Thursday, July 14, 2005

God’s Marketing Plan Pt. 2: Word Of Mouth

Last Week Review:

Last week, we began a series called “God’s Marketing Plan”.

We talked about choosing to live a life of influence.

I told you last week that God wants you to be a person of influence. That God wants us to influence our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and one day the world!

I told you that that’s God’s dream for us! And it has been from the beginning.

We saw in Genesis 1:27 that it says, “So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them.”

I showed you that one of the things this implies is…

That God’s plan from the beginning was that, in all the diversity of his creation, we would stand out as a constant reminder that he exists.

And I said that you can think of ourselves as God’s advertisements, because we are God’s main way to make himself known in this world.

When we looked at 2 Cor. 5:14-21 and saw that God has given us all “The Ministry Of Reconciliation”! God wants to make his appeal through you to the people you come in contact with on a regular basis. He wants to use you to reconcile people with himself!

And then, I read you a quote from Dale Carnegie where he said, “There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.”

I told you last Sunday that these 4 ways are the only way we can stand out as reminders of God in this world. That we can only reflect or reveal God by what we do, how we look, what we say and how we say it.

We then spent the rest of our time last Sunday looking at how we can reflect God by what we do. We looked at how as followers of Jesus, we should stand out by accident – without trying! I called it being “Accidental Witnesses

We saw this in Matt 5:13-16 “You are the salt of the earth…You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden...” And it ends with this, “In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds (the things we do) and praise your Father in heaven.”
  • We said that to be salt means to influence the people or situations that we’re a part of by what we do.
  • To be light means you reveal the truth or the right direction by what you do.
  • To be a city on a hill you have to be willing to live in a way that lets you stand out.
Because, if you’re going to be a witness you’re going to have to stand out. We have to stop trying to blend in.

I read you a quote from Seth Godin about his marketing book “Purple Cow” and at the end of the quote he summed it up with this…

“Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.”

I told you that what Seth says here is true for business and it’s true for us as individuals!

God wants us to live such remarkable lives that the people around us are attracted to Jesus, because of us.

I hope you’ve been praying about and thinking about how you can live this way! *This is the foundation for you to be an influence on the people God brings in your life.

If you weren’t here last week, I want to encourage you to go to our website and listen to the message. Download it and burn it onto a CD, then you can listen to it in the car.

Today, I want to start looking at one of the 3 remaining ways that we can be advertisements for God in this world. We’re going to talk about how to reflect/reveal God by what we say.

Do you know what the most powerful form of advertising is?

Word of Mouth Advertising!

John Milton Fogg, a well-known network marketer said this, “The recommendation of a Friend is the single, most powerful Marketing 'force' in the world.”

Word-of-mouth advertising is powerful, but for some reason, God has such a hard time getting many Christians to ever mention him to anyone!

Today I want us to begin to learn how to get over this problem. To do that let’s start by looking at John 1:35-51...

Hear the message below:

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