And I hope that our vision will be
truly a world vision, and that must start
right here in Great Britain.
This is why a lot of our effort
this summer is right here in Britain, especially
among immigrants, but not exclusively.
And I hope that you will have that
vision.
I had a quotation from Stephen Alford that
I wanted to read to you on the
subject of evangelism because it went through me
like an arrow.
It is characteristic of our natural sluggishness and
laziness to put off the work of evangelism.
Isn't that true?
By cunning calculations and clever rationalizations, we talk
ourselves out of the urgency of the past
and the demand upon our time, talents and
tithes.
Now we need to ask the Holy Spirit
to rid us of prejudice, indifference, unbelief, and
hard-heartedness.
Stephen Alford.
That's my question.
I want you to turn now in your
Bible to the book of Galatians.
I want to just share something tonight under
the title of survivalship.
You know, when we first started to emphasize
discipleship 25 years ago, we started to distribute
that great book, True Discipleship.
I hope it's on the book table.
I have a load of them in my
bus, which they're praying might be here tomorrow
night or the next morning.
But that book, True Discipleship, when it came
out, it was one of the first books
on the subject of discipleship.
Oswald Sanders, I believe, had a book on
discipleship before that.
There were a few others.
And in the past years, of course, it
became more and more popular to speak about
discipleship.
It's good.
It is in the Bible.
Then a few people used this discipleship term
to describe a particular brand of discipleship.
And in parts of the United States, discipleship
was linked with manipulating people, with sort of
a heavy-handed kind of leadership in which
young people and some not-so-young came
under strong authority.
And that was referred to as the discipleship
movement in some places.
And when that happened, a lot of people,
including myself, we started to wonder about the
use of this word.
But I think most of you understand that
discipleship is not a narrow thing.
Discipleship is as broad as a narrow road
that Jesus has called us to walk on.
I came from an education system that specialized
in making the road wider than it was.
And I never dreamed when I became a
Christian that I would soon meet a lot
of Christians, some of whom would have the
main task, seemingly, of making the road narrower
than it was.
You know, the little group down on the
corner that says, We are the only New
Testament church.
And there's a lot of groups that feel
theirs is the only way.
And they specialize in making the narrow road
narrower than Jesus made it.
Seems strange, doesn't it?
One extreme to the other.
Actually, anyone who knows Jesus Christ personally, I
believe, is a disciple.
He may not be a good disciple.
He may not be living up to the
teachings of the Master.
That's why he's a disciple.
He's a student of Jesus, his Master.
And he may be failing.
He may have a lot more to learn.
But if he has been born again, if
he started on God's road, he is a
disciple.
And as I was praying about the meeting
and thinking about the meeting tonight, I was
wondering if there might be some people that
hear about this and they see the word
mission somewhere.
That word probably is being used.
And they may come in here thinking it's
sort of an old-fashioned evangelistic mission.
In fact, in the universities, they have a
mission.
It's a word we don't use in the
United States.
We use an evangelistic crusade, evangelistic meetings.
Here you have a mission, and that refers
to the time at university when you evangelize
and you reach out among the students.
And maybe there's someone that just is here
tonight, and you think, well, this is going
to be a mission.
And we're going to start talking about things
that you may not understand because we're here
to talk about world missions.
We're not here, firstly, to preach the gospel
to unconverted people in Chester.
That is being done regularly in the churches
and probably in other meetings.
But we're here to speak about the need
to preach the gospel to everybody all over
the world.
And I'm explaining that for a purpose because
as you go out into evangelistic work, I
think you will understand how easy it is
to miscommunicate.
And I hope that in these days you
will learn something about being a better communicator
for Jesus, and one of the ways you
should do that is by learning to be
simple.
You know, that was one of the great
emphases of Hudson Taylor, to somehow keep things
simple.
Simple.
Simplicity.
I hope this message will be very basic
and in some ways very simple, that everyone
here tonight may learn something from what I
want to share.
Now, the verses I want to refer to
are found in the book of Galatians, starting
at verse 7, and these verses have helped
me many, many times.
Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for
whatever man soweth, that shall he also reap.
For he that soweth to his flesh shall
of the flesh reap corruption, but he that
soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit
reap life everlasting.
And let us, this is a key verse
for tonight, let us not be weary in
well-doing, for in due season we shall
reap if we faint not.
In due season we shall reap if we
faint not.
Now, let's be very honest.
If we're going to launch out in world
evangelism, the Muslim world, the subcontinent, you've been
hearing about many of these places.
I spent a lot of time today praying
for many different countries, as I was going
through reports and prayer letters.
I was unable to sleep last night because
of jet lag, and spent an hour or
two just praying through reports from all over
the world.
And it's incredibly exciting what God is doing
around the world.
Then I picked up a manuscript.
People are always giving me manuscripts.
I feel so flattered.
And they want me to read their manuscripts.
And a dear brother gave me a manuscript
on a book, a very basic needed book
on the subject of health.
The last thing I felt like reading about.
And I just read some pages in this
book.
And oh, how it gripped me again, the
reality of health.
If it's not a real place, and Jesus
hasn't come to save men from sin and
health, then let's close down and move a
circus in the tent and make better use
of the ground.
Because what we're here for doesn't make any
sense if men are not lost.
If Jesus Christ only came to die for
the British, the Americans, and the Swedes, or
people who are so reared in the so
-called Christian culture, he didn't die on the
cross for Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or
Communists or atheists, then, you know, I surely
am one more mixed-up man.
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth,
and the life.
No man cometh to the Father but by
me.
And that same Jesus who gave those words
spoke more about hell than any other person
in the New Testament.
And it's amazing how, especially our neo-Orthodox
friends or enemies or wherever else you classify
them, they like to give us this whole
new terminology, and they want us to have
Jesus without the teachings of Jesus.
And there are many that want the blessings
of the Christian faith, but not the responsibility
of the Christian faith.
They want to know they're going to heaven.
They don't want to be involved in the
sweat and the tears and the hardship and
the suffering and the sacrifice to take the
gospel to the ends of the earth.
Men and women may be snatched from the
grave.
Now, if we're going to launch into this
great task in a world of four and
a half billion people, four and a half
thousand million people, then I believe we're going
to have to learn at a very early
stage how not to grow weary.
Because I know in my own life, I
found it so easy after a few years
in the work, especially after the first ten
years, to really start to grow weary.
And you're looking at a very potentially weary
person.
I go perhaps through struggles with weariness, coupled
with discouragement, almost on a daily basis.
Very few days, perhaps because of the way
my mind works, perhaps because of all the
people I'm involved with, when I don't just
think, you know, Lord, I don't think I
can make it.
Every day there's something.
Early this morning I received an urgent phone
call from a friend in the United States.
I'm told that one of my very close
friends, one of the first persons to ever
pray for this work, has a ten percent
chance to live.
His son begged me to phone through to
the hospital in Chicago.
I got through to him.
A man who's just normally just, you know,
bounding with energy and strength of voice could
barely hear him.
He discovered his body was eaten from one
end to the other with cancer.
He's been on the operating table this morning.
I don't know the results.
But I can tell you I spoke to
a man in horrific pain and suffering.
After that I could only weep.
In fact, I don't know how I would
go on in my Christian life if God
hadn't taught me how to weep again.
As a little boy I was told that
weeping was for sissies.
I tried every method to learn not to
cry.
I felt, you know, I'm going to be
a man.
You know, when you've got a little tiny
body like this, you've got a few problems.
Some of you know the story.
Before I was converted, I felt a little
bit ashamed of this little skinny body.
I saw this advertisement in the newspapers for
building up your body.
It was Charles Atlas Muscle Building.
They had these little cartoons.
I think they're still using them.
It's the same silly cartoon 25 years later,
30 years later.
There's a picture of a really good-looking
girl on the beach.
There's a real skinny fellow about my size.
He's sitting on the beach with his girlfriend.
Along comes a big, strong fellow, good-looking
and all that.
He knocks the skinny fellow away and he
walks off with a girl.
I thought, you know, this is what's going
to happen to me all my life.
They had a little coupon, very handy, you
know, right in today.
We can change you.
You can be a he-man.
You can be a real man.
I fell for it.
Dear sir, I sent in my money.
For months, months I was lifting weights.
I was eating extra food.
I gained a half a pound.
Something was mainly on my nose.
It was a wonderful day after I became
a Christian.
It didn't happen all at once, but slowly.
When I just realized, you know, when God
made me, He didn't make a mistake.
I learned to really accept myself and to
function in God's strength, in God's energy.
I remember, even as a young Christian at
times, being tempted to do something really foolish
and being saved from going into that sin
by that ninth verse in the book of
Galatians.
I shared briefly last night about how I
was converted.
Let me just say that one of the
main things that helped me as a young
Christian to go on in the Lord, and
I know some of you are young Christians,
it was to memorize God's word.
Peter, you've been in a lot of the
meetings.
Has that been emphasized yet, memorizing God's word?
Has it been emphasized?
How many have heard a challenge in these
days about memorizing God's word?
Let me just know.
Somebody's mentioned it.
Good.
I'll just say amen to whatever that person
said.
And you may want to start with Galatians
chapter 6.
What a chapter.
It's good to memorize whole chapters.
You know, it's often when we meet a
Christian who's committed and going on for God,
like our brother Dale wrote on, we want
to know, what's your secret?
What special triple over crisis experience did you
have that put you on the upper trail
for Jesus?
Somebody was traveling with Dale.
I heard this story, and I think it's
true.
They wanted to know what his secret was.
Was it you?
Am I using one of your illustrations?
I told you you should be preaching.
Anyway, it was Peter Conlon traveling with Dale,
and basically, if I remember right, Dale simply
said he read the Bible.
He read the Bible.
Well, I knew Dale.
I knew that he not only read it,
but he memorized it.
I remember when I went out to where
he was studying at college.
He studied at Wheaton College.
He had a job because he had to
make a little money in his spare time.
He had two or three practical Christian work
efforts.
He was working among black people in Chicago.
He was doing this and doing that.
He was doing a regular degree course, and
yet he had time to memorize a high
percentage of the New Testament, chapter by chapter.
He used to put them on cards, put
a little verse on cards.
I remember going into his room and seeing
all these cards, pile after pile after pile,
cards filled with text from the Word of
God.
I think one of the most important decisions
you can make in these days together, whether
you're here for the operation world from out
of town or whether you're a local person,
is the decision to memorize God's Word.
Memorize God's Word.
One of the first persons who came to
share with me last night for a little
counseling, which I always do at the end
of the meeting, his burden was concerning how
to get in the Word of God.
He was finding the Word of God dry,
difficult.
That's normal for many people.
We're all different.
Some people, because of the way their mind
is, because of other factors, and of course
the work of the Holy Spirit in their
lives, they just, after conversion, get into the
Bible and they just stay in it.
Others find Bible study very hard.
They may not understand it.
We don't all have the same education.
We find people who don't have as much
education as maybe someone else.
Some of the great believers I met in
India, they were illiterate.
The only way they could get the Word
of God was sitting in meetings.
Boy, they got a lot.
Some of the meetings were three hours long.
I remember arriving one night in a meeting.
We had difficulty on the road.
We arrived several hours late.
It was about 11 o'clock at night.
You thought they'd all go home.
No, they were just praising the Lord and
they were worshiping.
I found the believers in India generally a
lot more relaxed about things.
Imagine in the West arriving three hours late
to the meeting.
Just find everybody praising the Lord.
No.
They were having a wonderful time and I
arrived.
The main thing they were concerned about when
I arrived was that I would not cut
the ministry short.
They knew me.
The reputation had gone ahead.
They said, Brother, we want full portion tonight.
Dear brother, full portion.
We must have gone for about two hours.
Then the ON team was having a night
of prayer that night.
I said, Look, I'm going off to prayer
meeting now.
You all need to go to bed.
They didn't even go to bed.
They started praising the Lord again.
Until some strange hour in the morning.
I think when our so-called night of
prayer was ending, some of them were still
going to bed.
Lo and behold, I was just about to
go to bed and a man knocked on
my door.
He said, Brother, we'd like another portion in
the morning.
I thought, They're going to bed late.
They're going to bed late, so morning, these
people, they're humans, they're probably 10, 11 o
'clock.
We'll have a Bible reading.
No, no.
Six o'clock, brother.
They had to go back to the fields
that next day or have something else.
Oh my, what I learned in India.
I just want to challenge you, young people
from Great Britain.
I believe that India and the subcontinent in
general provides you the greatest opportunity for Christian
service in the world today.
I really believe that.
I meet so many people in the United
States and other parts of Europe.
They'd like to go, some of them even
for long term, into India.
Many of our leaders who are in the
ship ministry now, their first preference would have
been long term in India.
But because they weren't British and because non
-commonwealth people cannot get proper visas generally, I
can't get in at all anymore.
They don't go.
And you have a passport that can go
into India without a visa.
And I would ask you to consider the
possibility of at least giving two years of
your life to the subcontinent.
You don't need a missionary call to do
that.
You need a little common sense and a
little guidance.
And I'm convinced that if you'll seek the
Lord, at least some of you, not all,
will get the guidance to go out because
the need is so great, the hour is
so short, the opportunity is beyond description.
And because it's a country, more than any
country, where British people have a wide open
door, and though it was once your colony
in an amazing way, because of the unique
way you handled your former colonies, they still
welcome you.
Not everybody welcomes you.
That's not true.
You know, that won't be true anywhere in
the world.
And it would be wonderful to see an
army, an army of workers going out to
India.
You know, I think of our brother here
with the China Inland Mission, oversees missionary fellowships.
I've often asked the question, why do these
people, when they come out of China, not
go into India?
I don't know who made that decision.
Probably seem in heaven.
But we don't have so many great faith
missions like the China Inland Mission, OMF, working
in India.
We have some.
Usually have a very small staff.
WECC was there, very tiny staff.
And now they work through various complications.
They decide anybody who goes out with WECC,
they join Operation Mobilization.
So WECC and OMF join together to work
in India.
And OMS is there.
You may not have heard of OMS. It's
a very great mission society.
The Oriental Mission Society.
They may have changed their name.
Everybody's changing their name trying to keep up
with all these missions.
But they have a great work, but mainly
in the South.
Then we hear the work of Bakhsh Singh.
I've referred to that already.
That's also mainly in the South.
Rajasthan, Ujjain Pradesh.
These places will be presented in other meetings,
so I won't go into it.
Get that great booklet available on the literature
table about India.
These places only have a tiny fraction, a
tiny fraction of many other countries in the
world.
You know, sometimes I'm in London.
I live in London and I'm talking to
people about world missions.
And they say, some of them get upset.
They say, how can you talk about London
or about other countries when the need is
so great in London?
Then I have to control my metabolism and
pray for more grace.
And I say, look, I know London is
needy.
We also have a team in London.
We have a team among Arabs in London.
We often have a team among Jews in
London.
We had an Easter crusade in London.
But I want to tell you something.
And I want to tell you something because
some of you are from London.
That most of the cities that I've lived
in have less than one-tenth, less than
one-tenth of the witness that London has.
So I'm not saying London isn't needy.
But what are you going to say about
Bombay, Calcutta, Milan, Torino, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Kathmandu,
Bangkok, and a host of other cities?
In the University of Paris, they have one,
this is even a ridiculous comparison, maybe one
-tenth, maybe one-hundredth of the witness that
you would have in the average British university.
There's no comparison.
And it seems to me that those of
us who do remain in Britain, I'm in
that group part of the year.
We don't need to run around defending why
we're working in Britain.
We don't need to come out with false
statistics so that we can make our work
appear to be as important as the work
in India.
We should simply acknowledge we are together.
And one of our purposes in London is
to recruit for India.
The only thing I will then ask is
where are the recruits?
Because the average church in London sends no
recruits whatsoever to India, not even one.
You can even go into very large churches
in London and they will not have a
single recruit in India.
I want to tell you if the secular
businesses in London went about their business the
way the Church of Jesus Christ is going
about world evangelism, they would be bankrupt in
a month.
And businessmen who five days a week in
their business are sharp and committed and they're
out to make a profit and they're out
recruiting and all kinds of things when they
come to church they just sit.
You know, there's big competition to Operation World
going on down in Wimbledon.
Do you realize that?
Sue Barker, I don't think, did so well.
Maybe she ought to come up here.
But we'll give her a greater challenge than
even playing tennis.
I'm sure she's already at it, especially hanging
around Cliff Richards.
But I was watching Stan Smith just for
a few minutes and I don't know whether
he won or not.
Another committed Christian in the tennis world.
But it's interesting tennis, isn't it?
Oh my goodness, all these people sitting around,
thousands of them.
I've never been there.
I can't afford it.
But two people out in the court or
several courts, of course, just working with all
their heart firing the little ball back and
forth across the net.
You know, if somebody came from another planet
that didn't know anything about sports, they could
really get some confusing ideas about planet Earth.
You know, it may be all right for
Wimbledon, but it's not all right for the
church.
And yet, that same type of spectatorism, that
same type of spectator mentality has invaded the
church.
And in most churches, it seems to be
a small number of people that are working
like mad.
I wonder how it worked out for Operation
World here in Chester.
How many really got involved, really worked hard?
Maybe a couple of hundred.
Well, they haven't come out tonight, actually.
But probably the work was carried on by
a few committee members.
And probably in the average church, even here,
it's a few who carry the load.
And the majority are spectators.
I believe that's one of the greatest blights
on our thinking and on our lifestyle.
We're spectators.
And we don't want Operation World to be
just one more series of meetings, one more
sort of evangelical Wimbledon, where we all come
and sit and we watch slides and speakers
and messages and films and panels and interviews.
We want this to be a starting mark
for moving out, out of the stands and
into the field of action.
We want you to win a soul to
Jesus Christ within the next couple of weeks
because God's touched your heart here.
We want you to write in to several
of these mission societies.
The missionary situation is complex.
If you want to eventually end up a
missionary, it's good to start writing a number
of societies as soon as possible.
They got a lot of regulations.
They got a lot of different countries they're
working in.
It's not a simple thing to become a
missionary.
It's not a matter of just going back
after the meeting, sitting on one of those
tables, and somebody will come along and pick
you up, put you in his car and
take you to the airport and fly you
to Mozambique.
It doesn't exist anymore.
I think it's the Malagasy Republic.
It's going to take some door pushing.
This is why so few are going.
We have so little initiative.
I can't believe, I can't believe the lack
of initiative, even in my own little fellowship
of OM, much less the rest of the
world.
You know, one of the things we try
to teach people in OM is to send
out a prayer letter.
You say, what's a prayer letter?
See, we believe that the work of world
evangelism is linked with the people who pray.
So those of us who are out on
the field, we send back a little letter.
Now, some people have made use of those
letters to mainly ask for finance.
I'm not saying whether that should or should
not be done.
There's a place for it, I think, in
certain cases.
The letter that we ask our young people
to send out is to simply give information.
And yet, as I've taken a survey, even
among young people who have been around OM
for several years, I find that they have
very few people sometimes on their prayer letter
list, and I find sometimes it does not
increase one single person from one month to
the next.
I was recently with someone around OM, six
or seven years, and they had about 60
people on the prayer letter list, and it
had barely increased.
I have difficulty understanding that.
On the other hand, I do understand it.
Initiative doesn't seem to be easy to come
by any longer.
Maybe it never was.
Could there could that be partially because through
television we've become even more a passive generation?
The average person spends thousands and thousands of
hours watching television before he's 21 years of
age?
And now, of course, they have television dinners,
so you don't even have to hardly do
anything.
You just walk into the kitchen for a
minute, push the dinner in the oven, and
then ask your little brother to bring it
out when it's cooked.
And now, of course, because it's such a
hardship to get out of your chair and
go to the television to change the channel.
People were literally collapsing.
People were having heart attacks moving from the
chair to the television.
And so now, the big thing is you
can sit back in the chair and you
have a little...
I was in a home the other day.
It was in the United States, cable television,
45 channels.
This was a big diner.
I didn't want to watch anything.
I just wanted to play with it.
Sports, rock music, strip team.
I didn't watch that.
Everything you can imagine.
44 some channels.
The passive, initiative-less, spectator generation.
Doesn't that make you angry?
Some of you need to get angry.
It's been a long time since you've been
angry.
Get angry!
You say, isn't that wrong to be angry?
No.
The Bible says don't let the sun go
down upon your anger.
But I heard a message the other day
how important it is at times for Christians
to get a little bit angry.
When we see some of the degradation of
womanhood through pornography, we should get angry.
When we see some of the things that
happen in government, we should get angry and
sit down and write somebody a letter if
you still love your own country, don't want
to see the whole nation just go down
the drain.
Get angry and sin not.
And I, when I think of the spectatorism
that has invaded the church, the lack of
perseverance, the lack of drive, the unwillingness to
go the extra mile, the heartaches.
Well, it was about 26 years ago that
I started to speak this way, started to
try to live this way, and I can
assure you that many times I have got
very, very weary and I find wherever I
go, now that I'm in the middle years,
isn't it?
Boy, I think these are great years, I
tell you.
You know, this has been one of the
best years of my whole life, this year,
since going back to, say, 1st of August.
I can't remember too much what happened before
that.
I picked up a book some time ago,
Mid-Year Crisis.
You know, everybody's talking about this, the mid
-year crisis.
When you come to the middle years, all
kinds of problems, you know, take place, and
then you come into what people are now
calling male menopause, you know, male menopause.
You've got to go to a psychiatrist, hello.
And I picked up this book, Mid-Year
Crisis.
I was feeling great until I read that
book.
You know, there's something in this, that as
we start to think negatively, we, we, sometimes
we start to get more problems.
And one of the reasons I'm so thrilled
now to be in the middle years is
because for years I lived under the cloud
of youthful zeal.
That's all I was.
You cannot believe the criticism we had to
go through.
God, we used to hit, never got bitter
over it.
Criticism, best thing we ever had.
And, and, and how people just wiped us
off, youthful zeal.
When those 900 young people from Great Britain
launched across the English Channel in 1963 to
reach 90,000 villages with the gospel of
Jesus Christ, they were turned on fire.
Most of them, a high percentage of them
wanted to become missionaries.
They wanted to go to the ends of
the earth until they got back to Britain
and had to go through more cold water
than you and I could ever imagine even
existed and just be written off as just
a bunch of youthful zealots.
And many of them never recovered from it.
You know, it's interesting what Dr. Martin Lloyd
-Jones says about being active.
You see, if you're a young person and
you start to get active, you start to
get out a few tracks, you start to
knock on a few doors, you say, I'm
going to go on OM to Spain or
I'm going to join OMF and go to
China or I'm going to join this mission
and work in the back ghettos of London,
just as tough probably as China.
Someone is going to put the youthful zeal
guilt trip on you, especially if you make
any mistakes, as if anybody's going to do
anything on this planet without making mistakes.
And sometimes people are quite kind to you
until you make your first mistake and then,
boom.
If you're not making any mistakes, it's indicative
you probably aren't doing very much.
Failure is the back door to success.
Every great general that ever lived made mistakes.
I looked on TV at the news the
other night and I saw one of the
mistakes that was made in the Falklands.
It was a calculated risk.
Instead of sending those men over the difficult,
tough terrain to that one particular place, they
decided to take them without air cover on
that ship down along the coast and when
the Argentinians hit, that one ship alone, 50
were dead.
And many of you saw it on TV.
It was a major news feature.
It was an all-victory in the Falklands,
my friends.
But the ultimate victory came to Britain, at
least up to now.
And in the Christian life, it's not a
matter of two weeks.
It's not a matter of two months.
It's the long, great, ultimate victory that we're
aiming at, though in fact, we know it
has already been won by the Lord Jesus
Christ through what He has done on the
cross.
And I think it's so important to understand
it.
It's so important to realize the need to
bounce back when we do fail and to
not allow some little cliché or some little
expression that's handed to us at a moment
of failure and when you leave here in
the next month, you will have some failures.
So allow yourself to get discouraged and depressed
and then throw in the towel and quit.
Praise God for David Wilkerson's new book, Have
You Felt Like Quitting Late.
Have You Felt Like Let me read what
Lord Jones said.
Nothing is more obvious about the teaching of
the New Testament than this, that the Christian
life is a life of activity, a life
of vigor, a life of exertion.
The strength is given to us by the
Lord, but we must act.
Here's that dear old saying, he's now with
the Lord, respected by a high percentage of
all the Christian leaders in Britain, even those
who were not of the same theological persuasion,
generally respected the old doctrine.
And here's what he says.
No wonder he decided, though it brought some
criticism, that before he died he would visit
the old M.V. Dulas and share a
message from the Word of God.
And before you leave here, if that bus
gets up here, there's a tape in the
tape collection that you can get of a
message that Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones gave on
the Dulas in London sometime before he died,
pleading with us for balance, sound doctrine.
Yes, we need sound doctrine.
In some places that's not emphasized enough, but
also a move of the Holy Spirit, revival,
freedom, the power of God.
Yes, I believe one of the things God
wants to teach us during these days is
how to persevere.
Be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work
of the Lord, knowing that your labor is
not in vain in the Lord.
One of the things that's going to help
us in that perseverance is to memorize the
Word of God and to learn to use
the weapons of the warfare.
Tomorrow night I'm going to share with you
some of the specific ways that God has
helped me to persevere over these 27 years
since I was converted.
Sometimes people come to me and they say,
well, when do you get the time?
They know I'm involved a little bit in
administration and that I often take a couple
of meetings a day and have a few
other things to do.
They say, well, when do you prepare your
messages?
And I sometimes have to say, I hope
it wasn't misunderstood, my whole life is preparation
for my next message.
The next message is inspiration for the rest
of my life.
Of course, there are times when you specifically
prepare and I have notes and I believe
in that kind of preparation.
But for this message that I want to
continue tomorrow evening on the subject of survivalship
and perseverance, God has been burning it into
my spiritual life since my conversion.
Because it hit me as a young Christian,
it hit me very hard that a high
percentage of people fall away.
Nothing shook me more than to see people
come to Christ, go on for Christ and
then fall away.
I was in evangelism as a teenager.
I saw people come to Jesus and I
loved these people and I wrote them and
I went after them and I visited them.
Then I moved away to college and then
I went somewhere else and as I wrote
back to some of these people, they no
longer were interested at all.
They denied the very experience, the very girl
that went forward with me at the Billy
Graham meeting to accept Jesus.
Within two years, she just threw the whole
thing over.
Fifteen years later, I went to visit her
in Florida and she, it was all just
a little childhood fantasy.
She was now in women's lib.
She was studying to be a lawyer.
No small shock because she was a very
close friend.
Then a year after getting her law degree
and everything she ever dreamed about, she died
just like that of cancer.
You know, in God's work, people are important.
And one of the faults in our western
culture, in our Anglo-Saxon culture is that
often we are project-centered rather than people
-centered.
And I want to give a call tonight
as we bring this to a close that
you will become people-centered in your ministry,
in your thinking.
So that when you meet people and you
become friends, you take your name, you take
their name, you pray for them.
And that you do everything you can to
encourage them on.
Michael Griffith wrote that amazing little booklet.
I'd be happy to send you a copy.
We could have operation feedback.
Take out a piece of paper, put my
name on it, ask me any question you
want, put any prayer request you want, limit
it to one page because I'm still reading
the feedback for the last two weeks.
But I pray through every piece of paper
that gets to me.
Or at least look at it.
Can't say I pray for it.
Everything, I'm not a human being, not possible.
But in that feedback, because I don't think
this booklet is available, may be out of
print, we'll have to duplicate it to fulfill
this promise, but I'd like you to send
you that book encouraging one another.
Encouraging one another.
You know, I find that as exciting as
preaching.
One of the main ministries I've had the
last two months as I'm seldom in the
States was just to call people up and
to just encourage them on in their faith.
I couldn't do much on the phone.
You can't preach a message.
Hello John, how you doing?
Here's six points, hang on there, this phone
call is going to cost about ten pounds.
But you can call someone up.
Some people die New Years ago, today they're
divorced.
In their minds they think, oh, we're divorced,
George Brewer.
Then I call them up.
Call the wife up.
She's living in one state.
How you doing?
Think of one couple where the wife was
really innocent in this situation.
She's pressing her on, she loves Jesus.
Call the husband up.
They couldn't believe it.
George Brewer, haven't seen each other for seven
years, still thinks of me, still knows my
number.
I found out though he's a divorced person,
he's crawling his way back somehow to California.
Somehow he wants to get his life back
again.
One thing I learned, that with God, when
you know Jesus Christ personally, there's no end
to the road.
Some of you, someday, you may think you're
at the end of the road.
You've blown your life, maybe you've blown your
marriage, maybe you've sinned in a terrible way.
I will tell you, if you know Jesus,
you're backslidden.
He's just longing, he's just longing to reach
out, pick you up.
And somehow in this conference, if the message
of God's mercy and God's grace doesn't get
through to our hearts, we'll just go out
of here a semi-nervous wreck.
We'll just go out of here with endless
guilt trips.
We'll just go out of here feeling we've
failed more than ever before, more guilty than
ever before.
And remember, when God hits you, it's because
he wants to prepare you for a blessing.
When God hits you, it's because he's got
a mercy drop, or maybe even a mercy
gallon to pour down your heart.
Don't fail to get it.
Because without the mercy of God, the grace
of God, the forgiveness of Christ to sinners
and failures, there's not going to be any
world of angels.
That's why I'm still here.
It hasn't been all the discipline or the
principles of discipline.
It hasn't been, you know, all that I've
learned of New Testament teaching.
It hasn't been the training I received in
Mexico, or even the verses I've memorized.
All of that is a factor.
But it has been the mercy of God
poured out again and again when I felt
I couldn't go one more mile, when I
felt so hurt, so confused, and lay there
in my puddle of tears that God just
met me in supernatural grace.
Do you know how to meet God that
way?
When you're down, you're discouraged, you're scared.
You ever get scared?
I get scared every week.
This planet scares me.
The whole place scares me.
Lebanon scares me.
Egypt scares me.
Certain people scare me.
When that man in the United States tried
to pull a bullet through the President of
the United States when I was there two
weeks ago, suddenly declared innocent.
Innocent, because he was somehow mentally not all
there.
I get scared.
And I have friends who assure me who
are in the world of psychiatry that there
are more murderers running loose on the streets
today than ever before.
One of my closest friends from India was
just found dead with a bullet in an
apartment house in Brooklyn.
I'll never see him again.
I hope I'll see him in heaven.
Yeah, I get scared.
And I know one thing.
When I'm at the end of my resources,
shaking, scared, confused, sometimes even wondering about things
that I read in the Bible that I
don't understand, God is ready to meet me.
And there is power, wonder-working power, in
the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
There is grace, overwhelming grace, even for the
weakest of us in the Christian life.
I am no strong Christian, I can assure
you.
But if I can find the way to
find that grace and to draw on that
mercy, not for just my youthful, zeal years,
but now for these heavy, difficult, little years,
then hallelujah, there's hope for everybody in this
tent.
Let's get with it.
Let's repent of unbelief.
Let's repent of lack of initiative.
Let's put our hands on the plow and
realize, by the grace of God and the
mercy of God, we shall not turn back
until the ends of the earth have heard
his name.
That's God's way.
Let's get in the race and run together.
Amen.
Let's pray.
Father, we just thank you for your grace
and mercy.
Lord, I didn't even get to the message
tonight.
I only got the introduction.
But somehow I believe that you can use
these feeble words and we can have the
message tomorrow night.
Lord, we need to be shaken.
We need to be shaken out of the
grand stands of evangelical game playing, into the
field of battle, sweat, tears, toil, agony for
souls, and yet grace and love, forgiveness and
joy, unspeakable, full of glory.
Lord, baptize us afresh with your power in
these days and we may move as a
mighty army to do your will and to
run the race right to the end.
And we'll give you the glory and we'll
give you the praise.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.