How Will You Use Your Influence?

Do you realize the influence that you have? What about the number of people that you're having an impact on around you? Who is looking up to you? Who is counting on you to take the lead? Now what about your faith? How is your faith having an impact on the people around you? Hey Danny! Yeah? Are you ready to influence? I guess. Okay, here's what I want you to do. I want you to use your influence to get 5 people to do a dance routine with you. You ready? Yeah. Come on, John, you can do it, you can do it. It's an easy dance to do. I know you can do it, Josh. Come on, envisage those moves. You've got this, Sarah, you've got it. Macarena, macarena. Would you have the boldness to do what Danny did, or would you be too scared? There's power in influence though, isn't there? So what about using your influence to take a stand for Jesus? Take Justin Bieber, for example, who at time of filming has over 180 million Instagram followers and over 64 million YouTube subscribers. In an interview with Apple Music, he said without an active relationship with God, he would be 100% on the path to self-destruction. For him, what he's saying is in order to take his faith seriously, he needs to recognize the bad influences in his life and make change. Or take Katie Taylor, who's won every boxing belt possible, and she spoke about her main influence when she told a reporter that she clings on to God and she clings to the scriptures to focus on what God is saying. Now these people are by no means perfect, but like us, they can choose to use their influence for goods and for bads. This was not unlike the disciples who had similar choices to make. Throughout the four Gospel accounts, we see the goods, the bads, and the ugly of the disciples. It's important to remember though that the word disciple means learner, so as they tried to learn and do as Jesus said, they were always going to get some things wrong. It's not that we don't want to follow their example, but some of their mistakes we too need to learn from rather than repeat. Like in Luke 9, Jesus had sent some people ahead to tell the town of their arrival but received word back that they weren't welcome. Rude! Enter the sons of thunder, James and John. Their immediate thought was, "Do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?" They weren't called sons of thunder for nothing. But Jesus gently rebukes their outrageous suggestion. Then in Matthew 20, the two brothers strike again. They're talking about the Kingdom of God and a fight breaks out between them. Who is going to be the person who gets to sit next to Jesus in heaven? And Jesus replies to them, "It is not about being served, but about serving." others, they had missed the point again. As if that wasn't enough, in Mark 10 we see people bringing their children to Jesus, and yet the disciples tell them not to. Jesus is annoyed, he's angry at what he's seeing. As we learn from the disciples, we need to realize there will be people who will oppose us. Maybe we'll need to walk away and use your influence through prayer. Or perhaps we'll fall into the same trap as the disciples and think me first. We too need to realize that in this upside-down kingdom, it isn't about lording power over people, but rather following Jesus' example, we choose to serve others. More than anything, we don't want to get in the way of people coming to Jesus. We want to use our influence to bring people closer to him. Not further away. The disciples also had many great moments of influence. John, the once thunder-loving pyromaniac, and Peter, the 3-time Jesus denier, did incredible things by the power of the Holy Spirit. After a healing miracle, the authorities tried to imprison them for it. But listen to the conclusion they came to: They could see they were ordinary men with no special training in the scriptures, but they also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus. Of all the things we can be known for, both good and bad, I want to be known as a follower of Jesus. We don't have to be Bible experts or have all the answers, but we can still have an influence as we ask the Holy Spirit to work through us. And then there's also the great example of Philip In Acts chapter 8, we see him being led to speak to an Ethiopian on the back of a chariot, a bit like this one, maybe not as modern. The Ethiopian was struggling to understand scripture. He was stuck on a particular quote from the prophet Isaiah: "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearers is silent, he did not open his mouth." The Ethiopian asked Philip, "Was this prophet speaking about himself or someone else?" And so beginning with the same scripture, Philip went on to tell him the good news about Jesus. We're all influenced by others, but we need to own the fact that we carry influence too. Because in school you will have so many opportunities to stand up for Jesus and share your faith with others. So we want to encourage you to pray boldly that like Philip, you will have the courage to let the Holy Spirit guide you to who God wants you to influence. Just like one of our own. Over to you, Danny. So I grew up here in North Liverpool. I actually grew up right next to Everton's football ground. Boah, I'm a Red. I've supported Liverpool all my life and it's had such a massive influence on me. But when I was 7, I had another influence. I decided to follow Jesus, and when I made that decision, I knew that I wanted to live my life for him. But it wasn't easy. I remember coming to high school and feeling overwhelmed. There was thousands of young people in this school and, and very little support for my faith. I remember just wanting to fit in and just wanting to be liked and wanting to be popular. I started to shy away from my faith and sweep it under the rug. I started to hang around with friends who were into drinking and taking drugs and breaking into houses, and I had a decision that I needed to make. Was I going to be influenced by them, or was I going to continue to be influenced by Jesus? Unfortunately, I made the wrong decision. and it led to a very dark day. I found myself here in this alleyway. I remember that morning in school, my friends had found out that I was a Christian and that I went to church. Nothing got said about it through the day, but I remember walking home with them and things just started to get a bit awkward. My friends started to ask me about why I went, and then they started to call me a Bible basher Some of them started to push me and it just got really tight. And the next thing I remember, there was 14 lads just jumped on me in this alleyway and just started to beat me. I remember at the end of it all, just lying here in a pile of bin bags covered in blood, just thinking, what is the point? And realizing that I'd made the wrong decision. So my dad's a preacher, and I remember him sitting me down that night and telling me a story out the Bible. It's the story of a man who lost everything trying to hoard up his wealth and his possessions. And I remember my dad looked at me and he said, 'You are like that man. You spend so much time trying to build up your popularity and build up being liked, all of these things that can just be lost in a flash. I remember sitting down and thinking about that story and realizing that I was influenced by Jesus and I wanted to live a life for him, but yet I had let that slip away. Jesus says that we are valued, that we are loved, and we are his, and, and what could be more important than that? Now I look back on that moment and I realize how much it changed my entire life. God is the driving force in everything that I do. Jesus has been the greatest influence in my life, in good and in bad. Now, being a Christian isn't easy, but nothing good in life worth having ever is.