Welcome to Founders Week 1998.
The theme of this year's conference is called
to compassion.
George Verwer, founder and international coordinator of Operation
Mobilization, comes to us from Kent, England.
Let's just seek God's face together for a
few moments.
Just take a moment for silent prayer in
our hearts.
God wants us to have a spirit of
expectation, spirit of faith.
He wants to bless you.
He wants to bless us.
He wants to bring greater vision.
He wants to teach us more about spiritual
warfare, faith.
Let's just have a few moments of silent
prayer, and then I'll pray.
Our God and Father, it is such a
privilege to be here, to hear this ministry,
to have this time for worship and praise.
We would especially thank you for the alumni,
the alumnus who've gone out across the world,
from Chicago to the ends of the earth,
declaring your gospel, building your kingdom.
We thank you, God, that by your mercy,
this great Institute, with all of its many
ministries, has remained faithful to your word all
these years.
In this age of confusion, in this age
of compromise, in this age in which so
many things seem to be getting watered down,
even the very basic doctrines of the faith,
that somehow this Institute has remained faithful to
your holy word.
And we would not take that lightly.
We would not take that for granted.
And we come with praise in our hearts,
and with a spirit of faith and expectation
that you are going to continue to do
great things through all these ministries and all
these people.
Speak to us, O God, from your work
tonight.
Speak to us from the reality of history.
Increase our vision, increase our faith, that we
may be your mega-motivated, proactive people, and
that the Church may be planted in every
people's group in the world, and that every
person on this planet may at least have
an opportunity to hear and to find out
about salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ, through
whom we pray.
Amen.
I think there's always something unusual for a
student who maybe now many years ago sat
in the audience to now switch places and
be up here.
For many, many decades now, I have lived
on the precipice of being overwhelmed by the
challenge, by the responsibilities, by the opportunities.
I especially had that in Korea a couple
of summers ago when I stood in the
Olympic Stadium and spoke to 80,000 people
through an interpreter, when I told everybody, because
he had never seen anything like this as
a Presbyterian mega-dignified pastor, and when I
had my huge six-foot-wide globe, which
I forgot this night, this evening, probably because
of jet lag.
It's now 3 in the morning on my
watch.
But when I had this Korean edition of
Operation World to show all those people in
the Olympic Stadium, he got so excited, he
didn't interpret anything at all.
So I'm not sure if they know that
book yet exists in Korean.
We do have it in English, and I
think most of you know, and you need
to know, that one of the greatest ministries
of Moody Bible Institute is Moody Press and
all the other literature ministries, which were a
huge impact on me when I came as
a student and met people like Ken Taylor
and Peter Gunther and became their friends.
One of the books that Moody Press publishes
I consider one of the most important missionary
books in this decade.
People Raising, by a man named William Dillon,
is probably sitting out there somewhere.
If you're going to go into mission work,
and I know many of you want to
do that, you need to know what's in
this book and how to release finance in
the work of the kingdom.
In most missionary fellowships, you have to raise
your own support, and that will challenge you
right out of your socks and back again.
Amazing percentage of people who are wanting to
go to the mission field from Korea, from
Brazil, from all these nations, including America, are
finding it difficult to gather together that support.
Praise God, sometimes you can go as a
tent maker.
Many of our people in the Middle East
countries are tent makers.
But I thank God for this great book,
and this book that has prayer requests on
every nation in the world, and the children's
edition, which is great for adults of the
TV generation, as it's mainly pictures.
And I know that some of you will
want to use that book.
It's a very awesome, challenging responsibility for me
to have this chance to share with you.
I don't take it lightly, even though I've
been a number of times over the years.
I really wrestle with God as to what
I should share.
Sometimes, in my approach to ministry, I actually
don't know what I'm going to share until
this particular point.
Then I make a decision, because you have
to, at that point.
But somehow, God was merciful, and He knew
that I did not want to stand here
in front of my friend Joe Stoll, not
sure of what I was going to speak
about.
So, at about five o'clock this morning,
when I was seeking his face in prayer,
he gave me the message that I was
to deliver to you from his Word.
And it was a bit surprising to me
what he wanted me to share, especially because
it was so positive.
I tend to have a little bit of
a negative streak.
And all over the world, I have this
message which brings some of the greatest response.
I first gave it at Prairie Bible Institute.
It's entitled Seven Things They Didn't Teach Me
at Bible College.
And I will tell you, I preached that.
I've never met anybody that's spoken at more
Bible colleges than I have, all over the
world.
I even have a tape, a cassette tape.
I'll send it to you free.
Why go to Bible College?
But this message does sometimes bring miscommunication, especially
with the faculty.
And so, I was praising God this morning
that he gave me a new message.
Seven Things God Taught Me at Moody Bible
Institute.
Allow me to read from the Word of
God, from the book of Acts, NIV, chapter
16.
You know, we're a land of many, many
strange Christians.
I don't know if you've met many of
them.
One of them wrote me a letter recently
and told me to throw all the...we have
these two ships that distribute Bibles and books
all over the world.
He wrote me a letter that I should
take all the NIV Bibles and throw them
in the ocean.
Amazing, if you can imagine some of the
letters I have received over the years.
I receive notes sometimes when I'm preaching as
well, which can be very encouraging.
George Whitefield, a great revivalist, a couple of
centuries ago, he would receive notes when he
was speaking.
Somebody would write up, saving faith has just
flooded my heart.
You know, that could get you going when
you're preaching.
I'll never forget my first note.
It was here in Chicago.
A man handed me a note while I
was preaching, and I opened it.
It says your time's up.
Sit down now.
I had another man in Germany, one of
my favorite countries, at least in the top
100, and this man also tried to get
me to stop speaking because I was going
on so long.
I'm known as the longest speaker in the
whole of Europe, but it was mainly young
people and was our own meeting, so I
figured we could go on.
Some of you know this story, but this
man tried to stop me.
He was sitting way in the back, and
he started waving his watch at me, trying
to get me to stop speaking, and I
was speaking about world missions, the need to
give, the need to pray, the need to
go, and I saw this watch.
I said, praise God.
Look at this man.
He's donating his watch for world missions.
The book of Acts, chapter 16.
I'm glad there's no one here from the
Ukraine.
Paul and, and probably is one of my
favorite countries.
Paul and his companions, verse 6, traveled through
the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been
kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the
word in the province of Asia.
When they came to the border of Mycenae,
they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit
of Jesus would not allow them to go.
So they passed by Mycenae and went down
to Troas.
During the night, Paul had a vision of
a man of Macedonia standing and begging him,
come over to Macedonia and help us.
After Paul had seen the vision, we got
ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding
that God had called us to preach the
gospel to them.
In many ways, tonight, I also come with
a Macedonian call.
The Macedonian call is not a call to
go into missionary work.
I'm sure the Lord could use it that
way.
They were already missionaries.
In Acts, chapter 13, five men waited upon
God, the Holy Spirit spoke, and the church
sent Paul and Barnabas out into the harvest
field.
That's a great chapter to study.
But as they headed out in their missionary
journeys, they at times struggled as to what
was priority and where they should go.
And so God used this Macedonian call to
direct them geographically over to that new missionary
field.
And one of the key words in that
particular passage is the word help, come over
and help us.
My wife and I were married 38 years
ago this past Saturday.
I graduated from Moody Bible Institute approximately one
week or two weeks before that.
And my wife and I have not lived
in the United States ever since.
Within three days, we crossed the Mexican border.
From there, it was Spain.
After that, it was France, and then Italy,
and then Britain, and then Holland, and then
India, then Nepal, then Thailand.
Then God gave us ships.
We lived on the ships for a couple
of years and ended up settling in the
international city of London.
We're still praying about that first furlough.
We just haven't been able to fit that
in yet.
We've had the privilege of seeing 90,000
people trained in OM on the field training
and campaigns.
Those 90,000 generally working on teams have
given the word of God to over 900
million people face-to-face and excluding any
radio or television.
If our present thrust in India, a land
of 900 million people, is successful and it's
a bit rough right now, in which we're
targeting another 100 million people using literature and
video in dozens of languages, then somehow by
the end of the millennium, this feeble fellowship
would have given the word of God directly
to one billion people on planet Earth.
So you can see when I come to
a meeting like tonight, the tendency is to
get a little bit excited.
What God can do through one person or
one small group is absolutely mystifying.
Whenever I come to Moody Church, it's a
bit of an emotional experience.
I guess I tend to be a bit
emotional, but it was here in this church
that I sat under the ministry of Alan
Redpath, who became one of my closest friends
and associates.
I was at his funeral some years ago.
I remember when Alan Redpath organized nights of
prayer here at Moody Church.
Not too many came, and that was a
great burden on his heart.
He was often a criticized person because he
spoke so strongly, and he spoke about the
need to make Jesus Christ Lord of your
life, a message that was in deep impact
upon me.
And I can remember those nights of prayer,
usually in a different room.
I especially remember when Oswald J.
Smith came.
I only remember him speaking on one occasion
when I was a student.
He was one of my heroes.
I had read his book, Passion for Souls,
when I was at a liberal arts college,
a very liberal college, before I came to
Moody.
And his book, Passion for Souls, and the
challenge about Afghanistan, which was destined to be
one of OM's main fields of operation, I
even have one of my own nephews in
Afghanistan right now, was spoken about in the
preface of that book.
And my vision for Afghanistan came from that
book of Oswald J.
Smith.
So you can imagine, when he came here
to minister, it was a very special experience
in my life as a young student.
And when he gave the invitation, it was
a very unusual meeting.
No one responded except one character.
I had already been to Mexico.
I had already been esteemed by some people
as some kind of person of prayer and
student leader.
But when Oswald J.
Smith gave that message from this pulpit in
this church, it was as if I was
completely alone.
And even though pride was trying to keep
me seated where I was, as we sang
the invitation hymn, and I was there with
the woman who was destined to become my
wife, what would she think if I, you
know, responded to repent and recommit my life?
Somehow I forgot everything and came forward and
went into this back room and wept and
wept.
And when the choir came back there, it
was a little embarrassing, I ran to the
basement and I wept my way back to
the cross as I allowed the Spirit of
God to convict me of sin in my
life, especially the sin of insensitivity toward other
people, other people who were different from myself.
So it's quite an awesome thing to come
back 38 or 39 years later and to
stand in this place and to attempt to
share my heart which is so full.
I want to give a Macedonian call again
tonight for Afghanistan.
The church is almost still non-existent.
There are a few believers, some of them
have been martyred.
Fanatic Muslims have taken over the country under
the Taliban leadership who have some good things,
but it's a complex situation where so many
have been killed, there's so many minefields, there's
so much suffering, it's just hard to describe
it.
But I want to give that call, a
Macedonian call to come and help the Afghan
people.
Many of them live in Iran, some of
them live in Washington DC.
When I was there at the Promise Keepers
event with a million men, I marched around
the entire million men with my big globe.
Whenever anybody asked me what that was for,
I said it's to remind the Promise Keepers
of the neglected promise, which is the seventh
promise concerning the Great Commission.
But I went to buy something that day
and the man selling the food was from
Afghanistan.
I had to jump in a taxi for
a quick appointment somewhere.
That driver was from Afghanistan.
God has brought the most amazing range of
people, even from throughout the 1040 window, even
from many of the most unreached places in
the world, right into our midst.
Why we are not doing more among these
people in our midst is beyond me.
I can't think about it too much, I
get depressed.
A Macedonian call for Afghanistan could be in
Washington or New York or Chicago as well
as Afghanistan or Pakistan where many of the
refugees are.
I want to give a Macedonian call for
the land of Turkey.
We now have 70 people in Turkey.
Many other agencies have also got involved.
It was actually right here in the library
of the Moody Bible Institute that God gave
me the vision for Turkey.
Before Turkey, He gave me the vision for
Iraq.
Before Iraq, or at that time, the vision
for Yugoslavia and Russia.
Some people say, well, unless you go to
all these countries, how can you have a
burden, a vision?
How can you be bonded with these people?
But I can tell you, God met me
in this place, in this institute, and completely,
utterly revolutionized my life.
And I believe God has brought you here
as a student, not to just fill your
head with little bits and pieces from the
Bible, not to just somehow give you a
little education and a piece of paper you
may be able to show to your grandmother.
God has brought you here to radically revolutionize
and change your life, that you may never,
ever be the same again.
I want to give you a Macedonian call
for the land of India.
It's amazing how we can get misinformation about
different countries.
When I was here, a famous Indian speaker
came to speak named Bhaktsingh.
Little did I know that he would become
one of my closest friends in India, that
he would accept me almost like his son
and let me speak at some of the
biggest meetings in all of India back in
the mid-60s.
But when I heard about Bhaktsingh and he
ministered here, I had the idea India must
be well taken care of with a man
like that.
And so I blotted India out of my
thinking.
I wanted to go where others were not
going.
Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, other places, and
then the communist world, which was so closed
at that time.
But in God's providence, he gave me a
Macedonian call to India.
He sent an Indian to tell me about
India.
And I asked Dale Roton, who was linked
with me from the earliest days when we
went to Mexico together with my brother Walter,
who lives in Chicago most of his life
and who's here tonight.
We were the first three to go to
Mexico just before I came to Moody when
this work was born.
But I asked Dale to go to Afghanistan
to spy out the land.
And I said, if you're in Afghanistan, you
might as well keep on going and see
what's going on, especially among the Muslim peoples
of India.
And he sent the most amazing reports back,
that within six months, we got on our
faces and sent a fairly large team overland
in three or four vehicles to India upon
receiving an invitation from the Indian churches.
Today, there are 600 full-time OM people
in India.
There are thousands who have been trained or
working with almost every major group and almost
every major organization and church denomination in the
whole of India.
And yet, India today, a land of 900
million, has a challenge baffling to the imagination.
Some of you feel called to Chicago.
And surely in the next three days with
our brother Ray, you will be challenged about
Chicago.
But let me just give you some information
that you will never discover unless you go
to other places and live where some of
us have lived.
And it's not that we feel we are
any better or our work is any more
important.
Because to be called in the marketplace ministry
of Chicago, which we certainly need, to me
could be just as important as church planting
along the Ganges.
But the cities that burn on my heart,
that I want to give you a Macedonian
call to, most of them have less than
5% or 1% as much witness
as Chicago.
Chicago is a needy city.
We need to shake Chicago for Christ.
God revolutionized my life as a student here,
partly because I was out in so much
evangelism, door to door, down to the jail,
with the children, with the drunkards.
And God used that outreach to take what
I was receiving in the classroom and burn
it into reality in my life, which became
the whole foundation of Operation Mobilization, working in
partnership with hundreds of colleges and schools across
the world, realizing the need to balance academic
study with practical, dynamic evangelism out in the
streets and the highways and hedges.
Many cities of the world, much less conglomerate,
unreached people's groups, which we're attempting to focus
so much on in what's called the Joshua
Project, would have less than 1% of
the witness we have in Chicago.
Brothers and sisters, one of the reasons I
thank God for Moody Bible Institute and have
never ceased to pray for this great ministry
is because you have never lost the vision
for the unreached, and you've been able to
maintain the balance of acting locally and impacting
globally.
It is possible to do both.
I have many other Macedonian calls, Sudan, Algeria,
Angola, Mozambique.
What can we say of those countries of
Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan?
Some people in their ignorance thought these were
new pizzas.
These are nations.
These are nations where the door is now
opening with the collapse of communism and where
they are giving us a Macedonian call to
come and help them as to harvest as
plenty, as outlined in Matthew 9, and the
laborers are few.
But I must move on and share that
message God put on my heart this morning,
and I've got to do what I know
very quickly.
Seven things that God taught me while I
was a student here.
Of course, I came here as a baby
Christian.
I was converted in a Billy Graham meeting
in New York City where Jack Wursten had
invited Billy Graham to an anniversary rally in
Madison Square Garden.
I wasn't from a Christian background.
My grandfather from the Netherlands was an atheist.
My other grandfather, my mother's father, he was
Irish, Scottish, and English mixtures.
This is sort of toxic.
He was an alcoholic.
But somehow, as I was living my own
broad road, a woman near my high school
put my name on her Holy Ghost hit
list and prayed for me.
She not only prayed that I would become
a Christian, that was bad enough, she prayed
that I would become a missionary.
Can you imagine?
She didn't even discuss this with me.
New Jersey people are known for being rude.
I didn't even get, I didn't even get
a phone call.
Praise God for that woman who changed the
course of my life.
And so I am a result of the
prayers of one woman who we consider the
founder of Operation Mobilization.
And through her influence and the godly influence
of Billy Graham, who emphasized prayer so much,
we started our little nights of prayer and
other prayer meetings in that high school.
So I knew a little bit about prayer
before I ever arrived here.
But it's here that I met other men
and women of prayer like Alan Redpath and
a number of my teachers, and especially Dean
Broman, who persistently emphasized the need to pray.
I thank God for those little prayer bands.
I don't know what you call them now,
it doesn't matter.
Wherever two or three are gathered together to
pray, he is in the midst.
And I felt convicted as a freshman my
first year at Moody that one of the
most important things going on on the campus
were the little prayer meetings in the dormitories,
in the rooms, and those missionary prayer meetings
that took place at various times.
And I tried to get to at least
two or three of them every single day.
It set the pace in my life for
prayer that I've never departed from a single
day in 42 years of serving the Lord
Jesus Christ in much weakness.
God taught me a lot about prayer at
NBI.
If you miss God's school of prayer at
NBI, then you have missed perhaps the most
important part of what God has.
Because prayer involves worship, prayer involves personal revival,
prayer involves knowing God, knowing Christ.
It's so easy to talk about these things,
but to know this in the depth of
your soul, so that God is as real
as this pulpit that I stand behind, that
is what we want to have outlined in
such majestic chapters as Isaiah chapter 6.
Before we have a missionary call, we've got
to have a deeper experience of God Himself.
And that was to be my privilege for
two years as a student in this institute.
Secondly, God taught me more about repentance.
He taught me more about repentance, more about
being real, more about facing up to my
own failures.
At 16, I had been hooked on pornography,
and after my conversion, I was trying to
believe that I was delivered.
But I don't think I was sort of
totally delivered, and I struggled with pornography as
a student in Chicago.
I struggled with it even when I came
back from Mexico, having seen God do great
things.
And it was here, through the Word of
God, through the prayer meetings, through the books,
as books have been such a huge influence
in my life, that I got the victory
over the lust of the eyes.
That has been my personal reality every single
day.
A mission society recently took a survey and
were stunned at the number of their missionaries
hooked on pornography on the internet.
Pornography and addiction to pornography is out of
control in our society, and the first step
is we've got to face up to it.
It is not the same as adultery, and
people don't need severe kind of discipline if
they're willing to repent and walk in the
light and stay away from it.
Just as God uses alcoholics, God uses ex
-drug addicts, God can use pornoholics as they
learn the power and the reality of the
Holy Spirit.
I was in an airport in Oregon, I
think it was Portland some weeks ago.
A pastor came out with his son, who's
actually studying here at the Institute, and gave
me this book, which was destined to become
my number one book for 1998.
I just happen to have a copy with
me because I just purchased 5,000.
The title of the book is, When Good
Men Are Tempted.
It's interesting that with what's going on in
the White House, which is par for the
course throughout the whole nation, in case you
didn't know it, this interesting character Bill Perkins
is having some very great opportunities with radio
interviews, just as I did this afternoon on
primetime, offering this free of charge to every
radio listener throughout the nation.
As they handle the inquiries tomorrow, I forgot
to tell them I was going to do
that.
I got very discouraged at times in my
Christian life, but I just decided that for
a character like me, discouragement might be worse
than impurity, because once I got discouraged, Satan
would be able to get in and perhaps
even destroy me.
And so I declared war against discouragement.
And I've never had a fully discouraging day
since I was a student at MBI.
I've had some mighty miserable minutes, however, and
not time to go into them.
Now, learning how to repent, learning how to
humble yourself, a book came into my life
which became a Christian classic by Roy Heshin
called Calvary Road, sort of a forerunner to
the greatest book on grace I've ever read,
Charles Swindoll's book, Grace Awakening.
I just bought 10,000 of those as
well and would be happy to send you
one free.
We need the message of grace.
We need to understand that personal revival is
plan A.
Any other kind of revival is plan B,
C, D, or E.
And it is our privilege in Jesus Christ
to live in personal revival every day of
our life.
And I share without any boasting, for we
can only boast in Jesus Christ, that from
the moment of my conversion 42 to 43
years ago to this night here in February
of 1998, every single day I've experienced something
of the grace and the love and the
power of God to weak struggling sinners like
myself.
If a loud-mouthed son of a Dutch
immigrant from New Jersey with so many struggles
and doubts, and I've only just touched the
tip of the iceberg tonight, can walk for
Jesus and live for him in his grace
every day for all these years, then let
me tell you this is going to make
you uncomfortable.
You don't have any excuse.
And some of you know you've been excusing
your miserable prayer life for quite a few
years.
You've been excusing your lack of passion, your
lack of evangelistic zeal, your lack of personal
revival, your lack of walking in the light.
You've been excusing your shyness.
You've been excusing lots of things.
And I believe God wants to just minister
to a heart and say, no more excuses.
He can use you.
He can enable you to overcome these weaknesses
and these difficulties.
We're not talking about perfection, for the victorious
life is not perfection.
The victorious life is Jesus by his Spirit
living through you, which means according to his
word, knowing what to do when you do
fail, when you do sin, when you do
blow it.
Brothers and sisters, I thank God for my
two years in Chicago because I learned how
to repent.
I had to go into Dean Broman and
admit that I had broken some rules that
I didn't understand.
I became a bit of a rebel about
certain things and God dealt with me about
my attitude.
And I learned how to repent of bad
attitude.
Here I am, 43 years later, still repenting
of bad attitude because I can tell you
some of God's chosen, generally frozen people wind
me up big time.
But when I find that the Lord's people
seem to be a bit of a pain
in the neck, I just say, thank you,
Lord, I'm not a giraffe.
It may sound silly, but it helps characters
like me.
In my Christian life, even when I was
at Moody, it was so easy for me
to see the negative side of things.
I thought half the students at least were
backslidden.
I wasn't much sure about the faculty as
well.
My one confrontation with Dr. Culbertson as to
why he wasn't praying more for Billy Graham
wasn't my most favorite day in my Christian
life.
And I will not go on about my
amazing relationship with the Dean of Woman, Angela
Dattema, who also became a long-standing friend.
Yes, God taught me to repent and to
be honest.
I had to stand up in my missions
course and admit that I was the person
that had asked offensive questions of visiting missionaries.
Thirdly, God taught me during those two years,
He taught me how to love.
There's not time to go into detail, but
those of us who are visionary and who
are focused and who are somewhat choleric in
temperament, which according to the Tim LaHaye books
is the worst kind of temperament.
In all my life, I basically had people
inferring that I was going to backslide by
the end of the week.
It's amazing how God's people have a ministry
of discouragement to characters like me.
Many of them are discouraged.
Quite a few have gone on to heaven.
Learning how to love, learning to understand people,
people much older than yourself, taking time to
get to know them.
They may sound like basic things, but they're
important things.
For 1 Corinthians 13 is surely a Mount
Everest of scripture, and if we don't have
what's spoken about there, which is really what
Charles Swindoll's book is about, then we don't
have very much.
Fourthly, God taught me more about reaching the
lost.
I wish there were more time, but I
want to say this.
The emphasis that Moody has on doctrine was
very important in my life.
I didn't come here as someone with a
lot of teaching.
And as I look at the world today,
I see tremendous confusion because there is a
lack of emphasis on sound doctrine.
I know in some places they go extreme
on that, and they almost shoot you dead
if you're not using the same translation or
if you're not a triple separatist or whatever
else.
I believe the balance that has been emphasized
here at the Institute has been one of
the main factors that has enabled you to
stay on the cutting edge of where young
people are today, and that's why more people
want to come and study here than are
able to get in.
Hallelujah for such a victory in a day
when Bible college attendance is basically decreasing in
many places and many parts of the world.
John 14 6, Jesus said, I am the
way, the truth, and the life.
No man comes to the Father but by
me.
I already sort of believe this, but here
at Moody it was confirmed.
Jesus is the way.
There is no other hope in any other
religion.
I love other cultures.
I appreciate other religions.
I am not a religious bigot, but I
have to stand on the truth of God's
Word that there is no other name given
among men whereby he can be saved.
Only the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
What a privilege to have as part of
your curriculum going out to talk to people
about Jesus Christ.
How many institutions in the world can this
be part of what you're supposed to be
studying?
No wonder somehow in my life during those
two years everything started to come together, and
I talked about this on the phone with
my wife this morning, and she will acknowledge
that basically most of what happened in my
life happened before I left Moody Bible Institute
at 21 years of age.
Of course I needed refining, I needed growing,
but I have the foundation that I and
this whole movement was able to build upon
and therefore become one of the largest missionary
evangelical biblical agencies in the world today.
No wonder I'm excited about what God can
do in your life as you allow the
Holy Spirit to have full sway in your
life.
Forgive me for speaking so loud.
There is no purpose speaking loud when you
have this kind of sound system and you're
on the radio.
And when I first moved to Great Britain,
one of my greatest desires was to become
quiet.
And living in Great Britain, I thought all
spiritual people were quiet.
Fortunately, I did have Alan Redpath as an
exception, and I prayed a prayer after reading
these books, Quiet Talks by Mr. Gordon.
Oh Lord Jesus, from now on I'm going
to be quiet.
Help me.
Lord, help me to be quiet.
God, help me to be quiet!
It was a beautiful day in my life
when I really began to accept myself.
That's another thing that God taught me at
Moody, but that's in the second set of
seven.
Fifthly, the Lord taught me to preach.
I remember as a young grammar school student
and a high school student being so frightened
of speaking in public, and people who listened
to me were also quite frightened.
Never did I dream that soon I would
be speaking 900 times a year, and that
by this ripe age that I'm about to
arrive at, I would have spoken 25,000
times in 60 nations to millions of people
across the globe.
It was here at Moody, going to youth
fellowships, going to churches, studying hermeneutics, studying homiletics,
getting a chance to open my heart, that
God taught me how to preach the Word.
God gave me the privilege of listening to
dozens of men and women who came to
Founders Week, the missions conferences, and other special
events.
People like George Duncan, who also became a
close friend, and he taught me how to
wait upon him, how to get messages from
his Word, and then how to, in my
own way, with all my struggles and weakness,
to open the Word of God.
Last year, because I'm trying to cut down,
it was only 420 times, and I certainly
hope 1998 I can preach less.
Somebody said to me, what about a greater
emphasis on quality?
Thank you very much.
And then Sixley.
What about learning to finish on time?
I'm sticking to my 45 minutes.
Everybody relax.
But Sixley, God taught me about the disciplined
life.
It was at this point, under this topic,
I wanted to say a little more about
this whole challenge of our sexuality.
By 16 years of age, I had had
32 different girlfriends.
I didn't just date women.
I worshipped women.
From age 5, I can remember going outside
the grammar school, waiting for this one chick
to come and sharpen her pencil.
In my culture, back in the suburb of
New Jersey, outside New York City, we were
the age of So though I was going
steady at 13 years of age and went
with that girl for a couple of years,
mainly it was just a lot of kissing.
It's changed a lot since then.
It was already changing back then.
But I know there's hope for those of
us who struggle with our sexuality.
There's not time to speak more about that,
and that's why I brought this book.
But I remember Billy Graham speaking at Urbana
in the late 50s.
I wasn't there, but I heard it on
tape.
Little did I dream that someday I would
be speaking to those great crowds at Urbana.
But Billy Graham spoke on the subject of
sex, and he said, if you lose this
battle, you lose the most important battle of
your youth.
And I would urge any of you young
men or women that are not walking in
purity and reality and openness and honesty to
come clean before God and come clean before
your brothers and sisters and get into some
kind of accountability fellowship where you can develop
the discipline and the spiritual warfare tactics and
all that the Word of God has so
that you know the reality of holiness and
abundant Christian living.
The whole world right now is looking at
the White House.
Never has such an event had such worldwide
publicity, and of course in this age of
the internet.
But I believe God could use whatever's going
on there to shake us, even we who
are Christians.
For when we point a finger at someone
else, sometimes there's several fingers being pointed back
at us.
Those of us who claim to believe we're
indwelt by the Holy Spirit, those of us
who go around singing all these choruses and
all these songs, those of us who claim
to believe the Bible is God's Word, we
who are teachers will be more accountable.
Therefore, we must make sure that we have
this part of our life under the power
of the blood of Christ.
There are thousands and hundreds of thousands of
men and women who have proven it is
possible to live in moral purity.
We have had very little major immorality in
our movement, and we are now 40 years
old, and we are involved with one another.
We may have missed a few things, but
generally you find these things out.
Of course we have had some.
Living a life of victory, staying away from
pornography, having a godly relationship with your fiancee,
having a biblical, happy, solid marriage, I believe
is for all who love the Lord Jesus
and His Word.
And then finally, the Lord taught me how
to give.
I think I was a little extreme on
this even before I got here, but it
was here at Moody through different books and
ministries and examples that once again I saw
it was more better to give than receive.
I just began to just give everything away
that I could.
Many in our little OM fellowship, we weren't
called OM at that time, that was the
name given to us when the work exploded
in Europe.
We were called Send the Light, we were
mainly going to Mexico.
Maybe we were extreme, but we had this
one passion to reach the world with the
gospel of Jesus Christ.
I don't think that is wrong.
I believe it is biblical.
Yes, we made mistakes.
Sometimes we got into judgmentalism.
Some of us had to battle through various
kinds of emotional struggles, which is true in
life in general.
At the end of the day, as Brother
Andrew once said, it's easier to cool down
a fanatic than warm up a corpse.
So I don't think, I don't think too
much prayer is the biggest problem at Moody
Bible Institute.
Too much evangelism, too much compassion and love
for one another, too much forgiveness.
Hey, be careful, there's too much forgiveness going
on.
We better have a lecture on bringing this
forgiveness business into balance.
Too much reconciliation.
Watch out, look at these black and white
people.
They're getting into reconciliation.
Whoa, there's Native Americans who are loving Latin
Americans.
And wow, there's a Korean in the middle
being filled with the Holy Spirit.
Whoa, let's be careful here.
A.W. Tozer, who was another major influence
in my life, said to think that too
much enthusiasm was the biggest problem in the
average church was like sending a squadron of
policemen to the nearby cemetery to guard against
a major demonstration by the residents at midnight.
It blows my mind to discover how many
churches are basically unfriendly.
Rick Warren in his amazing book, Purpose Driven
Church, exposes that in a powerful way.
I personally feel the church in America is
in a very difficult time, and I believe
unless there's more repentance and more prayer and
more love and more reality in reaching the
lost and more biblical preaching and more disciplined
living and redeeming the time and more giving
of our time and our money and everything
to the Lord, then we will never make
it through the difficult years and decades that
lie ahead of us in this nation or
any other nation.
May God strengthen you, may God fill you,
and may God use you for His kingdom
and His glory.
Amen.
You've been listening to a message from Founders
Week 1998.
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