Well, we've been, some of us, especially me,
have been praying about having these meetings for
the last three years.
Because I've been coming every year in order
to meet some of my friends.
Who come up from India and Pakistan and
Bangladesh, and we meet together to discuss many
things in connection with our work.
And it's always been very short visits.
One time it was down in Butwal, and
it just didn't seem to work out to
have any meetings.
So now, thanks to the Lord and the
kindness of many of you, this door has
opened.
Someone who lived in Kathmandu back in 1968,
69.
It's such a joy to be back and
just see so many of you here tonight.
We have never ceased, in many, many parts
of the world, wherever we meet, to pray
for you here in Nepal.
We just are thrilled as we hear of
people coming to know personally the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Now we've also put up a special book
display, which we hope you will look at.
Some of my own books are there, many,
many different books in English, but also some
very good books in Nepali.
And some scriptures.
Maybe it's already been mentioned, but for many,
many years we've been praying about getting this
book, True Discipleship, into Nepali, and now it's
finally here.
So you can get those after the meeting.
Let's just now once again pray.
Father, we thank you that we are here
and that we are your body.
We thank you for forgiveness of our sins.
We thank you that in your Son, Jesus
Christ, there is no East or West.
We are one.
We are your children.
We know of this great assurance of our
salvation.
And we just look to you to guide
and lead us.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
I've been ministering in Pakistan for the last,
well before I came here, for about a
month.
And one of the most exciting meetings was
among the Afghan refugees.
Two and a half million have fled for
their lives over the border into Pakistan.
And our teams are working there among those
people.
I had about 45 meetings in Pakistan.
So often, no Muslim would come into the
meeting.
So of course we had to go out
into the streets to give them the word
of God.
But there, among the Afghans, about 15 or
20 Muslims sat in that meeting.
Generally speaking, they are the most difficult people
to tell about Jesus Christ.
And I thought, oh, what am I going
to say to these people?
And it was interpreted into one of the
Afghan languages called Pushto.
And I shared a message called, Why I
am still a follower of Jesus Christ.
And to my amazement, many of them really
listened and were so appreciative of this message
all about Jesus Christ.
See, I gave the message not thinking about
the believers who were in the meeting, but
I gave the message thinking about them.
And of course I am aware that I
am in a very different country now.
Tomorrow night I want to give that message
Nepali style.
And maybe if you know someone who is
not a believer, but somewhat at least open,
maybe you can bring that person.
Because that is a special burden I have
for tomorrow night.
Tonight I want to share from the book
of Hebrews.
And share my own testimony.
Not how I found Christ, but how Christ
found me.
We have a seeking God.
He is seeking.
He is looking for followers more than they
are looking for Him.
And I trust that God will just bless
everybody here.
God wants to bless us from His Word.
Now here is an amazing verse in Hebrews
chapter 12.
How many of you have a Bible?
Hold your Bible up.
New Testament.
That is very encouraging.
And I hope you read it and study
it and memorize it every day.
So Hebrews chapter 12 verse 29.
Very short verse.
Which embodies my own testimony.
For our God is a consuming fire.
I wonder if you have ever heard a
message on that verse.
Our God is a consuming fire.
I have a big question that I want
to ask you tonight.
I know that most of you are believers.
You know Christ personally.
You know that you are saved.
So if you were to die tonight, you
would go to heaven.
And what a privilege to know that.
But here is another question.
Are you personally on fire for Jesus Christ?
Now I don't know how this sounds in
Nepali.
But in English, when someone says are you
on fire for Jesus Christ, you sort of
step back about three feet.
It's just a little bit too strong for
the average Evangelist fish we have swimming around
our churches.
If you can get that into Nepali, you
will get a bonus.
Yeah, okay.
I'll give you a copy of the text.
But you see, so often in our church,
we, in our churches in the West, we
like everything nice and calm.
Nice and calm.
And when we start talking to people about
being on fire for Christ, they're afraid they're
going to be condemned.
They become religious fanatics.
Now I don't know much about the Nepali
churches.
Maybe this is your problem.
People just too enthusiastic for Jesus Christ.
People who are extreme in their love for
God.
People who just feel and sense the fire
burning in their heart and they're just telling
everybody about it all the time.
So the pastor always has to keep preaching
on calming down and being more balanced and
take it easy.
Well, I can tell you, this is not
the problem in our churches.
So many of our people are very sleepy
in their Christian faith.
They only go to church once a week.
Television, ten times a week.
Favorite hamburger stand, ten times a week.
Church, once a week.
Some have been doing that for years.
Only thing they ever do as a result
of that, they shake hands with the pastor
at the door, say, God bless you pastor,
that was a good message this morning.
Many never witness for Christ.
Never give out a piece of literature for
Christ.
You can't tell any difference between the Christian
and the non-Christian until next Sunday, when
the Christian gets up and goes to church
again.
Now I want to ask you, please, here
in Nepal, would you pray for our churches?
So really, this isn't a message just for
you tonight, it's a message I preached in
about so many countries all over the world.
You remember Moses, when he was in the
wilderness, running away from God?
And God met him in a bush.
A burning bush.
And as you study through the Old Testament,
again and again God met people in fire.
This bush burned, but was not destroyed.
And when God's fire is in our hearts,
it burns, but we're never destroyed.
We go on and on until He takes
us.
You remember when Elijah was on the mountain?
The false prophets were praying for fire, the
false prophets were praying for fire.
Nothing happened.
Then Elijah decided to pray.
He even put water on the wood, not
the best way to light a fire.
And when he prayed, God met them in
fire.
And when God led the children of Israel
out of Egypt, He led them by a
pillar of fire.
And when the Holy Spirit first came, first
came in that historic way upon the church,
there were cloven tongues of fire.
So Hebrews 12.29 isn't anything really new.
It's a reaffirmation that our God is a
consuming fire.
Of course, we must understand, he's speaking spiritually,
he's speaking about spiritual fire, not fire that
you put in your oven to cook your
rice.
And conversion takes place when the fire of
the Holy Spirit and the fire of God
comes into the heart of a man.
When you study the Bible, you will be
greatly helped if you understand that God expresses
often the same truth in different ways.
Look at another verse.
Gospel of John chapter 1.
This was the book, John's Gospel, God used
to bring me to salvation.
I'll tell you how that happened in a
minute, but before that, let me tell you
about my mother-in-law.
Let's look at the Gospel of John chapter
1, verse 12.
But as many as received him, to them
gave he power to become the children of
God, even to them that believed on his
name.
God comes into our hearts in power.
This is what happened to me 29 years
ago.
Now, I don't look that old, do I?
But in fact, my son is 23.
He is so proud that he went to
school in Nepal when he was a little
boy.
Very close to here.
And he decided he did not like school.
He also went to school in Bombay.
And he went to school on the ship
Lagos.
As you know, some of God's people prayed
many years ago, especially here in Nepal, and
God answered that prayer and gave an ocean
-going ship for world evangelism.
Just a few days ago was my spiritual
birthday, March 5th.
What does that mean, spiritual birthday?
Now, some people are not exactly sure of
the date they were converted.
That's not a great problem.
As long as they know in their heart
they have been born again, they have crossed
from death to life, that is important.
Some people have more emotional conversion experiences than
other people who have maybe more quiet experiences.
We are all so different.
God is working in different people in different
ways.
Let me share how this happened to me.
See, my grandfather was from a country called
Holland.
He didn't believe in God.
You see, some people in rebelling against foolish
ideas about many different gods have gone to
extremes and don't believe in any God at
all.
And that was my grandfather.
And he believed a lot in the bottle,
drinking very much.
And a very difficult situation, my father's family.
So my own father did not know hardly
anything about Jesus or God.
Now, my other grandfather, he was from Scotland.
He was a complete drunk.
One thing I noticed when I come here
to Nepal is that it seems in every
shop they are selling this jungle juice.
And so many people that I met all
over the world had their lives just destroyed
by this form of drinking.
Well, that family, they ended up being divorced.
My grandfather just left after beating up my
grandmother many times.
So my spiritual background was not overwhelmingly positive.
And already by the age of 16 I
was very selfish, very materialistic.
I had a number of problems.
I don't know if you have these same
problems in Nepal.
Ever since I was just a little boy
I was always fighting with these people.
And I was very small.
So I had to learn to fight.
And I don't want to go into detail
about my problems.
But I discovered at 16 I was a
slave to sin.
That's what the Bible says.
He who commits sin, even if he be
a young boy, he who commits sin becomes
a slave of sin.
I had the difficulty of not telling lies.
It was so easy just to tell a
lie, even to my mother.
She always wanted me to clean my teeth.
Always, son, clean your teeth.
I wanted to go outside immediately and play.
Play many different sports.
So my mother asked me if I brush
my teeth.
I just told a little lie, so simple.
Yes, mommy, I brush my teeth.
Just a small thing.
But it grew.
And it was hard sometimes to tell the
truth.
So when I was little, I also learned
to gamble with cards.
So I learned how to cheat by keeping
one card up my sleeve and shooting it
out.
And I won quite a lot of money
in this little game.
I knew these things were wrong, but I
didn't know how I could change my life.
I seemed to be controlled by these habits.
Then I had this one other thing I'd
just share with you.
I often hated people.
And that was, of course, linked up with
fighting with them.
Remember this one young boy about my age,
he lived down just a few houses down
from my house.
He had a big white house.
I did not like him.
See, when I was very small, has this
stopped?
This one.
Sorry about that.
I went to his house with a big
black bucket of black paint.
And I thought of one of the worst
swear words in the English language.
And I painted that word in black paint
on the side of his white house.
Now my father was not very appreciative of
this kind of artwork.
And, of course, we had many difficulties together.
By 16, I had three little businesses because,
among other things, I had a passion to
get money at any cost.
I wanted to get money.
And in the mercy of God, a woman
of prayer started to pray for me.
That's really why I'm here 29 years later.
She had been praying for the school that
I was attending for 15 years.
And she was not only praying for people
to be converted to Christ.
She prayed, literally prayed, that many of them
would go to other countries as missionaries for
Jesus Christ.
This wasn't a Bible school.
This was an ungodly, secular grammar school.
Just a public school.
And then she sent me a Gospel of
John through the post, through the mail.
And I began to read this, God's Word.
And I read John 1, 12.
Many, many other verses there in the Gospel
of John.
And she kept praying for me.
She also put some Gospel tracts in the
railway station near the school, in a little
holder that these tracts could fit in.
You see, she didn't just pray.
She acted.
She was just an ordinary woman.
Most of her work was just in the
kitchen and with the children and making food
all day long.
The flame of God was in her heart.
And so she knew the reality of worship.
And we talked about this morning.
She knew the reality of love and faith.
God had changed her life.
And now she was committed through prayer and
love to see other lives change.
Well, over a couple of years, nothing happened
in my life.
I was too caught up with my money
and my business and my foolish things.
Then a man named Billy Graham came to
the city near my home.
My father had immigrated to near New York
City.
Billy Graham is an evangelist.
That means the main thing that he does
is just continue day after day, everywhere, preaching
the Gospel.
Preaching the Gospel.
He speaks a very simple message that all
have sinned and come short of the glory
of God.
And that the wages of sin is death
but the gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ.
And this fellow, actually a young man who
I didn't like very well, another young man,
invited me to go and hear Billy Graham.
Such a little thing.
Ask someone to go to a meeting.
Such a little thing.
Yet that completely changed my whole life.
I went to that meeting.
I heard the Gospel.
And God loved me.
That God would forgive me of all these
sins and all this evil.
And at the end of the message, he
didn't just tell people to go home.
He told them to repent of their sin
and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he told people to come out of
their seats.
This is a very big, big place.
And I knew God was speaking to me.
How did I see?
And I went up to the front.
In tears, I asked Jesus Christ to forgive
me of my sin to come into my
heart.
And I know as sure as I'm standing
here tonight that I met the living God,
the God of fire.
At that moment, at that place, I've never
been the same.
I went away from that meeting.
And I started studying the Word of God.
I took a Bible correspondence course.
I listened to the Bible on the radio.
There was a little program on the radio.
I started to memorize the Scriptures, spending time
getting these words in my mind and in
my heart.
And it was feeding me and I was
becoming stronger and stronger every day.
Of course, I was still in this school.
Sometimes one third of all the students were
completely drunk on the weekend.
Very few followers of Christ.
And myself, I was scared.
What are my friends going to think?
They're going to think I'm crazy.
But there was a fire burning in my
heart.
So I began to tell others about Jesus
Christ in that school.
Some, of course, they just laughed.
We know this fellow, George Brewer, he will
be back in the nightclubs next week.
This is just nonsense.
Well, I hope they're not waiting for me
because 29 years is a long wait.
By God's grace, I never turned back.
By God's grace, though I was a very
struggling, weak Christian, that fire that began to
burn 29 years ago, the same fire is
still burning tonight right here in Nepal.
Not always at the same degree.
Because many times the enemy of my soul,
Satan, and the enemy of your soul has
tried to put cold water on my heart
and on that fire.
The cold water of pride.
The cold water of lust.
The cold water of selfishness.
The cold water of fear.
Many times, as the Bible says, grieved the
Holy Spirit.
So the fire became very, very small.
But the conviction was wrong, was there, that
this was wrong.
And then I learned how to repent.
As a young Christian, I learned how to
repent and deal with sin.
The moment it tried to get into my
heart, deal with it, and the fire leaked
again into a blaze.
And some of us began to pray together
in that school.
Remember, the lady had been praying 15 years.
And I can testify that the fire of
God fell on my school.
First there were about 15 who were born
again in God's Spirit.
We prayed very hard.
For over a year, we distributed Gospels of
John to everybody in the school.
And we had even a night of prayer.
We called a big meeting.
And five or six hundred students came to
that meeting.
I was very young and very scared when
I stood before those students.
And I saw the fire of God in
that meeting.
No, I didn't literally see fire.
But 125 students professed their faith in Jesus
Christ in that one meeting.
And that became in a sense the first
birthplace of a spiritual movement that spread all
over the world, working with the churches in
spreading the fire of God through the Word
of God to every nation and every people.
Three of us went to the land of
Mexico.
Just three of us.
I was 19 years old.
That became really the second birthplace.
As we saw that God could use us
even though we were very young and we
made mistakes.
We didn't even speak the language properly.
And we went into the prisons.
And people got saved in the prisons.
We went into the streets.
And people were saved in the streets.
And a work of God was born.
That has now spread to many, many nations.
Well, that's my story.
This is the beginning of it.
And I'm sure most of you have a
similar story of how God found you.
How you put your faith in Jesus Christ.
And how His Holy Spirit entered your heart.
And how you receive forgiveness of sin and
assurance of your salvation.
I want to ask you these two questions
again.
Have you had this experience?
Have you been born again of God's Spirit?
Do you have assurance of that salvation?
Not because you have worked hard.
Not because you're special.
But because Jesus Christ has died on the
cross for your sins.
If you've not had that experience.
If you don't have that assurance.
Tonight could be your moment of decision.
Tonight could be that moment when you turn
from death unto life.
And I pray that you will do that.
And then my second question.
Are you on fire for Christ?
That means, are you going on in growth
and in reality in the Lord?
You see, because after we become followers of
Christ.
Satan tries to stop us.
Get us side road into some secondary problem
or into some sin.
We're told in Corinthians, don't be ignorant.
Don't be ignorant of Satan's methods.
You know, one of the main things Satan
tries to do.
Satan tries to get us discouraged.
As a young Christian, I had many struggles.
Sometimes I was tempted to get discouraged.
Christian life is a warfare.
Sometimes I looked at other Christians.
And I got disappointed.
They didn't live up to all my expectations.
Other times I looked at some of the
circumstances and the problems.
I started to get discouraged.
Sometimes I looked too much into myself.
Looked too much at myself.
Then I started to get depressed.
During those early days as a Christian, somehow
I got some of these great Christian books.
Then I started to read those books.
After all, a book is just a sermon.
It's a message like I'm giving tonight in
print.
See, we're making a tape recorder.
We're making a tape recorder.
So you can listen to it tomorrow.
Those of you who are English, you can
learn Nepali from this tape.
But some people, they take my tapes and
they take the words down on a typewriter
and then they publish a book.
A book is just a message in print
and we can read and feed on these
messages every day.
That's one of the ways we maintain this
fire in our hearts.
Tomorrow night I'm going to share why I've
kept on this same path for 29 years,
though many, many times I've been tempted to
completely leave the Christian way.
Tomorrow night I'm going to share why I've
kept on this same path for 29 years,
though many, many times I've been tempted to
leave the Christian way.
I did not find the road easy.
When I went to university, I had many
intellectual questions.
I thought, why should everybody have to go
through Jesus?
All religions are good enough.
And as I had to study so many
books and study so many religions, many, many
questions came to my mind.
Maybe if you know any students, you can
bring them tomorrow night.
Because I'm going to give the intellectual reasons
why I've kept on this path by His
grace every day these 29 years.
Our God is a consuming fire.
He wants to burn in your heart.
He wants to fill you with grace and
love and power.
He wants to put a joy in your
step and greater victory over sin in your
life.
I believe there may be some people tonight
who need to recommit their life to Jesus.
If you're really honest, you have to admit
you've drifted away and you've become cold in
the things of God.
I would invite you to come back to
the cross.
Fill the fresh with the Holy Spirit.
And let that flame, that spiritual flame of
God again fill your heart and your life
and your whole being for His service and
for His glory.
I once burned myself in a fire.
Have you ever had that experience?
You feel it.
That's reality.
You pour boiling water over your hand.
You're not going to stand there smiling.
What we're talking about tonight is reality.
And when it happens in you, you will
know it.
And other people will know.
Because when there's a fire, it spreads.
It warms those around and it spreads from
place to place.
I remember I met some missionaries when I
first went to Europe.
They taught me a hymn that I wrote
in the front of my Bible.
It says, Thou Christ of burning, cleansing flame,
send the fire.
God of Elijah, hear our cry, send the
fire.
I hope that will be your prayer.
Send the fire.
Let us pray.
Lord, You know each one of us.
You know our hearts.
You know our minds.
We thank You for being here with us
tonight.
We thank You for this great gift of
salvation.
I'd like everyone to just be praying for
a moment.
I believe God has spoken to some of
you.
But there are some who do not know
the Lord Jesus personally.
And yet tonight, you want to know Him.
You want to be born again.
You want to have this assurance of your
salvation.
I would ask you right now, in simple
faith, ask Jesus to come into your heart.
He loves you.
He wants to save you.
And if you will pray that prayer, asking
Christ into your heart, I would like to
pray for you.
Right now.
I'd ask you just to raise your hand.
If you want to make this decision, to
be a true follower of Jesus Christ, have
that fire of God in your heart and
the forgiveness of sin.
You are sincere praying that prayer.
I'd like you just quietly to raise your
hand.
I'll pray for you.
God bless you.
You, you, you.
In the back.
Over there.
Women.
Praise the Lord.
Anyone else?
Yes.
God bless you.
This one in the front.
Lord.
Jesus.
Father, I pray for these who have raised
their hands.
In one sense, Lord, I don't have to
pray because I believe you will hear their
prayers.
And I pray that they may be strengthened
in their new faith.
To be a true disciple and a true
follower of you.
Lord, fill each one with your Holy Spirit.
May they know that their sins are forgiven
and that they're on the way to heaven
because of what you did for us.
We trust you, Lord, because this is written
in your word.
Jesus' wonderful name.
Amen.