I'm always asking the Lord for new messages,
as you may know, some people, when they
listen to a message, they like to have
an outline.
They like to be able to remember something.
And the last couple of years, I've been
in my sevens.
And I have another seven.
And it's called the Seven Literature Lacks.
Now, that may not make sense.
Seven Literature Lacks, or you can say Seven
Lacks, in the area of literature.
And I cannot express how much this has
been on my heart on this trip.
And as I continue to read reports and
sit through endless OM meetings, people often ask
me, what's your biggest burden for OM?
And people around the world somehow think that
I'm involved with OM.
So they ask me, what's your big burden
for OM?
And of course, one of my greatest burdens
is that we don't lack vision.
I'll tell you, this work here in Bromley,
and I guess I've been involved in Bromley
now for 20 years.
My roots in STL actually are deeper than
my roots in ICT, because ICT is a
relatively recent thing.
Whereas STL goes right back to the very
earliest days, when we first came to Britain.
But I know one thing, that the work
here in Bromley, if you don't have a
vision, can really become a pain in the
neck.
And become real drudgery.
And this, it's easy for us to see
our weaknesses and our needs and our struggles
here.
I have the interesting task of seeing these
weaknesses and struggles in every OM field right
across the world, because I visit all of
them.
Not every year any longer, I used to.
And every field in OM is struggling.
Every field has people who are not happy.
Every field has people who are, you know,
not making it.
Maybe have lost their enthusiasm.
Or something else along that line.
And I think, of course, a movement like
OM, and especially when we're in a specialized
task as STL and ICT to a degree,
of course, our vision has to be renewed
again and again.
I think the Lord is putting together here
in Bromley a tremendous team of people who
are committed to the vision of Christian literature,
which was a large part of the original
vision of OM before short-term training, before
ships, of course, by many, many years, before
a lot of things.
If you ever listen to the early tapes,
Bob Rose claims he has one of the
earliest tapes in the history of OM.
He wants to sell it to me for
a thousand dollars.
But you will know that we were, of
course, very strong on literature, so strong that
that image still sticks with us.
OM is no longer mainly a literature distribution
agency.
OM is many things.
For many it's a short-term training program.
For many others it's a church planting program.
For many others it's a church renewal leadership
training program.
Don't want to get into that tonight.
That will get me on a sidetrack.
But I think especially for those of us
here in Bromley, and the only reason ICT
is in Bromley is because STL is in
Bromley.
We wouldn't have chose Bromley.
I was here in order to work with
STL.
I arrived back here, I remember that year
when John Watts, the director of STL, was
killed, and most people felt it was finished.
Gary Davey was in Spain, a very unlikely
candidate for this job in the minds of
many.
And it was, you know, since the British
director had been killed in the same accident,
it didn't look too good.
I had been living previous to this in
Belgium, in Zaventem, involved in the European work.
This is when I wasn't in India.
I'd be in India half a year and
then I'd come back for the summer.
So this is why I ended up in
Bromley.
I think of the words of the Lord
Jesus where he said, I am the way,
the truth, and the life.
No man cometh to his Father but by
me.
And I think of the words of that
hymn, Publish the Tidings, Tidings of Peace, and
a lot of other great hymns that clearly
tell us that we should be distributing the
word of God, publishing the word of God,
preaching the word of God throughout the world.
I had the joy a couple of weeks
ago of being at the bedside of Dr.
Oswald J.
Smith.
He will be 96 years of age and
he is weak.
No man in North America influenced world missions
as much as Oswald J.
Smith, except maybe Billy Graham, because of Billy
Graham's just huge impact in every possible direction.
Billy Graham is already lined up, I understand,
to preach at OJ's funeral.
Dr. Smith is very, very weak.
He's 96.
Doesn't seem to have anything wrong with him
except he's weak.
Some of you already had that at 26.
But what a challenge to just be with
this man.
I told him about what was going on
with his books.
We are involved in distributing his books.
I have some challenging news for Neil Brinkley,
since he coordinates all this.
Dr. Paul Smith, now in charge of that
literature, is seriously considering turning the whole of
OJ's literature over to you.
To coordinate with your little computer and your
wonderful wife.
And Allison can help and Paul and Robert.
But anyway, we'll talk about that another time.
But this man, Oswald J.
Smith, has a major influence in my life
through his book, Passion for Soul.
We cannot measure how God uses that book.
It's been rewritten in different forms.
I think the Challenge of Missions now has
some of the chapters.
Oswald Smith is always dividing up his chapters
and putting them in different forms.
Amazing man.
Paul Smith has carried that people's church.
And though the church has gone down a
bit in attendance, because the competition, the number
of churches in Toronto, and all the new
things, because that's an old one.
It's quite amazing.
And yet with that church decreasing in attendance,
they saw $1,300,000 come in for
world missions last year.
That's Canadian dollars.
That's like a million American dollars.
They're not a church full of wealthy people.
We're talking about many ordinary Canadian people.
What a great testimony.
But I think the thing that marked the
life of Oswald J.
Smith was vision.
And Paul told me the last thing that
Oswald J.
Smith ever gave up, long after he gave
up his pulpit, gave up preaching, the last
thing he would ever surrender was his books.
He was still writing people about his books
and challenging them to get them back into
print.
And we've had the joy of seeing some
of those books reprinted.
And I told OJ about the magazine books.
I'm not sure if it quite got to
him.
But I said, you know, we had done
50 or 100,000.
And he said, 100,000?
No, I don't think he had heard of
that big of a number before of his
particular books.
Vision.
And that's what I want to just talk
a little bit about.
There are many other scriptures I would like
to give.
You know, sometimes you get people and feel
the only thing we can talk about is
the word and the only thing that we
should do is expound the word.
Well, if I had followed that course, O
.M., humanly speaking, would not exist.
The word is the foundation.
The word is the guide.
But I didn't find a strategy for Mexico
leaving, you know, in the book of Ephesians.
I found the foundation.
I found the truth for my life.
I found the inspiration.
But I believe it's extreme to say that
God never speaks to us beyond his word.
I mean, are you getting guidance about who
you should marry in the word?
Watch out for these one-verse things.
Expecting your first year.
But I think God does, of course, speak
beyond his word.
But he doesn't contradict his word.
He doesn't go against his word.
So we don't add to the word of
God.
But the Lord leads us in terms of
particular things we're going to do.
We are living 2,000 years since the
last scriptures were given to us.
And one of the greatest challenges of the
Christian life is to contextualize, to take that
which we receive from the word of God
and make it work.
Down in, you know, down in the IBM
company or in the stock exchange or out
in the merchant navy or in the army
or wherever.
Isn't that the great challenge today?
We all say we believe it.
But so many are saying to me, it
doesn't work.
That's why I think, together with the Bible
teaching and the messages that we need here
and the Bible study, we also need to
know where are we going as a movement?
Where are we going in STL?
My concern for literature must go beyond STL.
STL is only part, a major part, a
crucial part, but only part of the overall
literature vision.
And so what I'm sharing here as it
goes on cassette tape is not just for
STL, but for everybody in OM.
And one of our greatest burdens in OM
has been able to show non-literature groups
how they can use literature.
Even the radio people.
And traditionally there's been tension between radio and
literature people.
Even the radio people eventually realized they had
to use literature.
And they came to us, some of them,
we went to them, and they said, look,
we'd like you to distribute this million leaflets
so the people know how to find the
program on the radio.
And I feel that whatever your ministry may
be in the future, literature can be part
of it.
And it's unfortunate now that even within OM,
there's a bit of departmentalization in that we
think, oh, STL and Thoreau and, you know,
Philip Mars and, you know, this is literature.
Oh, yeah, Dave Brown, it's literature.
This other section, well, this is church planting.
Where do most of these people get their
visions of church planting?
I tell you, most of them read about
it in books.
There's not that many original thinkers falling out
of the trees these days.
There's a lot of people who read.
I think that literature is a vital part
of church planting.
Spreading the vision and then, of course, we're
the believers, the people who come to Christ
and all that kind of thing.
Well, what are the seven areas of need
or the seven lacks?
I only chose lacks.
Something is lacking because it's linked with literature.
Number one, the lack of vision.
I've already touched on that.
I wonder if you'd pray a prayer when
we bring this message to a close and
ask God to give you a greater vision
of even what this is all about.
Much harder for you than it was for
us when we began this.
When the first boxes arrived at my doorstep
on the west end of London and we
started selling books in the British Isles, it
was pretty exciting.
It was nothing.
O.M. was nothing.
The name had only been born a few
months before that.
It is more difficult for the second generation.
And STL is in a time of transition
as a man who carried the vision for
so many years is being led into other
aspects of ministry.
And let's ask God to increase our vision.
Not just for evangelistic literature but literature that's
needed to build up the church.
Now you may not feel the British church
is that healthy.
My view is that the British church is
one of the healthiest churches at least in
the 50 nations I've visited.
The church will always have its weaknesses.
It will always be struggling.
There will always be backsliders.
There will always be churches up the creek.
There will always be churches that are extreme.
There will always be churches of all kinds.
But you know, unless you've traveled in some
of these other countries, you'll never have grasped
the heritage we have in this country.
And I'm not British so maybe I can
speak more openly about the British.
I'm not British.
But I tell you the heritage of this
country and it's linked to literature.
It is impossible to separate British history from
literature.
Right back to the Bible.
Right back to Witness.
And Tyndale.
And the English Bible.
I mean even to this day in Western
Canada you have groups that believe the King
James Bible is the only true word of
God.
I had a head-on collision with these
people on the most negative letter I've had.
Vera attacked the answer today.
From one of these people who believe the
King James Bible is the only true word
of God.
In an audience of two and a half
thousand I absolutely torpedoed them with everything I
could pull out but obviously didn't do much.
Vision.
So how God can use literature like for
example the literature Philip Morris is trying to
get into the hands of pastors around India.
Commentaries, Bible dictionaries.
You know if it wasn't for Haley's handbook
and Joseph Free's book Archaeology in the Bible
I'm not sure I'd even be a Christian
today.
I hope I don't want to step on
your eternal security toes in that theological sense.
So you can take that with a grain
of salt.
But the fact is that I was wrestling
for my very faith in an unbelieving school
where biblical Christianity was being attacked.
And it was getting Haley's handbook and getting
Joseph Free's book in Archaeology and one or
two other books.
I mean there weren't many apologetic books around
at that time that I knew about that
just saved me.
Because people were just trying to destroy my
faith.
And I just hope I hope and pray
that wherever this message is being listened to
we'll search our hearts are we losing this
vision that was such a hallmark of O
.M. concerning literature.
Evangelistic literature, literature for believers books that will
challenge people books that will educate people all
kinds of literature.
So it grieved me that in some fields
in O.M. they narrowed down the number
of books they take door to door perhaps
overreacting to the approach we had years ago
when we took too many different titles.
But we're dealing with all kinds of people.
One of the best ways in the home
and door to door work is children's books.
It's a natural.
And children need Jesus.
And often the parents read the children's books.
I understand one of the hottest books in
the communist countries is this children's book by
Ken Taylor a book that I think I
started selling door to door even in Spanish
27 years ago.
Now I understand it's a just a book
in great demand.
We never had enough money to get more
editions of that book into the communist block.
Other times we need a book you know
that's geared towards suffering.
Most people are suffering.
Why aren't we in our door to door
work using C.S. Lewis' problem?
C.S. Lewis is probably one of the
greatest Christian writers of all time.
Didn't cross his T's exactly where every Bible
thumper crosses his T's.
But again and again I meet people whose
lives have been just helped through C.S.
Lewis.
And on and on I could go I
don't have time.
But let's pray for a renewed vision.
In the whole of O.M. those doing
door to door work which is really the
toughest aspect sometimes in literature of answers is
the thing that people found the most obnoxious
about O.M. in the early days was
door to door.
Many wouldn't even touch it.
Just the thought of going door to door.
Especially the women.
Some of them ended up the best door
to door people we ever had.
I've discovered very few continuing door to door
evangelism.
It's just too much for most people's nerves.
I've had to back down from some of
my early teaching on door to door because
it intimidated people beyond the point of sanity
at times.
But I thank God there are still people
maybe like the Marine Corps where people can
only handle it for a couple of years.
But praise God that's 25 reasons why I
want to be in short term work.
If they're the ones that can handle door
to door short term people then that's the
group that I want to be with.
Praise God in places like India it goes
way beyond the second year as brothers have
been doing this kind of work for many
many years.
On and on I could go.
The vision for literature.
Tracks.
I would say that if we took a
survey in O.M. on how many people
are regularly giving out tracks we would have
the all time low in the history of
the work.
I won't take the survey.
I've got enough areas where I'm struggling with
depression.
But it's just natural isn't it?
After the years go by the vision weakens.
A moment that was almost unheard of.
You know we were extreme.
Everybody had tracks.
Everybody was giving out tracks.
The people were and they got six tracks
on one street from six different O.M.
people.
And now of course young people in O
.M. it's hard for me to believe but
it's true they don't even have tracks with
them.
They don't even have tracks with them.
If someone came up to them and asked
them could I have a gospel track so
that I could be saved they'd say well
I work with S.T.L. that's the
Christian Literature Agency but I don't ever carry
any literature with me.
That really adds up to me.
Adds up that something's wrong.
The second lack and probably this is the
reason for part of the problem in the
first area the second lack is a lack
of training.
I've been challenging jury to perhaps get involved
in this area different parts of the world.
Literature committee sits down has great discussions and
comes up with great conclusions and it's difficult
to implement because O.M. is into so
many different things.
We have to fight at the general the
September conference is getting shorter every year it's
getting shorter.
It's just about 24 more years it won't
exist at all.
And you just have to battle there.
Fortunately there is some good training on a
national level.
Some very positive things on a national level.
And maybe that's the best way to do
it.
But we've seen out in India one of
our great needs is to train people how
to give out tracks how to sell a
book how to even loan a book how
to even get the conversation going so that
you can even get around to any of
that in a way that's acceptable.
So really pray let us know what ideas
you have on how we can increase the
training.
There's nothing better of course than on the
job training when it comes to this kind
of thing.
And I know some of you are in
that right here and that's exciting.
And then number three the sheer lack of
literature.
You know this is one of say twenty
or thirty things that's influenced me to the
slight modifications we've made in the OM financial
policy and a statement will be going out
about that in the next parallel.
Some of you have been working hard to
send that out to the leaders in the
last two days through the post.
Let's really pray as that statement goes into
the parallel.
That's the first thing and most prayer partners
have even heard about this.
You know we all know that there's some
changes.
The average prayer partner knows almost nothing.
Quite a few of course people very close
to the work have heard my financial crisis
paper.
So let's pray as that paragraph goes out.
But you know one of the things that
pressed me to make that paper which eventually
led to a united decision was the fact
that people no matter how much we pray
to make finance for literature people generally do
not give unless they have some information.
And I don't think it's God's will for
you to just go in a corner don't
tell anybody you're trusting God for a million
tracts you're not going to tell anybody what
kind of tracts you're going to produce where
you're going to distribute them you're not just
going to tell God and you expect him
to touch somebody on the head to send
you six thousand dollars as somebody recently did
for another million tracts.
From the earliest days of OM I can
assure you information has been going out.
And when you see information going out now
about some project that is nothing new.
But it has generally been done by me
or by a few of us who sort
of work behind the scenes we had the
contacts we knew the funny rules of the
OM game and they are of course the
people that have printed the tracts many of
the tracts that were produced in India have
been produced by Mr. Sampson of Deo Gloria.
Hasn't done any tracts much lately but over
the years millions and millions and millions of
tracts.
He's the man we knew and so we
were able to share with him the burden
quite openly sometime and therefore he came up
with the mega bucks to do and the
money to give dollars, pounds, whatever to print
the tracts.
Another man is a millionaire over in the
United States.
He's not a man that has much cash
around.
He gives a huge amount of money to
his own literature ministry.
He's a man that just provided $12,000
for two million tracts in India.
These people don't give us money.
Just a bird flies by their ear during
their quiet time.
They want information.
They're businessmen.
In fact, this particular man when he sent
$6,000 in for the first million wrote
a rather strong letter saying don't ever dare
go ahead again without my full permission.
And fortunately we had in our files a
letter signed by him he's getting a little
old showing that he had given us permission
and I talked to him on the phone
and sent him a copy of the letter
and the next $6,000 came within a
few days.
But there is still an enormous lot of
Christian literature.
We have so much in English and yet
we know even in English many British people
many British people have never had a single
book that's in that warehouse.
Not one.
I wouldn't want to give you a percentage.
The average person is not reading hardly any
Christian books.
So we see the need is still here
for English.
Praise God that such a high percentage of
the books going out of the warehouse now
are actually going all over the world.
People are reading English all over the world.
We've seen that of course with both ships
as well.
Let's pray that we may be able to
supply more and better literature for India.
There are 700 million people there.
There are a lot of churches and Indians
are more open to giving out literature than
the average person.
I'm talking about committed Christians.
What a shame when we don't supply the
tools to do the job.
And of course as you know the whole
vision of selling books door to door in
English in countries like England the birth of
STL has its roots back in this is
what we call the two punch strategy.
That one punch is we get books out
here and people need books here.
If STL never made a profit this would
be a valid powerful benefit here and in
other English speaking countries.
So that's the first punch.
And we've had to work on that one
a little harder lately.
The second punch is that when we sell
books here because of the way the whole
publishing operation is structured as a business beginning
publishing in general profit comes from those books
and so those profits produce the literature in
English.
Now sometimes that actual cash in STL doesn't
produce literature at that time because we have
found that in some months out in India
in some years more money is coming in
for literature but no money is coming in
to keep you know the general thing and
general wheels going.
Either way it has been the STL money
that has been a major factor in keeping
the whole India operation going where literature still
is such a big part of the work
together with of course now so many different
ministries.
Number four the fourth lack is the lack
of finance.
You know what blows my mind I'm being
real honest with you this is my home
scene.
I can't understand people being in O.M.
for a couple years and not wanting to
pour all the money in the world of
English.
This is a real problem.
I know I was extreme in the early
days and I sent a lot of people
around to Ben most of them came back.
I can't understand how people can understand there
is a need for Bibles there is a
need for tracts there is a need for
Gospels and not want to just you know
get everything for that purpose.
What are we waiting for?
Are we waiting for Jesus to die on
the cross again and announce that salvation is
here and tell all the world about it?
And this was a mark on this movement.
From the early days we believed that scripture
should be published tracts should be printed and
of course we made mistakes.
I'll never forget publishing 15,000 of that
book Science Speaks in Spanish.
La Ciencia Habla.
I got so excited about that book.
I think I told you the story already.
If some of you are new that's a
great story.
But I remember when I found this book
standing in the streets of Chicago.
I thought this book was going to shake
Chicago.
I was so naive.
And I stood in the middle of the
streets in the center of Chicago.
New book proves Bible to be the word
of God.
I thought all the agnostics were going to
stop.
At least buy a copy.
I tell you I was deeply blown away
through that Chicago.
But I thought the Mexicans were more interested.
And we printed 15,000 copies.
No research, no planning, pure inspiration and vision.
It took many, many, many years to sell
15,000 copies of Ciencia Habla.
A book that made such an impact in
my own life.
Now when you see the age of balance
it's a deadly dangerous thing.
It gets more frightening as we go along.
But remember our definition of balance is that
it's the right combination of different extremes.
Let's give what we have for finance.
Every one of you working here without salary
trusting God for your own finance.
You are giving.
And I hope that you experience joy and
satisfaction in doing that.
It's because people working for STL over the
years have been able to trust God for
finance, live sacrificially, cut corners.
We know today with inflation some of us
wonder if sacrificial living is possible any longer.
Once you've got several, once you have a
family and children.
I remember Richard Wormbrow specially warning me to
never allow O.N.'s children to be forced
into poverty.
He said, you know, he thought that we
were into poverty.
And I tried explaining that it was a
volunteer basis.
He said, well, a volunteer, but how do
you handle that with your children?
It's a difficult one and it is
a difficult one and it difficult one and
it is a difficult one and it is
a difficult one and it is a difficult
one and it is a difficult one and
it is a difficult one and it is
a one and
it is a difficult one and one and
it and it is
a difficult one and it is a difficult
one and and theologists are dealing with and
talking about together with church growth and yet
if you study both of those important subjects
you'll discover that literature is absolutely in the
center.
So I don't believe we should play the
follow-up ministry against the evangelistic ministry but
I think we need both and I think
in a lot of the projects that OM
has launched we've not been able to follow
up as much because of a whole number
of factors and let's not get disturbed.
And then the last lap is the lap
of prayer.
The lap of prayer.
Praying over these books.
There's nothing wrong with laying hands.
I mean you believe in the laying on
of hands.
Laying hands on those parcels as they go
out.
Praying.
You don't want a circus act down here,
right?
Laying hands on that parcel of books or
praying around, I'm sure you're already doing this,
praying around one of those containers or skids
of books before they go out and asking
God to use his word.
Praying that it will even get there.
And believe me, it's prayer that puts a
cutting edge on what we're doing.
And all of us in this ministry have
to continually search our hearts in regard to
our own prayer life.
It's so easy when you've got to get
here at 8 o'clock in the morning
for study.
It's so easy to let that prayer life
slip.
Life seems to rush by and sometimes we
seem to be rushing in the middle of
the rush.
Don't let that prayer life slip.
You're never going to get prayer life all
that you want.
I never have.
So you don't want to fall in that
trap.
But battle to get that time with God.
Because brothers and sisters, here in this warehouse,
I'm not a privilege that God has given
us here.
It's so easy to take all this for
granted.
You're looking at a movement that, you know,
I know I look old, but I'm not
that old.
Not long ago we were just operating out
of the closet almost.
I just met a whole group of STL
people Sunday night.
They all remember that little house in Auguston
where STL was based.
I think it must have been for maybe
a couple, two years or something.
By the time in the West End was
only a couple months and the East End
was exactly more months than Kidwell, that maybe
was a year, then it shifted north to
Auguston.
And they remember OM was in Bolton and
STL was in Auguston.
And they were very, very close.
A number of those couples I met, they
all met one another when they were packing
books.
One of the women said to me, this
was 22 years later, she said, you know,
we were absolutely petrified of you.
Not a lot, they were petrified of you
back then.
I guess I was more extreme now, nobody's
scared of me anymore.
But I remember them packing books.
I was in a little office up there
in Auguston for a while.
God has blessed this ministry so much.
Given us this tremendous warehouse and this garage
across the road.
And the bookshop, which I understand is, I'm
forgetting, is not big enough yet, but I
hear very good things.
The bookshop is bigger and selling more.
And of course now we're expanded over to
West Wickham and other places.
The vision of this ministry has to be
reborn in the heart of every new retreat.
If you just come thinking, oh, it's just
something already going on, you're just joining for
a year, you're just going to come and
do your little thing and go, that's just
a trick of the devil.
You are a vital part, especially since we're
all so short staffed, you are a vital
part of what God wants to do.
I wonder how you're doing in those seven
areas.
Take your heart.
Don't ever think that Operation Mobilization is a
group of leaders.
Operation Mobilization is every person on the team
carrying their weight.
I was challenged out of my socks watching
part of the World Series.
I was a baseball nut as a kid.
I've almost forgotten the game hardly exists 25
years away from my own country.
And I was there in Canada and of
course everybody in Canada is talking about the
Blue Jays.
I didn't even know the Canadians had a
baseball team.
Then I discovered no Canadians on the team.
They're all Americans playing on the Toronto Blue
Jays.
They almost got into the World Series.
I've been lost against the Kansas City Royals.
I didn't even know they had a baseball
team in Kansas City.
It was a bad day, I can assure
you.
But I was a Yankee fan.
But I watched the last part of the
second-to-last game.
If St. Louis had won, and I know
this is meaningless to many of you cricket
nuts, I apologize to Peter Manion if he's
listening to this tape.
But if St. Louis had won that game,
the World Series would have been finished.
And last minute, last minute, the guy got
a base hit and scored.
And you know if you watch baseball, you
watch football, you watch cricket, watch any of
these sports, what does it say?
It speaks of excellence, it speaks of teamwork,
it speaks of sacrifice, it speaks of hard
work, it speaks of sticking to it.
Many of the attributes we need in this
world, sports people have.
And to me it's a rebuke.
And it's also a comment.
But I'm in something that's 100 times more
important than football, baseball, and cricket, and rugby
all combined, even played together on the same
field.
That's taking the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And you know if Operation Mobilization ever had
to divide, then all those who are going
to do in-depth church planting, who are
going to do in-depth this and in
-depth that, and all these different ministries we're
involved in that I believe in, if they
all went one way, and the literature in
that case went the other way, I tell
you, forgive me for being old-fashioned, I'm
going to go with the literature.
Because I believe those of us committed to
Christian literature are the ones that determine what
happens in all these other areas, directly and
indirectly.
Fortunately, you know Em, we've married these two
things together permanently, and even put a ship
on top, like a big cherry, two cherries,
and we believe it can go forward together.
Let's pray.
Lord, you know the lack of vision so
easily comes into our hearts.
We go around talking about hell, talking about
commitment.
We go on in our little Bible studies,
scoring it up in our heads, and it
somehow never gets to our heart, or to
our feet.
And your words say, blessed are the feet
of those that preach the gospel.
We think of Martin Luther, the number of
tracts he wrote, we think of John Wesley
going up and down this country on his
horse, writing, publishing, distributing literature, reading even when
he was traveling on his horse.
We think of the influence of Oswald J.
Smith, we think of the writings of so
many great men and women that have influenced
the church, that have influenced all of history.
We think of Billy Graham's books that have
gone to more people, perhaps than he's even
been able to preach to, at least face
to face.
And Father, we don't want to leave this
vision, I don't want to leave this vision.
We believe there can be changes, we believe
there must be growth.
We don't have all the answers.
We're inundated with English books, we don't even
know how we can even look at them
all, much less to figure them all.
We think of millions that haven't had their
first tract, millions that don't have a Bible,
don't have a New Testament, hundreds of millions,
don't have anything.
Lord, we want to do something about this,
and we believe that as we move together
in obedience and discipline, a vision, that a
lot can be done.
Guide us now as we pray about these
things, in Jesus' name, amen.