O Lord our God, we do thank you
that we have this quiet place to seek
your face and to worship you and to
open your word.
We thank you for what you're doing around
the world through many different movements and through
your servants.
And we just believe that tonight it has
been ordained of you that we're together here.
This is not an accident, it's not a
coincidence, but it is of your divine arrangement
that we are together tonight.
We give you the praise, we give you
the glory.
Speak, O Lord, and give us obedient hearts,
lest the very truth we receive turn to
poison in our spiritual bloodstream, and we find
ourselves on the shelf instead of in the
spiritual warfare where we belong.
We thank you, Lord, for answers to prayer.
We pray for Toccoa Falls Bible College that
is experiencing this enormous tragedy of this huge
flood.
We pray for the loved ones of those
who have perished in the flood and for
others who are in special need at this
time there in Georgia.
We pray for those that perhaps would be
at this meeting but cannot come, minister to
them perhaps through Christian literature.
We pray for the pastor.
We pray, Lord, that surely we may glorify
you tonight.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Our desire in every meeting, I believe, is
to glorify the Lord, and that's what we
want to do even as we share from
His Word.
Our hearts are somewhat grieved tonight as we
know of this tragedy in Toccoa Falls where
quite a few Bible school students living in
trailers have perished in this flood when the
dam broke, I believe yesterday, there in Georgia.
Some of you perhaps have heard about that
on the radio.
And we want to be upholding them in
prayer.
And as I was talking to someone just
about an hour or two ago, it hit
me how we tend to immediately think, wow,
some of God's people have died.
And yet the thing that should hit us
is not that perhaps some brother or sister
has died in this flood, but that some
died in this flood who did not know
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And you know, in these days that we
live in, we are just reminded of how
quick life can pass.
And I just want to say this as
someone from a non-Christian background.
I wasn't reared in a Christian home.
My mother and father came to Christ after
I did.
But if you don't know Jesus Christ as
your personal Savior tonight, you know, don't take
any chances.
The greatest slaughterhouse in the world, the American
highways.
You have no guarantee you'll ever even get
home.
Four of my best friends just two years
ago, around this time of the year, gone.
A drunken truck driver hit them.
Three of them never woke up.
One of them woke up and then died
later.
Life is short.
Don't fool around.
We're not here tonight to just preach the
gospel, but I felt there may be someone
who perhaps the Lord could touch.
And it would be wonderful to talk to
you if you don't know Christ personally.
My grandfather actually was an atheist from the
Netherlands.
My father wasn't a Christian, even though he
became a deacon in a local church that
didn't preach the gospel.
The greatest enemy of the gospel in America
today is religion, good old Protestant religion, of
the Christ-denying, Bible-denying variety.
And I received the gospel of John through
the nail as a young person, and I
read it, and it began to speak to
my heart.
And then a man named Billy Graham came
to New York City for one night, and
I heard the gospel for the first time,
and was born again in the Spirit of
God.
Before that I thought, oh, this kind of
thing is all just an emotional thing.
But it's been 22 years since I had
that experience.
It's hardly an emotion.
Twenty-two years is a long time for
any emotion to last.
It's reality.
Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and
the life.
No man cometh to the Father but by
Him, the Lord Jesus Christ.
That night as I went away from Madison
Square Garden, it just seemed the most logical
thing in the world was to tell others.
And so I began telling others.
I never wanted to start any kind of
an organization, that's for sure.
I wasn't even sure what I was doing
most of the time.
I just began to share Christ in my
high school.
I found out later that the lady who
really had prayed me into the kingdom had
been praying for that high school for 15
years.
Surveilling, agonizing in prayer.
A woman of prayer.
Unknown woman.
No wonder within the next year or two,
over 200 in that ungodly high school near
New York City surrendered their lives to the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And born out of that woman's prayers was
a little movement known as Send the Light,
a hymn I believe you were just playing,
which later in Europe, where it really took
root, became known as Operation Mobilization.
You see, that woman not only prayed that
people would be saved in that high school,
but she prayed that from that school people
would go out all over the world witnessing
for Jesus Christ.
Well, this is an insane prayer to pray
for a half-drunken ungodly high school across
the George Washington Bridge.
You might pray that for a Bible school.
Even that would take faith, the way the
Bible schools are managing to put out so
few missionary recruits.
But she prayed this for an ungodly high
school.
And I, just in God's providence, was one
of the vessels that was saved in that
move of His Spirit in that high school.
I went off to college.
I met another brother who was saved in
answer to prayer.
We began to pray together.
And by six months or ten months later,
we found ourselves crossing the Mexican border to
expose ourselves to a foreign country, to visit
with missionaries, to see, is there anything we
as young people can do?
We were petrified as just teens, 19 and
20 years of age.
But as we got into Mexico, we saw
there was something we could do.
Though we weren't yet trained.
Though my Spanish was so bad that no
one seemed to understand it.
Though we were frightened.
Missionaries welcomed us.
We found out we could give out literature.
We found out that we could play gospel
recordings.
We found out that people got converted through
our ministry.
And so, the next summer, five of us
went down.
And the next Christmas, a dozen or two
dozen went down.
And that was the birth of what today
is known all over the world as Operation
Mobilization.
I can't give you a history lesson tonight,
but there are now 1,000 of us
full-time moving in about 100 nations, though
we're only permanently based in about 25 nations.
The Lord especially broke through in 1962 and
63 when in sheer answer to prayer, with
almost no publicity, God gave us almost 2
,000 Europeans in a situation 10 times more
difficult than America to get recruits.
He raised up this army of Europeans and
brought to pass an invasion of France and
Italy and Spain and many other European countries.
This spilled over into the communist lands.
It spilled over into the Middle East.
Soon a movement was born in India, and
today there are 200 full-time workers in
India.
There are 150 laboring in the Middle East,
the largest number we've ever had in the
history of our work, counting the Muslim push
in Bangladesh.
It was in about 1964, after some really
big efforts in Europe where we distributed about
30 million pieces of Christian literature, though our
main work is not literature but rather man
-to-man discipling and small group discipling.
But as we came back from that crusade,
we thought, how can we move in a
heavier way into Asia, into India, into the
Middle East?
By that time we had a fleet of
125 old vehicles.
Most of them we purchased for less than
$100.
God brought mechanics willing to work with our
hands.
They repaired and rebuilt the engines, painted the
old trucks, many of them large trucks, could
carry 2, 3 ton of literature and 15
or 20 people.
And how can we do this in Asia?
We looked at the highways and we looked,
as you can see on this map, and
wherever we looked we saw water.
It came to the mind of a few
of us, why not a ship?
Why not an ocean-going ship that could
carry 20 or 30 vehicles, carry 100 or
200 people, carry 100, 200 tons of literature
and spearhead an invasion anywhere in the world
as we had seen God do in Europe
in which already thousands had professed faith in
Jesus Christ.
In France alone 13 churches had been born
through that operation.
It wasn't just a matter of scattering literature
or witnessing in the summer.
This led to a year-round program in
which people who learned the language planted churches
and engaged in evangelism in depth.
And so we asked God for an ocean
-going ship.
This seemed insane.
We wrote to various people in the shipping
world.
They said it's impossible.
They wrote us pages on how sophisticated a
shipping operation has to be, the documents you
need.
We heard of other problems like one mission
in America that tried a ship and it
didn't work.
The Lord kept this burden on our hearts.
We kept praying.
For two years we saw nothing.
Not even one seaman joined us.
At the end of two years, God gave
us a captain, a man of faith, though
he was destined never to sail on the
ship.
He became the director of our work in
the British Isles instead as God raised up
other captains.
And the Lord brought into being a ship
called the ship Lagos.
It was a historical day when we signed
that contract, seven years ago last month.
It is a historical night tonight as tomorrow
morning we will sign a contract for a
second ship two to three times the size
of the MV Lagos.
A ship of 6,800 tons gross.
A ship that can house 500 people, that
can carry 300 tons of literature and that
can move an army into any nation of
the world, perhaps with the exception of a
few countries.
I've been on the phone to Germany all
week as this has been such a frightening
event.
The signing of this contract.
We have then four weeks to get our
money down to Italy.
We're buying the ship from a large Italian
shipping company.
It has been a first class cruise liner
up until last week.
We moved our men into the ship last
week.
She's lying in Genoa.
One of the oldest ships in the world.
That's why most people buying ships won't even
go past looking at it on paper.
We were crazy enough to investigate the ship
and to discover that though it was built
in 1914, the engines are 1970.
The inside is 1950.
And the steel built in Virginia is better
than ships turned out in the 50s and
the 60s.
And so for $770,000 we're buying a
ship that would cost between $10 and $15
million to build today.
And it will do anything a new ship
will do, especially with 1970 medium speed, 17
knot Fiat engines.
The air conditioning alone, if we were to
put it into a ship that size, would
cost $300,000 and the scrap value is
$500,000.
So you can figure that we're getting a
pretty good bargain in the way of a
ship.
You are the first church to hear this
news anywhere in the United States.
We are a strange little movement that doesn't
believe in publicity.
We only believe in being led by the
Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit leads us to 10 men.
He'll do more through those 10 than He'll
do through 100,000 who may hear a
blurb on television or through wasted propaganda sent
out through the post.
That's why many of you perhaps have hardly
even heard of this work.
Wherever I go in the United States they
say, I've never heard of this work.
Many people have never heard of the ship.
I think you have heard here because of
Jim Lamb who has been out with us.
But we would ask you to take this
burden, which very few people know about, the
signing of the contract tomorrow, the moving of
our men into the ship to make sure
not too much gets stolen, the taking of
the ship up to northern Germany where we'll
have about $200,000 worth of repairs, which
is quite normal when you take over a
ship of this age.
We would really ask you as the first
church that I've spoken to about this.
I'm hardly ever in the United States.
In fact, it is intensely frustrating to know
where I'm supposed to go on a Sunday.
And how God brought me here I'm still
trying to figure out.
And I think you can thank a couple
of stubborn saints and perhaps the Holy Spirit.
I'm supposed to be speaking at Houghton College.
I was booked to speak this morning and
this evening at Houghton College where I've been
speaking to 1,200 students twice a day
for a week.
When the flags came waving from this part
of the world I decided to phone Houghton
College and get out of that evening meeting.
And my dear brother, the director of our
work in India, is taking the meeting there
tonight.
And I got a very interesting airplane.
One of the smallest planes I've ever flown
on from a place called Bradford, Virginia.
No, Pennsylvania.
And I managed to get here for this
meeting.
Now, I'm ashamed of my little book exhibition
because I could only bring a few books.
We sold so many books at Houghton College
we didn't have many left.
Then I had to bring them on this
plane.
I was afraid the plane might not even
get off the runway after I loaded the
books.
So, we have just a few books on
display.
For those of you who don't know anything
about OM, we believe in Christian literature.
We believe the power through print is as
significant as the power through preaching.
You know, John Wesley believed that.
He was criticized all over the world, especially
Britain, for always pushing books from the pulpit.
Later on the Encyclopedia Britannica said, no man
in the 18th century did more to get
people reading Christian books than John Wesley.
We cannot even imagine how God is using
Christian books.
And this is why when we have an
opportunity for a meeting like this, we're limited
in our time, we bring books.
That you can take these books not just
for yourself, we're little babes in Christ, we're
just born again, we think mainly of ourself.
What do I need?
Me, me, me, me, my, my, my, my.
But as we grow up in the Lord,
we think of others.
We think of someone we might be able
to give a book to.
And you know, a vast percentage of Christians
in this country are the most Christian evangelized
nation in the world.
You may not think that.
Because most of you have never studied the
statistics.
But if statistics mean anything and we know
they can lie, we are the most Christian
evangelized nation in the world.
Now we've still got a long way to
go.
But if I could take you to the
other 50 countries I've been in, you'd probably
short circuit just thinking about it.
Because I have been in nations where there
are no believers.
Not one single believer.
I have been in quite a few countries
where there is no church.
There is no church.
I have been in many more countries where
we have less believers than we have believers
sitting in this one church tonight.
And I live in England where we are
probably the third or the fourth most Christian
evangelized country in the world.
And we only get 5% of the
nation in church on Sunday compared to 50
% in America.
And even if we shoveled off 70%
of those as liberals or heretics depending on
your theology, we still have an awful lot
of people.
And this is a burden.
And yet with all those Christians, many of
them have never read the most basic Christian
books.
And I believe that's one of the reasons
that so many of them are spiritual midgets
who have never grown.
I believe many of our pastors in this
nation, next week I go to speak at
Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, which is going to
be an interesting experience.
I believe that many of our pastors are
spiritual midgets.
And if we have spiritual midgets being churned
out of our seminaries like cookies coming off
a cutting machine, then what kind of saints
are they going to produce in return?
And I believe the greatest need is to
get into some of these deep Christian books,
the writings of men like Tozer, and to
see where we have fallen short of the
glory of God, and then to do something
about it.
Let me recommend very quickly some books I'd
like you to read.
Tozer is the first.
The Pursuit of God.
Gems from Tozer.
We published this one ourself.
To introduce people to Tozer, we took quotations
from 20 of his other books and put
them in this one book.
Like you can get for 50 cents or
75 cents.
So try to get those two books.
If you don't have money, you see Jim
Lamb.
Jim Lamb, he's in charge of finance.
He'll collect the money later on.
Another great book on missions.
Dick Hillis.
Is there really only one way?
What a powerful book that is.
Very important for missions.
A new book about Muslims.
We are so ignorant about Muslims, and yet
one out of every seven people in the
world is a Muslim.
Do you know how many hundreds, perhaps thousands
of Muslims there are in this state?
I don't know so much about Ohio.
I think I'm in Ohio.
Sometimes I get my countries mixed up, but
usually I get the right state.
But in Michigan there are thousands and thousands
of Arabs.
Someone said there's 200 Iranians at Akron University.
We need to know what Muslims believe.
And here's a new book.
It used to be a dollar or two
dollars.
We published it for 50 cents.
Reaching Muslims Today.
There's another book.
In case we run out of that one.
Sharing Your Faith with a Muslim.
So helpful.
This kind of book to understand what Muslims
believe.
And then there's a book by a man
named Leonard Ravenhill.
Now you may not agree with all of
his theology.
Actually he and I are not exact same
theology.
But this book is anointed.
Why Revival Theories is one of the most
anointed books I've read in 23 years, and
I probably started, I haven't finished, but I
certainly started at least 2,000 books.
Maybe finished 500 of them.
I would just say this is one of
the most anointed books I've ever read.
We just printed a special edition for African
Asia of 50,000 copies.
I just talked to the printer tonight.
Some of you have heard of Roy Hession.
How many have ever heard of Roy Hession?
Calvary Road.
Good.
This is a Christian classic in 35 languages.
They probably read more Christian books in the
Congo than we do in America.
I don't know.
But this is a classic, and this is
his recent book on the problem of sexual
immorality in the church.
Not the liberal church, the evangelical church.
Rather unusual subject, isn't it, for a Christian
book?
One of the most needed books in our
day.
Because one of the greatest problems in the
evangelical church is the invasion of impurity.
We don't talk about it much.
It just goes on.
And here's a man who after 40 or
50 years in ministry has finally written a
book on repentance on this subject of morality.
So take advantage of these great books.
You'll get more from these books than you
ever will from me in our little time
together tonight.
And I believe it could be an enormous
blessing in your life.
This is a map of the world.
You can get one of these as well.
These are special for your home.
You hang this over the front of your
television.
This map.
And you use it for prayer and intercession.
And if we spend a little more time
praying and a little less time watching some
of the nonsense that comes through the tube,
I believe that we might grow a little
more in maturity in Jesus Christ.
So take advantage of that map.
We publish them ourselves.
And this little set of prayer cards is
often useful to have with a map.
This little set of cards, you have 52
of the most needy nations in the world.
Now I know you've had a tremendous missions
emphasis here over the past weeks.
And actually my first burden tonight is not
missions.
My first burden tonight is reality.
And the subject, if you take notes, you
want a title for this little talk, you
can call it reality in Jesus Christ.
I think there's a great danger of separating
missions from reality.
Separating missions from discipleship.
I was so thrilled, our brother, your assistant
pastor, reading that book by Winky Prattney.
I was just with him.
An unusual man from New Zealand.
He's written a book on discipleship.
But I think all of this is one.
Discipleship, spiritual emphasis, world missions, local church, the
Sunday school, a prayer meeting, it's all one.
And the way I love to summarize it
is, spiritual reality in Jesus Christ.
These cards will give you some facts that
I haven't got time to give you tonight.
52 of the most needy nations in the
world.
And as you read these cards, and they
have prayer requests on the back of each
card, a little map on each card, you'll
be amazed.
We have never printed anything that Christian leaders
have so highly esteemed in terms of just
tools for prayer as this little set of
cards.
So take advantage of them.
And I think if you get them together
with a map, we often give them at
a special price.
There's a lot of free literature there on
the table about different aspects of our work.
It happened in India.
There's this little book about India that we're
giving free.
To cut down on the number, we're giving
it free to anyone who buys any other
book.
There's also cassette tapes.
If something I say tonight seems to minister
to you, and I know different people are
ministered to by different people, I may not
minister much to some of you.
You can just open your Bible and midway
through my sermon, memorize the word.
It won't bother me.
Someone else will minister to you, maybe next
week.
But if somehow, if some of the things
I say get on your wavelength and you
want more, since it's unlikely I'll be back
here for another decade, I'm hardly ever in
the United States, there are some cassette tapes
that are available.
Let's now look in the Bible and read
the Word of God.
And I'm here tonight because I believe this
book is the Word of God.
Otherwise, there's no hope, there's no sense.
I certainly wouldn't be here.
I want you to look, first of all,
at Acts 1, verse 8.
Acts 1, verse 8.
I was so thrilled when I heard about
this church because I heard that sometimes the
pastor, he goes on past a certain time
preaching.
Or maybe I have the wrong church.
But if you're a clock conscious, you may
get a little upset tonight.
But I will try to limit myself.
I remember Leonard Ravenhill preaching and he's the
kind that goes really long.
He was preaching at Asbury College and the
bells rang to go back to class.
He went on another hour.
One time he was preaching and he said,
Oh dear, I forgot my watch.
You know, preparing the way for a long
message.
One of the elders popped up and says,
Mr. Ravenhill, you don't need a watch, you
need a calendar.
But, I don't want to come here just
with a little challenge and throw out a
few exhortations.
I want us to look into the Word
of God.
I want us to look at the world
tonight.
I believe we are living in a disaster
area.
I believe what's happening in Toccoa Falls is
indicative of what's happening throughout the entire universe.
The whole world tonight.
Tozer said, The whole world is an emergency
area.
Nothing is right nor will be right until
put right by the redeeming work of Jesus
Christ.
I believe that as evangelical Bible believing people
we must take our faith absolutely serious.
Otherwise we should clear out and admit we're
just hypocrites.
For people to say they believe the Bible,
to say they believe men and women are
lost, to say they believe in the Second
Coming, to argue over inerrancy and then live,
you know, as if it was all sort
of semi-mythological.
This is hypocrisy.
And it is an abomination to God.
We must take His Word seriously.
We must realize this is such a privilege
to be here tonight.
Think of how many saints of God are
in prison.
Think of how many saints of God don't
have this opportunity to be in a free
country.
I've lived in many closed countries.
I've been in jail in the Soviet Union
and have had many other interesting experiences that
make me thank God every time I come
back to a land where we have so
much freedom.
We have too many complainers in America and
it's because they never lived anywhere else.
Maybe if the Communists took over for a
few years we'd come and thank God a
little more and wouldn't worry too much about
the preacher taking five extra minutes out of
your television time or your snack time or
whatever else you do after the evening service.
Acts chapter 1 starting at verse 8.
You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit
has come upon you and you shall be
witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria
and the uttermost part of the earth.
The uttermost part of the earth.
I'm here to speak to you about that
because I've just returned.
In this past year my wife and I
covered about 40,000 or 50,000.
I covered 100,000.
I guess she was with me for 50
,000 of it.
I covered miles visiting our teams and visiting
countries doing line-up work for the ship
or follow-up work for the ship or
something else.
I've just come back from Bangladesh, from Nepal,
from Sudan, from the Seychelles Islands where the
great radio broadcast Phoebus Seychelles is sent out
from.
From a number of other lands.
And the burden is heavy upon my heart
for the uttermost parts of the earth.
And I want to share something about that
with you.
But first let's look at 2 Corinthians 10,
16.
Just to get this burden from the Apostle
Paul himself.
From the Word of God.
2 Corinthians 10, 16.
So good to hear the pages in the
Bible rustling.
I know I'm in a church where they
believe God's Word.
2 Corinthians 10, 16.
Don't be afraid to say Amen.
Wow!
Boy, that's encouraging.
Woo!
You know, we're so worried about becoming too
emotional in America.
It's like, you know, Tozer said, that's not
our problem most of us getting too emotional.
If we think we're going to get too
emotional, that's like, that's like sending out a
squadron of policemen to the nearby cemetery to
stop a demonstration in the night.
That's not our problem.
We need people who can express themselves a
little more.
Anyway, 2 Corinthians 10, 16.
Paul is speaking.
This is in the 1st century.
This is not 2,000 years later.
To preach the Gospel in the regions beyond
you.
And not to boast in another man's line
of things made ready to our hand.
Paul in the 1st century had this burden.
To preach the Gospel in the regions beyond.
2,000 years later.
Here we are in America where there's 330
,000 ministers.
That doesn't even include thousands with Campus Crusade,
with IVF, with child evangelism, with open air
campaigners, with underground campaigners, and 100 other Christian
organizations.
330,000 ministers in America.
Even if only half of them were evangelicals
and we're now told the evangelicals are triumphing,
whatever in the world that means.
I guess that's mainly in numbers.
We have to look out over the regions
beyond and realize there are only 37,000
American missionaries and a third of them are
on furlough.
And a very high percentage of them are
women limited to social work.
The number of men aggressively reaching cross-culture
to the heathen in the world today represents
less than 20% of all the missionaries.
That's what Ralph Winner, one of the leading
missionologists in America today has said.
And that deserves some thinking if we are
missionary minded.
You know, World War II wasn't just a
matter of realizing we had a war and
then sending out the troops.
And that's the foundation I've been fighting from.
A foundation of terrific freedom.
A foundation of accepting myself and the things
about myself that used to disturb me.
Realizing that God wants to change me but
He doesn't want to annihilate me.
And you may feel so inadequate, so fearful,
but I can tell you God can make
the difference.
God can make the difference.
And the time to start I can only
say is the younger the better.
The younger the better.
Do you know we have a disease in
many churches?
And it's such a complex thing that I've
wrestled with it I think for 20 years.
It's a disease I call in my book
Hunger for Reality.
It's a disease called Spiritual Schizophrenia.
In that we have heard so many messages,
so many challenges.
I think one of the reasons my three
children love the Lord Jesus, one of them
13, one of them 17, one of them
15.
And none of them are great apostles.
But I believe one of the reasons the
three of them are going on for Christ
is that I decided years ago to give
them a low dose of religion.
Not force them into too many meetings.
And I found out that low dosage is
very, very helpful.
Some of our children in evangelical circles get
very heavy dosage of religion.
And not always a high percentage of reality.
And this produces Spiritual Schizophrenia.
And some of us even as adults who
were reared in the church know how patient
God was with us to get us out
of this kind of religious fog.
But I can tell you this.
Probably 40% of the young people in
our work today around the world serving Jesus
Christ were reared in evangelical homes.
My number one man who leads the whole
work in Europe was reared on the mission
field.
Over dosage, man!
He just about drowned in the Word of
God.
And it's just so exciting to see young
people from non-Christian backgrounds converted and set
on fire with young people from Christian backgrounds
who perhaps were overdosed coming into reality in
Jesus Christ.
And being delivered from the fog of Spiritual
Schizophrenia, Spiritual Myopia or whatever else you want
to call it.
But it will take time.
It will take time.
And it will take patience.
I pray that as we bring this meeting
to a close that many of us may
make a deeper commitment of our lives to
Jesus.
Not just in word but in action.
What will that mean?
I believe it will touch every area of
our practical life.
I believe it will touch the way we
walk, the way we talk, the way we
think, the way we spend, the way we
buy.
I believe it will determine the size of
our house, the kind of furniture, the car
we drive.
Every area of our life will be touched.
I believe it will determine our future.
I believe it may mean that some people
sitting here with very comfortable jobs, very nice
situations, will prepare, at least prepare and do
what you can to move out to the
mission field.
It's not easy.
So God may close the door.
Very easy for God to close the door.
Why don't a few more people at least
start moving in the right direction?
When we consider the overbalance of evangelism in
this country compared to so many other nations,
perhaps it's fortunate your pastor's not here tonight
because, you know, I'm sure you don't want
to lose him at this stage of your
church growth.
But it does happen, I'm afraid, when I
come around.
I was in one of the biggest, fastest
growing Baptist churches in the whole of the
Chicago area.
Pastor brought me in.
He thought the high school students needed discipleship.
So I went in.
I preached to the high school students.
He sat in the back of the meeting.
Well, he quit his church two years ago.
He's got four children, but he's joining the
second ship.
He's wandering around France right now.
I think they managed to find another pastor.
So I guess it's God's providence your pastor
isn't here tonight.
Of course your assistant pastor's here.
We could use him.
But I believe with all my heart if
our pastors or our choir master or if
our favorite Sunday school teacher or if anybody
in the church says, I think I should
go to the mission field, we should say
hallelujah and not be so worried whether we're
going to suffer here and who's going to
replace him.
We could spare 100,000 pastors from America
and we've got 60,000 Bible school students
right now that could step into their shoes
pretty quickly.
No doubt there's people sitting out here that
could be pastoring churches.
No, we've got the manpower never in history
have there been so many men in one
nation who claim to be born again as
in America tonight.
No wonder the devil is trying to do
everything to deceive us, confuse us, sidetrack us,
rock us to sleep.
And tonight I am convinced you are either
evangelizing or fossilizing.
The Holy Ghost brings the Holy Go and
if you're not going and that starts right
here, this is a mission field right here
in Ohio, then I believe something is wrong.
You say, I feel so weak.
I feel so shattered.
I feel so inadequate.
You don't know all my problems.
I do.
I probably have the same ones.
Fear, inadequacy, struggles to this day yet with
lust.
All kinds of things.
But greater is He who is in me
than He who is against me.
And I don't have any more of the
Holy Spirit than you do or at least
than you can have if you want.
Oh beloved, I know this hasn't been exactly
a streamlined message.
I somehow was very poor at homiletics there
at Dear Old Moody Bible Institute.
But I pray the Holy Ghost will put
it together.
More than that, the Holy Ghost will put
you together and make you what you should
be for God and for His glory.
That the whole world may feel the impact
even of this one meeting.
Why not?
How many meetings in Acts chapter 2 did
it take to set the whole world ablaze
on that one day?
How many meetings do we need in New
Milford for the whole world to feel the
impact?
Isn't it exciting?
We're not on the periphery.
We're not sitting on the edge watching missionaries
beat their brains out.
We are right in the midst of the
struggle.
Every last believer.
And we need people dedicated to missions and
to Christ at home as much as we
need them abroad.
My main concern is not geography tonight, it's
reality.
And we could be doing, those of us
who are out there, could be doing so
much more if we had the interest and
the prayer support standing behind us.
Because right now, many Asians are signing up
to be missionaries.
We've just had 100 more Chinese young people
full time into our work.
150 Indians full time into our work.
We estimated it would only take one more
year to have the full quota of 250
people for the second ship.
By the way, there's a picture of it
out on the table.
But all of this will mean very little
without the intercessors.
Without the men and women who show up
at the prayer meeting.
How are you doing on that score?
Moody Monthly, concerned about the disaster of the
average prayer meeting across the American evangelical camp,
asked me to write an article on that
subject.
I can't write, but I wrote it anyway.
I think they'll be publishing it next month.
It's entitled, What Happened to the Prayer Meeting?
And I believe that the prayer meeting is
the dynamo, the generator, the powerhouse of the
Church.
And though I know it's hard to get
out in the middle of the week, and
sometimes we come home from work tired, and
I also work about 16, 17 hours a
day, we need to get into the prayer
meeting.
We may feel weak.
We may feel our prayers aren't much.
You link your weak prayers with another lady's
weak prayers, and another person's weak prayers, pretty
soon they'll have a revival.
Let's show up at the prayer meeting.
Let's make sure we're having our own prayer
time with our family, and in our own
private time.
These are practical things, but so often our
Christianity is beautifully vague.
We talk about all these things, witnessing and
prayer and love, and sometimes it doesn't get
down right to the nitty-gritty of where
we are.
Let's call people up on Tuesday night and
say, Hey, are you coming to the prayer
meeting?
Or whatever night is appropriate.
Are you coming to the missionary prayer meeting?
If you can't get to the prayer meeting,
why not at that time gather your family
around and have an extra 10 minutes right
there in your own home.
People always say, Well, we're handicapped.
I knew a man, I read about a
man in Chicago, he had no arms.
He had no legs.
He was blind.
I'd say that's a bit of a handicap.
He learned to read the Braille Bible with
his tongue and was a beautiful witness for
Jesus Christ.
There was a man in Switzerland for years,
he couldn't get out of his bed, just
there in his bed all the time.
What was he doing?
Praising Jesus.
What else do you want to do in
bed?
And as he was praising Jesus from his
sick bed, he was sending Gospels of John
out all over the world.
And people were being saved.
The Word of God is still sharp.
I could keep you here all night.
I know at this point that's what some
of you are worried about.
Telling of what God does through His Word.
A man just wrote us from Ghana, Africa.
He was a pickpocket.
He was out, you know, doing his business.
He got somebody he thought was a wallet.
It was a Gospel booklet that somebody just
got from somebody off the ship.
And he read this Gospel booklet and he
got converted.
He wrote to office in London.
He said, I'm unemployed.
What am I supposed to do from here?
God's Word is sharp.
How many of us are distributing tracts?
How many of us are involved in getting
out the Word of God?
It's true.
O.M. has been accused of being extremists.
There's all kinds of rumors going around about,
you know, if you come on O.M.
you only eat peanut butter sandwiches.
It's not really true.
But it is true that we try to
live on the barest essentials.
I don't say this as if most of
our married couples live on three or four
thousand dollars a year, those who have two
or three children.
And it's more expensive to live in Europe
than here.
Petrol alone costs us two dollars a gallon.
But we've learned how to live.
Very few Americans know how to live.
They've been brainwashed into thinking they need this,
they need that, they gotta have this.
You know, they gotta have a bowling alley
in the center of their house.
And if you and I love Jesus Christ,
if you and I believe that this was
the Word of God and the whole world
should have the Word of God and many
don't have it, simply because people don't give,
I believe we would start to live a
revolutionary sacrificial life and we would enjoy it
even more.
We'd be hilariously happy as simple followers of
the carpenter, not the banker, the man from
Galilee.
What a joy!
And don't do it if it isn't a
joy.
For the Bible says it's more blessed to
give than receive.
Give Christ your life, your all.
Determine to be a disciple.
Turn your back once and for all on
this evangelicalism that is so prevalent in the
present fishbowl community that many of us live
in and determine to be a soldier of
Jesus Christ.
May God grant you the grace.
It won't be easy, but the grace is
there.
Let us pray.
It's just our hearts and our minds before
the Lord in prayer.
We need to just take a few minutes
to think and to pray to consider what
we have heard.