Let's read a few scriptures.
If we want to know about the disciplined
life, there are many men we can choose.
One of them is Jesus Christ.
Another one is the Apostle Paul.
Let's just look at a few verses about
the Apostle Paul.
We have endless books about Paul, several new
ones this year.
Endless books about his epistles.
I think the young people of our generation
are only asking one question.
Where are the Pauls?
Where are the men who can actually live
this way?
I think you and I have been in
the ministry long enough to know that many
British young people, especially those who have been
in touch with the Christian Church, they've heard
the message and their hearts are yearning to
see the life.
Their hearts are yearning to see the life.
And if our lives, and I speak to
myself, can be even a few inches more
a demonstration of reality, after being here, it
will have been worth coming.
And I know some of you sacrifice valuable
ministry time to be in a conference like
this.
Praise God for those who organize it.
Let's start in Acts chapter 20.
My hope is that the Lord will use
his word tonight.
Because sometimes my words are weak, sometimes even
off-balance.
I'm a natural extremist.
That's why I preach all the time on
balance.
I even wrote a book on the subject.
And I don't know how they've ever let
John Stott's book on balanced Christianity go out
of print, but I hope it will be
back soon.
Because I'm convinced that one of the major
targets or the major strategies of Satan for
the Church in Britain is extremism, getting us
off-balanced, and all kinds of things along
that line.
Let's read these verses.
In Acts chapter 20, verse 19.
Serving the Lord with all humility of mind,
with many tears and trials which befell me
by the lying in wait of the Jews.
And how I kept back nothing that was
profitable unto you, but I've shown you and
I've taught you publicly and from house to
house.
Someone called that 20-20 vision.
Acts 20-20.
Testifying both to the Jews and also to
the Greeks' repentance toward God and faith toward
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now behold, I go bound in the Spirit
unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall
befall me there.
Except that the Holy Spirit witnesseth in every
city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me.
But none of these things move me, neither
can I my life dear unto myself, so
that I might finish my course with joy
in the ministry which I've received of the
Lord Jesus to testify the gospel of the
grace of God.
Verse 27.
For I have not shunned to declare unto
you all the counsel of God.
Take heed therefore unto yourselves and to all
the flock over which the Holy Spirit had
made you overseers, to feed the Church of
God which he hath purchased with his own
blood.
For I know this, that after my departing
shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not
sparing the flock.
How true that is today.
Also of your own selves shall men arise
speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after
them.
Therefore watch and remember that for the space
of three years I cease not to warn
everyone night and day with tears.
Now brethren, I commend you to God and
to the word of his grace which is
able to build you up and to give
you an inheritance among all them who are
sanctified.
I have coveted no man's silver or gold
or clothing.
Yea, yourselves know that these hands have ministered
unto my necessities and to them that were
with me.
I have shown you all things how that
so laboring you ought to support the weak
to remember the words of the Lord Jesus,
how he said it is more blessed to
give than to receive.
And when he had thus spoken he knelt
down and prayed with them all.
Because of the time I'm not going to
read several other scriptures, but I'm going to
bring them to your mind.
First of all, we have those words in
Corinthians where Paul says, I buffet my body
and bring it into subjection lest after preaching
to others I become a castaway.
What significant words for all of us in
the ministry.
If the Apostle Paul, you can forget about
me.
If the Apostle Paul said I buffet my
body, I bring it into subjection.
Read many of the different renderings and the
different translations.
They get, you get a wide variety of
explanation, but it says the same thing.
Discipline.
Lest after preaching to others I become a
castaway.
Many of you would not know perhaps the
name of Chuck Templeton, one of the best
looking, best speaking evangelists that America ever knew.
He was rising faster than Billy Graham and
then the devil moved in.
He's been one of the most scandalous reprobates
in the history of North America and has
just come out with another faith devastating book
that probably will tear the faith out of
many hundreds, maybe thousands.
We are in a spiritual warfare.
One of the things that bothers me about
some conferences that it all appears to be
a big gigantic holiday camp.
Contrary to public opinion, I'm not against holidays.
People on our ship are forced to go
and take a holiday.
And rest and go to the mountains and
unwind and refuel because otherwise they won't be
worth very much.
But I am convinced that we have lost
the sense that we are in spiritual warfare.
We have Ephesians chapter 6.
All of us have preached on it, much
less studied it.
So I don't need to quote all those
verses about the shield of faith wherewith we
can stop the fiery darts of the devil
and about putting on the whole armor of
God.
The Apostle Paul is not only a picture
of discipline, he is a picture of balance.
Especially if you study the first epistle to
the Thessalonians, you see him in his discipline,
but you also see him as a nursing
mother among her babes.
He was a man of tremendous balance after
all he did.
By the Spirit give us 1st Corinthians 13.
Without balance, without love, discipline becomes legalistic, it
becomes ugly, it becomes unreal.
And you can be sure that in movement
like operation mobilization we've known something about that.
Perhaps that's why I wrote that little booklet
called Pseudo-Discipleship.
The subject of discipline perhaps has been one
of my greatest concerns because I'm not a
naturally disciplined person.
Let me give you my own testimony because
I'm sure most of you don't know me
or know anything about me.
Not that that's important, but it may help
you understand this burden I have.
I'm not from a Christian home.
My grandfather actually from Glasgow was a drunk
and my other grandfather from the Netherlands was
an atheist.
My parents were middle-class materialists.
My father left the Netherlands and moved to
near New York City.
He wanted to provide me with a good
life.
By 16, I thought I was really on
my way.
I had three businesses.
I was spending my weekends in the nightclubs
of New York.
I was intrinsically lazy and my dream was
to be the capitalist and to sit back
and enjoy life, especially women and a few
other things and let other people work.
Then an elderly lady came into my life.
I never met her, but she prayed for
me for three years.
She'd been praying for the grammar school near
my near her home for about 15 years.
A woman of prayer.
We're going to be speaking about the discipline
of prayer because that is the cardinal of
all disciplines in the life of the evangelist
and the Christian leader.
She prayed for 15 years.
She started to pray for me every year
I got worse.
She kept praying, persevering prayer.
That's what makes the difference.
We shall reap if we faint not.
She then sent me a Gospel of John
through the post and it was that Gospel
of John that prepared my heart for a
Billy Graham meeting in New York City, just
a one-night meeting in 1955.
I think he had just come back from
Britain and God that night by his sovereign
mercy, mercy saved me and brought me to
himself and put his Holy Spirit within me.
As I began to study God's Word and
immediately some great Christian books became the major
influence in my life.
Writings of men like Oswald J.
Smith and many, many other books, correspondence courses
and I realized that the Christian life was
impossible.
Just on the lust thing alone, I thought
there's no way.
There's no way that I can live this
morality, this Sermon on the Mount.
You know, we have a lot of verses
in the book of Proverbs on laziness.
We touched on the subject of guilt and
I'm sure as we spoke about guilt this
afternoon, we realized that there is legitimate guilt.
If you go and punch your grandmother in
the nose and you feel guilty, then you
don't read a book on how to get
rid of guilt.
You read Calvary Road on how to repent
and get right with your your grandmother or
whoever else.
And praise God for legitimate guilt.
I've counseled a lot of people and I
found very few among, you know, the average
person who was dying of guilt.
I think it's very different, of course, if
someone is mentally ill and appreciated so much
what was said along that line.
I went back to this grammar school and
I found myself in the ministry of evangelism
at 17, preaching to 500 students the gospel,
giving an invitation.
I didn't even hardly know what this was
and seeing a hundred, 125 of my own
students come forward and go into the cafeteria
for counseling.
And a lot of people locally thought I
was the young boy evangelist of the area.
I think you know how Americans can get
a little bit carried away.
That's why we try to fill our movement.
For every one American, we get two Englishmen
just to keep the whole thing in balance.
Of course, if you get a Scotsman, then
it's one for one.
You don't need two.
I won't say what happens when you get
a Welshman in the crowd like Mike Evans
over in France.
Most of us Americans find that we're panting
trying to keep up with him.
But they thought I was going to be
the boy evangelist.
But in those very early days, I was
driven to the scriptures and then a trip
to Mexico in which there was failure and
problems on the team.
I was driven to see that if there
was to be evangelism, there must be a
solid foundation of discipline, spiritual reality, humility, brokenness,
the cross, the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
It's amazing what a controversy we have on
that subject.
I always love what Billy Graham says about
the reality of the Holy Spirit.
He says, I don't care how you get
it, just get it.
People wonder how OM survives being so filled
with such a variety of people, especially when
it comes to that area of theology.
We have a little motto in OM.
It's let your crisis be followed by a
process or it will be an abscess.
I'm sure you have already heard that, but
hearing it is not enough.
It's making sure it doesn't happen.
And so I was driven almost by the
Lord into a training program of teaching young
people the discipline life.
You know, it only takes a minute for
a young person to get a crisis experience.
Young people who are keen, and Tozer said,
the more keen young person is more easily
led astray.
And we see this happening all the time.
It only takes a moment for a young
person to have a crisis with God.
I've had quite a few actually being a
little bit too emotional.
But it takes a life to teach a
man disciplined living.
This is one of the reasons that my
favorite book is a book called Spiritual Depression
by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones.
People have asked me if I went to
prison with my Bible in only one other
book, what would it be?
And I've said it would be Dr. Martin
Lloyd-Jones book on spiritual depression.
I'd like to read something from that book.
I collect quotations.
I hope you do.
I have pages full of them and never
know which ones the Lord's going to leave
me to use.
And I recommend you in terms of organization,
because I'm supposed to be touching on that,
to get yourself a quotation book.
This is a quotation book.
And anytime I get a hot quotation, and
some of you are in here, I write
it down so I can use it.
And I carry this with me wherever I
go.
But I felt especially that I should read
this quotation by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones that
has meant so much from the book Spiritual
Depression.
I defy you to read the life of
any saint that has ever adorned the life
of the church without seeing at once that
the greatest characteristic in life of that saint
was discipline and order.
Now that's a heavy statement.
Invariably, it is the universal characteristic of all
the outstanding men and women of God.
Read about Henry Martin, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards,
Brother Wesley Whitfield.
Read their journals.
Does not matter what branch of the church
they belong to.
They have all disciplined their lives and have
insisted upon the need for this.
And obviously, it is something that is thoroughly
scriptural and absolutely essential.
We're not dealing with a periphery issue, but
we're dealing with one of the most basic
issues in the whole of our Christian life.
I think of some of the statements that
Watchman Nee, a man unfortunately who is being
misquoted in these days and a new cultic
type movement under the leadership of Witness Lee
is stretching these teachings to spread their message
around the world.
Quite heavy now in Germany, very heavy in
America, not very much yet of that group
here in Britain.
But I still think we can learn much
from Watchman Nee and I wanted to read
another quotation that was such a blessing to
me from this man and from one of
his writings, Table in the Wilderness.
How hard we find it to drag ourselves
into his presence.
We shrink from solitude and even when we
do detach ourselves physically from things outside, our
thoughts still keep wandering back to them.
Many of us can enjoy working among other
people, but how many of us can draw
near to God in the most holy place?
To come into his presence and kneel before
him for an hour demands all the strength
we possess.
Listen, because we often think of Watchman Nee,
you know, very spiritual and some people have
only taken sort of part of his teaching.
They become sort of the super spiritual cop
-out types.
Listen to what Watchman Nee says.
We have to be violent with ourselves to
do it.
But everyone who serves the Lord knows the
preciousness of such times, the sweetness of waking
at midnight and spending an hour with him
or waking early in the morning and getting
up for an hour of prayer.
Let me be frank with you.
You cannot serve God from a distance.
Only by learning to draw near to him
can you know what it really is to
serve him.
We won't take more time to bring the
challenge and the need for discipline because I
think you're already convinced and you're already teaching
it.
But I'd like to touch on some areas
that I found especially difficult in my own
life, especially as the kind of man described
in Proverbs, and I think we need to
be honest about our laziness.
It can be emphasized that often as Christian
leaders and evangelists, we are very active and
maybe workaholics.
Many who I've counseled acknowledge to me that
one of the greatest problems in their life
is laziness.
And the Word of God is clear about
laziness, and I don't believe it will be
extracted easily.
Tozer said materialism will not come out of
us easily.
He says it will come out like a
tooth being extracted from the jaw.
And I'm convinced that laziness and many other
very basic things to our nature, they just
don't come out through the raising of the
hand or even the laying on of the
hands or special prayer or what else.
It'll be daily.
Jesus said again and again, if any man
come after me, let him deny himself, take
up the cross daily and follow me.
Whatever other message we may preach, without that
message of Jesus Christ, sooner or later we're
going to be on a sidetrack or far
worse than that.
The discipline life has been a long uphill
battle for me, especially the discipline or the
disciplining of the mind.
And I found that the devil never seems
to give up.
And as we grow and we enter new
periods of our life, Satan seems to have,
what shall we say, new strategies, new strategies
for us.
Let me just insert this.
I was going to speak for a while
on the foundation for these disciplines, but I'm
not going to do that because some of
that was so beautifully touched this afternoon.
Let me just give you these things because
without these foundations, I think discipline becomes very
extreme and weird and it doesn't represent biblical
Christianity.
These are some of the foundations for the
discipline life.
Reality in worship.
Now in a sense worship is a discipline.
But I am so convinced that the highest
calling of the believer is worship.
This was the cardinal backbone of our work,
more important than discipline.
Without the emphasis on worship and praise combined
with fellowship, I believe OM today would either
be extreme or wiped out completely.
It would have just, you know, you run
out of steam.
But as we learn to worship, and I
love those words of Tozer who said, God
knows all about us and loves us still.
And I don't come to you as some
great disciplined person who's got everything arranged, you
know, leading Christian work.
I come to you as a fellow struggler.
I come to you as a father who
has failed my children.
I have three teenagers, 18, 16, 14.
You can imagine what that's about.
I come as someone who at times has
been a poor husband.
I come as someone with a tremendous temper
that God is still working on.
I come as someone who overreacts and a
lot of other problems.
And have just so much more to learn.
I remember hearing Lindsay Glegg in this very
room.
And I'm indebted to balanced people like Lindsay
Glegg and some women.
And I tell you, we men need ministry
from women.
If we don't get it, we go lopsided.
Now, since some of your churches don't let
the women say much, you'll have to read
their books.
And I would recommend the writings of Eugenia
Price and other women who see things from
a different light.
Whenever you find a book that's mainly written
for girls like your half of the apple,
get a hold of it and read it
and find out some of these deep truths
that may help you survive.
Anyway, I don't know how I got into
that from this thing of worship.
The second thing I put down on this
foundation for worship, for discipline, is to know
the rest of faith.
One of my favorite subjects, Hebrews 4, the
rest of faith.
And I link that with knowing how to
deal with worry.
You can be committed, active, preaching, working.
At the same time, worry can be destroying
you from within.
And this is something we need to learn
to deal with.
We know the verses, but are we dealing
with it strong enough?
And then a little quotation I think of
almost every day.
Know your limits.
Oftentimes, we're exposed to great men of God
who have great gifts and abilities.
And they may be ordinary people, but in
some ways they may not be so ordinary.
And sometimes reading their books, you know, the
Jim Elliots and all these different people.
The more we read, the more depressed we
get because we know, you know, that's not
where we are.
That's not where we are.
And you know, it's wonderful to know that
God knows all of our limits.
One of the greatest things that happened in
my life was to know my limits.
Everybody thought I was headed for a nervous
breakdown.
For 23 years, they've been waiting for me
to have a nervous breakdown.
That makes me nervous just thinking about it.
Now, I can tell you, I probably have
caused a few nervous breakdowns, but I haven't
had one yet.
And I think one reason is God showed
me my limitations and taught me how to
back off and get into those hills of
Scotland or the Quantock Hills or the Lake
District or wherever and refuel.
Know your limits.
And something else that has so helped me
lay this foundation for disciplined living, again expressed
in the words of Tozer.
He said, and he has some very strong
material, and if you only read the strong
Tozer, you'll go off balance.
You got to keep reading.
But he said, God is easy to live
with.
I couldn't believe it after all the other
things I read of his.
And Tozer acknowledges in his writing, I was
just reading this three days ago, that his
tendency was to overreact.
His tendency was to take things in his
own hand, to speak out too quickly, and
he acknowledged in his writing he lacked moderation.
This is why his marriage had trouble.
This is why Tozer's children, I think most
of them, went astray.
That doesn't mean he wasn't a prophet.
That doesn't mean we cannot learn from him.
And I've learned a long time ago not
to point at people whose children may have
gone astray, because I know great men of
God whose shoelaces I'm not worthy to tie,
who have maybe one or two children astray.
And I think this is something perhaps needs
to be kept in balance.
But God is easy to live with, and
we don't have to be religiously jumpy.
That's how he describes it, because God knows
our every action.
Another foundation is to get to know God's
priorities, and get to know God's growth rate
in your own life.
We're all growing at a different rate.
I was so impatient with God's people.
I used to want to, in my early
days, and even now and then nowadays, you
know, grab them by the neck.
And you know, I could have blown the
whole movement of OM to pieces so easily.
God is working in different people in different
ways.
And it takes time.
Fantastic book by Lane Adams.
Why is it taking so long?
A great man of God who was willing
even to go to a psychiatrist to get
some of his own problems straightened out.
He writes about that in his book.
Now this man is one of the greatest
Presbyterian churches in the United States.
And then a right emphasis on relationships.
I think this is why discipline living is
so hard for us as Christians, because we
have to be willing to scrap a whole
day's schedule to deal with one problem person.
Our priority, I believe, in evangelism and in
God's work is people.
We may have scheduling.
We may have to dictate so many letters.
We may have to make a radio broadcast
or some other big important thing.
But if some needy soul comes to our
door, I believe that not every case, in
most cases, should be the priority.
Kept within balance.
To know your limits.
Because I know in counseling, and I spend
more time counseling than preaching, that that can
wear you out faster than preaching.
Counseling one problem case can take more out
of me in two hours than preaching.
Any time.
And yet I believe I need just as
much of God's Spirit for that as for
ministry.
And then the foundation of making sure as
much as possible that in all things we
are maintaining spiritual balance.
The family, the work, some of these things
we've touched on.
Now, let's move into some specific areas.
First of all, our prayer life.
We would say there's no need to speak
about this.
It's so basic.
But doesn't that where, isn't that where the
devil often attacks?
The basic issues?
I meet many Christian leaders.
They acknowledge to me even some in our
own work.
In fact, we had a leaders meeting recently
and the Spirit of God moved upon us
in the prayer meeting.
One of our leaders stood up and said
he'd been away from God for months.
No communion.
At least communion.
He wasn't in overt sin, but he wasn't
walking with God.
And together we reached out for him and
and stood with him and he's back walking
in victory.
Our prayer life.
Samuel Chadwick, that great soul winner whose writings
most of you have read, said that will
be the one primary aim of Satan to
destroy your prayer life more than anything else.
How are you doing on that?
When the doctor mentioned jogging, I almost said
amen.
Then I remembered it was England.
I conserved myself.
Controlled myself.
But I believe in jogging.
I hate it.
I love the bed.
Alan Redpath said the greatest problem in Britain
is blanket victory.
Certainly true of me.
Getting the blanket off in the morning and
getting out of bed.
And I, knowing my limitations, I gave up
a long time ago.
Now I have someone help me.
They come to the door and they ring
the buzzer.
6 30 every morning until I'm there.
You can't leave this poor soul out in
the English weather.
6 30 in the morning leaning on your
doorbell, even if it is a chime.
So I get out of bed and I
go down and we go for a run.
Maybe a half a mile or a mile.
That's been the habit of my life.
That type of exercise almost my entire life
since I became a Christian.
I find more than keeping me in physical
condition.
It helps me fight morning depression.
My type of depression is more intellectual than
emotional.
The newspaper, the suffering, the tragedy, the hell
that seems to spring loose in this crazy
world.
And the state of the church and all
these negative things.
It just, as some Americans now say, it
just blows my mind.
And I find depression early in the morning.
You know, the Bible seems dry and you
don't want to pray.
And I found that a little physical exercise
early in the morning.
And have your cup of tea before or
after whenever.
Forgive me for my sugar.
Boy, I feel so guilty about that.
My doctor told me anything I put in
it'll burn it up in about 25 minutes.
He said I had a high octane engine.
Fortunately, he told me I had medium low
blood pressure and that's probably why I'm still
alive.
Yes, I find this getting up and a
little exercise is the key to my prayer
life because I was a professional at sleeping
in prayer.
I used to have men on my team
in India like this.
They could sleep in prayer on their knees.
I had this one brother.
I thought he was so spiritual.
He was there for an hour on his
knees.
I went over, brother, it's time for breakfast.
It reminds me of this fellow that tried
to have his quiet time under the blankets
with a torch.
And it seems to me that there are
practical things that we can do that we
can be more alert and then give ourselves
to the Lord.
You know, Oswald J.
Smith does most of his praying walking around
a table or his office.
He doesn't pray sitting down.
I do a lot of my praying walking
around the woods of Kent.
Hallelujah.
And I hope you'll be willing for some
of these practical disciplines that your prayer life
may increase.
But no matter what, it will take the
buffeting of the body and discipline.
We can work together in this.
Don't we admit one of the greatest needs
the church in Britain today is the prayer
meeting?
Some of you may have read an article
I wrote, What Happened to the Prayer Meeting,
published in a few British papers and in
Moody Monthly.
I'm so concerned about this.
And I hope you're faithful in getting in
to a local church prayer meeting or some
kind of midweek prayer meeting and encouraging God's
people and leading it.
We spend hours in preparation for sermons, but
we go into prayer meetings with no preparation
at all.
And then the people wonder, or you may
wonder, why it's dead.
Oh, how we need leadership in prayer.
And we just finished a wonderful night of
prayer over on Doulos.
We didn't believe anybody was going to come
because America is worse than Britain on this.
We had a thousand people for a night
of prayer.
It started at about eight o'clock.
Christian leaders came and we phoned some others.
Brother Andrew up and a few other Christian
leaders played it through a loudspeaker.
We had 400 people still praying at three
and four in the morning.
William McDonald, one of God's great Bible teachers,
he said he believed this was one of
the greatest needs in America.
I would love to see someone organize nights
of prayer throughout the nation.
You don't have to have a night of
prayer.
Many of our teams worldwide, they're free.
They have a day of prayer.
Have a morning of prayer.
But prayer for sure is the greatest discipline
and the greatest need of the hour.
And then I've written down discipline in details.
Don't think that details are unimportant.
Some very spiritual people think I'm going to
leave the details to someone else.
But no matter what your ministry is, you
need to have some files.
You need to have a good address book.
You need to have a few systems.
It saves time.
To me, one of the great challenges in
the Christian life is to redeem the time.
Redeem the time.
And I'm still challenged by that.
Little things can be entered into so that
you can redeem the time.
For example, some time ago, we produced some
prayer cards.
Some of you have seen these little cards.
52 needy nations in the world.
We don't need these to pray.
But if you're going to the Mind Wanderers
Club, as I do, you'll find that these
little maps of each country, prayer requests about
each nation, are valuable.
You're on a bus.
You're on a train.
You're waiting for someone.
You can just go through these and have
a great time of prayer.
You can do the same thing with memory
verses.
I try to feed on different tapes.
Some of you that I've never had the
opportunity to hear in person.
I've been listening to your tapes for years.
Generally, I listen to tapes when I'm shaving
or when I'm in the bathtub.
Because to me, that's a, you know, what
you like to do, if possible, two things
at once or three.
But never just one thing unless it's a
priority thing like prayer or counseling someone or
preaching.
But things like shaving, washing, driving.
You can listen to cassette tape when you're
driving.
Alan Redpass is a bit heavy when you're
driving, but you could try David Watson.
And I can't tell you how much spiritual
food I have received through those cassette tapes.
Little things do count.
And then the discipline of setting goals.
Do you have goals for 1980?
You've only got a few more days left
in this year.
Write some goals out.
I don't believe that's being legalistic.
I'm, not saying you have to make New
Year's, what do they call them?
Resolutions.
I'm not talking about that.
But goals after prayer, if they involve the
whole body, discussion with others, or if it's
a personal thing or a family thing.
Last year, as we went into some difficulties
in our family, I felt 1979 should be
the year of the family.
Now, really, every year is a year of
the family.
But if you've been a family neglector like
me, you know, you have to repent, and
I did.
And we had the year of the family,
and I've been home more than ever before,
and I've been doing all kinds of wild
things.
I even took up canasta.
I used to feel cards were all of
the devil.
That's what they teach you at Ingram Moody
Bible Institute.
But anyway, my son got into bridge, and
that was too much for me.
So we compromised on canasta.
I hope I don't break fellowship with all
of you, I know.
But I am convinced that so often little
things are big.
And we need to be disciplined in setting
goals.
I'm just going to take a few minutes
over time, because I lost five minutes.
I hope you won't mind that for the
canteen.
But I just must not fail to give
you these few more points.
The discipline of letter writing.
This is where I believe 90% here,
probably, if you're honest, you need to repent.
You need to repent.
Because most Christians are not good letter writers.
There's people you even said you were going
to write to, and they're still waiting.
We tell people we love them.
Good to see you, brother.
Praise the Lord.
We'll be remembering you.
Out he goes to Africa.
Out he goes to Europe.
Never hears from us again.
There are people you've led to Christ that
would, they'd worship, almost worship a letter from
you.
Or be certainly encouraged by it, but they
didn't get it.
And I believe that those of us in
evangelism and people's ministry have got to learn
to write letters.
You can get a dictaphone now.
I saw one in Smith's at St. Pancreas
a few hours ago.
29 pound.
You say, I don't have a secretary.
I'm not some big cheese leading some Christian
organization.
I'm just a little nobody.
What about your wife?
Maybe she could learn to type.
What about one of your own children?
Some of you look old enough to have
children.
I believe there are people in the churches
would be thrilled to do a few letters
for you.
And just imagine the blessing that would be.
The discipline of letter writing to me is
so important, especially in the age of impersonalization.
And I want to tell you, in evangelism,
we are up against a lot of prejudice.
A lot of criticism.
That's why I believe in what Dr. Schaeffer
says.
By the way, as you know, he's very
ill with cancer, but has been responding excellently
to the treatment.
But he says we have to engage in
pre-evangelism.
And I think that's so often true, breaking
down prejudice.
And in this age of depersonalization, a letter,
a phone call.
Why don't we make more use of the
phone call?
When phone calls after five or six are
so cheap.
It's cheaper now than a letter, if it
isn't too long.
And you don't have to have a long
call to encourage someone on.
I find many of God's people are discouraged.
And I believe we lack discipline in that
area.
And then discipline in the distribution of Christian
literature.
Isn't it interesting that if someone gives out
tracts, they're considered sort of naive.
Oh, that's all right for the new converts.
Oh, that's all right for, you know, late
adolescents give out tracts.
What a wonderful thing when mature, seasoned, I
hope not too much, Christian leaders are still
giving out tracts.
I don't mean you have to stand in
the corner and give out 5,000.
But just as you go, people are still
being saved and brought to Christ through literature
distribution.
And I will tell you our young converts,
our young Christians today, far more than learned
by what we're saying.
They're going to learn by what we're doing.
That which has become a disciplined reality in
our own lives.
We're going to do it differently.
But I think it's so important.
Many young people have said to me, what
depresses them is they don't see leaders in
evangelism.
Yes, leaders are willing to preach to crowds
on the radio, but in the streets, in
the markets.
I'm not saying you have to do that
every day.
Even once a week would bring a revolution
to the present scene in Britain today.
The apostle Paul was found in the marketplace
and in the streets and house to house.
And I know some of you, of course,
are doing far more than that of that
than I am.
It takes discipline, doesn't it?
And I am just convinced, and I'll close
just with this thought, that we have been
babying ourselves, many of us, for far too
long.
We have more hymns on the subject of
comfort than any other subject.
We have been babying ourselves.
We have become flabby and we have become
fat.
And when that happens spiritually, that's far worse
than it happening physically.
Because I know some mighty disciples who are
way overweight and they're burning on for the
Lord Jesus Christ.
I may say a few words about that,
but that's not my big concern.
It's when we become spiritually flabby, spiritually undisciplined,
and we don't have these realities that we're
even preaching about in our own lives.
Then I become worried about the church of
Jesus Christ.
We're not going to get here overnight.
But let's go from this conference at least
moving with a little more energy by God's
power in that direction.
Some people say, well, isn't it just the
Holy Spirit that does this?
It's just, you're going to get us all
into bondage.
People talk about, oh, I'm being in quiet
time bondage, because we have quiet time every
morning.
I go to this person and say, do
you have breakfast every morning?
Yeah.
Oh, breakfast bondage, huh?
Nobody's worried about that.
No matter how filled we are with the
Holy Spirit of God, He will not force
us to live the Christian life.
Jesus said, if you love me, keep my
commandments.
The power and the grace is there, but
we've got to take the step, embrace the
cross, and go forward with all of God's
strength.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time
of just having our minds renewed by your
word, by some of these quotations from great
men of the past.
We thank you that you know all about
us and you love us still.
And that in so many ways, you are
easy to live with.
We don't get to heaven because of discipline,
but because we're on the way to heaven,
saved by grace, we want to be all
that you would desire us to be.
Disciplined men and women in every area, and
balanced and built up in yourself.
We commit our lives to you as we
sung in the beginning of this meeting, Lord,
take our lives and let them be wholly
consecrated to thee, in Jesus' name.
Amen.