We sort of have the idea that if
we put the bucket in front of the
church, which is great, that somehow it will
all come in.
But that's just part of the picture.
And I can testify in OM, a movement
whose income has increased every year, who knows
almost nothing of indebtedness, that we also spend
nights of prayer and go out to find,
as led by the Spirit of God, the
finance.
In fact, we have a man right now
in Australia who is just about doubling any
money I receive from a business person for
the 1040 window vision.
He will double it.
And he doubled it last year to the
tune of one million Australian dollars by the
end of the year.
There's money out there, but we need people
willing to go and help find it through
prayer and biblical fundraising.
One of the greatest mistakes the church ever
made in Britain was years ago to think
that somehow fundraising was from the devil.
And in the process, we engaged in other
kinds of fundraising.
Just didn't call it fundraising, and some of
it became foolish raising.
And we looked like hypocrites as we had
to close mission societies, and we had people
return and not go back to the field,
and we always sort of blamed God.
You know, God's work done in God's way
will never lack God's supply, which if misinterpreted
means, if you don't have money, you're a
jerk.
That really encourages missionaries tremendously to press on
in what they're doing.
So I, again, just thank God for the
vision he's given you here at your church.
I'm sure over the years you've had some
opposition to this vision, emphasizing world missions.
You always get someone walk up to you
and quote something.
They think it's from the Bible.
It's not from the Bible.
They just got it from their great-grandmother.
Charity begins at home.
It may begin at home, but is that
where it stops?
Praise God for your vision to send out
workers into the harvest field.
Let's just pray once again together.
Lord, I just thank you for the privilege
of being here, hearing what I've been able
to hear this morning.
Thank you for these great songs and hymns.
Lord, I thank you for this tremendous mega
band.
And just bless them.
May they all have the music in the
heart as well as in the instrument and
in the mouth.
And that's always more difficult.
Just guide, Lord, as I share this message
that you gave to me only this very
morning.
In Jesus' name, amen.
I've never shared this particular message because God
only gave it to me this morning.
To make sure I didn't lose it in
the process, he woke me up at 6
.30 and poured this into my heart.
I wrote it down, which is unusual for
me.
And I appreciate the fact that this is
going to be put on tape because I'd
like to get a copy of it to
share with the people actually on Operation Mobilization.
Now, this sometimes happens with my team in
London who meet with me almost every week
when I'm in the country.
I live in London.
I'm there about one-third of the time.
They sometimes have to be the guinea pigs
as I share a vision that I feel
is for the whole world or at least
the whole work of OM.
But they're the first people to hear it.
And this morning here in Hollybush, and this
is so appropriate for a farm situation, you
are a guinea pig.
I don't know if you use that term
here.
But anyway, the Lord will have mercy because
I believe he's going to take this message
through video and audio and spread it right
across the world.
And some of your other messages that have
been recorded here have gone out across the
world.
And now let me share what's on my
heart.
The title of this message this morning is
The Ten Ingredients That Made Up the Ministry
of Operation Mobilization.
Now, in one sense, you can forget about
OM.
You can think about your own ministry.
You can think about your own church.
You can contextualize what I'm sharing from my
41 years of living under the control of
the Holy Spirit into your situation because every
situation is different.
But I want to share the ten ingredients.
There are probably more, but these are the
ten that just flooded into my heart this
morning as I just recently had my 41st
spiritual birthday, as I'm launching perhaps the biggest
thing I've ever launched in my life, Acts
13 Breakthrough 2000.
Many of you picked up information about that.
I did a new tape about that just
a week and a half ago, the whole
subject of why we need at least 200
,000 new missionaries because some people who don't
understand the situation, population explosion, the 1040 window,
the fact that 90% of all existing
missionaries are working where the church already exists,
don't realize that this is a minimum number.
And we're not counting on this number to
do the job of world evangelism.
We're counting on their disciples to do the
job, the national disciples in the country.
So the results don't hinge on the number
of missionaries.
The results hinge on the effectiveness which is
tied in with intercessory prayer and tied in
with these ten biblical ingredients that we must
find in a work of God.
Now, I don't share this as a message
that I picked up out of a book.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I share with this because this is what
I've lived in for 41 years since my
conversion.
I'm reading a book by Morris Rowland, Life
with Billy Graham.
It's kind of a book I'll never finish.
I just sort of dip into different sections
of it.
But for those of you who are new,
I was converted in a Billy Graham meeting
in March of 1955.
My grandfather was an atheist.
My father was sort of a materialist, but
he was somewhat seeking God.
My mother sighed.
My grandfather was a drunk.
That marriage broke into two awful pieces.
So my spiritual background was not very much.
And a dear lady prayed for me, sent
me a Gospel of John through the post.
That led me to Billy Graham meeting where
March 5th, 1955, I was powerfully converted.
And I can share that's been a reality
every day ever since.
Hell, I didn't walk out of Madison Square
Garden, New York City, planning to start a
missionary society.
I walked out of there just wanting to
somehow live for Jesus one day at a
time.
But as I look back over these 40
years, I see different ingredients that God, through
His Word and through other people, has brought
into the very ethos of OM and become
sort of the core values of OM.
And I just share these things with you
probably in the way of remembrance because hopefully
you have these same core values in your
own life and in your own family.
And this morning, this is just a testimony
these things work.
These things work.
We're not talking about pie in the sky.
We're not talking about theological tidbits.
We're talking about dynamic, practical, life-changing truths.
The first ingredient in any work of God
and certainly in our own history is the
sovereign working of God, the sovereign, mysterious working
of God and the leadership and the guidance
of the Holy Spirit.
We've been focusing on Acts 13.
I didn't get to read it last night
as my New Testament here got hidden away
underneath my books.
But praise God, someone had a major search
and found my New Testament.
And so now I can read to you
those words from Acts 13 which we're focusing
on so much during this weekend where we
see the first major missionary movement being born.
In the church at Antioch, there were prophets
and teachers, starting at verse 1, Barnabas and
Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaan who
had been called up with Herod the Tetrarch
and with Saul.
While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting,
the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me
Barnabas and Saul for the work to which
I have called them.
So after they had fasted and prayed and
placed their hands on them, they sent them
off.
Notice who did that?
The Holy Spirit.
Verse 4, Two of them sent on their
way by the Holy Spirit, went down to
Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus.
An amazing part of O.M. history that
very few people know is that our O
.M. roots were very much in the more
basic evangelical camp, Moody Bible Institute, Billy Graham.
And back in those days, Pentecostal people were
looked down upon and they were persecuted.
We sometimes forget that.
And it's a miracle in God's sovereign working
of the Holy Spirit that this sort of
anti-thing that was taught to me, actually
taught to me, never, it just never took
hold of my heart.
Because God led me as a young man
to Mexico and God opened the door for
me to minister in the Pentecostal churches in
Mexico.
And I saw, I didn't understand everything, but
I saw the Holy Spirit working among very
simple, humble people.
And I saw that the greatest reality of
the Holy Spirit wasn't firstly the gifts, as
important as that was, but the first and
great reality of the Holy Spirit was love.
And I saw love in those people.
Love even to listen to me, just a
young man at 20 years of age with
horrendous Spanish.
They had so much love that even when
I said things that were completely off, they
were so excited, I don't think they actually
understood what I said, they just kept praising
God and encouraging me to learn how to
preach in Spanish, which I've been doing ever
since.
God shortly led me out of North America
to Spain, but even there my environment, quite
different from Mexico, was very much more in
a non-Pentecostal environment.
In Spain in those days, the church that
was really on the cutting edge, we're talking
1960, were the Brethren Assemblies.
They were persecuted, but they flourished in Spain
under Franco because they didn't have a clergyman
that people could nail and put in jail.
They couldn't figure out who was the clergyman.
These Brethren Assemblies had many, many men ministering.
If you know anything about the Renewal Movement,
you know that a high percentage of leaders
all came out of the Brethren Movement.
The fastest growing movement in the world is
probably ex-brethren.
But in those days, I was there among
these open brethren, sometimes referred to as Plymouth
Brethren, in Spain.
And God did a work.
Of course, I...
I didn't feel that you ever arrived, you
know, in which you now can declare, we
are the New Testament Church.
To me, we all needed so much more.
I was very much into radical discipleship.
I was very much into wanting to see
people really move in the power of the
Spirit in evangelism and missions.
And one time, when I...
The only time I had the privilege to
speak in the largest assembly in all of
Spain, in my broken Spanish, I told them
quite clearly they weren't a New Testament Church.
Wow!
A bit of O.M.'s history that perhaps
should not be written.
But through experiences in different countries, through books...
I remember Ken Taylor, who was the head
of Moody Press.
The head of Moody Press said, here's R
.A. Torrey's book on the baptism of the
Holy Spirit.
I think Moody had discontinued selling this book.
He was in charge of Moody Press.
He said, you can have all the copies
you want if you give them to your
workers.
And so all of us in O.M.
were reading Torrey's Baptism of the Holy Spirit
in the very early days.
And I remember even before that, as a
college student, actually that book came into my
hands as far as my own personal copy
before I ever went to Moody.
And I remember reading something about the baptism
and the reality and the fullness of the
Holy Spirit and getting on the floor of
my bedroom as a college student, university, before
going in Moody and asking God to fill
me with the Holy Spirit and to give
me that power and that anointing that I
needed for ministry.
Again, I didn't understand it all.
But the next week when I went into
the jail to minister, there certainly was far
more power in the ministry than I had
experienced before.
Maybe it was just the beginning.
I don't know.
But in that jail, before the Spirit of
God was done, almost everyone had accepted Jesus
Christ as their Savior.
That, by the way, opened the door for
me to go to the Nashville State Penitentiary.
I visited there twice recently as I correspond
with prisoners.
And here I was, a young man of
19 or 20, speaking to almost all the
inmates at the State Penitentiary because some of
my jail friends had been transferred there.
From the earliest days of OM, we have
believed in the power and the reality and
the fullness, the baptism of the Holy Spirit
of God.
And this is one of the ingredients that
sometimes doesn't always get talked about.
But in any work of God, without that,
whatever the particular terminology and the fine-tuning
of how this works out, without that, you
cannot really have a work of God.
It's clear in the Book of Acts that
the Holy Spirit is the chief executive officer
of all missionary work.
And this is why God has birthed a
very unique movement in which about 50%
of our people come from Pentecostal and Charismatic
and Renewal churches, and yet 50% come
from other churches where they don't perhaps have
that total emphasis or that's not their particular
ethos.
And God has kept this together for almost
40 years by the power of His Holy
Spirit and the reality of I Corinthians 13.
Now, the sovereign working of God is just
that.
It's sovereign.
It incorporates mystery.
And we made many mistakes and we had
many failures.
But we saw God again and again overruling
our failures.
And that's why, I guess, grace became such
a major emphasis.
We saw the reality of God's great program
in the book Ragamuffin Gospel, which so many
of you now have.
I was reading one of the latter chapters
about God giving you a second ministry, a
second chance after major difficulty or failure or
tragedy.
That chapter alone is worth the price of
that book.
Again and again, we discovered the joy in
the reality of Plan B.
Plan C.
We had people come into our work with
a lot of failure, even as Christians.
We always like to say to them, even
if they think they're on Plan D, praise
God for a big alphabet, press on.
Press on.
And I hope that's true of any of
you that may have gone through serious struggle
or failure in recent years.
The second ingredient is the practice and the
reality of prayer, both personal and corporate prayer.
How encouraged I was this morning to hear
about your own special prayer times.
On our international coordinating team based in London,
and we'd love to have you visit us
sometime.
It's an incredible story how God now has
given this place to us where we could
have been asked to leave with one month's
notice, two and a half acres in London,
God in His sovereignty has given it to
us.
Touching the heart of a dear man from
Singapore, a Chinese man who came there, saw
this tiny little office where I work, blew
all of his circuits, and he went back
and sent us a check for 200,000
pounds.
Well, it was four checks for 50,000
each.
Does God supply?
We were hardly even asking.
We were asking to stay there, but we
weren't asking Him to give us a place
with a two and a half acre garden,
which now has been declared by the neighbors
as a nature reserve.
We still, by the way, have a few
more payments, but we got a lot of
years to do that.
The reality in practice of prayer, what I
wanted to share is that a few weeks
ago, we had a whole week in which
even part of the time we closed the
office, unheard of these days in Christian ministry.
We closed the office to give ourselves to
prayer.
We had a 24-hour prayer retreat in
a little different location that was given to
us as a gift for 24 hours, including
the food.
And we saw God give us the grace,
weak, needy ragamuffins to pray and intercede for
the nations of the world.
Not a matter of either or.
Is it personal prayer or is it corporate
prayer?
It's both.
And the idea that we have to be
super spiritual to pray, we have to be
totally victorious to pray, is really one more
intimidation from hell.
Prayer is for ragamuffins.
Prayer is for needy people.
Even as we go to the prayer meeting,
we may have a bad attitude.
Maybe you're down on yourself.
Because you go to prayer meetings with a
bad attitude.
Hey, join the club.
You think I've gone to nights of prayer,
which I've been into for 35 years, always
with, you know, a nice attitude.
Oh, praise God, four more hours with the
same boring people I've been with.
Oh, I hope they don't see this video.
They're not really boring on my team.
Just a few of them.
But praise God, we can repent when we
have a wrong attitude.
And the Lord, He understands.
He understands.
And there's again an illustration in that book
about how as His children, even if our
prayer is completely cuckoo, He still loves us.
He loves to hear us pray.
And I tell you, I have heard many
cuckoo prayers over the years.
Praise God, He's got more patience and grace
than I do.
Somehow by the mercy of God, even 35
to 40 years later, prayer and prayer meetings
and personal prayer has remained the heart of
Operation Mobilization Strategy and Ethos.
Though often it's an uphill battle and it
would be a lie to tell you that
everybody in OM was some kind of great
prayer warrior.
The hardest thing to teach this generation often
is how to pray.
Praise God, you now can get Operation World
on a disc.
You can use your computer to pray.
Encourage your young people to use their computer
in prayer.
You can get maps of the world through
the World Wide Web and OM has a
homepage on the World Wide Web.
You can sit there in front of your
computer and have the greatest worldwide prayer meeting
probably you've ever had.
Very soon, all information, everything that's ever been
recorded or a high percentage of it, in
all of history will be available in your
living room on your computer.
The changes in the world of computer and
computers and information are phenomenal.
Now we know the devil can use this
just like the devil used electricity.
But for Christians to start campaigns against computers
saying they're from the devil is again to
play the fool.
So don't bother.
The third ingredient into this spiritual movement is
the emphasis on commitment to evangelism.
And praise God, though there are many struggles,
OM today, worldwide, and it's true of any
great missionary movement, is committed to evangelism.
We're involved with literally millions of unconverted people,
many of whom never go into a church.
We had a hundred thousand visitors in two
weeks on our ship in Mauritius, a little
island off the coast of Africa.
Can you imagine?
A hundred thousand visitors in a week or
two.
These are people that don't know Jesus.
These are Muslims.
These are Hindus.
And again, I would like to thank you
for your support of OM and for your
support of the ship ministry.
And only eternity will tell the results.
I had a letter recently from Dale Roton,
the director of the ship ministry, saying that
now 1.4 million who have come to
the ships have gone away with Bibles or
New Testaments.
1.4 million.
And we have a bigger emphasis, actually, on
other books.
Not because it's bigger, but because it's just
such a bigger variety.
And so millions of books and bookazines.
You can get a free sample this morning
of one of our bookazines from that book
table.
As you pray for OM, pray that our
zeal for evangelism will not diminish.
Pray that we may never become lukewarm.
The Word of God says, Be ye hot
or be ye cold, for if you're lukewarm,
I will spew you out of my mouth.
The fourth ingredient is the strong, it was
almost extreme at times, emphasis on unity and
friendship.
In OM, we're a family.
We're even connected with many ex-OMers and
OM graduates, working with them, helping them, supplying
them with free literature all over the world.
Not so easy, as there are 90,000
that have been on Operation Mobilization for a
short time.
And we're on a new campaign to bring
them into our global partners program, people who
have been on OM, partnering together to do
the great work of world missions.
In the early days of OM, for about
20 years, you had to listen to nine
orientation tapes, the old reel-to-reel tapes,
before you came.
And on those tapes, we especially emphasize, going
from verse to verse, from verse to verse,
the need for unity.
The need for unity.
1 Corinthians 13 became the Mount Everest passage
and the foundation passage of the whole movement.
Everybody had to memorize that.
And ten other passages from the Word of
God, we required people to memorize.
And I believe meditating and memorizing Scripture is
becoming a lost discipline in the Church of
Jesus Christ and we will pay a big
price for that.
Because we know the Word of God is
sharp and powerful.
God used those tapes and that one tape
on the subject of unity was especially used
to teach us from the Word of God
the basic foundation that's needed in a spiritual
ministry.
We became friends with one another.
We would emphasize a lot the need to
spend time together.
And so we had conferences, we had times
of waiting upon God.
Even to this day, the ship closes for
one week.
It costs a lot of money to close
a ship in a book exhibition for a
week.
And they have prayer and the ministry of
the Word of God and some rest and
recreation as well.
This is the ingredient.
And one of the reasons I'm excited about
this message is because even people in OM
or people that have been praying for OM
often make generalizations as to why OM has
been so effective over the years.
And usually they've just touched on one or
two things.
And if we only focus on one or
two things, like people would emphasize our strong
emphasis on faith and prayer.
But if we only emphasize one or two
things, we get lopsided.
Paul was very clear to emphasize the whole
counsel of the Lord.
That's not easy.
But one biblical principle brings other biblical principles
into balance.
And OM, because of our tremendous zeal, our
conviction that men were lost and going to
hell without Christ, we had a natural tendency
to go extreme.
And God used the balance of Scripture and
books by great men and women of God
which were constantly flowing through OM like a
river to bring us back in brokenness and
repentance to that place of biblical balance.
All of us here in Britain have seen
whole churches blown away because they overemphasize something
that may have been a truth, but when
it was overemphasized, it became a distortion.
The fifth ingredient is the endless effort and
zeal toward recruiting and mobilizing workers.
Even in the early days, thousands of meetings
were taken.
Any kind of meeting.
I would go to meetings and speak to
three people.
I remember going to one of the largest
churches in Great Britain in a place, if
I can pronounce, we'll be bordering on the
miraculous in Scotland, Strathpifer.
There was a great convention there, but I
was not invited to the great convention.
I was invited to a Sunday evening service.
This huge church that must have died a
long time before I got there and hardly
anyone at all was in the meeting.
I'll never forget that night standing among all
these empty pews with a few people thinking
of this great convention once a year that
filled the place.
Somehow, I gave it everything I had.
I can hardly ever remember preaching.
It used to be 900 times a year
and not sort of with whatever energy I
had giving it all that I could because
the Word of God says whatever you do,
whatever you do, do it with all your
heart and with all your might.
Somehow this vision for meetings, this vision for
recruiting and mobilizing became contagious and soon O
.M. had hundreds of people crisscrossing the whole
world and then eventually two ships crisscrossing the
whole globe taking tens of thousands of meetings,
yes, among believers for renewal, for a call
to the Lordship of Christ, but also to
recruit and mobilize.
Isn't it amazing that our name given to
me in that tree after I was arrested
in the Soviet Union in 1961, that name
which had never been used in Christian ministry
before, Operation Mobilization, the word mobilize is now
more popular in mission circles than ever before
in history.
There are only 34 years late to grab
onto this great, mega, motivating, life-changing word,
mobilize.
You too can be a mission mobilizer.
I even have a tape now, how to
be, practical steps, how to be a mission
mobilizer, using books, using tapes, using video, loaning
things out and unless we find an army
of people, what some people call the grassroots,
who are willing to start getting excited about
missions, we're never going to see the job
done.
Now, I'm always looking for freebies wherever I
go, I'm looking for freebies.
I tried to get Jen's tie, it didn't
work, but as I walked out of here,
I saw an entire newspaper sitting out there
just about the alpha courses.
The whole newspaper is just telling you how
great the alpha courses are.
It's what I call overkill.
I guess an American produced it.
But it's great.
It's great.
People are excited about this.
Why?
Because this influences their church and people are
concerned about their church.
Sometimes I meet people who are so extreme
about the local church, they would never have
me or anybody in OM into their church
because we are classified as parachurch.
We're not a local church.
We are the teams, according to what I
see in the book of Acts, sent out
by the church.
And of course, China Inland Mission, now OMF
is the same, WICDF is the same, and
there's a strong group of churches, newer churches,
that have rejected all of this completely and
said in one big sweep it's unscriptural.
Now, a lot of those people have changed
and apologized and that situation doesn't exist so
much in Britain, but it's still a big
thing in America.
Doesn't the devil like to divide us up?
Imagine a group like WICDF Bible Translators, one
of the greatest missions in the history of
the church that's led to the planting of
thousands of new churches, being rejected by local
churches because they are not a local church.
Sometimes people go on about the importance of
the local church, but in fact, if you
talk to them carefully, what they mean is
their local church.
And that can be sometimes tied in with
our own ego because a fear of failure
and a desire for success on a local
church thing is normal for us human beings.
I praise God for people here this morning
and last night from other churches.
I praise God that Jim and others here
encourage you to go where the Spirit of
God leads you as far as church, especially
if you're from some other part of the
country.
I know Holly Bush is a great place,
but I don't think people should commute here
from London for Sunday morning services despite better
train service to the eastern part of this
country.
Mission mobilization.
We need each other.
I will tell you if the church in
Great Britain got as excited about world missions
and the unreached people in the 1040 window
as they are about this Alpha thing and
a few other things, we would see thousands
of new British missionaries thrust out into the
harvest fields very, very quickly.
But it takes extra faith to get excited
about things that seem distant, things you can't
easily feel or touch, things that you don't
think will be a blessing to your home
or your family or help you in the
midst of your problems.
But in fact, that's also a deception because
it's often when we get involved in the
bigger picture, some of our own problems start
to get much, much smaller.
Sixthly, the sixth ingredient is the strong focus,
and perhaps this should be the first, the
strong focus on the Lord himself.
I've hardly known a movement in history and
I do a lot of study that devoured
more books on spiritual life than Operation Mobilization.
We were the ones who mainly introduced A
.W. Tozer to Great Britain.
We're the ones that launched a lot of
the Watchman Knee books.
Some of them, of course, led some people
into extremes, but the Watchman Knee books are
still powerful books on basic spiritual life that
God has used.
And all through these years, we've been tied
in to some degree with things like the
Keswick Convention.
Wherever people exalt the Lord, even though we
may not agree with everything, we felt that's
where we should be.
Focusing on the Lord himself, not firstly the
work, not firstly what we can accomplish, where
we can go.
Reality first, geography second, has been one of
the slogans of Operation Mobilization, and I hope
it will be of your ministry and of
your life as well.
Of course, focusing on the Lord led us
into a greater reality of the cross.
This book, Calvary Road, became required reading in
OM for 25 years, and Roy Hesschen then
ended up speaking at the OM conferences together
with men like Alan Redpath and so many
others that were obviously men filled with God's
Holy Spirit.
The emphasis on the crucified life and the
emphasis on brokenness have been part of the
core values of OM from almost the beginning,
and it should be a core value in
your marriage, in your home, in your ministry,
and I know that at this church it
is.
Seventhly, the seventh ingredient is the constant push
toward the more unreached people of the world.
Before there was ever talk about the 1040
window, that's where OM missionaries were, not just
short term, but hundreds of them long term.
In fact, as I stand before you this
morning, by God's grace, after years and decades
of prayer and work with endless disappointments, we
have a thousand people laboring in the 1040
window, and amazing enough, largely unnoticed by a
great vast percentage, even of Christian leaders.
Brothers and sisters, God has honored this commitment
to Acts 1A.
There are verses in Corinthians and verses in
Romans as well that emphasize the need to
go to the more unreached part of the
world.
People ask me, why do you always wear
this global jacket?
I've had people tell me this is ugly.
I've had every kind of insult heaped upon
me because of my global jacket.
I've got global socks.
I got in big trouble with my global
underwear because in a big meeting I just,
you know, I wanted to show them my
underwear, and my wife got really upset by
that.
I promised her now not to do that
anymore.
But I do this because I believe there
is some value in being a fool for
world missions.
Whether I'm a fool for Christ, you have
to judge.
I hope I am in a biblical way,
but I am willing to be a little
bit outlandish to somehow just try to bring
things into balance.
We're not expecting all of you to put
on a global jacket and run around with
balloons.
Oh, praise God, if you're that free in
Jesus, that would be a nice sight.
But we're attempting to bring things into balance.
Some of you know the story about the
practical value of this jacket.
I was in a jumbo jet flying from
here, Brazil, down to Argentina.
I went up to the cockpit, British Airways
jumbo jet, to talk to the pilot, and
they were having a discussion about where they
were.
They thought they were flying over Ecuador.
They used this jacket in the cockpit of
a jumbo 747 to see where they were
going.
They were flying over Uruguay.
So this isn't just, you know, some kind
of a gimmick.
This is very practical and basic for survival
as we go into the 21st century.
Everybody needs a map, a globe, and a
torch as they go along life's road.
Praise God for the 82,000 movement that
has at least brought a grassroots movement in
some nations to emphasize the more unreached.
We know this is not something new.
It goes back to Pentecost.
It goes back to the Apostle Paul who
said, I want to preach Christ where he's
not been named.
I don't want to build on somebody else's
foundation.
We can talk about Hudson Taylor.
I just saw this movie about the life
of Hudson Taylor.
You can get it on video where he
was persecuted by fellow missionaries because he dared
to think about going to the interior of
China.
We follow with weakness as missionary ragamuffins in
the footsteps of men like C.T. Studd
and Hudson Taylor and George Mueller and a
host of other men and women who have
been the great pacesetters in reaching the unreached
across the world.
The eighth ingredient is the constant effort, I've
already touched on this, to be biblically balanced.
Grace and discipline as we talked about last
night.
Work and worship.
In fact, in my old Bible that I
don't always carry with me anymore because it's
falling apart, there's page after page of notes
that the Spirit of God gave me on
balance.
Fifteen ways to be balanced in the home.
Twenty ways to be balanced in world missions.
I even wrote a book about balance.
I never forget when my daughter accused me
of being extreme in the area of balance.
I guess eventually I had to confess I
was extreme.
But at least I'm still making my effort
to be balanced and to find a balance
of biblical truth.
And then the ninth ingredient is the practice
of disciple making.
Leadership training and turning the work over to
the nationals within the country we're working.
It's amazing how God brought us into this
in the very beginning.
Because when I first went to Mexico I
had to go back and finish college.
I left university and transferred to Moody Bible
Institute in Chicago, not because, to be honest,
I was so keen on studying, I did
want to study, but I wanted to evangelize
Chicago.
And so God brought me to Chicago.
Little did He know that's where also I
would meet my wife.
And God sent us to Mexico.
But we first went to Mexico in the
Christmas and in the summer.
So we had to turn the work over
to Mexicans.
That became the ethos of OM.
So soon in Spain, the second country I
pioneered, the work was turned over to Spaniards.
Shortly after that I was in other European
countries.
In each case I was moving on, we
turned the work over to others.
Then my wife and I ended up in
India and within a short time the work
was in the hands of Indians.
Today, OM India has 600 workers, 98%
Indian.
God has honored that.
That means we have to be willing to
take risks.
That means we must avoid missionary perfectionism, where
when we turn the work over to a
national brother or sister, we see them make
a mistake.
We feel we have to rush in there
and pick them up and sort of carry
them around.
Actually in some fields the work has not
grown until the missionary got out of there.
That doesn't mean there's not a need for
missionaries today because there are 2,000 people's
groups where there are hardly any missionaries.
And some people believe, like Ralph Winter, a
great missiologist, that we need a redeployment of
some of our missionaries as the nationals can
take over where they are and they can
go to places where there are no nationals
or churches in existence.
It's an important concept.
I know it's controversial and it brings some
criticism, but I'm convinced the Spirit of God
reveals this clearly in the book of Acts
and in apostolic New Testament missionary work.
Disciple-making is 90% of the work.
10% is to bring the man to
Jesus.
The Holy Spirit has prepared people throughout the
world.
Through prayer, the Holy Spirit does His work.
People come to Christ through the proclamation of
the gospel.
But then they must be discipled.
They must be taught.
They must be grounded.
That takes a full-scale movement that is,
of course, very much based on planting churches
or working with already existing churches.
And that leads me to my final ingredient.
Did you think I'd get to 10 so
quickly?
Some of you stand or sit there aghast.
You're going to get lunch after all.
But my 10th ingredient is the emphasis from
the early days on the importance of the
local church.
O.M. And we don't want to boast
saving Jesus Christ.
But we can say, and it's not always
true of groups called parachurch, which we don't
like.
It sounds too much like paralyzed.
But from the earliest days, O.M. esteemed
the local church.
Even though the church where I was saved
was totally liberal and I had to leave
that church, God linked me with other local
churches in my own hometown, my own little
mini-Antioch.
And though I had the vision to go
to Mexico sort of on my own, I
went to a local church on a Wednesday
night.
They let me preach.
And I said, Would you pray for me
and commend me to this ministry?
This, brothers and sisters, is 1957.
I was 19 years of age.
And some of the men in that meeting
became the board of directors that I later
submitted to.
And one or two of those men, including
my own father who got converted meanwhile, are
still alive today.
My dad's 90.
He visited here once.
And I appreciate your prayers for him.
God gave us the understanding of the importance
of the local fellowship.
That's why O.M. started church planting not
in the 90s, as some people think.
We started big-time church planting as far
back as the mid-60s.
And in France and Italy and Spain and
Turkey and other parts of the world, there
are local fellowships planted by O.M. teams.
Personally, I feel we're often better at working
with a church planter in doing this than
attempting to do it on our own.
No time to go into those reasons.
And, of course, that's one of the reasons
O.M. never became a denomination but phased
out of the picture after the church was
planted and allowed that church to become part
of a national network or of an already
existing denomination.
There's so much more I'd love to share,
especially about what can happen when there is
dynamic partnership between a local church and a
missionary fellowship raised up by the Spirit of
God.
This is one of the reasons I'm so
excited about Acts 13, Breakthrough 2000, the goal
to see 200,000 missionaries mobilized across the
world from the whole body of Christ.
Not O.M., not even all the mission
societies that all the world put together, but
the whole body of Christ.
And many churches today have their own mission
societies like ICTHUS down in London and send
out workers directly to the field and work
in very unusual and profitable ways.
The church is exploding across the world more
than ever before in history.
Just because it's not exploding in your back
garden doesn't mean it's not exploding.
The church in Britain had its heyday.
We did miss many opportunities, but God is
sovereign.
The church in Britain today, even though there's
not huge church growth, stands surely among the
top ten nations in the world as regard
to potential to send out workers.
Two days ago, God gave me another message.
Maybe I'll share it some other time.
Ten reasons, or ten great positive things that
are happening in the body of Christ in
Great Britain right now.
I think the Lord again gave me that
message as a balance to so much negativism
that's going around among God's people.
Some of it quite extreme with Christian leaders
even saying, Oh, Britain is such a mission
field.
We can't really send out workers anymore.
What a lot of eyewash.
How could a Christian leader ever say such
a stupid thing?
Where was he ever educated?
Where has he ever traveled?
The fact of the matter is though there
are needs here, there always will be needs
everywhere.
For narrow is the way and few there
are who find it.
And broad is the road to destruction.
Britain is still surely among the top ten
nations in the world as far as potential.
Probably a million people who claim to be
born again in Britain.
Probably half of those claim to have had
some powerful experience with the Holy Spirit.
We have no reason for not being, even
as Brazil becomes a great mission sending country,
as Korea maybe leads the pack.
Doesn't matter who leads the pack.
What does that mean?
That is not even a Christian way of
expressing things.
Great Britain is to still have a major
vital role in the great commission and the
completion of the great commission.
I would urge you to look over again
this list of ingredients that we need to
have in any work of God.
To double check to see if you have
these in your own personal life.
To see if you're working on these things
in your own church.
And believe me, as people buy into the
Word of God, as they turn determined to
follow the Word of God wherever it leads,
and believe me, at times it costs.
I haven't had time to talk to you
of thousands of disappointments.
I haven't had time to share about terrorists
attacking our ship in the Philippines with hand
grenades and blowing two 19-year-old girls
into eternity.
I haven't had time to share about how
we eventually lost Lagos too after 17 years
of ministry, one terrible night in the Beagle
Channel off the very southern tip of South
America.
But I can say this, in the midst
of all these things, the heartbreaks as well
as the victories, we've seen the sovereign, powerful
working of the Holy Spirit of God.
That same Holy Spirit that lives in every
single believer.
Never forget that.
And the potential of those of us just
sitting here this morning is almost beyond measure.
If God can take one needy, loud-mouthed,
difficult kind of character, son of a Dutch
immigrant in New Jersey, and save him and
send him and use him in world missions,
then I don't believe anybody really has any
excuse.
Let's go for it.
Let's build these ingredients into our organizations, into
our churches, into our lives, and many others
that we get from the Word of God.
And let's believe that everybody in this world
could be given the Gospel in the near
future, and that a church could be planted
in every people's group, in every nation of
the world.
Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you for
your Word.
We thank you for this dynamic example from
Acts chapter 13.
We thank you for what we've seen over
these years.
And Lord, I just thank you for your
mercy to our own fellowship, Operation Mobilization.
God, you know my first burden isn't OM.
My first burden is your church.
My first burden is the whole kingdom and
the whole world.
But Lord, you do put us in different
fellowships.
You put us in different churches.
And we have to be faithful to the
particular ministry that you give us, even if
there are things in that ministry we don't
particularly like.
So Lord, somehow by your grace, in the
weeks and months to come, we will deny
self, take up the cross and follow you.
Somehow in the weeks and the months to
come, we will allow, as it was in
Acts 4.31, to be filled afresh again
and again with your Holy Spirit, that we
may go forth and speak your Word across
the whole world in boldness.
We pray, Lord, on the basis of Matthew
9, raise up workers to send forth harvesters
by your Holy Spirit into the harvest field.
We pray, Lord, for at least 100,000
churches around the world to send at least
one.
Many could send five or ten.
Big mega churches might be able to send
a hundred.
But we pray specifically on the basis of
your Word for somehow at least 200,000
new workers to at least begin to move
the training, the short term that they may
ultimately end up in church planting situations and
back up situations throughout the entire globe.
Oh, God, we thank you for what you're
doing.
But we know you want to do so
much more.
And we commit ourselves to that in the
name of Jesus Christ.
Amen.