I want us to look at just one
text tonight, and that's John 14, John chapter
14, and verse 6.
Now, some of you are a long way
in the way.
Can you hear me way back there?
Raise your hand if you can hear me.
I have a great following of deaf people
all over the country, and I often have
them come to me and say, Brother, you're
the first person I've heard preach here for
weeks.
Then I have others come and say I
preach too loud.
John 14, verse 6, Jesus said unto him,
I am the way, the truth, and the
life.
No man cometh unto the Father but by
me.
I believe that's one of the greatest, most
powerful missionary texts in the whole Bible.
And it was when I was a young
student at college that God used this text
to revolutionize my life.
Some of you know the story of Operation
Mobilization.
We just celebrated our 25th anniversary from the
very early days when three of us, Dale
Roton, one other brother, Walter, and myself went
to Mexico.
We had this celebration in New Jersey, even
though in the United States Operation Mobilization is
not very well known, having become a European
movement and really having its larger birth in
Europe in 1961 and 62.
It was a joy to have with us
at those meetings the elderly lady who really
was God's instrument, through prayer, to bring this
movement into being.
And I tell this story not because I'm
that interested in history, but because I believe
the story of this woman who believed this
verse in John 14, verse 6, is a
story that can inspire you the rest of
your life.
Because when it comes to world missions, the
bottom line is prayer.
Learning how to pray, being a man, being
a woman of prayer, learning the art of
intercession.
There's a book on the table called Born
to Battle published by OMF and written by
an OMF missionary who went to be with
the Lord some years ago.
It's about intercession.
Get that book.
I'll be showing it on another evening.
Let me tell you about this lady.
She's a woman who believed the Bible.
She really believed.
And you know when you really believe something,
you act.
You act.
If we believed this tent was going to
fall down in a few minutes, we would
not sit and sing another chorus.
We would not sit and write a chorus.
We would not develop a theology on falling
tents.
We would get out of the tent.
Simple as that.
You wouldn't need a lot of education to
know.
And if we really believe these things we
keep singing about in our churches, we keep
arguing about sometimes.
I believe the action must come or it
is evident we don't really believe it.
Our faith, Martin Luther said, and I was
listening to a talk about Martin Luther traveling
here today, a talk Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones
gave before he died, and I remember those
words of Luther that our faith, Christian faith,
is a revolutionary thing.
And we're here this week to talk about
spiritual revolution.
Only spiritual revolution will lead to world evangelization.
I believe in so many cases today, whether
we're in Britain or in America, whether we're
in Scandinavia or in India, so often when
it comes to missions, it's token commitment.
That could easily be the case this week.
A lot of effort has gone into organizing
this, more than even I know.
It's harder to organize something like this than
it is to preach it.
My part is very, very small.
I am incredibly conscious of how small my
part is, even in this week of coming
together.
A lot of people have worked hard.
And it's somehow my prayer that this will
not be a week in which a few
people in Chester give token commitment to missions,
but somehow it will be a week in
which a large number of believers give total
commitment.
You don't have that many missionary conferences.
Let me assure you, my friends, the missionary
conference is a disappearing relic in the 20th
century evangelical, Pentecostal, Bible-believing world.
I don't want anybody to feel left out.
And I'm convinced that this is really a
tremendous thing that you have done to organize
this.
And I pray that it will not be
token commitment this week, but total commitment.
On the phone, getting to the meetings, and
believing that from this tent, the ends of
the earth can be touched through prayer.
The ends of the earth can be touched
through acts of obedience.
This is the kind of woman this woman
was.
She corresponded with missionaries.
She had maps of the world and missionary
letters all over the house.
She didn't neglect her family.
All of her children, three or four of
them, grew up to be godly young men
and women.
She was involved in local evangelism.
She was involved in the church.
She had child evangelism classes in her home,
plus all of her housework, and yet she
was a totally ordinary housewife.
When I went to the school near her
home, it was what you call a grammar
school, somehow she found out about me, probably
through my bad reputation.
And so she began to pray for me.
She had been praying for the school for
15 years, prevailing, persevering prayer.
I was at one of the truly great
churches in Britain this morning, the Worthing Tabernacle.
There was a pastor who drove me up
to the other side of Reading where I
rendezvoused with my OM coach, which broke down.
Then another man rescued me and brought me
up here.
And this pastor was sharing with me that
more or less in his church now, because
God has been moving in this church in
a mighty way over a number of years,
more or less, if you're not ready to
commit yourself to the prayer meeting of the
church, really he'd prefer you not to become
a member.
Interesting.
You know, he's not totally legalistic about it,
but he talks to people before they become
members.
He wants to know, you know, what do
they believe about prayer?
Are they going to be in the prayer
meeting?
And I will tell you, they have a
prayer meeting there on Monday night.
They have four or five other prayer meetings
during the week in which the ends of
the earth have been touched, and workers flowing
out from there, and finances flowing out from
there, and the church at the same time
is packed on Sunday morning and often full
on Sunday evening as well.
And it isn't a small church.
And the pastor every year goes for a
month of missionary service, usually with Operation Mobilization.
Yes, there are still committed, missionary-minded churches
in this country, but also few in comparison
to the need.
This woman had the same vision.
Prayer meeting was a priority for her.
And she believed this little verse, that Jesus
was the way, the truth, and the life.
In fact, through her son, she arranged to
send me a Gospel of John.
Now, I wasn't from a Christian home.
My grandfather was an atheist from the Netherlands,
and my father was born in the Netherlands.
My other grandfather was a drunkard from Glasgow.
As you can see, my spiritual heritage wasn't
overwhelming.
And this lady heard about me, she started
praying for me, and for two to three
years she prayed for me.
And then she sent me, in the name
of her son, she was very wise, in
the name of her son, who went to
the same school, a Gospel of John.
And that little Gospel of John was used
to break into my bent, deceitful heart.
And then Billy Graham came to New York
City, just for one night.
It wasn't a crusade.
And some Allison people prayed me into that
meeting.
The young man who invited me came to
the anniversary.
He's a Wycliffe Bible translator.
He was also touched in that high school.
It was good to see him again.
And I heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And there might be someone here tonight.
Though this is a missionary meeting, and though
our challenge is mainly for true believers to
become involved in the great missionary task, there
may be someone who's drifted in here tonight,
and you don't even know Jesus Christ personally.
You've never been born again.
You've never experienced salvation.
Someone once said everyone is either a missionary
or a mission field.
Which is it for you tonight?
There's no middle ground.
In answer to that woman's prayers, by then
other people were praying.
That night I found Christ as my personal,
or as my Lord and Savior.
I went back to that high school, and
I was very young and ignorant.
But somehow I learned that God answered prayer.
You know, you don't need a lot of
education to learn that.
It's good to get all the education you
can.
But God answered prayer.
And as young students, 17 and 18 years
of age, we started a prayer meeting in
the grammar school.
And by the time Billy Graham came back
in 1957, it was two years later, we
were organizing nights of prayer.
And God had already been working, and dozens
and dozens had come to Jesus Christ.
In fact, in one meeting where I just
shared my testimony to the students, this was
shortly after I finished at that grammar school,
I had the opportunity to go back.
I think about 500 were in the meeting.
125 students in that one meeting came into
the cafeteria for counseling about salvation.
Within the next year, another 75 or 100
more surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ.
One woman, one ordinary woman, who believed God's
Word, one woman putting God's Word into practice
in her daily life, entering into the reality
of prayer, entering into the reality of witness,
even by sending a simple Gospel of John
through the Pope.
And the whole movement of OM, there's about
1,600 of us now with permanent work
in about 35 nations.
In the summer, there's about 3,000 of
us.
All of it, the two ships, the 400
workers in India, the 23,000 who have
been trained and graduated from OM, many of
whom are serving Christ in almost every nation
in the world, the 300 million who have
been presented the Word of God face to
face, either through literature or through speaking, can
all be traced back to one praying woman.
Does that excite you?
I will tell you what excites me.
I might just say that one of the
things that disturbs me is that so often
we find that God's people are no longer
excited.
You say, well, you know, they're plenty excited
in my church.
Our big problem is extremism in our church.
Well, I know that's a problem these days
sometimes.
Some of the smaller groups, some of the
newer groups, they're all excited.
And when that's the case, often the bigger
danger is extremism, getting off into this total
answer or that total answer.
But I don't think that's the biggest problem
in the average church.
I don't know anything about Chester.
But I doubt if it's the biggest problem
in town.
Too much excitement, too much enthusiasm for God,
people just going overboard in witnessing and prayer
and loving one another too much.
You know, A.W. Tozer said something I'll
never forget.
He said to think that was the greatest
problem in the church, too much enthusiasm, was
like sending a squadron of policemen to the
nearby cemetery to guard against a demonstration by
the residents at midnight.
Not the biggest problem in the average town.
I read in the book of Hebrews that
our God is a consuming fire.
And I always like to ask this question
of myself.
I like to ask it daily.
Sometimes I forget.
And I want to ask it of you.
Are you on fire for Jesus Christ?
Have you been filled with the Holy Spirit?
Sometimes we find one group way over here
becoming sometimes extreme in some of their thoughts
about the Holy Spirit.
We find others reacting, going in the other
extreme, not understanding the beauty, the reality of
the person and the power of the Holy
Spirit.
Such tremendous controversy.
We read in Acts 1.8, Ye shall
receive power after the Holy Spirit has come
upon you, and ye shall be my witnesses
in Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost
parts of the earth.
The Holy Ghost will bring a holy go.
And God in these days wants to fill
us afresh with the Holy Spirit.
And speaking about the Spirit walk, the Spirit
-filled life, Billy Graham said, I don't care
how you get it, just get it.
Some of you probably heard this amazing story
about D.L. Moody.
I have to tell it again even though
I know many have heard it because God
uses it to touch my own heart.
You know, I don't know about you, but
I'm a natural backslider.
If any of you go uphill naturally, spiritually,
you just go, you know, every day, you
know, just straight ahead uphill.
Boy, you know, you can come and autograph
my Bible right here.
A special section for you.
Written on the top, hypocrites.
Someone said to D.L. Moody, why do
you keep going on and on about being
filled again and again and again with the
Holy Spirit?
Moody just looked him in the eye and
he said, because I leak.
Well maybe you didn't expect this this week,
but I can assure you, you're looking at
one weak, leaky Christian leader.
But I've discovered where the refills are.
In my prayer tonight, in my prayer, it
says, Oh Lord, do it again.
Fill me, fill us with your Holy Spirit.
Acts 4.31, people were there in that
prayer meeting who had been touched at Pentecost
and yet in Acts 4.31 it says,
and when they prayed, the place where they
were gathered together was shaken and they were
filled with the Holy Spirit and they went
forth speaking the word of God with boldness.
It doesn't say they went forth arguing with
one another.
They went forth discussing periphery issues concerning theology.
They went forth discussing the date of the
second coming.
They went forth discussing the relevancy of the
coming Israel.
They went forth speaking the word of God
with boldness.
It seems so often today we're speaking everything
but that which the Lord has told us
to speak.
The gospel of Jesus Christ.
John 3.16, John 14.6. Jesus is
the way, the truth, and the life.
Not a set of theories, not churchianity, but
a living, reigning, ruling Lord Jesus Christ.
As we come here, we don't even come
to preach missions.
We come to preach Christ and then follow
on in what he taught about world missions.
I want to ask you, are you filled
with the Holy Spirit?
That isn't some special, super spiritual thing that
happens to a few odd people who stay
up all night.
Being filled with the Spirit is the ordinary
Christian life.
In a sense, that's where it begins.
When you're filled with God's Spirit and you're
learning to walk in the Spirit day by
day, then you're more teachable and you can
learn many of the precious lessons from the
New Testament that, without the help of the
Holy Spirit, are difficult to understand at best.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit is the
normal Christian life.
It's the provision for every believer.
It doesn't mean you're no longer human.
After you're filled with the Spirit, you still
have to eat.
You still get tired at night.
Wings don't start to grow out of your
back.
You'll still fail.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit doesn't exclude
failure.
One of the greatest experiences of my life,
perhaps, together with being filled many, many times
with God's Holy Spirit, was the experience of
really accepting my humanity.
I was a natural extremist, and when God
touched me, it was like an arrow shot
from an overtaught bow, and I just went
on until I hit some tree and I'd
come back again.
I made many, many mistakes in my early
Christian life, and I did get in at
times into super-spirituality and into extremes about
sanctification, and I made a lot of people
feel pretty bad.
It wasn't always the Holy Spirit making them
feel bad.
If the Holy Spirit didn't do it, I'd
take it up on my own.
God had to humble me through mistakes.
God had to humble me through failure in
my home, failure with my wife, failure with
my children.
And one of the great deliverance experiences in
my Christian life when I was delivered of
false ideas about how Christians behave, and I
started to accept Christians as they were, weak,
feeble, human beings.
Some of you young people may be rebellious
the way I was.
Fortunately, in my case, God got control of
it.
I went to a Bible college.
I learned to submit.
I learned through a little book Calvary wrote
what it was to repent.
And somehow through that, God brought me into
a degree of spiritual balance, so I have
a long way to go.
One thing I feel so convinced about is
that this treasure, Holy Spirit, God, is in
an earthen vessel.
And some of you are going to have
a lot of trouble in your Christian life
until you get it sorted out in your
mind and in your thinking that you're just
a clay pot.
And you won't get so depressed and so
down or so discouraged when sometimes a little
bit of the earth gets mixed in with
the treasure and the message and the prayer.
I remember when I went first for one
of my first nights of prayer in Spain.
Talk about high goals.
My goals were so high I had to
use binoculars to see them.
I had so many high goals about prayer,
and I was going to spend a night
in prayer out in the woods alone.
I'd been in nights of prayer with other
people, but I hadn't been out too many
nights of prayer alone.
And in Spain it was warm in the
daytime and cold at night.
I'd forgotten that, so I didn't take much
clothing.
I went out and was sitting in the
sun praying.
I was fasting.
I was very extreme.
I did a lot of fasting.
That's not the reason I'm skinny.
That's another problem.
But I was sitting out there praying and
praying.
I had this little piece of bread.
I was going to eat that in the
morning when I broke the fast.
So I put it there next to me,
and I was praying and reading and praying.
Eventually, like most human beings, I fell asleep.
And I woke up when I got cold
at two in the morning.
I was shivering, and I, boy, this is
the time to break the fast.
I went for the bread.
The bread wasn't there.
Somebody stole my bread.
Can't God protect me in this night of
prayer?
Obviously, some animal came along, and he saw
that I was mainly bone and went for
the bread.
I will tell you, I never forget that
experience.
And when I walked back to the apartment
where I was living, I ran into a
pack of about ten dogs.
That's always a wonderful experience, all barking at
you in the middle of the night in
the dark without a torch.
I was so slow to really face up
to failure, to face up to the fact
that this treasure is in earthen vessels, and
that as a missionary, I was still just
an ordinary person.
Missionaries are ordinary people.
But we do have that treasure, and we
can be filled with the Holy Spirit.
That doesn't dehumanize us, but it gives us
power.
Ye shall receive power.
And I'm convinced that God wants to show
us much of that in this week together,
that many will know when this week is
over that they're walking in the power and
the energy of the Holy Spirit.
And if I didn't believe that's possible, I
wouldn't want to share any more.
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth,
and the life.
No man cometh unto the Father but by
me.
I was sharing with you how that first
year at college, I became gripped with this
verse.
And I had to ask myself whether I
really believed it.
My first year at college was a great,
great struggle.
Most of the people in this particular college
doing a degree course were either unbelievers or
young people who had overthrown the Christian faith.
Incredible place.
Many of them were studying for the ministry
and through higher criticism, unbelieving teachers, all kinds
of liberal thinking, they had overthrown their basic
biblical beliefs.
And some of the teachers, including my own
Bible professor, they just reveled in making fun
of us if we claimed that we believed
the Bible.
And they mixed Hinduism and Buddhism and Christianity,
they mixed it all together, and they used
to mock us if we said we believed,
you know, in a verse like John 14,
6.
And I remember one young man who was
a philosophy student, he came and knocked on
my door and he said, Jesus saves!
Green stamps.
You have to withdraw the hallelujah on that
one.
Just mocking that which we would consider to
be most precious.
But you know, God is sovereign.
Peter gave us that verse, Romans 8, 28.
I suggest you memorize the whole chapter.
It's the first chapter in the Bible I
memorized.
And somehow God knew that was the perfect
environment for me.
I had to put my faith on the
line.
I had to fly my flag.
I had to learn to pray.
I had to learn something about the spiritual
warfare.
I would have never survived that first year
in that particular environment.
And I had to seek out people who
were strong in faith.
And I heard about this character Dale Roton.
I heard he was a fanatic.
I heard he was baptizing people in the
showers, which was interesting.
He was a Presbyterian.
And so I sought out this Dale Roton.
He was a year ahead of me.
Very bright student.
And he became really the one who at
the university, that college, helped me understand something
of the Christian life.
In God's mercy, though, he and I are
very, very different.
We've been together now for 25, 26 years.
I think one of the things people don't
understand about Operation Mobilization is that the great
secret has not been the evangelistic thrust.
The great secret hasn't been all the zeal
and all the dedication.
All those things are important.
But I think the great secret, apart from
God himself, his mercy, and the fact that
he answers prayer, is the way through accepting
what the Bible teaches about relationship, the Lord
has welled an army of men and women
together right across the world who are of
one heart and one mind.
And he's kept many of us together for
a quarter of a century.
If you know anything about the tactics of
the enemy to break up relationships, break up
marriages, break up churches, then you know it's
a miracle when a couple of dozen people
stay of one heart and one mind 15,
20, or 25 years.
And, you know, we learned something in the
midst of the spiritual warfare that every relationship
we have will be tested.
My relationship with Dale was tested.
My relationship with my wife was tested.
And God is going to bring some of
us in these days into relationship.
You're going to make real friends today, people
who are going to stick with you, people
who are going to pray for you.
Maybe some of you will end up out
on a team together in Turkey two years
from now, or out in the front lines
of India, or maybe in a little prayer
group here in this part of the country.
And God will knit your heart, and it'll
be beautiful.
Then the devil will test it.
God will allow it to be tested.
And I pray you may learn to stand
against the wiles of Satan when he tries
to move in and break up some relationship
you have.
We have different kinds of relationships with different
people.
We should never be jealous of relationships other
Christians have.
People who were once very close to me,
and we were knit of one heart and
one mind, today I know they're closer to
others.
Praise the Lord!
That's wonderful!
If one person can be blessed through me
for a few years, and we can be
close, and now he's closer to others, maybe
something happened where even I turned him off
a little bit.
That's normal.
And this other person has picked up the
pieces.
Hallelujah!
As long as a person gets on with
the job.
You know, it's easy in Christian work to
try to squeak out little bits of glory
for ourselves.
Have you ever done that in the Lord's
work?
Some of you look young.
You haven't been in the Lord's work that
long.
God will share his glory with no one.
And even as we come here together night
after night, even as we pray together, we
want to give all the glory to God.
We don't want people going away talking about
George Berward, talking about Operation Mobilization.
We can mention we have different kinds of
relationships with different people.
And these things, of course, we're not a
secret society, but we want to glorify the
Lord.
And if anything happens here, I'm sure it
will be because people are praying.
And God has chosen to work.
In closing, I want to ask you, do
you really believe that verse?
Do you really believe that Jesus is the
way, the truth, and the life?
No man comes to the Father but by
me.
I don't want you to answer that question
with words.
I want you to answer that question with
your life.
That's what God challenged me to do when
I was 19 and I started from Mexico.
There was a time when I doubted the
Christian faith.
I was so confused.
And I said, Lord, if I can ever
come back to a greater belief in all
this.
I never left it.
I never departed it from it as far
as my walk with Jesus.
But in my mind, I had very little
I was hanging on to.
That's wonderful because that proved God was hanging
on to me.
And you may feel intellectually mixed up at
times.
You may feel intellectually weak.
You may be confused by some theological problem
or philosophical problem.
Maybe at university.
But I can assure you one very important
thing.
God loves you.
And even when you're shaking and weak and
trembling, He still loves you.
Don't get out of the train when it's
in the tunnel.
Don't get out of the train when it's
in the tunnel.
I sense in my heart some of you
sitting here today are in a dark period
in your Christian life.
I often sense that.
It's not based on any sort of mystical
thing as much as just an involvement with
a lot of people.
And I pray that if you're in some
dark period in your Christian life, you'll not
make some foolish mistake.
Not sort of jump off that train in
the midst of the tunnel.
And I prayed to the Lord.
Somehow my faith would increase and I would
understand.
And I said things, I guess some of
them were silly, but, Lord, if this is
your word, then the only logical thing is
my whole life.
My whole life.
Everything.
My time, my money, everything on the line.
Nothing else counts.
If this is really your word.
And within that year, I became convinced.
More and more, week after week, I read
other books.
I got a hold of some books on
Christian archaeology.
And my faith came into greater bloom.
And somehow, by his grace, I laid my
life on the line.
And every single day, these 25 years, I
have known the satisfaction of doing his will
every day.
Oh, I've failed, I've sinned.
Sometimes I go to a church and they're
expecting some strong missionary challenge and I give
this, one of my favorite messages, the confessions
of a weak missionary.
I've got the outline in my Bible.
I might give it one of the nights
this week.
People are amazed.
This guy's got all these problems.
Struggles, fears, lust problems.
Missionaries with a lust problem.
You know, we're so, so confused, many of
us, about what the Christian life really is.
And I pray that this week will not
be just a week of focusing on world
missions.
Praise God, that is our burden.
But it'll be a week in which the
Holy Ghost can focus on us.
And that the Holy Spirit will reveal false
ideas or sin or pride or jealousy or
anything in our hearts, anything in our lives,
that's keeping us from running that race.
Oh, how I long for this in my
own heart.
Do you believe that verse?
With all your heart?
All your mind?
All your soul?
All your strength?
If you do, or should I say, if
you will, you will be a revolutionary for
Jesus Christ.
You will turn Chester upside down, I can
tell you.
And Wales and England.
God is not looking for a great majority
movement to somehow launch out across the world
in jumbo jets.
Or on the Queen Elizabeth II.
But God is looking for a remnant who
will say, Lord, here I am.
I'm weak.
I've failed you many times.
There are things I don't understand.
But I believe this is your word.
This Jesus is the way.
He is the truth.
There is no other hope for all of
mankind, no matter how good they may be.
Without this message and without this Savior, I
therefore will give myself to taking it, to
giving it, to preaching it, to disseminating it
in every possible way.
May God grant you the grace to do
just that.
Let us pray.
Let's just have a moment of heart searching
so we can pray, Lord, take my life
and let it be consecrated unto thee.
Pray your own prayer in your own words.
And ask the Holy Spirit to do a
deep, filling, lasting work even this very night.
Amen.