Rev. Heiney had just returned from the Guinea, west Africa area in which he has been a missionary for 8 years. He later led a Bible Study for the congregation, telling of the work being done among more than 100 new congregations there. (Note: This is a transcription of Rev. Heiney's words. We hope we have edited the tape adequately. We left in words like "gotta" and "gonna" rather than changing them to written English.

����������������The text for today is a double text, really two texts. They both come from the Gospel and from the Epistle that we read today. The first is from the Gospel: Matthew 16:26. "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul, for what can a man give in exchange for his soul." The second is from Romans 8:18 which is the Epistle, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." This is the text, Let's pray: Dear Lord God, Heavenly King, Lord we worship you and praise you and we thank you for word. Be with us now today Lord send your holy spirit, open our hearts and minds so we can accept and understand the word that you have for us today. That every word spoken here be your word and that you would bind Satan in this place. Be with us now Lord, in your name. Amen ����������������

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I'm gonna talk about something strange today. I'm gonna talk about missions and outreach. Without talking very much about missions and outreach. About things that you already know, things like what Jesus did for us when he died there on the Cross. What he actually saved us from. You see, that's what realizing those things is what finally got me started in planning to be a missionary. I did grow up in a Christian, Lutheran family. I went to a Lutheran school, I went to a Lutheran high school. But these things that Jesus did for us, what he won for us, what he saved us from, they weren't the central thing in my life.

I went to college, I went to school to be a pharmacist. It was in the fourth year of the five year pharmacy program that God really grabbed a hold of me in my life, it's a long story, but it wasn't a spectacular thing, just a friend of mine who also was a Lutheran, we were sitting in a car one night and we were talking and I don't know how in the world that we got on the subject of God, that wasn't one of our normal topics but we started talking about God and we started saying, if this is really true, what we go to church and talk about every Sunday that is really true, then nothing here we are doing here on earth really matters, nothing is really important. Things that have to do with eternity, like living forever in God's kingdom, unless we are reaching out and dealing with that nothing we do here makes any difference and that day it was like eternity opened to me. And suddenly I could see it and I could see the truths in these texts that we just talked about. What good would it be if a man gains the whole world, what good is it if we have a nice good life and make a lot money and have a good home, and things go well for us, what difference does it make. It doesn't mean anything, but I consider that our present sufferings with whatever happens here will not be compared with the glory that will be revealed with us in the end, that's what will be important, and what counts in life.

I saw it in a whole new way. By the end of my fourth year I realized that I was not going to finish Pharmacy, I was going to go into the Ministry, but I did finish Pharmacy, I finished the fifth year. And I went on to the seminary, but already when I got to the seminary some people said, hey you've already got a pharmacy background, hey you could become a missionary. No, I'm not gonna go out and be a missionary because I was a Lutheran, I was the kind of person who sat in the pews all the time and I didn't realize what this was all about. Now I do, now I'm gonna tell people what Christianity is all about and people are gonna get all excited and people are gonna sell their homes and then move overseas, we're gonna send out about 20 Missionaries from my church every year, it's gonna be great.

Right after the seminary, well things didn't work like that and tell people you know this is what Christianity is really all about. People would pat me on the head and say oh that's good, that's nice, that you found that out for yourself. Wait a minute, you don't understand what I'm telling you here, and I saw that people weren't gonna go out and sell their houses and all that, so I kind of told God hey God I see that this is not gonna work like I thought it was I want to account for the most people in the Kingdom of God that I can. I if I can do that best by being here or sending out Missionaries fine I'll do that, but if the way that I can reach most people is to be a Missionary myself, then fine I'll do that. So, within a week God made it clear to me, well in a week he let me know that I got on the Missionary track and ending up being a Missionary. But it always did frustrate me that I really could not get people to understand what I was talking about.

But when I was there in Africa, the Africans sometimes had a hard time grasping future and what future is, so I developed a presentation hat I would talk in villages a lot times about future and what eternity is and get that across to them, one time I came back to the states and started realizing, hey this might help me to get across what I am trying to get across about this life and about eternity. So here it is this is the African presentation, in Africa it takes me about 2 hours, but here it won't take that long here because I won't have to explain a lot basic things to you. But what I'm gonna do here is we're put your life on a timeline. And use this tape measure like a time line and we're gonna say first of all let's say that one inch equals a year in your life, this is your life now, and then here you're one years old, here you're two years old and we get to about out here and your ten years old, you're a little kid and now you're growing up, then we get out here to about twenty years, and your twenty years old now and you're getting married. And for purposes of this let's say that everybody is gonna live to be a hundred years old so we can keep on going, you get to be fifty years, then 70 years old and you're getting old and then you're a hundred years old and you die, so this is your life, this is your life here on earth, we're gonna change it a little bit, now we're gonna say that one inch equals one hundred years, so now here is your life on the revised scale. This where you were born, this is where you went to school, this is when you got married, here you're about forty years old, and you're a respected leader, then fifty years old and here your about 70 years old and your teeth are falling out and here you're about a hundred years old and you die, ok, so this is your whole life on this scale. But this is not really your existence, because now we can go out to five hundred years now, now you have been in existence for five hundred years and of that five hundred years This one hundred years is the only time that you've spent on earth, this is the only time that you have suffered. The only time you had any pain, the only time you were ever frustrated, the only time you had anything, everything, ever went wrong in your entire existence is all in here. Now for this four hundred years you've been in the Kingdom of God and everything's been perfect, everything's been wonderful, no more pain, no more sickness, you're there with your parents, your grandparents, your ancestors, and your kids and your grandkids and your descendents and you're all there together everything's great, everything's wonderful and you're in perfect health, and that's the way life has been for four hundred years, let's go out to a thousand years, � you have been in existence for a thousand years now, of that thousand years this 100 hundred years is the only time you suffered, had any pain, any problems, for nine hundred years you've been in the Kingdom of God and everything's perfect, everything's, wonderful and everything's great, let's go out to 5000 years. You've been in existence for 5000 years now, of this five thousand years this one hundred years is the only time that you've ever suffered, had any pain the only time you ever had any problems, and you know what, you know Jesus has done incredible things for us, he's given us all this life, you know this one hundred years, this is the only time in your entire existence that you can do something for Jesus. That you can let, you can be used by him, to reach the lost, that he's trying to reach that he wants in the Kingdom of God, this one hundred years is this is the only time that can be used by him to reach the lost, after that you are in the Kingdon of God and you will never be able to reach out to a lost person again. You'll never be able to do anything like that for Jesus that means so much for him as in this little one hundred years. And then for four thousand nine hundred years you'll be in the Kingdom of God and everything is gonna be perfect, gonna be wonderful, gonna be great, now if I had a longer tape measure here, we could send this tape measure all the way down the hallway, all the way out to the doors, we could run this tape measure out through the doors, out into the street in front of the church. And still this one hundred years would only be the time you would suffer, you would only have pain, this one hundred years is the only time that you can be reached out and be used by God to reach people who are lost to the Kingdom of God. And you know eternity is not gonna end when we get out across that street, I can keep sending this tape measure out and I can send it out across through Junction City, out to Highway 70, take it down to Topeka, over into Kansas City, pass through Kansas City out of Missouri and to New York City and still this one hundred years is the only time that you suffered, the only time that you had pain, the only time you can reach a lost person to Christ in your entire existence. And it isn't gonna end there either, eternity is gonna keep on going, we can send it out, wrap it around the world two or three times throw it out to the nearest star to Alpha Centauri. And still that's only the beginning of the distance that this tape measure can go. And still of that incredible amount of time and distance, this one inch is the only time that you'll ever suffer, ever have pain, the only time that you can do something for God of this magnitude, to reach out and to go for the lost. You know, this is not your life, this thing that we're living here, you know everybody says this is your life, that you gotta go for the gusto go for everything that you can. We think this is our life, right here, right now and then there's this nebulous thing eternity that kind of trails out somewhere behind it. This is not your life, if our existence was like a college career, this life here would be the entrance exam, just the very beginning entrance exam to get in, and then the college career is all that follows after that. If somebody was gonna write right now later, way off in the future, a 15 volume history of your life, of your existence the life that you live here, this would be a little one page introduction. In comparison with all that would be written about your existence. This is not your life, this is not your existence, your existence, is meant to be there in the Kingdom of God with God, with him for all eternity trailing out there, now we're gonna really understand this good and get everything straight, we gotta look at the other side of it too, because for a lot of people probably most of the people who ever lived on the earth this one hundred years is not gonna be the best time of their life. It's the same kind of life that you're living but for them it'll be the most wonderful part of their entire existence. Because they're gonna be lost after that for all time and for all eternity. And for however far this tape measure goes out. They're gonna be lost and they're gonna be in Satan's kingdom. We don't like to talk about that, that's unpleasant, a lot of churches don't talk about it at all anymore, we don't talk about unpleasant things, we don't like unpleasant things, it's not nice, but if you want to understand, if you want to see reality, you want to see things the way it is, that's the way it's gonna be and it's like we can't think about it all the time I couldn't think about it all the time, we all have loved ones who are lost, people we care about, and we don't want to think about that but if you want to see what is really, what life is and what's really happening, we've got to open that door, we've got to look in, we've got to see it, we couldn't do it all the time, we'd go nuts, I'd go nuts.

But sometimes you gotta look, we gotta see what's happening to those people. But those people are being lost and they are gonna be gone, and they are gonna be gone for all eternity. Now, if right now here in this earth, some pod blew up or something and all of the whole earth was infected with a disease and nobody knew about it and every person on earth was infected with this disease and it was gonna kill them in a short period of time, everybody was gonna die, several months, maybe a year incubation period but then it's gonna kill everybody and everybody was infected and then somebody came to you and gave you a drug and said this is it this is the cure, you can have it you can have as much as you want, and you take that thing and you take it for yourself and you're cured, you're not gonna die when this thing incubates, but what about the rest of the world, what are you gonna do now with your life, if you have this cure and everybody else is infected and everybody else is gonna die. Are you gonna get up tomorrow and go to work and just live your daily life plodding along and doing the things you always did and say well maybe you know maybe I'll get a chance to talk to my neighbor about this someday. Is that what we would do? I don't think so, I don't thin you'd go to work the next day, I think you would change the whole way you live. You'd pump your whole life into this you'd do something. You gotta get out there I don't know how you made money, what you do, but you've got to get this out to everybody. And you would and you'd work at it. What is the difference between that and what we have in the Word of God in our Kingdom?

How can I -- why don't we make that kind of effort to get the word of God out to the whole world? Why aren't we living that? Why are the daily lives that we live, why are they undistinguishable from the lives of everybody else who is living on this earth who doesn't know what we know, who don't believe what we believe, and yet day by day look at us and can't tell the difference between our life and somebody else's life. One of the big problems besides not seeing eternity exactly as it really is, we don't see the spirit move, we don't see how important that is. And how different that is., This world, the world we live in this is a temporal world, nothing here is important, nothing here is gonna last forever, it's there, it's here for a short time and then it's over, There's nothing here eternally important that's what I saw on that day when I was there in the pharmacy and we were working together. It's the next world, it's the spirit world, the one we don't see that's the eternal world that's where everything is important, that's where this eternity lasts and exists. And yet we don't see it. You know this world, this world that we live in right here and now it was created to be eternal when God created this world with Adam and Eve and everything was perfect and everything was holy and this was supposed to last forever, but when mankind sinned, when we sinned we turned it over to Satan and this world became Satan's thing. Jesus himself said, Jesus called Satan the prince of this world. And Satan told Jesus I'll give you all the kingdoms of the world if you just bow down to me. Jesus said no you don't have the kingdoms of this world he did, he owns the kingdoms in this world, it was created to be perfect and beautiful and now Satan's turned that beauty and he uses that against us.

As we try and think about eternity and what's really going on he's always pointing to us, here's your daily life, this is the stuff that's in front of you, this is the living that you gotta make and that becomes a deception to keep us from really living to going from what's important and really lasting for all eternity. Have you ever seen that movie the Matrix? Most of you anybody who's over 55 didn't see it, didn't care to see it anyway, because it's a science fiction thing, it's about the future, in this movie, it's kind of weird, in the future there's been this big war between machines and people, and the machines have won, and they basically put all the people on earth into little pods where people are born in a pod, and grow up in there and they die in there, and the machines are using the people for batteries. You know the heat that's generated by our bodies they are using that as an energy source. So that's where all the people are. The machines said in order to keep people inside there and not rebelling they've created the Matrix, which is a virtual reality world where everybody goes to work in a time just like our own here now a days, and everybody just does what they have to do and just lives their daily lives and that's what they think they are doing inside these pods. If you've seen the Matrix then you know what I'm talking about well in some ways, this world, what you're looking at, the wood, everything around us, this is just (stuff) Satan has begun to use this like a matrix, to keep us plodding along in our daily lives doing our daily things using our money for ourselves and keeping ourselves happy and content, and not knowing an not caring that there are people dying and going to hell every day that enormous, incredible eternity shaking events are happening all over. That there are demons in this room right now fighting with the hosts of heaven, these incredible wars are being fought, and won and lost and we're not worried about that we're just going along in our daily life just doing whatever it is that we have to do from day to day. As I said that in this room right now, the reality is this room is full of spirits eternal spirits that are gonna live forever and they're doing battle for what your mind is seeing and what it's understanding. Because if what I am saying to you today is starting to break through, if there's any chance that it's gonna make a difference in the way that you live your life or the way that you're gonna do things from here on in then those evil spirits are especially in a big battle right now, and they're fighting right now because they don't want that to happen. They don't want you to break out of this mold and do anything different than you've always done. And the really sad thing about all this is that in most cases, those evil spirits are gonna win, they're gonna win here today because most of you are probably gonna leave here and within two hours you're gonna be thinking about football games, and what's for dinner, and where the relatives are and how Thanksgiving weekend is gonna end up and how the clean up is gonna happen or whatever, but our minds will be off into the normal thing and by Monday morning we're gonna be back to work and all these things are going to be dissipated and that's the way it's gonna be. But if any of you out here, if any of you can by the help of the Holy Spirit win that battle and realize how important this is and what's at stake, all this eternity, not just for you and me but for many, many others and what we could be doing, you know I can't tell you what you could do for the Kingdom of God, I can't tell you because we all have different gifts, God's gonna use all of us in different ways at different times in different places but God can use us in mighty ways. And if you make it number one in your life and you start looking for that with everything you have and say God this is important this is the number one thing in my life, not taking care, not making sure we have a comfortable place to live or all that, that's not number one. This is short and this doesn't mean anything for all eternity. The important thing is the thing that goes on for all eternity.

If we make that number one in our lives and we give ourselves to God and we say God I'm ready tell me what to do. God would show us those things and he will reveal it. And our lives would be lived in a different way. I can't tell you what you need to do, I'll tell you one thing though we have 6000 congregations in the Missouri synod, over 6000. 6000 congregations and out of that we only have like 200 people, 200 families or units that are out in the Mission field and we've had to pull a lot of those back because of money problems, but they're all even without the money problems we only had about 200 people out there. I don't believe that that's all God ever consecrated or asked or called to go out to reach these thousands and thousands and thousands, millions going to hell every day. I believe God has called many many more than that, we've got 6000 congregations, I'd say God has probably called at least 6000 people. This is coming out of my head, I'm sorry, this is from my own perspective, but I believe he'd have called at least 6000 people, but people are not listening and people are not going because we're in this little "Matrix-world" that Satan has set up for us that's keeping us from going out and doing anything in his kingdom. So out of 6000 we only have 200, that means if people are willing to go, maybe you haven't been gifted, maybe God hasn't given you everything that you'd like to have. Maybe you weren't the first one that God called but since so many others have abdicated God has the power, he can use you exactly the way you are anywhere that he needs you. He can use you. I don't know where, but one thing I can tell you this does need to be the number one thing in our lives. This is the most important thing. And if you really want to make it number one in your life you want to keep this in front of you it's gonna take a real effort and you're really gonna have to do it. Because Satan will wipe that out so fast even me, even when I'm in Africa I gotta struggle to keep my mind open and keep remembering what's real and what's important and what is not real and what is not important, this what you are looking at this is not reality.

Everybody says this is reality, look at reality see reality what's around here. This is not reality, the reality is in the Kingdom, in eternity, in things that'll last forever. II Corinthians 4:17 says for our light and momentarily troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes on not what is seen, but what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. In Colossians III it says set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. The things we don't see are the eternal souls around us everyday. Those are what are at stake. That needs to be number one in our lives no matter what we do, no matter where we go. Because what good will it be for man to gain the whole world in this little time here and then forfeit his soul. When we consider our present sufferings in this little time here are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. You make that choice and say this is gonna be number one for me. And it causes you problems and pain and maybe you don't have everything you would have liked to have had in this world. But this is what goes on forever. This is what goes on for eternity. Let's accept the sufferings, let's go for the glory, let's make this eternity the number one thing in our lives. Let's pray.

Dear Lord God, heavenly King, Lord we worship you, we praise you, we do not understand what you have done for us, we do not understand the incredible glory and the eternity that you've won for us in your Kingdom, we don't understand and we never will understand what you've saved us from, eternal death and suffering. But Lord, I pray right now that you send your Holy Spirit to everyone in this church to everyone sitting in these pews. I pray that you send your Glory and through your Holy Spirit, open their eyes, open their hearts. Open their minds and help them to see eternity, help them to see what this world is, nothing but a deception. Lead them and be with them Lord, and Lord as some of them are committing themselves to you and are saying that they want to make this number one in their lives now Lord, lead them from this place help them to see and to find what you want them to do. And if others have abdicated help them to find the strength� (the tape ran out just before the end of the prayer).