...or share that they were getting trapped into
this kind of double life.
In a very unusual way, in 1968 I
was asked to speak at the Urbana Student
Convention in the United States.
There were about 9,000 in that convention,
and I spoke about the danger of a
double life.
I spoke about this dichotomy in which we
decompartmentalize our life.
And in a strange way, I was called
upon to give an invitation in connection with
world missions.
Some were a little upset because my invitation
was firstly to repent and to get one's
life right with God.
4,000 students stood up to turn in
repentance and ask God to put their life
together so that they would be ready for
the challenge of world missions.
My book, Come Live Die, actually grew out
of the Urbana Convention.
Because the InterVarsity magazine wanted to use my
article on the dichotomy.
And I finally allowed some of those different
messages to go into print.
I've had about 13,000 letters as a
result of that book, personal letters.
So many people who have written have said
the same thing.
The double life.
On Sunday, one thing.
On Saturday night, something else.
With spiritual people, one way.
With other people, people in the world, another
way.
And I've come to see that, of course,
this is not something unusual.
Our burden is not to lay some super
heavy guilt trip on you tonight.
But let us not be brainwashed by the
philosophy of this world that says all guilt
is wrong.
I read an article in a major American
magazine this afternoon, just the one page, that
tells about the latest step in the great
sexual revolution that has come into our society.
First, there was the propagation of just general
immorality and fornication.
Nothing wrong with sex before marriage.
We are told our ways are old-fashioned
that just produce guilt.
And right behind that came the teaching that,
of course, there's nothing wrong with a little
unfaithfulness in the marriage, as long as, you
know, we just sort of are mutually agreed
about it.
And then, of course, came the natural teaching
that, of course, it's perfectly acceptable and normal
for people to divorce when they're having a
hard time in their marriage.
And then there were the various liberation movements.
And, of course, women's liberation came in, which
has enslaved at least some women more than
ever before.
Because with it came the defense of lesbianism
and the defense of homosexuality.
And, of course, the free distribution of pornography.
And then child pornography.
And this article that I read today is
telling us of a new liberation movement.
Children's liberation.
And it will become a major movement in
the next decade.
It may take the 90s to really get
it big, but it's on the way.
Certain psychologists are saying there's absolutely no harm
in children, even little toddlers of three, having
sex in the family.
With the father, with whoever cares to have
sex with it.
And that little children should be taught how
to have sex at five, at six, at
ten, any year of age.
We must recognize the tremendous sex life of
all these toddlers.
There is already an
array of books that are coming out in
this direction.
And it's just unbelievable.
It is just unbelievable.
I was absolutely almost ill after reading that
one page today.
And you know, that kind of thing just
gives me a hatred for sin.
I think it shows the devil up for
what he really is.
And the Bible teaches that we should hate
that which is sinful and cleave to that
which is good.
And there is a place for legitimate guilt.
If someone murders someone, like the man who
murdered John Lennon, still at least our society
says, well, that's not right, really.
And yet that same society, in producing a
film, a pornographic film in Mexico, arranged for
a person to actually be killed in the
film to make it more realistic.
Surely the world today is in a state
of chaos that is almost hard to imagine.
No wonder God has raised up some emergency
programs to get the gospel out to the
ends of the earth before it's too late.
But the real battle goes right down to
where we are individually.
Now we read these beautiful verses in chapter
one.
I will read in English and you follow
in your own language because we're short on
time.
Read verse five through the end of the
chapter.
This is the message we have heard from
him and declare to you, God is light,
in him there is no darkness at all.
Six, if we claim to have fellowship with
him, yet walk in darkness, we lie.
We claim to have fellowship, yet we walk
in darkness, we lie and do not live
by the truth.
Seven, but if we walk in the light,
if we walk in the light as he
is in the light, we have fellowship one
with another or with one another.
And the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies
us from every sin.
Praise God.
And verse eight, if we claim to be
without sin, get this, we deceive ourselves.
This is a letter to believers.
It's a letter to believers.
Verse eight, if we claim to be without
sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is
not in us.
Verse nine, if we confess our sins, he
is faithful and just and will forgive us
our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
And yet ten, if we claim we have
not sinned, we make him out to be
a liar and his word has no place
in us.
And then verse one of chapter two.
My dear children, I write this to you
so that you will not sin.
Goal number one.
But if anybody does sin, we have one
who speaks to the father in our defense,
Jesus Christ, the righteous one.
Verse two, he is the atoning sacrifice for
our sins and not only ours, but also
for the sins of the whole world.
Oh, we could spend a long time on
these few verses.
But we want to go to prayer and
I've got a one o'clock ferry to
catch from Zebrou, which protects you from a
long message.
But I somehow feel this is one of
the most essential truths we can teach you.
There is a victorious life, the
dichotomy, the hypocrisy, the spiritual schizophrenia can be
destroyed in the life of a believer.
That doesn't mean perfection.
It means reality.
There is a sense in which, of course,
we all have our inconsistencies.
But you see, when we confess that inconsistency,
when we're open about that inconsistency, that breaks
the dichotomy, that breaks the darkness and brings
it out into the light.
Now, confession to men is not necessary to
receive forgiveness from God.
Let us make it very clear.
We are saved by grace.
Justification is by faith alone.
This movement stands very strongly for this doctrine.
It is not faith plus works.
It is not faith plus discipleship.
Or even faith plus confession.
Or walking in the light or anything else,
including discipleship.
We are saved by the atoning blood, by
the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross
for our sin.
But if we are saved, there will be
good works.
That is the proof, the divine proof that
a divine work has taken place in the
person's life.
But walking in the light with another brother
or sister, though not part of being saved,
not necessary for salvation, is essential if we
are going to grow and be strong in
Christ.
And especially so if we have been deeply
wounded through sin and transgression against the living
God.
James says, confess your faults one to another
and pray for one another that you may
be healed.
I think of the great revival that took
place in East Africa.
Or the revival that took place ten years
ago in Canada.
God works in different ways in different revivals.
And in some places the word revival has
lost its meaning.
In the southern part of the United States,
some churches have used this word in place
of the word evangelistic crusade.
They are not the same.
Revival is a deep work of the Holy
Spirit that begins among believers.
And there is the aspect of this kind
of revival that is very linked with the
sovereignty of God.
So when you see one of these little
advertisements in the newspaper there, revival will begin
at our church on October 2nd at 7
.30 at night.
Our revival preacher is Howdy Doody or who
else is in town.
This is a very poor and misuse of
this term.
It almost caused me to run away from
using the term at all.
But revival is possible.
There are revivals taking place right now.
And the history of the church is absolutely
linked with the history of revival.
In East Africa that great revival that Roy
Hesschen was involved in, there was a powerful
emphasis on the confession of sin.
And in his biography he shared how sometimes
this got a little extreme.
The Africans are beautiful people.
When they were touched in revival, they became
very open, very free.
Can you imagine the leading bishop standing up
and confessing the sin of fornication with several
of the women in his diocese?
Can you imagine the leading bishop standing up
and confessing the sin of fornication with several
of the women in his diocese?
When this message came to England 40 years
ago, it had not small effects.
And this revival movement ended up being blamed
for things, as usual, that never even happened.
Though some things did happen.
When I was speaking at the Canadian Revival
Convention, I met dozens of people who had
their lives, as Peter Conlins, radically turned around
as they experienced true revival from God.
And with almost all of them it involved
walking in the light, meeting with another person,
sharing the real struggles and failures and sins,
and then praying for that cleansing blood to
do a deep work.
and then praying for that cleansing blood to
do a deep work.
But if we walk in the light, as
he is in the light, we have fellowship
with one another, and the blood of Jesus'
Son, pure Messiah, purifies us from every sin.
But if we walk in the light, as
he is in the light, we have fellowship
with one another, and the blood of Jesus'
Son purifies us from every sin.
I received from someone a few years ago
who sat right here in these meetings.
He had a serious homosexual problem, and I
only found out later, he took it all
rather lightly.
Well, that's the way he was.
And well, maybe for a while he would
at least try to control it a little
bit, but I mean, he wasn't going to
get real uptight about this whole thing.
And I don't think he certainly planned to
walk in the light about it.
Let us make it very clear that the
sin of homosexuality is clearly condemned in the
Word of God.
We're not talking about temptation.
And you must understand that perfectly normal people
can be tempted to commit homosexual acts, and
in our society they often do, just to
try the other side of the fence for
some kind of a sexual kick.
It is not a sin to have a
homosexual temptation.
I don't believe it is a sin to
have a homosexual tendency.
We live in a wounded society.
Many people have deep emotional problems that have
been mixed with sinful pasts, histories.
And yet I have known of many such
people who have come into the power of
the resurrected Christ.
And though even ten years later, twenty years
later, they still have that temptation, they have
learned how to, in the light, deal with
that temptation.
But I don't believe such people will generally
know real victory.
And it's true of people with other difficulties
and other sinful habits that somehow have got
a hold of their life.
They, by the fear of people knowing about
them, they are in a sense forced into
a life that is in darkness.
Verse six, if we claim to have fellowship
with him, yet walk in the darkness, we
lie, we lie and do not the truth.
There is victory in Jesus Christ.
I have watched Peter Conlon for fifteen years.
It took him two or three years after
that experience of beginning to walk in the
light, to come into spiritual stability and maturity.
And of course, as he shared, there were
still temptations and struggles to this present hour.
In the Christian life, you never arrive at
that place where you no longer are vulnerable,
where you no longer can be tempted or
even fall.
And after that experience that he had, that
was not the end, that was the beginning
or at least a new beginning.
But I saw through the word, through sharing,
through discipline, him and hundreds of others like
him over these twenty-five years grow in
grace and in strength in the Lord.
One of the main secrets of our relationship
together as leaders in this work is that
we walk in the light with one another.
We have nothing to hide in our lives.
Jonathan McCrosty, Dale Roton, many of those men
know my struggles, my failures.
That doesn't mean that we have to go
around parading intimate details of difficult experiences.
And especially in public meetings, some things should
not even be spoken of, according to Hebrews
or Ephesians, chapter five.
Of course, the Bible is very blunt about
what it speaks of.
But we are not always speaking with the
same degree, I can assure you, of inspiration.
And this leads me to want to just
share with you these few thoughts that I
shared up in Canada among these people, so
many of them who had experienced revival.
As you begin to move on this road
of revival, getting your life right with the
Lord, walking in the light, confessing sin, fellowshipping
with others, and knowing the daily infilling from
the Holy Spirit, the devil will do everything
to get you lopsided, to get you off
balance, extremes easily invade movements of revival.
As God works in our midst in these
days, and as we experience newness of life,
and have great experiences with God, whether it's
here in the meeting or out in the
woods, the devil will counterattack.
What are a few of the areas of
difficulty we need to watch for in a
discerning way?
I've mentioned already, number one, the danger of
getting involved in too much confession, too many
details.
In one movement, people almost competed with one
another to confess more.
And the more you could confess, the more
you were considered as being touched by the
Lord.
Remember this, there's a wide range of people.
Some are more sensitive than others, were from
many backgrounds.
God is not trying to force you into
something that is going to go against, in
a sense, your conscience and your very being.
The more you were considered as being touched
by the Lord, the more you could confess,
the more you were considered as being touched
by the Lord.
in your very being.
Finding balance in the area of confession is
very important.
The second area is super-spirituality.
The Lord touches your life, you experience the
power of the Holy Spirit, you have some
great manifestation, some great experience of the glory
of the Lord, and pretty soon a very
subtle and ugly form of super-spirituality comes
in.
And you judge people who don't have your
vocabulary.
So we develop a revival vocabulary, and we
use that revival vocabulary to block other people
out from our little circle of revived friends.
And then we may organize a conference of
those who have been touched in our revival,
but if we do, we should not be
surprised if the Holy Spirit decides not to
come.
You will probably hear this from me fifteen
times before you leave.
God works in different people in different ways.
Many of you have a testimony completely different
from Peter Kahn.
Some of you have been walking in a
very lovely walk with Jesus from your childhood.
Jonathan McCrosty is like that.
From childhood as a son of a missionary,
his whole life was a walk with God.
That doesn't mean he didn't need revival.
It doesn't mean he didn't have to deal
with sin and learn to repent, of course.
And then another difficulty is the danger of
exaggerating our testimony so that it can compete
with some of the more popular testimonies.
I know that Peter Kahn's testimony is the
truth.
But don't take any of his testimony and
put it into yours, thinking that will make
yours more dramatic.
Don't talk about the deep double life you
were living at eight years of age.
Don't give a suicide testimony simply
because at one time before you were converted,
the thought of suicide happened to flutter through
your head.
In India, of course, suicide testimonies become very
popular.
In India, self-mortification testimonies become very popular.
Our brother Devakaran actually attempted suicide and was
in a hospital dying.
And through that, he came eventually to Christ.
Some little brother hears his testimony, he likes
to copy that.
It makes such an impact how we need
to walk carefully before God with our testimony.
Because ours is a God of honesty and
integrity.
And then, fourthly, there's the danger of spiritual
naiveness.
I find this often among God's people.
They experience some blessing, but fail to see
some of the complications when they present this
to other people who have different problems and
different needs in their life.
This is linked with the fifth thing I've
written here.
Total answerism, the tendency to have a total,
final, easy answer.
One of my favorite books is No Easy
Answer, No Pat Answer by Eugenia Price.
There are similar books.
I have always had, for the last 20
years or 15 years, a little bit of
reverent skepticism to those who promise, through charts
and graphs and books, the total answer to
all of life's bewildering problems.
I will tell you, OM and the teaching
and the vision of OM is not the
total answer.
Dr. Schaeffer's teaching is not the total answer.
Bill Gothard's teaching is not the total answer.
How much we've learned from those two men,
and from many others, truth is very big.
No one man, no one group has ever
had all of it.
Let us walk humbly before God.
Let us realize that life is a very
complicated place for many, many people.
That which is a blessing to one person
brings another person seemingly into confusion and bondage.
Again and again I have seen that.
That's why it's good I go away for
four or five days, and other completely different
men, different age, different organizations, come and minister
the word here.
And then there is the danger of spiritual
impatience.
God blesses us.
We see great victory.
We fail sometimes to realize that actually may
have built up over many years.
And then we want our brother, our mother,
our father to get immediately the same thing.
We become spiritually impatient with others, and then
sometimes with ourselves.
Because we think, well, if I've got that
blessing, certainly I can do that now.
The Lord has filled me with His Spirit.
Certainly I can lead five souls to Christ
in Ankara, Turkey, if I go there as
an evangelist this year to the Muslim world.
George Miley has a tremendous message.
I hope he can give it at this
conference on how God's people can be deceived.
Yes, God's people can be deceived.
Spiritual impatience can be the road to deception,
even in the area of our social relationships.
We can want a particular person so much
that somehow this works in our subconscious, produces
a dream about that person, and we take
the dream as a confirmation that that's God's
person, God's partner for us.
It's an area where we easily become impatient,
and we can get very much deceived.
And then the next area of difficulty is
the neglect of family.
Caught up with the Lord, caught up with
a blessing, the blessing caught up in the
revival, we neglect our own families.
It's not God's way.
And then I have here stereotypism, I don't
know if that word even exists, think everybody
must go that way, don't go around saying
everybody needs to join Operation Mobilization, that's utterly
ridiculous.
You know my advice to some of my
close friends?
Don't join Operation Mobilization.
This movement is not everybody's spiritual training place.
We are only one weak movement in the
hands of the Lord.
Don't feel upset if a friend of yours
tells another friend, don't go on OM, I
don't think that's the right place for you,
don't go into the air screaming when that
happens.
And then the next danger I've written is
emotionalism.
I have seen emotionalism destroy so many people.
I guess I have become a little bit
conservative.
I used to be very, very emotional in
my praying.
When the Lord was moving in those early
prayer meetings, jump on top of the table,
praising God, run around the room, hallelujah, Jericho,
marching around the room, praising God.
Many, many things I did.
God used my wife.
She came to me once, she said, you
know what the other people are doing when
you're standing there on the table shouting?
She said, they're not praying, they're all watching
you.
I felt that one.
And then what happened?
Other new recruits, when they got the blessing,
they jumped on the table.
So easily we try to copy people who
are spiritual, or we think they are spiritual.
Of course, in OM, things often go the
opposite way.
We preach so much on this that people
do everything possible to make sure that in
no way they appear to be like George
Verwerf.
And if I announce, let's go 6.30
jogging in the morning, you can be sure
that 90% will definitely not be there.
So for the next five mornings, you can
go because I will not be there.
Paul said, be followers of me.
It's a difficult teaching, that is.
You see, in terms of love, basic spiritual
qualities, yes, we can follow people.
But not in terms of personality or practice
or other outward things.
And we are honest in acknowledging that the
convictions that burn in our hearts, for some
of you it will take several years before
they become your own convictions in the deeper
sense.
Search the Word of God in these days.
See if these things be so.
Then next week, there's a danger of spiritual
window dressing, pretension.
Long after the revival is gone, we're still
singing the same choruses, going through the same
motions.
Then there is that danger of the neglect
of discipline.
We think, oh, I've got the blessing now.
The Lord will do the work for me
now.
I won't have to exert myself so much.
But that's a great mistake.
Let me read this as we bring this
to a close from Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones.
I defy you to read the life of
any saint.
You cannot read the life of any saint
that has ever adorned the life of the
church, that without seeing at once that the
greatest characteristic in the life of that saint
was discipline and order.
Invariably, without question, it is the universal characteristic
of all outstanding men and women of God.
Read Henry Martin, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, Wesley
or Whitfield.
It does not matter what branch of the
church they belong to.
They have all disciplined their lives and have
insisted on the need for this.
It is obviously something thoroughly scriptural and absolutely
essential.
God can touch us in revival.
We can walk in the light.
We can experience great cleansing.
God can set us free by his power.
But that must be followed up by daily
crucified living, daily discipline.
And it will be a battle.
And as Peter has brought out, there will
still be struggles and difficulties and at times
even sin and failure.
Chapter 2, verse 1, sin not.
But if you sin, you have an advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
Many great men of God have shared this.
The closer they got in fellowship to the
Lord, the more things were uncovered in their
life that were not right.
So the truly committed life is a life
of continual committing ourselves to God.
I pray this will be the road that
you will take.
Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you for
the power and the reality of your Holy
Spirit.
We thank you that we can experience daily
personal revival in our lives.
Oh God, grip us with the reality of
this.
That we may never be the same again.
That we would not be afraid to seek
out the help we need to get our
lives sorted out.
Keep us from these pitfalls, from these extremes.
For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
Let us stand worshiping and singing number 16,
Christ the Lord is risen today.
Brother Frank Dietz and Fritz Schuller will be
leading the prayer meeting.
We want to go right into prayer, but
some may have to just quietly go out
at some time and then come back.
With all of our hearts, this is to
sing all year round, not just Easter.
Christ the Lord is risen today.