I do want to share this morning, I'm
not here next Friday as I'm very much
involved with the ship in Merseyside.
We have a very important board meeting on
that day, the Friday.
There's a little group of us going up
in the old coach on Thursday evening.
And we won't get back until very late
Sunday night.
So I wanted to just share some thoughts
that are on my heart, which are basically
connected with leadership.
Some of you might say, well, I'm not
going to be a leader.
That's the last thing I ever want.
Absolutely amazed at people that were not in
responsibility of leadership in OM, but when they've
left, what they get into.
Some people highly esteem your having a couple
of years, not necessarily even with OM, overseas.
And in any kind of Christian organization, they
think automatically when you come back, you're some
kind of a leader, or you have some
authority.
And surely one of the greatest problems in
the church is that people gravitate to major
responsibility with weak foundations.
That is one of our problems in operation
mobilization.
You never have enough people to lead or
to be leadership servants, so people get thrust
into responsibility without necessarily having a proper foundation.
Getting a proper foundation isn't a matter of
just hearing what's involved in basic spirituality, basic
leadership.
It's appropriating it.
It's learning it.
I stand aghast at things that I'm still
trying to learn.
I'd like you to turn to 2 Timothy,
chapter 2.
2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse, well, we'll start
at verse 1.
Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the
grace that is in Christ Jesus, and the
things that thou hast heard from me among
many witnesses.
The same commit thou to faithful men, who
shall be able to teach others also.
Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier
of Jesus Christ, no man that woreth entangleth
himself with the affairs of this life, that
he may please him who hath chosen him
to be a soldier.
And if a man also strive for masteries,
yet he is not crowned except he strive
lawfully.
The farmer who laboreth must be first partaker
of the fruits.
Consider what I say, and the Lord give
thee understanding in all things.
Remember that Jesus Christ, at the seed of
David, was raised from the dead according to
my gospel, for which I suffer trouble as
an evildoer, even unto bonds.
But the word of God is not bound.
Therefore, I endure all things for the elect's
sake, that they may also obtain the salvation
which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.
It is a faithful saying, for if we
be dead with him, we shall also live
with him.
If we suffer, we shall also reign with
him.
If we deny him, he will also deny
us.
If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful.
He cannot deny himself.
Of these things, put them in remembrance.
I guess that gives some encouragement to share
with people who have heard these things before
or have been around a long time.
That's why I reread basic books of these
things.
Put them in remembrance.
Charging them before the Lord that they strive
not about words to no profit.
Seems to me a lot of that's going
on in the church today.
But the subverting of the hearer.
Study to show thyself approved unto God, a
workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly
dividing the word of truth, but shun profane
and vain babbling.
For they will increase unto more ungodliness, and
their word will eat as doth a gangrene,
in whom are Himenaeus and Philetus, who concerning
the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection
is past already, and overthrow the faith of
some.
My mind jumps back almost 25 years ago.
A young man I met in Mexico, well,
seemed a nice young lad.
I had a time of fellowship with him.
Next thing I knew, he was back in
the States and had joined a cult, a
thing called the Way.
Movement quite well known in certain parts of
the United States.
I remember here in Bromley, I guess 20
years ago, one of the leaders of the
Navigators.
Within weeks after I got to know about
this man, he joined the Children of God
and became one of their leaders.
Got a letter a year ago or two,
maybe more than that now, a young man
came back from OM and became an out
-and-out Jehovah Witness.
The first Englishman I think I almost ever
met, his name was Tim.
I met him in Spain.
He influenced me to come here in the
first place.
He was very much taught under Ian Thomas
in Caponry, but he didn't like the idea.
After I got here, he sort of shied
off because he wasn't very much into doing
anything.
He was very much into sort of a
more passive approach to a Christian message, waiting
for the Holy Spirit, waiting for the whole,
what he felt the life in Christ to
do it through it.
At the same time, he went to one
of our leading Bible colleges where he became
a very committed Mormon and is to this
day.
There are just a few stories, I could
give you many more.
The Word of God urges us that if
99 people are going right and one is
going astray, that's the one where we should
give attention.
I really believe we should acknowledge that it's
our own sins and our own failures as
a movement, and I'm willing to include myself,
that is linked with a lack of long
-term recruits that we face this year.
Now, one sense we don't lack, we're growing
very quickly.
We've now become one of the largest missionary
agencies in the world, but that's not gonna
help us to fill the gaps, philosophizing that
is, to fill the gaps of needed workers.
And we need a specific strategy to see
more workers going out into the harvest field.
We are committed to do that.
Some people believe we are one of the
best groups involved in doing that, but he
who is good at something needs to work
to be better, to be the best.
Excellency only begins when you're good.
That's where it begins.
If you're doing something good, well, now you
can decide to really excel.
And that's not so easy.
That's where I'm spinning sometimes my wheels.
I think one of the things that hit
me the most this summer was talking to
a leader and just discovering that this person
had been in the work for so many
years, he had heard these messages, but one
of the most basic aspects of the message,
it just wasn't happening in his life.
And he was discouraged.
Actually, it seemed best that he stepped down
from his leadership to a large degree for
a season.
And that experience, that time with him made
a real impact.
Nothing new, just that it hit me very,
very, very hard.
Especially when I realized that his greatest struggle
was something just very, very basic.
He just acknowledged this to me that he
just never followed up on the people that
he met.
He met people, they liked him.
He has a fairly good ability to communicate,
teaching, preaching.
He said it was because of his temperament.
And we discussed that.
And I just, ever since then, I've been
wondering how many leaders are having this difficulty.
It is possible, once a movement gets rather
large, it is possible to really get away
with an awful lot.
Without sounding proud, the Lord forgive me, I
just say this, that if I had done
back at 17 and 18 some of the
things that leaders do now, OM, I don't
think would exist.
I mean, let's be realistic.
When a movement is being born, it's a
tremendous cost.
If you make mistakes, that's it.
I could have made a mistake at Moody,
I would have been thrown out.
I almost got thrown out, actually.
I went back to one or two of
the heads of the school and apologized and
put things right.
I could have actually ended up in a
cult.
I had that natural extremism, and there's a
lot of hostility, especially against sin.
You say, well, how can hostility against sin
lead you into a cult?
Many people who get into tangents, it's because
they can't stand the sin among God's people.
They just, they can't understand that.
One of our first leading light up men,
an outstanding man, left us after a number
of years of ministry and joined the Witness
Lee extremist group.
Now, if you say that they're a cult,
they're liable to take you to court, and
they've almost taken me to court.
They've got a lot of problems right now,
so I don't think they're doing too much.
But one of my very close friends ended
up joining that group because it had all
the answers.
And in his light up work on the
ships, he had seen, especially after Indonesia, he
had seen so much division, so much sin,
so much carnality among God's people, he just
couldn't put that together.
And there's something in us, isn't there, that
wants to put everything together.
And the cults give you that offer.
The cults with one sweep say, all these
people are apostate, all these people are this,
or all these people are that.
And if they're just a small group under
tremendous pressure, they will have to produce a
lot of love.
And a small persecuted cult will produce a
lot of love.
When we were more extreme, we had more
of that kind of motivation in those early
days.
We were under the gun.
We didn't dare make some of the mistakes
we make now.
It would have been in the press.
And they had a Jerusalem meeting here in
England in the early days, when a high
percentage of missionary leaders were opposed to me.
And one or two had mercy on me,
and they invited me into this Jerusalem meeting,
the Evangelical Alliance, I didn't even know what
it was.
And I sat at the end of this
table with all these big canons of the
missionary world.
And believe me, they shot one or two,
praise God.
And then a few others stood with us.
The amazing thing is in those early days
when we were so criticized, very few people
would ever come to you.
And that's how sometimes pioneers and people trying
to really do something for God can so
easily get hurt and bitter and more hostile
and decide to just go their own way.
It's always a historic moment in a movement
when they decide to either go their own
way, even though they may say, well, we
believe the rest of these people are part
of the body of Christ.
They basically go their own way.
Follow some of the new groups in Britain
right now.
With their mouth, they're saying, we believe in
the rest of the body of Christ.
But in their practice, they basically go their
own way, do their own thing.
And if you study carefully, you'll see they
have a one-upmanship philosophy where they really
do believe they're a little better than the
other groups, which in some ways they may
well be.
But the word of God says, take heed,
lest ye fall.
Many, many years ago, I wrote on a
piece of paper some of the big mistakes
I felt that we were making.
In fact, I later transferred this to my
Bible.
I think it was one of the very
first coordinators conferences.
I don't even know what we called them
then.
I think it was in 65.
I wrote Deal.
The conference took place in Deal down on
the coast.
Again, tied in an amazing way with a
small group who were linked back here.
Ian Currie's father became the pastor of that
little fellowship for quite a few years.
It was there during a summer campaign when
I decided to go down and have a
one-day visit.
There was a Bible teacher they invited.
I wasn't quite sure what he was about,
but he seemed to be a good Bible
teacher.
We had invited him down to Deal.
This is a couple of years after this
conference.
So I went down to speak, and I
met this character.
Name was Peter Maiden, and that was one
of the steps that led us together in
this long-term partnership.
So Deal has an important place in O
.N.'s ministry.
And I shared just these thoughts.
The great dangers that face us as a
movement.
Now, that's a long time ago.
I wonder if some of these dangers are
facing us today.
I really believe if O.N. and we
as leaders, and it includes everyone, these things
can be contextualized into anyone's life.
They're very, very basic.
They're tied in with 2 Timothy 2, the
things that God has given us.
Commit to others.
We can all do that.
I used to beg people almost on my
knees, will you please read How to Win
Friends and Influence People?
It was a required book.
It was in the early part of the
leadership manual.
I think we'll go down in history that
one of our greatest mistakes was the phasing
out of the leadership manual without bringing anything
in its place.
I just agonize.
I have nightmares about this.
And yet I failed to get this new
leadership manual.
The job has been delegated off to us.
I've been on the phone with the people
involved for over three and a half years.
This has been discussed at area level.
It's uncanny how we have no leadership manual.
Somebody said to me, but we have a
policy manual.
Only a few people in the movement read
the policy manual.
And it's very different from a leadership manual.
Praise God, we almost lost the discipleship manual
in the midst of the same confusion.
But when I took the survey at the
new recruits conference, praise the Lord, two thirds
had read the discipleship manual.
Any movement as it goes forward in some
areas will go back in other areas.
Let us acknowledge that's history because we have
so many things we're attempting to do at
once.
We have a lot of other better teaching
tools and teaching methods that are going on
in a sense which make up for the
missing leadership manual.
Like for example, a lot more teaching within
each national country.
That's where the big muscle, the big clout,
the big action generally takes place.
A whole conference going on this week, just
finishing I guess today.
Training the Middle East people.
And a lot of the things that were
in the original leadership manual are now in
other manuals.
Middle East manual, Luke manual.
So we're not lacking for manuals.
But I believe that if we as leaders
and all of us could just take a
few steps of faith, make a few changes,
the impact would be enormous.
Now let's be honest.
Some people on OM are basically obnoxious people.
Let's just be honest about it.
They're not gonna disciple anybody.
They never have discipled anybody.
They probably never will disciple anybody.
Now praise God at OM because it's teamwork.
That rather obnoxious, unfriendly type of person can
still play a vital role if he somehow
teams up with someone else.
Now maybe you feel those words are too
strong, but I will tell you some of
the offensive things we have done in churches
are incredible.
And those churches have closed their door and
they've said OM is not coming back here
for many years.
We have quite a few Christian leaders in
this country who still will not touch us.
I could give you names.
And I'm involved in it because in some
cases I said something, I did something that
was unkind, maybe obnoxious.
I've got all the potential for arrogance, obnoxious,
impatient, hurtful statements.
And if we could just reread that book
or something similar, say the Sermon on the
Mount, I believe we could feel the impact.
The bottom line in winning people today in
the society we're in is making friends.
It's making friends.
It's not carrying placards down your street.
It's not sketchboards.
Praise God for sketchboards.
It's making friends.
It's Love Europe, not George Verwer that announced
this is the decade of friendship evangelism.
So what's with us?
Can't we make some more friends?
Different people make friends in different ways because
I had a strong message.
I had a message that certain people wanted
to hear including some other hostile people like
myself who were hungry for God, desperate for
deliverance and victory.
I could win people who didn't particularly like
me.
Not everybody has that gift, you see.
If you're quiet and you don't have a
vision and if you're not sort of of
that kind of temperament, you generally won't win
people unless you make friends with them, do
you follow me?
Because there's nothing there to gather them.
People that couldn't stand me joined Operation Mobilization.
They believed the message.
They believed that the word was a bit
loud and he was a little unkind and
a little insensitive.
They believed the Holy Spirit was with them.
Now let me tell you something.
If you can convince people today that the
Holy Spirit is with you, you can get
people to join you who can't stand you.
Isn't that amazing?
Now they don't always stick around.
If later on they discover that you don't
have the reality, they don't stick around.
Why do many people join different groups and
fellowships?
If there's a major sort of charismatic type
of leader with a vision, with a burden
who's going places, they join because they want
to do something.
It's not necessarily friendship.
It's not necessarily even godliness so that will
have to be there to some degree.
The average person isn't in that situation.
The average person doesn't have a chance to
stand in front of people and try to
win them.
Even when I was a student at Moody,
so young and even before that in my
own high school, I was given the opportunity
to speak.
Therefore I could overcome some of those barriers
when I was speaking.
There was one pastor in my hometown who
really in a sense didn't like me.
He was speaking out a little bit against
me, especially my extremes about forsaking all.
I think back in those days I didn't
even believe in drinking things like Coca-Cola
or spending money and the word came out
that this man didn't agree.
Imagine that!
This pastor didn't agree with George Verber's teaching
on forsaking all.
That's when I was only 18.
But as we look at the situation in
OM today and our emphasis on friendship, surely
it should drive us to rereading such books,
how to win friends and influence people.
And I just say this this morning, my
first burden isn't OM as I share this.
Some of you are gonna leave OM soon.
And if you don't get your act a
little more together, you're not gonna make it.
It doesn't mean you won't exist.
In fact, I'm convinced some of the marriages
break up because we were insensitive.
We don't know how to sometimes communicate to
our own wife, to our own children.
I think of the mistakes I have made
in this area.
Again, God's mercy, God's grace, the charisma factor,
God's hand upon me.
It's a mystery.
Surely a mystery how and why God uses
some of us.
But I do know this, that the world
out there is a cruel place.
Some people think OM's cruel when they're on
it.
They're usually a little naive.
I have followed ex-OMers for 34 years.
Almost all of them will say that OM
was a fairly pleasant time compared to what
hit them when they got out there.
That's why some of them are divorced.
That's why some of them are in such
terrible situations, including completely overthrowing the Christian faith.
The thing that has shocked me the most,
and it's one of the things that pushed
me more and more into preaching and living
and talking about balance, is the people who
united with me in the early years who
were the most outspoken and seemed to be
the most committed to the very revolution which
we were hoping was a Jesus revolution.
When the pressure came, they were down.
I just stood and waited.
And then some of my own failures under
pressure, one of them I guess worthy of
putting in the Gospel Gazette, shook me into
the reality that balance is not optional.
Balance is not optional.
Balance is absolutely basic if we are going
to survive.
What are a few of those things I
wrote down and shared with those leaders?
If anybody could find a copy of this
old tape from the mid-60s, I'd be
interested in getting it.
Number one, getting set in our ways.
Praise God, He heard our prayers, and by
His grace, OM never got set in its
ways.
We are, of course, to some degree, it's
a continual area of growth.
And the changes we have made over the
past years, I believe are as important as
some of the basic principles that we brought
into our movement in those early years.
Beware in your own life of just getting
set in your ways.
Be willing for change.
Be willing to read a new book.
How many husbands, even though they have difficulty
in their marriage, never, never would read a
book on marriage?
I believe one of the greatest mistakes I
made in my marriage is not to read
more books.
I leveled off somewhere in my early days
because I was heavy on marriage books.
I just stopped reading it because the fact,
my kind of stubborn character needs to read
it two or three times before it got
in.
Some of the great truths of those books
never got into me.
I mean, they may have got in a
little.
And I think my wife has had to
suffer because of that.
Have you read any of that material by
Dobson and others on how to understand your
partner and how to love your partner?
I mean, that stuff is so revolutionary and
yet so incredibly difficult to put into practice,
especially when you're in a movement that makes
a lot of demands on you and on
your time.
Let's not get set in our ways, in
our marriages, in our witnessing, in our discipling
of others.
Let's be willing to grow.
Let's be willing to change.
Let's keep listening to others.
Let's keep the L plates on.
If those of you have heard me speak
many times, get even one thing this morning
that you feel you could use to make
some changes in your life that would enable
you to encourage more people, disciple more people,
build a kingdom that it's worth.
Stopping for 45 minutes and sharing some of
these things.
Number two, failing to keep walking in the
light.
It's interesting that Pauline Hymas, who's helping lead
The Real program, shared with me that she
feels this is where O.M. is really
slipping.
A movement that once so emphasized walking in
the light.
You couldn't even get in the door without
reading Calvary Road.
Now we have people in the movement that
don't even know what we're talking about.
Walking in the light, what does this mean?
Working in the daytime instead of working at
night?
People don't know what walking in the light
is.
And there is so much gossip at times
going on behind people's backs.
And unfortunately, that is normal in Christian work.
And I say unfortunately with a capital U.
Instead of going to one another in love,
sharing what's on our hearts, we talk to
other people.
We got the possibility of that in the
next eight months, playing habit with this team.
We don't pretend that we're a perfect team.
This team sometimes is a survival operation because
we're human beings, we're under pressure.
We are overcommitted.
I am convinced absolutely, Viv Thomas is overcommitted.
Not quite convinced Wakely is overcommitted because he
doesn't seem to indicate that he is, but
he's so phlegmatic and laid back.
But I'm destined to get him overcommitted because
it happens to anybody who gets near me.
He's got to lead this team when I'm
away.
He's got Nepal growing, he's got Bangladesh growing,
Pakistan growing.
I did see a few signs last year
that he might be getting overcommitted, but we
won't discuss that at present.
Let's walk in the light.
Let's not lose that principle in O.M.
First John 1.7, walking in the light.
Number three, not taking time to meet for
prayer.
Can you imagine way back in the mid
60s, where we're already getting upset about the
lack of prayer in Operation Mobilization?
And of course, I believe that this is
where a lot of the enemy effort comes.
Do you think Satan knows that there's a
book called His Present Darkness?
Do you think Satan knows?
Do you think he's read that?
Does Satan read?
It's one of the fastest selling books in
the history of the Christian church.
Did you know that?
One of the fastest selling, but now there'll
be a major blockbuster movie coming out of
Hollywood on that book.
Now Christians are divided on that book.
Mike Wakely's written two pages explaining the weaknesses
of the book.
I was with Dean Sherman when he was
talking on the spiritual warfare, oh, I'm not
picking on you this morning, spiritual warfare message.
And I think he had his hesitancy.
Anybody with a brain will have some hesitancy
about the book.
But he said, at least the book is
making God's people aware that there are forces
of spiritual darkness.
At least people are being made aware.
But Satan is so subtle, people are so
locked into habit that people are reading that
book and it is not necessarily changing their
prayer life.
How can it be?
How can it be that we could actually
say we believe in evil forces, we believe
these powers are there and around and it's
prayer, the book makes it very clear, prayer.
And now we've got this new teaching on
territorial spirits.
I mean, when we have these marches this
weekend, different people will be doing different things.
For me, it'll be a survival march and
I believe in praying against the forces of
darkness.
I'm not gonna get into a semantic jungle.
I'm not sure what this territorial spirits is
all about, but I believe in just praying.
Let's pray for Maggie.
Let's pray for the White House, not the
house, but the people in it.
And if somebody else next to me is
praying that something up above gets out of
the way, though I find it a little
bit uneasy, I'm not gonna have a fight
with them.
I got too many other things to do,
but I know that's becoming a big issue
around Great Britain and other parts of the
world.
Long before you arrived here in Brownlee, most
of you, I sort of gave up on
hardlining on evangelism.
I think Jack was the last to make
the big ditch stand to lead evangelism.
I can't believe anything could be so difficult,
so complicated, so exasperating as trying to lead
people out in the more old-fashioned kind
of O.M. evangelism, door-to-door, in
the streets.
And I finally, I guess in the name
of balance or survival, delegated this off to
others, no longer set the pace.
I was so extreme on setting the pace,
the pressure that brought my family into the
time it took me away from my own
children is quite uncanny.
Saturday was the day we did it, yet
Saturday was the best day to try to
be with our families.
I would drag my children out in every
kind of evangelism you could think of, when
they were real little, they loved it, but
as they got older, like around eight or
10 or whatever, they weren't so keen.
And so evangelism in the past years, of
the more old-style traditional evangelism, O.M.
was known for, has been very weak in
Brownlee.
I guess it was in the name of
survival, it was in the name of whatever.
I can honestly say, and I trust you
can as well, that I have never hardly
a day lost my evangelistic seal.
But I have found that I so quickly
get involved with people that I lead to
Christ that it just becomes overwhelming.
I'd meet people on the train at Brownlee
South, I'd have them in the house.
In the early days in the East End
of London, we had people right off the
embankment, drunks, drug addicts, we'd have them living
out in the O.M. place.
We have tried everything in the name of
trying to obey the Sermon on the Mount
that you can imagine.
I wonder, at the end of the day,
we decided to work for balance, we got
into certain teachings like a human factor, and
realized how difficult it was to put all
these different challenges into practice at the same
time.
Different people have different amounts of time.
And if you can squeeze, possibly squeeze, out
of your intensive schedule, and get out door
to door in the streets with tracts of
personal evangelism, as we did so often, it
was our bread and butter.
I'm not talking about the first couple of
years, talking first 15 or 20 years, until
this movement became so big, so complex with
emergencies every day, with a backlog of people
who have come to Christ through the ministry
who are waiting for one single letter from
the person who led them to Christ in
the first place.
We don't lack people coming to Christ through
OM right now, that may sound funny, but
following up on them is awesome, and we
discover that people who profess faith often it
is not a conversion.
And I will not give up gently rebuking
people when they just list someone who professed
faith as being a conversion.
We have not had 300 conversions in Jordan
in the last few days.
I don't think we should use that vocabulary.
300 people while they were getting relief work,
also profess faith, it can get a little
mixed up, can't it?
I hope there are many real conversions out
of that.
There will be, as we pray, as we
follow up, it will happen.
Number five is the subtle influences of the
lukewarm.
Lukewarmness is so subtle, and lukewarmness is making
its way into OM, it makes its way
into the prayer meetings, it makes its way
into every aspect of our life.
We battled it then, let's continue to battle
it now.
Number six, presumption that we know the principles.
Well, if we were presuming in the mid
-60s that we knew the principles, what do
we say now?
Such principles as forsaking all, walking in the
light, spiritual warfare, unity.
The old tapes were phased out quite a
few years ago.
It's unbelievable that that old orientation series that
Jonathan Dale wrote down and I gave lasted
so many years.
The tapes were getting to be a bad
quality, the tapes were outdated.
I fully agreed that they should be replaced.
Unfortunately, around that time, the average OM office
gave up its vision for tapes.
Very few OM offices make much use of
cassette tapes.
STL dropped tapes from their whole distribution line.
They're very hard to distribute.
Some offices continue to use tapes on a
voluntary basis for those who wanted to go
through them.
A few shortened the tape orientation to four
tapes.
That was actually very encouraging, an excellent compromise.
And a lot of people are saying to
me, and I think there's an element of
truth, that a great percentage of people come
on Love Europe, really do not know what
Operation Mobilization is actually all about.
It is playing havoc on the ships and
in other parts of the work.
And though we may have had a lot
of failures in those early days, we're not
interested in turning the history pages back.
Sure do you know that's my feeling.
We can learn some lessons.
And if people know what they're getting into
when they come on OM, number one, we
may lose a few, but I believe we
will have less disappointment and bitterness from people
who come and it is not what they
expected.
Again, we wrestled with that in the early
days because even after hearing those tapes and
going through books, I can assure you there
were still problems because especially we couldn't live
up to the principles that we preached on
those tapes and there was not enough balance
and the human factor was there on those
tapes, but it was weak.
And that's another reason perhaps they needed to
be phased out.
Beware of thinking we know these principles.
Young people come into the movement and if
you've been around for a few years, they
expect that you are going to be some
kind of incarnation of these dynamic principles of
these books or these messages.
And most people have heard at least some
challenging message from an OM speaker before they
come and they are now looking for that
in some people around them.
Seven, choosing the road of least resistance.
I was too strong on that in the
early days.
I had to compromise because there are times
when you have to choose a road of
least resistance in order to get back on
God's highway.
You can't always take the hard road.
And it gets a little more complicated than
perhaps I thought in those early days with
my strong, strong emphasis on the fact that
we were soldiers of Jesus Christ.
Have you ever studied the early intensive training
program on Lagos?
You can be sure that after a few
years they did away with that program.
Why do we have to do away with
that program?
Only one out of 10 leaders can lead
that kind of program.
The secular people still have that kind of
program.
Let's acknowledge that as we've dropped it in
OM.
The secular people still have that kind of
program and it costs you two and a
half thousand to go on it.
Two and a half to three thousand to
go on it and top executives go on
it and it's as rough as ours.
It's absolutely scary.
It's called Schools of Adventure or Outward Bound.
We of course couldn't maintain that because it
takes a leader of high giftedness, of high
degree of training to lead that.
If you don't have the right leadership in
that kind of program, who can keep that
spirit of core going, who can do all
kinds of things, people in Outward Bound are
professionally top trained people.
It won't work and eventually we had to
drop it.
We almost had people killed on the ship,
rock climbing.
You can't play at rock climbing.
After four or five years in it myself,
I dropped it because I almost got killed
and my son almost got killed and then
I felt bad that I had started that
in Operation Mobilization.
Now my son Ben tells me he wants
to go back to rock climbing.
His rope he has is so old that
if we try to repel, that might be
the end.
Number 10, I just insert here sort of
in brackets, especially in connection with our own
temperament.
Number eight, listening too quickly to evil reports.
That was a problem in the mid 60s,
it's a problem in the beginning of the
90s.
You see the movement hasn't changed that much
really.
The same old sins are still around.
We reinvent the wheel.
Number nine, allowing discipline to slip.
Number 10, getting caught into subtle forms of
pride.
I'm quite amazed that in the mid 60s,
we discovered there were subtle forms of pride.
I thought we were only aware of the
most overt, clear cut forms of pride, which
gets so wonderfully demonstrated from time to time
in the work of God.
Number 11, failing to keep up the big
battle against lust.
And number 12, neglecting the home and the
wife.
Let me just make it clear that if
any of us who have children that are
not walking with Jesus, it is not because
O.M. neglected the home and the family.
My children don't believe that.
O.M. was a new generation movement.
There was an extreme emphasis on family and
that whole area thing because we had the
books.
In 60s, we already had the books.
We were one of the first groups to
pioneer the concept that the wife is firstly
a wife and a mother, not firstly a
missionary.
It was radical when we launched that.
Now it's been accepted by many mission societies.
I'm not saying we didn't do enough.
I'm not saying we didn't fail, but in
understanding the history of O.M., let's not
be intimidated into thinking that our commitment to
discipleship world evangelism meant we naturally neglected our
families and our children because it isn't really
true.
It's a little more complicated than that life.
I know we like to measure things in
black and white.
And some of the most godly people who
have never left the United States and who
were mega, mega family-oriented people have children
who are away from Jesus Christ today.
If you meet one of the brothers or
sisters, as I did in a conference recently,
you ask them about their brothers and sisters,
you'll generally find there's usually one or two
that are away from Jesus.
So that's not a simple thing to always
measure, but we felt from the earliest days,
here it is written in the notes, beware
of neglecting your wife, your home, and your
family.
And of course, sometimes we did that.
And then 13, I'm amazed that this got
written in here, beware of idealism.
I must have not followed up on this
because idealism did become destructive in O.M.
It became destructive and we ended up judgmental.
We ended up legalistic at times.
We ended up turning against each other.
We couldn't live up to one another's expectations.
And those ideals, which can be so beautiful
under the control of the spirit, were like
a sewer running through the movement, hurting and
hindering what God wanted to do.
And I thank him for the grace to
learn, to repent, to grow.
And I hope that somehow through this little
unique sharing this morning, we can all learn
at least something.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you that we can move
forward on the foundations you gave us in
the very beginning of this work.
And though some of us had been around
for over 30 years or 20 years, and
we're working together with people who have just
walked in the door, you can unite us,
the old and the new.
The basic principles redefined, the basic principles expanding,
being integrated into other biblical principles with your
strength, your power, your Holy Spirit can enable
us to accomplish this vision, this burden we
have for world evangelism and for revival in
the church and for reality.
Lord, blessed reality among your people.
Don't let us who've been around a while
presume of what we have or don't have
in our lives.
Enable us to sharpen up in this whole
area of passing these principles on to others
also so that we can see this bonding
take place with us and the new generation
of disciples.
We know you use Love Europe leaflets.
We know that you use video cassettes.
You use great congresses and great preaching, but
none of it, I don't believe, can be
a substitute for that bonding between one and
another, that friendship, that heart linking when we're
repenting together, we're working together, we're growing together,
we're learning to walk in the light together
in our marriages, on our teams, on this
team, in this place.
Here we are from such a wide range
of backgrounds and churches.
On Sunday, we scatter to worship and to
meet in different places and we come in
on Monday with different ideas and yet we've
got to work together in spiritual combat, much
more difficult in a spiritual comparison to those
troops down in Saudi Arabia who haven't even
begun to fight.
We're in the midst of the greatest war
in the history of the universe.
Help us to live in the light of
this and to somehow work day and night
to be better soldiers, better disciples of your
Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray,
Amen.