Dr. John Yeats – 2014 MBC Annual Meeting Executive Director’s Address.
OSAGE BEACH – Missouri Baptists must despair of themselves and pray that God would fill them with His Spirit, Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) Executive Director John Yeats said during his address at the 2014 annual meeting here at Tan-Tar-A Resort, Oct. 27.
“Listen, our Heavenly Father yearns to have His churches comprised of believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit,” Yeats said. “His purpose is to give the Holy Spirit to His children as much as He gives air and water to the inhabitants of planet earth. His will for you and me is that our whole being is saturated, fully dominated, ruled and possessed by the Holy Spirit.
“But to experience Him, we must cast ourselves at the feet of Jesus in helplessness.”
Before opening his sermon, Yeats commented on a Missouri Baptist Convention video that traced the success of Southern Baptist cooperative ministry to prayer. After the video, Yeats asked Missouri Baptists, “What could happen in our state if every man of God would start his day on his knees praying for his family, calling out to God for his church and praying for our cooperative outreach in the Heartland and across the globe?
“Lord, give us 300 warriors who cry out daily, 300 who put on the helmet of salvation, strap on the shield of faith and wield the sword of the spirit for their families, their churches and our cooperative mission work.”
Preaching from Acts 2:1-4 and Ephesians 5:18, Yeats said that Missouri Baptists can do nothing together without the empowerment of the Spirit.
“We must be filled with the Holy Spirit to accomplish what the Father wills to do collectively through us,” he said.
On the other hand, Missouri Baptists must avoid the “cultural religion of humanitarian goodness and political correctness.” Because of this attitude, “in some places in evangelical life we have lost our backbone to stand up compassionately for our biblical convictions in the public square,” Yeats said.
“What do we train our children to be? What is our goal for making disciples? To raise a good person? To raise a productive person who can hold a good paying job? To disciple a new believer so that they smell better and learn the songs of Zion? Heaven forbid!
“It must be our passion to raise up a godly person filled with the Holy Spirit on mission with God,” Yeats said. “Isn’t that what discipleship is all about? Isn’t that the chief aim of our parenting, our student ministries in our local churches, or our educational institutions? And when it isn’t, we have decided to go our own independent way instead of humbling ourselves before the One who bought us with His shed blood on the cross.”
Moreover, Missouri Baptists must be filled with the Spirit for the sake of others, Yeats said.
“It is not a matter of ‘fill my cup.’ It is ‘fill my pipe.’ We are to be conduits of His life, His living water to the dry and the thirsty,” Yeats said. “You cannot be his conduit unless you are a clean vessel, unless you have broken the contract to allegiances and obligations that supersede Him.”
Yeats urged Missouri Baptists to surrender everything to God and follow Him “anywhere, everywhere, at any cost.”