This church, in this part of the country,
is one of the birthplaces, really, of Operation
Mobilization as it's known today.
There's my little globe I'm famous for.
Everywhere I go, people want these, and you
no longer can buy them.
It's amazing.
A company in Germany was selling these.
They no longer sell them.
They gave us a manufacturer.
They're no longer manufacturing them.
I could have sold a hundred of these
globes.
I need one myself soon.
This one sprung a leak, I think, in
the ozone layer down there.
But anyway, whenever I have this globe, I'm
reminded of the fact that there are so
many nations in the world.
And I am involved in praying for almost
every nation in the world.
When I go through the book Operation World,
many of you have that book, I end
up praying for every nation in the world.
I've done that three or four times.
I correspond with people in almost half the
nations in the world.
And in the age of email, it's getting
a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
And we have literature projects between the ships
and STL and the other teams of OM
around the globe.
We have literature projects or literature distribution in
almost every nation in the entire world.
In dozens, well, way over 100 different languages.
Operation Mobilization isn't just two ships.
You may not even feel that our ship
ministry is that strategic.
Most people who have been on the ship,
of course, the chairman of the board that
owns the ship just happens to be sitting
here tonight, Mr. Val Gris, he's an expert
at answering questions.
He has his book, A Lawyer Answers Your
Questions, about the ship ministry.
Well, he hasn't written that yet, but he's
thinking about it.
And he often travels on the ship.
But in fact, the ship represents about 500
people, the two ships, Lagos II, which replaced
Lagos.
Lagos II is in Mexico right now.
I'll join her in Miami in a few
weeks for one of my normal brief visits.
And Duas, that I've just come from, is
over here in the Gulf, in Bahrain.
And we'll be in the Gulf and then
down to places like Yemen and probably then
down African coasts over the months to come.
Duas is the oldest passenger ship still sailing
in the world, listed in the Guinness Book
of Records, built around the time of the
building of the Titanic.
We've had a little better fortune, by God's
grace, than the Titanic.
So there's about 500 people connected with the
ship ministry.
It's getting harder and harder to keep the
two ships going.
We need engineers, we need finance, we need
prayer.
But the response is as great as ever.
And the ship has given the gospel to
tens of millions of people.
It's a combination of ten different ministries that
all go on simultaneously.
But there's 2,800 people on OM plus
1,000 children.
What are the rest of them doing?
Many of them, about 1,000, are working
in what is known as the 10-40
window.
This is the much-talked-about window of
missiologists across the world.
It's 10 degrees north of the equator to
40 degrees north of the equator.
The span of my hand just about covers
it.
Starting in North Africa, going across places like
Libya and Egypt, right through places like Turkey,
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran and Pakistan, Bangladesh
and India, right on over to China.
That's the 10-40 window, emphasized simply in
an effort to point out the more unreached
peoples of the world.
We know there are unreached people everywhere, including
across the street.
But this is where the largest block of
more unreached people in the world are.
Many people's groups, listen, where the church does
not exist.
You may feel there's a tremendous need here
in Manchester, and there is.
But the church exists, relatively speaking, quite strongly
here in the greater Manchester area.
And where I live, in Bromley and Forest
Hill area, we have hundreds of churches in
the southeast that are proclaiming the gospel.
We need more.
And many of them are very inward-looking
and have various forms of spiritual myopia, so
are not actually leading many people to Christ.
But they're there, and there's some kind of
light shining out.
Whereas as we go across some of these
countries, and we'd love to send you more
information about any of them, the church often
does not exist.
Libya has maybe six believers, apart from expatriates
who might be there.
What can we say of places like Saudi
Arabia?
Afghanistan, where the church doesn't yet exist.
So a good number of people, about a
thousand, are in that 1040 window.
700 of those are in India, but we
wouldn't sort of count all those being in
the 1040 window.
I guess many of them are.
And as many of you know, India has
been one of the primary focuses of the
whole movement from almost the earliest days.
And we now have 700 workers in India,
a result of those early teams.
Most of which went out from Britain in
the 60s and the 70s.
The ship vision grew out of the India
vision.
And yet today we're finding it hard to
get people to pray for India.
India and Britain is old hat.
So to get people to pray for India,
get people to finance their work in India,
is quite difficult.
And we would appreciate your prayers.
And if any of you have a special
interest in India, we'd love to send you
our special India prayer letters.
And many different prayer letters in O.M.
I know it may seem a little confusing.
But that's how we get specific prayer for
specific places.
Then another large number of O.M. people
are laboring a little north of the 1040
window in what is called Central Asia.
This is the fastest growing new area of
the world that's still considered part of the
Muslim world.
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan.
Some people thought these were new pizzas.
But these are new countries.
These are countries.
And there's open doors, especially for tent makers.
And it's quite amazing that in these countries
right now, dozens, dozens of Muslims are coming
to Jesus.
The hundreds.
It's adding up to hundreds over a period
of years.
So Central Asia is a major target area.
We still consider Western Europe, much less Eastern
Europe, where we also have many hundreds of
people, as still a very challenging mission field.
We still have our summer campaigns.
Norman Alexander's wife, his first wife before she
died, was one of the first persons to
ever come on an O.M. summer campaign.
It was considered very unusual then for someone
of her age to come over on a
short-term summer campaign.
Do you know today, many of the largest
churches in the world, do you know what
they have as their goal?
Every member is to go on a summer
mission.
I was in an Anglican church in Singapore
a couple of years ago.
Their goal is everybody in the church goes
on a missions trip.
That's the new term for the short-term
campaigns that we started in 1962.
Another church, one of the largest churches in
Singapore, has 1,000 people preparing to go
on a missions trip.
And some of you, perhaps as a result
of our two days together, might consider going
on a missions trip.
I have this feeling, I hope I'm incorrect,
that often people who go to meetings like
this in the middle of the week, there's
nothing wrong with it, it's wonderful, but I
often feel they're what I call spiritual gluttons.
They are always taking in more and more
messages.
Next week it's going to be, imagine, four
days in a row with Roy Clements.
That'll blow all your circuits.
But how much of this ever becomes a
practical reality in our lives so that we
actually begin to do something, whether it's leading
someone to Christ across the street, or whether
it's signing up to go on a missions
trip, which previously might have frightened us right
out of our shoes.
The Lord says in James chapter 1, we're
not to be ears, but we're to be
doers of the Word.
And I'd like that to be our focus
this evening.
There's much more I'd like to say about
OM, but I think we'll have to leave
that to the literature, to the books, to
Val Grieve and to some of the others
here who know about OM.
How many of you have ever been on
an OM missions trip, short-term, long-term?
Raise your hand.
Wow, quite a few people.
Great to see you.
Some of your faces look very familiar.
Last night I shared five words, and if
you got the five words last night and
you write me a year from last night,
you get five dynamic, life-changing books.
If you don't read, mention that in the
letter to me a year from now, and
we'll send you five videos or even CDs
instead.
And I was really wrestling with what I
should share this evening.
We also last night tried to emphasize the
missing part of the Easter message, the message
of Galatians 2.20, I am crucified with
Christ.
It's not just the Lord Jesus who was
crucified 2,000 years ago.
We, as followers of Jesus, are now to
somehow be identified in his death with all
the mystery that involves and know something of
the crucified life.
And we tried to emphasize that the lack
of emphasis on the crucified life leads many
people into difficulty in their spiritual pilgrimage.
I decided after some thought and wrestling and
praying that I would share tonight five more
words.
Completely different words, but again, if a year
from now you can share these five words,
you can have five free books.
Of course, my reason for doing that is
to get you to at least pay enough
attention to write down the five words.
My scripture, however, is an unusual scripture, not
really for Easter, but perhaps unusual in that
it's not so often read.
And it's found in Mark's Gospel, Chapter 15.
It's an appropriate scripture as we come and
are now in those days preceding Good Friday.
We'll pick up the story in Mark's Gospel,
Chapter 15, Verse 6.
Now it was the custom at the feast
to release a prisoner whom the people requested.
A man called Barabbas was in prison with
the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the
uprising.
The crowd came up and asked Pilate to
do for them what he usually did.
Do you want me to release to you
the king of the Jews, asked Pilate, knowing
it was out of envy that the chief
priests had handed Jesus over to him.
But the chief priests stirred up the crowd
to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
What shall I do then with the one
you call the king of the Jews, Pilate
asked them.
Crucify him, they shouted.
Why, what crime has he committed, asked Pilate.
Yet they shouted all the louder, crucify him.
Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas
to them.
He had Jesus flogged and handed him over
to be crucified.
The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace,
that is the praetorium, and called together the
whole company of soldiers.
They put a purple robe on him, then
twisted together a crown of thorns and set
it on him.
They began to call out to him, hail
king of the Jews.
Again and again they struck him on the
head with a staff and they spat on
him.
Falling on their knees, they paid homage to
him.
And when they had mocked him, they took
off the purple robe and put his own
clothes on him.
And they led him out to crucify him.
May God cause his word to burn like
a fire in our hearts.
Let's pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you for
your holy word.
We thank you for the Lord Jesus who
went all the way to the cross, who
was mocked, who was spat upon, and then
was crucified for our sin.
Oh, what great mystery this is, oh God.
Even those of us who have lived for
you for decades cannot fathom the mystery of
it all.
We worship you in the midst of that
mystery.
And acknowledge this as our faith.
That he has been crucified for our sin
and he has risen again for our justification.
Help us now to receive this message tonight.
As we know, you do want to bless
us.
You do want to encourage us.
You do want us to be more revolutionary
and more radical and more dynamic in our
walk with you.
Whatever our temperament.
We pray this now in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Five more revolutionary resurrection words for Easter 1998.
Some of you know I'm part of a
movement, an international movement, called the 82,000
and Beyond Movement.
That has mobilized literally millions and tens of
millions of believers, especially in prayer.
It's more of a network than an organization.
It doesn't actually exist as a structure in
the British Isles.
More active in two-thirds world countries like
Korea and Brazil.
And many other places where, by the way,
OM is receiving many of our new recruits.
Though we still need as many British people
also as possible as the task is still
so great.
Especially in some of the parts of the
world that we have already referred to.
Remember those words in Acts where it describes
the team that traveled with the Apostle Paul.
I think it's Acts 17.
As these who have turned the world upside
down have come here also.
Early Christianity was a radical, revolutionary, dynamic, explosive
force that swept thousands and hundreds of thousands
into the kingdom and has continued to varying
degrees burn for close to 2,000 years.
Our goal in the 82,000 movement is
the gospel for every person and the church
for every peoples by the year 2,000.
And if you would like to get more
information about 82,000 or some of the
missiological material that comes out from the amazing
U.S. Center on World Missions where Ralph
Winter prayed for his wife who's battling cancer,
has stirred so many to become more radical
in their missiology and to make very important
changes in our missionary strategy so that the
unreached people of the world can be reached.
As 90% of all missionaries as of
10 years ago were laboring where the church
already existed.
And less than 10% were working in
pioneer situations among the more unreached people of
the world.
Five revolutionary resurrection words.
Words, of course, to those of you who
have been Christians for a long time, will
not be new.
And so, what I share for some can
only be in the way of remembrance and
I can only have a heart cry that
somehow the Spirit of the Lord will quicken
some of these thoughts to take us further
down this highway of spiritual reality.
The first word is a word that may
surprise some people, but it's the word history.
I seldom speak on the subject of history.
No, I was a history major at university
before I left and went to Bible college.
And I've always had a passion for history.
I remember a period of my life when
I was living on the ship and I
was completely infatuated with British history.
I tried to memorize the name of every
single king and queen.
And I eventually gave up.
Now, I was trying also to attach with
it a bit of history during their particular
period.
And I used to just go to every
film I could about the history of Britain.
A great film, very controversial, about Oliver Cromwell
or that film, The Man of All Seasons.
I thought that was quite good.
I wish, as I look back at my
life, that I had a better memory.
But I put the word history among my
five choice words for tonight because I want
us to just remember once again that Jesus
Christ lived in history.
He died in history.
And as old Dr. Schaefer used to say,
if you were there and ran your hand
down the cross, you would have got a
splinter.
We're not engaged in some kind of mythological
existential pilgrimage.
We are engaged in following a historic Christ.
And we believe that Jesus actually rose from
the grave.
I know to speak to a group of
evangelical Christians along these lines is like taking
coal to Newcastle.
But I think in the day and age
in which we live, in which everything is
being questioned in the press, on the telly,
and even in Christian books, we must acknowledge
before God at this Easter season that we
believe this happened in history.
And if the Church departs from this, then
that Church really should not claim to be
a Christian Church.
Let it be called Unitarian.
Let it be called a religious center for
stories and homilies or mythology.
But if it's a Christian Church, it must
be committed to the facts of our faith.
He was crucified.
He did raise again from the dead.
I had a great struggle with this, actually,
as a young Christian.
I think I've been a borderline agnostic most
of my life.
I hope that doesn't surprise you.
I've been assailed many, many times with doubts.
I remember books like Who Rolled the Stone?
I remember other books similar to that, including
one written by Val Grieve about the resurrection.
That encouraged me as a Christian when I
was in times of struggle and doubt.
When I lived in India, I found it
difficult to spend days, weeks, months out on
the streets sharing my faith with Hindus and
somehow believing that these people were lost.
One of the things that I find difficult
in the day and age in which we
live is we seem to have so few
people of passion.
I know I am categorized as being extreme,
and I would acknowledge that part of my
passion is not necessarily spiritual.
Therefore, I do not look for George Verwerker
passion in my co-workers.
But I would hope that some kind of
passion would be gripping people who actually believe
that Jesus was the Son of God and
that he died on the cross and that
he rose again, much less the great theological
implication of that, that we are saved by
his great atoning work on the cross.
I must confess that as a Christian, I
often have to look for passion in other
places.
I find it in the world of business
and have contact with both Christian and non
-Christian business people who are people of tremendous
commitment and passion.
Some of them would be considered extreme.
I must confess that I find people in
the political world are very passionate.
They may sometimes be crooked.
They certainly get criticized in the press.
But I find them quite passionate.
One of my persons, it's always controversial when
I mention her name, is Margaret Thatcher.
I guess as an American, to be caught
up as a sort of observer of Margaret
Thatcher might be considered interesting.
I thought what she did the other day
was rather dumb when she covered the tail
of the new British Airways jumbo jet because
she didn't like the fancy colors.
She definitely quickly dated herself.
But it was amazing to follow her year
after year.
Even when people seemingly were trying to kill
her in the Great Brighton Bombing, she was,
whatever you may think of her politics, a
person of passion.
I find people in the arts world very
passionate.
Like that producer of that amazing film, The
Long Kiss Goodbye.
I'm sure you're not showing that in the
local Sunday school.
But the producer of that film happened to
be married to the woman who was the
leading actress.
And to make that one scene more vivid,
he made her break through the ice out
of a frozen lake as they made the
film.
I would call that extreme, would you not?
People in the arts, from the person trying
to learn the violin to someone who's memorizing
some huge script in order to participate in
a play week after week, night after night.
One of my heroes is a man named
Cliff Richards, who I find extremely passionate about
what he's doing.
Again, it doesn't matter whether you agree with
them or not.
That's not my point.
Or whether you, you know, went to Heathfield
or not.
These are people of passion.
And the truth is, history shows that people
who don't have passion hardly ever amount to
anything.
And if you and I are to really
build this kingdom that we are commanded to
build, then we must acknowledge history.
And we must let history confront us.
And we must even allow history to bring
us to our knees that we are not
walking often in the steps of those passionate
men and women we read about in the
book of Acts.
They had clay feet just as us.
They had struggles and difficulties and doubts just
as us.
What can we say of people like Peter?
If you live in the home of bad
grief, you'll be confronted by an avalanche of
books.
And as I got up early this morning
and went down for a cup of tea,
the book that grabbed me in this huge
shelf of books was Alan Redpath's book on
David.
And as I opened the book, it fell
open to the chapter about David when he
sinned with Bathsheba.
What a mess!
And yet he was restored.
A lot of the Bible is history.
And yet we're told in the New Testament
we are supposed to be learning from that
history.
And so one of my words for this
Easter season when maybe some of us will
have a little extra time to read is
that history.
Not just what Jesus Christ did on the
cross and in the resurrection, but what comes
before that right back to Genesis.
What comes after that right to the book
of Revelation.
In some of my meetings I take a
survey.
How many people, I say, I don't think
I'll do it tonight, have never even read
the book once?
Generally 50% of the audience, often I
have young audiences, have never read the book
once.
I think I read the Bible once and
got a group to read it once before
I was even a Christian.
I was searching at that time.
I was a president of my youth fellowship
in a very liberal church.
And I got the idea, why don't we
as a youth fellowship read the whole Bible
through together?
Twenty-four hours.
We'll just go on and on and on.
And it ended up getting into the newspaper,
especially this church.
They hardly know what Bible reading was.
And I think we as a youth group,
nonstop, out loud, read the whole Bible through
around the clock.
And I think it took about 60 hours.
Would you give 60 hours in 1998 to
King Jesus and try reading the Bible through?
I recommend a modern translation.
And it's so good.
When I come across from the country of
my birth and I land at Heathrow, I
always feel things are just a little, slightly
more sane.
Because over in America, there are still people
that are insisting that the King James, the
authorized version, is the only true version.
We actually, in America, have books on this
subject.
And I've gotten significant difficulty pushing modern translations.
And if you want something really bizarre, just
pick up the new street language translation for
America called The Message.
I saw one on Val's shelf.
No doubt there will be a British edition
of that as well.
The second word for tonight is the word
reality.
I guess I'm a little bit known for
that word as my first book, or the
second book I ever wrote, was called Hunger
for Reality.
I never wanted to write a book and
I only wrote it really because two of
our leaders of the work in the UK,
John Watts and Keith Beckwith, were both killed
in a terrible motor accident in Poland in
the mid-60s.
And John Watts had urged me to write
a book.
And so I dedicated that book to those
two men.
It only came after I ministered at the
Urbana Conference, the big student convention in the
United States, around 1968, on the subject of
spiritual schizophrenia.
And the book grew out of that message
in which 4,000 people stood to repent
and make a radical commitment to the Lord
Jesus.
I love the word reality.
Though I have assurance of my salvation and
I know that I'm on the way to
heaven and I have a daily walk with
God, I can say I'm still hungry for
the whole thing to be more real.
I'm absolutely amazed that a character like me,
with all my weaknesses, with my kind of
temperament, is still following Jesus.
I'm absolutely amazed.
One of the reasons I'm amazed is because
so many other people tell me they're amazed.
And if hundreds of people are amazed that
George Verwer, 43 years since his conversion in
a Billy Graham meeting, is still going on
for God, then I better be amazed as
well.
Though sometimes I say, well, what is the
big deal?
Isn't this what's supposed to happen?
You get converted and then you go on
for Jesus.
And you're forgiven when you fail and you
bounce back and you keep running the race.
I'm still hungry for reality.
I'm still listening to cassette tapes of other
people, men and women, to learn more about
the Christian life, to get other people's viewpoints.
I want to have a learning curve until
I'm with Jesus.
I thank God for the Walkman, an amazing
little device.
My wife and I, this is one of
30 or 40 areas where we're not in
agreement.
She refuses to put one of these things
over her ears.
It's amazing.
But I think these Walkmans are great.
I remember when my wife and I were
sleeping on the floor in the airport in
New Delhi in the transit lounge going from
Kathmandu to Lahore.
And a bunch of smugglers and loudmouths came
into the same place.
There was no hope for sleep.
But I had my Walkman.
My wife, of course, I would have been
happy to give it to her, but she
doesn't use them.
I put my Walkman on.
I put a little, I don't know whether
it was Beethoven or Petra, it's very similar.
I put it on, turned the volume up
and fell right asleep.
I couldn't hear any of the noise.
My wife, of course, hardly slept a wink.
And as usual, was very tired the next
day.
I really wish my wife were speaking here
instead of me.
I'm sure it would make a much greater
impact.
We've just celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary.
And humanly speaking, we were a misfit.
It's not funny, is it?
We were a Bible college marriage.
She agreed with my theology.
She thought I was a man of God.
What else is there?
I gave her Ephesians 5, not even the
whole chapter.
Submit.
Boom.
We got married and away we went.
Talk about, somebody mentioned my honeymoon.
We didn't exactly have a honeymoon.
We traveled to Mexico.
As I sold her possessions to pay for
the petrol.
But the marriage really, it went really well
for several weeks.
But then she started to read these other
verses about, you know, husbands loving their wives
like Christ loved the church.
I'm sure that that verse has to be
reinterpreted.
But anyway, we discovered that we were incredibly
different.
Very, very different from one another.
There came a period in our lives we
thought we had come in from other planets.
So we were not surprised when the leading
book on marriage came out some years ago
entitled, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From
Venus.
But we've experienced reality in our marriage every
day for 38 years.
Reality in the home is one of the
keys to living for God.
Reality in the church.
Reality in the marketplace.
Our Christian faith is a complete marriage of
everything that we are involved in.
And one of the things that I like
about some of the preachers in the 90s
is that they have been able to somehow
destroy this dichotomy in which we have our
spiritual world here and we have our religious
world or our non-religious world, secular world
over here and the two don't really join.
Praise God for that brilliant book by the
former CEO of ServiceMaster, a little company that
started by some Christians in Chicago, became one
of the largest service companies in the world,
built on Christian principles.
And now that same man is the chairman
of the board and has written the book
called The Soul of the Firm on ethics
in the marketplace and I'd be thrilled to
send you a copy.
Reality.
We're hungry for reality in every dimension of
our life.
Therefore, we're open to learn.
Therefore, we're willing to listen to other people.
Therefore, we avoid generalizations about different kinds of
people of different races.
And we're willing to acknowledge the horrendous mistakes
that the Church made concerning women and allow
women to get into ministry in a more
dynamic and proactive way that will enable us
to take the Gospel to the remaining unreached
peoples of the world because the truth is
that women have always been ahead in the
race when it comes to world missions.
How we can have one policy on the
mission field for women and another policy back
in the local church is as bizarre as
dancing with a dinosaur on a skateboard going
down Mount Everest.
May the Lord forgive us.
My third word is another one of my
favorite words but it might be boring to
you.
It's the word light.
In fact, the first name of our fellowship
before we got the name Operation Mobilization was
send the light.
I got it from a hymn book.
It took me a while to realize how
boring that hymn was but meanwhile we had
that as the name of OM and later
on it became the name of our literature
work here in Britain which we now just
call STL.
Regardless of that, when we think of the
resurrection we think of light.
We think of the light sort of coming
out of the tomb.
We've seen it in various films.
I remember that great film called Ben-Hur.
I guess when you first see it it's
more of an impact than when you see
it the second time sort of like Star
Wars.
But the whole message of the resurrection when
it's brought forth on a film like the
Jesus film by the way that has now
been seen by one billion people across the
world one thousand million.
Isn't that amazing?
The goal of the Jesus project that was
just at one of their meetings is that
everybody in the world nothing like having hymn
everybody in the world might see the Jesus
film in the next few years.
Part of me says they're crazy.
That's completely impossible.
But anyway I guess it's better to have
die of high aim than die of low
aim.
Many of God's people seem to be highly
professional at aiming at nothing.
Jesus is the light of the world.
Isn't that tremendous?
He rose again that darkness may be conquered
that light may be explode in our hearts
and that we may be forgiven.
I wrestled on whether to include the word
forgiveness in my five words.
I even thought of increasing it to seven
words.
But in the light of the time maybe
I'll just put that word forgiveness there next
to the word light.
To me forgiveness is the great ultimate theme
of the Bible.
That Jesus Christ has forgiven me that God
has forgiven me because of what Jesus Christ
did on the cross.
He is risen for our justification and today
I'm convinced many people do not understand what
justification by faith really is.
We even have young people sign up to
come on OM as missionaries and when we
take them through our counseling and we share
with them we find they do not understand
justification by faith.
We've even had people acknowledge a completely wrong
view of God and that they're actually going
to the mission field because they thought this
would please God more and they might possibly
get accepted by God through being a missionary.
No.
We are accepted in the beloved because of
Jesus.
We are forgiven and therefore one of the
most practical dynamic realities in our own life
is that we forgive people.
Even those who trespass against us to use
some old-fashioned lingo or put the knife
in the back.
I'm convinced many people are ill because they
don't know how.
They don't know how to forgive people.
They don't know how to just let go
of things.
They have an axe to grind.
They have something in their heart.
We're warned in the book of Hebrews not
to have even a root of bitterness.
Let the light shine in.
Let the forgiveness shine in and flow out.
That is part of the Easter message.
And my fourth word is the word freedom.
I guess one of the first books that
started to free me up during my time
when I was more legalistic and more uptight
and more extreme.
Doesn't mean I resent those early days as
a young Christian.
We all make mistakes.
Life is full of progression.
But one of the first books that really
started to free me up was a book
by Eugenia Price, a brilliant women professional writer
who wrote that book where God chose his
freedom.
Eugenia Price just died a few years ago.
It was always my dream to meet her
but I never did.
She lived on a little island off the
coast of South Carolina.
I never did get to the place until
after she died.
She then wrote a book Make Love Your
Aim.
And other books came into my life, books
similar to Grace Awakening but long before Grace
Awakening was ever written that showed me the
freedom we have in Jesus Christ and that
made me an enemy of legalism.
I'm convinced to this day many who bear
the name evangelical are basically legalistic in their
basic view of Christianity and of life.
I'm not saying obedience is not important.
I'm not saying there isn't such things as
the Ten Commandments.
But I am saying that Grace Awakening means
that the reality flows from within going out
rather than attempting to be manipulated by outside
things pushing us to try to change on
the inside.
Grace Awakening is one of my favorite words.
We are free to choose what movie you
want to go to.
When I was a student at Moody I
had to sign a document that I would
not go to any movies because Hollywood was
all from the devil.
Then what was I supposed to do when
I arrived in Britain and found out there
was a born-again rock star going around
one minute singing about Jesus and the next
minute it's dancing around the stage with a
bunch of not very well-clad women.
I was indeed confused in my faith as
an American when I came to Europe.
But the more I studied, the more I
read, the more I realized how God works
in different people in different ways.
We're not to try to produce stereotypes.
God ultimately must be the judge.
Who can stand among us and throw the
first stone because we're so clever, we're so
perfect, we're so sanctified or whatever other terminology
we may want to use.
We are free in Christ.
No, not to punch other people in the
nose.
We're not free to become racist.
We're not free to rob banks or devour
tons of pornography.
We are free to live on the highway
of holiness but we must have the discernment
to be able to tell the difference between
clear-cut sin and that which may be
just cultural baggage or cultural distinctives.
One of my cassette series that I gave
at an American university is there on the
book table and if you'd like to hear
more of my thoughts about this, which you
probably don't, you can pick up that cassette.
And then my final word is the word
power.
We could never leave that out of a
resurrection message.
Ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit
comes upon you.
The final words of Jesus before he ascended
into heaven.
So easy to talk about power.
So much emphasis on power.
We're talking spiritual power.
We're talking the flow of the Holy Spirit
in the life of the believer.
And if we're honest, there's tremendous confusion about
this word.
Is this power to raise the dead?
Some people believe.
Someone write me recently said they'll never be
satisfied ever in their ministry again until they're
involved in major ministry of raising the dead.
It's a bit of a mystery, isn't it?
Because we have heard of seemingly cases where
people have been raised from the dead.
I guess I studied too much under A
.W. Tozer who said you need a lot
of reverent skepticism to survive the present day
Christian world.
There are different manifestations of God's power.
But surely one of the most basic is
that we have the power to live a
godly life.
The fruit of the Spirit.
We have the power to be able to
share our faith and see people convicted of
their sin and come to Jesus.
We have the power by the Holy Spirit
to deal with areas of darkness in our
own life and somehow come into more freedom.
So many people today seem to be unwilling
to really share where they are in their
spiritual pilgrimage.
I know the Promise Keepers movement has been
highly criticized.
And of course, a movement that gets so
huge so quick is just loaded with clay.
It's loaded with clay.
But when I was there in Washington with
my big globe walking around those one million
men who spent half of the time praying
and on their faces in the grass, I
felt there was a holiness about the place
that I had not experienced before in my
many visits to Washington, D.C. The great
miracle of the Promise Keepers movement with all
of its complexity is that it sets up
small groups of men who make a commitment
to walk in the light with one another
to share their struggles and their problems.
A high degree of men are struggling with
pornography even though so few are willing to
talk about it.
Many, many of them, their marriages are coming
unglued.
As 50% of all Christian marriages in
America end in a divorce court.
Certain kinds of Christian surveys have shown recently
more legalistic, fundamentalistic types has a higher marital
breakdown rate than even the average non-Christian.
So let's face it.
We need help.
And I'm willing to look for help, help
from many different sources.
Let's understand more from God's Word about history,
about reality, about God's great light, about freedom,
and about the power of Christ, which must
include the power to take the gospel to
every single person in this world.
That is not an option.
That is not a message that should be
separated from the main thrust of Christian doctrine.
Just as tonight, I have primarily not talked
about mission, but have talked about very basic
Christian attitudes and radical and revolutionary principles.
And one of them, of course, is that
everybody in the world needs to hear about
what Jesus has done.
That He has died for them and that
He has risen again.
This is an enormous offense to our Muslim
friends.
They believe last minute He was stolen from
the cross because how could God ever allow
a great prophet?
And they acknowledge Him as a great prophet,
which gives us many opportunities to talk to
them about Jesus and the Holy Angel.
But the thought of Him dying on the
cross, no.
And one Muslim group believes He was taken
down and ended up in Kashmir and they
started a cult based on that particular teaching.
He has risen.
That is not a defeat, as the Muslims
would think.
It is the greatest victory in the history
of this planet.
Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we believe that You
have called us into all the world to
preach the Gospel to every person.
This is not optional.
This is not for those taking a missionary
course at the local theological college.
But this is for every believer on the
basis of Acts 1A, on the basis of
many other biblical teaching.
And so we ask, O Lord, that You
would enable us to fulfill the Great Commission
in the years to come.
And that these great five mega-principles from
Your Word may be a burning practical reality
in our lives.
For we pray, in Jesus' name, Amen.