A little informal meeting.
Normally, this meeting, I think, gathers in somebody's
home.
But somehow, there was a fear that more
people were going to show up than they
would be able to fit into that home.
And so we've expanded into a church.
I always worry when we have a meeting
like this, because my main burden in being
in Pakistan at this time is for my
Pakistani brothers and sisters.
And they may think, oh, there was a
big meeting at the church and nobody told
us about it.
But actually, this was just a little fellowship
meeting of friends, and it just expanded.
But any time you want to have a
Paka Urdu meeting, all you have to do
is write Mike Wakely, who is the leader
of OIM in Pakistan.
And then we'll have a proper Urdu meeting
for Pakistanis.
We'd love to do that here.
We had it once a couple of years
ago.
Not many people came.
Maybe someday we'll try again.
So if any, especially Pakistani brothers and sisters,
there are a few here, say, oh, why
weren't we invited?
Or why weren't we notified?
That's the explanation.
We just had three tremendous days in Rawalpindi,
ministering in a fellowship of independent churches who
have some of their roots back into the
great ministry of Bhakt Singh, a man who
I've been able to work with quite closely
in India, back when I lived there many
years ago.
And what a joy it was to be
there in Pindi in their holy convocation.
They came from many parts of Pakistan.
They had a night of prayer.
And then we had a lot of other
meetings, a worship meeting, I guess went around
three hours this morning.
And then we had to rush down to
be with you here this evening.
And we thank God for what he's doing
here in Pakistan.
And I think all of us as internationals
need to just be so aware that we
are guests here.
And we should be very conscious of the
Pakistani church, the Pakistani people, and the Pakistani
culture, even though quite a few of you
are in relief work among the Afghans.
They are also guests of Pakistan at this
present time.
I've spent the last three weeks in Nepal
ministering to the Nepali church and meeting many
of our OM people coming up from various
countries.
And what a challenge it has been.
A lot of my time I just spent
in one-to-one fellowship, this time not
just with the leaders.
I always meet the leaders, because we have
our main Asian leaders conference in Kathmandu.
This time I went down to the border
and lived in the little town of Butwal.
And Peshawar seems like New York City next
to Butwal.
And there I met, one by one, with
about 100 brothers.
And we met in groups also.
My wife was with me, with the sisters.
And that was a great challenge.
We've been in India now for 21 years.
And it's been exciting to see what God
is doing there.
Though I, myself, no longer go to India.
Before that, I was briefly in Bangladesh.
But I especially was in Singapore and Malaysia.
It's exciting to see what God is doing
there.
And I believe we're going to see an
increase of workers coming from Singapore and Malaysia
into this part of the world.
I had some very good meetings with the
Christian leaders, also with ex-OMers, as we
call them, people who at one time had
some training on OM.
There were about 700 Malaysian and Singaporean ex
-OMers.
Many of them praying for God's plan for
their lives.
And of course, if you know anything about
OM in Pakistan, you know that about one
third of the people, maybe more, are Singaporeans
and Malaysians.
And I was with the women's team in
Rawalpindi.
From here, I'll be spending some time ministering
in Lahore and Karachi, and also visiting the
OM teams there.
Thank you for praying for this ministry.
I really come here to get my Afghan
and Pakistani border battery charged.
I don't come here with any pretension that
I'm going to have some great ministry.
It's a very short trip.
Now that OM is so spread around the
world, there are many teams I don't visit
at all, only once in five years.
But I've had the joy of visiting Peshawar
every year now for four years.
Must be a very special place, very special
people here.
One of my burdens is to be able
to mobilize prayer on your behalf, because we
strongly believe in what you're doing.
We know it's not going to be easy.
And we want to mobilize careful, culturally sensitive
prayer on your behalf.
Too much publicity for this kind of work,
of course, as we've seen in many parts
of the world, can actually do more harm
than good.
But at the same time, we need to
mobilize people of God to pray.
And the Nepali church, they're praying.
You know, Christian literature is illegal in Nepal.
We've been having an interesting time, trying to
get more and more Bibles and New Testaments
into that country.
Cannot keep up with the demand.
It's illegal to become a Christian.
Christians are put in prison.
On the other hand, to a large degree,
though these laws are there, the Nepali way
seems to be a peaceful way.
And the church is growing.
And some amazing things are happening in Nepal.
And there may now be even 15,000
or 20,000 believers.
When my wife and I lived in Kathmandu
back in 68, 69, there were just a
few thousand believers in the country.
Now there may be 15,000, 20,000,
25,000.
A lot of the work of taking the
gospel has to be done by trekking.
And some of you know Mark Soderquist.
He's been traveling with me this year.
He was involved with all of you here
last year.
But he's also been involved in Nepal.
And if you want to know a little
bit about trekking, at how many thousand meters
or feet?
8,000?
18,000 feet.
I don't know how many meters that is.
But that's high.
I didn't know anybody lived that high.
Did you have to just go that high
to get to the next valley?
Or were people living up there?
They live that high.
But pray for Nepal.
You know, in this giant subcontinent area, we
refer to this as the subcontinent, some of
us, there are 1,000 million people.
Americans say a billion.
1,000 million people.
Do you know it took until 1830 to
get that many people in the entire world?
Around 1830, world population reached 1,000 million.
Now you have that number living in the
subcontinent.
It's really quite an overwhelming challenge.
Now, in many ways, some of us perhaps
prefer the sort of house atmosphere.
This is the popular atmosphere in the church
today, meeting in a home.
And we prefer that, too, in some ways.
But God tonight has given us this historical
atmosphere.
So you can just make the adjustment in
your minds and not let this meeting have
any kind of coldness because you're all sitting
in rows.
But just think of this amazing church.
I've never been in a church like this.
Looks like a mosque right here in the
middle of this very unique historic part of
the world where so many have lost their
lives in physical warfare.
We have been called here in a spiritual
warfare.
And let's thank the Lord for a place
even to meet.
In Nepal, a meeting like this would be
pretty well impossible and probably true in a
number of other countries as well.
The word of God.
Lord, we thank you for what you're doing
here in Pakistan.
We thank you for the privilege of being
here tonight in a free country.
We thank you, Lord Jesus, for what you're
doing in other lands like Nepal, Singapore, Malaysia.
And Father, we believe you have a word
for our hearts tonight.
We don't want to waste this time.
Speak, for we, your servants, listen.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Now I want to share a message that
really is burning on my heart.
I've had a little difficulty with my voice
again.
I've been speaking too much.
Since I was last with you, I've been
in the hospital and operated on again, tuning
up my vocal cords.
Nothing that serious.
But sometimes after speaking too much and getting
too excited, which has an effect on my
vocal cords, my voice gets just a little
bit weak as it is right now.
But this message is really burning on my
heart.
I guess it came back to my mind.
It's a message I've been sharing for years,
though I will be adding some new thoughts
to it this evening.
But I guess it especially came to my
mind because there on the Nepal border, I
came again to a very grievous church situation.
A little church, a small town, the only
Christian church in the town, surrounded completely by
Hindus.
And somehow, the enemy got in.
I had been there a couple of years
ago and met some of the people.
I hadn't ministered there at that time.
And somehow, a year and a half ago,
the enemy got in and the church split
in two.
And I had the opportunity of counseling with
the pastor.
And though it's a year and a half
later, this man is still in pain.
And a lot of other people are in
pain in that little town.
And some of the people who were seeking
the Lord, they're not going to either church.
And all the Hindus are talking about this
Christian church.
The new church, instead of going on the
other side of town, opened up its meeting
place.
I spoke there as well.
The man who seemed to be involved a
lot in the split, he's left Nepal.
Though he was in Nepali.
And instead of at least a church being
on the other side of town, it's right
there in the same community.
I am the missionaries.
Even before I got there in Katmandu, I
had shared this message with the church in
Katmandu.
And somebody said to me, that's the message
you need to share down in that town.
There's also division among the believers in Katmandu.
Division has come between Nepali-born Nepalis, who
are citizens of Nepal, and Indian-born Nepalis,
who are not citizens of Nepal.
And two or three of the strongest churches
have had to leave the Nepal Christian Fellowship.
And there's been tears, and there's been heartache,
and there's been difficulty.
And I guess this just brought my mind
again back to this subject of unity among
the people of God.
And I want to speak to you this
evening, a very similar message that I gave
this morning to the Pakistani believers.
And they were, of course, Pakistanis are very
gracious and very hospitable, but they were just
somehow overwhelmed with this word and greatly helped
by this word, because some of their little
fellowships also have been through great disunity.
I didn't know that this morning when I
spoke on this.
One brother came and shared with me that
their own little fellowship in a small Pakistani
town has been through terrible disunity.
And another one of their fellowships in another
major city has been through terrible disunity.
And though I didn't know any of this,
the Holy Spirit did when He put this
word upon my heart.
The Bible says in Corinthians, 2 Corinthians 2
.11, Be not ignorant of Satan's devices.
You know, I studied in Bible college for
two years, and I never ceased to be
amazed as to what they didn't tell me,
really, of how difficult and how complex Christian
work can be.
Now, I've been in Christian work for 30
years, and believe me, I do not think
I have arrived.
I'm still here as a learner, and I
like to listen to those who have been
in God's work 40, 50, 60 years.
Like my brother Buk Sim, or Oswald J.
Smith, or old Mr. Maxwell, who just went
to be with the Lord, or Paul Bilheimer,
who died at 80 years.
And I listen to a lot of the
cassettes, a lot of the messages.
I've listened to messages of over 100 different
teachers.
Your Bible education doesn't end when you graduate
from Bible college.
It goes on.
A.W. Tozer said, The greatest gift needed
in the church today is discernment.
You may think your work is difficult now,
but I will tell you, if the Afghan
people respond to the gospel, your problems will
multiply tenfold.
Tenfold!
It's all nice to talk about Korea and
talk about Brazil.
Have you ever been there?
It's nice to talk about tremendous church growth
in Mexico.
Have you ever been there?
When people start coming to Christ, when churches
start being born, your problems multiply tenfold.
You know one of the reasons we have
so few problems in Turkey, where we've been
laboring 23 years?
We hardly have any believers.
And we still have plenty of problems.
The latest news is that the OM team
in Adana with six believers have all been
arrested under martial law and may be sentenced
to six years in prison.
So you can pray for the OM work
in Adana, Turkey.
But there are just not that many believers,
and so the work is simple.
Most of the fellowships and groups that labor
in Turkey, many different groups are working there.
They all work together.
There's a relative degree of unity.
There are some little split-offs among Turks
due to some extremist teaching.
But generally the body of Christ in Turkey
has a relative degree of unity, which of
course is possible because there are so few.
And also because they have put a strong
emphasis on unity.
They meet together in different camps.
They discuss their differences.
The different groups that are working there, and
I think it's a good policy here as
well, they don't emphasize necessarily the group that
they are coming from.
People have never heard hardly of OM in
Turkey, though we've been there with quite a
large group for 27 years.
I believe Tozer was right.
We need discernment.
And here in the work, in this very
delicate, culturally complex area of Pakistan, we need
a lot of wisdom.
And it's my prayer that if somehow this
little message could increase your wisdom even 3%,
my visit to Peshawar would be worthwhile.
I'm incorporating into this that which has taken
me 30 years to accumulate.
Now I tend to speak too long, so
I purposely put in a C60 cassette because
that's what controls my speaking.
When the cassette ends, we'll close in prayer
because my voice will need a rest.
I want you also to feel absolutely free
to write to me about anything I say
tonight.
I don't think it's fair for me to
be able to just speak, and you can't
write.
The meeting last night, I spoke on the
Lordship of Christ.
By the way, there are over 30, if
any of you Urdu speakers somehow want to
listen to my ministry, there are over 30
George Verwer cassettes in the Urdu language on
every kind of crazy theme, even marriage.
But last night, I spoke on the Lordship
of Christ.
And about 50 stood at the invitation to
ask Christ to be Lord of their life.
In many ways, I would love to speak
about that tonight.
But I have this message on my heart.
When I was a young Christian, before I
went to Bible college, I was at university,
which I left because I felt so many
of the courses for me were an absolute
waste of time.
But while I was there at university, I
spent a lot of time studying the Word
of God, and I took an old piece
of paper, and I listed all the major
themes, my feeble viewpoint, in the New Testament.
And the theme that leaped the most out
of my New Testament was the theme of
love and unity.
I listed, without the concordance, all the verses
on love, and then all the verses on
unity.
I was shocked.
I realized this message was more in the
Bible than my message that I was hitting
people pretty hard with about world missions, about
evangelism, a lot of other things, even discipline.
And I began, I guess I was about
19 at that time, to make the number
one message always the same.
Love.
Because it's so clear in Scripture that whatever
else we have, if we don't have love,
we're nothing.
And wherever I go among God's people, I
think I can state the same thing.
We need more love.
I don't know anything about the work here
that much, but I can say on the
authority of Scripture and from visiting God's work
in 50 nations for 30 years, probably your
greatest need is more love.
More love for your own wives, husbands.
More love for your own husbands, wives.
More love for your leader, follower.
More love for your followers, leaders.
And on we could go.
There's no doctrine that the Church pays better
lip service to than this, and especially on
the mission field.
And especially sometimes in operation, mobilization.
A movement that at times has had some
teens that were so unloving, it's a miracle
God didn't drop them in the nearest ditch.
Fortunately, He's more merciful than I am, because
I certainly did.
But then the Lord convicted me, and I
had to repent of my lack of love.
Be not ignorant of Satan's devices.
Turn with me to those very strong words
that led Dr. Schaeffer to write an entire
book on the subject, found in John's Gospel,
chapter 13, verse 34.
A new commandment I give unto you.
Now these are the words of Jesus Christ.
I'm not too worried about what you do
with my words.
If you go away from this meeting, and
there's something I've said, and you say, well,
you know, I don't agree with that particular
thing that George Verwer said.
That's no problem.
I appreciate you telling me, but if you
don't have time, that's no big problem.
But these are the words of Jesus.
This is the beautiful thing about a Christian
meeting.
We come here maybe expecting to hear a
so-called visiting speaker, and what happens?
We hear Jesus.
Isn't that great?
Sometimes speakers are such a disappointment to me,
I pop on a cassette tape of some
famous Bible teacher, and halfway through I'm bored
stiff.
I don't know, I'm the kind of character
that likes hot communication.
There's nothing like listening to somebody talking about
the greatest truth in all the world in
a monotone, that somehow drives me almost around
the bend.
But probably that's a temperament problem with me.
Jesus wants to speak to us tonight.
This is Sunday.
He especially speaks on Sunday, right?
Or does he speak here in this part
of the world on Friday?
That's the thing I like about Pakistan, that
you can get good meetings on both Friday
and Sunday.
Because some churches are honoring Friday, I lean
that way myself, and others are honoring Sunday.
We had great meetings on Friday, but this
morning we had, you know, the more official
breaking of bread meeting, and we had a
good meeting this morning as well.
That's great.
That's one of the privileges of being in
this part of the world.
Jesus wants to speak to our hearts.
In this, verse 35, shall all men know
that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one toward another.
That's what it's all about.
That's part of the Gospel.
Now I have some very radical ways at
times of presenting the Gospel.
John 3.16 is my favorite verse.
Forgive me.
I love John 3.16. I accept it.
Preach it.
Memorize it.
Even in Spanish.
That's Spanish.
Not very useful in this part of the
world.
But there are a lot of other verses
that to me are part of the Gospel.
What about 1 John 3.16?
You know that one?
In this we perceive the love of God,
in that He laid down His life for
us.
So we ought to lay down our lives
for one another.
Some of God's people, they aren't even talking
to one another.
Lay down our lives?
Forget it.
We're not even talking.
We're not going to lay down our lives.
We might take somebody's life if God doesn't
get control.
But we're not going to lay it down.
And it's the scandal of the Church.
It's the scandal of the missionary community.
It's the scandal of Pakistan.
It's the scandal of every nation I have
been into.
And some people maybe will accept it.
They say, well this is just the way
it is.
This is just the way people are.
But I don't accept it.
Because when I read my Bible, it tells
me it doesn't have to be that way.
It tells me in Acts chapter 2 that
God's people can dwell together in love.
And in unity.
And when I visit my brothers in East
Africa, and I see these dear black brothers
who have experienced revival for 30 years, and
who are laying down their lives for one
another, even though Burundi and Uganda is still
a complete nut house, it makes Pakistan seem
like the most sane, quiet country on earth.
And yet in the midst of that situation,
the believers, of course, they have their struggles,
they have their problems, but many of them
are experiencing revival.
And even between many of the missionaries and
the black brothers and sisters, there's been a
sense and a spirit of revival.
The book Calvary Road came out of that
revival.
Do we dare to believe that if a
great work of God is born here in
this part of the world, it could be
different?
Or are we already pessimists?
Are we already cynics?
That if a church is born here among
the Afghans, surely it'll divide within the year.
Like my Nepali friends I was with last
week.
A lot will determine on what you believe,
if you're a part of what God is
doing here.
A lot will depend on what you pray.
A lot will depend on what you make
the priority in your life.
Let's read a couple of other passages of
Scripture.
I could give you at least a hundred
different verses, but already we're getting to the
end of side one on this tape.
So let's just look at 1 Corinthians chapter
1.
This is dynamite, this one verse.
It's dynamite.
As you know, the Corinthian church had division
and they had disunity.
Some said, I'm of Apollos.
Others said, I'm of Cephas.
Verse 13, is Christ divided?
Was Paul crucified for you?
Or were he baptized in the name of
Paul?
I thank God.
This is Paul writing.
I baptize none of you, but Crispus and
Gaius.
The verse I want you to look at
is verse 10.
Mark it in your Bible.
When I was a baby Christian, I learned
to mark my Bible.
Revolutionized my Bible study.
Mark verse 10.
Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all
speak the same thing, that there be no
divisions among you, but that you be perfectly
joined together in the same mind and in
the same judgment.
That's strong.
It should be.
Because it was Jesus Christ himself, in the
17th chapter of John, who prayed, who poured
out his heart to the Father and said
that they may be one.
They may be one.
Now I know some people spiritualize this and
they say, well, in Christ we all are
one.
That's already settled.
So we don't need to discuss this anymore.
I don't accept that.
I partially accept that.
We are one.
Spiritual unity is there.
Every believer is a member of the same
body.
And that should motivate us to love one
another, to forgive one another, to let love
cover, to see unity as much as any
other doctrine perhaps we could find.
But you see, there's something in every one
of us.
Some people call it the self-life.
Some people call it the old nature.
There must be at least a hundred different
books giving a hundred different explanations.
You can call it whatever you want.
But it's there.
It's in you.
The capacity to hate.
Some of the most hateful things I have
ever seen have come from believing evangelical, Bible
-believing Christians.
In fact, Jack Van Empie, who was part
of what turned out to be a hate
movement within American fundamentalism, has recently written the
most devastating book called Heart Disease in the
Body of Christ.
And I tell you, the book is scary.
You know, in Pakistan, just names like, for
example, Gujjanwala, just to say Gujjanwala among the
Pakistani people, and you say division.
The two words are synonymous.
Gujjanwala means hatred, division, court cases, people screaming
and yelling, even threatening to kill in the
name of Jesus.
And somehow, we go on accepting it.
Somehow, we go on sort of pretending it
doesn't exist or pretending it can never happen
to us.
But it can.
Because we're made of the same stuff that
some of those believers in Gujjanwala were made
of.
And some of them are believers.
Some may be nominal Christians.
It's easy to look for little pat answers,
isn't it?
Like, they're all nominal Christians, or they're all
demon-possessed, or some other little cubicle that
we Christians sometimes think into.
But it's not that simple.
And it's in every nation.
Don't be embarrassed, my Pakistani friends, by these
problems in your country.
They exist in every nation.
You are not special.
Satan hasn't made Pakistan an extra big target.
In fact, your next-door neighbor, that big
next-door neighbor, has 25 times as many
problems like this, because they're just that much
bigger.
Why is it that disunity so easily comes
among God's people?
Let's first of all understand that disunity is
not just among God's people.
It's everywhere in our society.
Look at the Iran-Iraq war.
You see, there's a danger that as Christians
we get a little bit down on ourselves.
And maybe some of you are young Christians,
and you feel there's so much disunity in
the Church for you, that's a proof the
whole thing is unreal.
No, brother or sister, it's a proof it
is real.
Because the Bible says, the flesh lusteth against
the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.
The two are contrary.
The Bible teaches that Christians are still weak
human beings.
In fact, I was just reading in Proverbs,
man at his very best state is vanity.
That's an interesting verse to keep your sanctification
teaching into balance.
And let's understand that the disunity in the
world makes what Christians are facing generally look
pretty small.
Because generally Christians, it's mainly talk, it's mainly
words, it's hot air.
People are hurt, people are injured emotionally.
But over there in Iraq and Iran, they
have slaughtered a quarter of a million souls.
A quarter of a million souls.
And I've heard some statistics for this land
of Afghanistan that I'd rather not even repeat
in public because they just sound so horrific.
Do you think that when the Soviets and
the Americans sit down in Geneva, they're going
to get this all resolved?
And they're all going to go back home
and destroy their nuclear bombs?
You must be more naive than the whale
that swallowed Jonah.
All of history has proven man's hatred, man's
inability to get on with his fellow man,
the caste system, nationalism, every kind of wild
extremism.
It's part of our society.
It's not going to disappear, even though some
great philosophers a hundred years ago predicted utopia
by now.
You remember the old liberals, the latter part
of the last century.
There must be 25 or 30 different places
in the world right now where people are
killing each other.
Hatred is very, very great.
And generally speaking, generally speaking, the church in
Jesus Christ is representing the way of love.
It's representing the way of peace.
It is helping to contribute to peace and
to some degree of sanity and love on
various levels of society, perhaps because that does
happen in some cases.
And it's such a tremendous laven in the
lump of society, such assault in the society,
that Satan viciously counterattacks.
And often it's on a local church level.
A number of our people, when they've been
out in our work for two or three
years, when they return to their church in
the West, it's divided in two.
In fact, our present problem in our fellowship
is not firstly getting people to go.
We have almost more people who want to
go at least longer term than the church
is willing to send.
Now, some of our characters go anyway.
But not everybody's built that way.
I was built that way.
I went to my local church, and I
told them, a little Baptist church down the
road, I didn't belong there.
I went there on a Wednesday, and I
said, the Holy Spirit's directing me to Mexico.
By the way, as I read Acts 13,
the Holy Spirit was the director.
And the Holy Spirit's directing me to go
to Mexico.
If you'd like to pray for me, I
want to grant you that opportunity.
Please sign up.
Miraculously, 50 people signed up to pray, and
they sent me off to Mexico.
Of course, if they hadn't prayed, I would
have gone anyway.
I was already leaving three days later.
It was too late to change any plans.
Now, of course, OM has tried to become
more biblical in this area, and we're trying,
you know, to get the local churches to
really send us out, as it was in
Acts chapter 13.
But time and time again, some of our
people return to divided churches, where now, because
of the division, the legal case connected with
the property, other difficulties, missionary work temporarily has
to be put on the back burner.
Or, in some cases, it collapses.
I mean, you can't blame the pastor if
he's battling for survival.
He's about to see his own work disintegrate
in front of him.
It's a little difficult for him, you know,
to be throwing all of his energy into
the evangelization of the regions beyond.
One of the messages I shared in our
leadership training program in Nepal, I still have
the notes, the seven major blunders of the
returning OMer.
Maybe I'll share this one tomorrow with my
OM fellowship.
Seven major blunders.
And let me tell you, when we return,
those of us who are here as missionaries,
to our own churches, we are very vulnerable.
Our lack of love for the brethren back
there, our lack of sensitivity to the problems
they are facing, they're not living here, they're
living there.
The church complexities they may be in.
The materialism that is trying to dream them
of their last resource.
Our lack of understanding and love and 1
Corinthians 13 reality often causes us to say
things that we don't dig out of very
easily.
And we need a lot of wisdom as
we go back for our furloughs.
Some young people have told me that re
-entry into the United States and England was
more difficult than adjusting to Pakistan or Nepal
when they first went.
Interesting.
Well, we can't get into that too much
tonight.
Let me share some of the reasons or
some of the ways that disunity so easily
comes within the body of Christ.
It may be a team laboring right here.
It may be a church.
I've been thinking lately more concerning churches.
This message really is geared toward the local
church situation, but you can apply it.
You can apply it in your marriage.
I arrived in a city not so far
from here recently.
I find out that one of the married
couples, local people, that thing just stopped, that
their marriage is coming apart.
And these principles, I think, you could call
them transferable concepts.
They will apply in the church.
They will apply in parachurch situations.
They will apply in a small team.
They will apply where two or three may
be living together, you know, in a little
apartment.
I'd love to write a history of women
living together in Operation Mobilization.
The only thing that would be more wild
would be men living together in Operation Mobilization.
The inability for people simply to live together
under the same roof, it is baffling to
the imagination.
The petty little small-mindedness that creeps in
when people somehow have to live in the
same building and eat from the same table.
The things we get offended about.
Like the married couple that just about split
up because the husband believed in squeezing the
toothpaste any old way and the wife believed
in the systematic roll it from the bottom.
I resolved it.
I've got the new kind of plastic thing
that sits upright and you push a lever
on the top and it spurts out and
hits you in the eye.
Let me give you some of the reasons
disunity so quickly comes or how it quickly
comes.
Number one, because among God's people there's such
a range of personalities, temperaments, tremendous range of
temperaments.
And the enemy knows how to use those
differences.
The quiet person who never shares.
You ever get one of those?
It's been always one of my struggles.
The quiet guy who never shares.
No matter what you ask him, you get
some little superficial tidbit that's not worth an
American quarter in a Russian vending machine.
But somehow he's there.
He's there in the body of Christ.
But then there's the other guy, the extreme,
that's me, the loud mouth, gets on everybody's
nerves, never can keep quiet, mouth goes faster
than his brain, perpetually putting the foot into
the glass door, the bull in the china
shop.
A great range of temperaments.
Now, of course, some of you are married.
Some of you have thought about marriage.
Let me just say that the cock-eyed
ideas that single people have about marriage scare
me right out of my shoes.
They think it's some kind of mutual pleasure
trip, some kind of mutual journey in which
there's deep, lasting fulfillment.
Let me tell you, that's not what the
Bible teaches about marriage.
There is fulfillment in marriage.
Hallelujah, there's even pleasure in marriage.
But marriage is commitment.
And marriage takes crucified living, if it's Christians.
And it takes a lot more than people
are imaginable.
In terms of self, in terms of 1
Corinthians' love, some of the books say that,
you know, as you're married you get more
and more like each other, like two little
peas in a pod.
And we're all told about this one particular
couple who have been married for 50 years
and they're still just so in love, they're
still in the honeymoon period, and they go
tottering down the streets, holding hands.
Now, I'm not against that kind of thing.
And I just bow down to those people
and have them autograph my Bible.
But that's not most marriages.
That's not most marriages.
Now, I know one couple like that, but
they're actually both divorced and remarried.
And somehow their second marriage is really, really
going well.
I mean, you know, we have to go
through this two or three times before we
finally learn how to do it.
This seems to be the philosophy in some
places today.
Marriage is commitment.
Marriage is part of God's training program.
It's God's graduate school.
My wife and I just gloriously celebrated our
25th wedding anniversary.
If you want, I can even give you
a special letter about it that she wrote,
uncensored material from the husband, by the husband,
me.
And we have discovered over the years how
different we are, more than we thought when
we were married, in many, many, many things.
In fact, the other day we sat down,
let's make a list of the things we
really agree upon.
Praise the Lord, the atonement, doctrine about heaven
and hell, operation mobilization.
Definitely there are a number of areas.
But a lot of the more nitty-gritty
things that marriage is made of, we don't
exactly see eye to eye.
But we're excited about the next 25 years.
Marriage doesn't work unless we're willing to accept
the other person's personality and the other person's
temper.
And if the person's a bit of a
loud mouth, you're going to have to accept
that.
You can work on it, you can pray
for it, you can feed him gumdrops, you
can try different things, but you're going to
have to accept that.
And if the person is relatively quiet and
shy, you're going to have to accept that.
In marriage we accept one another.
And in team life, and in missionary work,
there needs to be a greater, just, unilateral
acceptance of one another.
With the weaknesses, with the raw whatever it
is, you can still fellowship, you can pray,
you can talk things out, but it comes
from a foundation of acceptance, not a foundation
of irritability and disunity.
So the enemy knows how to use the
differences in temperament, differences in personality, and all
the other things that are related to that.
The second reason disunity so quickly comes is
because we are different nationalities.
The Church is an international body.
Missionary work is international.
And if it's not international, it's intercultural.
Do you think South Indians get on with
North Indians?
Do you think people from Southern Kerala can
get on with people from Northern Kerala?
Do you know any country where everybody in
the country likes everybody else in the country?
Have you been in one of those countries
yet?
Now, I've only been in 60.
Maybe you've been in one I haven't been
in.
You can write to me because I need
constantly to bring things into balance.
Southerners don't like Northerners.
People from the West don't like people from
the East.
I have a friend from Manchester, England.
I swear he wouldn't give you two bob
for a Londoner.
He doesn't even like to go to London.
Southern English people.
Unfriendly.
He's got a whole list of words.
He's a proper Englishman, and he's talking about
other proper Englishmen.
Let me tell you, there are over 100
varieties of proper Englishmen, and they don't get
on with each other.
That is a national heritage.
Probably 75, between 50 and 75 percent of
all the churches in Britain in this decade
have had serious splits and divisions.
Differences of nationality.
Differences of culture.
Thirdly, and this makes it so interesting for
us Christians, differences of doctrine.
We've got a whole book a whole book
full of doctrine.
And we've got the most interesting way to
go about getting our doctrine.
We lay love aside.
That's too basic, isn't it?
That's too simple.
Love.
Of course we believe in love.
Don't be an idiot.
And then we get into the Bible, and
we pull out all these little things by
taking this verse here, this verse there, and
we come up with our little denominational cocktails,
and our little parachurch cocktails, and we go
around, each group pushing their little thing.
And pretty soon, it's just like 1 Corinthians,
I'm of Paul, I'm of Cephas.
We believe in this.
We believe in sitting on the floor.
We believe in standing with our hands in
the air praying.
We believe in sitting on our hands so
that they don't hit anybody when we're praying.
And we wonder why some really intelligent people...
Now maybe you don't agree with this, but
I have a respect at times for intelligent
unbelievers.
Forgive me.
My burden is to win them to Jesus
Christ.
To win them, I need to understand them.
And so when I meet a man who's
totally switched off the church, somehow, you know,
I can reach out to him.
And one of the things that switches people
off, if you know that term...
I gave another message at our Leaders Conference.
Seven major turn-offs.
I'm big into sevens.
Must be some influence about the number of
completeness.
But I have a lot of other longer
lists.
But I listed seven things that we do
so easily that turn people off.
Like our legalistic, bombastic, narrow-minded statements, especially
about things we've never studied or really know
anything about.
Like so many Christians spouting off about politics.
That's especially interesting when you get back to
the country of my origin.
Now I must be very careful here because
the word is out internationally that I am
anti-American.
Now the one country you think you can
preach about is your own.
Just naturally, everybody knows you've been brainwashed for
15 years as a child into loving your
own country.
You can't even despise your country if you
want to.
At least it's not easy once you've had
15 years going through the machinery.
I'm not anti-American, but I am anti
-sin.
And I am anti-anything that doesn't glorify
God and edify the body and work toward
harmony and love and unity without sacrificing basic
biblical and doctrinal positions.
And the only way I've been able to
find a partial solution to this and I
haven't found a total solution is I have
a doctrine of compassionate disagreement.
You can add this to your theological...
You know, just feel free to add this
to your theological material.
Compassionate disagreement.
And I see that as one of the
ways please try to get this one of
the ways that we can continue to love
and to work together even when there are
things that we cannot accept because we do
have our convictions.
And missionaries have stronger convictions than most people.
If you didn't have strong convictions you wouldn't
be out here.
And those same strong convictions that get you
out here make it impossible to live with
you when you're here.
That's right.
So you've got some reversing.
But as you reverse you'll go too far,
then you've got to go forward again.
And so you have to learn to compassionately
disagree.
We discovered in our own work we can't
work with everybody.
But we're known for being pretty broad.
And here in Pakistan and in countries around
here we have terrific linking with the churches.
Church of North India I've never fellowshiped with
more bishops until I came here to Pakistan.
And the Pentecostal churches, quite a few of
them.
And this unique independent brother movement I've just
been with them over the weekend.
And we work with a wide range of
churches and a wide range of groups.
But I tell you, we can't work with
everybody.
In fact, we had to write some strong
material in our work against extremism to scare
people and try to keep them away from
our own because we knew, though we love
them we appreciate them, we hope God will
bless them even more than he blesses us.
We just can't work with everybody.
We're human beings.
We're wrestling with our own convictions, what we
believe.
Every year we meet together as leaders in
our work and we argue over every kind
of crazy subject you can ever imagine.
And so we've had to set some basic
goals, some basic guidelines.
It was a joy to share this with
these pastors and Christian leaders this morning.
To just see their eyes light up.
This was the answer for the church down
the road that they don't agree with.
They don't feel that church has proper doctrine.
They're not going to win people and send
them down to that church.
They saw a possible beginning solution for dialogue,
for understanding.
Compassionate disagreement.
Did Paul and Barnabas have a compassionate separation?
I wish I'd been there with my video
camera.
I wasn't there.
When I get to heaven, one of the
first things I'm going to do get Barnabas,
get Paul and ask him about that particular
incident.
But let me tell you, in my own
ministry, 30 years, I've had to have a
number of Paul and Barnabas situations.
We just had to acknowledge we didn't have
the energy, we didn't have the solution especially
to doctrinal differences which can be so great
among God's people.
And so there had to be compassionate separations
for the sake of getting on with the
work.
Isn't it possible for that to happen where
there's an atmosphere of respect, love, gentleness, concern,
humility, as we're humbled before God that we
have not been able to find a solution.
I remember once when I asked a main
leader of our work to leave the work.
It was a terrible experience for me.
I was jet-lagged.
It must have been at midnight.
For three years you've been speaking again and
again against other leaders, against the general policies
that OM had, especially the ship ministry which
was being born into OM at that time.
He was going on and on.
And that night I didn't have the energy
and I said to him, because some other
people had also counseled me that they felt
it would be better for him to leave,
I said, look brother, if you really feel
that in the depth of your soul, then
maybe you want to leave.
And he left.
Do you know God is using him?
And we're linked together, pray together, pray for
each other.
That in many ways should be the last
resort after every other possible effort is made.
But certainly within the body of Christ, if
we study the New Testament carefully, doctrinal differences
cause a lot of disunity and some of
it seems to be inevitable.
But there's something else that causes more than
that.
Am I up to number four?
And that's pride.
I believe that pride is the number one
cause for disunity in the body of Christ.
Linked with a lack of love.
I don't think you can separate.
The syndrome is very, very, very, very common.
Some people are discontent in the church.
They go to the leader in weakness.
Maybe they're upset and they try to present
their case or they present their criticism.
Very few people are gifted at criticizing.
Very few people.
And so when they say it, it doesn't
come out in such a very good way.
And so the leader's pride is hurt.
And so he reacts.
And then they react.
And then he reacts.
I've had some great struggles with my reactions.
And if it wasn't for godly men around
me who have taken me to the wall
and brought me to repentance, I would have
been disqualified from God's work.
Because I've got a big mouth.
I've got a roaring temper.
And temperament.
And at once I asked a couple of
leaders to give me lists.
Ten reasons why not to overreact.
I cannot explain how much those lists have
helped me.
I've written them here in my Bible.
I haven't got time to share them tonight.
But I do know that much of the
disunity today in God's body is caused by
overreaction.
It's caused by pride.
It's caused by crooked thinking.
It's caused by generalizations.
It's caused by two plus two equals twenty
-two.
That's twenty-two.
And that's why I believe without that little
message of Calvary Road, repentance, brokenness, the cross,
humbling yourself, that Christianity does not work.
It does not work.
Take forgiveness away from Christianity and it's not
worth anything.
The whole message of God to us as
sinners was that Christ died for us to
forgive us.
Rebels, enemies of God, were forgiven.
And though in God's work and in God's
church we will be stabbed, we will be
hurt, we will be misunderstood, we in turn
probably at times will hurt others.
We'll say the wrong thing.
We'll do the wrong thing.
The hope always lies in God's mercy, in
forgiveness, in coming back to the cross.
Not waiting for people to apologize, but to
forgive them immediately because Christ has forgiven you.
Now there are many other causes for disunity,
sins of the tongue, prayerlessness, lack of love,
failure to repent, selfishness, fear, impatience.
The list could go on and I'll let
you study it on your own.
Make love your aim, it says in Corinthians,
after the first Corinthians 13 chapter.
Are you doing that?
Is that the passion of your life?
When you're stabbed, when you're hurt, does forgiveness
and love reach out to bring that person
in?
That's the only way we're going to see
healing in our churches and healing in our
relationships.
And I pray that we may see this
from the word of God and act upon
it with all of our hearts.
Let us pray.
Father, we thank you for this privilege of
looking into your word tonight on this important
subject.
We know that people will know that we
are your disciples because we love one another.
We want to recommit ourselves to this message,
to this way of life.
And we believe by your grace it is
possible.
And we'll stand on your word.