2nd Corinthians chapter 6.
We then, as workers together with him, beseech
ye also that you receive not the grace
of God in vain.
For he saith, I have heard thee in
a time accepted, in the day of salvation
have I helped thee.
Behold now is the accepted time, behold now
is the day of salvation.
Give no offense in anything that the ministry
be not blamed.
Very strong.
But in all things commending ourselves as the
ministers of God in much patience, in afflictions,
in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments,
in tumults, in labors, in watchings, in fastings,
by pureness and by knowledge, by long-suffering,
by kindness, by the Holy Spirit, by love
unfeigned, by the word of truth, by the
power of God, by the armor of righteousness
on the right hand and on the left,
by honor and dishonor, by evil report and
good report, as deceivers and yet true, as
unknown and yet well known, as dying and
behold we live, as chastened and not killed,
as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet
making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing
all things.
Our God and Father help us to receive
what you have for us in the final
moments of this meeting.
And Lord we thank you that you know
everything about us and you love us still.
We thank you for your great mercy, your
great acceptance and the great reality that is
ours, not in the absence of struggle and
heartache and questions and doubts and fears and
tears, but in the midst of those things,
this great faith.
Through Jesus Christ, amen.
In our brief time together in this passage
of scripture, I'd like to just focus on
verse 10.
As sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet
making many rich, as having nothing and yet
possessing all things.
Remember in Sunday has always been a very
important thing for me, as someone who in
a sense immigrated to Great Britain and wasn't
originally my native country.
I'm sure you can guess by the accent
that I was born across the water in
the United States.
For those of you who may be new
to to me or to Operation Mobilization, I
thought I would just give in a few
words, a few sentences, paragraphs of my own
testimony that my grandfather and father went from
the Netherlands over to America to find the
good life, but they didn't find it.
And my grandfather died somewhat of a miserable
person and a drunkard.
Well, that was my grandfather from Glasgow.
Well, he wasn't a total drunkard, he was
a heavy drinker, but he died an atheist.
My own father seemed to be seeking God,
but ended up in a very wishy-washy
church where they did not proclaim the saving
gospel of Jesus Christ in a very clear
way.
I also went to that church, had religion
but not reality.
And surely religion is often the greatest enemy
to spiritual reality.
An elderly woman who believed the Bible was
God's Word began to pray for me, sent
me a Gospel of John through the post,
which led me to seeking God.
And then through a meeting of Billy Graham
in Madison Square Garden, I came to understand
that Jesus Christ died on the cross for
me and took that step of faith when
I was born again.
God did some amazing things in my grammar
school.
Many of my fellow students came to Christ.
A movement was born that later was to
be called Send the Light, and after that,
when it exploded in Europe, was to be
called Operation Mobilization.
But first it was to be Mexico, Christmas,
summer, whenever I could get off college.
And then later, after college and a short
time at Bible College, God sent my wife
to Mexico and on to Spain.
After a fiasco in the Soviet Union, and
what thrilling news is coming from there during
these days, God gave me this burden, Operation
Mobilization, to see thousands and tens of thousands
of Europeans mobilize to make an impact on
continental Europe and all of Europe with the
gospel, with the hope that this would flow
over into the Soviet bloc.
I believe that what's happening in the Soviet
countries right now is specific, clear-cut answer
to prayer.
We have prayed for these things for years.
We have walked on that wall.
We have been ministering in almost all of
these countries, praying for more freedom, praying for
God's people, and many other prayers.
Sunday is a time, this Sunday, a time
of remembrance.
It's become somewhat of a controversy, as some
in Britain no longer want this particular Remembrance
Sunday.
And I was listening to some discussion on
radio and a little bit, perhaps it was
even on television, about Remembrance Sunday.
And I must confess that I am in
the camp of those who feel that this
is a good thing.
I don't think it's a triumphalistic thing that
we're celebrating war.
There may be a few people intoxicated with
that.
But for most people it is a sad
event.
It's a remembrance of so many who have
died, so many who have given their lives,
even as Christians with higher aspirations and the
things of the Holy Spirit.
Surely our feet are on the ground enough
to know what it is to be a
war widow.
And there are many war widows alive from
those two wars in Britain today.
This is the first year that the older
veterans from the Great War, the First World
War, the war to end all wars, are
not marching.
There are so few of them.
As so many have died, they made the
decision not to have that historic march.
And they showed some footage on television of
last year's march.
Such things are very moving to me.
I know I'm a bit of an emotional
case.
But I'd rather be a bit of an
emotional case than someone who's unable to express
emotion.
Someone who's professional at repressing fear and hurt.
And when I think of those two wars,
I want to weep.
And I may weep before I'm through here
this morning.
In almost every town in Britain you can
find a little monument with lists of names
of people who gave their lives.
I think not only of those two wars,
but so many other wars.
The Boer War, the Crimean War, the wars
there in the Northwest Territories with Afghanistan and
India, the 1947 partition.
Truly, a country that once had an empire
that extended to one-fourth of the world's
population should stop every once in a while
and remember what happened.
There is a sense that all who are
involved in war feel a twinge of guilt.
It's not just those who backed Mussolini and
backed Hitler, perhaps carry tremendous guilt.
But it's those who have engaged in other
wars that perhaps were unnecessary.
As an American, I am completely convinced that
Vietnam was an unnecessary war.
It's been one of the greatest, most difficult
things for me to accept as an American.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail documentary given this
week on television is enough to cause any
American to weep.
It was complicated.
I'm not mega-judgmental about those who made
the mistake, because history is a story of
mistakes.
It's quite amazing how some of these wars
ever got started in the first place.
We make a tremendous mistake right now.
If we think the coming down of the
Berlin Wall, the changes in the Soviet Union,
if all of these things mean that no
war can possibly be ahead of us, that
would be naive, both in terms of biblical
knowledge and knowledge of history.
It can happen again.
It can happen at any time.
It could happen with the Muslims instead of
the Communists or the Fascists.
We, as God's people, should be among those
who are more discerning and more able to
stay free from various forms of naive thinking.
It's good to stop, as we did a
few moments ago, and remember, especially those who
have given their lives.
But when I do that, I remember those
who are still alive, who have battled years
of loneliness because they lost their husband or
wife during that war, or maybe a child.
I tend to be a mega-pragmatic practical
person.
Even earlier this morning I called a widow
in Melbourne, Australia, who lost her husband in
such a sudden way a few weeks ago.
I speak of Archbishop David Penman, who was
one of the main speakers at the Lausanne
Congress, returned to Australia on October 1st, had
a sudden heart attack as a relatively young
middle-aged man, and is now in the
glory.
As I received a letter from her and
was praying through it this morning, I decided
to try to take a chance on my
little cellular phone and see if I could
talk to her, and I did.
Maybe you're not into calling Australia, but I
wonder if you'd call a war widow somewhere
in Britain today, someone you know, someone you've
almost forgotten, or maybe a man who lost
his wife in the bombings.
Maybe someone else who's suffering, who's bereaved, may
have nothing to do with the war.
But as remembrance comes to your mind, to
pick up that phone at a cheap rate
on Sunday and pass on a word of
encouragement could do a lot.
Life is not mainly big things, my brothers
and sisters.
Life is mainly little things.
And there's many a church in a mess
because God's people don't have a vision for
little things.
Some people will be visiting war cemeteries today.
And I think that's something that is often
very, very touching.
Sometimes in the morning when I'm out running,
I remember especially in Germany, it's just vague
in my mind, no, it was Switzerland, some
months ago I was running early in the
morning and women in black were climbing up
this hill and going into the cemetery, obviously
to remember a loved one.
This leads me to this great verse that
has been such an encouragement in my life.
There have been times in my life when
the news of what's going on in the
world, my knowledge of history as I was
a student at the University of History, my
visits to some 60 different nations where I've
ministered, the refugee camps I've seen, the suffering,
the imprisoned, we have 500,000 prisoners in
the United States, the drug addicts, the drunkards
who I've worked among over the years, has
been so overwhelming to me that I have
almost completely given up, completely given up.
I'm the kind of character that's lived at
times for days on the precipice of agnosticism.
Reminds me of the rock climbing I used
to do with my son, Benjamin, my older
son.
So we got the helmets and the ropes
and the carabiners and all this equipment and
we went out into the Welsh mountains and
almost got ourselves killed.
I gave that up.
I'm willing to take risks for the kingdom,
but I'm not sure if I'm willing to
take risks for that particular sport.
Sorrowful, verse 10, yet always rejoicing.
As I touched on last night, there is
a legitimate place for sorrow.
If you feel led, as I know my
father often does since my mother died a
year ago, to go out to a cemetery
and to weep a little over a loved
one, provided it's kept within some degree of
balance and does not lead you to some
form of neurosis, there is certainly nothing wrong
with that.
For us to visit one of the war
memorials in our town and to just pray
a few prayers and perhaps with it a
covenant that we believe in peace.
We are against war.
That doesn't mean we're pacifists.
That doesn't mean we're against a nation having
unarmed forces.
I happen to be a little bit in
the camp that believes that history shows that
armed forces are necessary.
Maybe you don't believe in the doctrine of
the just war, and I will not get
into that heavy subject this morning, especially as
an American, I would get in deep water.
I was preaching about being a soldier of
Jesus Christ in one little sleepy Anglican church
and got a very strong note, how dare
I mention such things as war or being
a soldier in the church.
Of course, onward Christian soldiers in many churches
is now anathema.
Such terminology is not acceptable by mega-pacifists
who believe that all armies and all bombs
should be banned.
We of course should all believe in that,
but how does that happen?
How does that happen?
Do you think the Ayatollah, now dead, and
his followers are going to stop gathering armaments
because somebody in Lancashire decides to be a
pacifist?
Come now, none of us are that naive.
There is a legitimate place for sorrow.
There's a legitimate place for grieving.
When churches go through a heavy, difficult experience
and there's crises, there are people that may
lose their faith.
There are people that may become casualties.
There is a process of grieving.
It is normal.
Some will grieve more than others, but we
must never remain there.
We must leave the cemetery of grieving.
We must leave the war memorials, speaking of
dead people, and we must live our lives,
and we must live our lives to the
fullest.
For the Word of God says that Jesus
Christ, John 10.10, has come that we
may have life and that we may have
it in abundance.
This particular verse points out one of the
greatest paradoxes in the whole of the Bible.
And if any of your children know what
paradox means, the older children are with us
now, please explain it to them.
It's an apparent contradiction.
It's something that looks like it is a
total contradiction, but it's not.
Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.
And I think this is so important for
those of us who are committed realists.
Some places I go, Christians seem to be
committed to optimism at any cost.
Don't talk about anything negative.
Believe only the best no matter what's happening.
Never confront anyone about sin.
Never have any discipline in the church, etc.,
etc.
Surely that's not the road of reality or
revival or spiritual victory.
We, as God's people, should be committed to
honesty.
Honesty is often the first step to revival.
Honesty is often the first step to renewing
our marriages, which so easily go through difficult
times.
Honesty is often the key to renewing relationships
with our own children.
I have perhaps had the most touching moving
letter from my second son, Daniel, that I
have ever had just two days ago.
As God gave him the grace to be
honest, and God gave me at times also
the grace to be honest.
Do not be surprised when problems, seemingly unsolvable
problems, come into your home.
I was with a Christian leader two days
ago who was sharing with me that his
older son has gone completely bananas.
He's unable to communicate to him.
He's left the Lord and he, I believe
this young man had been in OM for
a time.
OM is no guarantee you're going to go
on for God.
No movement, no church, no formula, no book,
no conference, not even any one spiritual experience
is a guarantee that you'll go on for
God.
It's a daily walk we have.
God doesn't have any grandchildren.
I now have one.
I'm so proud of little Emily Ann.
I'm just getting about 50 photographs made of
Emily and I together.
If you want one, you can write to
me.
One quid a photo.
No.
Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.
Whatever sorrow may be on our hearts as
we think over the past year and now
over the past decade as it soon will
be 1990.
Just think of that.
Just let that sink in.
1990.
Doesn't that motivate you?
Isn't that one of the most important parts
of our Christian life to stay motivated?
I may talk a little bit about that
tonight.
If Satan gets my motivation down, anything can
happen to me.
Anything can happen.
So I don't allow my motivation to go
down.
I fight.
I kick.
I scream.
I roll.
I sing.
I jump.
I go swimming.
I go on roller coasters.
I've been on nine more roller coasters since
I was last with you.
Just happened to be that my meeting in
Dallas, Texas was right behind the biggest amusement
park in the city.
I mean, if anything was God's providence, it
was that.
Even though I finished the meeting at 11
o'clock at night, it was a banquet.
The amusement park was still open.
I hit three of the world's biggest roller
coasters before I got to bed last night.
By the way, Manchester can never be classified
as a super mega city until it gets
a proper, really hair-raising, mind-bending, foot
-shaking roller coaster.
Maybe you have one.
I just missed it.
Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.
One of the reasons Christians often continue in
discouragement and depression and ongoing sorrow that's hindering
their behavior is because they have never gathered
from the Word of God a strategy for
staying motivated and a balance of strategy that
will have the right mixture of the spiritual
and the practical.
I don't know if any of you were
at the Keswick Convention when I spoke on
the Book of Kings.
The spiritual factor when the fire came down
in answer to Elijah's prayer and the human
factor when Elijah is found under a tree
wanting to commit suicide.
There they are, right in the middle of
that book.
And God didn't bring Elijah a great revival
or a great exhortation or a new Christian
manuscript.
God brought Elijah some food and some rest
and some more food and some more rest.
One of my mechanisms for survival, especially when
I was living in high-pressure days as
the director of the ship Lagos on the
maiden voyage around Africa with millions of Christians
watching and quite a few sensing it would
be a fiasco.
The pressure, the difficulties we had on the
ship, I developed a mechanism that perhaps enabled
me to survive those years.
Whenever I felt too much pressure, I couldn't
go any further, I'd go to sleep.
Right after lunch I'd slip into my cabin,
put a sign on the door, don't touch,
danger, high explosives, handle with care, and I'd
go to sleep.
Now not everybody has that gift.
I inherited it maybe from my father.
But it's a beautiful thing at night, and
we all have to sleep eventually, to know
that we can cast every care upon Him.
Surely worry is causing more difficulty among the
people of God than immorality, or maybe even
gossip, though the two are often linked together.
And many people are in the grip of
heartbreaking experiences.
They're in the grip of their own problems
because they've never developed a balanced strategy for
survival.
Maybe they have the idea that the Christian
life is always way up here, constantly rejoicing
in Christ, some Concord laser beam 32,000
feet nonstop epistle of joy and happiness and
wonderful experiences day by day.
Now maybe that's your situation.
It's all getting more and more wonderful every
day.
Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the
day before, fine.
You never have any setbacks, any heartbreaks, any
difficulties.
I'd like you to sign right here in
the back of my Bible, right here.
Hypocrites, sign here.
We all struggle.
We all fail.
We all have a fluctuation in terms of
our vitality, our motivation, our vision.
Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.
There are many reasons to rejoice, even on
a practical level.
What God is doing in the world today,
the lives that are being changed, the people
that are being saved, those that were saved
through the live link and are going on
today, just as I was saved through Billy
Graham 33 years ago and have been going
on every single day ever since.
What's happening in the communist countries is a
cause for rejoicing, but the growth of the
church in the Soviet Union, the growth of
the church in China, the phenomenal growth of
the church in other parts of the world
is even a greater cause for rejoicing.
The way God works in our lives, even
failure can be the backdoor to success.
Men who have had enormous failure in their
ministry and could only see a great black
hole at that moment were restored and then
later used in unique and unusual ways that
they would have never gone into if somehow
the bottom had not dropped out of what
they were doing in the first place.
As God's people, we get stuck.
We've had people get stuck in Operation Mobilization
and we could see they were lacking zip
and vitality and God allowed their little world
to cave in and after it caved in,
a whole new ministry was born and a
number of early OM leaders who wanted to
stay long term with us.
It was only through their world sort of
dropping from under them that they went through
a time of crisis and struggle and difficulty
and some failure and later were used to
start whole new ministries.
I think of one that now has 150
people alone working among Muslims and he was
one of those who felt he must be
in OM for life.
I'm glad he didn't stay.
Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.
Our, of course, bottom line rejoicing comes because
of Jesus Christ living in us.
Even when we are feeling miserable, we can
experience a degree of praise.
Many young people feel guilty because they don't
like to go to church and some parents
are professionals at making them feel more guilty.
It's quite normal, my friends, not to feel
like going to church.
The Christian life is not mainly going to
church.
There may be a time when the Lord
actually tells you to stay home and sleep
in and get a little rest, maybe listen
to the message later on, on cassette tape.
If I were a pastor of church, I
would close it down some Sunday mornings, that's
why I'll never get to be a pastor,
and send them all out in evangelism because
we seem, as Christians, to be generally somewhat
faithful in church attendance, but generally miserable in
reaching out to raw, unconverted people who are
all over the place, even Sunday morning these
days, in the marketplaces and the golf courses
and in the parks and everywhere else.
Sometimes it's good to just break out of
our church mentality and spend more time with
unconverted people, whether it's in a park or
a bus or a train or in their
homes or they in our homes, for without
that kind of breaking out, we are destined
to develop ghetto mentality that eventually will lead
us to some kind of spiritual ostriches with
our heads perpetually in the sand.
That's another whole message.
There's not time to give it this morning.
I thank God for this great paradox.
We are sorrowful concerning those wars, concerning all
of that death, concerning what's happening in the
world right now, in Beirut, in Kampuchea, Cambodia,
in Afghanistan, in South Africa, Nicaragua, there's so
much suffering, and we feel that when we
watch it on television.
Our hearts are broken almost every day as
news comes over the telephone and through letters
to us.
Some of you know we have one of
our own men who's been missing for eight
years there, working among the Afghans who probably
has been murdered.
He's left a wife with two children and
she's about to have another one next month.
There is legitimate sorrow for all of us
who live on this planet, but there is
rejoicing.
We know there is an ultimate glorious plan
by a sovereign almighty God that we can
never fully grasp here.
We see through the glass darkly.
There is an ultimate plan.
There is an ultimate destiny for all of
God's people, and we have to put the
mystery factor of all that in God's hands,
knowing he who created this great universe and
created us knows what we need to know
and what we don't need to know in
order to live godly, Christ-like lives that
glorify him.
Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you for
your word.
We thank you for the reality of your
Son Jesus Christ living in us.
You know those that are carrying special burdens
this morning, those that may have special sorrows,
struggling with particular emotions and difficulties, and we
pray that each one from your holy word
would develop a biblical strategy for maintaining their
motivation, a biblical strategy for marathon running, that
we may understand the paradox of this great
scripture, that we as your people, as soldiers
of your Son Jesus Christ in this great
spiritual warfare, are sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.
We thank you for this great truth, and
we want to make ourselves available to you
to be your witnesses here in Manchester and
throughout the world, to be involved in this
great spiritual revolution of justice and righteousness and
truth and salvation, and to be a vital
committed part of spreading the gospel to every
part of this world, even where millions have
never once heard, never held a Bible or
read a gospel tract.
Grant us increased vision, increased spiritual dynamic, and
great faith to do this task.
In Jesus' name, amen.