I want you to turn to the book
of Acts.
You know, if you try to get your
theology out of the book of Acts, you'll
probably end up very confused, because God has
given us the epistles, basically, for our New
Testament doctrine and teaching.
But if you go to get the pattern
for life and the example of the outworking
and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the
book of Acts is a good place to
go.
I'd like you to look at Acts chapter
20.
Now, we have the situation with Paul and
the Ephesian elders, beginning at the 17th chapter,
17th verse of the 20th chapter.
And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and
called the elders of the church.
And when they were come to him, he
said unto them, You know from the first
day that I came unto Asia, after what
manner I have been with you at all
seasons, serving the Lord with all humility of
mind, with many tears and temptations, which befell
me by lying in wait of the Jews.
And how I kept back nothing that was
profitable unto you, but have showed you and
have taught you publicly and from house to
house, 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, save that the Holy Ghost
witness it in every city, saying that bonds
and afflictions abide me.
But none of these things move me.
Neither count I my life dear unto myself,
so that I might finish my course with
joy and the ministry which I have received
of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel
of the grace of God.
And now behold, I know that ye all
among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom
of God shall see my face no more.
Wherefore, I take you to record this day
that I am pure from the blood of
all men.
For I have not shunned to declare unto
you all the counsel of God.
Take ye therefore unto yourselves and to all
the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost
hath 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.
Also of your own selves shall men arise,
speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after
them.
Therefore watch and remember that by 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 which are
sanctified.
I have coveted no man's silver or gold
or clothing or apparel.
Yea, yourselves know that these hands have ministered
unto my necessities, to them that were with
me.
I have showed you all things how that
so laboring you ought to support the weak.
And to remember the words of our Lord
Jesus, how he said, it is more blessed
to give than to receive.
And when he had thus spoken, he kneeled
down and prayed with them all.
And they all wept sore and fell on
Paul's neck and kissed him.
Sorrowing most of all for the words which
he spake, that they should not see his
face no more.
That they should see his face no more.
And they accompanied him unto the ship.
It's a great chapter, isn't it?
Recently I was speaking at Bible College.
And I read about four major scripture passages
on the life of the Apostle Paul.
And spoke on the subject of the life
of Paul.
And I don't think we have a picture
of discipleship and evangelism any better than in
the life of the Apostle Paul.
And I want to just briefly again this
afternoon to some extent, refresh your minds concerning
the life of Paul.
For Paul is our example.
An example of a man, a human being
who lived out the indwelling life of Christ.
Whereas today we mainly talk about it, Paul
lived it.
Whereas today we write books about it, he
walked it.
I think of the words of Paul, and
I don't want you to lose your place
there in Acts chapter 20.
Found in the book of Thessalonians, where he
says, Now
anyone who takes an intelligent study or makes
an intelligent study of the New Testament will
see that the message of the New Testament
and the drive of the New Testament is
aimed at producing moral quality in the lives
of those who read it.
You can use another term if you want,
you can call it holiness, you can call
it sanctification, you can call it whatever you
want.
But you must see and realize that God's
plan and desire for you is to conform
you to the image of Jesus Christ.
It isn't to fulfill the Great Commission, or
it doesn't fulfill the Great Commission, when we
run around the world spreading lukewarm Christianity.
I think I'd rather express it in the
words of A.W. Tozer that I've written
in my Bible after the Great Commission.
He says, And
that's
true.
What the regions beyond need today is not
a greater quantity of semi-dedicated, half-hearted
Christians who after the first persecution want the
first ship home.
Or the first, I won't say it.
What the world needs today is to see
men like the Apostle Paul.
You must realize that the Apostle Paul was
not some special creature in terms of innate
power.
He was a human being and it says
very clearly after one of the most vivid
descriptions of his life, that perhaps we should
look at in 1 Corinthians because I want
to give you plenty of scriptures to think
about.
Keep Acts 20 and go to 1 Corinthians
4 where we have a description of Paul's
apostolic ministry.
And before I read beginning at verse 9,
I need to read to you verse 16
where Paul says, Wherefore I beseech you, be
ye followers of me.
Now if Paul could say this to the
Corinthian church, the carnal Corinthian church that was
caught up with all kinds of egocentric ideas
and practices.
If Paul could say this to the Corinthian
church, he certainly can say it to us.
Be ye followers of me.
Then we read the verses that he's referring
to.
Verse 10.
Verse 9.
For I think that God hath set forth
us the apostles last, as it were, appointed
to death.
For we are made a spectacle unto the
world and to angels and to men.
We are fools for Christ's sake.
Ye are wise in Christ.
We are weak, but ye are strong.
Ye are honorable, but we are despised.
Even unto this present hour we both hunger
and thirst and are naked and are buffeted
and have no certain dwelling place.
And labor, working with our own hands, being
reviled, we bless.
Being persecuted, we suffer it.
Being defamed, we entreat.
We are made as the filth of the
world and are the offscouring of all things
unto this day.
I write not these things to shame you,
but as my beloved sons, I warn you.
For though ye have ten thousand instructors in
Christ, yet have ye not many fathers.
For in Christ Jesus I have begotten you
through the gospel.
Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of
me.
For this cause I have sent unto you
Timotheus, who is my beloved son and faithful
in the Lord, who shall bring you into
remembrance of my ways which be in Christ.
Isn't that terrific?
It's a terrific summary of Paul's strength.
My ways which be in Christ.
As I teach everywhere in every church.
Now some are puffed up as though I
would not come to you.
But I would come to you shortly, if
the Lord will, and will know not the
speech of them which are puffed up, but
the power.
For the kingdom of God is not in
word, but in power.
What will ye?
Shall I come unto you with a rod,
or in love, and in the spirit of
meekness?
The kingdom of God is not in word,
but in power.
Now that's a favorite word today in Christian
circles.
Power.
And it's my conviction that a majority, especially
of young people, are very much confused about
what power is with God.
And when you look at a verse, and
you quote it, like we like to quote
this verse.
The kingdom of God is not in word,
but in power.
You should read the context, or else you
become a little bit like the Jehovah Witnesses.
Who come to the doors, taking every possible
verse out of context, and able to construe
almost anything by it.
And when you look at this verse in
the context, you realize it is not what
many people think today.
Many people feel today that if we have
the power of God, we're going to have
all kinds of great things happen.
We're going to see these Muslims falling down
and all repenting and following Christ by the
hundreds.
And we're going to have all kinds of
things happening.
But that's just the opposite of what we
see in this context.
In this context, we see the Apostle Paul
going through all kinds of difficulties that all
of us would have prayed for deliverance from.
And we see that the power that the
Apostle Paul is referring to is moral power.
It is not firstly power that sort of
falls out of heaven and hits a man
on the head.
It's power in the life of a believer
to stand against the trials and persecutions and
difficulties that will come upon any man who
dares to follow Christ.
And that is the primary power that God
wants to put in your life.
That doesn't mean that God doesn't work in
convicting power on the sinner's heart.
He does.
But that is not what he's referring to
primarily in this passage.
He's referring to the kind of power that
comes in the disciple so that when the
hard times come, when the fruitless times come,
when the struggles come, when the trials come,
he can stand fast, unmovable, abounding in the
work of the Lord as he described in
1 Corinthians 15.
Because we see here what Paul went through.
Now our day and the religion of our
day is aimed at getting more blessing for
miminim work and miminim prayer.
And more deliverance from any little disease that
might bother us, a cord on the end
of our toe and anything else people want
to get rid of it.
And they'll do almost anything to do it.
If I have a campaign here and I
put up a big sign that thousands are
going to be healed, and don't misquote me,
I believe that God heals.
But if I have a campaign like that,
people will travel all over the world to
get there.
You let me put a sign up taken
from the New Testament.
Philippians 1.29, you shall not only believe
on him, suffer for his sake.
You have been called not only to believe
on him, to suffer for his sake.
And I'll put a sign up and say,
come all free, no offering to be taken.
We give hardships, sufferings, trials, difficulties, testing.
And you watch the people flock.
You'll have the meeting in the vestry, if
you have any at all.
And yet this is the rock bed of
New Testament Christianity.
And it grieves my soul, the people that
flood out of my own country, living on
salaries the likes of which big men in
the business world are not getting.
Living in the lap of luxury, staying in
the biggest hotels.
I'm not referring to Billy Graham or any
specific individual.
And then come to us and try to
tell us about New Testament Christianity.
I just will not believe.
As I read this book, as I see
the message of the New Testament, it's a
message in which the very foundation stone is
hardship, suffering, trials, difficulties.
And the power that God wants to give
us is the power not necessarily to jump
over them, go around them, but the power
to go right through at any cost.
And no matter how you study your New
Testament, you'll see it.
If you read verses in context.
Paul's life was a long history of suffering.
If you think for a minute that the
Apostle Paul had a prayer meeting, when he
got up from the prayer meeting, everything was
solved, then you better reread your Bible because
I don't know why he wrote most of
the epistles.
He said in his epistles that he was
praying for all of these churches, and yet
it's obvious from the epistles that the problems
were not all being sorted out simply because
the great Apostle Paul had prayed.
He explains in the first chapter of many
epistles how he's been praying for them, and
then he has to go on and write
a whole epistle trying to undo all their
problems.
So you see, it's not just a matter
of mouthing an interesting prayer and then expecting
everything to suddenly become flat and even and
smooth and lovely.
Well, Alec was very sorry that one of
the tapes from our leadership conference didn't come
out.
Brother Frank Dietz was speaking on the subject
of the cult of softness, the cult of
softness, and most of us, whether we want
to admit it or not, at least have
half a membership card in the cult of
softness.
And we basically all of our lives choose
the easy way.
Subconsciously, you must realize, subconsciously, naturally, we choose
the easy way.
And I'm convinced that modern psychology has proven
that most of us act according to subconscious
drive rather than logical, sensible, reasonable, conscious level
thinking.
We're driven by the various drives of our
unconscious mind, by the inner self, and that's
why we're always doing things and we sometimes
wonder why we do them.
Have you ever done anything and you say,
Oh great, why did I do that?
Why did I say that?
Why did I go there?
Why do I have this habit?
Why can't I get rid of this particular
thing in my life?
And it's because this drive, this unconscious drive,
is in control.
And I believe the greatest warfare is not
the warfare of how many tracks we can
give out in the streets of Paris.
The greatest warfare is right within you.
The flesh lusters against the spirit and the
spirit against the flesh and the two are
contrary.
And you can give whatever terminology you want.
And you can polish it over with whatever
theory you want, but it's there and I've
seen it with every man I've ever met.
This tremendous battle within.
Praise be to God.
The word of God says there is victory.
The word of God says if you walk
in the spirit you shall not fulfill the
lust of the flesh.
And oh that some of us in these
days might learn what it is to walk
in the spirit.
You know, I don't think you'll ever know
whether you're walking in the spirit until you
get out in some tough situations and until
you get out of the cult of softness
and get out of the padded life.
Most of us are constantly padding our lives.
Our homes are padded, our diet is padded,
the way we think, the way we walk,
the way we talk, it's all padded.
To avoid the collisions with life, and that's
why we have so much mental breakdown.
Because the padding will only go so far.
And the more you soften your life, the
more padding you put, the harder it will
be, listen, the harder it will be when
that crisis comes.
Mental illness is higher among the rich than
among the poor.
Higher among the elite than the uneducated.
Higher in Hollywood than in the villages of
Bihar.
Why?
Because these people have all the padding of
the cult of softness that's available.
If a woman is having a problem in
the kitchen, she buys some gadget to solve
the problem.
If she's having a problem in her diet,
she just goes out and buys whatever she
needs.
If it's weight-losing pills, that's a shilling
a piece, she buys them.
But whatever particular need she has, she nags
her husband and she gets it.
And since the husband has so much money,
it's no particular problem.
It's better to give her what she wants
than hear her yapping around the house.
And so the padding gets thicker and thicker
and thicker.
And they feel a two-room house is
a bit crowded and it's not enough privacy.
Well, then we get a three-room house
and that's not large enough.
And so, some of my friends in the
United States with 20-room homes, they still
discover they're not happy.
And the more padding you put, the more
ease, the more easy ways, the harder it
will be when the real crisis comes that
no padding will help.
I don't know if I'm communicating.
Way back 200 years ago when the men
who went into America were rough and strong
and physically able and had to work hard
and the women suffered, these people didn't have
these enormous problems of emotional illness.
They had no time to get all involved
in all this thinking and introspection and all
this that causes so many of these problems.
They were hard-working.
They were physically fit.
And things were hard.
This is why the mission situation is becoming
worse and worse because the gap between a
disciplined soldier of Jesus Christ who wants to
suffer and the kind of life that's coming
today out of most of us is getting
wider and wider and wider.
So that years ago, that which was hardly
suffering at all to a man who lived
in Britain who was already having it hard
living here, now the gap is so great
between the life we live here and what
we're going to have to live out there
that it becomes impossible and so there's mental
breakdown and all kinds of other problems.
The cult of softness, the love of ease
is producing a gap between us and the
kind of man that God would have us
be so great that there are some men
in missions today that doubt it can ever
be bridged.
And I know that that gap is so
great in some young people that they will
never be missionaries despite their desire to be
so.
And it's not all their fault.
They have been reared in a culture and
in an environment that has made them unfit
to be an ambassador for Jesus Christ and
the regions beyond.
We realize that one of the purposes of
OM is that young people can see if
they really are fit, if they really have
the makeup and the stamina to take the
missionary situation today, which isn't getting any easier.
The villages of New Guinea are not being
lined with silver coating.
In India today, in the villages, they're living
the same way they lived 2,000 years
ago.
Can you imagine what it is to take
a man out of the cult of softness,
out of the kind of life we live,
where basically we do what we want, when
we want, we have sufficient money to get
what we need, we have a soft home
and a nice environment and plenty of food,
what it is to take a man out
of that environment and thrust him into an
Indian village where people are living as they
lived in 1 BC.
You know, there's not even 10% of
the missionaries in India today that are laboring
in villages.
Can't, can't possibly adapt to that kind of
life.
And the only hope I see is that
now, while we're young, while our lives are
still being molded and still being formed, while
you're still capable of doing something about it,
to do something and to do something fast
and to do something desperately.
Or you will wind up in a situation
where you won't change even if you want
to.
I've had older men of God stand before
me and kneel before me in prayer and
weep because they wanted this way of life,
but they knew it was too late.
They knew their life would never change.
They knew basically even they would never change.
The cult of softness had taken its toll
and it's taken its toll in the evangelical
church in a way that is absolutely horrifying.
Recently I was reading in one of the
famous missionary magazines about one of the African
missions.
Known to most all of you, I'm sure.
Now missionary leaders are just, just overwhelmed with
the job of training their new recruits for
the regions beyond.
They don't know what to do.
And they've said over and over again, the
greatest problem is lack of discipline.
Well the word discipline and the word discipleship,
you know they have something in common.
They have something in common.
Discipline is basically doing what you know you
should do, not what you feel like doing.
This is why we don't pray much.
We don't feel like praying.
If you felt like praying, you would pray.
This is why we don't go out to
the doors and evangelize and do this personal
work and other things.
We don't feel like doing it.
Oh well, we might have some kind of
nice experience and then we'll feel like doing
it for a while, maybe even a year
or so.
You know, youthful zeal will last a year
or two.
But oh, to stick at it.
That's another story, isn't it?
And so most of the things that God
wants us to do, don't get done because
we don't feel like it.
And we don't feel like it because our
feelings have been catered to so long.
And we live this way so long that
it is literally a revolution.
And that's just what it will take in
your life.
So what do people say at this point?
They say, well this is not for me.
This full time work is not for me.
I'm not going to be a missionary.
I can't do it.
I have to have a little home somewhere
in England.
And I couldn't possibly.
And so we withdraw from the armies of
God.
We withdraw from the invasion.
And we determine that we're going to set
up our little shrine and our little castle
somewhere in England.
And we discover after a few years, it
catches up, 5, 10, 15 years.
That doesn't work either because the warfare can
be just as real in a little house
in Birmingham as it can in a village
out in Beehive.
I want to tell you, young person, stop
trying to escape reality.
Stop trying to avoid the hardnesses.
Stop trying to avoid the difficulties.
Stop trying to avoid the hard way.
And decide today to face reality at any
cost.
And reality in life means hardness, tragedy, difficulties,
trials, and all that's involved.
Billy Graham said recently that life at its
best is full of sadness.
And I believe he's a man who's seen
it.
It's true.
I know many girls.
Oh, this life's not for me.
Discipleship.
Oh, my husband going out to the regions
beyond.
This can't be.
And they think the answer is the normal
life.
What they call a normal life.
Got a nice home and my husband get
a good secure job.
He'll bring us 15 pounds a weekend.
We'll put so much in this account.
We'll have our security.
We'll have this and that.
We'll have our two little children in a
proper hospital where they can be taken care
of.
They're all planned out.
Nice and well padded.
It's ideal.
But it doesn't work.
I've counseled with dozens and dozens of people
in the secular world.
Businessmen.
My wife has done the same.
It doesn't work.
It's a dream.
It's a phony bubble and it'll pop in
your face.
One out of every nine women in the
British Isles spends part of her life in
a mental institution.
One out of every nine.
What do you think your chances are?
And they aren't coming from the ranks of
the people who are overworked.
They're generally coming from the ranks of the
people who have padded their life very well.
Don't seek the soft way.
Don't seek the easy way out.
Don't seek the back door because at the
back door the ditch is bigger than on
the front.
And if you go out the front door
and you follow God's way, He'll take you
through the ditch.
But when you go out the back door,
there's no way across.
This is the kind of power that Paul
talked about.
Power that took him through wildernesses often.
Power that took him through shipwreck.
Power that took him through all the trials
of the churches with all their problems because
the New Testament church had its problems, plenty
of problems.
And he says in describing his life in
the 11th chapter of Corinthians, after all of
this description of this difficult life that Paul
has, and he then describes, and that which
came upon me, the care of all the
churches.
This, I believe, is reality in discipleship.
Determined in your heart by the grace of
God to seek the Lord Jesus Christ no
matter where it leads.
No matter where it leads.
Oh, I tell you, I wish, I wish
I had more ability to communicate this truth.
I feel so often I'm such a weak,
frail vessel to communicate what God is trying
to say through so many of these passages
of Scripture and through the life of the
Apostle Paul.
The power of God is not in word,
but in power.
You knew what manner of life I had
among you.
Think of that verse 11.
Even unto this present hour we both hunger
and thirst and are naked and are buffeted
and have no certain dwelling place.
Why couldn't Paul just pray and get a
dwelling place?
It's amazing how we Christian groups are praying
for dwelling places all the time.
And all the Bible schools in America, they're
all building their castles.
I call them mud pies.
They're spending millions, millions of dollars to put
Bible school students in such luxury that all
it does is produce more chocolate per pound.
I want to tell you it's a curse
on the earth.
And it's not just the little boy of
28 who's saying this.
This is being preached now by some of
the intellectual giants in the Church of Christ.
They know, they know this is the need.
We were amazed in O.M. recently when
we received a letter from the InterVarsity Christian
Fellowship Committee in Chicago for the International Missionary
Convention in Urbana.
The biggest missionary convention in the world where
Billy Graham is generally the main speaker.
And they wrote to us and they asked
if I would go and be one of
the main speakers at this convention.
And I saw the letter and I almost
fell over.
I wrote back and told them that I
didn't think that this would be possible because
I probably would be in India and a
few other things.
They wrote me back on behalf of the
entire committee.
And this is what they said.
The young people of our generation must have
this message.
These are the men who are probably closer
to world missions than almost any men in
that country.
This was their statement.
The young college men of our nation must
have this message.
You must come.
That's what they said.
Now if these men who have so many
fingers on the evangelistic situation in the world
today say that the young people of our
generation must have this message, it seems to
me it's about time that a few of
us who are just beginning need to pay
a little more attention.
We must have this message of discipline.
We must have this message of the warfare.
We must have this message of deny self,
take up the cross and follow him.
We must have this message of esteeming the
brother as better than yourself.
We must have the message of unity at
any cost apart from compromise with truth.
Without it, we're doomed for failure.
Because we're faced over here with a tremendous
enemy, militant Islam, militant Mormonism, militant JWism, militant
Hinduism, militant Catholicism.
How many members of the legion of Virgin
Mary will come out of Ireland this summer?
How many?
Hundreds, perhaps thousands again sweeping across Britain winning
converts.
How many Muslims are sweeping into Africa to
win Africa for Islam?
We see the result for every one led
to any form of Christianity including all the
cults.
Nine are receiving Islam.
You see it even in Britain as militant
Islam presses forward in back of our headquarters
in Bolton.
They're building a mosque, moving into a mosque.
Militant sects, militant cults, militant communism.
Where is militant Christianity in 1967?
Have you seen it?
If you have, please introduce me to some
of it because I'm just itching to see
what it looks like.
I want to take a picture.
I want at least to meet whoever's involved
in it.
And although the evangelical church is producing one
book a day, one new evangelical book a
day.
I tell you, I'll be very honest, in
some ways I'm so sick of seeing books.
So sick, books, books, books, books.
Every time somebody drops a penny, somebody writes
a book.
And every time I put anything in print
of mine, there's only one or two things,
I almost tremble.
I think, well, what's the use?
And an awful lot of people have to
sort of pressure me and do a lot
of things before I put something in print.
Yet we know God is using these books.
We must maintain a balance.
One new book every day at least, probably
closer to two evangelical books.
How many books on the life of the
Apostle Paul?
How many books on the Pauline epistles?
How many professors going around teaching the Pauline
epistles?
How many conventions where we're going to have
instruction on the Pauline epistles and the life
of Paul?
But I have one question, young people.
Where are the Pauls?
That's my question.
Forgive me if maybe I'm an agnostic, but
where are the Pauls?
Where are men who live like this?
Where are men who love like this?
Where are men who suffer like this?
Where are men who are ready to do
anything for the cause of Christ like this?
I just don't find them.
And yet I'm convinced that this book is
true.
I'm convinced that this message can produce this
kind of man in its different context.
Because God is not going to take away
your personality and annihilate you.
He's going to take you with your problems
and your personality.
And He's going to make you and conform
you to the image of Jesus Christ.
And it will take all your life.
But it's a wonderful thing and it brings
more glory to God than we can ever
imagine.
And this is the question.
And this is what we have to face
up to.
If we're going to be realists.
We cannot stick our head in the clouds
any longer.
And go on singing our hymns.
When we put our heads in the cloud
and reality is down here, we're up here
singing.
My Jesus, I love thee.
We have so many wonderful hymns.
Evangelical Christianity has produced the greatest number of
wonderful hymns of any religious group in the
whole world.
We're a religion of hymns.
And there's an average of a new hymn
book coming out every couple of weeks.
With more and more hymns.
And they're more wonderful and some of them
are more militant.
And we sing them and we change them
and we play with them and we organize
them.
And oh my, it's just a great, great
fog of evangelical nonsense.
Because if you sing a hymn and you
don't want it to be real in your
life.
And you're not ready to obey it and
you're not ready to live up to it.
It's just noise.
It's sounding brass and tingling cymbal.
If you sing my Jesus, I love thee.
And have something against a brother or sister
in Christ next to you.
You're a hypocrite.
You're not the kind of hypocrite that's headed
for hell.
But you're the kind of hypocrite that's going
to face something at the judgment seat of
Christ.
When you'll account for all of your works.
And all of your ill feelings against the
other brothers and sisters.
And it's just wrong.
I think of how we sing some of
these things.
I'll never forget one time.
I was in church and the man's chairing
the meeting.
He was so loaded with money.
And he was known for it.
I had tea in his home.
And he had so much gold and silver.
And he was showing me this cup and
that cup and this silver.
And something we ate on.
I could hardly lift the stuff we ate
on.
And we sang that night the hymn in
the church.
Take my life and let it be.
And we got to that verse.
Take my silver and as my gold.
And oh I tell you the volume was
great.
It was a great church.
They were a jovial crowd.
He sang with all of us.
Take my silver and my gold.
Never batted an eyelash.
I'm sure he never even thought of all
the silver around his house.
Sure he never thought of a few hundred
thousand quid he had in his bank account.
Probably never dawned on him, you see.
A great damnable dichotomy has come.
In which our theology and our hymnology and
our religious ritualism is in one compartment.
And our life is in another.
And they don't mix.
They don't mix.
So that people can talk about dedication and
commitment and being sold out and loving Jesus.
And they can talk about the deeper life
and the Holy Spirit.
And it's over here in their life.
The way they eat, the way they talk,
the way they spend their money, where they
go, what they do with their free time.
That's over here and the two have nothing
to do with one another.
A.W. Tozer says, we are the great
game players.
We play the game of words.
Like when you go out to watch a
football match you see them kick the ball
around.
It's terrific.
Kicking the ball, kicking the ball.
And the people there watching the game when
the game is over, nobody's any different.
When the game is over, no one's had
a moral change.
When the game is over, no one changes
their life or what they're going to do
with their money or anything else.
And the same way with us.
Come to our evangelical conventions and our meetings
and our special conferences and most evangelicals are
spending most of their time if they're doing
anything trying to persuade other evangelicals to believe
the same as them.
That's the main activity.
When you finally do get dedicated you give
your time to persuading others to believe like
you.
And meanwhile, 150,000 souls go out into
hell a day.
It's completely unrealistic.
It's just the game of words.
And we're especially good at Bible college of
this.
A Bible college can be the most unrealistic
place in the entire world.
And we specialize in the game of words.
And we go, we have our game, we
throw the words around, all kinds of phrases
and all kinds of verses taken out of
the context and we play the game of
words and hymns and songs and everything else.
But when the game is over, even though
we're very excited when we get in the
game, sometimes our tempers even get up and
we're standing for truth at any cost.
But when the game is over, we're just
the same.
Morally, mentally, emotionally, we're the same.
And we wonder why so many are taking
the road of agnosticism.
We wonder why so many are vomiting up
our evangelicalism and taking the road of Bishop
Robinson and all the rest.
Look, D.L. Moody had the answer.
He said, lukewarm Christians will produce more atheists
than all the unbelieving books ever published.
It's true.
And until there's a move where unbelieving people
can see living Christianity, nothing will ever happen.
We've seen this happen.
I think we've seen it happen in Switzerland
through the ministry of Dr. Schaeffer, a man
who not only has a great apologetic message
for our day but who has a life.
And he has this little retreat up in
Switzerland and all kinds of unbelievers and agnostics
and atheists and people that have completely turned
from evangelical faith or are just men out
of the art world and all of those
things, they come there and they listen to
his tapes and they watch his life and
they speak with him over the table and
number after number of these men, militant unbelievers,
have surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ because
they've seen living Christianity, real Christianity.
And this is going to do more than
all of our books and all of our
tracts and all the challenged newspapers even if
we could fly them over Britain and drop
them down by the ton.
People in Britain today must see living saints.
They must see living witnesses.
Not people who are emotionally on a tangent.
Not people who are just throwing words around.
Not people who claim one thing and live
another thing.
But they must see disciples.
They must see men that live this life.
This is evangelism.
Oh yes, there'll be literature.
There'll be witnessing.
There'll be preaching.
All these are a part.
But the basis is this kind of life.
Doesn't there have to be a spiritual revolution?
You say yes, but can God really change
me?
Can God really change a generation of young
people?
Can God really raise out of this softness,
out of this ease, out of this blindness,
out of this egocentric cesspool that most of
us are walking around in?
Can He really raise up men who live
like Christ?
Can He really raise up men whose brother
is better than Himself?
Can He really raise up men like Paul
who will throw their life to the wind
and love suffering like a bosom brother?
Can God do that in 1967?
I say yes, because He has said the
Kingdom of God is not in word, but
in power.
And it's God's power that can do this
in you.
God's life in you that can do it.
And I believe much depends on whether you
really want it.
Much depends on whether you're willing to let
go of your idols and let go of
God, and God alone.
You know, forsaking all is not some difficult
thing once you get God's perspective.
Giving your life wholly to Christ, doing His
will no matter what it is, is not
hard once you have it in perspective.
It's like holding a small coin in one
hand.
Just a ten naira piece a piece from
India.
It's worth just a little more than a
penny.
And you're holding that in your hand and
you think, if you go to the right
place you might be able to get a
cup of tea.
And you think of how nice that cup
of tea will be.
You're very thirsty.
You haven't had one for a long time
and you think there's the secret to the
cup of tea.
And you squeeze on it.
And another man comes over here and he's
got a hundred rupee note.
He's got a wallet and he's got a
hundred rupee note.
And he takes it out and you just
look at that and you just, well, you
better stick with your ten paisa piece.
You know, that seems like pure insanity to
me.
A man's offering me a hundred rupees and
I'm holding on to ten paisa.
Well, the illustration almost seems silly.
And yet I tell you, I believe there
are young people here tonight, this afternoon.
You're squeezing a little ten paisa piece.
Your ego has you so fooled that you're
holding on to a ten paisa piece, to
some little crumply things in this world, a
few little plans, a few ideas, your love
for self, your desire to be wanted, the
feeling of wanting to be important.
Oh, so many little ten paisa piece.
You're holding on and God is offering you
not a hundred rupee note.
He's offering you an open checkbook.
An open checkbook full of promises, full of
reality, full of blessings, full of fellowship.
It's true, some of them can only be
cashed in banks that lie across rivers of
suffering and hardship and trial and difficulty.
It's true, some of them can only be
cashed in the land of deserts.
It's true that some of them might only
be cashable in Afghanistan.
In the first church of Afghans that hasn't
yet been born, the checkbook is there.
Oh, I pray, let go of your paisas.
Let go of your pennies and take God's
checkbook.
It's true, Jesus said, except you forsake all
that you have.
You can't be my disciple, but he said
in Philippians, following it up, just
as he had promised.
But as long as you're holding on to
your own, as long as you're supplying your
need through your own ingenuity, your own craftiness,
your own driving force, as long as you're
supplying your own need, God can't supply.
It doesn't mean that it's not good to
have a good hard-working job because oftentimes
that's God's provision and you must seek out
God's way concerning it.
But oh, might we know the reality of
discipleship in the 20th century.
Not even 20% of the people who
come on OM really follow this way for
their life.
That's what the Word of God said.
Only a few.
And even those who went on the team
of the Apostle Paul, many of them didn't
continue.
That's evident by what he said in a
number of places.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop preaching
it.
That doesn't mean we should stop making it
our target, and I believe I wrote them
in the back of my Bible.
The words of Jonathan Edwards, and this is
what he said, and how often it's helped
me.
He said, I go out to preach with
two propositions in mind.
First, every person ought to give his life
to Christ.
Second, whether or not anyone else gives him
his life, I will give him mine.
And it's my desire this afternoon that every
one of you in this room would give
your life to Christ and your King as
your Lord and your Master.
But I want to tell you, and there's
a few more I think who would say
the same, if no one else gives theirs,
I still want to give mine.
And you must determine this in your church.
You must determine this in your environment.
Some of you are in difficult environments.
That your desire, yes, is that many would
come to Christ, many would follow Christ, but
determine in your heart that second proposition, even
if no one else will, you will, by
the grace of God.
That's apostolic Christianity.
That's discipleship.
May God grant you the reality of it.
Let us pray.
Our Heavenly Father, the Word is sharp, double
-edged sword, piercing even to the marrow of
the inner part of us, cutting into our
subconscious mind, into our egocentric living, into our
frowniness, into our hypocrisies, and showing us that,
oh God, we need you.
Showing us, Lord, that we cannot go without
thee.
That in the flesh we can do nothing.
And causing us to realize that you are
the living God.
And, oh, with you all things are possible.
God, we know that the kingdom of God,
your kingdom, is not in word, but in
power.
Move in us through that power, which we
believe is the indwelling Christ, the Holy Spirit
God.
Might we not quench it, hinder it?
Might we yield and bend daily at every
instinct, at every junction, at every roundabout?
Might we take the right path, the narrow
path, the hard path, by the grace of
God?
Lord, you know how easy it is to
misunderstand some of these words that just flow.
I'm only a clay bissel.
So borrow, Lord, by your grace, straighten out,
and cause each one to understand and to
take that which must be applied.
In Jesus' name, Amen.