I'm excited.
I'm excited about this weekend.
I know those of you who know me
say, hey, that's no big deal.
Verwer is always excited.
It is true that I have been excited
every single day since my conversion to Christ
and I can assure you that I'm not
a good missionary speaker in many ways because
my great burden isn't missions.
My great burden is Jesus and my great
burden is just to see Jesus reigning and
ruling in people's hearts.
In fact, I turned down many missions conferences
in order to take youth events, in order
to take all kinds of other meetings where
they don't know I'm a missionary because when
they know you're a missionary quite a few
key people don't show up and that's always
discouraging.
And even as we go through this weekend,
we will be focusing on missions, but I
believe the Spirit of God will have something
for everyone because you're in a mission field
right here in Memphis and you need the
power of God as much as we do
overseas.
You need the wisdom of God.
I'm amazed at the lack of wisdom among
God's people.
There's an overemphasis today on power and seeing
the power of God.
But if you have what you may think
is the power of God without the wisdom
of God, you soon will have a circus
and we have many evangelical circuses going on
around the world and a few in the
United States.
I'm amazed at the mistakes they make in
Washington.
I'm a grace-awakened person, so I do
forgive, but it's hard to believe that some
of these people have done any studying or
got any wisdom.
And the Bible emphasizes wisdom.
I'm amazed at what people will go to
pay at a motivational seminar.
Probably we would get more tonight if we
charge 15 or 20 dollars each and market
it in a 90s fashion and listed me
as a motivational speaker.
But some motivational speakers pick up 20 grand,
30, 40 grand a shot, just like that.
I've listened to some of their material.
Some of it's actually quite boring and the
lack of wisdom that some of these motivational
speakers has, which in turn leads hundreds of
people astray into New Age philosophy and all
kinds of crazy things, is really quite off
the wall.
And my prayer this weekend is that God
will give you some nuggets of wisdom for
your own work, your own ministry, for your
home, for your family.
I was selling books in my hometown shortly
after my conversion and I met a dear
wise old woman and she knew I was
a young little babe in Christ that needed
wisdom.
She bought a lot of books for me,
so that encouraged my heart, and then she
invited me in, sat me down and started
to preach.
I was only about 18.
And she said, you need a lot of
wisdom in what you're going to do, she
said, and you said, therefore you should study
the Proverbs.
And she said, a proverb a day will
keep the devil away.
Have you ever heard that?
There's 31 Proverbs, one for every day of
the month.
And ever since those teenage years, I've tried
to read the Proverbs every day.
And any wisdom I've ever had, because my
number one job is still the oversight of
this whole movement, which I do by email,
telephone calls, and working through better people than
myself so that I can squeeze in a
few meetings in between my other work.
And today is so exciting because when you
come down the highway, you can also be
on your mobile phone and talk to the
whole world, even from freeway number 40 between
Nashville and here.
I'm excited.
I've been excited every day since Jesus came
into my heart.
And if you're not excited, then there's something
wrong with you.
And you need to just simply quietly repent
where you are.
That doesn't have to be any big fanfare.
You don't have to raise your hand or
come forward.
You can just quietly repent of lukewarmness, lack
of excitement about Jesus, lack of excitement about
missions, or maybe you're just ill and you
could see a doctor and see if you
need vitamins or what you need to get
you excited.
Because I'll be very honest, the lack of
excitement among God's people concerning Christ and the
kingdom and missions and the lost is a
scandal.
It is bigger than the scandal in the
White House.
It is bigger than the scandal in the
bar.
It is bigger than the scandal down in
the New Age, whatever.
And my great burden, wherever I go, is
to see God's people coming into biblical Holy
Spirit excitement.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to be
loud.
I'm a little bit loud.
And then they turn these microphones on.
I mean, I don't actually need these things.
But they're good to try to get me
to speak softer and protect my vocal cords.
And I was loud before I was a
Christian.
So I'm not saying being excited means you're
loud.
I'm loud.
I'm from New Jersey, but people from New
Jersey tend to be a bit loud and
rude and obnoxious and a few other things
until they're born again, in case any of
you are from New Jersey.
A lot of the people that I know
who are excited about missions and excited about
Jesus are actually quite quiet people.
If you're looking for men to plant and
women to plant churches in the Muslim world,
probably you would not choose people of my
temperament.
Do you know anything about this temperament business?
I'm the most negative of all four temperaments.
You have phlegmatics, sanguines, cholerics, and what's the
other one?
Melancholic.
Oh, they're terrible.
But I'm known as the choleric.
You know, we're sort of aggressive.
We get things done, but we hurt people
in the process.
It's better if we wouldn't marry, but we're
usually lustful, so we all marry and usually
get divorced.
And Tim LaHaye's book about cholerics is really,
it's really quite depressing until you get to
the section about spirit-filled cholerics.
And the spirit-filled choleric is sort of
just a generally confused person who has met
God and is attempting to put into practice
the Christian life.
I always say, as I speak to many
young people, that if God can use a
character like me with all my weaknesses and
born in New Jersey, son of a Dutch
immigrant, then nobody else has an excuse.
And I hope you realize that missionaries, even
leaders and founders of missionary societies, we're just
weak, ordinary, struggling people.
You feel you've got problems in your life,
you write to me.
I probably got two for every one you
have.
If you write to me and you have
more problems than I have, I send you
five free books, so give it a try.
Now that reminds me of the fact that
we have bought a lot of books.
When you go out there and look, some
of you know me, God bless you for
hanging in here, but when you go out
the door there on my left and wander
around there, you'll find a huge book table
piled with books, and you will wonder, what
are all these books?
But you see, we know one of the
keys to mobilizing, motivating, energizing people in missions
are missionary books.
We get confused selling books and making change.
We're fast lane operators.
We find all that a bit of a
pain.
These books are on a donation basis.
You can give a check, you can give
a postdated check up to the year 2000,
but we want the books to go out.
What are some of these books?
And some of them, because we never have
enough faith to order enough books, though I
remember coming here to First Seed Bay and
way back in the 70s and putting books
out one Sunday, and I think it was
one of the greatest book bonanzas in my
entire missionary history.
I don't know if you're still reading books
as much as you were in the 70s.
I didn't get around here so much in
the 80s, but we have got some mega
books tonight.
Born for Battle, a book on intercessory prayer.
I appreciated what you said about Prayer Emphasis
Day.
My actual practice, and I don't say this
to boast, is that every day is a
Prayer Emphasis Day.
I always try to have between an hour
and seven hours of prayer each day, and
I've practiced that since I was a teenager.
Because prayer is so exciting.
I wish I had time to just teach
you about 30 ways to make your prayer
life exciting.
Because a lot of people, they don't know
how to make prayer exciting, and so prayer
meetings become boring and therefore people don't go.
Yeah, a lot of young people say the
church is boring, and I think they're right.
Some of the music is certainly boring, but
following Jesus Christ is not boring.
I have never had a boring day since
my conversion.
That is not an exaggeration.
I've had boring hours.
I've had boring minutes, and that's terrible.
I've met lots of boring people, but I've
never had a full boring day.
And one of the reasons is because I
discovered as a teenager the excitement of prayer,
and walking with God, and knowing God, and
the reality of worship, the reality of praise,
Thanksgiving, intercession, praying while you walk, praying while
you're driving, praying with your walkman on, praying
in bed, praying under the bed, all kinds
of prayer.
And you ought to get this book, 31
Studies Born for Battle.
When you get serious in prayer, then you'll
want to get Operation World, which many of
you already have, right?
How many of you already have it?
That is probably a higher percentage than any
church in the world.
How many of you now are reading and
praying through it regularly?
Raise your hand again.
We had a liquidation of many hands which
proves that I really should be speaking to
you about the children's edition of Operation World.
This is a lot better for those that
are not big on reading, and there's some
children will not even go to bed until
they have read a page out of the
children's edition, which is probably the greatest children's
book in the entire history of the Church
of Jesus Christ.
This is a mega book for children, and
we don't have that many, so probably they'll
all go tonight.
I always have a book of the decade,
which is Grace Awakening by Charles Swindoll.
I have a book of the century, which
is, I remember pushing it right here in
your church.
Martin Lloyd Jones' Spiritual Depression, Its Causing Cure.
I don't think I have those with me.
And then I have a book of the
year, book of the year, 1996.
I just found in a missionary apartment in
Argentina a few weeks ago.
I'd never seen the book before.
It so blessed me.
I wanted to stand on my head.
When I was in the Boy Scouts, I
did a special program standing on my head
because my top of my head is flat
and I could stand there a long time.
I'm not sure of all that I did
at that time because I've repressed some of
it.
But this book so excited me.
Splashes of Joy in the Cesspool of Life.
How many of you have read that?
You ladies, look at this little gang in
the front row.
They're all into splashes.
But this is written by a woman, and
I believe all of us men need to
read more books by women.
Because as men, we are naturally lopsided, and
when we get some splashes from a woman
in the form of a book, it's just
wild.
A lot of this book is humor.
How many of you are into humor?
How many of you are opposed to humor?
Opposed to humor?
A lot of people in some churches are
very opposed to humor.
Laugh and the world laughs with you.
Cry and you simply get wet.
This is the kind of chapters you got
here.
This one's dedicated to me.
How can I be over the hill when
I never got to the top?
Motherhood isn't for wimps.
Oh Lord, let my words be tender and
sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat
them.
I introduce to you, Barbara Johnson, Splashes of
Joy dedicated to missionaries around the world.
Let's pray together.
Lord, I thank you for the printed page.
I thank you that almost every day of
my life, I've been motivated by the printed
page.
Encouraged by the printed page.
Rebuked by the printed page.
And as we carry these books from the
book table tonight and give them away to
our friends and distribute them, we believe we're
going to multiply the blessing more than we
can ever imagine.
So Lord, we'll give you the glory and
we'll give you the praise.
Speak to us from your Holy Word now.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Turn with me in your Bibles to Acts
chapter 13.
I'm going to share with you a vision
tonight.
I don't say this lightly, but tonight for
me is a historic moment, because I'm going
to share a vision that God gave to
me on an airplane flying from Cordoba, Argentina
to Buenos Aires some weeks ago.
It was a very scary experience, because I
haven't had this kind of vision, which comes
from God and comes into your mind, for
a long time.
I remember back when God gave me the
vision for the ships in the mid-60s,
the vision that I shared immediately with a
small group of people to get a ship
for world evangelism.
And a few years later, I wrote out
a memo when I was living on one
of the ships, the first ship, why we
should get a second ship.
My mind jumps back long before that, when
I had my fiasco and the Soviet Union
was arrested by the KGB and accused of
being a spy.
And my name was flashed across the newspapers
in 1961 as an American spy arrested in
the Soviet Union.
After two more days of interrogation, they decided
I was a religious fanatic and gave me
a submachine gun escort back to Austria.
Our work before that was known as Send
the Light.
That was going on mainly in Mexico and
Spain, and our thrust was the Muslim world
and the communist world.
But it wasn't to be exactly like that.
And I went for a day of prayer
after that experience in the Soviet Union.
And during that day of prayer, I was
actually on the top of a tree.
I used to like to climb trees, praising
and singing.
And God gave me two words just out
of the blue, Operation Mobilization, which has been
the name of the entire movement ever since.
That's trained 95,000 people in evangelism who
are working in every nation in the world
with every mission society in the world.
Over 100 mission societies and groups trace their
birth back to OM.
And on top of that, we've been able
to give the word of God to about
700 or 800 million and see many tens
of thousands come to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But the vision of Operation Mobilization in the
tree that day was a change on my
original thinking because it meant I should get
involved in Western Europe.
Before that, I wasn't interested in Western Europe,
Britain, Germany.
They had enough churches.
I wanted Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq.
I don't want to go where they have
lots of churches.
But God was to change my life and
birth a movement that would be known for
its partnership with churches, especially in Europe.
And soon we had a couple of hundred
people coming out from those churches in the
first OM summer in 62 and then 2000
by 1963.
I remember when God birthed the vision for
that 62 summer.
It grew out of that experience in that
day of prayer.
But it was in a weekend of prayer
and waiting on God in Spain with some
Spaniards that I shared the vision for that
next summer.
And it was right after that summer that
God gave the vision to multiply everything by
ten.
I'm sure part of that was very human.
But I felt everything we did in the
summer of 62 with all the blessing we
saw from God and OM was just really
being born at that time, we should multiply
it by ten.
We had 12 big trucks taking literature in
teams.
I said, Lord, give us 120.
It was out of that that we got
later on the vision for the ship, which
actually came to me in a converted pub
in Bolton, Lancashire, or a converted bar.
We turned it into a Christian bookshop.
So I guess when people have sometimes referred
to me as a visionary, that is, I
guess, somewhat true.
The vision for India came very, very quickly.
In those days, I could do things on
my own.
Now we're a modified democracy operating by consensus,
and sometimes doing something at OM is a
bit slow.
But we just had leaders' meetings in Singapore
with 135 leaders from around the world, and
we've launched something new, which isn't my vision.
In fact, I have felt strongly for the
last 25 years that my work was to
back up other people's visions.
The great vision of Hyderabad and all that
India is today was not my vision.
I had the joy of just being a
servant and backing up the vision of Joseph
de Souza and Divakaram and other Indians.
The vision for South Africa and what's going
on there, spreading into Angola, spreading into Mozambique,
not my vision.
I'm just helping, just backing it up.
Some of the big visions for Operation Mercy,
moving among the Kurds, engaging in helping in
their physical needs.
That wasn't my vision.
Somebody else's vision I've been just trying to
help, true of what Gordon Magney is doing.
Some of you know him, in serve among
the Afghans.
And so in some ways over the past
years, I've become less aggressive.
I've become more laid back.
And my burden was just to empower and
to serve and to help others.
And I was quite happy in this role.
There's plenty to do in something as big
and complicated as OM.
Then somehow I got drawn into a movement
called AD2000 and beyond.
Not well known yet, except in some third
world countries.
But it's a network.
It's not an organization.
Many organizations relate to it.
Southern Baptists are in that, very big players.
Campus Crusade, very big, WAC.
Many, many different movements are networked in.
Doesn't mean they agree with everything.
Doesn't mean we work together in everything.
But there has been a feeling by some
of the big groups like Campus Crusade and
the Southern Baptists and some very beautiful, humbling
statements made by some of their leaders that
we cannot do it on our own.
We need each other.
This movement is led by a young Latin
American named Luis Bush, who is able to
win people and get them together in Colorado
Springs and then get them together in Korea.
We had our big AD2000 gathering in Korea
last May.
Luis Bush and other people, as I consulted
with over 30 people before I joined this
movement in leadership capacity, wooed me into becoming
the chairman of the section of the movement
for the mobilization of new missionaries.
Now, when I got into this particular track,
led by a young man from Youth Within
Mission named Perry Rickard, they had the goal
of mobilizing one million new missionaries.
I said, you're crazy.
I said, we've got to get it down
to a more somewhat sensible figure.
There are less than 200,000 missionaries in
the whole world today.
There are different ways to count missionaries, even
being quite broad-minded.
And so my contribution to AD2000 mission mobilization
track so far was to get the number
down to 200,000.
We agreed to try to help mobilize 200
,000 new missionaries.
Now, it's very important to listen at this
point and understand we don't think we're going
to do this.
This is a ballpark figure.
A lot of it is already happening, has
nothing to do with us.
But we feel it is good to have
goals for the whole body of Christ.
As far as we're concerned, some of the
great missionary shakers and movers and senders and
goers will not necessarily be part of AD2000
and may never get our letters and may
never hear of this vision I'm sharing with
you tonight from Acts 13.
But they're still part of God's family.
We're all one, whether they will agree to
be one with us or not, they're still
one according to the Bible if they're God's
children.
On this flight just a few weeks ago
from Cordova to Buenos Aires, I had the
heaviest vision poured into my mind that I've
had since those days when I thought about
India and launched that and launched the ships.
And I'm shaking.
I'm still wondering what is going on.
Is this, you know, is there some ego
in here that I've got deceived?
And so I share this with you in
a bit of fear and trembling, though it
looks like now this vision is in the
air.
Louise Bush believes it's from God.
Perry Rickard of the Mobilization Tract believes it's
from God.
The people in OM that I submit to
believe it's from God.
It's now on the Internet going around the
world.
It's now going out to 2,500 leaders
in the form of a cassette across the
whole world.
And I'm extremely nervous.
But the vision is simple and the vision
is from the Word of God and the
vision for many people is not new.
But some of the concepts in this vision
are breakthrough concepts.
And I believe we need breakthrough concepts if
we are going to see new missionaries, especially
since the latest report shows that in the
greatest missionary sending nation in the world, the
United States, the number of career missionaries is
now dropping.
Let's read the passage, Acts chapter 13.
I'm sure you've read it many times.
Now, there were at Antioch in the church
that was there prophets and teachers, Barnabas and
Simeon, who was called Niger, and Lucius of
Cyrene and Menaen, who had been brought up
with Herod, the Tetrarch, and Saul.
And while they were ministering to the Lord
and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart
from me Barnabas and Saul for the work
to which I have called them.
Then when they had fasted and prayed and
laid their hands on them, they sent, there's
our theme, they sent them away.
Verse 4, our theme again, so being sent
by the Holy Spirit, they went down to
Seleucia and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
And when they had preached or when they
had reached Selemus, they began to proclaim the
word of God in the synagogue of the
Jews and they also had John as their
helper.
Many, many times over these years I have
preached from this passage.
But on the airplane that day, in a
state of struggle, in somewhat of a state
of discouragement, to give the background, I was
at the OM Love Latin American Congress in
Cordova.
The numbers were not as high as we
were hoping.
I met with some key Argentinian Christian leaders.
I speak Spanish, by the way.
And it's obvious that the great numbers of
missionaries they're hoping for from Argentina, they are
not coming, at least not yet.
There's a lot of talk, there's a lot
of hype, there's a lot of exaggeration about
what supposedly God has been doing in Argentina
and God has been doing wonderful things, but
some of it gets a bit exaggerated.
There are many struggles in the Argentinian church.
There has been major immorality, and the young
people that have wanted to go so far,
many of them have not been able to
raise their support.
We had Brazilians at that meeting.
I talked to the Brazilians.
I minister in Brazil, and in Brazil as
well, a much bigger country than Argentina, considered
the great future missionary sending country of the
world.
It's obvious that the big numbers some are
dreaming about are not yet really in the
pipeline.
So, humanly speaking, on that flight, I was
again struggling with this number, 200,000, wondering
if it was even from God.
That number wasn't something I thought of.
Remember, I'm the one that brought it down
from a million.
But I had agreed.
I had, in a sense, reluctantly taken ownership
of this vision.
I was asked to speak to 75,000
people at the Olympic Stadium in Korea.
And here I am challenging all these Koreans
to consider world missions, and 80 percent in
that meeting stood to make a missionary commitment.
I'm back to Korea again this summer for
a follow-up meeting among many thousands of
students.
All kinds of things have happened in my
life, especially in the last 24 months, that
are really quite scary.
And as I wrestle with unbelief and wrestle
with my doubts, I have a heavy negative
streak.
I wrestle a lot with cynicism.
I'm a borderline agnostic.
I'm not a natural spiritual person.
I'm a natural backslider.
And if God doesn't meet me every day,
somehow I start to get a bad attitude,
even concerning missions and Christian leaders and AD2000
and OM and whatever else.
I don't know if any of you have
any of that kind of struggle in your
life.
But you might as well understand, you don't
have some kind of spiritual Holy Ghost, laser
beams, some kind of combination of converted Clint
Eastwood, Madonna and Prince combined here to share
with you about world missions.
You've just got a needy character that God
saved in a Billy Graham meeting.
I didn't even seem to have that much
to do with it.
You know my testimony, most of you.
One little old lady heard about my trouble
with the police and my trouble with my
swearing and my pornography, put my name on
her hit list, prayed for me not only
that I'd become a Christian, but I'd become
a missionary.
Amazing!
She just prayed this.
She didn't even discuss this with me.
You know, I like to decide what I'm
going to do with my life.
Sent me a gospel, John, through the mail.
That led me to the Billy Graham meeting,
March 1955, where I was converted.
Somehow on that airplane, some ideas began to
come into my mind.
I began to just write things down.
And I saw for the first time, it
could be done.
In fact, getting 200,000, if we consider
the whole picture, it's not that hard, it's
not that many.
If other churches your size around the world
would do what you have done, it's finished.
We've got 200,000.
But you see, we don't have that many
churches, relatively speaking, like First Evangelical.
That take mission seriously.
That raise hundreds of thousands.
That send out workers.
They have missionary working groups.
But if it can happen in one church,
and we know across America it's happened in
many, and it's happened to quite a few
in Great Britain, we're still talking about a
small percentage.
Only a small percentage of the churches in
the world today that love the Lord are
sending churches, especially here in the southern part
of the USA.
But the potential is there.
And my heart was just filled with the
potential of the number of churches in the
world today.
Somebody said it's several million churches in the
world today.
I don't have the exact statistics.
There seemed to be some contradiction.
But to carry on this strategy, as God
put on my heart, though it's subject to
many adjustments, you know, God didn't give me
the numbers in a revelation, we need just
100,000, just a little more than 100
,000 churches.
And 75% of those churches only need
to give one missionary in the next four
or five years.
Our goal, let me remind you, is 200
,000 new missionaries launching out, hopefully many of
them into the 1040 window, but we're not
going to tell them where they have to
go.
It's way too complicated.
200,000 from the whole body of Christ,
whether they're in any network or whether they're
independent or whatever, with a special focus on
having the gospel for every person and the
church for every people in the world, which
is the motto of the AD 2000 movement
and many other movements.
We only need 100,000, a few more
churches.
I pointed out sort of recommendations of what
size church should give or send forth a
certain number of missionaries.
I have overhead.
Maybe I'll show you those sometime.
I should have brought them here tonight.
I went back to the night of prayer
of my international coordinating team in London, England,
and I shared these things, and that tape
is the tape that's going all over the
world.
I'd be happy to send you a copy.
I've called this vision so far.
We may change the latter part of the
name, but up to now it's called Acts
13 Breakthrough 2000.
We've got a number of other names because
it's still in draft stage.
This is still being discussed, still being prayed
through.
Then I made a list.
God, just as I was on the plane,
began to put the countries on my heart.
I don't know whether I had my global
jacket.
This is a very handy jacket, by the
way.
I know some of you probably think it's
a bit weird if you're sitting in the
back.
This is a map of the world.
This is not just any old color.
I was on a flight, actually, from Brazil
down to Argentina a couple of years ago,
went up to the cockpit to talk to
the pilot, and they were having a discussion
as to where they were.
And the co-pilot said they were flying
over Ecuador, which is way up here.
I think you can see it better with
the globe.
Latin America flying here down to here, Ecuador
is up here.
They used my global jacket in the cockpit
of a jumbo jet to see where they
were going.
They were flying right over Uruguay.
It's a story, true story I'll never forget.
I've been flying with other airlines since that
experience.
But there I was again, and I spend
a lot of time on airplanes and hate
it most of the time, though I learn
to make the best of it.
That's the story of a lot of things
in my life.
Can any of you relate to that?
Anyway, that's another message.
But I just began to write down the
key potential sending countries, Korea, Argentina, Brazil, South
Africa, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia.
I've been in most of these places.
And then I started to put numbers down.
And all the numbers that I expected each
country to send, I put the number mainly
of churches, sending churches.
It was quite amazing.
It's not that many.
In fact, in the United States, according to
my vision, and I know big visionaries here
in America will be insulted by it, we
only need 25,000 churches to participate in
this.
Now, this is difficult for a church that
is already sending a lot of missionaries and
battling to support them.
Because that itself is a huge task.
Because we want 200,000 new missionaries.
But in those kind of churches, people are
returning.
New people are going out.
And so I'm sure churches like First Event
will very much be involved in this program,
which I believe is God's program based on
this simple concept of Acts 13.
So when I came back, I put those
numbers on an overhead projector.
And now those numbers by World Wide Web
email and other methods of communication are going
all over the world.
I happen to have a video camera there
as well the night that I spoke.
This is the first time in front of
a large congregation that I have ever shared
this vision publicly.
And I feel it is more significant than
any other vision God has ever given me
in my whole life.
Because all the other visions were mainly to
involve the organization that God put me in,
OM.
OM launched those ships, though other people got
ship visions as well.
The vision to send people short time, short
term, which goes back to my living in
Maryville, Tennessee, and realizing America at least had
the opportunity to hear the Gospel, but Mexico
didn't.
And I shared with my friend Dale Roton,
let's go to Mexico this summer.
That was also one of those small beginning
visions, which in those days I used to
have about every other month.
But God meeting me on that plane, God
giving me these statistics, giving me a number
of ideas.
I have a memo, your questions answered, about
Acts 13 breakthrough 2000, in which I've taken
three pages to answer the toughest questions that
people can fire at me about this wild
idea of seeing 200,000 missionaries mobilize.
I answer right off in the first question,
what do we mean by a missionary?
And I answer in that first question or
the second question, why do we need 200
,000?
I pointed out, by the way, that in
the United States, we have hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Christian
workers.
Why do we need so many pastors and
missionaries and Christian workers?
I think the number has gone way over
one million full-time workers in America.
And we're all excited about 200,000 more
for the rest of the world.
Now, we are talking about 200,000 more.
There's between 150,000 and 200,000 out
there.
Some of those are on furlough.
Some of those are coming back.
We'll never be able to measure it right
down to the last missionary because we're talking
about the whole globe.
We're talking about having a global vision.
And one of our burdens for this weekend,
even though you may not comprehend all of
this, is that we become global in our
thinking, global in our praying, that we go
against the tide.
And the present tide in America is against
global thinking and global giving and global praying.
The present tide is saying, America is such
a mess.
There's so many problems.
There's so many drug addicts.
AIDS is growing.
Crime is growing.
Prisons are bulging.
Ah!
Many are lukewarm in our churches that our
major thrust must be here.
Let me shock you with something.
There is no nation I have been in
and I've been out 40 years where Christianity
is more deeply rooted and stronger than in
the United States.
So if you think the church and everything
is a mess here, do you know what
I would suggest?
That Christianity, in fact, then, is not true.
And some people now in America believe that.
I don't.
And I believe the mistake and the reason
many are discouraged and confused and praying all
kinds of weird prayers and other things is
because we have unbiblical expectation as to what
Christianity is supposed to do in a nation.
And we have departed from the simplicity and
the basic teaching of the New Testament, which
says, now is the way and few there
will be that find it, into some kind
of concept where we're hoping somehow we will
have a Christian nation even though there are
no verses in the New Testament about that.
The fact is Christianity has often thrived more
in a hostile environment with hostile government and
hostile leadership than it has thrived when everybody
was happy about it and government law was
in line with what is taught in the
New Testament.
Now, on the other hand, don't misunderstand me
because I'm mega big in salt and light
teaching and I believe when there are committed
radical Christians, there will be the salt and
light and that will influence government, it will
influence society, and I am committed as an
American to see that happen in every possible
way.
And when I speak at a place like
Wheaton College, I don't challenge them all to
go to the mission field.
I challenge them to do God's will and
to build a kingdom.
And we need to build a kingdom in
Chicago and Memphis as well as in Mongolia
or New Delhi.
And we need people in the marketplace, in
the banking world, in the political world, in
the arts world, in every other aspect of
society.
And we have more than enough believers now
in America to do it all.
Of course, people say, well, we need revival.
That's true.
That's true in every other country in the
world as well.
Do you realize how small the Church is
in Europe where I spend a lot of
my time?
And yet on a per capita basis, even
in places like Germany and Great Britain and
Sweden, the Church is relatively strong and healthy.
And they are planning to send out thousands
of missionaries.
Now, that's not many for countries the size
of Britain and Germany, but it shows that
God is working there.
And this may not seem to be the
normal place to start in our mission thinking,
but I think we need to be reminded
that God has done great things in our
country.
And God is working in our country.
And we are still one of the strongest,
if not the strongest, potential missionary-sending country
in the world.
I hope Korea passes us up.
I hope Brazil passes us up.
But any thinking person knows they have a
long, long way to go.
And as I go around to all these
colleges, next week or the week after I'm
at Biola University, I've just Sunday night been
at Oral Roberts University, 4,000 students.
I've just been at Priorcrest.
I've just been at Bethel.
I've just been at Wheaton.
I've just been last year at Taylor University.
There are thousands of students with cutting-edge
commitment who are thinking about missions, or who,
if they don't go, want to become senders.
So I am excited about what God is
doing in America.
Last week, 40,000 pastors gathered in Atlanta.
Unheard of in the history almost of the
world.
40,000 pastors with basic convictions from the
Word of God.
They're not big into world missions yet, but
they have that somewhere there in the promise.
And promise keepers, I believe, are going to
move in God's timing into world missions.
And they, together with many others who are
not necessarily connected with that, will provide one
of the greatest potential missionary groundswells that the
world has ever known.
And we can get those 25,000 sending
churches, and we can get those 50,000
or 75,000, depends on how many each
church sends.
I haven't worked out the numbers to that
detail in this strategy.
It's doable.
Do you know that term?
That's a new American term.
It's doable.
When I first heard that word in connection
with missions, I didn't like it.
Do you know Ralph Winner?
Has he ever come to one of your
missions conferences?
Ralph Winner, surely, with all of his controversial
thinking and ideas, is one of the most
unique missionary leaders in the 20th century.
I just thank God for this man.
Because Ralph Winner helped us look at the
unreached people.
Ralph Winner is an optimist.
Ralph Winner is still talking about giving the
world, everybody, the gospel by the year 2000.
Many have given up.
Many missiologists and especially the theologians are writing
against this concept.
And Ralph Winner is still saying it's doable.
It's doable.
And he churns out the statistics, and he
churns out the information.
And when I read it, I just get
so excited.
I was sitting with him in the WEF,
World Evangelical Fellowship, meeting in Manila, and he
was up in the balcony so that he
could work on his word processor at the
same time, listen to what's going on, and
he was churning out some article to point
out that we can do it.
And I believe God wants to bring a
baptism of optimism to our hearts in these
days in which the tremendous negative things coming
from all sides, in books, on television, on
the radio.
And we all know of the problems in
the church.
You don't need to have much intelligence to
see the problems.
We all see some of the depressing kind
of Christian television that makes us feel negative
about even the body of Christ.
I have great struggles with so many things.
But it's my prayer that this weekend there
may be a baptism of optimism and that
just as God gave me this optimistic, faith
-filled expectation in the airplane a few weeks
ago, that somehow he would fill your heart,
not just for this big ballpark figure for
$200,000 that you may not be able
to relate to, but for your own church
to see that money come in, to see
that budget met, to see new workers go
out as well as the old workers supported,
and all the other things that are connected
with being a missionary sending church.
To realize that being a sender, which I
feel I am much more than a goer,
though you would classify me as a goer,
living in London, England, in a basically sending
country, I feel really I am a sender.
A lot of my work is raising finance.
It's prayer.
It's recruiting.
It's church relationships.
It's more to do with the sending than
it is with the missionary strategy of, you
know, how to plant the church in Turkey.
Other men and women in OM more talented
in those areas than I are doing that
kind of thing.
But I am so thrilled being a sender.
The prayer, the money.
Some of you work hard.
My life has been challenged more by lay
people in the business world than almost by
those in the full-time ministry, a term
I don't like, because I know business people
who are cutting edge in sending.
I have a friend in Australia.
I wish you could be with me when
I visit him.
I have another friend in Singapore who's putting
large finance into ministry, but the pressure his
company is under.
Next week I'll be several days with one
of the best supporters of our work, a
man in Oregon, an inventor, a scientist.
He's an older man.
He should retire, but he's cutting edge, sending.
And you're talking big money.
You're talking sacrificial money.
You're talking about people that instead of buying
one more big thing or this or that,
they put the money into world missions.
Many years ago, I had a hero.
I had many heroes, but one of them
was Borden of Yale.
He was a millionaire that went to Yale
University, and when God touched his heart about
this needy world in which we live, and
the Muslim world, Borden of Yale began to
give all of his money away, and he
went to Egypt as a missionary, and he
was soon dead.
And there's a biography of him.
And many of us in OM read his
biography.
And that's why OM today has 1,000
people in the 10-40 window.
Do you all know what the 10-40
window is?
Anybody doesn't know what the 10-40 window
is?
Let's show you the 10-40 window.
Don't confuse it with something else like your
bay window.
The 10-40 window is 10 degrees north
of the equator to 40 degrees.
My fingers span it, starting in the west
coast of Africa.
It goes right across that whole heartland of
the Middle East, right across Afghanistan, Pakistan, all
through India, Burma to Japan.
That window, you'll see lots of pictures of
it.
There's a video here.
You can pick it up tonight, five minutes
tonight before you go to bed, a song
about the 10-40 window by Bill Drake,
a singer who often travels with me around
the world.
That 10-40 window video song was shown
to all those leaders from all over the
world when they gathered at Korea.
Ninety percent of the more unreached people in
the world live in the 10-40 window.
And God in his providence, before we knew
anything about such terminology, made this part the
heartland of operation, mobilization.
We have a thousand workers there.
What is it going to cost us to
keep those people there?
What is it going to cost us to
give them the tools to complete the job,
the Bibles, the New Testaments, the literature?
Some of you know in India now we're
launching Project Light.
In India alone, and I'm going to finish
in a few minutes, is to target another
100 million people in the land of India.
I'm sure you'll be hearing much about that
in the future.
One hundred million.
That's just one part of OM's forward global
thrust.
The greatest need right now is not more
people to go.
That's there.
The greatest need is for sending churches and
sending people.
My new hero is a little different than
Borden of Yale.
Can I tell you about him as my
closing story?
My new hero is a guy that went
on OM and heard me preach about the
10-40 window and went to a seminar
and heard about Central Asia.
You know, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
These are not new pizzas.
These are new nations that now are open
to the Gospel.
And he got so excited in this meeting
he made a commitment to go.
And he wanted to go.
Now, this young man belonged to an interesting
family.
His father owned a business that was making
money for the kingdom, and his father and
mother were putting in tens of thousands for
world missions.
But when he got home from this OM
summer campaign and he was excited about going
back, he sat down with his father and
his father shared that he just discovered he
had a heart condition, needed surgery, would not
be able to run the business in the
same way.
And the father said, Son, I know you
want to be a missionary, but I want
to ask you for a few years, would
you lay that on the altar and help
run this business to keep all this money
going out to these workers?
I will tell you, you may not understand
this, but if you walk with me these
40 years in 60 nations, you would.
That's my new hero.
And unless we see men and women raised
up who are willing to be cutting-edge
committed senders, then neither the vision of the
200,000 nor the vision of Ralph Winner
in 82,000 will ever, ever come to
pass, at least in the next 10 years.
Serving as senders.
Twice in Acts 13 it mentions the word
send.
We're going to be talking about that for
the next two or three days.
And I'm praying that all of us will
take greater ownership of this great commandment of
our Lord Jesus and this great vision to
see the whole world reached with the gospel
of Jesus Christ.
Let us pray.
Father, you know everything about us and you
love us still.
You know the things that aggravate us, maybe
have aggravated us even today, little things that
have gone wrong, little times when our patience
has been tested like mine.
And we just somehow want to turn away
from these little things and from the small
world in which we're forced to live.
And you will give us grace for this
world in which we live.
But Lord, from these moments we want to
move away and take on, we want to
take on this global vision, the 1040 window
and the whole world.
And we want to pray, Lord, that you,
as it says in Matthew 9, would send
forth workers into the harvest fields, yea, even
200,000, from 100,000 participating churches across
the whole world.
Oh God, this may be too big for
us, but it is not too big for
you.
And so we would pray that you would
raise up the senders and the sending churches
in Argentina and Brazil, in all of Central
American Mexico, in Canada and across Europe, and
now in Southern Africa and the rest of
the world.
From Korea especially, send forth those workers.
Those who sat in that stadium some months
ago, send them forth.
And oh God, raise up those who would
joyfully and sacrificially give that this may be
a reality in the next few years.
For we pray in the exalted, powerful name
of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.