Well, if you haven't been, you will be
this summer.
I'm haunted by the lack of time.
I yearn to be able to keep my
eyes open longer and to get more hours
out of the day, be able to get
up earlier.
There's just so much to be done.
Now, don't forget those girls exercising.
How many girls are coming out for the
exercises tomorrow morning?
Look at that.
Revivals sweeping through the auditorium.
I'm not going to lead them.
I don't know the women's exercises, but we
had two girls volunteer to lead them at
630 in the girls' parking lot, which is
over here.
The men's parking lot is over by the
highway where the noise is.
And we believe that's a good thing.
Well, let's pray.
Let's pray.
Let's get our bearings for the message.
Lord, just help us to know what's on
your heart, what's on your mind.
We look to you.
We praise you and worship you in Jesus'
name.
Speak, O God.
Amen.
Let's turn to Acts chapter 29.
What are you laughing at?
You know that Acts ends in chapter 28.
Now, some of you, of course, knew that
ahead, because you've heard my tape, What Happened
to Acts 29.
You know, it is interesting in quite a
few churches to see the dear saints paging
through their Bibles in all seriousness, looking for
Acts 29.
Especially embarrassing when the pastor behind me is
paging away.
But I believe that we are Acts 29.
And really, I don't have any message tonight
about any kind of outline or anything.
I just want to share from my heart
something of the early history of this work.
Somebody said to me some years ago, and
I'll never forget it, it was an O
.M. reader.
Every once in a while, they say something
really good.
And he said he believed the spirit of
O.M. had to be born again every
year in each individual.
Any movement of the Holy Spirit, I would
tell you, if I didn't believe that this
was a movement of the Holy Spirit of
God, if I thought it was a man
-made organization, I would get out tonight.
And the leaders, I think the leaders of
O.M. know that I would.
I want to move, or the Holy Spirit
is moving.
I don't want to invest my short life
in something that doesn't count.
I don't want to even waste one year.
And I know that the Holy Spirit can
lead the movement, and Ichabod can be written
across the front of it.
You know what Ichabod means?
You should know.
It means the Spirit of the Lord has
departed.
It can happen.
This is why every year we need the
Spirit, the Spirit of what God did in
the beginning, even though it will continue to
grow and mature and change, and we don't
expect you to be exactly the same way
we were in the beginning.
But we believe the vision, the impetus, the
compassion, the spirit of abandonment and love must
be born again year after year.
And I think you deserve to know something
of those early days.
I don't share this much.
In fact, I have not shared this probably
in a similar way since last year in
Detroit.
And I can tell you one of the
reasons I'm sharing it tonight is because of
Brother Don Hammond, who encouraged me after that
message last year and said it was really
meaningful.
I don't know what's meaningful and what is
not meaningful.
And the last thing I want to do
is blow my trumpet, really.
I'm so scared of doing that.
I was greatly encouraged by Paul Tournier.
I tell you he's a man to read.
I'm ashamed that we don't have some of
his books.
I want to apologize for our selection of
books.
It's not Bernie's fault.
We've just got so many things to do.
We've got so many books, so much money
invested in these books.
We can't keep up with all the good
books.
It takes a very skilled, trained man, Bernie's
just come into this job, to keep up
with all the really tough books.
You'll see a lot more when you come
over to Belgium.
But Paul Tournier is a man you'll want
to read.
And he believes that it is relevant and
sensible and good to speak about ourselves.
Not everyone who speaks to you about himself
is on an ego trip.
In fact, we can overreact against speaking about
ourself because, in fact, our ego is too
much intact.
Paul Tournier was a great encouragement to me
on this, of just feeling free about myself.
I'm a human being.
I respect myself.
I accept myself.
I have a story to tell because God
has worked in me.
And I don't want to blow the trumpet,
but I want to pronounce the truth.
And I want you to know what God
did, and why we are the way we
are today.
It's so difficult to communicate in these few
days why we believe certain ways.
Why we are a bit, what some people
think, is fanatic concerning the use of God's
money.
Why George never has bought himself a new
suit and has got his Charlie Chaplin pants
and whatever else, according to Leonard Ravenhill.
He's not always the most accurate preacher.
But I believe with all my heart it
will help you to understand something of what
God did in the early days.
And I hope this will ring of Acts
29 or Acts 1340 or wherever else we
are in the continued work of the Holy
Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is working in many different
ways.
I want to be the first one to
say that OM is only one, only one
of many, many ways that the Holy Spirit
is working.
And it is one of our greatest burdens
to esteem these tremendous other groups.
Actually, I had invited Glenn Wagner of the
Pocket Testament League to be here and speak
to us.
He was unable to come.
He was one of the great original four
horsemen of the University of Minnesota many years
ago.
It goes back a long way.
He never got hurt playing football, but he
broke his finger, I think, passing out Gospels
in Asia.
He was a great influence on my life,
one of many, many influences.
And the Pocket Testament League to me is
a great work of the Spirit of God.
Harry Lew, Alfred Koontz, and many that are
going on today.
It was the Pocket Testament League Gospel that
I received back in those early days.
Praise God for every work, every movement of
the Holy Spirit, right down to the last
local church, the last prayer cell.
Most of you know the original story because
that's given more often.
A dear lady, praying for high school 15
years, prayed for me for three years, sent
me a Gospel of God, actually in the
name of her son, who was a very
godly brother, whose life made an impact on
me.
I read this Gospel for two or three
years.
A few other people were praying for me.
I don't want to go into the details
of my selfish little life.
Some of you have heard that, which sometimes
I use when I'm speaking to unconverted people.
She prayed for me for three years.
I went to the Billy Graham meeting, my
heart prepared by the Gospel.
I was converted to Christ.
I went back to that high school.
We had a distribution campaign with Pocket Testament
League Gospels.
About a thousand students in this ungodly high
school outside New York City to promise to
read a Gospel of John.
That very, very, very first year we saw
maybe a dozen or two come to the
Lord.
Just after I graduated and went back to
the high school, we had a meeting and
125 young people came forward in the high
school auditorium into the cafeteria to accept Christ
as their personal Lord and Savior.
And then a year later, when Billy Graham
came back in 57, I don't know how
many more came to Christ in that high
school.
Her prayers were answered.
Some of you know that she is going
to be with us on the campaign this
summer.
Mrs. Craft and her husband, both of them
wonderful people of God.
And we're looking forward to their visit to
Orem.
After all these years, she's very much wanted
to remain in the background.
She's a very, very ordinary woman.
God moved in that high school.
I can remember the very first night of
prayer.
You're all teenagers, 16, 17.
It didn't go very long.
And then in 57, when Billy Graham came
to New York, we organized nights of prayer.
I remember one of the first ones was
in an Episcopalian church.
It was a very interesting night.
I remember another one was in a Reformed
church, my old church, which was basically liberal,
and I was trying to bring in a
bit of revolution at that time.
In fact, hired a bus for that campaign
out of a church parking lot.
About that time, my father, who was a
deacon and didn't know Christ, was on his
way toward the Lord.
And even though he was an usher in
the Billy Graham meetings in 57, he went
forward when there was a call to come
to Jesus Christ.
And then he came to know the Lord.
But I remember in that church, we organized
a night of prayer, and I invited all
the pastors and all different kinds of people.
And I really thought a night of prayer,
this has got to go right through the
morning, eight o'clock in the morning.
And I told, you know, I was a
rather naive, to say the least.
You know, I thought some of these people
would come and pray right on.
Well, about midnight, there wasn't anybody left, but
one or two others.
And I was rather too stubborn.
I felt we should pray on about one
or something.
I guess everybody left.
Well, I didn't make it.
I prayed and prayed and fell asleep on
the kitchen table.
Woke up at about seven o'clock in
the morning.
That was one of the first nights of
prayer that I ever experienced.
So don't feel too bad if you fall
asleep in a night of prayer.
You can always have a partner and agree
to wake each other up if he's willing
to stay on that long.
I mention these things because there's a danger
that you think you're too young to really
be involved all out in this kind of
spiritual revolution.
But we were only 17 and 18 at
that time.
I think I was 17 and a half
when those meetings were born.
The original name of this work, which very
few people have ever even hardly heard of,
it was very, very dull.
It was called Christian Youth Committee.
Dear me!
I only found that out when I saw
the picture of the original Dodge truck that
went to Mexico and had CYC on it,
Christian Youth Committee.
The story of the first campaign in Mexico
is a very interesting one, and I tend
to drag it out.
I have to try to condense it.
I went to college right here in Tennessee,
Presbyterian school that I thought was evangelical.
It had been evangelical.
It had gone completely neo-orthodox and liberal.
They mocked any kind of biblical Christianity.
And there in the province of God, oh,
I tell you, the province of God, I
met Dale Roton.
He was a year older than I was.
I was warned about him.
I hadn't been on campus a week, and
I was warned about Dale Roton.
I was a freshman.
I was green.
I had only been converted about a year
and a half, two years.
I had already recommitted my life to Christ.
In that summer, I still had one of
my businesses, this firefighting apparatus business, and I
drove an old truck all the way to
Las Vegas selling firefighting equipment.
And it was in Grand Canyon.
My mother told me, no matter what, don't
you dare go to California.
So I only went to the border and
came back.
But I remember in Grand Canyon, does God
ever speak to you through natural beauty?
I tell you how we should thank God
for the natural beauty of this country.
I have been all over the world, and
the natural beauty of this nation is completely
beyond me.
And Grand Canyon, and that park, Zion National
Park north of there, I tell you, you
just can't believe it.
And I went out on the edge of
one of these rocks.
I love rocks and mountains, and I just
recommitted my heart again to Jesus Christ.
I had actually chosen Maryville College because they
still had dancing.
I was a fanatic dancer.
And some people, I remember some Christian tiptoed
up to me, and the Christians in the
high school were a little scared of me.
They didn't know which way I was going
when I got saved.
There were only a few of them.
They all seemed to be scared of their
shadows.
And they said, George, you know, we don't
believe in dancing.
I don't believe in dancing.
I had never heard anything about not dancing.
Billy Graham hadn't touched that in that message.
If he had preached that I had to
forsake dancing to come to Jesus Christ, of
course I would have said, forget it.
You know, it's amazing how God is so
gracious with us on our weak points.
And I found this verse in Psalms about
dancing.
Boy, I took that Bible.
Look, buddy.
But it was that summer just before going
to college, around that time that I recommitted
my life there in Grand Canyon, when I
went to my own sister's wedding, and they
wanted me to put on a little dance
exhibition, rock and roll, and was just coming
in.
We were more or less still jitterbugging.
That shows you how dated I am.
And that was just going out, and the
twist, and rock and roll, and all this
kind of stuff, which is really, really, really
fantastic.
It's good I got out of it.
But at that wedding, when they asked me
to do this little dance exhibition, I thought,
Lord, is there anything better I can be
doing than this?
Is this really the way to demonstrate your
life?
And I went out into the woods outside
that—it was a bar, really—and I prayed to
the Lord, God, is this thing, this dancing,
got such a grip on my life.
Is this really right?
It's often, you know, man can't do something.
It takes God to break in.
And as I walked back from the woods,
my atheist grandfather, who I'd never witnessed to,
walked out of the bar.
He was very upset.
Somebody upset him.
He was an excitable man, I tell you,
my grandfather.
And for the first time, I had a
chance to share something of Jesus Christ with
him.
And it came together in my mind, this
is the better thing to do.
Every minute, sharing Christ.
Every minute, the work of the kingdom.
I don't think I ever danced again.
It was a real big experience of my
life.
Anyway, I arrived at that college with all
the dancing.
Every day, they had dancing after lunch.
And I never did dance once.
But then I met Dale Roton.
And Brother Dale, I was warned about him.
And they said, boy, watch out for this
fellow.
He's baptizing guys in the shower.
And they've got these extremist prayer meetings going
on.
They're praying for everybody at the dances, and
they're praying for all of us sinners.
And the people used to go by my
door at college, and they'd sing, Jesus saves,
Jesus saves, green stamps.
They'd laugh and go down in their room.
We had many pre-ministerial students.
Most of them were agnostics.
Pre-ministerial students, big gigantic pictures of nudes
at the end of their bed.
I thought that was the new liberty.
Some of our seminaries, this was true 20
years ago, 17 years ago.
Who knows now what it is?
One of the first places they take you
when you get to the seminary is down
to the special rooms underneath the seminary where
the fellows and girls shack up together after
the parties.
Seminaries.
Anyway, there at college, I met Dale.
I remember when we first talked, we were
walking back from a little Presbyterian church.
And I knew here was a man who
was just completely sold out, hungry for God.
And almost everything he said, everything he did
made an impact on me.
Then he introduced me to one or two
others.
He introduced me to a Hungarian, he was
thinner than I was.
I tell you, this guy, put your hand
around his chest.
He almost died as a Hungarian refugee, but
all the love of Christ.
This was another major influence in my life.
The love of Jesus he showed.
It was a beautiful thing.
Beautiful thing.
And I met just a few others.
And I remember one night we got on
a bus.
Now I had been distributing literature house to
house, but I hadn't caught the vision yet
of just giving it everywhere.
No, on the bus.
A little bit, you know, I was a
little bit reserved, my own funny way.
And I remember getting on the bus with
a few of these other believers.
And bang, two of them moved down the
bus, giving out tracts, and I just sat
there, wow.
And I, you know, I was still a
bit of a phony, and I, you know,
I just immediately said, oh boy, give me
a tract.
And I moved down the bus, you know,
as if I'd been doing it for 20
years.
First time I ever gave out tracts on
the bus.
I never stopped after that.
We went into Knoxville.
Knoxville is one of the most significant cities
in my whole Christian life.
I used to hitchhike to Knoxville every, almost
every weekend.
Worked among the people in the bus station,
and among the trunks, and then with Youth
for Christ a little bit.
And then that one time we were on
the bus, we were going to visit two
elderly people living outside Knoxville called Mom and
Pop Goodman.
And they lived in a little old lighthouse.
Funny little place.
I never met two people in my whole
life so totally given over to world missions.
I just can't.
Both of them have to be with Jesus.
That one night in their house was just
another major influence.
It was in that house that I heard
the testimony of Boston Trotman on tape.
It hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was in that house that I heard
about the great work of H.C.J
.B. It was in that house that I
saw these two people with pictures of missionaries
throughout the entire living room.
Every inch was covered almost with pictures of
missionaries.
And they were praying, and they were praying.
They had to come back from Latin America
because of health.
And they were just totally given over.
They had a few of us students out
trying to warm our hearts for missions.
So many influences God uses in our lives.
It's amazing, isn't it?
You've had many of you the same experience.
We started to pray together, a few of
us at Maryville.
I started to work in the local jail.
I started to work down among the down
-and-out children.
And I started to read more and more
Christian books.
Christian books in the first year of college
just began to come into my life.
There had only been a few before that
time because I was very much out of
the evangelical stream.
I remember when I got my first Bible
and was told that I was allowed to
mark it.
I didn't know you could mark a Bible.
And I remember almost when my first pen
marked my Bible, and I started to mark
this Bible.
It was in those first year and a
half in college that I received the foundation
from the Lord.
Forever went to Bible school of the orientation
tapes that are listened to to this day.
I went through and underlined all specific subjects.
Every verse on love, and then listed them.
Every verse on unity, and listed them.
Every verse on prayer, listed it.
Every verse on this subject, that subject.
I had a big, long piece of paper
I put on my desk, listed all these
verses.
And I thought, this is God's direction.
And then in God's mercy, I was able
to take a correspondence course on soul winning
from a movement that unfortunately went completely screwy,
and the director committed adultery and married his
secretary.
God used that little course on soul winning
to challenge me to win a specific number
of souls a week.
It's true that I probably lacked knowledge.
It's true that I probably did some of
this in the flesh.
I think a great danger in our thinking
is when we become black and white thinkers.
You're all in the flesh, you're all in
the spirit.
I tell you, my life is a long
history of being in the flesh and the
spirit many times at the same time.
You say, wait a minute, I never heard
that before.
Well, you can study it.
But sometimes it's true that I forced people
to accept Christ.
I had learned how to sell.
When I went into the Knoxville bus station
after studying my lessons on the correspondence course
on soul winning, I believed, you say that's
not scripture, but I believed that God was
going to give me souls.
And I tell you, I must have offended
a few people.
I tried to listen to everybody, but sometimes
perhaps I was a little rough.
But almost every week someone came to Christ.
Almost every week or two weeks someone in
the jail came to Christ.
I'm sure some of them were not real.
I kept the list of those people.
This is 19 years ago.
I'm still praying over that list.
I have it written.
I have it in a little book.
One of my, the most important principles of
my whole life, and I yearn for it
to be true of this whole movement, is
that every person who comes into your life
for any length of time is significant.
Not every person is significant, but you can't
do something for everybody when you start meeting
a lot of people.
I remember Jim Shemansky, the first young man
to accept Christ in that jail 19 years
ago.
I wouldn't be able to give you his
name if I didn't remember it.
Unfortunately he didn't make it.
They shipped him to Nashville, Tennessee.
He went on for the Lord for about
two years.
He even opened the door for me to
preach in the state penitentiary in Nashville.
And then through a lot of upsetting experiences
in the prison, he backslid.
And in my early Christian years, the most
devastating, life-shaking things were connected with the
people I thought I had led to Christ
when they backslid.
Just shook me.
And I saw that five percent of the
work was leading a man to Christ.
I saw this before I was 20 years
of age.
And 95 percent of the work was follow
-up, building a loving relationship with that person,
feeding him on the Word of God, showing
him you cared, laying down your life for
him, being walked down, being spit on, and
just keep giving and giving and giving and
giving.
There are many other lessons that I learned
back there at Maryville College, Tennessee.
Significant that we're back in Tennessee tonight.
There's not time to tell them.
And I saw that God worked through prayer.
And I saw and believed that this was
the main thing, must be the main thing
in my life.
I believe I was 17 or 18 when
somewhere, I think it was my own room
back in Jersey, that I said to God,
only one thing I want in life, I
want to learn to pray.
I want to learn to pray.
This seemed to be the key thing.
I saw this in a number of ways,
especially in the life of Mrs. Clapp, the
lady who prayed me into the kingdom.
Well, I remember Brother Dale was an unusual
person.
And in some ways we were going separate
ways.
He actually fell in love with a girl
around that time after he convinced me completely
of the bachelor life.
Because my life was a bit interwound up
with women before then.
And I really decided to lay off this
for a couple of years.
A few weeks later, old Dale fell in
love with this girl.
And they spent most of their time memorizing
scripture.
And I wanted to get out and go
to the jails and go to Knoxville.
So we didn't go out too much.
But he continued to be a major influence.
And when God put it on my heart
to go to Mexico, that's a long story.
I haven't got time to tell.
I went to Dale and I said, Dale,
look, would you come to Mexico?
Well, he had already signed up in summer
school at Wheaton.
He was already getting out of Maryville.
He was a good student, very bright.
But he wanted to get out and go
to Wheaton College.
But he agreed to go, and we only
then could go in August because he would
be in Wheaton during all of July.
So in July, I worked with the Billy
Graham campaign, just from the local area, as
I mentioned to you.
And then God had given me a Christian
roommate.
Of all things in that school, I had
a born-again roommate.
And he became one of my closest friends
and went to Mexico with Dale and I
in August of 1957, about two years and
a few months after my conversion.
I haven't got time to tell you all
that happened, how we got that first ON
vehicle.
We had nothing.
We had no money.
I sold my fire extinguisher business, most of
it, and sunk the money into Christian books.
I slowly was beginning to discover Christian books.
So while Dale went off to Wheaton to
study, Walter, my roommate and I, decided in
our own home area, in the daytime, the
Billy Graham meetings were at night, were to
go house-to-house with Christian books, in
our own town.
Not only did we sell books, we made
a profit of about four dollars an hour,
selling Christian books to non-Christians and Jews.
And don't let anyone tell you you can't
sell Christian books.
We used to load our car and go
door-to-door, and what exciting times we
had.
God gave us some prayer partners.
And in those days, some of the men
who became our prayer partners are still on
the board of directors today.
They've stood with us 17 and 18 years.
When they first agreed to come on the
board, which is a year after what I'm
just talking about now, that was a miracle.
We bought this old truck for $150, a
1949 Dodge.
This was 1957.
I tell you, it was old.
And we trusted God.
He supplied finance in strange ways.
I even got a job teaching Spanish.
I didn't even know Spanish.
And I got about five dollars an hour
for teaching Spanish.
But God was a funny fellow.
He had about 25, 30 cats living in
this house where I had to go teach.
And boy, I tell you, interesting situation.
But I remember praying.
We were constantly praying.
We were having more extended prayer meetings.
We were also showing films locally and trying
to win souls to Christ out of our
home area in our high school.
And I remember once driving the car.
My father had an old Pontiac.
I was driving it down the road, and
a fox darted out under from the bushes.
And I just stepped on the gas a
little bit and hit it.
$30 bounty.
I think it was $30 I got on
that fox.
I don't know if they still pay these
things.
This was some of the first money God
was supplying for this work.
Now, I'm not, I am not exaggerating.
There are people here like Livingston who know.
Been listening to the story for 10 or
15 years.
Wait till I tell about him, boy, you're
going to really get knocked out.
But God was showing us that he worked
through prayer.
We were only kids.
We were teenagers.
We're just, I guess, starting to go into
that ripe age of 20.
I thought by 25, you're out of date.
Man, I looked at people, 25 is too
old.
Too old.
We need young people.
Interesting.
Now we turn people down because they're, well,
is he old enough?
You know, we look out some of the
years are young.
May God deliver us.
Well, we went to Mexico.
The vehicle exploded on the Pennsylvania turnpike outside
Harrisburg.
I didn't know much about vehicles.
My whole relationship with vehicles over the years
has been a nightmare.
But even as we pulled out of my
driveway in New Jersey, we had some literature.
We had all the literature from Moody Press.
We're going to pick it up in Chicago.
We were told we'd never get across the
border.
We were told every negative thing you could
think of.
We wrote to missionaries, several wrote back, hopeless,
impossible, don't come.
But this missionary, John Beekman, said, come.
I had met his sister going door to
door in Midland Park, New Jersey.
He said, come, come and stay with the
Whitcliffe Bible translators here in headquarters.
Boy, that was a wonderful letter.
Praise God for a few open-minded people.
Short-term work was almost unheard of in
1957.
But God had put it on our heart.
We didn't even know what short-term was.
We weren't even thinking about what it was.
I was just asked to fill a huge
document for somebody doing a PhD on short
-term work.
I could not answer one question.
What were the social implications that led you
into short-term service?
What were these implications that led?
I couldn't answer the questions.
I wrote the guy and said, look, man,
this is beyond me.
What led me into short-term service?
But God worked, and we prayed there in
Harrisburg, and we spent the night in a
skid row mission.
Do you still call them that?
I'll never forget that night.
This place, we didn't want to spend any
money.
We didn't have any, hardly.
We were praying for an engine.
We'd been giving out tracts all day in
the station, the railway station.
It's a good spot for evangelism.
We went into this skid row mission.
I don't think I've ever told this story.
And the guy wanted me to take off
my clothes, all my clothes right there in
sort of public.
And he put a sheet over me.
I don't know if you've ever been in
these places.
You know, they're afraid you have lice.
And so all my clothes went off, and
I got in the sheet.
He said, the dormitory's down there.
And I walked down these stairs, creaking stairs
around the corner.
There were about 100 beds, triple-decker, you
know, dark, little light in the corner.
Boy, I was a bit apprehensive.
Cost us a quarter, I think.
Anyway, I finally got in a bed, and
I was just about going to sleep, and
somebody started shaking my bed.
You're in my bed, kid!
What are you doing in my bed?
A car exploded out on the highway, and
this guy's shaking my bed.
I'm dressed like an angel.
I tell you, I wanted to quit.
And you'll have your experiences in OM, too,
when you want to quit.
I tell you, when you lay down at
one o'clock in the morning after a
night of prayer and discover you're in the
girls' dorm instead of the boys, it can
be a pretty heavy experience.
But this is why I preach so often
on the rest of faith.
Anyway, God worked.
He supplied a rebuilt engine.
God touched some people's hearts who only found
out about it by, almost by accident.
Perhaps this is a little sad part of
the story, but the man who put that
engine in, Henry Rudak, was a relatively, well,
wealthy man.
He drove a Cadillac in a big construction
business.
What happened in those days so hit Henry
Rudak?
He was never the same again.
He sold his whole business, and this is
about two years after he gave us the
money for that engine.
He launched out to Bolivia as a missionary
at fifty-some years of age.
And he was flying missionaries, doing a tremendous
work for God with his plane.
He got all the licenses for flying at
that age.
He developed this skill.
Flying missionaries all over Bolivia and evangelizing.
It was only this year, a few months
ago, that Henry, with four Bolivian nationals, got
lost somehow in a cloud, or I don't
know, made him in vertigo.
I don't know what happened, but he was
taken to be with the Lord.
And it's people like this, really, that we
owe a lot to.
In fact, he was the man that paid
for those original Gospels, I can say it
now because he's with the Lord, that paid
for those original Gospels to be given out
in high school.
I want to tell you, don't despise prayer
partners.
And those of you who don't actively seek
out prayer partners in the coming days, you're
missing one of the major principles of this
movement.
I acknowledge that I was weak back then.
I knew I couldn't do it myself, and
God gave me men like Henry and others
who are living today, and others who are
with the Lord, and they stood behind me
in prayer as I went forward in fear
and trembling.
While we got to Chicago, we picked up
the Gospels.
We headed down to the border.
We prayed so much about crossing that border.
In those days, Mexico was semi-closed.
They were stabbing people for giving out tracts
in Mexico in 1957.
Men would sweep down on Protestant orphanages with
torches burning to the ground.
We don't discuss that much anymore.
They were hard days for the Mexican church.
Persecution.
The persecution of the Christians in Mexico made
the church grow and grow and grow.
Anyway, the man who was to inspect our
vehicle was completely drunk, sort of looked into
this old vehicle, this black truck, looked like
a hearse, and he said, go ahead.
The next morning, we were in Monterey, and
we were giving out tracts in the middle
of the street, and I tell you, I
can't explain to you what happened to us
in that first summer.
That's why I'm so convinced in taking teams
of young people out summer after summer.
I must admit, my flesh gets very tired
of it.
I've been to 16 or 15 June conferences,
and I get everybody mixed up.
I'm a far more sensitive person than perhaps
anyone will ever know.
I live at any conference like this, I
live in perpetual frustration.
I hate to forget people's names.
I like to meet with everybody.
I'm embarrassed to walk even down the corridor.
You think I'm the big strong Christian leader
prancing around here?
I'm almost scared to walk in that dining
hall every day.
I hate to tell you that.
It'll be harder tomorrow.
Because there's so many people, and I feel
sometimes self-conscious, and I want to meet
and talk to everybody, and I used to
in the early days of the work, there
were six people, ten people, a dozen people.
You could relate to them all.
You could know them all.
Now the whole thing seems to be explosively
out of hand.
But the thing that has helped me in
that is just a simple knowledge.
It's not my work.
I'm just a tiny, tiny, tiny, extremely tiny
little part of a great work, and so
I ought to relax and just pedal on
and paddle on and proceed forward in my
faith.
But in that first summer in Mexico, we
saw God work.
I remember going into my first Mexican prison
in Monterrey.
I tell you the way those men were
living.
I just couldn't believe it.
I didn't know anybody lived that way anywhere
in the world.
Made the Nashville State Penitentiary look like a
palace.
And God opened the door.
We played gospel recordings.
I was just learning to speak Spanish.
We played gospel recordings, hundreds lined up behind
the truck, listening.
And I saw that young nobodies who couldn't
preach, who didn't know a thing, could be
used of God.
We had dozens profess Christ in that first
campaign.
We only had a month.
We had some problems as well.
We got sick.
A standard part of missionary initiation is sickness.
We were all sick up in the Whitcliffe
Bible Translator's headquarters.
I remember John Beekman coming up to visit
to us.
John Beekman is one of the first heart
tracers ever put in a human being.
They said he's supposed to be dead 15
years ago.
He's a man I mentioned this morning that
just had this stroke.
His biography is written up.
Hidden.
Is it hidden?
Parallel?
Parallel by choice.
Anyway, he has this thing in his heart.
When he came up the stairs to visit
us sick fellows, boy, this thing started to
thump.
And he was leaning over looking at us.
You don't know whether it was a time
bomb or what.
And he explained this little thing in his
heart.
Praise God for that man.
Read the book if you get the chance.
Well, that was the first summer.
We came back and disbanded.
Dale Rothau went to Wheaton College.
And I don't think I ever thought of
going to Mexico again necessarily or banning together
with any of us.
There had been nothing organized.
This Christian Youth Committee had only been in
something in New Jersey to show films and
work in the high school.
I went back to Maryville College for another
six months.
With my roommate, a lot of things continue
to happen.
There's not time to tell it.
The Lord led me in January that year
to transfer to Moody Bible Institute.
I hardly knew what the place was.
I didn't even know what a Bible Institute
was.
But it was in Chicago.
My heart was in evangelism.
I wanted to evangelize.
I wanted to go to Chicago.
And I found a school in Chicago.
It was Moody Bible Institute.
Little did I know all that God had
planned in his providence.
The providence of God is one of the
greatest truths in all of the Bible.
The young man to pick up my suitcase
when I arrived at Moody Bible Institute, the
president of the student council, was a young
man named Jonathan McCroskey.
He was there in the hallway.
There's no room for me in the school.
They put me in the YMCA.
I became a chaplain of the YMCA, which
was an insignificant, ridiculous task because they had
hardly anybody ever came to the chapel.
And it was in that ministry because I
went in January because I was in the
YMCA.
I got a burden for the men in
the YMCA.
I didn't have to do that.
The school wasn't even happy about it, but
my heart was pounding for the souls of
these men.
I cannot tell you how the Holy Spirit
had gripped my heart concerning souls in that
day.
I cannot explain.
I do not have the same intensity in
the same way.
I'm glad it's not necessary.
And that quote I read the other night
explains that.
But I wanted to reach these men and
so I went the extra mile and I
decided to rent some Moody science films to
reach these men in the YMCA.
And I went up to the seventh floor,
wherever it was in Moody Bible Institute, and
I heard there was a Moody science film
section.
I want to get one of these films.
Now I can tell you, let me just
insert this, perhaps the greatest struggle in my
life was girls.
From the age of four, I am not
exaggerating, because I wasn't yet in school and
I can remember standing outside of the window
of the grammar school that I was going
to go into next year, the primary school.
I was going to go in first grade
or kindergarten next year.
I remember standing outside the window waiting for
a particular girl to come to the window
to sharpen pencil.
It's because of experiences like that that at
15 I thought maybe I was sick.
Even at 20 I thought I was still
sick.
I found out there's a few other men
had the same problem.
Of course, it wasn't linked with sex or
anything like that.
It's just sort of this infatuation with this
other species that God had created.
God had dealt heavenly with me.
I must lay off the girls.
I got in such confusion after I was
a Christian.
We're always proud of the sins we did,
we committed before we were Christians.
What about all the things you did since
you were a Christian?
Well, I made some pretty big messes.
It's also when I led one girl to
Jesus Christ and I ended up in such
a necking party with her in front of
Washington Monument that I just wouldn't want to
tell you the details.
She fell in love with Jesus and George
at the same time and it was one
big ugly mess.
Brothers, don't mix your soul winning with your
passion.
It doesn't work.
You will not advance the kingdom of God.
I tried it.
It doesn't work.
God really scorched me and really hit me
in that experience.
Anyway, girls have been out of my life
for a couple of years, two years at
least.
I went up to rent this science film.
Of course, there were about seven girls at
Moody at that time that were bothering me.
Man, I can't even explain it.
But I was running around.
I was going around the opposite directions.
I was, you know, Joe Batchelor.
And man, there was a chick sitting behind
this desk renting films.
Man, she's my wife.
Trina, I think my wife should stand.
She's so shy.
She's always sitting in the back.
You've got to stand up and make sure
who you are.
Thank you.
The moment I looked at her, I knew
she won't marry me and she won't go
to the mission field.
She was too pretty.
And I had this conviction that none of
the pretty girls wanted to go to the
mission field.
And I tell you, at Moody Bible Institute,
there weren't 15 pretty girls in the whole
institution.
They all looked like they were going to
the mission field.
So I said to, I said to my,
to Trina, I was very bold.
I said, I think the second time I
went up to get some film strip projector
or the film, I said, I bet you're
not going to the mission field.
She was a bit taken back by that.
I've had her spellbound ever since.
But she wasn't in love with me, I
can assure you.
Only God could ever do that.
Anyway, that's another story, another chapter in the
book.
But believe me, if you just get on
with the will of God, if you get
on with reaching men for Christ and get
your eyes off the women and all that
thing, he will bring that girl into your
life and vice versa for the girls.
And if I had tried to figure out
who I could ever marry and all the
rest, it would have never worked.
A number of times I could have got
so easily involved with the wrong girl.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God.
I did everything actually in the coming months
after that to scare her away.
Even though down to my heart, I was
absolutely knocked out.
And because I knew that even though I
was emotionally wrapped up, that if God didn't
break into it, it was of no value.
We went to Mexico again and the work
began on a permanent basis in the summer
of 1958.
God, because of the laws of the United
States, because a few people were beginning to
give money, as we planned to go back
to Mexico, we incorporated Ascend the Light Incorporated
in the spring of 1958.
And these men, in fear and trembling, decided
to serve on the board of directors.
That summer we had several major prayers that
a bookshop could be open, correspondence school could
be open, that faithful nationals could be discipled.
The whole burning passion of the work from
those earliest days was discipling individual nationals.
That the work in any country would be
done mainly by the nationals, not by us
as foreigners.
We would back them up, encourage them, supply
them with literature.
And we must have prayed again and again
and again.
God would give us at least one faithful
man.
It's all we wanted, at least one.
That summer in 1958, God gave us Baldy
Maraguilar.
He's with us to this day, running his
bookshop and his radio broadcast and his preaching
ministry and other things there in Monterey.
I'll never forget another crisis experience in my
life when I went out to a garbage
dump in Monterey to preach.
People were living in the garbage dump.
They were eating garbage soup.
I never saw so many flies in my
life.
There were literally millions of flies.
We picked up babies.
Three-fourths of their body was covered with
flies in their mouths, in their ears.
I asked God, I cried out to God,
how can it be that I have had
so much?
Living in middle-class Snobberbia with everything I
ever wanted, every gimmick, every gadget, car when
I was 17, more clothes than I could
wear, and God just began to hit me.
I think that that was a major experience
in this area of wanting to live on
the barest essentials, of not wanting to any
more exploit the poor and the poverty stricken
of the world through consuming more than I
needed.
Another experience was when I heard a missionary
previous to this at a little church here
in Tennessee, a man who described the situation
in Africa, and how he picked up a
little baby and pulled out a worm about
eight feet long out of the baby's stomach,
and how he saw so many dying and
suffering in ways beyond the imagination simply because
there was no medicine, simply because God's people
didn't care.
And I wept many times.
I don't want to be one of those
selfish, middle-class, I don't know what adjective
to add.
I came back again from Mexico.
We saw God answer prayer.
He gave us Balimor.
He gave us a shop.
We were in college at the same time
studying Spanish.
The correspondence school opened.
We just saw so many answers to prayer.
The first gospel radio broadcast went on the
air.
It had never happened before in Mexico.
We had asked God to do it.
He did it.
We were told it couldn't be done, but
God did it.
Well, we were getting old by then.
We really wanted to get moving.
Boy, I was I was really at the
bit.
Boy, I tell you, the moody course was
three years.
I thought, Lord, impossible.
I'll never exist here for three years.
I'll go out of my head.
So I managed to do correspondence courses in
the summer and on my spare time, and
on my dates with Drina, we studied correspondence
courses, and I got out of there in
two years.
And I went back to Mexico.
A lot of things happened in between.
I was running out of time.
There were Christmas crusades.
Pretty soon there were two dozen of us
going down instead of three or four.
And about that time, Wheaton College got plugged
into this.
I went out to see Brother Dale.
He had become very intellectual, and he was
memorizing scriptures.
His eyeballs were coming out on the floor.
He was wearing glasses, memorizing scripture, and he
was fanatic for Wycliffe Bible translators.
And I went out and had a meeting
with him, and he made further influence on
me.
In fact, very shortly, he ended up baptizing
me, not in the showers, but in a
little gospel chapel in Wheaton.
He was being influenced by a little movement
known as the Brethren.
This was to be another major influence in
O.M. And I began to share again
the vision and the challenge of Mexico, and
then it was the next Christmas, Brother Dale,
I believe, decided to go down to Mexico
again.
He had bumped into some rather interesting characters.
One of them was a guy named Greg
Livingston.
Greg was a bit skeptical about the whole
thing, but he decided to at least favor
us with his presence at one of our
conferences, the first full conference down on the
Mexican border.
And then he went down to Guatemala.
And I'll never forget Brother Greg giving his
own testimony.
And they had the vision for books.
And I don't know whether that story is
true or not.
I think it is about the little red
wheelbarrow or little red wagon.
Brother Greg there in sophisticated Wheaton was pulling
his little red wagon around, selling Christian books.
But they became extremists.
Some of the rumors against the work grew
out of Wheaton, not out of Moody.
We were more balanced.
But they started to forsake everything they could
get their hands on.
They wanted to forsake even other people's things.
But there are some interesting stories.
And I don't know all that's truth.
I know that they took half of their
breakfasts.
They only ate the perishables and all the
cornflakes and the cereal that they carried out
of the cafeteria.
You can imagine this happening at Wheaton College.
And pretty soon there were a couple of
dozen students carrying all their cereal out for
Mexico.
And they were stashing boxes and boxes of
cereal.
Then started clothing started to come and they
were selling that and forsaking a lot of
things.
And pretty soon they were down to one
suit each.
And then the president of the freshman class
resigned.
He was supposed to spend a thousand dollars
for a fountain, a new fountain.
It's so important for Christian colleges to have
fountains.
Who ever heard of a Christian college without
a fountain?
So they added a fountain and he said,
this is it for me.
His letter to the class resigning is written
up in true discipleship, signed RM.
And this was the explosion.
This was, this was too much.
Then he was going around with only one
suit.
Everything was going down to Mexico.
People began gossiping and criticizing stories.
True, we made mistakes.
Has there ever been a movement of the
Spirit of God where there haven't been mistakes
made?
Excessive zeal.
God was keeping his hand on it because
we had prayer partners, because we were reading
Christian books.
In order to try to keep the students
calm, they started switching suits.
One brother one day in one suit.
People were beginning to be relieved.
Oh, they're coming into more balance.
And a lot of other things could be
told.
Why were we doing this?
Because we were completely convinced that this book
was the Word of God.
And we were literally trying to follow this
book.
Isn't it amazing that anyone who literally tries
to follow the Bible gets ridiculed and mocked?
You study it for yourself.
Dale wrote down by then, had one-third
of the New Testament in his memory.
He was doing evangelism.
He was assistant to his professor.
He also got his master's degree at Wheaton.
He wasn't just sitting around.
He's not an intellectual, intellectually backward.
But God was dripping his heart about the
world.
And we saw people fight for gospel tracts
in Mexico.
We saw that 70% of the people
in Mexico had no Bible.
We saw that millions at that time had
not even a gospel or a tract.
How would we dare?
How could we dare waste money back in
college when we're having three or four good
meals a day and everything we could want?
How could we waste more money when that
money could print tracts and Bibles and gospels,
support national workers, open bookshops, put radio broadcasts
on the air?
And so this was the impetus that brought
us in to this lifestyle.
God had to balance it out.
And if you didn't hear my message on
balance, maybe you shouldn't listen to this one.
When I finished at Moody, I got married
and I headed for Spain.
Before that, I spent six months in Mexico
discipling nationals and all that.
We saw some beautiful answers to prayer.
By then, six bookshops, by the time we
left Mexico, six bookshops were open.
It was on the way back from Mexico.
We met Greg at the border.
And from the very, very early days, it's
not been one man.
I, of course, know my own story.
Every brother has his side of the story.
But from the very early days, it wasn't
one man, but it was God welding together
a team.
One man had a bigger mouth, but God
was welding together a team.
And I just so feel so convinced about
teamwork.
I feel the key thing in missions is
relationships, relationships with one another.
If we get down together, as it says
in Corinthians, if we're of one heart and
of one mind, I tell you, nothing can
stop us as we use the weapon of
prayer and the Word of God.
And so from those earliest days, we started
spending a lot of time together.
We practiced walking in the light.
A major book came into the movement at
that time called Calvary Road.
And another book earlier than that, Passion for
Souls by Oswald J.
Smith.
These books were to temper and mold the
whole movement.
Other influencers like Dr. Alan Redpath at Wheaton,
I mean at Moody, Moody Church, and others
who came to Moody Bible Institute to preach,
like George Duncan, molded the movement, helped to
balance us, humble us, and things began to
explode.
It was in 1960, I sailed on the
old Queen Elizabeth to Spain.
I was completely ignorant of Spain.
I was told nothing could be done.
I was told what we were going to
do was foolish.
But God had put Spain upon our heart
as the next step.
My ultimate goal was the Soviet countries, though
my greatest burden was to challenge other people
to the Muslim world.
The Muslim vision had already been born in
depth before we left Moody, mainly through studying
books on missions.
Then I got out of the library and
through talking to missionaries from the Muslim world.
I remember men like Lionel Gurney coming through.
He's still burning on, a bachelor for God,
60 years of age.
He's just in my home in London, going
on another world tour to pioneer more countries.
God worked.
Back from those prayer meetings for Islam and
those nights of prayer at Moody, there are
people in every continent in the world today.
A very high percentage of the people that
were caught in the early flame of this
movement through Moody are out on the mission
field.
Exciting.
I remember one young man, Phil Parshall.
He came and he said, George, I think
the Lord's leading me to West Pakistan.
Through the flame that was burning at Moody
at that time, through the prayer group, he
caught a vision for Islam.
I said, look Phil, I think you ought
to pray about going to East Pakistan, which
was totally, totally unreached at that time.
He's now the director of perhaps the largest
single mission in Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan today.
To try to shorten the story, we hit
Spain in the fall of 62.
I arrived in France, bought the oldest car
I could get, drove down to Spain from
Paris.
It exploded in the mountains and we got
another engine.
I arrived in Madrid as my wife flew
in, six months pregnant, our son to be
born three months later in Madrid.
We knew almost no one, but we knew
God.
Within three days, we started sending out the
gospel through the post secretly.
On the second week, God gave us our
first full-time Spaniard.
Four weeks later, he quit.
Gonna knock me out when that happened.
Three months later, we opened the first Christian
bookshop in the whole of Spain.
It was a Catholic Bible store.
We opened it in the center of Madrid.
The Christians couldn't believe it.
And students, young Spaniards, began to get excited.
In the summer of 1961, I went off
to the Soviet Union because this was my
burden.
I'd been studying Russian in Madrid while teaching
English and starting to work there.
I got arrested in Russia because of my
own stupidity.
And I came back from Russia convinced that
we weren't ready for those countries and that
we needed something in Western Europe.
I was in a day of prayer and
fasting, maybe only one meal, and was up
at the top of a tree in southern
Germany just praising the Lord.
I don't have a theology of timing trees,
but I just like to do it.
And I was praising the Lord.
And as I looked across Europe, I thought
of my wife's father who had been killed
in the war.
I thought about Germany and locked her armies
against Britain and America.
And that's where the name Operation Mobilization came.
And it was there in the tree.
God gave me these two words, Operation Mobilization.
I said, what?
What is the Lord trying to say?
Up to that time, we were just planning
to send a few brothers to the Middle
East.
About ten students, including Dale, were on a
ship on the way to Spain and were
going to leave in a few, in a
month or two.
We were thinking mainly the Middle East and
Turkey and the communist countries.
And God said, no, Western Europe first.
He also showed us that Americans were not
to do the job.
Europeans would do the job.
They would move across their own continent like
two mighty armies, the British and the Germans
and the Swiss together, reaching, mobilizing, training.
And then it would spill over into the
Muslim world and the communist world.
That has been exactly fulfilled.
There's not time again to tell, but we
went back to Spain.
I went back to Madrid and I took
a group of Spaniards.
I think there were seven of them.
I took them to the mountains of Madrid
for a weekend of prayer, waiting on God.
And I presented them with this bizarre plan,
that they, as Spaniards, would lead an army
of Europeans to invade France and several other
countries.
These Spaniards had never been out of their
own country.
Their own country was closed.
And in my broken Spanish, two hours per
sentence, I was trying to explain that God
was going to use them to shake the
whole of Europe for Jesus Christ.
You know what?
They believed it.
There's nothing like young people to believe that
they can do something.
And this is one of our greatest problems
as we get older.
The gangrene of unbelief creeps into our hearts,
and we know better, and we're more sophisticated,
and we know more theology, and more eschatology,
and more of all the rest of the
gangrenes that can drag you down into unbelief.
And so these Spaniards said, we can do
it.
Two weeks later, the little group arrived from
North America, Dale and several others.
Paul Troper was in that band.
We had our first fall conference there in
Madrid.
I tell you, God, the heavens opened in
that conference.
We were out in the middle of the
fields, just praising God.
Next minute, we were on the floor.
I remember once playing the Messiah, and we
were all just on our faces, worshiping God
as we listened to the Messiah.
Meanwhile, Brother Dick Griffin, who just put his
head in the door, went down to Mexico
to hold a fort there with Baldy Maher.
Greg began to take over the work at
Wheaton, which was beginning to explode, and to
begin to think about mobilizing an army for
the summer of 1963.
In 62, there were very few Americans.
There was no charter flight, but God gave
us 200 Europeans.
People said, even missionary leaders, you'll get 20.
It'll be a miracle if you get 20.
We had no transportation.
We had no money.
Nobody knew who we were in Europe.
But God did, and they came from the
churches.
I arrived in Britain in February of 1962,
and by June of 62, we had 80
Britishers who were ready to move out for
Christ.
Fifty percent of the people who took part
in the campaign in 1962 are serving Jesus
Christ somewhere in the world today.
There were 200 of us, and yet 25
million pieces of literature went out across the
continent of Europe.
It was an incredible thing.
Truckload after truckload.
There was not one single mechanic.
I knew more about mechanics than almost anybody
in O.M. at that time, and we
had 15 old, broken-down vehicles.
I remember driving the whole summer.
A five-ton truck.
I was petrified.
I remember the water started coming out of
the block, up in the mountains of Italy,
and the thing was overheating, and I sent
the men off to separate villages.
We had three million tracks to get out.
This was mainly a mass track campaign.
That's where we got that reputation.
It's stuck with us ever since.
One crusade.
We did that in 62.
I remember this water leaking out, and just
crying to God, what can I do with
this thing?
And I couldn't speak Italian, and I went
in the garage.
The guy didn't even want to talk to
me.
Get that thing out of here.
You've never seen a truck like this.
We got it in a junkyard in London,
and so I used to chew gum rather
intensely.
I took this girl, stuck it in that
crack, and it held for several weeks.
You can see my time is already gone,
but the whole summer was just one answer
to prayer after the other, and I just
insert this.
None of it would have ever happened without
that little girl sitting in the back.
I was a bit rough as a husband.
You wouldn't believe it.
She was seven months pregnant.
I said, get in the truck, man.
We're moving out.
She did it.
She never even complained.
She complains more now, but she never even
complained, and I said, look, honey, I got
something to share with you, and she never
wanted to be a leader.
She's always been quiet and shy and all
that.
I said, I think you got to take
over the team.
Take over the team?
There were about 15 girls on this team.
The fellows were out on squads, but there
were two other fellows.
I didn't feel they could be the leader,
so I said, you'll have to take over
the team.
I got to go back to Paris.
I went back to Paris to get more
recruits to have the August conference, and I
left the team with my wife.
I gave her about 50 villages to cover
and five cities, and she moved up with
this team along the coast of Italy.
I came back later and met her in
northern Italy.
Story after story, I could tell you it's
true.
We were young, only your age.
We were scared.
We made mistakes.
We couldn't even drive these trucks.
We just steered them.
Here we come along.
We had so many accidents and vehicles exploding
and wheels falling off, and yet that first
year in 62, hardly a single person was
hurt.
We rode the voodoo again in Madrid in
the fall of 62, and all we could
think of, remember talking to Federico, our Spanish
leader, was multiply by 10, multiply by 10,
multiply by 10.
That was God's burden.
We're going to multiply everything we've done this
summer by 10.
We're going to go to 2,000 people.
We're going to go 110 some odd trucks.
We're going to go to so much literature.
We knew God was the God of the
impossible.
Of course, souls had been saved.
Some of the very leaders in the very
campaign had been saved just a year before,
like Christa Fisher Eicher, who's now married to
Ray Eicher in India, came from East Germany,
got saved in Madrid.
And so in 1963, we prayed for this
massive effort, the 2,000 young people, to
put out 200 tons of Christian literature, and
yet slow down, do more personal work, book
selling, cover the villages, more discipling.
By then, Greg was moving in North America,
and recruiting, and ready for the first charter
flight, an old propeller plane.
I don't know whether that was the year
that it took off, and then had to
go back to land again because something went
wrong, and they had to drop all the
gas out in the Atlantic Ocean, and everybody's
looking out the window as the gas is
floating by the plane.
And I tell you, we just prayed as
this plane came chugging across the Atlantic.
People thought we had gone mad.
We knew about the New Tribes mission that
had seen two airplanes of missionaries crash.
We thought, what if that happens to us?
Tremendous fears came upon us.
Worry, fear, tension.
In fact, I remember that first truck I
drove down to the coast.
I went into a state of psychosomatic, uh,
fixation, whatever you call it.
I had started to ache, especially as the
truck, the timing went off.
It started to explode as we crossed London
Bridge of all places, and we were late
for the ferry.
The last vehicle in the line of cars
had an accident, and suddenly I felt tremendously
tense and headache.
And I had a crisis experience in the
cab of the truck.
My wife, I think, can remember.
I just realized deep, deep in my soul,
this is God's truck.
This is God's work.
My worry might tension, my fear will not
add one bit.
And I remember in moments, or within the
hour, that headache went away.
And I came into a relaxed position, even
though we missed the ferry.
Yes, God held us together.
We were weak.
We were afraid at times.
We overstepped ourselves.
In 63, He gave us those 2,000
men.
We invaded 90,000 towns, 90,000 towns
and villages with the Word of God.
We moved into Spain.
I get a little hazy on that.
It was either 63 or 64, but we
moved into Spain with a massive effort, even
though it was a semi-closed country, and
people were in and out of jail in
many, many cases.
And on and on the story could go.
Of course, most people thought it would all
fizzle after that.
A lot of mistakes were made that summer.
By the end of the summer, we had
broken down vehicles in almost every part of
Europe.
We had no headquarters.
We had borrowed the European Mission headquarters for
just July and August.
We couldn't have it in the fall.
We rendezvoused in the fields.
We were living in the fields like gypsies,
praying, God give us a place.
We found an old place in Switzerland.
How are we going to get the broken
down vehicle to Switzerland?
I don't forget that.
We found that the Swiss didn't want these
old vehicles, especially if they didn't run.
It's an insult.
We found we had to get these vehicles
somewhere.
The winter was coming.
The big push out to India, and we
found a guard post, a checkpoint on a
hill.
We towed the vehicles to the top of
the hill.
Then the tow truck would back up, and
they'd release the emergency brake.
These big old beat-up trucks would roll
down into Switzerland, and they'd stop at the
checkpoint, pull the emergency brake, all put the
passport, immigration, look over the truck, okay, release
the emergency brake, no motor, and into Switzerland.
Meanwhile, I went to the north of England
to find a conference center.
All we could find was an old house
that people told us was haunted.
After we moved out years later, no one
ever did move in that place again.
But we were so crowded that they were
sleeping on the same floor where we had
the conference, where we had the dining hall.
Everything was on the same floor.
They kept clearing it up, clear the beds
up, bring out the tables, clear the tables
up, bring out the chairs, and that's where
the vision more for India was born.
And when dear brother Greg came, he wasn't
sure where he should serve, and I said,
I don't know how I gave him the
challenge, but I said, Greg, you're going to
India.
We weren't quite as organized, to say the
least.
And God knew this little nobody, this little
pastor from Aspen, Colorado, he wasn't a pastor
back then.
In fact, if you had gone to him
then as an O.M.R. and said,
a brother Greg, like Frank Dietz did one
time, I think I'm going to be a
pastor.
Livingston would have given you 25 reasons why
you can never go be a pastor in
the United States.
Well, he is now a pastor in Aspen,
Colorado, but it shows the way God works,
because he will soon be launching out again
in God's timing.
And I just can't forget how God used
brother Greg in India.
We were told it would never work in
India.
No one would join us.
There's no future, no life insurance, no salaries.
Indians will not have it, except the unemployed
and crooks and thieves.
We averaged two thieves for every team in
the early years.
We had so many things stolen, I tell
you, I thought we were on a relief
program.
And it was doomed.
It seemed totally doomed in India.
So many problems, so many cultural barriers, but
we kept praying and we kept working.
And soon God gave us a few nationals
and we poured our life into them.
Today there's 170 full-time nationals in India.
I don't think there's any major thinking missionary
in India that wouldn't say that this little
work of the Lamb has been one of
the greatest historical mission works in the whole
history of India in the past 20 years.
And then it was the Middle East and
Turkey and many other places.
I just can't, I just don't feel free
to tell you more because of the time.
God, the same God that worked through this
feeble group of nobodies is with you this
summer.
We need the same recklessness tempered by love
and by balance.
We need the same vision, the same desire
to press on when everything's impossible.
The same victory over our emotional problems, the
same willingness to suffer, to pray and finance.
We ran out of money so many times.
Not only were we operating on a shoelace,
we couldn't even find the shoelace.
In 1963 we were in debt $70,000.
It was finished.
We decided to stop eating for two days.
Hardly any food was consumed, especially by the
more mature people.
We cried out to God and I remember
a night of praise.
It was, it was midnight.
We were praising the Lord.
The money had not come in, but we,
we just felt the money was coming.
Somehow we decided not to move out.
We have a fixed policy, you know, we
don't move out in September or with all,
unless all bills are paid, up to date.
We stop everything.
We've, seven years at least over these years,
we've stopped everything for days and just waited
on God.
Praying and praying and praying, didn't tell anybody
about it.
God brought him in.
And at midnight when we were singing praise,
the letter that had come seven hours before
from Holland, winding its way around the confusion,
got to the Dutch brother leading the Dutch
prayer meeting upstairs and he came running down
the stairs as I went running up to
the meeting to tell him that the Lord
had given us a spirit of praise and
they should praise the Lord.
He ran down the stairs, I ran up
the stairs and he said, brother, 9,000
Dutch guilders, the biggest gift we had perhaps,
perhaps had almost in the history of the
work.
And after that, it just, it just came
in.
If you think this is all coincidence, thousands
of, of experiences like this over the years,
then you're going to have more faith than
I have.
God answers prayer.
God will supply finance.
We still had a lot of debts and
yet in a miraculous way, we had one
gift, the largest gift in the history of
our work.
It has never been matched except perhaps this
morning.
In 19 years, we had a gift somewhere
around 60 or 70,000 dollars.
You couldn't, I mean, you couldn't imagine what
that did to this movement.
When we were bankrupt and people were screaming
at us for not paying our bills.
We were praying and we were fasting for
a long period of time.
The first teams that headed out for India,
it was torment.
Mumps hit the headquarters.
People were chewing at each other.
The Americans thought the British were in sin
and hindering the work.
This one thought that one was in sin.
They even decided to have a foot washing
meeting because they thought there wasn't enough humility
and one brother wouldn't let anybody wash his
feet and oh, they can, people, we had
at least a dozen people quit.
That was one of the great purges of
OM, 1963.
In the fall, just a month after that,
came this huge gift of 60, 70,000
dollars and almost every single bill was wiped
off.
And from that day to this day, it
has just moved like a mighty rushing wind.
There's been problems, heartaches, disappointments, beyond words and
still some mistakes.
But God, always with us, always forgiving, always
accepting, always loving.
Your God, my God, Acts 29.
We want it again this summer.
We want more this summer.
We're more ready this summer than we were
back then.
Now we've got a ship.
We've got 200 vehicles ready to roll.
We've got 30 mechanics around the world who've
been working hard for a year.
Things have exploded so much in the literature
department in Bromley, Kent, where we distribute an
average of a ton of literature almost every
week around the world, exporting to over 75
nations.
We've had to put a computer in there
just to handle the invoices.
Yet though we may have a computer there
and though we may have a ship and
though we may have a truck, our confidence
is not in these things.
Our confidence is not in these things.
Though we may have a few headquarters, we
still hardly ever buy any property.
We're not interested in putting money in property,
but our dependence is in the Lord.
It's got to be.
We'd rather sell the ship.
We'd rather cancel the crusade than move out
in the arm of the flesh.
This is why you cannot come to us
to join an organization.
You must go out, sense of God, and
if you don't sense today and tomorrow that
God is sending you on this campaign, don't
go.
If you're just joining us, if you're just
coming to soldier for a summer, don't go.
But if you sense the call of God
as we did in those early days and
even to this present hour, if you sense
God is leading you, God is with you,
then go.
And may God be with you.
Let us pray.
Lord, you know our hearts.
I apologize to you if I talk too
long.
I just carried away when I think of
your mercy toward us as such a weak
group of sinners.
And I thank you for every man, every
woman, every prayer partner who's poured his life
into this feeble effort.
But Lord, again, we're out of Mount Everest
as we think of a second ship, as
we think of the problems of keeping Lagos
going, as we think of the tons of
literature that are needed, as we think of
the hundreds of workers that you've committed to
us and all the incredible things like the
legal case in Istanbul and the fuel crisis
and petrol at two dollars a gallon and
so many things.
God, we are cast upon you.
We are cast upon you.
We are so weak and we're so scared
like the little truck driver with a headache
going down the hill.
But you are God.
You can put it all together and you
can put us together and we'll give you
the praise and we'll give you the glory.
Do not allow this movement to become a
monument.
Do not allow us to to be sidetracked.
Do not allow us to just settle for
anything less than your best power from on
high, spiritual reality, answers to prayer, lives being
changed, people being helped, sinners being saved, people
being cared for, discipled, loved, trained.
Lord, do it again.
Do it again and again and again in
our own lives.
For we pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.