So let's look at Philippians, a great challenge
from God's Holy Word here in this first
chapter.
Paul and Timothy, bondservants of Jesus Christ, to
all the saints in Christ Jesus, who are
in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons.
Grace to you, grace to you, and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ.
I thank my God in all my remembrance
of you, always offering prayer with joy in
my every prayer for you all, in view
of your participation in the gospel from the
first day until now.
For I am confident of this very thing,
that he which hath begun a good work
in you will perfect it until the day
of Christ Jesus.
What a great promise.
For it is only right for me to
feel this way about you all, because I
have you in my heart.
Since both in my imprisonment and in the
defense and confirmation of the gospel, you are
partakers of grace with me.
For God is my witness, how I long
for you all with the affection of Christ
Jesus.
And this I pray, that your love may
abound still more and more, in real knowledge
and all discernment, so that you may approve
the things that are excellent, in order to
be sincere, blameless unto the day of Christ,
having been filled, filled with the fruit of
righteousness, which comes through Jesus Christ to the
glory and praise of God.
Bless him for his powerful word.
In ministering for the last thirty-three years,
I've spoken a few thousand messages, never counted
how many, used to be about nine hundred
a year, but a lot of people challenging
me to slow down.
So I tried to pace myself more, and
I'm now way down and only sharing maybe
four hundred times a year.
But it's still a lot of messages, and
you often want to get something a little
different, especially with all my tapes floating all
over the place.
Nothing like preaching to people, and they sit
there, oh yeah, we heard that already on
tape.
Doesn't he ever get anything new?
Well, I'm still reading the New Testament over
and over and over again, and I keep
getting something new.
I'm also rereading the Old Testament right now,
and some of the passages, it's as if
I'd never read them.
Alec Brackett is here, and he's probably going
to get a copy of this tape and
make a few hundred.
And I thought, well, maybe I should have
a title, and I need a different title.
And God, I believe, has given me the
title for this little talk, this little exhortation
from verse nine.
Never used it before.
What words do you think I'm going to
choose for the title from verse nine?
I pray your love may abound.
That would be the best, but I think
we've got a lot of tapes with the
word love.
I've written a book on that subject.
No, the words that are on my mind,
more and more.
Have you ever heard a message on that?
More and more.
As I was wrestling with what to share,
it just came to me that you're a
committed people.
You have committed leaders, committed pastor.
You have a lot of teaching.
You've had great friend Ian Thomas here recently.
Well, what can I encourage you to do?
What can I challenge you to do?
And it just came that there's probably not
much of a need to give you anything
new, but simply tell you to do more
of what you're already doing.
Now, doesn't that sound real dull?
Because we like a new thing, don't we?
And, you know, sometimes when a pastor gets
intimidated, and some ministers get easily intimidated, and
they start looking for new messages, especially after
they've been preaching a long time, some of
the stuff they come up with is really
lousy.
I know, I've listened to some of the
tapes.
I don't think Roy Eshin and some of
his new messages, I'm not saying they're lousy,
but I don't think his new messages match
what he put in that book.
And I've been following Roy for a long
time.
That is old, but it's new to many
people.
More and more.
Here was a church that was known for
its love.
Known for its love.
But the Apostle Paul writes to them, and
he says, More.
He says, I'm praying.
I'm not praying for some spectacular thing to
take place.
I am praying that your love, which you
already know and you already have, may abound
more and more.
These people were known for their love.
Your church is known for your love.
But God would say, More.
More.
There's several words that are on my mind
tonight.
And preceding each one of these words, which
God really has burned into my heart again
and again, I want you to put the
word More.
Or More and More.
Because I think these particular biblical concepts, these
attributes of revolutionary living, are already a reality,
I hope, to most of you.
But I think God has brought us together
to say to us, maybe to us as
a team, More.
The first word is the one we just
touched on.
Love.
It may sound boring.
It may sound repetitive.
But I believe more love is the greatest
need among God's people.
Our own fellowship has been known as a
revolution of love.
We've preached messages on love.
We've distributed tapes on love.
We have demonstrated God's love and our love
to one another.
Some of us have been together in this
work 25, 20 years.
We're going to have a reunion over in
Holland next week.
Not this week, the one after that.
700 are coming together from all over the
world because relationship is important, because friendship is
important.
Imagine OEMers getting together without an evangelistic campaign.
What's happening?
Well, we just had that conference.
That was last week.
I've just come from there yesterday morning.
700.
700 gathered in Belgium.
There were 400 in June.
There'll be another 600, 700.
And just to keep in balance what I
already said about the lack of missionary emphasis,
the country that's still sending more young people
on OEM is Great Britain.
Over 400 young people from Britain this summer,
apart from 300 full-time or longer-term
staff, have come on OEM and are moving
out on teams right now.
But with all that said, I would say
that the greatest need in OEM is more
love.
More love.
I had a phone call this afternoon.
Finally, after all these years, I finally have
this phone I can carry with me.
So, while I'm on the motorway, coming up
here, I can be talking on the phone.
And I talked to Peter Maiden, who is
sort of like a co-director of OEM.
He's over in the States, meeting with the
North American USA Board of Directors.
And he shared with me that they just
had a great meeting dealing with a number
of difficult issues.
And from that meeting came greater love among
those who were involved.
As we meet together to consider and make
a final decision about getting, or sort of
ratify and take another step toward getting a
replacement ship.
As we gather at the end of August
for that meeting, our greatest need is more
love.
Do you want to know how to pray
a little better for OEM?
Then understand this.
We are an international body, an interdenominational body,
from all different churches, and quite a few
strong-minded people.
Used to be a lot of strong-minded
men.
Now the strong-minded women are catching up,
which makes it all very, very interesting.
And we need prayer that we may have
more love.
More love.
What church can say we have enough love?
What pastor would be foolish enough to stand
up and say, we have enough love in
our congregation.
We all need more love.
And our love for one another is going
to be tested.
You may feel you love your pastor.
You love your deacons or your elders.
But I can tell you, that love is
going to be tested.
Because we're all human.
We're all people.
We all fail.
And when everything is going well, and the
relationship is smooth, and there's no particular problem,
and there's nothing we disagree much about, then
love is easy.
But it's when we fail one another.
It's when things go wrong.
And when things go wrong, that doesn't mean
that God isn't blessing.
We have some people who think because the
ship hit the rocks, God sort of took
off his blessing from the ship for a
night and let it hit the rocks.
No, when God is working, the devil is
working.
When God is working, there are complications.
Plus, God's great working does not eliminate the
human factors of life.
For the Bible says it rains on the
just and the unjust.
There's a lot of extremism today.
The United States right now is suffering in
a very, very big way.
You may not think people there can suffer.
They have so much money.
But that country is being hit by the
greatest drought in 20 years.
Farmers, tens of thousands of farmers are in
an awesome state.
Some, if it repeats what's happened a few
years ago, will commit suicide.
Sometimes we're a little hesitant to pray for
the rich countries.
We pray for India.
We pray for Campuchia.
We ought to pray for the United States
right now.
Imagine some of those farmers that may be
Christians caught up in one of the latest
doctrines in America, the prosperity teaching, which says
God always blesses.
God always gives whatever you need for what's
best, whether it's a new car or more
rain or whatever.
Imagine if a farmer's got that teaching and
he's just seen his farm completely destroyed and
wiped out.
Some people in Houston, Texas, when the oil
thing went flat and were in that kind
of teaching, became bitter, angry against God, disillusioned
against Christianity.
Doesn't work.
That's right.
One of the things I'm trying to learn
as God's servant is not to promise people
that which God doesn't promise because in the
long run, it becomes a hurtful experience.
Whenever there's a meeting and someone's mentioned having
terminal cancer, there's always someone that gets really
uptight about that and says, we must, no
matter what, we must heal this person.
And there have been thousands of people in
Britain that have gone around the bend crying
out for terminally ill people who God in
His providence had decided to take and be
with Himself.
And that is His privilege, whether the person
is a few weeks old and my dear
brother Alec and Sheila just lost a grandchild
in a car death, or whether it's a
teenager or someone in their twenties or someone
in their seventies.
We need a bigger picture of life.
We need, as God's people, to be a
little less naive.
We need to understand the difference between faith
and presumption.
And the whole book's on the subject now.
Yes, God can heal, but often He chooses
not to heal because He allows His people
to live in a fallen planet where all
this is part of the ingredient.
My heart today goes out to those people
whose loved ones were just killed on that
oil rig.
Why don't we just close all those things
down?
We knew from the beginning it was a
risk.
We want our cars.
We want our petrol.
We want our houses to be warm.
Life is a little bit complicated.
There are risks.
Things do go wrong.
Those people in Brownsville last week rushed into
the supermarket to get out of the rain.
That's a logical thing to do, right?
But the roof caved in, and they're still
digging out the bodies as of this morning.
I know Brownsville because we had a Christmas
campaign there many years ago to reach people
for Christ.
More love is the greatest need in our
complicated world.
Together with that love will come greater maturity.
Together with that love will come greater patience.
How easily we get impatient with one another.
This becomes an epidemic sometimes in Operation Mobilization.
All of our strong-minded people, everybody thinks
to some degree they know how to do
this better or that better, and we have
collisions and impatience and irritability is manifest.
I want to share with you, not easy
to say so, that my greatest sins have
been the sins of impatience.
I have hurt my wife.
I have hurt my children.
I have hurt my best friends through irritability
and impatience.
I thank God at those moments, most of
the time, their love was intact when my
tongue was untacked.
I don't know if you can say that,
but you got the point.
Any of you feel you have a little
need in that area?
How are you doing around the house?
That's the big test of spirituality.
It's not in the pulpit.
A goat could be spiritual in a pulpit.
It's in the house.
It's in the house where the real spirituality
gets tested.
And I must confess, sometimes I've come up
a bit short.
So if you pray for George Verwer, who
now is becoming a little bit known somehow
for 25 years of trying to hide behind
a cactus plant, pray, Lord, give him more
love.
Lord, break him.
Make him a better husband and a better
father.
Teach him more patience.
And then when I feel the impact that
I'm tested, I'll say, well, praise the Lord.
There they are up in Manchester praying for
me again.
More love.
That's, I believe, a word from God for
us tonight.
The second word that's on my mind is
the word vision.
I must be honest, if I didn't have
a vision, I wouldn't be able to press
on with the love.
I just wouldn't be able to.
I'm a natural backslider.
If I don't get something from God every
day, I begin to leak.
I begin to get a wrong attitude.
Any of you ever have a wrong attitude?
We can have a nice little gospel smile,
smile like a piece of evangelical plastic, but
inside we can be like a rattlesnake.
I was climbing a mountain in Scotland, one
of my favorite things, I don't get to
do it very much, listening to a cassette
tape by John Stott.
And the tape was on the subject of
vision.
He was speaking about leadership.
And he pointed out that to be a
leader, you must have a vision.
He used the example of Wilberforce.
That hit home to me because often I
take people for a walk to the famous
tree near my home by Keston Vale, where
Wilberforce first talked to William Penn about his
desire to present the idea of the freeing
of the slaves and stopping slave trade.
So as John Stott began to talk about
Wilberforce, I tuned in.
And he spoke about the vision this man
had for the impossible and how he gave
his whole life, he gave basically his whole
life for that one vision.
I want to ask you, do you have
a vision?
Do you have a vision of what God
wants to do with you through your prayers,
through your giving?
Do you know why people are not generous
givers to world missions?
They don't have a vision.
They don't realize what even that five pound
note can do.
I had that vision before I was even
converted.
That's right.
I was reading the gospel.
A lady prayed for me, sent me a
gospel of John.
I was reading this gospel in the process
of coming to know the Lord and I
got this vision for giving everybody in the
world a gospel through the ministry of the
Pocket Testament League.
So I wrote in for their films and
I showed their films in my very sleepy
liberal ecumenical church and took offerings to give
for the distribution of scriptures.
I wasn't even saved yet.
How people can want to spend so much
money on themselves when they can put their
money into scriptures, they can put their money
into gospels, they can reach unreached people, they
can feed the poor, they can put roofs
over people's heads.
Most people live in homes around the world
smaller than the average British garage.
It's difficult for me to comprehend.
My understanding would be that because people have
such a vision and they want to give
so much that pastors would have to be
ministering a lot on balance.
I'm going to do it and encourage people
that they've got to spend some money for
themselves.
I have a message on this.
I had to give it in O.M.
years ago when we got a bit extreme
and we never wanted to spend anything much
on ourselves and it brought disunity and confusion
and I even produced a memo about simple
lifestyle and world missions and I had to
learn some of this myself and realized that
if we're a poor testimony, if we become
some kind of religious weirdos and the roof
is falling in our house and the garden
looks a mess because we won't spend any
money on anything but the gospel, that is
surely not God's way.
You can't take one verse, we've got to
take all the verses.
But do you think that's the big need
in Britain today given that kind of message?
People are just, they're giving too much to
world missions and there's too much sacrifice, they're
neglecting their gardens, they're neglecting their cars, they're
neglecting their homes, they're not eating enough.
If this is a big problem in your
community, please write to me.
I need some illustrations to bring some of
my other illustrations into balance.
The fact of the matter is not many
people have the kind of hilarious, joyful, visionary
giving that the Bible talks about.
In fact, I believe we could prove that
a lot of God's people are downright stingy.
And this is why a lot of British
young people, and I can prove this, many
British young people have wanted to go to
the mission field.
It has not been possible.
And you know what bothers me, and I
don't think it would happen in your church,
but what bothers me is people who talk
straight.
Some elder in some little tiny church, he
won't say, look, we don't feel that we
should put our money into this young person.
In fact, we don't like him.
We don't think he's qualified.
Instead of saying that, he's not qualified, we're
not going to support him, they give you
some other little song and dance.
Do you know that expression?
And I believe this is very grievous.
And when I go to a church and
I have no money for missions, and yet
there's, you know, there's a Jaguar, there's a
Volvo, and they're not saying you can never
have a Volvo because you can get old
ones and they're usually cheap.
They got all these new cars, but no
money for world missions.
I say something's wrong.
Otherwise, my Bible's wrong.
We need a vision of what we can
do with our resources.
A little group down near London got a
vision for selling antiques.
Can you imagine anything as insane as that
in the British Isles?
This is a nation of phenomenal sentimentality.
People guard things given to them by their
grandfather who got it from their great-grandfather.
And, you know, this is important.
This is meaningful.
The only time they'll part with it, they
might sell it for big bucks to the
Americans.
And this little group down in London got
the idea of selling antiques for world missions.
Where were they going to get the antiques?
They were believing that people were going to
donate them.
It's like taking a tooth out of a
galloping dinosaur.
Donating antiques.
Guess what happened?
The Holy Spirit moved.
And people all over Britain started to give
their antiques.
And you know how much they've given to
world missions?
That little group?
Two million pounds.
I use that British testimony all over the
world, I'll tell you.
It really increases the British testimony in America
and in India and other parts of the
world.
They think the British have got a vision.
They don't realize it's only a few people
that ever do anything like that.
Let me tell you, I've taken surveys in
America that prove that most Americans have never
sold anything in their life to give to
world missions.
Can you believe that?
The richest nation in the world with the
greatest number of born-again spirit-filled people
in all planet Earth Something's gone wrong, don't
you think?
Or maybe I'm just, I'm off on a
tangent.
For 33 years, I've been asking people, look,
if I'm on a tangent, correct me.
We've got quite a few theologians in OM.
No one's corrected me yet.
OM has a lot of friends with other
Christian leaders.
No one's written to me and said, hey,
you're off.
No, contrary.
They said, you're right.
We need a vision.
What we can do with our resources.
We need a vision of what we can
do with our lives.
I'm praying that out of Mission 2000, many
young people will give their lives to world
missions.
And you know, if you belong to a
church like this, you are at a terrific
advantage because this church believes in world missions.
They don't have to bring in George Verwer
to say, now we will have the biblical
basis for world missions.
You've already had teaching on that from your
missionary-minded pastor and from others.
And one of the reasons you've gone ahead
with this great new church is because you
believe you're laying a foundation here for something
big.
I don't think you put up this building
in order to go backward.
This is our vision for 1990s.
John Dyer will now speak on going backward.
No, I don't think this is the general
plan here.
But you know, you can be part of
a live church, a visionary church, a missionary
church, and you yourself be dead.
I'm just studying the book of Revelation.
It says that you have a name, you
have a name, that you're alive, but in
fact, you're dead.
Young person, do you have a vision?
Would you consider, and not necessarily young people,
giving two years of your life to short
-term missions?
Now, why do I start there?
Why don't I start and challenge you all
to become career missionaries and go to a
theological seminary and then do the whole thing?
Because I believe in the light of what
nationals are doing, in the light of the
economics, in the light of the world situation,
in the light of about five other factors
that I haven't got time for, short-term
missions, giving two years, is incredibly strategic.
One false cult has 24,000 on the
field right now.
In Britain alone, they have 100,000 converts.
Guess what group that is?
That's not superficial because they turn the work
over to the nationals when they go home
and because another 24,000 take their place.
We need several thousand in Europe who will
give two years.
We've got specific jobs for two-year people.
If they stay on longer, praise the Lord,
it won't be possible for all of them.
Then he will get married.
That becomes more complicated.
A little junior will come along.
His sister will soon come along.
And then it is more complicated.
I wonder if you thought...
How many of you young people, be honest
now, under 30, how many of you have
at least seriously considered giving one or two
years to missionary service?
You've already prayed that through a little bit.
Just a little bit.
Raise your hand.
Come on, encourage my heart.
Praise the Lord.
Wonderful.
Four people.
That's good.
So you already have a vision.
There's four of you.
So the word, the key word is what?
More.
I'm not asking too much to ask every
one of you to pray about giving God
two years.
I stand as a person giving the Macedonian
call.
People are needed.
Not just preachers and teachers and theologians and
church planters.
In our work, we're desperate for accountants.
We're screaming out for a bookkeeper.
If you're a bookkeeper, you know how to
keep finance in books.
You can almost...
You know, we can almost have you aboard
in two weeks.
Normally it takes a couple of months.
You know, we're fast, but not that fast.
We need motor mechanics.
We have 400 vehicles around the world.
About 100 of the 400 break down probably
every month.
Engines clap out.
Tires sometimes get punctured and all kinds of
things happen.
I wonder if anybody here knows how to
repair an automobile.
Anybody?
I know this is going out among evangelical
Christians.
There it is.
Well, one person knows how to repair an
automobile.
Oh, a couple of hands go up.
You see, we've got a lot of cockeyed
ideas about missions.
We don't realize ordinary people are needed.
We're lacking people who can put Christian books
in boxes because in Africa they're crying for
books.
In India they're crying for books.
But we don't have these expensive robots yet
in O.M. who can put the books
in the boxes.
Maybe some of you are into robot technology
and you can help us out.
But meanwhile we need some people with arms
that can put the books in the boxes.
We can't find enough single men for our
ship.
We may be held up on the second
ship for the lack of single men in
the deck department and in the engine room
which is hot, tough, hard work.
And hot, tough, hard work is not too
appealing to this generation.
I am praying God's going to give you
a vision and I'm going to hear from
some of you in a week or two,
maybe through the pastor.
And you're going to say, look, ever since
that message I'm not sleeping well, I'm getting
these technicolor dreams, I'm seeing India, I'm seeing
old cars broken down along the road, I'm
seeing money piled up on desks that no
one will count, I'm seeing all kinds of
paper that needs to be sorted out and
books that need to go into boxes and
you're going to have a vision.
And you know what Oswald J.
Smith said?
If you can't go, send someone else.
Matthew chapter 9.
Pray the Lord of the harvest that He'll
send forth laborers into the harvest.
You might say, well, I can't go and
fix a car, but your mind starts to
go ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
You know a mechanic.
He lives over there in Hull.
Wow, he doesn't even have a job.
You get him on the phone tonight.
If necessary, send me the phone bill and
say, hey, we had a wild man in
our church tonight and he got me upset
or whatever and I wonder if you would
pray about becoming a mechanic for Operation Mobilization.
I was speaking in a church in New
Jersey where I was born about the ship
years before we ever had a ship when
most people thought it was a crazy harebrained
scheme.
The man was in the meeting and he
picked up a leaflet.
Why get an ocean-going ship?
He had a vision.
Not much of a vision, very small vision.
His vision was to send the leaflet to
someone else.
He sent it to a man in Australia
who gave it to a man who was
a chief engineer.
We were crying out for a chief engineer.
That man, unknown, didn't even know anything about
O.M. Hardy, phoned me from Australia before
we had the ship and he said, are
you looking for a chief engineer?
I said, what?
I'm available.
A Scotsman stuck in Australia.
He joined us with his large family when
we had no ship and worked on the
tugs on the Clyde until we got the
ship.
And then he gave the best remaining years
of his life to bring Lagos into being.
Went back to Australia and died of a
terminal illness.
You may only have a few years left.
Let's face it.
What are you going to do with it?
Are you going to sit?
Are you going to rot like a lot
of God supposedly chosen, generally frozen people?
Or are you going to decide you're going
to do something if you have to shake
Manchester in the process of doing it?
You're going to do something if you even
upset your neighbor.
Bless all of your neighbor's hearts.
You're not going to be one more pewsitter.
You're going to be a spiritual revolutionary.
You're going to be a visionary.
You're going to start reaching people.
You're going to start praying.
You're going to start giving.
You're going to start recruiting others.
You're going to start enrolling and getting more
prayer letters.
You're going to start buying and distributing Christian
books.
You're going to sell whatever you can get
your hands on that you don't really need.
And people are going to get...
Well, they're going to be amazed.
They're liable to think you're filled with the
Spirit.
I know in some churches it wouldn't be
true here.
There's some churches that come along with a
real heavy message on the Holy Spirit.
People get really nervous.
Real tense faces.
And I know none of us want to
get into extreme things in the name of
the Spirit.
But isn't there a danger today in reacting
to some of the extremism?
We end up in the deep freeze of
dead orthodoxy in which we don't know the
freedom and the power and the fullness of
the Holy Spirit in our life.
Billy Graham often talks about the Holy Spirit.
He's my spiritual father.
I'm glad he talks about the Holy Spirit.
He says, Be ye filled with the Holy
Spirit.
And in speaking about the Spirit-filled life,
you know what he said?
He said, I don't care how you get
it.
Just get it.
I want to ask you.
Are you filled with the Holy Spirit?
Maybe that's the reason there isn't so much
vision.
Maybe that's the reason there isn't so much
love.
Because the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, long-suffering, gentleness, fullness, faithfulness, meekness against
such.
There is no law.
Not that being filled with the Spirit makes
it all automatic.
Because the moment you're filled with the Spirit,
you can still grieve the Spirit.
You can still disobey.
And I am always a little hesitant when
I speak about some of these things because
some people think that basically there's nothing they
can do.
And if they pray a prayer and nothing
big happens, well, leave it.
There comes a time when you stop praying
and you start obeying.
And we need to often take the initiative.
I feel one of the things we often
need more of is sanctified imagination.
Some of my leaders are praying that I
would have less imagination.
Lord, curb him.
Control him.
He's going wild.
He's got too many ideas.
Somebody thought I was going to launch a
submarine for evangelism and death.
Someone else wrote me and thought I was
going to launch a gospel train to go
up and down Britain with a gospel train.
Then a character met me and was going
to launch a jumbo jet for Jesus.
Now admittedly, I have too many ideas and
I have learned to put a lot of
them in the file cabinet.
Is that your problem?
Tell me, do you have too many ideas?
Too many ideas about how to win people
to Christ, how to get more literature out,
how to get more money for world missions,
how to live on less.
That's exciting.
How to make use of used clothing.
Do you know O.M. has saved over
100,000 pounds by avoiding buying so much
clothing.
We're free.
We occasionally buy new things.
My wife just bought me a nice new
pair of trousers for my birthday.
But think of the money you can save
by going down to those places where they
sell the secondhand clothing.
Some of it is actually new.
And shoes.
We can have the Santa experience.
Remember the shoes didn't wear out?
You can do the same thing.
Well, it's a little different.
Secondhand shoes.
Oh my, that's bad for the feet.
You want to know when I wore all
new shoes as a young boy before I
was saved, I had perpetual feet problems.
I had to go to a foot specialist.
I'd have special shoes.
When I got converted and started wearing all
kinds of weird shoes and some of them
didn't even fit, I never had any problems
with my feet.
Hallelujah.
Now you know I'm a healing nutcase.
I'm not saying your vision has to be
my vision or my vision has to be
your vision.
No.
We're all different.
And when we're filled with the Holy Spirit,
God doesn't destroy our temperament.
God's not going to make you, some of
you look very tense tonight, God's not going
to make you into some loud mouth.
Yankee?
When I first came here, I thought I
had to be British.
I put on a black suit and a
black tie and I tried to speak in
a proper English way and get everything on
schedule and put my suitcase in the boot,
but I discovered it was phony.
It wasn't even my temperament.
Most Americans are not like me.
Most of the Americans who join OM, many
of them nowadays, are very shy.
In fact, we had a British fellow write
a protest letter recently to the Americans.
I saw it.
He said, I protest, where are the old
fashioned, loud mouth, aggressive, gum chewing Americans?
We used to get these in OM and
they were a great help.
Now we're getting all these post Vietnam, quiet,
shy, inhibited Americans.
You can't win, can you?
And let me tell you, when you're filled
with the Holy Spirit, you will still be
you.
And some of you are very, very English
and you will always be very, very English.
But oh my, when a very, very English
person gets very, very in love with Jesus
and gets a big, big, big vision and
begins to move, the world will feel the
impact.
Just read about Hudson Taylor and a few
thousand other great missionaries from Britain and you'll
see what I'm talking about.
More love.
More vision.
And lastly, the word that burns on my
heart is discipline.
Ooh, that's an unpleasant word, isn't it?
Discipline.
Because this is the missing ingredient in much
of contemporary evangelical faith.
Discipline.
It's not a matter of making a recommitment
of your life tonight.
Sometimes I call people to recommitment and I've
done this in the past ten days and
I've got over five hundred names and addresses
of people to pray for.
I don't think I'm going to do it
tonight.
But I tell you, any recommitment you make,
any crisis experience you have, that's not followed
up by daily discipline, it will not work.
Too many people are given the idea that
you just get the right ingredient, the right
blessing, go to the right conference, and after
that, basically, it will be automatic.
One thousand times, no.
Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, I believe, put the
nail in that coffin of false thinking in
his book Spiritual Depression, Its Cause and Cure.
You can get a copy from your bookstore.
Brilliant book.
He emphasizes that we have to put on
the whole armor of God.
We have to put on the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Paul said, I buff it, I buff it,
my body.
Bring it into subjection, lest after preaching to
others, I become a reprobate.
You know, a lot of Christian leaders have
been knocked out by immorality.
It's rather intimidating to the rest of us,
you know.
But I'll tell you, there's a reason for
every one that's knocked out.
There's ten that don't get knocked out.
And if you interview the ten, you'll discover
that one of the reasons in every case,
they learn something about Biblical discipline.
So when that subtle temptation came, it wasn't
a matter of just calling on the Lord.
These people who have fallen have often said,
I called on the Lord to help me
and nothing happened.
I fell.
Well, that makes God really look good.
No.
You see, that's false thinking.
As you call upon the Lord, and I
do plenty, you buffet that old body.
You say no to that desire.
Whatever it may be, whatever it may be,
there are many forms of immorality.
And that takes discipline.
Why do we invite young people when they
first come on OM to spend a summer
or one or two years in an intensive
training program where they learn about disciplined prayer,
where they learn about living together with others,
where we can teach them these things, where
we can throw them out into tough situations
and let them be stretched?
I can tell you OM is no total
answer because they must learn something of discipline.
The average person finds it difficult even to
get up on time out of bed in
the morning.
That's the height of the spiritual warfare that
they have been trained into.
Many young people have never worked hard in
their entire life.
And then suddenly they're on the doulos.
Maybe they thought it was an adventure cruise.
And for most on the doulos there's eight
hours of physical work.
Then the ministry, the Bible study, the prayer,
and all the rest.
And I tell you, some people start screaming
inside within the first few weeks.
More discipline.
I'm sure most of you are disciplined.
You wouldn't be here tonight if you weren't
a little bit disciplined.
And so my message is simply more discipline.
Now there are many other things I'd love
to talk about.
So I leave you with those three words.
More love.
More vision.
More discipline.
And I'll tell you when you move in
those three realms in faith, in action, being
filled again and again by God's Holy Spirit,
you will become a world shaker.
You will become a spiritual revolutionary.
That is all there is of this recording.