“When people comeback, they give back,” Jim Brown, senior pastor at Grace Community Church, Goshen, Ind., challenged students at Momentum Youth Conference on Wednesday night.
He told the story of Moses, a man who murdered an Egyptian and hid the evidence. When he was found out, he fled, harboring the sin and allowing it to haunt him.
“Moses goes on this journey of hiding his sin,” he said. “We often disqualify ourselves with a sin that we think God can’t forgive.”
Brown encouraged the students to repent of hidden sin.
“God chooses not to remember our sins any more, but we seem to not be able to send them to the delete file of our minds,” he stressed.
Moses went on to lead the nation of Israel from captivity in Egypt toward the promised land.
“If God can use a murderer, can he use you?,” Brown questioned, urging them to take a stand and become rescuers for God.
He asked students to remember and repent and choose to give those sins to God, who will never remember it again. He asked them to leave their seats and kneel in the aisle, leaving the sin on their chair.
Stressing that those who comeback, give back, Brown encouraged students to participate in the annual national youth offering. This year’s gifts will go toward two projects. Destiny House, a ministry in Las Vegas to trafficked girls which was founded by Annie Lobert, who shared her story on Tuesday evening. Gifts will also go toward purchasing a box truck to be converted into a ministry tool that would take Bible teaching programs to children in urban Philadelphia. This ministry is sometimes called Sidewalk Sunday School.
More than $26,000 was raised toward these projects.
Also on Wednesday evening, Carlos Baez shared his story about starting a Bible study in his high school in Orlando, Fla. “I encourage everyone to be open,” he said. “Maybe God is calling you to start a Bible study.”
Earlier in the evening, hundreds of students gathered at the outdoor track for a Concert of Prayer.
Momentum continues Thursday on the campus of Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Ind. The morning main session will feature Sean McDowell, an assistant professor of Christian apologetics at Biola University. Speakers in the evening main session include J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case detective who used his experience to examine the Christian worldview, and Davey Blackburn, a young Indianapolis pastor whose wife was murdered in 2015 in a home invastion.
Momentum main sessions may be viewed live online via the Momentum Live Feed. (Click here to access.)