Let's just unite our hearts for a moment
of prayer.
Our God and Father, we thank you for
this time together tonight.
We thank you that we can come apart
and be with you and hear something of
what you're doing.
And we thank you for this great salvation.
And we do want to spread the message
around the world.
And we thank you for every group, every
movement, society, church, that's doing this work.
And Lord, as we receive the reports of
the victories we know, greater is He that
is in us than he is against us.
And we pray for this immigrant work this
summer in Britain, that hundreds would be raised
up to learn how to do this work
and to do the work at the same
time.
A harvest is plenteous, the labors are few.
We as disciples have much to say before
the end of the day.
Oh Lord, we often sing, O for a
thousand tongues and fail to use the one.
We ask you, O God, open our hearts,
open our minds.
We pray for the ship in Ghana.
We pray for the armies moving forward in
India.
We pray for the work in the warehouse
that starts again on Monday morning.
We pray for the work of the church.
Thank you, our God, that you hear and
answer prayer, and we're trusting you and looking
to you.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
I want to divide my thoughts and my
message into two parts.
Firstly, I want to share something about various
countries that my wife and I have just
visited.
Actually, some people come to these meetings thinking
that George Burwell has just arrived in Britain
for a visit, when in fact, I actually
live here in Bromley and have for quite
a few years.
So for a long time, I spent with
my family half of the year in India,
then Nepal, and then the ship.
Now, because our children are in secondary school,
it's a little difficult to shift the whole
family.
So they're based here, and I continue to
travel.
In fact, we leave in two days for
our whole Easter vacation, taking about 30 meetings
over in Germany.
But on this trip, I had the privilege
of taking my wife.
Since I'd already just been away in Mexico,
I just didn't feel that another seven weeks
without my wife on this long trip was
of the Lord.
You know, normally her first task is the
home and the children.
After some heavy negotiations with the children, they're
all here tonight, we decided to go on
this seven-week trip throughout Africa and Asia.
I can only begin to share just some
prayer requests from some of the 11 nations
that we visited.
I hope some of you will write some
of these things down, because I committed myself
to the Church and to the brothers and
sisters in these countries that I would try
to mobilize prayer on their behalf when I
return, and I want to do that right
now.
The first country we visited was the land
of Egypt, and if you get one of
these little sets of prayer cards, and I
find these an enormous help, because I'm a
mind wanderer.
When I try to pray, my mind wanders
all over the place, and I find these
little cards a great help in concentrating my
mind, and I just can't tell you what
my own packet of cards meant.
Actually, I had to borrow this set, because
mine are soaking wet from Snowdin.
But you'll find the little Egyptian card, and
there you'll read the population is 36,000,
36,400,000.
You'll read about the various kinds of people.
You'll read that 88% are Muslim, 11
% are Coptic, and on the back of
the card you'll read some prayer requests for
Egypt.
I was amazed when I visited our team
in Egypt, especially since the team leader was
in the local prison, and I never did
get to see him.
This was shortly after the riot in Cairo,
and somehow, really, I think by mistake, the
leader of OM in Egypt was arrested during
that time and put in the central Cairo
prison for a little prison ministry.
He's now out.
He's had to leave the country and is
based in Cyprus, and I would ask you
to pray for Bertil Inquist, a Swedish artist
who supported himself for many years by doing
paintings, now as the leader of OM in
the Arab world.
The literature side of OM has now become
a separate organization in the Arab world called
Middle East Media, under the leadership of John
Furwerda and Terry Ascot, who comes from Orpington.
We'd ask you to pray for their work
as well.
We had a wonderful meeting together and talked
about some of the publication projects they are
involved in.
We have two kinds of teams in Egypt,
one based in Cairo, mainly trying to disciple
Muslims and reach Muslims.
The other in Alexandria, where the ship had
such an exciting ministry last year, that team
is mainly working with the churches, trying to
get them to reach the Muslims and to
reach out among their own people.
It's a hard country, and we need more
prayer for our work there.
A number of new books are coming off
the press in Arabic, and we're using those,
and also we're mobilizing young people to go
from Egypt in their summer holiday, just as
we go over to France and Italy and
Spain and Austria in these countries.
Egyptians were hoping we'll go to other countries,
especially the land of Sudan.
That was the second country I visited.
A country of great challenge.
Brother Kamal, who received two years of training
on the ship Lagos, is now the leader
of ON in the Sudan, which we classify
as part of the Arab world, since we
are working in the Muslim part of Sudan,
which is the north.
The team is having a great open door.
In fact, they distributed thousands of gospel packets.
They look at something like that, a little
smaller, and they sell them on a very
low subsidized price in the streets of Khartoum.
We had two evangelistic and challenge meetings in
Khartoum.
It was also my wife and I 17th
wedding anniversary, so we wanted to do something
special there in Khartoum, so we went out
selling Christian books through secular bookshops, which is
a rather unusual thing that had never been
done before in Khartoum.
We celebrated by having lunch together with Brother
Kamal.
But two secular bookshops purchased Christian books, including
New Testament.
These are being shipped out from probably this
week, if they haven't already gone, from the
warehouse right here in Bramley.
Think of that, crates of books going out
from Bramley right into the heart of Muslim
Sudan.
Some of our team members now have lost
their visas, but the main strategy in ON
Worldwide is as quickly as possible to get
the work into the hands of nationals.
They can't lose their visas.
They may get put in prison for a
while, but it's their own country.
And our work worldwide is built on this
concept of putting the responsibility of the leadership
in the hands of nationals as quickly as
possible, so that the work can become indigenous.
And our real work as foreigners, it's very
important to understand this, is not firstly evangelism.
It's firstly helping to train, motivate nationals who
can work in their own country.
We evangelize as well, because we cannot tell
them to do what we're not willing to
do ourselves.
But the real work of ON Worldwide is
training nationals and internationals, and seeing them become
effective in their own country.
And I hope the name of Kamal Fahmy
will be burned into your mind tonight, that
you will pray for him.
His father is the head of the Bible
Society in Sudan, and his father's vision also
has been expanding.
So much so that on the quiet, he
wants to open a Christian bookshop in the
heart of Khartoum, where there is no Christian
bookshop at this present time.
Kamal was sharing with me that in one
area of Sudan, there's a section of a
million people, think of this, a million people
where there is no witness for Jesus Christ.
This experience that we had in Sudan was
a great challenge to my wife and I,
and we'll never forget it.
And we feel committed to this country.
One of us, I believe the second or
third leading political man in Sudan recently wrote
Peter Tomlin.
He's another brother who lives in Bromley, but
hardly ever here, at present in Kenya, coordinating
all the African move of the ship.
But Peter had a letter from this number
two or number three man in Sudan, because
the ship's been there already, and he said,
we want Lagos to come back.
This is a Muslim, and we're praying about
the possibility, after Lagos finishes their journey around
Africa, we're praying about the possibility next October
or November of revisiting Sudan, and then even
coming back through the Suez Canal to pick
up books.
We loaded a hundred and fifty, who knows
how many tons of books, on the ship
in Port Smith.
And the book sales in West Africa have
been beyond our wildest imagination.
And before the ship can move on to
Asia, we'll need to get at least another
hundred tons of books out to her.
And that'll cost a lot of money if
we have to ship it.
So we're thinking and praying, and you can
pray with us, of bringing the ship back
through the Suez Canal.
We can get very cheap fuel in Jeddah.
Saudi Arabians are very helpful.
You know how it is there.
They just sort of push a straw in
the ground, and out it comes.
I will come through the Suez Canal, probably
to Italy, and then drive the trucks from
Bromley and from London down to Italy to
load books before she heads back to Asia
in December.
Pray for the possibility of the ship revisiting
Sudan.
Pray for young people, right from Britain, who
can go to Sudan next year.
If they're only allowed to go for six
months or a short-term visa, then we
want to keep a steady flow of short
-term people to work with the Sudanese young
people for the accomplishment of the task of
helping to evangelize Sudan.
From there, my wife and I moved on
to Kenya.
We had a little advanced meeting of people
interested in the ship coming to Kenya, some
Christian leaders.
Kenya, of course, is probably one of the
most evangelized areas in the whole of Africa.
When we at OM go to a place
like Kenya, it is with a challenge for
them to move out to other countries.
Africans reaching other parts of Africa.
This is our message.
We had a youth rally.
We were only there 24 hours, so we
only had about four meetings.
And in the evening challenge rally, we challenged
these young people from Kenya to pray about
Sudan, to pray about Somalia, to pray about
Chad and some of the surrounding lands.
Everything north of where my hand is, is
as un-evangelized as the Middle East or
other Muslim lands that OM has been committed
to for years.
When we talk about a lot of Christians
in Africa, we're talking about Nigeria.
And again, Southern Nigeria, not Muslim Nigeria.
We're talking about Kenya.
We're talking about Uganda.
Very small countries.
We may be talking about South Africa, but
we're not talking about anything north of where
my hand is, north of the Sahara.
And Islam is moving like a giant flood,
moving slowly, just as the Sahara is moving
slowly south, Islam is moving slowly south, grasping
hundreds of thousands of new converts.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to the Church of
Jesus Christ.
From Kenya, we moved on to that unusual
and perplexing land of South Africa.
Where Lagos will be visiting both Cape Town
and Durban for an interracial ministry.
And if you think that doesn't have a
few complexities in South Africa, obviously, you don't
read very much.
And we need your prayers.
There are many beautiful Christians in South Africa.
Many of them are not happy about everything.
But they believe that God wants them, first
of all, to be a witness.
We had some tremendous meetings in Johannesburg and
in Durban.
We also were given opportunity for nationwide broadcasts
on both radio and television to share something
of the burden of the gospel.
The man who interviewed me for television was
somewhat of an opposition type of person, and
his sixth question was a real tough one.
About, you know, do you really believe that
people who have not heard of Christ are
lost?
You know, that difficult question to answer, especially
on television.
Fortunately, we got going so heavily on the
first five questions that the time ran out
before we got to number six.
He was from Britain, by the way.
But South Africa needs our prayers at this
time.
In Durban, there are 400,000 Indians.
Most of them have never been in India.
But they need Jesus Christ as much as
Indians who are in India.
We feel they will be one of the
primary targets for the ship Lagos when she
goes to Durban.
There's a young man down there that I
would like you to pray for, named Graham
McIntosh.
He's one of our prayer partners.
He's also a member of Parliament for the
opposition.
He's got a heart for God.
In fact, I had difficulty getting a visa
when I answered all these questions on this
gigantic form the embassy in London gave me.
They said, I will have to refer this
to Johannesburg.
Well, I started my name dropping and I
said, would a phone call to some of
my friends in Johannesburg be of any help?
The lady sort of backed up a bit.
She said, well, if you want to.
Anyway, within a day, I had my visa
and dear brother Graham McIntosh made a few
phone calls to Pretoria.
You know, we have found all over the
world God has people in strategic places, in
government.
Out in India, where we have to do
so much work on the ship, the man
in the Mazagon dockyard, the number two man,
is a born-again believer who was interested
in the ship six years before we had
the ship.
No man, no single man has helped the
ship more than that one man in the
Mazagon dockyard.
And it's exciting to see how the Holy
Spirit goes ahead of us in this work.
The Holy Spirit is our lineup department.
The real lineup.
He goes ahead, then our men follow.
And this is why prayer is so important.
From South Africa, we joined the ship.
Actually, the Queen Elizabeth.
We felt rather out of place with all
the multimillionaires, but there were a few inexpensive
cabins down on foredeck and we had a
burden to sail to Singapore to have a
little bit of break between the meetings.
We're having three or four every day.
And also, because the ship was stopping at
the Seychelles Islands, Ceylon, and one other place
that I desperately wanted to go to.
It was inconvenient to go to by air.
Just a rather short trip, but we praised
God for that visit to the Seychelles.
And just to see those antennas out in
the sea with Phoebus Seychelles beaming the gospel
into the Middle East, into Africa, was a
challenge we will never forget.
We only had five or six hours there.
With Brother Wheatley and Jeffrey Cook, who actually
went to Moody Bible Institute with me many
years ago.
And I would ask you to pray for
that vital ministry.
They also have many personnel needs.
I couldn't believe how many people they are
lacking for that ministry.
And that should be one of the key
prayer targets.
Also, they have no program into Turkey.
We have been working with them for a
program into Afghanistan.
And that is now being beamed in, though
so far there's been not a single letter
back.
Now, some people may be hearing it.
It's another thing to get an Afghani to
write to a New Delhi address.
But we'd ask you to pray for that
15-minute broadcast into Afghanistan.
But there's no broadcast from Phoebus into Turkey.
Some of you may not realize, but the
Christian radio station in Ethiopia has, I believe,
been closed down and has been taken over
by the government for the propagation of the
revolution.
And this is a vital concern.
There's a little bit, very little, going in
from here into Turkey.
And as they were sharing this with me,
I said, what's the problem?
And they said, no one could do the
program.
No Turk who can do this program and
someone with him who can write the script.
And I want to make this a prayer
target.
Dennis Alexander, the coordinator of our whole work
in the Middle East, has this upon his
heart.
He lives in Ankara.
Actually, his mother and father are both involved
in the Seychelles ministry.
And his mother was sharing with me on
the phone some weeks ago the burden to
see a broadcast in Turkish from Seychelles into
Turkey.
But another burden came to my heart when
I was there in the Seychelles.
And that is to visit those islands.
There are many islands there.
It's not just one island, many islands.
They're small ones, but those people are important.
And we believe when we have two ships,
we are going to be able to spend
far more time with one of the ships.
It doesn't matter which one, probably the smaller
one.
In these islands, there are hardly any local
believers whatsoever in the Seychelles.
And that is true of many islands around
the world.
There is no church in the Seychelles among
the local people.
And we would ask you to pray.
We can't do it on this trip.
We hope to be visiting some islands, the
Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, much larger populations.
But I don't think we're going to be
able to fit in the Seychelles.
And this is another reason why we're so
burdened about this second ship.
We moved on by ship to Sri Lanka.
And again, our hearts were just, were just
broken during that one day.
The ship has been to Sri Lanka a
couple of times.
I cannot begin to express the ministry the
ship has had there.
You know, you may think that many, many
people are convinced about this ship ministry.
The ship has now been to Great Britain.
We learned through the visit of the ship
to Great Britain what we already knew, that
it is very easy for people to pay
lip service to this project.
It is a big project.
It is an unusual project.
It's hardly ever been done before in history.
And so there's a high curiosity factor.
But it has been proven to us since
the ship sailed from Britain, that it takes
something more than looking at the logos to
give a man a real burden.
That real burden can only come by the
Holy Spirit.
And it is our prayer that tonight in
this meeting the Holy Spirit may put a
burden of prayer, a greater burden of prayer,
on your hearts for the Logos ministry and
for the ministry around the world.
But when I meet people who have doubts
about the ship and wonder, well, you know,
what's the purpose of it all?
No, I just scratch my head.
On the other hand, I can understand, because
I haven't seen it.
And seeing it in London, seeing it in
Liverpool, is not like seeing it in Sri
Lanka or Vietnam or Bombay or Mangalore or
Madras, where we had 15,000 people show
up in one day.
We only had double that number come in
London the whole period, and we thought that
was a lot.
But as I went to Sri Lanka, and
it's been two years or so since the
ship's had a ministry there, I saw the
permanent fruit.
Just two examples.
We could give dozens.
A Methodist pastor, most of the Methodists in
Sri Lanka are Marxists or liberals or neo
-Orthodox.
But one of the leading Methodist pastors, who
came to one of the conferences on the
ship, was led to Christ by one of
the Logos crew, and is now preaching the
gospel full power in his church.
Do you think that fruit is worth praising
God for?
Another minister, an Anglican, who was also a
liberal, was converted to Christ during the same
visit.
We're not talking about people in the streets
coming to Christ.
We're talking about pastors with big churches repenting
and coming to Christ.
I can't think of any ministry more important
than that.
Because these people have under their leadership thousands
of other people.
Thousands.
And they can lead them astray, like false
shepherds described in the book of Jeremiah.
They can lead them astray.
And now this Anglican has been born again,
and he's taking the lead in the evangelical
Anglican movement of the British Isles.
Together with a few others.
I mean of Sri Lanka.
What a challenge.
Many others came to Christ, and they're looking
forward to Logos coming back there.
There are many complexities in going back.
One is we can't get any money, not
only out of the country, we can't even
get it out of the bank.
In fact, one of the reasons I went
there was to try to get money out
of the bank.
All we want to do is put it
into Christian books.
We'll even give the books away, but we
can't really afford to do that.
Somehow we need to get some of the
money back.
We put it in the books, and we
sell the books, and then we buy some
tea.
And when Logos comes, we load up on
tea like you've never imagined.
Because the tea consumption on the N.B.
Logos, which is dominated by the British, is
beyond all imagination.
And so we would ask you to pray
for Sri Lanka.
From there, we sailed on to Singapore, which
has become one of the fastest-growing sending
countries in O.M. Singapore is not a
target field.
It's more evangelized than Bromley, and that's saying
something.
Got many strong churches.
But there's a potential of young people in
Singapore, and I was thrilled to discover myself
that we now have 38 Singaporeans or Malaysians
full-time in O.M. around the world.
That's all happened in a couple of years.
There are a number of key churches.
The churches of Singapore, a number of key
churches, would be ten times more committed to
this work than any churches that we could
find in the whole of London.
That's Singapore.
They really, really stand behind the work.
Every young person, almost every young person sent
out from Singapore has the full backing of
their churches.
The elders, the deacons, the pastor, they're fully
supported, they're fully backed, and I tell you
the potential we've only scratched the surface.
Pray for the churches of Singapore.
The challenge is great.
Pray for Dr. Alan Adams, a medical doctor,
who's given up his career, perhaps temporarily.
I don't know if he's decided yet, because
he has a burden for discipling men rather
than repairing their broken legs.
Both are important, but so often, so often,
mission work, even to this day, has cared
for man's body and has neglected his soul.
It used to be the opposite.
Evangelicals used to be accused of, you know,
not caring for the body.
But as usual, we're great pendulum swingers, and
now the pendulum is over here, and you
can go to places like Bangladesh, and up
to recently, four out of every five missionaries,
they're in relief work, caring for the body.
Of course, some of them caring for the
soul as well.
But places like Singapore, many of the other
countries we work in, they don't want our
medical doctors.
It's an insult to them.
But we can go in in other ways,
other capacities, and present Jesus Christ.
Pray for an army of Singaporeans to launch
out from that little island city, and Malaysians
as well.
We have a team working in Malaysia right
now, in recruiting and challenging the churches.
Pray that they may launch into India, into
the Middle East.
After Singapore, we took just a quick one
-day visit to Bangkok, again to follow up
on the ship ministry.
In each one of these countries, we have
a nucleus of people praying for us to
come back, preparing for us to come back.
Bangkok is a city we need to go
to with a larger ship.
In fact, that's true of many of these
big cities.
There's just so many people.
There's so much to do, and Bangkok, Thailand,
where my wife and I lived for quite
a few months with our family, has never
ceased to be on our hearts.
Pray for Bangkok.
Especially since most of the mission work in
Thailand takes place more in the northern area.
As you may know, Thailand is now one
of the main targets for Communism.
It is one of their primary goals at
present, and there's a lot of terrorism and
warfare on the borders.
I hope every one of you will read
articles about Cambodia.
There was one in Reader's Digest, the ignorance
of what Communists do when they take over
most of these countries, here in Britain, and
throughout the rest of sophisticated Europe, is frightening.
And I believe that every Christian should pray
and read about Cambodia, and what has happened
to the Christians of Cambodia.
And then we might be a little more
prayerful about what can happen in some of
these other countries.
And as we look at what's happening with
Communism in Southern Africa, Mozambique, the Cubans now
moving in desire, I tell you, it should
drive us to our knees firstly, and it
should drive us to move in these open
countries, as well as the closed ones, while
we still have the opportunities.
From Thailand, we moved on to Bangladesh, one
of the primary purposes of our trip to
Asia.
In Bangladesh, we do not work under the
name of Operation Mobilization.
OM officially, in the early days, was asked
to leave the country.
And so we started a new work there
called Young Christian Workers, mainly Bengalis.
It's one of the most indigenous and exemplary
works of the whole of OM worldwide.
We have 15 to 20 Bengali men, a
number of them converted to Christ through our
own ministry in that country.
We have a few other foreigners there.
They go in officially with the International Christian
Fellowship, and then are loaned back to work
among the Young Christian Workers.
You see, one of the key things in
OM is maximum flexibility and adaptability.
We're not interested in terminology.
Whether you want to call yourself a missionary,
or an engineer, or a salesman, or a
carpet exporter, we got a man in Nepal
got a visa for exporting shoulder bags.
We have another man in Nepal right now
where OM has also been kicked out.
He's got a visa for teaching music.
What's the difference?
What's terminology?
We've got to get into these places, and
we've got to be flexible.
If someone gets kicked out, we send someone
else in.
That's very simple.
You don't even need to go to university
to understand that strategy.
And so God has kept us in many
countries where we were thrown out.
Some of them we were never allowed in,
like Turkey, except in jail.
We have people there every year, and we
need, as we think of world evangelization, we
need to get some of the cobwebs blown
out of our thinking.
We need to realize it is now 1977.
We're sending spaceships out to the moon.
We got satellites circling the whole of the
earth, and though the gospel has not changed,
the world situation has changed.
We live in a global village.
In four hours, you're in Washington from London.
And this means that if missions is going
to make an impact in the 20th century,
there has to be a greater degree of
flexibility.
There has to be a greater degree of
adaptability.
There has to be, there has to be
a greater willingness to adjust, to work side
-by-side and under national leadership, to even
take up jobs in these countries, to get
a visa to stay there.
There are unlimited open doors.
In fact, the whole world is open for
this type of missionary thinkers, and strategists, and
workers.
We had a conference in Bangladesh, and during
the last evening we invited ex-OMers to
come.
I couldn't believe it.
We have ex-OMers and ex-LAGOC people
working with almost every major evangelical mission in
the whole of Bangladesh.
There are a couple of dozen.
I think a young couple has just arrived
in town tonight.
I don't know if they're here, Bruce Littlejohn
and his wife.
But they just arrived in London tonight, and
I've just found out they're going out to
Bangladesh.
Bruce was converted for one of our teams
in Tehran years ago, has been our main
diesel mechanic for many years.
Like many of our long-termers, found his
wife in the movement, a Swede, and they're
headed back to work with another mission in
Bangladesh.
And this is an encouragement, because this is
one of our major strategies, to train young
people, the longer the better, in one sense,
and then to see them going out into
these needy areas with other missions.
From Bangladesh, we took that Bangladesh Biman airline
up to Nepal.
You know, when you arrive in that little
airport in Nepal, you realize you've got to
the uttermost part.
10 to 12 million people in Nepal, 95
% of them illiterate, an anti-christian Hindu
government, the only Hindu monarchy remaining in the
world today, Christians still in prison for their
faith, the Whitcliffe Bible translators at the same
time, as educational book exhibits, the name we
were working under in Nepal, both had to
leave the country, and yet, there's still an
open door.
We were in Nepal, not at this time,
for the purpose of evangelizing Nepal, but because
we were having our All India Conference in
Nepal.
It's a good change, a little cooler there,
and during elections, it was good to sort
of get out of India for a while,
and so 250, 200 of that number are
full-time OMers.
Very few people, even people within OM, understand
the scope of OM India.
Not that this means that much in one
sense, because we're not, our great concern is
not statistics, but this army is now the
largest single evangelistic body laboring in India today,
as far as full-time workers, so my
own conclusion, conviction, is that every Christian is
full-time.
But I think you know what I mean,
and what a joy it was to be
with these brothers and sisters for 14 days
there in Kathmandu, to be in their prayer
meetings, and to worship together with them.
They gave one and a half, two hours
every day for worship, and for praise, and
for prayer, then into the Word of God.
You can share with these brothers for an
hour and a half ministry from the Word.
They won't hardly bat an eyelash.
They just fill their hearts and fill their
notebooks.
There's a potential in our Indian brothers that
I do not find in many Westerners, and
this is why I'm so happy that the
work there has been built on Indian men.
It's taken a long time.
There have been many disappointments.
Some of these brothers, we've poured seven years
into them before they were ready for major
leadership, but now many of them are ready.
And we are continuing a full-scale invasion
of the Indian subcontinent.
It looks like a small place, India, doesn't
it?
I can cover it with my three fingers.
Can't do that for Africa.
Can't do that for South America.
Yet there are more people living in this
tiny single entity, this one country, than live
in all of Africa and all of South
America combined.
More of them living there.
There are over 30 nations, I believe, in
Africa.
Every nation, you need another visa.
Every nation, there's new problems, political complexities.
But one visa takes you in Africa, I
mean into India, and if you're British, you
don't need any visa.
If you go there short term, if you
go there as a businessman, if you go
there with any reason in the world, I
can give you a half a dozen, you
don't need a visa.
And I believe this is the reason God
told me and my wife 17 years ago
to leave North America, with the thought, most
likely, that we'd never return.
When I sailed on the Queen Elizabeth in
1960 to France and then met my wife,
she came over by air because she was
about to have my son.
She flew into Madrid.
It was with a thought that probably we'd
never return, that God had a new place
for us to make home.
We never knew where that was going to
be for a while.
We thought it was Spain, and I had
this great burden for Russia, but they weren't
friendly, very friendly there, and they arrested me
in the third day and threw me out.
Then I lost the opportunity to get any
further visas into India, which we really felt
was home, and so I landed up in
Bromley, Kent.
I'm still trying to figure that out.
But I believe one of the reasons is
because the people of Britain have an open
door into India without a visa.
And it is our prayer that even from
this meeting tonight, there might be some who
are at least willing to consider firstly short
-term service in the land of India.
A number of the men with STL, Dave
Scudder, and others, have labored in India.
And the reason they're with STL, one of
the reasons, and they're laboring in that warehouse
is because they know the little profit that
we get, and STL is firstly a ministry,
is not firstly something that makes a lot
of money.
You don't make a lot of money selling
Christian books, I can assure you.
Not as wholesalers, when many times you're operating
in a margin of 8%.
Only because it's been a ministry, only because
the Holy Spirit has been as much in
Sherman Road as it's been on Lagos, has
this STL even continued through the storms that
have blown against everyone in the wholesale literature
trade in this country.
But because these men have a vision for
India, they see with their own eyes the
possibilities and the open doors.
They're here and in that way helping the
work out there.
There's not really so much more time, but
I would ask you to pray for certain
areas in India.
Saurashtra, the southern part of Gujarat, 10 million
people, only 10 churches.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine London with 10 churches and
half of them dead?
The other half with less than 20 people?
That's what it would be if it was
Saurashtra.
And yet if you say Saurashtra to most
people, you know, they probably think you're taking
them down to an Indian restaurant to give
them some kind of special food.
Saurashtra is a strategic area, as strategic and
as important with God as the whole city
of London.
And it's got 10 million souls and it's
got only 10 churches of any type, Protestant
or evangelical.
And our teams are making that a primary
target.
We'd ask you to pray.
Also for Madhya Pradesh, right under my thumb,
in the very heart of India, a state
of 48 million people.
We're uniting together with the churches.
In fact, we have pushed this campaign on
to them.
It is now their campaign, it's not our
campaign.
And we are working under the churches of
Madhya Pradesh for a massive effort to reach
millions of people with the Word of God.
In no place in the world can you
reach people so quickly as India and so
inexpensively, not that that matters that much.
Recently, we sent 50 men to a Mela.
You know what a Mela is?
It was in the British press, it was
on the state TV, someone told me.
A Mela is a Hindu festival, a very
religious, semi-sacred festival.
And to this Mela in Allahabad, right there,
between 20 and 30 million people went, most
of them to take a bath in the
Ganges.
Incredible!
Some of them never lived, to tell the
story.
Nowhere in the world, so many people together,
it's unheard of in history.
And that team, moving among those people, they
couldn't go in the holy area, but on
the borders, even during this time of emergency,
reached face-to-face 2 million precious people
in 14 days.
2 million people!
Now when I say that, a little bell
rings that I'm miscommunicating, because when I say
that, people think, well, this is all O
.M. does.
They go to these places and they give
out millions of tracts.
But what about the follow-up work?
90% of our work around the world
is the follow-up work.
But if you don't do something in the
first place, you don't have anything to follow
up on.
And so when we talk to you about
reaching millions of people with literature, that is
only a small part of the work.
That only took 14 days.
It'll take us 14 years, beloved, to follow
up on what God did in those days.
And our burden is not just to see
people converted, but to see them gather together,
studying the Word of God, and then to
see new living fellowship churches born, if there
is no living church in that area.
We will not cooperate in any debt with
churches that are not based upon God's Word.
We consider that building unsand.
We don't want to build unsand.
And so, teams now have gone back under
the leadership of Joseph de Souza, another young
man, recruited and trained through the ship.
Now giving his life to Uttar Pradesh, and
he will be spearheading the follow-up campaign
in Uttar Pradesh.
Do you know how many people live in
that one state?
It's only one state.
How can O.M. get so excited about
one state?
We must think about whole countries.
How many people do you think live in
that one state?
100 million people.
Double the population of the British Isles in
one state.
And there are less gospel churches in that
state than you'd find within a 10-mile
radius of Brownlee Kent.
And I'm not exaggerating.
In the entire state of Uttar Pradesh.
Do you see why our hearts are burdened
and broken for this great subcontinent?
This continent that once played such an important
role in the thinking of British people, and
which has been so incredibly neglected in the
past 10 or 20 years.
In fact, if you call a missionary meeting
around Britain on the subject of India, hardly
anyone will show up.
In fact, in general, when I go to
take a meeting, I write to the organizers
and I say, please do not book it
as a missionary meeting.
And do not book me as a missionary.
Book me as a youth speaker or book
me as a anything, but not as a
missionary.
Why?
Because if I have a missionary meeting, and
especially if it's about India, hardly anyone will
come.
The best meetings I have are youth rallies.
I'm going to Canada in June to speak
to 15,000 Canadians.
You think it's going to be a missionary
meeting?
No!
It's going to be a music festival.
They're going to bring in 25 of the
top musicians in the whole of North America,
and they've stuck me six times between these
musicians.
And I tell you, it's going to be
a wonderful time, because we also have all
of the book tables.
15,000 young people.
People in general are not that interested in
missionary work.
And many times, it's because they have a
false idea of what it is.
And they think it's something of the 19th
century, and they think now each country is
taking care of itself, and the main thing
for us British is to save our own
tottering land.
That's not what the Bible teaches.
And I believe, I believe with all my
heart, that God's hand is still mightily upon
this country, because God works with a holy
minority.
And that he still has a plan to
send out many missionaries from this land to
the regions beyond.
I shouldn't miss out on one other country,
and that's the land of Iran.
We stopped there on the way back, and
visited with them during their mid-year conference.
Ron George, a young man right from Bromley,
the first young man I ever met in
Bromley when I came here in 1962, in
February, is leading the work there.
And it's been hard going this year, but
they're pressing on.
And that Muslim country is a very primary
target.
Gordon Magney, a worker in Afghanistan, we actually
have five in Afghanistan now.
None of them are called missionaries, and none
of them are called Omers.
But they're there.
There are only 12 believers in Afghanistan.
Maybe 18, between 12 and 18, among 18
million people.
People say it's a closed door, but it's
not completely closed.
Let's now look into the Word of God
to sort of summarize our thinking this evening
in Matthew chapter 7, verse 12.
Therefore, all things whatever you would, that men
should do to you, do ye even so
to them.
For this is the law and the prophets.
With this strong verse in mind, can you
try to imagine yourself tonight being a Turk?
Take yourself out of Britain, out of this
church, out of this country where the gospel
has been preached more than almost any nation
in the world apart from America, and perhaps,
perhaps Canada, perhaps Australia.
I don't know.
I've never been there.
Take yourself out of this country where even
tomorrow in the public cinemas all over East
Anglia, for weeks will be one of the
most powerful gospel films of all times playing
in the public cinemas, where men like Arthur
Blissett have come and have been on BBC
nationwide sharing his testimony.
We take these things for granted.
Filey, Keswick, radio, television.
No matter what God does, no matter how
many answers to prayer we have, of course,
we know the job is still so great.
But comparatively speaking, relatively speaking, Britain has had
more than any nation I have ever been
in apart from the United States and Canada.
They have so much there in terms of
gospel preaching, teaching, television.
When you go there, as some of our
British brothers have experienced when they've gone there,
it just blows their mind.
But just take yourself out of this context
and put yourself in the shoes of a
Turk in Eastern Turkey.
Once you move east of Ankara, Turkey, you
don't have to worry about determining what church
you're going to fellowship in.
If you're in Bramalea, you'll have to debate
and decide whether you're going to go to
the Assemblies of God or the Brethren Fellowship
on East Street, or walk down a few
more paces and come to this fine Baptist
Church, or go down to any one of
the other churches that you can find.
But if you live anywhere east of Ankara,
you won't have any trouble deciding what church
you're going to go to, because there aren't
any churches east of Ankara.
And that involves tens of millions of people.
Put yourself there, and if you could, and
this of course is impossible, know what could
happen in your town if the gospel came.
What could happen in your little lost village?
I remember going through some of those villages.
One village, the people were so degraded that
they literally tried to grab my wife right
out of my arms, and it wasn't to
say hello to her.
Immorality is so prevalent through Islam, they hardly
even discuss it.
It is just perfectly normal every Muslim young
man in Turkey to have prostitutes.
I mean, that is just as normal as
drinking water.
We cannot understand how low, morally, most of
the world's religions are.
In Hinduism, it's all mixed in, right in
with the temple.
Some of the most ugly pornography in all
the world is in those Hindu caves.
In fact, American tourists spend thousands of dollars
every year to fly to India, and one
of the top things in India is to
go to see the pornographic cave paintings.
Man hasn't changed.
We think that we've got some new liberation
in the area of sex.
We're now liberated, but you can go down
to caves and see the drawings they put
on the wall 3,000 years ago.
The same pornography they're selling down in the
Soho tonight.
Man hasn't changed.
It's not the new morality, it's the old
immorality, perhaps just with a few extra colors
due to modern printing.
Put yourself in a Turkish village.
Give yourself a knowledge of what the gospel
could do, and then what would you say
if you had a chance to speak as
I have tonight?
Perhaps you'd find, as I sometimes do, that
it's difficult to stay calm.
Perhaps you'd find, as I sometimes find, that
you just want to scream, you want to
cry out as the prophets cried out, and,
and, and do anything to awaken people that
they should take the gospel out to my
village.
And as I come to you tonight back
from these seven weeks of these various countries,
I haven't been to Turkey this time, but
we'll be going there relatively soon, I come
back just to, to, to speak on behalf
of those people, and I say come over
and help us.
Come over and help us.
I want to speak for the millions of
India.
One half of all the people in India,
one half have never yet had the gospel.
Even if we consider the miracle of radio,
and there's been a new breakthrough in gospel
radio in India from Radio Ceylon, never has
India had such a breakthrough as this.
That one of the Christian groups has now
a very powerful program in Hindi and other
languages on Radio Ceylon, a secular radio station,
and they are beaming, they are beaming the
gospel in the secular radio station into India,
and they are getting 900 replies a day.
900 responses a day.
Pray for that.
But even with the miracle of radio, even
with the literature that we've given out in
India, over a hundred and twenty million pieces
of literature, even with all that, one half
the people in that country are still waiting
to hear the gospel.
What if you were born in an isolated
village in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh
or Saurashtra, rather than here?
Look at the verse again, therefore, all things
whatever you would that men should do to
you, do you even so to them.
If you were in that situation, you would
want people to come and preach to you.
You would want them to come with literature,
with Bibles, with New Testaments, with Gospels.
Therefore, that's what we should do to them.
The history of Britain is probably one of
the most exciting histories you could ever read.
Every year I always go through a particular
phase in which I must read more of
the history of this country.
And I go out and visit the castles
and it's amazing, just the history of Kent.
Those who came to this country and first
brought the gospel and those who died by
the hundreds, who burned at the stake.
There's a book I saw some time ago,
The Martyrs of Kent.
I don't know how many were martyred for
the sake of the Word of God and
the sake of the gospel, right here in
Kent.
And if we asked ourselves now, tonight, how
many missionaries are going out from Kent to
take the gospel to the innermost parts of
the earth, I will tell you you'd come
up with a very small number.
I believe this verse is relevant whatsoever.
You would that men should do to you,
do even so to them.
Think of the challenge of the fact that
one half of the people in all the
world have never had a gospel tract.
Did you know that?
We get mocked.
No one knows how much O.M. has
been mocked because we still believe in gospel
tracts.
That is, you're just considered a complete twit
if you believe in giving out gospel tracts.
And if you don't think that's true, go
ask how many people, even in your church,
give out tracts.
Giving out tracts is considered something extreme or
something for children.
This is why people even think that O
.M. is mainly for young people.
Young people all run around witnessing.
They load in trucks and go off on
sort of an evangelical bonanza and they witness.
But when you become old and you have
a family, well, then, I mean, you can't
go around doing all these things.
You become refined and settle down to the
normal life.
A.W. Tozer says nothing is normal.
Nothing is normal in this world.
The whole world is a disaster area and
nothing is right until we put it right
by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.
Yes, in O.M. we believe in tracts.
It's not our major ministry.
In fact, it represents 10 percent.
Maybe 10 percent, probably closer to 5 percent
of our ministry, but we still believe in
it.
Because with all of our thinking and research,
and I've been studying missions now for 21
years, reading the computer reports, reading books.
Every week I'm reading a book on missions.
Don't always get through them.
We know of no other way where almost
4 billion people can be reached with the
present rate that the church is doing the
job.
If the church will mobilize, if God's people
will obey the Great Commission as the Word
of God teaches, then we won't need so
many tracts.
We'll still need some.
Because everyone will just be begin to move.
Thousands will move out from Britain.
When I look at the figures that our
mission societies are getting of new recruits every
year, I want to fall on the floor
and weep and fast and pray.
Now, praise God, there's been an increase.
But you see, we've got to keep up
with the death rate.
Some of you may be in fellowship with
Brethren Assemblies.
In the Brethren Assemblies, we are barely keeping
up with the death rate.
Isn't that interesting?
When you think of men like J.N.
Darby, you think of men like George Muller,
men so totally committed to God, burning out.
And today, what has happened to this mighty
movement of God that was raised up?
We can barely keep up with the death
rate.
And some of the other societies in Britain,
it's the same situation.
Yet, praise God, there has been in certain
places an increase of interest.
To me, the most exciting thing in the
British Isles is what God is doing in
the universities.
And then some little fellow walks up as
I met some time ago, and he says,
well, we don't really believe this university work
is scriptural.
God has so used these Christian unions, Cambridge,
Oxford, London, so many thousands of students never
reached by the church have been reached by
these university fellowships.
I believe it's part of the church.
I believe it's foolishness to separate these things
just because one thing operates on a campus
or in a college and something else operates
in a building like this.
We say, well, this is the church.
This is the main way that God's work,
but this university work, it's not really scriptural.
There's a whole movement in Britain today and
tens of thousands are in it that say
that everything outside the local church is not
really scriptural.
I don't think they've ever read the book
of Acts.
Because in the beginning of the book of
Acts and all these places that Paul and
his team went to, there were no churches.
There were no churches.
His team was unscriptural.
But when, when they planted a church, then
there was a local church, then all of
a sudden it became scriptural.
Somehow, you know, I know I'm not always
logical, but somehow that doesn't make sense to
me.
And I believe with all my heart that
these OM teams that are going out, or
these Christian Union teams working in the universities
trying to win believers, win people to become
believers, I believe that is as scriptural as
a local church.
They are one.
The local church should be sending out these
teams.
Many of our young people, not all, but
many, are sent out from their local church.
That's the way it should be.
But when they go to Turkey, when they
go to Iran, when they go to Afghanistan,
when they go to Rajasthan, when they go
to Saurastra, they are an evangelistic team.
Then they firstly give out tracts, then they'll
sell some books, then they'll start a Bible
study, then they may show a film.
I don't believe that's all unscriptural.
And the result in many parts of the
world has been the planting of a local
church.
In France, 14 local churches have been born
directly or indirectly as a result of those
teams.
And we need now men and women who
are willing to work on these biblical, scriptural,
church-planting, evangelistic teams.
And that's one of the purposes for this
meeting tonight.
If you were out there, never having once
heard, no place to go to church, would
you ask someone to send someone?
Of course you would.
Therefore, since you would do that, you should
be willing to go yourself.
I believe this meeting tonight, and your presence
here, is not by accident.
I believe it's in a divine purpose.
I believe God has ordained that you be
in this meeting tonight.
We don't have that many meetings.
There are not that many meetings of this,
of this kind.
And I believe it's because God's hand is
upon some of you, specifically for India, for
the Muslim world, maybe for behind-the-scenes
work, that others can go.
Oswald Smith said it again and again, looking
forward to being in his, in his church
in July.
What a, what a church.
It's not a rich church in the United
States.
His church is a moderate, people of moderate
income in Canada.
And they've just pledged that one church, a
million dollars for world missions this year.
Oswald J.
Smith is around 80.
He said, I think I can die now.
I'm ready to go.
We've hit the million dollars for world missions.
And I tell you, I believe with all
my heart, as we look out the task
of world missions, that we should take this
motto of Oswald J.
Smith.
You know what it is?
If you can't go, send substitutes.
And I would add, if you can't go,
if we can't go, and some of us
can't go to some of these countries, at
least we can send them Bibles.
At least we shouldn't have to keep writing
people and say, we're sorry, there's no more
tracks.
Continually in India, many other countries, our main
letter back to the churches.
We want to work with the churches.
Our whole work around the world is with
the churches.
We can't seem to get that into people's
minds.
When churches exist, but in many places we
work, they don't exist.
How are we going to work with them?
So he says, why don't you work with
the churches in Eastern Turkey?
Because there are no churches in Eastern Turkey.
And if we can't go, I believe we
must send substitutes, and I believe we must
send literature, and Bibles, and tracts, and New
Testaments.
Do you know right now, we are having
the opportunity, I mention this with hesitancy, some
people can misunderstand, but I just feel this
burden.
We have the opportunity to buy 300,000
New Testaments.
Do you know what's going to cost us?
Two pence per New Testament.
Two British pence per New Testament.
In Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, the languages of
India.
We've just signed a contract for 300,000
New Testaments.
Subsidized by a tremendous group not known in
Britain, the World Home Bible League.
They will sell them to us for two
or three pence, the exact more or less
same price we sell them for in the
streets.
How many Bibles do you have in your
house?
There are 30 versions now in the English
language, and now we have the Good News
Bible.
I guess there'll be another translation every, I
mean, certainly the Jubilee Year, there should be
another translation.
How many Bibles do you have in your
house?
How many New Testaments?
How many Gospel portions?
Maybe just sitting, you pick them up in
a meeting, and yet half the people in
the world are waiting for their first Gospel
tract, even that big.
Eighty percent, at least, of the people in
the world never had a New Testament.
We're talking about very real things.
Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you.
Learn to put yourself in other people's shoes.
Learn by faith, it has to be by
faith for many of us, to walk the
streets of Turkey, to walk the streets of
Iran, to walk the streets of Afghanistan where
98% are illiterate.
That's why in these countries, more than literature,
we use preaching and personal evangelism, and these
brothers know the language.
This is the advantage of working the way
we work.
There are always people who know the language,
and God is so blessed as we have
many, many people.
Half of all the people in O.M.
speak at least two languages.
We have brothers speak five or six languages.
We had one Indian that could hardly make
it through secondary school, but when he was
on O.M., learned a new language every
year for five years.
The language is not the barrier.
It's our hearts.
It's our stubbornness.
It's our unbelief.
It's our pride.
It's our getting caught up with trivial things
and secondary things.
And I feel so strongly that oftentimes the
enemy of the best, the enemy of the
best, is the good.
Think of all the good things that we
can do.
I've been criticized because I won't have a
television in my home.
People misunderstand that.
I'm not against television.
I'm not even against Christians having television.
Christians that are disciplined and really have a
good control over their lives, I think they
should have a television.
They can use it.
There are some good programs.
But I am not that disciplined.
It would not be the bad things on
television that would hinder me.
It's the good things.
I have so many interests.
I have so many potential hobbies that it's
the good things that would destroy my life,
not the wicked things.
And I would warn you in your life
to watch out for the good things.
There are many things that no one could
say, oh, it's wicked.
It's wrong.
It's of the devil.
No, I don't believe that.
I don't believe that's the line.
But is there something best?
David Wilkerson, speaking to thousands of young people,
said the sin of this generation is wasting
time.
Think of the precious time, young person, you've
wasted, perhaps even this week.
Perhaps in something good, but there could have
been something better.
Something you could have done positively, actively, that
could have helped someone, that could have taken
the gospel one more mile.
Maybe a letter to a missionary.
Maybe a witness down here in London or
even right here in Bromley.
Maybe a few tracts given out.
Maybe a few books packaged up at the
warehouse.
There is so much to do and so
few arms and hands and heads, tongues, willing
to do it.
I've written a little book called Come Live,
Die.
Actually, they're so hard to sell they're giving
them away now.
But amazing enough, this feeble book has brought
me 3,000 personal letters.
Over 3,000, it's pushing toward really 4
,000.
I never get any post, hardly, without a
letter.
And there are men here, help me open
my post, can tell you that's true.
And someone doesn't write.
The letters I've had are phenomenal.
From all over the world, from at least
50 nations.
And many of these people have said the
same thing.
They said, Brother George, what you've said in
this book is true.
I'm a spiritual schizophrenic.
I talk about spiritual schizophrenia.
I talk about the danger of hearing so
many hymns and so many messages going to
so many conferences and conventions.
Well, just today I was reading in one
of the evangelical newspapers, we've got so many
of them now, the coming agenda for Keswick.
Did you read that?
How many men, how many great men of
God are going to be at that one
convention this year?
How much spiritual food we have to take
to get so little finished product.
A.W. Tozer said if any secular business
needed so much raw material to get so
little finished product as the Church of Jesus
Christ, it would go bankrupt in six months.
You say that's very hard.
Well, you can talk to him in heaven
about it when you get there, but I
believe he's right.
So many messages, so many challenges, so many
Christian films, film strips, and yet so few
willing to go out as ambassadors for Jesus
Christ.
So few willing to show up at the
midweek prayer meeting when we get under the
burden of missions and we engage in the
highest calling of the Church, prayer and worship.
So few willing to sacrifice and give and
go.
It's the master plan of the enemy to
get us content with choruses, songs, doctrinal clichés,
and whatever else, and to keep us from
being and doing and acting.
I don't want people to go away from
this meeting with a guilt feeling, but I
believe in the light of what we are
doing to the people around the world, the
guilt feeling is the least, and that can
be taken care of.
As we realize that God is not trying
to whiplash us into evangelism or break our
necks or push us out to the regions
beyond, but he's trying to woo us and
call us and lead us as a shepherd
and encourage us to be his ambassadors, to
go where he wants us to go and
to be what he wants us to be.
We'll never be able to give up the
good things, so many good things that we
can do, until we fall in love in
a deeper way with that great Savior, Jesus
Christ.
So love of Christ constrains us to be
and to go.
We're not going to take more time tonight.
The books can follow up on what we've
said.
The challenge is clear, and I believe there
are some who tonight are going to say,
yes, I will go where God wants me
to go.
Others who will say, yes, I will become
an active, committed prayer warrior for world evangelization.
I'm going to ask our brother Anderson to
come up to the platform again, but as
he comes, I'd like to give my own
testimony, because seeing him reminds me of it.
You see, I was converted to Christ primarily
through a Pocket Testament League, Gospel of John.
If you want to trace the origins of
this work of O.M., with some 900
people full-time with us in some 25
nations around the world, you have to go
back to a little lady in Birmingham who
had a vision for Gospels in the work
of the Pocket Testament League, a movement that
Brother Anderson is very much involved in.
An elderly lady, another elderly lady near my
hometown in New York City, who sent me
this Gospel of John through the post and
prayed for me for three years.
She'd been praying for the high school for
15 years.
And then that Gospel plus the meeting of
Billy Graham over a period of three years
brought me to the saving knowledge of Jesus
Christ.
And was one of the sparks, because other
people were being saved at different times in
different parts of the world, and God brought
us together, and I don't feel I'm any
more important than any of those other sparks
that God brought together to make up those
first teams.
But that one lady in that one Gospel
lit a spark, and that spark has caused
a flame, and that flame has spread across
the world, and through this little movement, no
less than 240 million, almost a quarter of
a billion, as some people say, people have
been presented face-to-face with the Word
of God, and I say this with a
deep conviction, in many ways, in the midst
of our second decade, we have only begun,
because there's a world of 4,000 million
people, and every one of them needs to
hear about Jesus Christ.
We ask you to unite hearts with us,
unite hands with us, and do to these
people all over the world what we would
want them to do to us if the
table were turned, and we were in Turkey
instead of Bromley, or Afghanistan instead of England,
or Saurastra instead of Kent, or Nepal instead
of London.
Amen.