It really is a challenge and a privilege
to be able to share with you and
you may wonder what this man with the
video camera is doing, but we hope that
some other people, especially on our ships, one
of which is on the way to Japan
and the other should arrive tomorrow in Barbados
after crossing the Atlantic, will be able to
also get in on your conference through this
video cassette.
I come to you in much weakness and
fear and trembling.
I don't spend most of my time speaking
at huge meetings and in many ways my
greatest need is still to just learn all
of these things that we read about in
some of these books and that we hear
about in conferences like this, to learn more
of it in my own life.
And so it's with some hesitancy that I
ever came across, but many people are praying
and many thousands of our friends and prayer
partners are praying and I'm just trusting that
God will hear their prayers.
I feel there are many, many other people
that could make better use of this hour,
perhaps, than myself, but God has his strange
ways of working.
I think one of the blessings I have
is to just introduce books.
That's really one of my gifts, just to
introduce books.
If I had to choose between introducing books
and preaching, I would introduce books.
Let someone else preach.
We've had the joy of distributing books like
Born Crucified for the last twenty-some years
all over the world, and we just got
another thousand copies of Total Warfare, and if
you haven't read that book, then you'd better
bust into the bookshop tonight and get a
copy.
But God has been using these writings in
such a marvelous way, and this evening I
wanted to emphasize to you the writings of
four authors that some of you may not
be familiar with.
Those of you who are well-read, and
I was in one man's office today, Mr.
Rendell, and it looked like I was going
to come under an avalanche of books.
But for those of you who are not
well-read, you may not know about these
particular books.
First of all, I'd like to mention the
writings of Oswald Sanders.
He was the leader of OMF for many
years.
I met him in Singapore, and this is
his book, Spiritual Leadership.
If you come on OM and go through
one of our leadership training courses, this is
required reading.
And I believe it's the best book that
Moody Press publishes, Spiritual Leadership by Oswald Sanders.
There's a real lack of leadership training today,
and I feel this is a book that
should be widely read.
One of our burdens right now, and we've
just written to Oswald Sanders about this, is
to put this book into at least fifty
languages in the next five or ten years.
That's actually impossible, but we don't want to
die of low aim, so you can pray
with us that this book could get into
more languages.
And then the writings of A.
W.
Tozer, this Pennsylvania long, drawn-out speaker who
eventually took Canada by storm.
And this is a new book, fifty-two
favorite chapters out of the twenty-two other
books of A.
W.
Tozer.
Some of the strongest spiritual material I have
ever read, I've read in his books.
And I just believe he was a man
that was never recognized until he was dead.
He walked on people, he acknowledged that he
was far from perfect, that his own strong
temperament got sometimes into some of the things
he said.
But this is a message for the Church
today.
And there's a number of books in the
bookshop, all these books are in the bookshop,
by A.
W.
Tozer.
Karl Barth, who was hardly an evangelical Christian,
sort of the founder of neo-orthodoxy, had
great respect for a man way on the
other side of the theological fence, a great
evangelical leader in Britain, named Dr. Martin Lloyd
-Jones.
And he said Lloyd-Jones was the greatest
living preacher in the world today.
That's interesting from the enemy camp.
And I believe that this is probably true.
We had Dr. Lloyd-Jones on our ship
in London about a year and a half
ago.
He spoke on spiritual balance.
And I believe his book, Spiritual Depression, Its
Cause and Cure, though you may not agree
with every point, is probably the greatest Christian
book in the English language in fifty years.
I don't say that lightly.
I've read a few books, a few hundreds,
and I commend this as the great classic
of Christian literature in the past fifty years.
There are a few others.
He's not known in this country so much
because he's British.
He doesn't travel much.
He's moving on in years now.
And I just commend that book to you
on spiritual depression.
It's a very strong medicine.
The title, I'm not sure, is fitting, but
there are quite a few of you, when
you finish reading it, you will be depressed.
Then you'll have to grab Tim LaHaye's book,
Victory Over Depression.
And then another writer, William MacDonald.
He was the president of Emmaus Bible School
and some students on OM, before it was
known as OM, went from his school down
to Mexico, came back, and these students, their
lives so shook him as a principal that
he wrote this book, dedicated to the students.
This book is now in forty languages.
It's gone over a million, two million copies,
and has upset more people than most books.
William MacDonald, a bachelor, a man whose life
I know, and I can tell you he
lives this life.
He's written fifty other books as well.
This is his strongest, true discipleship, by William
MacDonald.
So there are four authors, Tozer, Lloyd-Jones,
Oswald Saunders, and William MacDonald, that I especially
want to commend to you.
Now this pulpit isn't the best for book
-pushing, but I think I'm okay.
No, that's all right, you leave, that's all
right.
They wanted to get the first copies because
they're afraid they're going to sell out.
I just want to mention two other items.
One is Operation World.
If you went to Urbana, where seventeen thousand
students were gathered a month or two ago,
you know this was the book of the
day.
When this book was first published, it died.
It did not sell.
People were sending back their copies.
God put it on our heart to try
again.
We put a new cover on it, and
we're just going to press with another fifty
thousand copies of this book that would not
sell.
And I think it's indicative of the increased
interest there is in world missions.
I didn't say increase of obedience, that's a
step that's a little more difficult.
There is a great interest in world missions,
and this is one of the outstanding books.
Patrick Johnson, the author of this book, just
spent a year on Operation Mobilization.
He's actually a Iraq missionary, now the research
secretary for WECC, one of the great mission
societies, World Evangelization Crusade, started by a fool
for Christ known as C.T. Studd.
And in this book, you'll have two hundred
and sixty-six pages of information, maps, prayer
requests, just valuable material.
A section on the communist world alone is
worth more than the price of the book.
I think they sold four thousand just like
that at Urbana.
And I'm trusting that this is going to
be, again, one of the great books of
this conference.
And I would like the joy of presenting
a copy of this to our brother Maxwell.
He was sitting in my high school meeting
in the front row, cheering, had just about
turned all eight of my batteries on.
I wonder if I could present this copy
to you.
Amen.
I'm sure he probably already has one and
has it memorized.
But anyway, that was a...
You know, it's a great privilege to be
in a conference together like this.
I've just come from about eleven different countries
in the last seven weeks.
One of them was China, communist China.
And I was only there a very short
time, but Peter Conlon, who was speaking here
to the students some weeks ago, went into
China with the possibility of lining up things
for the ship to visit China, which is
a possibility that we don't want put into
print.
And he had the opportunity of being the
first foreigner to interview Wang Mingdao, the great
Chinese pastor, a name that will not mean
much to some of you, but to any
of you who know China, his name is
probably more known than Watchman Nee.
He's just finished twenty-three years in prison.
He's almost completely deaf.
He's suffered more than we can know.
And when Peter asked him if there was
one message that he wanted to share with
the people in the church in the West,
he shared this one message, stand firm.
Stand firm.
What a challenge the church in China is
to all of us here in the Western
world.
You know, in one area of China, they
report that there's over two thousand house groups.
Some of those house groups worshipping the Lord
Jesus don't have a single Bible.
There are probably two, four million believers yet
in China.
Not many when you think of the population.
And I believe that the opening of China,
not to official missionary work, but to the
Bible to some degree, opening the churches, allowing
more freedom, overthrowing the gang of four, is
certainly one of the greatest answers to prayer
in the providence of God in history.
And I think it would be worth coming
here, somewhat almost direct from China, that was
the last stop that direction and this is
the last stop this direction, to request of
you to pray for China.
And I hope that in the prayer meeting
at 7.30, which I consider the most
important meeting in all of this conference, that
we can really be praying for the land
of China.
Of course, it's such a significant challenge.
There's so much I could tell you about
that.
Sometimes in a large meeting with people who
may be writing up for the Gospel Gazette
and whatever else, I'm a little bit hesitant
to say too much.
So my heart is full.
I was then in India, the land of
my first love.
My wife and I, family spent five years
in India, most of the year or half
the year, until we couldn't get any more
visas.
And I'll be very honest that this was
the thing that's tipped the scale in my
coming here to Canada, the fact that you
are Commonwealth and that you can go into
India without a visa.
And I just believe with all my heart
that God wants to thrust Canadians out to
the land of India.
And if you think that is a closed
door to missions, you have just played into
the hand of the devil because India is
probably one of the most wide open nations
in the world today.
We have had unlimited freedom in India.
For 14 years, we have 350 workers there.
We have reached 150 million Indians face to
face with the Word of God.
And there's just so much freedom that you
almost go out of your mind thinking about
it, especially for Canadians.
Not so easy for Americans, though I'm an
immigrant to Britain, I still tote an American
passport.
Not so easy for people from other countries,
though they go as well.
Six months India, six months Pakistan, six months
India, three months Nepal, three months Bangladesh, six
months India, two months Ceylon, six months India,
and it goes on.
You can be out there at least four
or five years, then you'll be so tired
you'll want to come home anyway.
So my heart is very, very full.
And you're going to have to pray.
I've never heard of such an early lights
out statistic anywhere I've ever spoken.
In OM conferences, I don't even finish preaching
until 10 o'clock.
We're going to get the lights out.
You turn it out when I'm preaching, I've
just been told.
I don't have any notes, so that's no
problem whatsoever.
But I remember when I was in Germany,
I was speaking about an hour and a
half, and in Germany they believe in this
punctuality business.
And the young people were really feeding on
the message, but some of the older people,
I guess, were getting nervous.
Maybe they were afraid they'd miss the evening
news or something.
But someone in the back row was really
getting upset, and so he took his watch,
or I think he borrowed it from the
man next to him, and he was holding
his watch up, trying to get my attention.
And I was just pouring my heart out
about world missions and true discipleship, forsaking all.
And I saw this watch, and I said,
Oh, hallelujah, here's a man already giving his
wristwatch for world evangelism.
So I don't know what methods you use
for communication here in Canada, but you may
want to be careful.
But this is the privilege of being able
to speak more than one evening.
I can save some of the burden for
other evenings.
Well, let's just unite in prayer so I
don't go too astray, and we can get
God's focus and get into his Word.
Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you that
in your providence you have brought us together
tonight.
And I don't understand your way of working
and bringing me here across from England.
But Lord, your ways are past finding out.
You have something to say to us about
China, about India.
More than that, about yourself, about this great
spiritual warfare into which we have been called.
We thank you for all you've done through
this great Institute over the years.
We thank you for so many hundreds that
have gone out to the harvest fields, and
we would just pray, O God, do it
again.
Do it again, O Lord.
We don't want to live on past tradition,
but we yearn to see a mighty fresh
new move of your Holy Spirit in our
hearts and in our lives.
We give you the praise and the glory
for the great work of world evangelism, that
at least half the people in the world
today have heard the gospel in some way
or form.
And we do come with hearts of praise
and adoration and thanksgiving.
And yet, Lord, we come humbled and we
come broken, knowing there is so much yet
to do, realizing the unbelievable population explosion that
takes place all around us.
And pray that, O God, you would grip
our hearts, that our minds may be penetrated
by your word and by the facts of
that which is actually happening in the world
today.
Give us spiritual sensitivity.
Deliver us from any biases and prejudices, and
that includes me, that truly we may obey
you tonight.
For we pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
I want you to turn with me in
your Bible to Matthew chapter 9.
I feel that the Spirit of God very
much led our brother Workantine from Indonesia to
share what he shared.
And as I heard him, and as I
know just a little of his life and
work, I thought that really I should be
giving the book reviews and he should be
speaking.
But we're all one, and we come here
ministering very much as a team.
And he's going to speak very strongly to
you through some speakers and not so much
through others.
Some of you may be turned off by
me.
That's fine.
I'm sure God can turn you back on,
as long as you don't get bitter.
But it's wonderful, and we've seen this in
our work, how God ministers through different people
in different ways.
And I hope we'll understand this and just
trust God to work and, of course, to
give him all the glory.
Matthew chapter 9.
I want to start reading at verse 35.
And Jesus went about all the cities and
villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the
gospel of the kingdom and healing every sickness
and every disease among the people.
But when he saw the multitudes, he was
moved with compassion on them, because they were
faint and were scattered abroad as sheep having
no shepherd.
Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest
truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few.
Pray therefore that the Lord of the harvest,
that he will send forth laborers into his
harvest.
This same text is more or less repeated
in Luke chapter 10.
And I feel that we have here a
very important and significant passage of Scripture that
needs to be studied and needs to be
obeyed.
I realize that many of you have had
so much Bible teaching, excellent Bible teaching, and
students, of course, are spending whole days studying
the Word of God.
When I think of some of the men
and women who come to share and minister
here, I very much fear that in some
ways there is very little that I can
add to what you have already heard or
read when I think of the books that
are available to you.
And in some ways I come, especially this
evening, just as a feeble testimony that these
truths which are taught here month after month,
they work.
It's reality.
It's truth, truth, as our dear friend Dr.
Schaefer says.
God answers prayer.
Of course, we don't prove our belief in
this doctrine by our lips.
We prove it by what we do at
730 tomorrow morning.
And one of my greatest concerns today for
North America is the prayer life of the
Church.
And as hard as you may try here
at Prairie, and as hard as we may
try in Operation Mobilization, there are now 1
,400 of us full-time on two ships
and in about 35 nations.
As hard as we may try, we will
not be able to move much further than
the Church is moving through the ministry of
prayer.
The Bible says as one member suffers, we
all suffer.
Some of you may have read an article
I wrote, which miraculously was printed in Moody
Monthly because I'm not a writer, called, What
Happened to the Prayer Meeting?
And after surveying and investigating many, many different
Church situations, I found out that the prayer
meeting is in many even Bible-believing churches
disappearing.
Or it's down to a very minimum attendance,
and often it's an incredibly cold stereotype meeting,
which especially frightens away the young people.
And one of my greatest burdens as I
come to you this evening is for the
prayer life of the Church.
And I hope that in the meeting in
the morning, and I'm not saying everybody has
to be there and no one can be
excused.
Maybe that's your hour for intercession.
It usually is my hour for private intercession.
I generally never let anything into 730 hour.
630 to 830 has been blocked out of
my life for almost 25 years since my
conversion, moving one way or the other to
some degree.
But I just feel that if somehow the
Lord has led you to put the prayer
meeting at 730 in the morning, that that's
where God wants it and that's where God
wants me.
And I'll adjust my jogging and my waking
up and the rest somehow.
And I feel it's better to do away
with your breakfast than miss prayer.
No one's gonna die in this overstuffed continent.
Billy Graham said, this is one of the
great sins of America, gluttony.
We all eat too much.
Alan Redpath, speaking at Moody Church when I
was a student at Moody Bible Institute, cut
us to quick when he said, oh we
don't fast much anymore, do we?
Because not many of us are hungry for
God.
Job said he'd rather pass by his food
and have his word, his time in the
Word.
It's so easy to talk about prayer.
We have over 50 books on the subject
of prayer and new ones are being written
almost every other month.
We have seminars on prayer.
One I heard about recently, they do everything
but pray.
But when it comes down to hours of
agonizing, prevailing prayer that we read about in
the book of Acts, that we see in
the life of Jesus Christ, that it was
embodied in every man of God who ever
walked the earth, we don't seem to know
much about it.
And if you graduate from prairie with all
the Bible knowledge in the world and all
your little doctrines neatly tucked under your arm
and you're not a man of prayer, you're
going to go a little distance in the
work of God.
I don't find too many Christian colleges offering
a PhD in intercession.
I feel so strongly about this and I
don't want to come on too strong and
frighten some of you more sensitive types.
I was told when I first came to
Canada to take it easy.
They're very conservative and tender plants there.
You don't want to come with your big
American loud mouth.
The English have been trying to quiet me
down for 18 years.
Some of them are going out of their
minds just thinking about it.
But really I do want to be very
somewhat low profile in this first evening.
I told Bert this was my strategy.
I usually lose it somewhere in the midst
of the book reviews, but my heart is
so burdened that we would understand this principle
Samuel Chadwick, that great soul winner, that spirit
anointed man said this is the one strategy
of Satan.
It's to get your prayer life.
Why is it that so many revivals sort
of tail off after a year or two?
Because the people learn something of praise, something
of confession, something of putting things right, but
they don't learn how to intercede.
They don't learn how to stand firm.
The Bible says the weapons of our warfare
are not carnal, but mighty unto God to
the pulling down of strongholds.
This is not some game.
This is not some evangelical emotional delicacy that
we sort of engage in like having some
kind of evening snack.
It's war, total warfare, and it begins upon
our knees.
And it will begin in this conference upon
our knees tonight and in our private prayer
tomorrow at 530.
And we've learned when there's a tight schedule
that you can't get up at 630.
You're joking.
Wish you could come with some of our
Indian brothers.
They believe in going to bed early.
They fit well in here.
They believe in going to bed at 10
o'clock.
And they're up at 430 on their knees,
sometimes two hours, so that they can get
the day in its right perspective.
Oh may God quicken us during these days
together for fervent prayer because it's the only
hope for world missions.
It's not quantity that's going to make the
difference.
It's quality.
In a sense, of course, we want both.
Maybe I could just, in way of illustration,
tell you about how our own feeble work,
one of God's feeblest works, Operation Mobilization, got
into orbit.
It was just one praying lady.
One praying lady.
It wasn't me.
I was an unsaved renegade, so rebellious in
my high school the teachers blacklisted me.
And that praying lady had been praying for
that school for 15 years.
Not only that people would be saved, but
they would go from that school all over
the world.
She had that text well memorized.
Saved and sent, that was her motto.
A woman of tremendous missionary vision, though an
unknown woman to this day.
The kind of unknown woman we need in
the church.
And then I went to the school and
somehow she heard about my bad reputation and
so she started to pray for me and
she prayed for me for three years.
She sent me a gospel of Saint John
through the mail, through the post.
That was used to soften my heart.
And then I was converted to Jesus Christ
March 5th, 25 years ago, Madison Square Garden,
through one feeble sloppy sermon by Billy Graham.
God's mercy.
We hear, oh, you know, people aren't saved
through this mass evangelism.
Well, I'll tell you, all over the world
I have met people saved through mass evangelism.
Maybe there's some critics of Billy Graham here.
That doesn't matter.
If your God is big, whatever you think
of Billy Graham, if your God is big,
and I hope you don't have a small
God, then he can work even if the
evangelist isn't in agreement with all of your
teaching, all of your burden, or whatever has
concerned you.
You know, the Lord brought a thought to
me last week.
I, and I said, Lord, I think you
want me to share that.
And it was simply this, that if we
have strong convictions, and those strong convictions, and
I have too many of them, almost drove
my wife completely crazy.
If you have strong convictions and they're not
mixed with love and patience, it will turn
to bitterness.
And I fear that many a fundamentalist in
North America is in that state.
Convictions, but not enough love, not enough compassion,
not enough patience, and so it turns to
bitterness.
And wherever I go, and in the articles
I often read, I find bitterness even among
a people of God.
Anyway, that's a message perhaps for another time.
But God saved me that night, and I
went back to that high school, and we
started prayer meetings.
We learned a little bit from this lady,
and we started prayer meetings.
And before God was done, 200 students in
that school, in a year and a half,
surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ.
That was the birthplace of what today is
known as Operation Mobilization.
Within a year and a half, three of
us were in Mexico.
I then left college and went to Moody
Bible Institute for two years, and within two
years was in Spain.
It spread from Spain throughout Europe.
Within the next year, through the Middle East,
on out to India, and there's not time
to tell the story.
But 23,000 young people have been trained
through this feeble work of OM.
They are now serving Christ with almost every
mission society in the world, in almost every
single nation in the world.
And they're now still, though most people move
on after one or two years, the Lord
still left us with a permanent army of
1,400 people this year to continue in
world evangelism.
The main target is the Muslim world, where
miraculously, in answer to that woman's prayers and
the prayers of many others, we now have
an army of 150 strong.
In India, there's 350.
And God has given us the privilege of
not just reaching some 250 million people with
God's Word, but to see many living churches
planted.
In France alone, 14 new churches.
In Spain, in Italy, even in some of
the Muslim lands, the beginning stages of new
churches have been born.
All can be traced back to one praying
lady.
I want to ask you, are you a
woman of prayer?
You may feel I'm not very gifted.
You may feel, well, the Lord seemingly hasn't
used me much.
Are you a woman of prayer?
Are you a man of prayer?
And I share this in some ways, fearing
it may be misunderstood.
But I think I have a few hundred
people who have lived with me for 15,
20 years.
Some of those of us who were linked
together 23 years ago are still together.
And I don't think people would stick together
if there wasn't some degree of reality.
But I just would not speak on this
subject if this was not real in my
life.
And in my life, there's nothing harder than
prayer.
I'm an activist.
When I read that verse in the Old
Testament, be still and know that I am
God, I thought, Lord, this is the end.
There's no hope for me.
I don't think I've been still since I
came out.
And my mother used to tell me long
before I was saved, none of my parents
were believers.
But she said, son, you've got a big
mouth.
And it's true.
I had one compliment about my mouth.
I haven't had many.
I was at the dentist the other day,
was working on a back, one of my
back teeth.
And he said, wow, there's lots of room
in here.
But I believe, even though prayer may be
the hardest thing for your temperament, even though
you may find an enormous struggle to be
in prayer, I believe it is God's will
for every believer to become a man, a
woman of prayer.
This is not a ministry for super saints.
Hallisbee, in his tremendous book on prayer, said
prayer is work.
Prayer is work.
Intercession, especially, is work.
Taking a book like Operation World and praying
through those requests, allowing the burden of China
to become your burden, allowing the burden of
India to become your burden, and to be
involved in the ministry of intercessory prayer.
And I believe it's the will of God
that each one of us who knows Christ
recommit our hearts and our lives in this
area of prayer at this conference.
The harder it is, the greater the victory.
Tozer was quoting some old mystic who explained
something along the lines that if your mind
keeps wandering away in prayer, and I'm sure
I'm the president of the International Mind Wanderers
Club, but as your mind keeps wandering in
prayer, bring it back.
For each time you bring it back, it
is an act of faith and worship to
the living God.
Another thing that Tozer quoted from one of
the old mystics is that God knows all
about you and He loves you still.
And you don't come into prayer under some
legalistic club.
You come into prayer because of grace, because
of mercy, because of the shed blood, because
of the righteous robes of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
The devil is the accuser of the brethren.
For any of you in women's lib, he's
accuser of the sisters as well.
He's always saying we're not good enough to
pray.
He's always telling us we're no good.
Our prayers are not effective.
Let some other great saint pray.
We're waiting for the great saints to lead
the way.
When will we realize that even great institutions
like this are not great fraternities for super
saints, but are hospitals for sinners?
And the sooner we in our Bible schools
and in our churches realize that, I think
the further we'll go in reality and spiritual
power.
You don't go to the prayer meeting because
you feel like it.
You know why I don't have a television
in my home?
Because I haven't got enough discipline yet.
Maybe I'll become more mature in the coming
days.
My children are praying for it.
I like television programs.
I think the bionic man is great.
I mean, I could use a hundred on
every team.
And a bionic woman, I mean, she's new.
I mean, I don't even understand, you know,
her, what's with her yet.
And so oftentimes when it comes to God's
work, good is the enemy of the best.
Most of the evangelicals down in the USA
that have their televisions, they always tell me,
because they know me, soon as I step
in the house, that they have it there
for the sports.
Yeah.
I think sports can be more of an
enemy than, than, than, than soap or some
other way out program.
The good is often the enemy of the
best.
If you're missing a prayer meeting to watch
Joe Blow kick a ball through a couple
of poles or something else, to me it
makes no difference.
The devil's got the victory.
The good is the enemy of the best.
And we cannot allow the enemy to deceive
us into missing the prayer meeting in our
church, and to missing those times of intercession,
and into missing our own personal prayer life,
whatever the cost may be.
You say, oh man, you're going to lay
a guilt trip on me.
That's how they say it down in the
States.
I don't know if you know all the
lingo up here, and probably a third of
you are Americans.
He's gonna lay a guilt trip on me,
as if that's the worst thing.
The worst thing is to feel guilty about
anything.
We got about 100 books, how to be
free of guilt.
We should be guilty.
We are guilty.
And I pray that God will put a
guilt trip on me every time I sin.
Not a trip in terms of an elongated
thing, but conviction.
And I thank the Lord I know what
to do with it.
Repent, and claim his precious blood.
Get up and go on.
May we be convicted of our prayerlessness.
May we be convicted of our lack of
conviction in the area of prayer, and getting
involved in the prayer ministry of the church.
George Duncan was speaking at the Keswick Convention
in England to the ministers, the ministers.
And he had to assume, because he's one
of Britain's greatest saints, and he knows these
men, he had to assume that many of
the ministers had no prayer life.
No wonder we get puppets in our pulpits
instead of prophets.
And we think in our seminaries we can
mass-produce spiritual men.
And in our seminaries there is hardly any
emphasis on prayer whatsoever.
And then we wonder why so many churches,
despite all the glitter and all the glow,
are dying from the inside out, and being
invaded by impurity, and every other wild concoction
of the devil that's ever been imagined.
Do not think God is impressed with our
statistics.
Our God is obviously from Scripture a God
of quality, and he yearns to see men
not just waving some gospel banner on a
weekend, but being conformed to the image of
Jesus Christ.
And that cannot be done outside of the
prayer closet.
If we look into the life of Jesus,
we see him praying.
There's a whole new book on the prayer
life of Jesus Christ.
I was writing the references down in the
back of my Bible and filled a whole
page.
We find Jesus in Luke praying through the
night, and we find the Apostles following in
the steps of the Lord Jesus as we
look through the book of Acts.
I feel a somewhat neglected book in our
day.
I often preach on the book of Acts.
I was in a very large church preaching
on Acts, and I said, let us turn
to Acts chapter 29.
Everybody's turning.
The pastor is turning.
Very embarrassing.
You all, of course, know there's only 28
chapters.
We are Acts chapter 29.
It has not stopped.
Or Acts 2029.
In Acts chapter 1, these all continue with
one accord in prayer and supplication with the
women in Mary, the mother of Jesus, and
with his brethren.
And then we find right through the whole
book, the end of chapter 2, after that
mighty Pentecost experience, we find the four pillars
of the church outlined in verse 42.
And they continued steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine
and fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer.
In Acts 4, 31, the very people who
had experienced Pentecost were in a prayer meeting
again, and they had to be filled with
the Spirit again.
Verse 31, and when they had prayed, the
place was shaken where they were assembled together,
and they were filled with the Holy Spirit,
and they spoke the Word of God with
boldness.
And the life of prayer is very, very
much linked with reality and witness.
They come together.
And right on through the book of Acts,
we find this reality in prayer, and we
find them in prayer and fasting, especially when
they had to make some major decisions.
And notice chapter 12.
We find the whole church gathered together in
an extended prayer meeting, because verse 5, chapter
12 says, Peter, therefore, was kept in prison,
but prayer was made without ceasing by the
church unto God for him.
Prayer was made without ceasing.
This wasn't some little five-minute prayer meeting.
It couldn't have been even a one-little
-hour prayer meeting.
They were prevailing and persevering in prayer, so
that after Peter was miraculously delivered and went
all the way across town, he came to
the prayer meeting in verse 12, where many
were gathered together praying.
This is God's strategy.
Valens said the church looks for better machinery.
God looks for better men.
In America, we've tried every gimmick, every Hollywood
method, every Madison Avenue pipsqueak idea to advance
the church of Jesus Christ.
Only one weapon is left that we have
not really tried, and that's prayer.
And I yearn that somehow we would see
this.
I yearn that I myself would know it
in a greater degree.
As a natural backslider, I need constant exhortation,
and there's seldom a time in my life
when I'm not in the middle of reading
at least one book on prayer, or the
life of some great man about prayer.
And one of the reasons I've introduced books
to you tonight is because books have been
such a significant, unbelievably important part of my
own spiritual pilgrimage.
Prayer.
Mr. Vendurin, in his little book, which some
of you know, said, prayer, the Christian's vital
breath.
How is your prayer life?
What about it?
Young person?
Older person?
When's the last time you shed a tear
for lost souls?
We see Jesus in Matthew 9 going from
town to town, from village to village.
I'd love to talk more about that, and
we may get to it in another evening,
but to me it's so beautiful because it
shows that Jesus was a man of action.
Why did He go from town to town
and village to village?
The next verse gives the answer, because He
was moved with compassion.
I'm not a compassionate person in myself, but
something happened to me 25 years ago.
The night I was converted, the Holy Spirit
came into me.
And if you are a believer, the Holy
Spirit is in you.
You may be grieving Him, you may be
quenching Him, you may be neglecting Him, but
He is in you.
And oh, if we only would know more
of the cross and the Lordship of Christ,
that in turn would release that power and
that greatness of the Holy Spirit in our
lives.
I know you can say it other ways.
There are many ways to express these things.
Colossians says, let the Word of Christ dwell
in you richly, and then gives the same
description that we read in Ephesians chapter 5,
after we read, be filled with the Holy
Spirit.
Different books in the Bible explain it in
different ways.
Billy Graham puts it this way.
I don't care how you get it, just
get it.
The reality, the compassion, the fruit, the power,
this is the will of God for every
Christian.
I want to share with you something that
again is a risk.
But you know, so often in our churches,
we we invite someone in to give a
backsliders testimony.
And so many people have backsliders testimonies.
They came to Christ, they drifted away, they
grew cold, and then somehow the Lord touched
their hearts, and they came back, and they're
plowing on, and we get them to give
their testimony.
Praise the Lord!
I am 100% in favor of that,
so don't misunderstand me.
But I think when we hear so many
backsliders testimonies, we get the idea that backsliding
is sort of the normal Christian life.
That if you're going to be a Christian,
that somewhere along the road you've got to
backslide.
Otherwise you won't have a backsliders testimony.
And I just believe with all my heart,
and if you set your heart to it,
you get your life and your heart in
the right place, you never have to backslide.
I was saved March 5th, 1955.
I've walked every single day these 25 years,
one month, and four days.
That is no boast.
I have sinned at times, but I know
what to do when I sin.
I have failed, I could fill an encyclopedia.
But I know all that I have in
Jesus Christ.
I read a little book many years ago
called, uh, Calvary Road, and I read another
little book called Born Crucified.
No, I didn't understand it all when I
was 19 and 20, whatever.
I knew that I had all that I
needed in Jesus Christ and in His Holy
Spirit to live every day and to walk
every day with Him.
That is the will of God, that is
the normal Christian life, and I only say
it to bring back into balance the other
side.
That, of course, Christians backslide and they have
to come back to Christ.
I've had many minutes.
I've had even a few hours over the
years when I've walked in the flesh, and
oh, I hate it.
I don't like to give the devil even
minutes.
That doesn't mean I'm always at the same
level.
That doesn't mean there's not discouragement and fear
and doubt and struggle of every kind.
But as one man of God once said,
great faith is not made in the absence
of doubt and fear and struggle.
It's made as we battle through.
And this is why we have to know
something of dying daily.
This is why we have to know daily
repentance and daily revival.
This is why we have a daily quiet
time, that we may know His power on
a day-by-day basis.
It was Jesus who said, if any man
come after me, let him deny self, take
up the cross daily and follow me.
And I'm going to be sharing in some
of my other messages some of the struggles,
some of the perplexities that I've had, and
I think that will bring what I've just
said, perhaps, into balance.
I'm so desirous of keeping things in balance,
I've actually written a book on the subject
which was mentioned this evening.
It's the will of God for all of
us to live every day, every hour, in
His power and in His presence, the rest
of our life.
And when we believe it, and we move
by faith, that's half, that's half the battle
right there.
I wonder how many of us tonight would
dare to tell the devil to get lost.
He actually is lost, but it's good to
remind him of his position.
And the next time he comes in on
you with one of his little soft-soaked,
sugar-coated poison pill messages, you will know
where you are standing.
And if you do fail, and you do
sin, you will know that God's grace is
for sinners.
And you will confess your sin, and He
will be faithful and just to forgive you
and cleanse you of all unrighteousness.
1 John chapter 2 is one of my
favorite chapters, especially verse 1.
Our first goal is to sin not.
Our second goal is, if we sin, we
have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ
the Righteous.
It's so basic, it's so simple, and yet
so often, it's right at that point where
we are deceived.
And so we drift away from the Lord,
and we grow cold, deceived by the evil
one.
And so, of course, we're not going to
be found in a prayer meeting.
And if we are, well, you know how
that is.
This is why I believe that revival and
spiritual revolution, spiritual reality, is so totally linked
with world missions.
And you can't have one without the other.
This is the will of God.
Daily revival, daily reality in prayer, daily power
and witness, daily strength against the subtle tactics
of the enemy, which we will be looking
at very carefully in one of our coming
evenings when we speak of the enemies of
world evangelism and spiritual reality.
Let us gather a company of His people
at 7.30 tomorrow morning, not to listen
to a man, because we are but men,
but to seek the Lord Himself.
Oh, when they fly in some great new
American convert to London, some great Hollywood star
that's just been born again, we hope, comes
in and plays his guitar, they'll pack out
the biggest auditorium in London.
But if you have a prayer meeting with
only the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
present, you can have it usually in the
church vestry.
Oh, may God burn into our hearts a
new set of priority or priorities in these
days together, that we may seek the Lord.
It was said that Tozer was often found
in his study lying flat on his face,
worshiping, crying out to God for hours.
We're not all A.W. Tozers.
There's no sense pretending that we all have
the same living God.
Let us seek Him.
Let us make God our goal at this
conference.
As we do that, I believe He will
honor our meeting together in a fresh and
wonderful way.