number. That's ridiculous. We've got to get that number much larger than I'm excited to be here. You and I are our soulmates on that. Tell me a little bit about yourself and our audience, of course, kind of the quick background and where you are, where you came from, and how you got to this place where you love sharing your faith. Well, I was born at a very early age, about 39 weeks, if I remember right. Some of your audience will get that later on, but I grew up in a small town in Georgia and I was educated at Georgia Tech for my undergraduate degree, married my high school sweetheart, NAN, and we've been married for 48 years. We have a daughter and son and two grandchildren that live here in Colorado Springs, spent most of my, about the first half of my business career, working for corporations, not big ones, but medium sized small ones. And then 18 years ago, I started my own company to do global product sourcing, mostly in Asia and Latin America, and then started a second company about 10 years ago with two partners, and we just sold that company in November. And I've been very involved in, with an organization called CBMC, Christian Business Management. Yes, sure, great organization. I found out about 15 years ago, after praying about it, that my purpose in life is evangelism and psychoship. What did that? I mean, how did that hit you? Well, I was talking to a friend of mine who was with CBMC and I told him I was looking and he said, well, think about the things that you're passionate about, that you get excited about. And then he said, you might be surprised that you're already doing it. And he was right, because I had been doing it for years, but I finally focused on it. And so I wrote this, I guess you'd call it a purpose, life purpose statement that says, as an ambassador for Christ, as you go, as I go, make disciples of all nations by giving loving and serving people with integrity around the world. And I plan to do that with the hospice nurse. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Till your last breath, right? So you were in the book on this, talking about your book right quick, I want to promote your book. Well, yeah. Great. I appreciate that. A few years ago, I had emergency open heart surgery. Thankfully my wife wouldn't let the cardiologist off the hook and they did a heart cath and they found out that I had over 90% blockage of the left main artery called the widow maker. Yeah. I was literally ready to drop dead at any moment. I didn't have a heart attack. They caught it in time, did an open heart surgery, and one week to the hour, which I celebrated the anniversary of yesterday. Oh, wow. I was sitting on the patio at my home. And I remember thinking, God, if I'm still here, you must have something left for me to do. And I don't know if that's two months or 20 years going to be really cool to know what it was. And for the only of the second time in my life, God spoke to me audibly through the Holy Spirit. And he said, I want you to write a book and I want you to call it as you go. And you know, those stories I've given you as you've traveled around the world and shared your faith and lived out the great commission. That's what the book's about. I found out writing a book for first time authors is pretty hard to do. We published it a couple of years ago and there it is. There it is. It is. Conversation that impacts eternity. So explain as we share our faith as we go wherever he leads us as we go and expel in that for a minute, he's as fascinating. Well, I think Matthew 2819 is one of the most misunderstood verses because it sounds like something a pastor and a missionary should do. And a lot of most believers are thankful. That's what they understand because they're scared to death to do it. But they don't understand what you would understand, which is that it's fun and so many benefits to it. Plus Jesus commanded us to do it. That was not a suggestion in Matthew 2819. So does that mean I need to quit my job, go to seminary and learn foreign language and move a half way around the world? I don't think that's what Jesus is talking about at all. No. So in the research in the book, I discovered that the Greek word for go actually means as you are going. So I believe what and what I talk about in the book is that Jesus meant as you are going along your way every day and everywhere, you are to share about me with your friends, your family, your co-workers, your neighbors and even strangers. And all the time, it should be thought of as a lifestyle or a mindset, not some mission I'm going to go do one day or here or there. No, I just live my life and people come up to me all the time. And so one of the first steps I think in this process is that you pray about it. I, Scott, almost every day, Lord, lead me to somebody that needs to know you. Start every day. Yes, sometimes I'll say to somebody, are you the reason I'm here and they'll say, what do you mean? I said, well, I prayed this morning, the guy would lead me to somebody. Is that you? Yeah. And then you start to be alert. I don't make these appointments for you. And you do it with a smile on your face, you know, it's not this point he figures out. I didn't know. Maybe you're the reason I'm here. Yeah, you just have fun with it. I've got a great story about that. Go ahead and come tell us, tell us. Get a stop. He just a minute. Yes. Understand that most people don't know what sharing faith is, okay? Probably most people watching us right now, okay, I just share my faith. What is it? They're thinking of going to a class, memorizing a bunch of stuff and having to repeat that stuff in the right order and then get somebody in the knees and get them say, okay, that's the classic. Nobody wants to do that. They have no concept of the fun that you're talking about. They have no concept that you're always on the ready, that as you go, leave it on the fact that almost everybody around us is lost on their way to hell. We don't like to talk about that, but that's the fact of the matter. Jesus is coming. We're running out of time. If you're not going to tell him who is. So the urgency and the opportunities are around us all the time and it's so easy to miss them, but they're right there. So go ahead, but I'd say amen, amen to everything you're doing because I love your heart. You know that. Well, Barry, that was why I wanted to spend some time with you because I looked at your website and you were saying all the same things that I was saying. I don't know if you might have said them before I did, but we're on the same page, man. So one of the reasons I do what I do is just what you said, we are surrounded everywhere by people who are hurting, especially now, and they are lost and they don't have hope. And we've got the answer to all of that, right? And so what do you do when you get great news? You know, you're getting married, you get a promotion at work, you have a baby. You can't wait to tell somebody about it, right? Well, I'm convinced we have got the greatest news ever. It means they're any greater news than salvation. Nothing. No, I don't know what it is. No. And yet everybody climbs up and doesn't want to share it with their loved ones that they care about. So anyway, this is quickly the story about, or you the reason I borrowed this from a friend of mine, Pat O'Neill in North Carolina, but he had used it. And so I went to church on this Christmas New Year's Eve, sat next to a guy with an empty seat. He was on the aisle. And I had just written this part in the book. And so it was on my mind. And so people talk about, how do you start a conversation? Well, this is when I can't come up with anything else, this is what I do. So he got to leave. And I say, excuse me, sir, are you the reason I'm here today? I'm never seen you by respond. So so much as he did, he said, what are you talking about? I said, well, are you the reason I came and sat here next to you this morning? He said, I don't know. I said, well, when you find out, would you let me know? He said, I'm going to do that. I said, well, here, my name's Victor. Here's my card. And then we've had this little conversation for 10 minutes. And I said, well, we should get together for coffee and talk. And he said, I'm not very social person. I don't know if I could do that. OK, that's fine. New Year's Day at about 10 o'clock. He calls me and says, could we have lunch today on New Year's? On New Year's. We didn't have anything going on. So I'll go and meet this guy for lunch. He pours out his life to me and it's filled with some, quite some stories and some horrible challenges. And so I suggest maybe we could get together some and he said, no, I don't think I could do that. OK. Well, I'm just doing to do the part God's asking me to do. So occasionally I send him a message. Well, about two years, about a year and a half goes by and one Saturday morning I send him a quick text and said, I was just praying for you. How are you doing? About five minutes later, the phone rings, it's him. His name is Randy. He said, what is it with you? You just won't give up with you. So well, it's kind of nice, you know? And he said, well, he's actually a very mature believer. And he said, God's been impressive upon me that I needed to start a relationship with somebody like you. And so for the last two years, we've been having an hour call on Saturday morning. Oh, my goodness. We're disciplining each other. We're sharing our life with each other. And he's helping me as much as I'm helping him probably. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a ministry, most Christians, they may be saved and done their way to heaven, but they're not having fun. And a lot of them are worrying as much as the world is worrying. And so for those of us who have joy, we have as much responsibility to ignite them to get them back. I'm having that continually all the time. And I say, you know, you're just a millimetre away from having joy. Now, I have a long way for having to know you're actually just a millimetre away from having joy. You can turn those problems and they'll go, they'll disappear so quickly, stop focusing on your problems, start going back because you made the problem, you're God. You know, you're saying, God, help me with my God. And that thing became, whenever we take anything else to make it our focus, that's our God. And if it's not God that has to do with people, people always let us down. So it's always a look this way and be concerned when we look at Him, we're in the solid rock. We never move, we hold on to Him, we're solid and we never lose our joy when we're focused out of Him, you know that. And so it's so easy, really quite frankly to get people, I know that. I need to do that and just bring them back into fellowship and direct connection with God and loving Him as their first love. You know, so many people try to come up with excuses and they do, there's all kinds of excuses why I'm not going to do this. But there's so many wonderful benefits, let me just mention a couple of other ones that I've experienced. First of all, your family and friends, close friends, don't you want them to be in heaven with you? I'll talk about that maybe in a minute if we have time. And in the process of sharing my faith around, I've made numerous lifetime friends, how wonderful is that? And in addition to that, you can have a dramatic impact on a person's life and their family and even future generations of their family, not because you did because of what God did with Jesus did. He just wanted to use a little Ome in the process of helping him, what a privilege and honor that he is. So, give us an example. Okay, so I'm sitting in the San Diego Airport early one morning looking out on the gate or at the plane, going to take me back to Denver and having my journal in a quiet time. All of a sudden there is this very loud bang right behind me about 20 feet. So you think of, because of gunshot, was it an explosion or something in today's world, but it didn't sound like that. It sounded like somebody had dropped a bowling ball from about six feet off the floor. So I jumped up and turned around and their lying on the floor was a woman face down. I had seen her when I came into the gate. She was sitting there reading the books probably in her early fifties. Turns out she was having a stroke or a seizure or something and she started to get up and she passed out and she fell and hit the floor. It was a doctor in the gate. He came over. They yelled to call 911 and didn't look good. And so just as they were trying to take her away, the paramedics were a man about my age, professionally dressed, walked up beside me and was looking to see what's going on here and he said, what's what's happened? And I said, well, I briefly explained what had happened. He said, well, that's horrible and the Holy Spirit prompted me. And I said to him, well, it might be horrible, but it all depends on what you believe about where you're going when you die. In my case, I actually, it's going to be great news because I'm going to be with Jesus in heaven for eternity. And the Holy Spirit prompted me again. I'm not sometimes not quite this bold, but I said to him, do you know where you're going when you die? Oh, my. He looked a little surprised. Yeah. And then he said, well, I hope I'll be in heaven. Oh, well, you know what that means? Yeah. He means he thinks he's a good guy. He's done some good stuff in his life and he's hopes he's done enough good to sweep early gates. Exactly. And you and I both know that no amount of goods are going to get you into heaven. This is the only relationship that Christ is going to do that. So I said to him, well, if you don't know where you're going to go, for sure, you might consider Jesus Christ in his forgiveness, okay, he said, and I said, okay, see you later. Have a nice day. Now some people would say, well, wait a minute. You had the opening. Why didn't you sit him down there and give him the whole deal? That's not what God was wanting me to do. God wanted me to just do my part. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm on the way. I say a prayer for him and then I'm looking for the next divine appointment. That's what as you go is. People think that I've failed if I did, if I tried to share my faith or some part of my faith and I didn't get them to get down on the knees and pray the prayer. No, no, no, you're just maybe one little part. And so my definition of success, and I've heard you say this too, is me moving someone one step closer to Jesus, yeah, even one half step closer to Jesus, just a scolding, anything. And even sometimes, you know, maybe I'm sitting on a airplane, I do that a lot. And I try to start up a conversation and the God just shuts me down. Actually, maybe he's even rude to me. You say, well, you failed. I don't believe that for a minute because you don't know what God is going to orchestrate in that man's life in the next two months or two years or whatever. And you're going to find him in heaven. He's going to come up and say, you know, I'm sorry. I was such a jerk to you, but you actually got me started thinking just because I hang Lucy is as you and I talked about it. It's a team sport. And even if we have the privilege of leading somebody to the Lord, you know, there's probably 20 people before us who were doing what you just did and you just and God orchestrates all that. He brings people in the lives and just you move a little bit further forward. And now that you were sensing the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit might have directed you to go further, but he didn't. Yeah, it was enough. You gave him the comment. That's all you need to do. And that's not failure. That's listening to God's voice. That's being you go walk away for that saying, yes, and God did or leading to the next person. And there's more of that than anything else, probably, in our sharing where we just move everybody. If all of us, there's 30 million Christians, okay? There's 30 million born again Christians in America. What if we all just did that and nothing more? What if we all just started love? You know, they don't see us as loving. The world does not see us. Christians is loving. They see us as really bigoted, narrow-minded, mean, they're all kinds of words on the internet. So when you just do that, it's saying, I just met a Christian and he was nice. If you start bumping into a few people like that, at some point you have to come to conclusion, you know what? I mean a lot of nice people who are Christians. Maybe I need to rethink what Christianity is all about. And so you were playing a critical role, and that's the body of Christ, isn't it? Yeah, that's it. Exactly. What's the payback for you? Because God really is interested in you and using that facial experience to bless you and feel you enjoy and direct your steps and all the blessings come down because of it. So every time you have that experience, I talk about that for a moment. When you have that kind of experience, what's your takeaway? My takeaway is that I feel like I'm following Jesus' command, and I'm obeying what He's asking me to, or not ask me. He's told me to do. And it just feels wonderful that you're sharing the love of Christ. You're not going out to someone, and this is another misconception. You're not going out and trying to say to you, you're a sinful person. Most people don't need to know they're a sinner. They already know that. And so you're just trying to love on them and share your life and your experiences and build, in many cases, build a relationship. I'm going to not talking about meeting people every day that you're going to share the whole story with. It may take years. I've got one story of a guy that I gave a Bible to in China, now 15 years ago. And we stayed in contact, and 12 years ago, he told me he had started reading that Bible. And after a few sessions on a Zoom call, or a Skype call at a time, he asked, what do I need to do? So it's about building relationships, listening to the Holy Spirit, and it's just one of the most fun things. And of course, that lead can lead on into discipleship, which is one of the most satisfying things I've ever done, especially for younger guys. We need them to not make some of the mistakes I might have done along the way. Really. And you know, when you encourage them to share their faith, we call it self-discipleship, because if it's discipleship that tells you you should be reading your Bible and praying every day, most people already know that, but our days are filled and busy, and we have to excuse why we don't do that. But when we're actively involved in sharing our faith, we're digging all the time. We can't wait to pray for the people that we're meeting, and words to say, and scriptures to give them, and we're in the game, and it's all flowing, it just puts us in a whole different place, doesn't it, spiritually? Oh, yeah, absolutely does. It's just so exciting and so much fun. Like I said, it's so such a pleasure to believe that God wants to use me and you. Yeah, and others do that work, and build His kingdom here on earth. To think that we're His arms, and He speaks to people through us, the privilege, the opportunity we have to do that. Jesus said, we're His ambassadors. What does an ambassador do? We represent the country where, you know, and that's what we're here to do. That's right. Amen. Well, okay, we're out of time, Victor, thanks for coming on. A final word, look at that camera, a final word, why should people be sharing their faith moving everybody every day closer to Jesus? Why should they do that? I want to tell you that you need to do it because Jesus told you to do it and that you can have a great deal of fun and enjoy the process of getting to meet people and know people and experience life in a whole different way and take away that idea that this is hard and this is something that's divisive and all that sort of thing. People are going to end up in the lake of fire if you don't get out there and do something about it, especially your friends and family. And let me just add, we're all called, you said it, Victor, but that calls for all of us. And whatever our personality is, you and I are soulmates, we are wired differently. We communicate differently, but we have the same focus and the same passion. And you will reach people that I can't reach. Maybe I can reach people that you can't reach, but all of us collectively, I mean, every single one of us, God has a plan how he can use us. It doesn't matter where we are, if we're in firm, we're a handicap. It doesn't matter, none of those things matter, matters the heart, you get the heart right. And even though the least of those have a powerful ministry, I mean, just powerful. I had a friend who was passing away and she got down where she hardly had any breath left. And I just encourage you, you know, God's keep you alive in the hospital for a few more days. You still have people to reach, you know. But even if your breath and your voice is hardly audible, you will never speak louder than right now just before you pass into glory, you know, so it's great hanging out with you. I love your heart, Victor. I really do. We are soulmates. And we're both having the time of our lives, we're supposed to do, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. Okay. We'll see you next time. Okay. Blessings there. God bless.