If you have your Bibles with you, will
you turn to 2 Corinthians, chapter 10.
I want to congratulate all of you who
are on your way to OM, because I
believe that the people here are people who
are hungry, hungry for reality, hungry for what
God wants to do in your life, hungry
to be used by Him to make a
significant contribution in accomplishing His purposes in this
generation.
And Jesus said, blessed are the hungry.
And so you're blessed, you're to be congratulated.
I think very much you're in the right
place, you're doing the right thing.
I remember when I first got involved with
this movement in 1959, I had no intention
whatsoever of becoming a missionary.
I didn't know what a missionary was, but
I knew I didn't want to be one.
I just wasn't the type.
I didn't want to marry a girl that
had her hair up in a bun with
a doily on the top and didn't like
snakes and spiders, was a red, white, blue
American who thought maybe he should be a
lawyer, and I was headed for law school.
But at the last minute I heard about
this Wheaton College where there were a thousand
Christian girls, and I felt strangely led to
go there.
But I still had no conviction whatsoever of
the ministry.
But I was walking across Wheaton's campus, and
Dale Roton, who's now the interim director of
the ship's ministry, came up to me and
said, Greg, how would you like to go
to an all-night prayer meeting?
I said, why?
What have you got to pray about that
takes all night?
At my little Baptist church we had prayer
meetings which were really Bible studies, you know,
with 10 minutes of prayer tacked on the
end.
Those prayer requests were usually the weekly medical
bulletin.
You know, has anybody got any requests?
Yeah, Joe, your grandfather's hip, okay.
Joe's got anything else?
Yeah, Susie, you've had the flu, okay.
And we sort of, you know, hit the
requests like swatting flies, you know, boom, one
request, two, three.
We didn't expect anything to happen.
In fact, if Joe's grandfather got up and
said he was healed, we'd have kicked him
out, of course.
But this was my concept of prayer.
So I wondered, what do you have to
pray about that takes all night?
And he said, the Muslim world.
Have you ever had that experience when nothing,
I mean, nothing comes on your computer screen?
I mean, Muslim, Muslim, isn't that a white
cheesecloth?
Or what is a Muslim?
I had no idea that one out of
every five people in the world was a
Muslim that went on in life day after
day after day in 44 countries of the
world without a clue that God's ever visited
the earth.
And more out of pride than anything else,
thinking, well, I can pray as long as
he can, I went down to this prayer
meeting at Moody Bible Institute, and this skinny
guy named George Burwer stuck his finger in
my face, and he said, what country are
you claiming, brother?
Well, I wasn't even, I wasn't even claiming
my tuition, much less the country.
I didn't know what claiming meant, but I
didn't want him to know that, so I
said, well, what's left?
And he said, Libya.
You got Libya.
So I'm thinking, let's see, Libya must be
one of those islands off Florida.
You know, it's got to be, it's got
to be out there somewhere.
Well, I found out that night, as I
opened up my heart to what was on
God's heart, I found out about Libya.
I found out that here was an entire
country without one known baptized believer among the
Libyans.
I found out about Turkey with maybe four
or ten Muslims who had come to Christ,
and Afghanistan with maybe four, and Mauritania with
no known believers, and country after country after
country, and the more I let God speak
to me about these lands where his name
is not honored.
It was kind of like that commercial, I
don't know if you have it up here
in Canada, where the guy is shaving, and
it goes, gotcha, because I had been captured
for a challenge that was exceedingly beyond anything
I'd ever thought about doing.
I suddenly realized that God wanted me to
do something about 800 million Muslims going into
a Christless eternity.
Well, some years later, in OM, we sent
a team to Libya.
In 1972, they were out distributing Gospels, and
they were arrested and put into prison and
sentenced to eight years in prison for distributing
anti-state propaganda, the Gospel of Luke.
So I'm sure that any of you are
ready to follow in their steps.
You're just delighted to be in a dirty,
filthy Middle Eastern prison for Christ, but strangely
enough, since that time, we haven't been able
to find hardly anybody else that wants to
go to Libya, until we went away from
the Bible schools and away from the Christian
colleges to Penn State University and found some
Christian students that were so dumb, they didn't
know that God couldn't answer prayer and couldn't
get them into Libya.
You know what the worst missionary disease is?
It's not malaria, you get that in black
Africa, that's bad enough.
It's not filaria, you get that out in
India.
I've got filaria, that's worms in the blood,
that's why I wiggle around a lot.
But that isn't the worst disease a missionary
can get.
The worst disease a missionary can get, and
it seems to have crept somehow into North
America as well, is not malaria or filaria,
but dullaria.
And the way you can discern that you
have dullaria is if you no longer are
excited about the promises of the Word of
God.
You're living by your experiences instead of by
the promises.
And when you see the promises, you say
into this mountain, get up and go into
the sea, you say, well, yes, that's a
nice devotional, but I think we need to
be practical.
And I just stand before you and praise
God for His grace of my life, that
I'm just as convinced at 44 that God
can answer prayer and open up doors in
places like Libya as I was at 19
in that prayer meeting.
And I pray that God will use you
as another generation to keep coming and coming
and coming at the missionaries that are already
on the field and bring back conviction and
faith and hanging on to the promises until
we see the honor of the Lord Jesus
Christ become a reality in the Muslim world.
Because the giant that we face, that I
want to share with you in just a
few minutes tonight instead of Thursday, because my
wife decides she'd like me home a little
more often, is the giant of Islam.
When I was with North Africa Mission, we
would have candidates come in and the candidate
committee would quiz them and say, where did
you get your vision for Muslims?
They'd say, Mexico.
And the candidate committee was scratching their head,
wait a minute, how can you get a
vision for Muslims in Mexico?
Of course I knew it was on Operation
Mobilization.
And God is going to continue to enlarge
your heart for the world, including the Muslim
world, while you have your time on OM.
And I pray that it will be a
disease that will never leave you until you're
part of that force that's going to believe
him to see tens of thousands and thousands
and thousands of Muslims vowing, not to Mecca,
but to the Messiah, to the Lord Jesus
Christ.
And might God give us conviction that it
really is going to happen.
I don't think for one minute the Lord
Jesus Christ is in heaven tonight scratching his
head, talking to the apostles and prophets and
great missionaries of the past, saying, well, guys,
we did pretty well in black Africa and
Latin America and not too bad in Korea.
They got those nice big prayer meetings in
North America.
There's been some good things happening, but I
don't know what to do with those Muslims.
Anybody have any ideas?
Maybe we should just write them off.
You can't win them all.
But we act like that.
But surely, in fact, we know because you
can peek in the back of the book
and find out how it ends up.
And we read there in Revelation chapter seven,
verse nine, that there are going to be
people from all nations, every people, every tongue
worshipping the Lamb.
So we know there's going to be a
breakthrough among the Muslim peoples of the world,
that God is going to open their eyes.
For the weapons of our warfare are not
of the flesh.
They're not of the human level, but divinely
powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
Picture from West Africa, Mauritania and Morocco and
Algeria and Tunisia and Libya and 80 million
Muslims below the Sahara Desert and across the
Middle East and across Afghanistan and Pakistan and
80 million Muslims in India and Bangladesh and
beyond into Malaysia and Indonesia and the Philippines.
Picture these fortresses where they have locked Muslims
in the darkness.
Muslims who are taught from the smallest age
that Jesus isn't God.
Jesus didn't die on the cross.
Wicked Jews changed the Old Testament.
Wicked Christians changed the New Testament.
So God had to send the final revelation
in the Quran which has no savior.
Picture these fortresses and then remember the words
of the Lord Jesus Christ who said, I
will build my church and the gates of
hell will not prevail.
Now that doesn't mean what most people think
it means.
Oh boy, the devil isn't going to get
me.
The gates of hell won't prevail.
You ever been attacked by a gate?
Gates don't attack people.
No, Jesus is referring to these fortresses where
people are held in darkness, where people are
closed out by the fact that missionaries aren't
allowed.
And he says, as we go after it,
as we obey him and we ram the
gates and ram the gates and ram the
gates, the gates will not prevail.
They will go down.
We will be able to enter and take
up residence and dwell in the land and
do good and love them and demonstrate the
loveliness of Jesus Christ.
And Muslims will come to him and form
into vital worshiping, witnessing congregations.
If we don't grow weary and faith not.
You know, I can't find in this Bible
anywhere that Jesus said, go and make disciples
of all nations if you can get a
missionary visa.
I don't think he said, go and make
disciples of all nations if it's safe.
It's not a new Testament question.
It's not safe.
It's not easy.
Islam is triumphalistic.
It believes that it is going to bring
the kingdom of God to earth.
It must reign, not Christianity.
We are on a collision course with Islam.
There's no question about it.
And they've just closed down another church in
Saudi Arabia.
They've just killed an Indian brother who went
to the Maldives to preach Christ.
And they're trying to slam out the gospel
in place after place after place.
And we say, oh dear, that's too bad.
Tis, tis, it must be closed.
That's well, we'll have to go somewhere else.
But it seems to me that God wants
to raise up people once again, like Peter
and John of old, who were commanded not
to speak in this name of Jesus anymore.
And they said, excuse me, sir, could I
ask you a question?
We need your advice.
You're a should we obey God or man?
What's a Muslim leader going to say if
you ask him that?
Should we obey God or man?
Well, you better obey God.
Thank you very much.
I agree with you.
And God told me to come here to
Kuwait and he didn't tell me to leave.
Well, if you don't leave, we're going to
put you in prison.
Well, sir, if that's what you think you
need to do, you do what you think
you need to do.
But I feel we ought to warn you
that at least once in history, when somebody
did that, the whole jail is destroyed.
Brother Andrew, God smuggler says he doesn't believe
that Muslims are going to come to Christ
until they see Western Christians willing to suffer,
willing to go to prison, willing to do
whatever it takes until they say, wow, you
are really serious about this.
You're not just a Christian out of convenience.
And then when we are willing to suffer,
national believers, Arabs and Iranians and Turks and
others, as it says in Philippians one will
be more bold, but it has no good
to scold them to witness.
We're going to have to show them that
Muslims can be transformed by the good news
of Jesus Christ.
And I think that he's calling us to
send many, 10, 20 armies frontiers.
It's just one, this little band of people
that we're pulling together to send out 200
church planning teams across the Muslim world.
It's just one of the regiments of God's
army.
That's going to come from every flank until
there are hundreds and hundreds of disciple makers,
permeating these Muslim fortresses everywhere they turn.
They're meeting someone who loves the Lord Jesus,
who refuses to stop speaking in his name
until those churches become a reality across the
Muslim world.
This is the dream that God has given
me.
And I pray that he'll give it to
many of you.
Well, we went to Penn state university.
As I started to say, and said, would
anybody go to Libya?
And I was beginning to get dull, Larry.
And I didn't think anybody would ever respond
to that.
But four fellows who were graduating in a
month or so came forward and said, we'll
go to Libya.
I said, you will.
We better have breakfast and make a plan.
So we got together the next day and
we made a plan.
And plan A was to go to London
where the Libyans were advertising jobs.
So they went to London, they applied for
the jobs.
They were told these jobs are not for
Americans.
So they quit and came home.
Yes?
No.
They went on to the next step.
They went to the island of Malta where
there were some 3,500 Libyans and they
began to live with them and speak with
them and make friends with them, finding out
about opportunities in Libya and about the schools
there.
And finally praying all the time, claiming the
promises that they were going to get into
Libya.
They wrote off to some colleges and in
answer to prayer, got a telegram back to
all four of them that said, we want
you to be our English faculty in a
certain university.
We'll give you $17,000 a year, free
room, free board, free trip home to North
America.
You just come.
The problem was, however, how could they get
inside the embassy to get a visa?
Well, they showed their telegram to the guard.
Finally he let them in.
They went to see the man who gave
out the visas and he was very cold
because of the political distance of the two
countries of Libya and America.
And as they were standing there saying, Lord,
you got us this far.
You've got to keep us going.
Another man walked in and said hello to
them and said, where are you from?
They said, Pennsylvania.
He said, really?
This Libyan man said, I have a son
in Pennsylvania.
They said, really?
Where?
At Penn State University.
They said, we're from Penn State University.
What's his name?
Mohammed so-and-so.
We just had lunch with him.
Well, if you know anything about Middle Eastern
people, suddenly the whole chemistry of the place
had changed.
The man who gave out the visas called
in for coffee, as these were friends of
his friend's son.
And everything was a different story.
And in 15 minutes, well, actually an hour,
45 minutes for coffee, 15 minutes for the
visa.
They got on the plane, flew into Libya,
were met with a chauffeur, taken to the
university.
And the administrator said, I'm sorry, but we've
got a problem.
We don't have any place for you to
live.
Would you mind living with the 290 men
in the men's dormitory?
They said, well, okay.
Did they have an opportunity to share Christ?
They didn't have an opportunity for privacy.
Day after day after day, Libyan students were
in the room.
What is the Injil?
That's the New Testament.
Teach about this.
What do Christians believe about that?
What do you do about this?
And they had Bible studies every single day
explaining their view of life.
The only time they weren't having Bible studies
was on the holidays.
And of course there are many holidays in
the Middle East.
And so what did they do then?
They went to the parents of their students.
Now, when you go to a home in
Libya, you don't bring flowers or candy.
If you want to be popular, you bring
a video cassette movie.
See, they all have VCRs.
They're tired of the one television station with
Gaddafi's harangue.
And so they all have VCRs and they
smuggle in movies.
That's one of the problems because they have
their view of Christianity from Hollywood.
But our guys had a movie on VCR
called the Jesus film in Arabic.
They said, yeah, we got a new movie.
Hey, all right, come on in.
Called in the neighbors, got a new movie.
They showed this film in home after home
after home.
Everybody made a copy of it, of course.
They don't respect copyrights, you know.
And not once were they told to stop.
In Libya.
Do you see how easily we are bluffed
into deciding what God can do and what
he cannot do?
And God wants to train you this summer.
And by the way, you might stay around
longer than the summer.
I feel my other warning, the first warning
was stay away from these extended times of
prayer because God's going to get you.
It's going to be like the mafia, you
know too much.
And the other thing I want to warn
you about these summer programs, because God's going
to speak to a lot of you about
staying the year.
My wife and I, we were so generous
with the Lord.
We offered a whole year to him when
we first came on OM.
We got home 12 years later.
Sure did shoot down a wonderful medical and
law career.
But you know, if there's any one word
that sums up our time with OM, it's
the word significant.
Significant.
We thank God.
I owe my spiritual heritage to OM and
the brothers and sisters who taught me the
principles of warfare and love and unity and
the messages you're going to be going through
again and again and again of brokenness of
international fellowship.
And I may not be in OM today,
but like they say, you can take the
boy out of OM, but you can't take
OM out of the boy.
And I thank God for my heritage and
the way that God used the people in
OM to disciple me.
But I pray that as you are about
the Father's business in OM, that you'll let
him keep enlarging your heart and that it'll
bother you something awful that some 400,000
Iranians have been killed, according to Time Magazine,
and some 400,000 Iranians, according to the
Bible, have gone into a Christless eternity.
And you say, God, whatever way you lead
me, use my life to see you honored
among the peoples of Islam.
Let's pray together.
Take just a few seconds to speak to
the Lord yourself and ask him to move
you with compassion for those 800 million Muslims
for whom Christ has died and tell him
that you're hungry to be used.
If there's anything I've learned in OM, it's
that God uses not the most gifted people,
but those who want to be used badly
enough.
Tell him that you want to be a
different person, a bigger person with enlarged heart
by the end of this month.
Father, you know our hearts.
You know how we love you.
You know how we desire you.
You know how we don't want to miss
anything of what you're doing in our generation.
And our hearts hunger to so get involved
in your purposes that we might hear you
say, well, thou good and faithful servant.
Lord, use us, even us, to be part
of the team that penetrates those fortresses and
sees beautiful Muslims for whom you've died, liberated,
worshiping the lamb forever and ever.
We ask it in his name who has
all authority to do it.
Thank you.