Our mission is to help people find and follow Jesus, who will then help others find and follow Jesus (ad infinitum). How do we do that?

March 17-18, 2018

Introduction

ILL: You got an apple when you came in—time to get out your apple! Who is this fabled character? Johnny Appleseed. His real name was John Chapman, and he became famous as Johnny Appleseed, the man who wanted everyone to enjoy apples. So what did he do? He didn’t go across America passing out apples. He planted apple trees—actually, he planted nurseries of apple trees. And what do apple trees produce? Apples—and something else: more apple trees, whole orchards of apple trees. Johnny Appleseed understood the X-Factor! He was a multiplier.

The apple in your hand is a multiplier too. Inside your apple are tiny seeds, and each seed could potentially grow into an apple tree that would produce thousands of apples. There are thousands of apples in your hand! But even more, every one of those seeds that can grow into apple trees that not only produce apples, but thousands of other apple trees. There is an orchard in your hand! In fact, there are countless orchards inside the apple in your hand. That’s the X-Factor, the power of multiplication that God built into the world.

You are like that apple. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have seeds inside you, seeds that can grow into other Jesus-followers, seeds that can grow into whole churches full of Jesus-followers. There are Jesus-followers and churches and movements inside you!

Lest you think I’m crazy, Jesus talked about this. He told four stories about seeds in Matthew 13 and Mark 4. The most famous story was about a man who went out to plant his crop, and as he scattered his seed, some fell on the hard ground of the path, some on rocky soil, some on weedy soil, and some on good soil. The first three didn’t produce, but what fell on the good soil multiplied 30, 60, or 100 times over! That seed is the good news of Jesus, and when it lands in your heart and grows, it multiplies into hundreds of other seeds that can be planted in other’s hearts.

Jesus even referred to Himself as a seed that was