This morning we have Dr. Orr, J.
Edwin Orr, the World Authority on Missions.
It is my privilege to be an associate
pastor of the People's Church in Canada for
about ten years.
And that, of course, is a church with
a great missionary burden and passion that's been
a challenge to other churches, including, for example,
Park Street in Boston.
So I've had this burden on my heart
for a long time.
We know well the words of the Great
Commission.
We are told to go into all the
world, make disciples of all nations, teach them
to observe all things that the Lord Jesus
commanded us.
Dr. S.
P.
Gordon once told a story that when the
Lord Jesus Christ went back to heaven, the
archangel said to him, Master, is the work
complete?
And he said, It is finished.
But who's going to carry it on?
And the Lord said, Peter and James and
John and the rest of my disciples.
But after they're gone, those who believe in
me threw their word.
But supposing they failed?
Well, said Christ, I have no other plan.
I've told that story many times to illustrate
a certain point.
But this morning it struck me with great
force.
It's only half the story.
If the Lord had depended on the disciples
alone, the Christian faith would have died out.
But you see, the Lord Jesus told his
disciples, It is better for you that I
go away, for if I do not go
away, the paratrooper cannot come to you.
But if I depart, I will send him
to you, and when he has come, he
will convict the world of sin.
He will guide believers into all truth.
He will glorify me.
And the Holy Spirit is the Lord of
the harvest.
Now I take it that many people here
have performed military service.
I did my four years in World War
II.
Perhaps you remember, regarding military command, that the
commanding officer always had an adjutant and an
executive officer.
If you wanted to see the commanding officer,
you went to the adjutant and stated your
business.
You approached the commanding officer through his adjutant.
On the other hand, when the commanding officer
wanted something done, he gave the order not
to the adjutant, but to the executive officer.
He would say to his executive officer, Major,
I want you to see that every man
has issued special rations, good footwear, because we're
ready to move tomorrow.
That was not the job of the adjutant,
but rather of the executive officer.
Now I'm taking this as an analogy, and
remember, analogies are not meant to be carried
too far.
We approach our Heavenly Father through the Lord
Jesus Christ.
He ascended to His Father, He's there making
intercession for us.
That's His work at present.
But the executive officer of the Godhead is
the Holy Spirit.
He is the Lord of the Harvest.
You say, how do you interpret that?
It was the Holy Spirit who said directly
to the church at Antioch, separate unto me
Barnabas and Saul for the work unto which
I have called them.
Paul and Silas had made their plans to
go into Bithynia, but the Spirit forbade them
because in His grand strategy He wanted them
to open up Europe, and He called them
to Macedonia.
The Holy Spirit is the Lord of the
Harvest.
Now I take it you agree with me
that for the evangelization of the world, we
have three main agencies.
The Word of God, the people of God,
and the Spirit of God.
We need all three.
The Word of God has been committed to
us, but of course someone has to print
it, someone has to distribute it.
The people of God are all too fallible.
Sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes they even forget
to do things, sometimes they're indifferent.
But the Spirit of God is God Himself.
He is Deity.
There isn't time to talk about the mystery
of the Trinity, but the Holy Spirit is
God, and He is the Lord of the
Harvest.
Now a certain famous Christian in the nineteenth
century taught that all we need to do
is to preach the Word, and he made
a remark to say that's the only Spirit
that we know.
In other words, the Holy Spirit only works
through the preaching and the teaching of the
Word.
This man, whose name I have not mentioned,
was a great debater, and he felt that
if you were to debate with an atheist,
everyone who heard your debate, if you made
a good case, would accept the gospel.
It doesn't always happen that way.
But the Holy Spirit is the power of
God.
The Lord Jesus Christ said to the disciples,
when they said, Are you going to restore
the kingdom of this time to Israel?
He said, It is not for you to
know times or seasons which the Father has
kept under his own direction, but you will
receive power.
The word there is dunamis, dynamic.
You will receive power after the Holy Spirit
has come upon you.
I was talking to a man in Tennessee
not so long ago, and he said, Yes,
that means that they were told to wait,
and then on the day of Pentecost, when
they were contributed to the church, they had
a blueprint, and they should go ahead with
it.
I said, Not a blueprint, power.
Now, not many of us here, I suppose,
in the great metropolitan area know much about
farming, but we have our ideas.
Supposing you were talking to a farmer in
North Dakota, and you say, You've got a
lot of grain ripening.
How are you going to get it in?
Oh, we're going to start bringing it in
in August.
What power are you going to use?
He said, I've got the best tractor that
money can buy.
Now, with that in mind, I want to
ask you, do you think the Holy Spirit
is a tractor for us to use?
Some people think they can use the Holy
Spirit.
He is not the tractor of the harvest,
he is the director of the harvest.
If you were to go to a big
harvest field, you'll find a foreman in charge,
and the foreman says, You go and work
over there, you go and work over here.
No, no, you come back here.
You take a week off.
He orders people around, he places them.
Why?
Because he knows the harvest.
Any farmer in the San Joaquin Valley knows
the truth of this.
Someone has to be in charge.
And the Holy Spirit is the Lord of
the harvest.
I'm tempted as a historian to give you
a little bit of church history, but I
must forbear, because time, of course, runs away
with us.
You could say the Apostles exercised their greatest
ministry up to about, say, A.D. 80.
For 300 years after that, we have the
persecuted church, a pure church, but in A
.D. 380, Christianity was made the official religion
of the Roman Empire.
And now they began to use force to
compel people to believe.
There were still faithful souls persuading, but there
were many who used force.
There are stories that you can document of
missionaries in those days burning down heathen temples
and provoking riots.
You could even take the example of the
Teutonic Knights who invaded Lithuania and told the
Lithuanians, You must become Christians.
They said, What's our choice?
Either baptism or the sword.
Well, who wouldn't want to be baptized if
he was going to have his head cut
off?
But for a thousand years, as Latter-day
Saints calls in a kindly way, the thousand
years of uncertainty, the church wavered somewhat.
And then, from the days of Wycliffe onward,
there was a recovery of evangelical truth.
Wycliffe gave us the scriptures, Martin Luther and
the others helped reform the church according to
the scriptures, the Puritans were concerned about scriptural
doctrine, and then Wesley and Whitfield spoke about
the experience of the heart, and then there
seemed to be already coming a missionary explosion.
It is one of the mysteries, isn't it,
to wonder why the reformers did so little
about foreign missions.
But around about 1780, there came a missionary
explosion.
I would say the outstanding figure of that
time was William Carey.
I once heard a missionary expert, a distinguished
alumnus of Fuller Theological Seminary, speak on William
Carey, showing what a splendid man he was,
how he collected information, evaluated and applied it,
and so forth.
Carey was a genius.
But again, that was just part of the
story.
And I'm going to take you a little
bit further back.
In the 1740s, a godly Presbyterian in Edinburgh
wrote a memorial, an appeal for prayer for
revival, and he sent it to Jonathan Edwards
in New England.
Jonathan Edwards replied by writing a book.
The title of the book was, A Humble
Attempt to Secure Explicit Agreement and Visible Union
of God's People in the Union of Prayer
for the Revival of Religion and the Extension
of Christ's Kingdom Overseas.
That was the title, not the book.
They had the idea, mobilize prayer, not only
for the revival of religion at home, but
for the missions abroad.
And at that time, there wasn't a missionary
society in existence, if you make an exception
of, say, the ASPG, which was a kind
of chaplaincy.
I'm speaking of Protestantism.
John Edwards died, and John Erskine, 1780, reprinted
his book, his memorial, and John Edwards' reply.
And he sent a copy down to John
Ryland, Mr. Baptist, living in Northampton.
John Ryland was a rock-ribbed, Calvinistic Baptist.
He was the one who told William Carey,
sit down, young man, when God decides to
evangelize the heathen, he'll do it without your
help.
John Ryland gave this little booklet to Andrew
Fuller and John Sutcliffe, two Baptist pastors who
were keen for revival.
John Sutcliffe had a layman working in this
congregation called William Carey, a shoemaker.
And these men organized a union of prayer.
They persuaded every Baptist church in the Midlands,
then every congregational church in the Midlands, then
throughout Great Britain, then the Episcopalians and the
Presbyterians and others, to set aside the first
Monday of each month for prayer, for the
revival of religion and the extension of Christ's
kingdom overseas.
For seven years they prayed, and then the
year after John Wesley died, 1792, there came
a great visitation of the Holy Spirit in
Great Britain, and out of that movement came
the missionary societies, the British and Foreign Bible
Society, the Religious Tract Society, and all these
great movements that we take for granted today.
You could say that the pioneers came out
of a movement of the Holy Spirit in
revival.
What area did it tackle, first of all?
China was completely closed.
The Emperor of China said it was forbidden
for any Chinese to embrace the Western religion.
In Japan and Korea, they were completely locked
out, they weren't allowed to land, and any
Japanese, for instance, leaving Japan and returning again,
was executed on the beach without further inquiry.
Africa was a dark continent.
Latin America was closed by intransigent Spanish and
Portuguese governments.
India was scarcely open.
Don't forget when William Carey landed in Calcutta,
the British authorities harried him out of the
place, and he took refuge under the Danish
flag.
One area of the world was comparatively open,
that was the South Seas, but alas, the
people there were cannibals.
The beaches were littered with picnic rubble and
rubbish, human bones and skulls and the like.
Now they went to the South Seas.
They started in Tahiti and Tonga and Hawaii,
and the first thing was what we call
a people's movement.
There was a chief in Tonga who decided
to become a Christian.
He made a club of a banana plant,
softwood, so that he wouldn't kill anyone.
And he, as chief, went to the priestess
in the village and knocked her out with
the banana stalk.
The people were frightened.
They thought surely the fire of heaven would
fall upon this sacrilegious chief.
But when nothing happened, he got together the
wooden gods and the idols of the village
and he spoke to them.
He said, I believe in being perfectly fair,
so I'm going to tell you what I'm
going to do.
I'm going to burn you.
Now if you're gods, you better get out
while the going is good.
And none of them moved.
So he set fire to them.
The result was that island became Christian.
But the missionaries said while they had turned
from idols to serve the living God, true
conversion was wanting.
In the 1730s, there came an outpouring of
the Holy Spirit upon Tonga that completely transformed
that community from a pro-Christian community to
vital Christianity.
And the same thing happened in Hawaii with
the congregational missionaries.
They arrived in Hawaii to find a people
who were turning towards God.
They wanted to become Christians.
But the missionaries in the 1830s began to
pray for a baptism from on high.
And in 1838, it came in Hilo on
the big island of Hawaii.
Titus Cohen, a congregational missionary from New England,
baptized after six months probation, 1,755 in
one day.
7,905 during the revival.
And when that movement was completed 20 years
later, 19,000 of the converts still stood
true.
And King Kamehameha declared Hawaii a Christian nation.
So the Holy Spirit is lord of the
harvest when it comes to what we call
people's movements.
He provokes them, and he meets their needs.
There was not a great awakening in all
throughout the United States, 1858-59.
I'll say very little about it, except to
say that when Moody died, he said, I
would like, before I go hence, to see
the whole Church of God quickened as it
was in 1857, and a wave going from
Maine to California to sweep thousands into the
kingdom of God.
That revival won a million outsiders to the
churches in one year out of a population
of 30 million.
Besides, countless millions of Christians revived.
That sent out other pioneers.
It's interesting that when the revival reached Great
Britain, in the west end of London, there
were two young men working in the slums.
One founded one of the greatest home mission
organizations in the world, the Salvation Army, William
Booth.
Half a mile from where he was, was
Hudson Taylor, working in the Twig Folly Mission.
And in the heat of the revival, he
founded the China Inland Mission, one of the
epoch-making missionary forward movements.
You'll find the greatest Methodist missionary to ever
go to India was Bishop James Thoburn.
He came out of that revival.
You'll find the great pioneer of the Congo,
George Grenfell, came out of that revival.
There was another moment of the Holy Spirit
in New England in the 1880s.
Now, Mr. Moody was a layman, but he
was not well educated.
He said on one occasion to his friends,
How do you spell this word Philadelphia?
I can get as far as F-I
-L-A.
What comes after that?
Moody was not only a poor speller, but
a poor grammarian.
Consequently, he kept away from university students through
modesty.
Luther Wishart, leader of the student groups in
the universities, begged Moody to hold meetings for
them, but Moody turned him down.
Someone persuaded Moody to speak at Cambridge, an
aristocratic university.
And there came an outpouring of the Holy
Spirit.
Perhaps you've heard of Stanley Smith, Orsman of
Cambridge, who became a great medical missionary, Sir
Monica Beecham, D.E. Hoste, who became second
in command to Hudson Taylor, the brothers Paul
Hill Turner, W.W. Castles, who became Bishop
of West China.
Perhaps the best known name was C.T.
Studd, the Babe Ruth of English Cricket.
They formed the Cambridge Seven and turned the
British universities upside down.
When Moody came back, Luther Wishart said, Now
what about us?
So they arranged for a meeting at Mount
Hermon in Massachusetts.
Two hundred and fifty Christian students registered.
One young man, Robert Wilder, begged Moody's permission
to speak to the students.
Moody said, I'm sorry, Professor MacCosh is to
speak tonight.
However, all right, if you insist, you can
speak to him over at the dinner table.
Robert Wilder said, My father went to India
and has come back to die.
But he says the fields are so ripe
for harvest that he's praying that a thousand
university students will go to the mission field.
Out of the two hundred and fifty, one
hundred volunteered.
In the next year, two thousand.
And the student volunteer movement was born.
In a generation, thirty thousand went to the
field.
The queen of the talent.
That was a great outpouring of the Holy
Spirit.
Those were the students who said the evangelization
of the world in our generation.
What they meant by that was each generation
has a responsibility for evangelizing the world.
But now when we come to our own
century, we see something else that's remarkable.
The indigenization of Christianity.
It's not enough to send missionaries to preach
the gospel.
It's not enough just to get people converted
and get them started in churches.
We've got to build for the future that
they may sustain themselves not only in their
own church life, but in sending missionaries to
other people.
And perhaps we can take a good example
from Korea.
Frederick Franson, the founder of the mission that
is now called the Evangelical Alliance Mission Team,
visited Korea in 1903.
And he met with the missionaries in Wonsan.
There came an outpouring of the Holy Spirit
that led to a cleansing of some of
the missionaries' hearts and a great burden for
prayer.
This spread to some national leaders who you
could say that in 1903 there was a
kind of preparatory or pallid revival.
I found out to my amazement when I
was doing some research into this that in
1905 there was a great movement of the
Holy Spirit throughout Korea.
Dr. Samuel Moffat, the present Dr. Moffat's father,
one of the pioneers, reported from north to
south they were flocking into the churches, wanting
to become Christians, professing conversion.
But in 1907 there came such an outpouring
of the Holy Spirit that whole congregations were
moved with great power.
Nine-tenths of all the students in Christian
colleges professed conversion that year.
When John Wesley died, he left behind in
England 70,000 Methodists to carry on his
work.
Out of the revival of 1903, 1905, 1907,
there were 79,221 permanently added to the
churches of Korea.
And Korea has had light visitations since.
Not all that's going on in Korea is
revival.
Korea seems to be in a cycle of
church growth.
But I would say that the great triggerings
of the movement have always come through the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
I would say the same thing about East
Africa.
I was talking to Leonard Beecher, the Archbishop
of East Africa.
He said when the Mau Mau terror was
at its worst, when the Mau Mau were
not only slaughtering European people, but cutting to
pieces African Christians, the only ones who stayed
true were the Abolokali.
They remained firm.
And I imagine from what the pastor said
this morning earlier, it was some brother from
the East African Revival Movement that came here
and was a blessing in Lake Avenue Congregational
Church.
That movement is still going on.
Now why am I emphasizing these things?
Missions is not a matter only of the
best methods and the best techniques and committee
work and finance.
The Holy Spirit is the Lord of the
harvest.
He knows the end from the beginning.
He knows where doors are going to open.
He knows what people are going to respond.
He knows where to send the people with
the evangelism that's needed when people turn to
God.
He knows all these things.
And we should consult him more.
I know Oswald Smith intimately.
I know something of his great burden for
missions.
But I would say that before his burden
for missions, there comes a great concern for
the Holy Spirit and the revival of the
Church.
And I would like to say to these
men that represent so many churches from different
parts of the state today that the secret
is get your people filled with the Holy
Spirit.
That's the answer.
I talked to a Presbyterian minister in New
Zealand who said he hadn't much use for
evangelism.
I said, what do you mean?
Wasn't the Lord Jesus an evangelist?
Oh, I mean mass evangelism.
This Billy Graham stuff.
I said, what do you prefer?
Oh, he said, I like visitation evangelism.
With my tongue in my cheek, I said,
how does that work?
Well, he said, you get your people together
and you train them and you send them
out two by two to ring doorbells and
try and get engaged in conversation.
And if you can't win them there, try
to get them to come to the Church.
I said, that sounds splendid.
He said, I'm surprised you didn't know about
it.
I said to him, how are you doing?
He said, what was that?
I said, how are you doing?
He said, I can't get them to do
it, he said.
He couldn't get us Presbyterians to do it.
And that's the secret.
Why is it so many churches have no
missionary burden?
They need to be filled with the Holy
Spirit because as soon as they're filled with
the Holy Spirit they have a missionary burden
because the Holy Spirit has a missionary burden.
Much as I would like to see revival
in the United States I must remember God's
word to Abraham in blessing thee I will
bless thee and make thee a blessing.
God has blessed nations only because he wanted
them to evangelize the world.
This is a day of opportunity for us
here in the United States.
God has given us the wealth and the
technology and the personnel.
And we should pray, the Lord of the
harvest secure, may I quote Jonathan Edwards explicit
agreement and visible union of God's people in
prayer for revival of religion at home and
the advancement of Christ's kingdom overseas.
Let us pray.
Oh God, help us to remember the words
of the Lord Jesus.
When he has come he will convict the
world of sin of righteousness and of judgment.
Help us to remember the words of the
Lord Jesus.
Ye shall receive power after the Holy Spirit
has come upon you.
And help us to remember that he is
the Lord of the harvest not a tractor
to be used but a director to be
obeyed.
The Lord help us to realize that thou
hast brought us here for a purpose.
Help us each one whether a member of
the church or a visitor from another church
to submit ourselves to thee.
The Lord, here am I.
Send me.
Use me.
For Christ's sake.
Amen.
Let us sing that wonderful hymn Christ for
the world we sing.
We simply must do that.
Christ for the world we sing.
The world to Christ we bring.
And let's sing the first two stanzas.
Music Christ
for the world we sing.
The world to Christ we bring.
Sing a song of truth and peace.
The Holy Spirit goes with you.
The message of God is in your heart.
Go in the name of Jesus and by
his grace.
Amen.