First aid for spiritual emergencies.
Now, in the midst of your mission or
the term in general, you're liable to have
some spiritual emergencies with other people.
An injury will occur.
People will get hurt.
And I found this in a little pamphlet
and wrote it down.
I have my quotation book.
It's a really red hot quotation.
I try to copy it from this little
book which is beginning to fall apart.
Let me read this little quotation because many,
many people have been greatly helped by this.
In the event of injury inflicted by a
brother or sister in Christ, follow this procedure.
Number one, keep calm.
Still your soul before God at the moment
of impact.
Be still and know that I am God.
Rushing about trying to correct the injury usually
causes greater damage.
Number two, apply direct pressure of understanding to
the wound.
What caused the incident?
Could you have prevented it?
Negligent?
How does the offending party feel?
What if things were reversed?
Then what?
Three, wash the wound thoroughly with kindness to
remove all harshness and vindictiveness.
Number four, coat liberally with the ointment of
love.
This will protect from the infections of resentment
and bitterness.
Five, bandage the injury with forgiveness.
This will keep it out of sight until
the wound is healed.
Six, don't pick the scab off by bringing
up the subject and opening your wound.
Serious danger from the infection in number four
still exists and this could be fatal spiritually.
Seven, beware of self-pity which is painful
and touchy.
This is often referred to as withdrawal pains
evidenced by the injured one withdrawing from others
especially the one inflicting the injury.
Remedy, accept apologies.
Number eight, prescription.
Take a generous dose of antibiotics from the
word of God several times daily using prayer
each time.
This has a soothing effect and is definitely
a very good painkiller.
And number nine, stay in close contact with
a great physician at all times.
Depend upon his strength, joy, and peace to
help you in your convalescence.
And ten, evidence of full recovery is noticed
when the patient is in full fellowship and
harmony especially with the offending party.
You know in Operation Mobilization we had some
very unpleasant experiences at times.
People of different backgrounds and different theologies.
It happens also at Bible schools.
One Bible school in this country a strong
-minded puritanical Calvinist met with an Arminian in
the loo and they exchanged words and actually
ended up exchanging blows.
I don't know who who swung first the
Calvinist or the Arminian but I think in
either case God didn't get much glory in
that particular situation.
And as we move together an interdenominational group
as you are in the Christian Union which
is one of the most beautiful things about
it all, at times things get said, people
get hurt, one of your theological corns gets
tread upon or one of your favorite doctrines
gets thumped or something even worse than that
like your own ego.
And that little first aid for spiritual emergency
may be of some help.
I'd like to just mention one other book.
I've mentioned books this morning so we'll not
go into further detail about that.
I'd like to mention just Operation World.
How many of you already have this book?
That is really encouraging.
Now I don't know why the rest of
you don't have a copy but I want
to encourage you thinking of the verse the
first shall be last because you don't have
a copy.
You are going to get a better deal
than the brothers and sisters next to you.
You're going to get a hardback copy of
this book if you want for lower than
the price of the paperback, at least the
present price.
Somehow we printed too many of these hardbacks
and there wasn't a great market for them.
We're hoping some people will put them in
their church library.
Now we don't agree with everything that's stated
in this book.
It's one man's production and it's quite a
tremendous work considering that.
The new edition has a few of the
strong, some of the right-wing political statements
just toned down a little bit.
We got a Cambridge graduate to do that
and we're encouraged by that.
Patrick Johnson is a real man of God
and he was again the speaker at our
conference, spent a year on OM recently, is
now the research secretary of WEC and he's
the one who put this book together and
I just want to just commend it as
an outstanding book.
It has prayer requests on almost every nation
in the world.
Someone said to me they felt the most
valuable book they had next to their bible
for prayer, which is the topic you have
asked me to speak on.
So I commend this book and we're giving
it for £1.50 and in order to
encourage you, we're giving you a free cassette
with the book and many groups sell those
things for £2, so that's a pretty good
deal.
We're selling them for a pound or three
for £2.
Now if you already bought one of these
this morning, go back and just take your
cassette.
They won't be there that long unless I
can leave them with someone, but I hope
you'll be encouraged to get Operation World and
a cassette, preferably the one on maintaining balance
because it's the one I have the most
of and that also will be a good
follow-up on some of the things I'd
like to say.
Let's pray together.
Lord, we look to you now in this
limited time as we think about this vast
subject of prayer, that it will be profitable
and that we will have something from your
word.
We thank you for the way you answer
prayer.
We thank you for the mystery of prayer
and we believe that this mission and the
battle of this mission will be won upon
our knees.
We look to you now to guide us
in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Matthew chapter 9, one of my favourite passages
on the subject of prayer.
It would help me in my speaking to
know how many of you have not heard
me speak before.
I'm relatively new to you.
That would help about 70% because I
feel it would be good if I could
just give my own testimony linking it with
this whole subject of prayer because as far
as I can see it, I was literally
prayed into the kingdom by a praying woman
of God.
Matthew chapter 9, starting at verse 35, and
Jesus went about all the cities and villages
teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel
of the kingdom and healing every sickness and
every disease among the people.
But when he saw the multitudes, he was
moved with compassion on them because they were
faint and were scattered abroad as sheep having
no shepherd.
Then said he unto his disciples, the harvest
truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few.
Just think, this is the word of the
Lord Jesus, 2,000 years ago.
The harvest truly is plenteous, the labourers are
few.
And then that command, pray ye therefore the
Lord of the harvest that he will send
forth workers or labourers into his harvest.
So clear, isn't it?
First, a picture of the Lord Jesus, a
man of action, out going from town to
town and village to village.
A few months ago I was going through
Israel visiting our teams.
Our work in Nazareth among Arabs is led
by a young dynamic carpenter from Nazareth named
George Khalil.
I was in Nazareth ministering at that little
assembly there and then traveling along the plain
of Megiddo and thinking of some of the
things that took place there years ago.
Jesus Christ was a man of action.
You know, there's a subtle philosophy around England
that sort of basically says if as a
young Christian you do anything, it's probably youthful
zeal.
And I have seen more and more young
people get into this passivity cult.
Not that it's an organized cult, but it's
there.
What happens?
They launch out in some evangelistic thing.
There's problems, they make mistakes, which is quite
normal.
And then someone comes along with a little
super spiritual message saying, this is why you've
had so much difficulty, you're in the flesh.
And if we're sensitive young people, we see
our mistakes, we feel bad about some of
the things we've done wrong.
We easily fall for this line that we
have sort of been in the flesh.
And so we start backing off from activity
and we start withdrawing and getting into some
kind of spiritual circle in which we mainly
emphasize our own spiritual life.
I believe this is a subtle pitfall from
the enemy because I don't think we can
emphasize our spiritual life without witness.
Spirituality does not take place and does not
grow in a vacuum.
And I do not believe that because we
make mistakes as young people, and I made
plenty in my teens and twenties and still
do, that doesn't mean we're in the flesh.
Being in the spirit doesn't mean you don't
make mistakes.
It's not all black and white.
Isn't that one of the greatest problems in
our spiritual thinking?
That we're all in the flesh and we
don't know how to handle, therefore, our basic
humanity factor or our limitations.
One of the greatest problems in my Christian
life was a failure to accept my limitations
and to live in the light of them.
Having a definite program for spiritual growth and
yet not copping out from facing the reality
of my own weaknesses, limitations, and humanity.
And it almost got me in a lot
of trouble.
So Jesus gives the example and is the
perfect picture of balance as a man who
knew the Father, spent whole nights in prayer,
gave us the Sermon on the Mount and
so much more, and yet is found going
from village to village and place to place,
healing and preaching and teaching.
And most of his disciples, if not all
of them, were doing the same thing almost
immediately after his death, certainly not long after
Pentecost.
What an exciting challenge the Book of Acts
is.
I read the Book of Acts every year,
sometimes two or three times a year, because
without an understanding of the Book of Acts,
we do not know anything really about the
Church.
And it's a very important book, not as
a theological textbook, but as an example of
how God was working.
And I appreciated one of the things stated
by one of the speakers at Keswick this
summer, who emphasized that there is no one
pattern in the Book of Acts for Church
life.
And this is one of the reasons I'm
so strongly convinced that the Christian Union is
biblical.
It's true, the exact structure of the Christian
Union is not found in the Book of
Acts.
Neither is the Sunday School, neither is the
China Inland Mission, neither is so many of
the greatest things that God has ever used,
including the structure that was found in the
Welsh Revival.
But the basic principles, the mentality, the attitude,
the reality is found.
Donald McGovern, that great Church leader and former
missionary, had just come from Korea, where he
was at a meeting of two million people,
Christians, meeting in a gigantic airport on the
runways.
What a man, close to 80 years of
age.
He ministered at an OM conference last month,
and it was exciting.
And he showed us from the Book of
Acts that it was not the Church in
Antioch that sent out the first missionaries.
If you study it carefully, you'll find that
it was five men who fasted and prayed
from that Church who sent out the missionaries.
Now, I don't, on that point, care which
theory you have.
We've always thought it was the Church that
sent them out.
But here's a man who knows a lot
more about the Word than we do, comes
along and drops this little bomb on us,
which we didn't mind because basically we see
that the Holy Spirit works in different ways
in different groups and different fellowships.
Just as we saw this morning, being filled
with the Spirit, Ephesians, Colossians, the Holy Spirit
isn't even mentioned.
And there's a danger that one Christian union
in Britain will try to copy another Christian
union.
And sometimes we hear, oh, this is happening
at the Christian union, and so and so.
This happened and that happened.
Oh, if this only happened in our Christian
union, how much more blessing we would have.
Now, over here in Wales, you're all a
little more conservative, which is helpful.
Tozer says that in the present religious scene,
it's good to develop a little bit of
reverent skepticism.
Not to believe everything that comes across the
borders from England.
Just have a little reverent skepticism.
And I am convinced that is basic for
survival in the 20th century.
So we see the Lord Jesus, a man
of action.
We see him a man of compassion.
Verse 36, he saw the multitudes, he was
moved with compassion.
One of the great changes took place in
my life when I first went to a
foreign country.
I'm a very ordinary person, I can assure
you.
I don't have a high IQ.
I am nobody special until Jesus Christ came
into me.
Just one in a million typical, loudmouthed, extrovert,
aggressive, hostile, lustful Americans.
But God found me.
And in his providence, he found me because
one woman had a burden to pray for
me, and she prayed for me for three
years.
She had been praying for the school that
I was attending for 15 years.
Not only that people would be converted, but
that they would be saved and sent.
Now, I'm not from a Christian background.
I didn't know what the gospel was.
If someone said, are you saved?
I would have thought in terms of a
flood or, you know, something in terms of
water as I was studying life-saving.
Believe me, that wasn't easy for a skinny
little character like me to rescue these gigantic
fat people out of the swimming pool.
But that's another message.
My grandfather was from the Netherlands.
He was an atheist.
My other grandfather was a more, a little
more calm character.
He was from Glasgow.
He was a drunk.
And my parents also didn't know Christ.
My father went from the Netherlands.
He was born over here to the States
to find the good life, and he was
a materialist.
And at 16, in many ways, I was
a confirmed materialist.
I had three businesses.
I had learned how to lie.
I had learned how to cheat.
I spent most of my weekends in the
nightclubs of New York City, and I'm not
proud of any of it.
And somehow, in God's mercy, this woman began
to pray for me, and then she sent
me a gospel of John through the post.
And I began to read this little book
in my spare time, sometimes only a verse.
I came home from a nightclub at three
in the morning.
I was a total neurotic on dancing.
If I couldn't find women to dance with,
I'd dance with chairs, brooms, curtains, anything I
could move with.
My mother thought I had been vaccinated with
a phonograph needle when I was a baby.
And to this day, music seems to do
things to me, and it's difficult to discern
the difference between what's Christian and what's non
-Christian in the present music scene.
But in any case, she prayed for me.
She sent me this gospel of John, and
I began to read this, and it worked
in my heart.
Then Billy Graham came to New York City.
I didn't know what an evangelist was, but
somehow I saw that he played sports.
I read a magazine article about him.
I saw that he had a wife, played
sports, so I thought he must be at
least half normal.
I went in to hear Billy Graham.
I sat way in the back.
To my surprise, I just had a letter,
by the way, last week.
The girl who was with me, one of
my closest friends who accepted Christ that night
and then backslid, 41 years of age, just
shriveled up, just like that, and died of
cancer a few weeks ago.
It was a heavy piece of news, as
I was praying and hoping she would come
back to the Lord.
But both of us, this girl and myself,
sat there, and we heard the gospel.
You know, I'm a great believer in the
sovereignty of God, probably the strongest biblical anchor
in my whole theology.
And I believe so much in the sovereignty
of God that even if the preacher is
not perfect, and even if you feel his
theology isn't perfect, and even if you don't
like the invitation he gives, or something else
about him, God is so great, and Wales
needs this message, that he can still save
souls.
Would you spread that message around Wales for
me, since I don't get here much?
Because I'll tell you, there's some people over
here, and in England, that feel unless everything
is just so, and the theology is just
so, and the historical foundation is just so,
and everything is just so, God can't work.
And then they claim they believe in the
sovereignty of God.
They turn him into a midget on one
end, cut off his legs, cut off his
arms, and then go around and say they
believe in God's sovereignty.
I will tell you, some of the greatest
conversions in the world have taken place through
very weak preaching.
I believe in preaching the gospel to include
repentance.
I even believe in preaching the gospel to
include discipleship, because Jesus said to the multitude,
unless you deny self, take up the cross,
and follow me, you can't be my disciple.
And the disciple is not a super saint,
he's just a follower of Jesus Christ.
It's a very basic term for all believers
in the book of Acts, and in the
gospels especially.
And I am just so convinced that though
on one hand, we have our ideals, you
know, and we're very much against easy believism,
we believe that we should not push people
to make decisions for Christ, because we're not
after decisions, we're after disciples.
And we have a lot of other strong
principles.
We want to be the first ones to
acknowledge that God uses others who we don't
even agree with, and whose methodology may seem
more superficial, and whose theology may not seem
to be all that we would like.
God is greater.
And we need the practical reality of God's
sovereignty, the practical reality of the gospel of
grace.
And if you want a good picture of
that, then read The Life, volume two, especially
of George Whitfield.
I'm in the midst of it.
A man who is very strong on working
together with people, even when you did not
totally agree, and yet stands as one of
the greatest reformed Christian evangelists of all times.
And oh, was he persecuted by some of
his fellow theologians, beyond all words.
And you know, often your strongest opposition comes
from your own house.
And the greater divisions in England often come
from within people of more or less the
same theology.
Often they're not even in contact with people
from other theology, so they can't have any
great big bust-up with them.
It comes right from within their own house.
This is why ultimately the way of the
cross is a way of love.
The way of the cross is a way
in which we acknowledge the greatness of God,
even when we ourselves feel so weak.
And when we see the Lord Jesus looking
at the multitudes, and then move with compassion,
we long for this kind of experience in
our own life.
When I went back to my high school
after my conversion, that meeting with Billy Graham,
my heart just broke.
All these secondary school students, a third of
them drunk on the weekend, I had a
mission field.
The mission field is always right where you
are.
I started right there in my secondary school,
and we started nights of prayer.
We didn't know how to pray.
You know, it's a wonderful thing, you can
start to pray without knowing how to pray.
You just say, Abba, Father, and you open
your heart.
And we had prayer meetings in the school,
and there were prayer meetings in the gymnasium.
And God moved in sovereign power through sometimes
very weak preaching, some of it my own.
All I did was read four things God
wants you to know from a little tract
I found.
And when I asked people if they wanted
to repent of sin and drunkenness and immorality
to meet in the school cafeteria, in one
of those meetings, 125 students, many of them
broken, weeping, went to the cafeteria to trust
the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior.
That was the birth of what today is
known as Operation Mobilization.
Fifteen years of prevailing prayer by one woman,
and God broke in to one of New
York City's suburban areas, roughest high schools or
secondary schools.
By the time Billy Graham came back to
New York, two years later, we were hiring
buses out of liberal church parking lots, running
people into the meetings.
My own father, who made some kind of
commitment to Christ in that meeting I just
referred to, went to the Billy Graham meeting
and got even a more sure faith in
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Before God was done with that secondary school,
over 200 had surrendered their lives to Christ.
About a year later, three of us went
to Mexico, again with this one great conviction,
God answers prayer.
From our teenage years, because I went to
Mexico when I was only 19, we had
this overwhelming conviction, God answers prayer.
That was the cornerstone of our whole movement.
And I come to you 25 years later
to say the same thing, God answers prayer.
God answers prayer.
And as you pray for the Lord to
work in your coming mission, you are going
to see God work.
It may not be exactly in the way
that you expect, because God is a God
of surprises.
And his will is always bigger than you
think.
Never did we dream when we started to
pray for one ship in that converted pub,
in that funny little prayer meeting where some
of us were laughing the laugh of faith,
could God give us an ocean-going liner
for world evangelism?
Did we ever dream that so many years
later would we only have one ship, but
we have a second ship two to three
times the size of the first one?
Not as a gimmick, because we've never had
much publicity about this.
No one even knew we had this project.
But as a practical way to carry people,
because missions are spending a fortune flying their
people to the field.
And to be able to move 300 people
in a training program and in a missionary
invasion to work with the churches, to distribute
millions and millions of books, 30 million pieces
of literature from a small ship alone in
10 years, is just a down-to-
earth way of getting the job done in
an enormous world of 4,000 million people.
How strange it is that on one hand
we say God is great, sovereign, all-powerful,
mighty, prayer-answering, omnipotent.
And on the other hand, we practically speaking
don't live any different than the atheists down
the road.
And I feel very strongly about that.
Practical theology.
I had a lecture for six days at
the continent's most conservative theological seminary in Switzerland.
This was an event of last year.
George Verwer, who has no degrees, I got
too impatient and quit university to go to
Bible College, and that Bible College didn't give
any degrees except the third degree when you
broke a rule.
And here I am lecturing in the theological
seminary where these students spend four years learning
Hebrew and Greek and everything else.
To my utter amazement, the head of the
seminary, after listening to me for six days,
offered me the job of teaching in the
seminary.
I don't think my OM leaders were overly
excited about me leaving OM to teach in
the seminary.
But I say this because I think even
our seminaries see the great need for dynamic
practical theology.
I have found that our seminaries, and I've
preached in many of them, are almost bankrupt
when it comes to prayer, praise, worship, practical
theology.
There's almost no training for ministers on what
to do when they get married.
And many a great preacher is an absolute
flunky when it comes to handling his wife
or his children.
And the generation of reprobate children of ministers
and missionaries is probably the greatest scandal in
the 20th century church.
No wonder John White has written this tremendous
book, Parents in Pain, which many of us
as parents need to read.
I believe with all my heart that unless
the church again renews the emphasis on prayer,
we are doomed to be orthodox in the
head and heterodox in the heart.
Any church that neglects the prayer meeting is
asking for trouble.
They may be able to keep up the
scaffolding, but the reality will soon disappear.
Tozer said the great danger is that if
the Holy Spirit left the average church, no
changes would be made whatsoever.
Things would go on as usual.
It frightens me because I know that can
happen in OM.
It could happen to our ships if we
don't walk closely with God and spend much
time waiting on God.
Andrew Murray, one of God's great men in
years gone by, whose books I strongly recommend,
wrote a book called Waiting Upon God.
How we need this in our jittery generation.
And before you go into this mission, you
need times of waiting upon God, not just
corporately, but individually.
Wales is certainly one of the more beautiful
parts of the British Isles.
You have no excuse for not getting out
into the countryside for a half day of
waiting upon God with an open Bible, with
an open heart.
It's been the practice of my life since
I was 17 to spend a day or
a half day, as often as possible, just
waiting upon God, going into the mountains, finding
a cave and just spending that time alone
with God.
When I first moved to Spain, Spain was
closed.
Everything we were attempting in Spain was impossible.
The opposition was great.
And I went alone out into the woods
of Madrid and waited upon God in a
day of prayer and fasting.
And it was there often that God gave
me the next move, the next plan for
what he was leading me into.
Oh, it wasn't all victory.
Most victory is mixed with some failure.
Like the time I went out for this
great day and night of prayer, I was
going to fast.
I've always found fasting hard.
I don't have much excess.
And one day fasting, I can barely stand.
And for a while I was very extreme
on fasting.
And I thought I'm going out for this
day of prayer and fasting.
I took one piece of bread with me.
I thought I'll need this after the fast
to get back.
I was going to pray on into the
night and it was Spain.
The weather changes.
I didn't realize that it changes very quickly
from the day the sun is out tonight.
And I must have fallen asleep somewhere around
nine o'clock.
I've always been very good at sleeping.
I'm in some ways naturally lazy and always
loved the sack.
Alan Redpath said the greatest spiritual problem in
Britain or one of them is blanket victory.
You know, just to get the blanket off
in the morning and get up and get
in the word.
Anyway, I fell asleep and it got cold
around midnight or one.
So I woke up.
When I woke up, I grabbed for my
bread.
It was gone.
I was all alone.
Who stole my bread?
Obviously some animal had come in the night
during my intensive prayer that had turned to
intensive sleep.
I had stolen my resources.
Then the worst ordeal came when I attempted
to make my way back home and ran
into a pack of about 15 dogs.
That was a great courageous Christian claiming all
the verses of Timothy.
I can assure you I am scared to
death of dogs, but somehow I made it
home.
Yes, failure is is often there when we
attempt to have a day in prayer or
half day in prayer.
Why is it that we understand that a
doctor will take maybe six, seven, eight years
before he's a master surgeon, but we think
that we're going to learn the art of
prayer in a couple of weeks or one
term or a few messages in a few
attempts.
Don't be discouraged in your praying.
Whether you've fallen asleep or your mind has
wandered or you found your prayer was not
answered.
Don't be discouraged in your praying because God
will have to test you.
As he allowed Job to be tested, so
he will test you.
One of my favorite books is The Mystery
of Providence, one of those old Puritan books
that needs to be re-read in this
day in which we all want instant everything.
Instant holiness, instant victory at Cardiff University, instant
revival or at least near instant revival and
all the rest.
I don't find that in my Bible.
I find the battle, the struggle, persevering prayer.
I remember Dr. Francis Schaeffer has always been
one of our closest associates in Europe.
Dear man, very seriously ill with cancer.
I remember him answering questions at the World
Congress on Evangelism and answering questions about prayer
and pointing out that going to God in
prayer is not like going to one of
these little machines in the railway station where
you put in your right coin, you pull
the lever and out comes your little chocolate
bar.
God works with us as human beings and
therefore into every transaction with God comes many
different human factors and that will include suffering.
Edith Schaeffer, I believe, has written a classic
book on the subject of affliction.
I was re-reading part of it again
this week about her experience with a dentist.
Have you ever had any really good, glorious
dentist experiences?
You know, we can be so brave when
we're singing our hymns on Sunday.
Onward Christian soldiers marching us to war and
on Monday we're scared stiff even to march
into the dentist office.
He's only going to check your teeth.
He's not going to take your mouth away.
But sometimes things go wrong and with Edith
Schaeffer it all went wrong and she went
through a two-year nightmare with her impacted
wisdom teeth.
That book is a dose of reality in
this very superficial day in which we live
and I would commend it together perhaps with
smaller books like No Easy Answers.
The Lord Jesus Christ saw the multitudes.
He was moved with compassion and then he
told us to go.
No, that came later.
He told us to pray.
Every real mission has to be born in
the prayer meeting.
Every real mission has to be born both
in the prayer closet of those in the
mission and the prayer closet of those who
maybe are not there but they're involved in
one way or the other.
If we don't take more time in prayer,
it's just a practical problem.
We just cannot possibly pray for all these
things.
I've often had people say to me when
they know that OM is very strong on
extended prayer meetings, we have a night of
prayer on Tuesday, we have a full day
of prayer on Thursday.
And that doesn't make us more spiritual and
maybe because we're weaker.
If you can do in one hour what
it takes us to do in a day,
praise the Lord.
Move forward in the battle, we will follow
in your smoke.
But most human beings, it takes them an
hour just to get their hearts softened up.
They're so frostbitten from the present day evangelical
scene, waiting upon God, worshiping God, confession, then
as we discern the will of God, moving
into the frontline attack of the ministry of
intercessory prayer as we're taught in the Word
of God.
And people say, well, what do you do
all night in a night of prayer?
First of all, a night of prayer for
us usually ends at one or two or
three in the morning.
Doesn't mean we go through every time to
six in the morning.
Our Indian brothers sometimes do that.
They're a lot better than we are.
But you see, we're burdened for the whole
world.
And we believe in specific prayer.
We have prayed for specific things about China
that have just been fulfilled.
I have just a few months ago come
from China.
We've had teams in China for the last
three or four months.
I can't even tell you what some of
those teams have been able to do.
And now very top government officials are asking
us to bring the ship Lagos to communist
China.
I don't want that in print anywhere, but
you can pray about it.
And God and his sovereignty has linked us
with the churches in Singapore and Malaysia.
If we could ever get a linking with
the churches in Wales, like we have in
Singapore, I tell you, we'd have a thousand
Welshmen on the move for God in the
next three years.
That would be the greatest missionary miracle in
the history of Wales.
But the church in Singapore and Malaysia is
alive.
They want to be involved in world missions.
They are encouraging their people to move out.
They are supporting them all as they move
out.
And we have many of them, you know,
I have over a hundred and many of
them speak Mandarin Chinese.
And they're on their way to mainland China
in the next couple of years.
There is a complete open door in China
today for overseas Chinese people.
Malaysians, of course, can't go because of their
government restriction, depending, of course, on their conscience.
But I believe with all my heart, God
is going to do something in China, and
that is because of prayer, years of prayer.
And we believe other nations also can be
invaded firstly by prayer.
And that's the way we're going to see
the victories.
When we first went to Mexico, and I
was back a little while ago about to
share that experience when I went to a
foreign country, I went out to a rubbish
tip.
We call it in America a garbage dump.
And people were living in this place.
People, little children, were eating garbage soup, soup
made from just what people threw away.
I had never seen such poverty.
I have always been from a sort of
middle-class bourgeois background, but because of various
reasons been incredibly sensitive to poverty.
Even when I went back to my hometown,
Patterson, New Jersey, which is now a very
poverty-stricken place, it's just overwhelming.
And when I walked through that rubbish tip,
that awful place, and saw people living, little
babies with 50 flies walking all over their
bodies and in their mouths, I just couldn't
believe it.
I thought, where have I been?
What strange place have I been confined to
for 19 years of my life that I
haven't realized other people are suffering so much?
As I walked away from that place, I
recommitted my life to the Lord Jesus, and
I knew that at least for many years
I would never return to my own country,
my own little lice community, where to this
day I'm still accepted as a nice little
good American patriot.
And I've been, together with my wife, away
from home, and we love our parents, 21
years.
I want to commend you to get into
a foreign country as soon as possible.
Beloved, we are not in the 19th century
any longer, even if half of Wales is,
when it comes to the church.
We need to realize the world is a
global village, and every man, woman of God
in Wales, if they are going to be
members of this great community in which what
happens in Wales affects Cambodia, that's right, then
we need to get our minds blown out
a little bit in terms of some of
the spiritual cobwebs, and get out into places
like southern Europe, or further afield into Turkey,
or Iran, or Iraq, or Cambodia, or Eritrea,
or Somalia, where millions are going without food,
where the church at times doesn't even have
a Bible, and where there's suffering even among
believers far greater than anything we know here,
though one of the great ailments of Britain
today is Operation Murmur, and everybody seems to
be murmuring about something.
Maybe it takes a semi-dumb immigrant like
myself to tell you I think this is
one of the greatest places in the world
anyone could choose to live.
If you think Britain is disorganized, including British
Rail, it's because you're incredibly naive.
You're still living in your little student jungle,
sipping some kind of intellectual straw from a
glass of something that doesn't exist.
Do you know there are countries in Africa
right now where there is total anarchy?
You can't post a letter, you can't make
a phone call, you can't walk down the
street and know you'll get to the house
alive.
There have been hundreds of thousands of people
butchered in African nations over the past 10
years because it is so difficult to organize
a country, to organize people, to run trains,
to run telephone systems.
We are benefiting from the Christian heritage of
this country, even though we have thrown away
the heritage to some degree while trying to
keep the benefits.
And today, Britain is probably still one of
the best organized and safest countries in the
world you could ever live in.
In America alone, for every one ever killed
in Britain, and there are not many murders
in Britain, there are 10 to 1 in
North America, and they think they're still the
greatest country in the world.
You're at least 10 times safer over here.
And I could give you at least 25
other areas where Britain is almost a little
heaven compared to nations where I have actually
lived, where every day it is a struggle
just to get through the day, just to
get the food, just to get on with
life.
And I believe one of the things God
wants us to do as British Christians is
to thank God for what we have, the
freedom to preach, the freedom to worship, relative
safety.
Sure, I know all the negative things.
I read the magazines.
I read the newspapers.
I listen to the wireless.
But as Christians, we should thank God that
we have relative stability in this country.
We don't know how long it will last.
Therefore, from this relatively stable situation, let us
launch the attack upon the rest of the
world and countries where there is chaos and
lostness and hunger, to give them the gospel,
to give them some of that foundation that
we have so that they can build at
least some decent, semi-decent form of lifestyle.
I feel very strongly that it's God's will
for a great army to go forth from
Britain to evangelize the world.
I fear the tendency, the present tendency on
introspection, telling us we can't evangelize until we're
all somehow together in love and unity.
The church in Britain, as far as I
can see it, and I spend a lot
of time researching this, is not going to
unite.
If it does unite, it will be under
a false flag of some phony ecumenicalism in
which we have to deny the basic principles
of the Bible and the reformed faith and
the basic doctrines in order to have some
kind of quasi-unity.
That's God's plan.
As individual believers, let us love one another.
Let us lay aside our differences in order
to be a mighty army for God.
The word toleration was hardly known in Britain
until Clownwell's army.
It was unheard of, toleration.
You either believed the particular religion that was
in at that time, or you were burned
at the stake or jailed or flogged or
beaten.
And every Christian should read the history of
the church, because in some ways we have
two Bibles.
You have this Bible, and then you have
the Bible of history.
What has happened because people have believed this
Bible?
And history is important.
And 50% of this book or more
is history.
And if you read the history of the
British church, you will understand even some of
the present-day happenings.
It was when Clownwell tried to raise an
army and brought in people of different religious
persuasions that the word tolerance was almost born.
Tolerating people of different religious persuasions, even though
most of them were Protestants, all of them,
in order to fight.
Now whether you agree with that fighting or
not is not the subject this afternoon.
But certainly the principle is biblical.
If we're going to be an army for
God, if we're going to evangelize the world,
or even Cardiff University, then we're going to
have to be willing to unite, even though
we don't believe everything the same.
I wrote something in my Bible that was
very meaningful to me.
It's the only hope for a movement like
OM.
I've written this.
Because of world evangelism and the reality of
the spiritual warfare, we need to agree on
a plan of action and a strategy and
policy to carry out that action even when
there are things we don't like or even
agree with.
And I would say the same for your
coming mission.
In order to have some strategy, in order
to operate at least to some degree as
an army, as a fighting force for God
in Cardiff, you're going to have to be
willing to unite and lay aside some of
the things that you don't agree on.
Otherwise you can never really engage in a
evangelistic thrust for God.
How important I believe that is.
So let us come together in prayer.
Let us take Matthew chapter 9 and begin
praying for laborers, both for the existing work
here and for the work around the world.
This is the clear command of the Lord
Jesus Christ.
If this command was true 2,000 years
ago, what can we say today?
We have this command backed by the life
of Jesus as we see him spending a
whole night in prayer, as we see him
teaching his disciples how to pray, as we
see him telling the disciples that after he
goes then they will give themselves to fasting
and prayer, and then we see the same
emphasis on prayer right through the entire book
of Acts.
Maybe we could just look at a few
references, like Acts chapter 12, when Peter is
in prison, verse 5, Peter therefore was kept
in prison, but prayer was made without ceasing
by the church unto God for him.
Was it Leonard Ravenhill in his incredible book?
I saw it there in the bookshop.
I could spend a week in that bookshop.
Who said a church that is not praying
will be strained?
I think he was the one that also
said you're either evangelizing or fossilizing.
There's no middle road because the Holy Ghost
brings the Holy Ghost.
Evangelism is as basic as breathing to the
Christian, and I hope you will see that
in the coming days.
As they attempted to evangelize in the early
days of the church, recorded in the book
of Acts, they ran into problems on every
side, and I will tell you Satan has
had committee meetings already, read screw tape letters,
to plan a counterattack on your card of
evangelistic efforts.
He knows how to sow discord, disunity, confusion.
He knows how to use extremism, and he
will work overtime, taking advantage of our weaknesses,
of our tendencies to speak before we think.
Any of you ever have that trouble?
Your tongue just goes slightly faster than your
brain, can get you in tremendous difficulty.
And oh, if we just knew a little
more of mouth control.
I've often had to pray, oh God, crucify
my tongue.
I remember a preacher once coming up to
the pulpit, I couldn't believe it, it would
have been very offensive in India, and he
took out from a bottle a gigantic cow's
tongue, and he was waving it at us,
and then he preached on the sins of
the tongue.
Reminds me of something Billy Sunday would have
done with a whiskey bottle, only he wouldn't
have waved and he would have thrown it
at us.
Anyway, Peter was there in prison, but prayer
was made without ceasing, by the church.
That's what made the difference.
It's one of the biggest but, B-U
-T, in the Bible.
Peter was in prison, everything was going wrong,
but prayer.
Cardiff University, tough situation, many agnostics, more indifferent,
few drunks, whatever else, but prayer was made
by the church.
And I don't think this type of evangelistic
thrust should be separate from the church.
It would be my prayer that every believer,
believer's group in Cardiff, every church would be
standing with you, though you have the unique
ministry as one of God's, in a sense,
guerrilla forces, to infiltrate the university because that's
where God has put you, praise the Lord
for his providence.
Even if you're not sure you're in God's
will, anybody in that state, I will tell
you the more I think about the will
of God and the problem of finding the
will of God, the more I look to
God's sovereignty.
And I hope there aren't too many of
you that are overly neurotic about the will
of God.
I once told someone, it really shattered them,
I said, look, if you marry the wrong
girl, one of your goals should be to
marry the right girl.
Men, you're all plugged in there, marry the
right girl.
I want to tell you, don't get too
neurotic about that because even if you marry
the wrong girl, God is great and he
can make it work.
Why do I say that?
I counsel people, they come to me, I
got away from the Lord, I married this
chick or this girl and now I've seen
from the Lord, this is not the right
girl, I should divorce her.
No, no, no, brother.
You got your theology wrong.
You got to get on your faith and
trust God to make this thing work.
I'd rather have the wrong girl and be
right with God than the right girl and
be out of fellowship with God and blow
the relationship.
Someday I'd love to come back and speak
to you on the will of God, one
of the subjects that I believe is so
important in the life of the believer.
So Peter was in prison, everything went wrong,
prayer was made and out he came.
It's a miracle.
You get people these days who are very,
very neurotic about breaking the laws.
They're always on us saying, you're taking Bibles
into China?
You're taking Bibles into Russia?
Isn't that breaking the laws of men?
You get somebody telling you about this, you
know, they're all up and driving down the
highway at 85 miles an hour, warning you
against taking Bibles into the Soviet Union.
I believe very strongly in keeping the laws
of men, but when that law is absolutely
contrary to the law of God, there are
not many cases, not many cases, then I
believe you have to choose.
And Peter said we've got to obey God
rather than man.
Read brother Andrew's little book on the ethics
of Bible, whatever he calls it, smuggling.
It's a term with certain semantical overtones.
But in any case, these particular angels were
actually breaking the law of this area and
this prison.
So God sent these angels to break the
law.
Behold, an angel of the Lord came upon
him, light shone in the prison, he smote
Peter on the side, raised him up, saying
arise quickly, his chains fell off, what an
expense to replace those, and the angel said
unto him and out they went.
The same thing happened to Paul, that was
even a more destructive event, later on when
Paul was in prison at midnight, keeping everybody
awake in his praise meeting, and he was
also rescued by angels.
The book of Acts is a book in
which we see God working in the lives
of people and through prayer.
Remember Acts 4.31?
They were all together praying, the place where
they were gathered together was shaken, they were
filled with the Holy Spirit, and went forth
and spoke the word of God with boldness.
And those people had been at Pentecost, and
though they had been at Pentecost, in Acts
4 they needed to be refilled with the
Holy Spirit.
And whatever your differences may be on the
subject of the Holy Spirit, I think we
can all agree, whatever the past, now we
all need to know the fullness and the
reality of the Holy Spirit.
And that's the privilege of every believer.
And I believe it's very important to emphasize
the ministry and the reality and the fullness
of the Holy Spirit in preparation for your
mission.
And if you're not sure that God's Spirit
is having free course in your life, in
the quietness of this woods or your room
or anywhere, you can just surrender your life,
use whatever terminology you want, commit your life,
surrender your life, and ask him to fill
you and use you in this mission.
When some do that, they have an emotional
experience, when others do it, there's just a
still, quiet assurance that God is working in
them.
We have become infatuated in our day with
the spectacular.
And sometimes God works in the spectacular, but
often our great God can work in the
ordinary.
My wife has been the most faithful, loving,
loyal marriage partner a man could ever ask.
She's not in a spectacular time.
She has no great public ministry and doesn't
want one.
Her ministry has been home, it's been washing,
cleaning children, and some illnesses and some surgeries.
Yet I've seen God working in the ordinary
back in my home as much as he
has worked at times through the extraordinary in
some of the meetings I've been involved in.
He's the same God.
And we need as much the fullness of
the Holy Spirit for the chores around the
house and for your boring, mundane, continued studies
during all this period as you do for
those spectacular moments when people are saying, what
must I do to be saved?
And you lead your first soul to Jesus
Christ.
Our God is not limited to any one
course of action or any one way of
working.
And I pray that in your mission, as
you emphasize prayer and reality and the warfare,
that you will also emphasize spiritual balance and
the many other aspects of spiritual life.
Well, our time's gone.
I don't have a closing, so I think
we'll just close.
Father, we thank and praise you for your
word.
We thank you for this challenge from your
son, the Lord Jesus, as he told us
to pray out laborers into the harvest, and
we want to do that.
From Wales, from all of Britain, we thank
you for 400 that came on OM, just
one of many of your movements this past
summer from Britain alone.
Truly, this is a miracle and answered in
many years of prayer.
We thank you for others that launched out
with different churches and fellowships to carry out
your great plan, and we, Lord, believe it
can be greater in the years to come.
You know more than we do.
The tremendous harvest fields of places like India,
where half the nation has never once heard
the gospel, where there's such an open door,
especially for British people.
Lord, we pray for India, for China, for
so many areas where millions have never once
heard.
We think of Peking with one church for
eight million people, whereas we live in a
land that has a church for every 800
people.
Oh, God, grip us with the reality of
what this is all about, and take us
into our prayer closet and to our knees
more than ever before to pray forth laborers
and to know reality in prayer.
Oh, God, we worship you.
We praise you, and we believe that as
a result of being together with you on
this weekend, our lives, by your grace, will
never be the same.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.