I'm going to come to this part of
the world, finally here, but of course I'm
not in his country.
I'm in your country.
And I really do count this a privilege.
One would think when you're speaking four or
five hundred times a year, as I am,
that one more message, you just throw it
out, like you throw something.
But really I feel a little nervous because
I believe this hour we have together is
very important.
I don't believe we're here by accident.
I actually speak Spanish, but I've never been
south of Mexico, where the work of O
.M. was born twenty-eight years ago through
young people.
And you know, one of my great convictions,
and I hope some of your young people
will be coming to our youth leadership training
conference later in the week, it's on the
program, but I'm just so convinced that God
uses young people and that one of your
greatest responsibilities as pastors and Christian leaders is
to be discipling and training up young men
and women who will be the great pioneers
and the great church leaders in the coming
years.
It's interesting that even the Lausanne Committee for
World Evangelism that organized the Great World Congress
in Switzerland some years ago, they have decided
to have a youth congress on evangelism for
young leaders, and that is being planned for
the coming years.
They just sense there's such a need to
give leadership training while young men and women
are still young and teachable.
This is my great burden as I'm here
just these seven days, and also briefly to
Martinique, that somehow young lives would be touched
for God.
You know, often youth can catch red-hot
Christianity from other young people, and I've lived
among the young people who are on this
ship.
I was with some of them in Belgium.
Before they can ever come to this ship,
they have to go through Bible training on
tape.
They have to read books.
They have to go through a summer sort
of boot camp intensive training, living on the
road, sleeping in tents.
Then they come together for a whole month.
They're interviewed again, and only then it's decided
whether they can come to the ship or
whether they can go out to India.
There are 1,600 men and women plus
all their children, and some of them have
grown up like me and have their own
children.
There's about 400 children, I guess, but altogether
there's a fellowship of about 2,000 of
us.
400 in the Indian subcontinent alone, and I
can honestly say the main reason I guess
I haven't been involved here in the West
Indies or in South America, even though I
speak Spanish, is because we're overwhelmed with a
task in other parts of the world.
For us, coming now to the West Indies,
to the English-speaking West Indies, is a
big step of faith for us in OM
and the ship ministry because we feel already
overextended, and we thought, well, how can we
get involved in one more place?
You may say, well, what are we overextended
doing?
Let me just share some of our other
goals.
Not that we are not burdened for this
part of the world, because we are, though
we would feel very strongly you, you, the
church here in St. Lucia, are the key
to world evangelism here.
Even as we come with this ship, we
know our part is very, very small.
We are not some great band of apostles
who have arrived here on God's battleship to
blow sinners out of their houses and into
your churches.
We have come in much weakness and inadequacy,
with 75% of the people on the
ship basically trainees and learners, some of them
very new.
And praise God for some, like the ship
director, Frank Fortunato, and others who have been
in the battle for Christ many years.
I was with Frank Fortunato when we thought
he would die.
He was in a terrible motor accident coming
back from India, where he had been serving.
And it was the worst automobile crash in
the history of our work.
Four were killed in that one crash in
Yugoslavia.
I rushed into the hospital.
I found out later I wasn't supposed to
go into Frank's room, because he was too
close to death.
We prayed together.
Actually, he jumped out of bed to greet
me.
I had just come in from Nepal.
He wasn't supposed to get out of bed.
And we prayed, and it was my joy
to see Frank, who is now the director
of this ship, raised up.
His fiancé was killed right next to him
in that crash, and go on many, many
years.
He's actually a musician by profession, just as
Dr. Alan Adams, who was director of this
ship for many years, has now gone on
to be director of Dulos.
He is a medical doctor by profession.
So what a joy to be here with
Frank this week.
Let me just mention these other parts of
the world where I'm involved to explain why
it's taken me so many years to get
to the West Indies.
First of all, our burden is the communist
world.
Just recently, again, I've been in the Soviet
Union.
I don't think we can begin to understand
the suffering and the pressure that God's people
are in, in the Soviet Union.
Many, many, many thousands are in prison right
now.
They're being tortured.
And though we hear of the church growing,
we know it's through much pain.
One brother who came to my meeting, my
meetings had to be secret.
I couldn't even take my Bible.
But one brother came to me in this
meeting and he said, do you have any
literature at all?
We're involved with others in getting literature into
all of the Soviet countries.
But I, on this trip, was not there
for that purpose.
So I didn't have any literature.
He had one tract.
It was a photograph of a tract.
In the Soviet Union, you are not allowed
to reproduce anything.
There are no duplicating machines, no photocopies, nothing
that you can make a copy of anything.
Carbon paper is controlled carefully.
A piece of carbon paper is like gold
outside of government-controlled agencies.
And he had a photograph of one gospel
tract.
And he had been risking imprisonment.
One of the things I had been carrying
with me was a few items for prisoners,
little bits of soup, bullion soup in cubes,
things that if they did find them, you
know, what could they say?
It wasn't known that they were going into
the prisons.
And this person had been converted to Jesus
Christ through the ministry of radio.
And he was risking imprisonment to talk to
people in the streets about Jesus Christ.
Now, this part of the Soviet Union that
I was in, in Latvia, the north, is
more open than other areas.
You know, there's different degrees of persecution and
difficulty.
And they were having some very large meetings
on the Saturday evening, which the government was
very, very worried about.
When I first went to Europe, I studied
the Russian language.
And in a sense, this ship ministry was
born out of my own failures in the
Soviet Union.
I had no plan for a ship at
that time.
My burden was the communist world.
I was living in Spain, learning Spanish and
Russian, teaching English.
In Operation Mobilization at that time, there were
only five of us, six, seven of us
full-time.
A number of them were Mexicans, my closest
friends.
And the first full-time worker in this
work was a Mexican brother.
And I went into the Soviet Union before
even the name Operation Mobilization was born, due
to my own failure.
Some of you know my good friend, Brother
Andrew, God's smuggler.
This afternoon, you have Brother George, God's bungler.
Do you have that word here?
That means the one who blew it, the
one who made the big mistake, God's bungler.
Because I also went into the Soviet Union
and I was arrested by the Soviet secret
police and accused of being a spy and
properly given a submachine gun escort out of
the country.
I was really humbled by that experience.
I don't know if you've had any nice,
really juicy failures in your life.
A very exciting book is called Failure, the
Back Door to Success.
Be sure to read that.
But I went for a day of prayer
after that experience in the Soviet Union.
And it was during that day of prayer,
actually, I was in the top of a
tree.
I was young.
I used to do a lot of crazy
things.
Not anymore, of course.
I was in the top of this tree,
praising God and worshiping.
And it was there that I realized my
own wife's father had been killed in the
war between Germany and the other countries.
And I realized that five million Jews and
five million Gentiles had been destroyed and liquidated
in that war, including my wife's father.
And I thought, could not love bring a
great revolution to Europe just as hatred had
brought so much war and destruction.
And there, two names came into my mind
as I was praying and fasting.
Operation Mobilization.
And a burden, a vision.
Not one I could see in the trees,
one God brought to my mind.
And I shouted from the top of the
tree.
I was there with a brother.
We had been together in Russia.
Operation Mobilization.
And the burden was to see the European
Church come alive and mobilize to reach everybody
in Western Europe with the message of Jesus
Christ.
Now, you please understand, we are not coming
here with European Christianity.
Europe is not Christian.
Europe is humanist, atheist, secular.
Many of your friends have been in London,
they can tell you.
Only 5% of the people of London
even go to church.
And we need dynamic, spirit-filled West Indian
missionaries to help us in London.
Some of them are already there.
We have worked together with them.
In fact, our major Easter campaign in Europe
last Easter was with a West Indian church.
And some of the really live churches in
London, England, are West Indian churches.
And so our burden, for just a few
of us, was to see the church mobilize
to reach every person with the word of
God.
Now, I was living in Spain, and Spain
was closed to the gospel.
We couldn't even freely give out literature.
It was all being done secretly.
And we were working through the church and
with the church.
We were sending out literature through the posts.
Those were the days of Franco, absolute dictatorship.
And we started meeting in nights of prayer
that God would open Spain.
Within three years, God opened that country completely.
And our teams went into every town in
the entire nation in every province in Spain.
And it was Spanish young people who helped
lead the mobilization forces.
Teams, just as in the Book of Acts.
In the Book of Acts, you'll see two
major units.
You'll see the local church.
And we believe the local church is the
key to world evangelism.
Not ships, not operation mobilization, but that small,
little, local church is the key to world
evangelism.
And the real secret behind the phenomenal growth
of operation mobilization has been our very deep
relationship with pastors and the local church.
Over 1,000 churches are linked with us
in an ongoing way.
Over 1,000 churches.
Many of them have given us the open
door to come and minister in their midst.
Dale Roton, the coordinator of the ship ministry,
was in a large, very dynamic Anglican church
in Bristol yesterday.
The pastor of that church, I preached there
about seven times, he said, anybody around among
the OM leaders, just send them down.
My pulpit is yours now.
In some of our Anglican churches, you're only
generally allowed to speak 30 minutes.
But when you preach in his church, you
preach an hour, you preach an hour and
a half.
You give invitation to repent and give your
life to Jesus.
And it's just an amazing Anglican church that
caught its vision through Oswald J.
Smith and the great vision that God gave
Oswald Smith, who was one of the most
influential men in my life.
In fact, one of the books I wanted
to mention to you was Oswald J.
Smith's book, The Passion for Souls, with an
introduction by Billy Graham.
By the next summer, after God gave us
that vision, 200 people, mainly young people, united
in Paris and fanned out across Europe to
give out 25 million pieces of Christian literature.
By the next summer, there were 2,000
young people moving into almost every town in
Europe, which led ultimately to thousands coming to
know the Lord Jesus Christ, to new churches
being born.
In France, our teams had planted over 17
new living Bible-believing churches.
In Spain, new churches were born.
In Italy, new churches were born.
Soon, these teams launched out to North Africa,
Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and to Turkey.
And even in Turkey, among the Muslims, little
tiny churches were born.
The first church of Ankara, the capital of
Turkey, a land of 40 million souls, the
first church of converted Muslims was born.
To this day, there are only 10 or
12 who fellowship because in the whole nation,
there are only 100 believers.
Brothers and sisters, that's after 25 years of
work.
You see, we've been a little bit busy
over there in areas of the world that
do not have nearly as many churches as
you have.
If we ever had something in Turkey, as
you have here in your beautiful island, why,
we would just, we would be standing on
our heads in praise.
So our first burden has been the communist
countries.
Our second burden has been, we just got
into it, the Muslim world.
One out of every seven people in the
world is a Muslim.
We believe one of the reasons God has
raised up Operation Mobilization is to penetrate the
Muslim world.
I've just come back earlier this year from
another visit to Bangladesh, to Pakistan, to our
work among the Afghan refugees who have fled
this terrible civil war in Afghanistan where genocide
is going on, where whole villages have been
just slaughtered and murdered.
And the people have come, 2 million refugees.
What a joy it was to visit these
refugee camps and to then in an evening
meeting share the gospel with these Afghan Muslims.
They are the most fierce people.
No one will ever and has ever conquered
Afghanistan.
And so the Soviet Union that has invaded
that country, they are losing thousands and thousands
of people.
It's a terrible thing because we love Russians
as well as we love Afghans.
We are not called in our movement to
political finagling.
We are called to preach Jesus Christ and
Christ crucified.
But oh my, the terrible things that are
happening there.
We now have about 250 workers committed to
the Muslim world.
It would be our sincere prayer that there
could be even one or two from this
island who eventually could work among Muslims in
some of these other lands.
We know your biggest task is still your
own work right here.
We haven't come here to transplant a load
of people off to wherever.
We've come here because the Holy Spirit directed
us here, because we hope this ship visit
will be an encouragement, because we hope these
books can be used for his glory, because
our own people here need to see what
you're doing for Jesus here, and because we
want to co-labor together.
We want to work together wherever people will,
what will welcome us for evangelism and for
presenting the message of Jesus Christ.
So our second major vision is the Muslim
world, and we have declared this especially as
a decade of Muslim emphasis.
You know, starting tonight, you can have the
greatest ministry for the Muslim world that anybody
can have.
What do you think that is?
Intercessory prayer.
Because there needs to be much more prayer
before we're going to see the church established.
In Iraq, there are almost no believers, the
land of Iraq, much upon my heart.
In Libya, there may be six believers.
In Libya, maybe six believers.
Six.
Not six churches, six believers.
We've just sent some more people into Tunisia.
There, there are a few dozen believers in
Tunisia.
What can we say of some of those
other lands?
Mauritania, Africa.
One known believer.
One believer in the whole nation.
How are we doing on our prayer cards?
Do we have any of those left on
the ship?
They have a little set of prayer cards.
We also have a book, Operation World, in
this particular packet that has the prayer cards.
But as you read through that book, and
that book is worth putting in your church
library.
It's a research book.
And get to know these other countries and
pray for them, because it's just, the need
is so staggering.
And then the third vision is the vision
for the Indian subcontinent.
This is another reason I find it difficult
to get to this part of the world,
because I am the director of the work
in the subcontinent.
OM is divided into six areas.
The Far East subcontinent, Middle East, Europe, and
North America, Mexico.
And we're just in the process of making
the decision to somehow, in a more official
way, get the West Indians in Central America
and South America into OM's thinking.
It's in the ship's thinking, but the rest
of OM, this large movement, don't know so
much about this part of the world.
And as I go back to have pastors'
conferences throughout Europe and the Middle East, in
a few weeks I leave for Singapore, Malaysia,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Gulf States, Dubai, Kuwait.
I will now be able to, in a
more fresh way, share something of the challenge
of the West Indies and the challenge of
this part of the world.
But our third burden is for the subcontinent,
India, where I used to live and where
we have now three to four hundred workers,
has seven hundred million people.
I hope you'll perhaps write a few of
these things down.
Staggering, isn't it?
There are more people in India than all
of South America.
The West Indies and Africa combined.
Just India in a country smaller than Brazil.
So this is a primary target.
The only reason there are not many Indians
on this ship, I remember this ship when
it was twenty percent of all the workers
were all Indians.
But we could not afford to take many
of those workers from India because the work
has grown so big and there's so much
to do among these seven hundred million souls.
And the ship changes its personality as it
goes different parts of the world.
Right now I can sense the ship is
still a bit European.
Just spent two or three years in Europe.
Now there's already nine or ten Venezuelans.
Maybe in a few months there'll be a
few more West Indians.
And the ship will change its character.
And we hope you'll pray that God would
give us the right people from this part
of the world to go through this very
unique training program.
This is not a training program for everybody.
In terms of living on the ship, it
must be those the Holy Spirit sends, as
we see in Acts 12.
I was mentioning those two units in the
New Testament.
The first one is the local church.
The second one, you study carefully, teams.
Teams of men and women.
And it's those teams that in many places
in the Book of Acts and all over
the world today, it's those teams, some may
think of them as apostolic teams, that have
planted the church.
That's why we need both.
That's why an international outreach agency, Operation Mobilization,
is an international outreach agency to work with
the church and help establish the churches in
the unreached areas of the world, especially the
communist world, the Muslim world, and the Hindu
world, the subcontinent.
Though on both sides of India we have
Muslim countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
I'd love to talk to you for a
long time about Pakistan, where I spent over
a month last year.
We had tremendous pastors' conferences there and evangelistic
efforts.
We teach young people when they first come
10 or 20 phrases, sentences in other languages
so they can sell books.
That's where they start.
Some of the young people who started 20
years ago, 10 years ago, speak those languages
fluently.
Phil Bushell, one of the leaders of our
work in Bangladesh, a land born in 1971.
This ship was coming into Bombay when the
government of India sealed our radio room, gave
us a submachine gun escort as we came
in.
And it was during that time that Bangladesh
was born as a nation.
Incredible story.
Over 300,000 women were raped, women who
now are not accepted in any way into
any society in the world.
One hundred, three hundred thousand.
They are just as lepers to their society
because that's what their society teaches.
This country is much upon our hearts.
Later on this ship went to Bangladesh and
reached hundreds of thousands in Bangladesh with the
word of God.
Phil Bushell, remaining behind, speaks fluent Bengali.
And they have planted five or ten new
living fellowships, all Muslim converts.
All Muslim converts.
Our experience is we can win 1,000
people of other backgrounds easier than we could
win almost one Muslim.
It's a mystery, isn't it, why it is
that way.
But that's the truth in Turkey.
In some of these other countries.
Bangladesh is a little bit easier.
Saudi Arabia, where I was recently, they have
no believers.
No church, no known believers in Saudi Arabia.
And in some of those countries when you
become a believer you will be killed.
Two women in one Muslim land poisoned their
husbands with broken glass when they became followers
of Jesus Christ.
So these are the burdens.
And then the fourth burden is to see
the work in Europe continue.
We don't like to start something and then
leave it.
We like to start something and do it
right.
And as you read your New Testament, I'm
sure you know much of what Paul, under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gives us
in the New Testament, much of it is
in the way of correction, correcting God's children.
Do any of your believers here at times
tend to wander away into their own little
doctrinal errors or their own little emotional errors
or their own little problems?
If they don't, then I will declare your
island as the most unusual Christian place in
the entire world.
Now, I've only been in 60 countries, so
I can't say about the other ones.
But the same was true in the New
Testament church.
Don't be discouraged as a pastor when the
sheep start to wander off into other fields
or they start to wander down the road
and eat the wrong kind of food or
whatever else because that's what was happening in
the New Testament.
And so we believe that when we start
a work, as we started in Europe 25
years ago, as soon as my wife and
I were married, we went to Mexico.
We had a six-month honeymoon in Mexico,
working with God's people and opening six more
Christian bookshops.
And then we went to Spain, and that's
when the work was born in Europe, just
about 24 years ago.
But the work has very much expanded, and
it takes a lot of time and a
lot of effort and a lot of prayer
to keep it going.
And so we have been slow to go
into new parts of the world.
And that's why it's taken me 29 years
of praying for the West Indies and your
countries here and around to ever get here.
So now I'm here, and I'm grateful to
the Lord.
And I've been able to give you a
little bit of history, and I hope a
challenge to your heart about the communist world
and the Muslim world through telling you that.
You can take a cassette of this message,
and you can share it with anybody you
want to share it with.
But let me go back a little further,
because I'd like to just share my own
personal testimony, because this to me is far
more exciting than what I've told you.
I was not from a Christian home.
I was playing church.
Do any people here in your beautiful island
play church?
I went there Sunday morning and sat.
Sunday school, they passed around the plate, and
so I took some out and put it
in my pocket.
I played church.
And I need to explain that, that what
I put in the pocket was what my
mother had put in.
I hadn't got quite into taking what other
people had put in.
And many, many people, though my father is
born in the Netherlands, Holland, he immigrated to
near New York City where I was born.
And into my life came a praying, godly,
elderly woman.
Humanly speaking, she is the founder of Operation
Mobilization.
I don't like really that word to be
used to describe me, because I don't think
I could start anything but trouble.
And this woman prayed for me.
She had heard about my bad reputation.
I'd been in some difficulty with the police.
Nothing big.
I was not in the mafia or anything
like that.
She had heard about my big mouth and
the trouble I'd got into with the school
headmaster.
And she knew a few other bad things.
And in God's mercy, she started to pray
for me when I was very young.
Fifteen.
Just gone to high school.
And she sent me a Gospel of John
through the Post.
You know, that's why I have written this
book on literature evangelism.
Because literature has been such an influence in
my own life.
And she sent this Gospel of John to
me through the Post.
And I read it.
And it began to work.
The Holy Spirit, from His Word, verses like
John 1.12, as many as receive Him,
to them He gives power to become the
sons of God, even to them that believe
on His name.
God began to break down the barriers in
my heart.
Now, I was very much into the nightlife,
the New York City life, the women, the
dancing.
But the other big thing was the money.
And by 16, I had three little businesses.
Because to keep my nightlife going, I needed
money.
And I was getting into more and more
of a very selfish, egocentric way of living.
And yet something in my heart said, it's
not right.
It's not right.
And as I read this Gospel, God spoke
to me.
Then Billy Graham came to New York City.
Now, I didn't even know what an evangelist
was.
You know, sometimes as Christians, we don't realize
how ignorant people are about certain things that
are very precious to us.
And we don't realize how prejudiced people are
because they have seen some of the foolish
things that churches do.
Now, I don't know if your churches here
ever do any foolish things or make any
foolish mistakes.
But in the rest of the world, believe
me, especially where I come from, we do
a lot of foolish things.
And we have pastors who one minute are
shouting and standing on the table telling everybody
to repent.
And the next minute we find out the
guy is sleeping with a girl in the
choir.
Now, I hope that kind of thing has
never come to Europe.
Part of the world certainly has in other
parts of the world.
And so people are switched off the church.
They don't want to know.
They don't want to hear.
And they just think the people in the
church, evangelists, they're just a bunch of emotional
nutcases.
And they want to stay away.
And that was the group of people that
I moved with.
Though we went, some of us, not all
of them, we went to a very nice
dead church just to have a little bit
of religious sophistication.
Just like putting this tie on.
One or two of the brothers said, well,
you should wear a tie.
We have the same thing in India.
I hate neckties, but I thought, well, maybe
I should just put this tie on just
to...
What does it say, this tie?
I don't know.
You can, in an emergency, use it to
blow your nose if you're out in the
woods.
But there we go.
So I was playing religious games, going to
church.
I became the president of the young people's
group.
I became the assistant to the pastor.
And I was living a completely double life.
I'd go from the nightclubs of New York
City at three in the morning, a few
hours sleep, and I'd be sitting there in
church Sunday morning singing God Bless America.
Billy Graham came to New York City preaching
repentance.
And the gospel that we read in Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John is the gospel of
grace, but it is the gospel of repentance.
It's a mystery because we know we're not
saved by works, so we're not saved by
repentance.
But if the Holy Spirit is doing a
great saving work in our hearts, repentance will
be there.
You can explain it Calvinistic way or Arminian
way.
People sometimes say to me, Are you a
Calvinist?
And I say, Look, I am an Arminianized
Calvinist.
So just relax.
If you have any strong Calvinistic friends here,
please do invite them to the ship because
the great leader of the whole Reformed movement
of Europe, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, he, much
criticized by some of his followers, came to
the ship.
And guess what Dr. Lloyd-Jones preached when
he came here?
He preached the need for sound doctrine and
revival, spiritual balance.
And this ship stands for sound doctrine.
We believe the Bible is the Word of
God.
I've listened to many of Dr. Lloyd-Jones'
tapes.
I've preached in his church.
We now have R.T. Kendall shaking London,
the pastor of that church.
I just listened to a tape of a
message he gave at a leaders conference in
England.
It's one of the most powerful messages that
Great Britain has ever heard.
And he has been going out in the
streets and he's been taking all these lovely
Reformed theologians out in the streets in soul
winning and God is saving people.
And Westminster Chapel where Dr. Lloyd-Jones was
the pastor and was down to 100 members
after his death, because after his death it
just went down, down, down, down.
It's now got hundreds of people in fellowship
and is once again one of London's great
churches.
It's so important to understand God is working
in different people in different ways.
The Holy Spirit will not be put in
a box.
The Holy Spirit will not be limited to
one group or one church or one stream.
He will go where He will because He
is sovereign and He is God.
And so into my life came this praying
elderly lady and she prayed me into this
Billy Graham meeting.
And I heard repent and believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham always explains it the same way.
He says you're going in one direction, you
stop and you go the other direction.
And you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
and your life will be changed.
And if the life isn't changed, nothing's happened.
Nothing's happened.
It's just in the head.
Billy Graham gets accused of emphasizing decisions, but
if you study his message more carefully, he
preaches true Holy Ghost conversion and believes in
the filling of the Holy Spirit and the
need to go on for God.
Well, I went to that meeting.
I heard the message.
And when the invitation came, I had never
seen an invitation.
Actually, get out of your seat and do
something for God.
You know, I had gone wild in football
games.
I had gone wild and danced.
I danced three, four women all at once.
And, you know, I was considered very, very
normal.
But in church, the church I went to,
nobody said anything or made any noise except
when they fell asleep and snored.
Billy Graham called people to get out of
their seats and to repent and to come
forward.
And I took that.
I was shaking.
And I went forward.
And I was saved and filled with the
Holy Spirit at the same time.
And that has been a reality every single
day for 30 years.
You know, when I used to give my
testimony, people said, ah, just a kid.
What a lot of hot air.
Bring in an older, mature speaker.
Take this kid away.
When I first went to Europe, I was
only 21 years old.
And, you know, Europeans, they don't exactly love
the Americans.
Now, I'm not exactly sure where they do
love the Americans.
And the Americans now don't even like the
Americans.
But anyway, seems to be the same all
over the world.
But you can imagine me going to Germany
and preaching spiritual revolution, forsake all, follow Christ,
repent, sell your homes, follow Jesus.
Went really big impression.
People said, youthful zeal.
Don't let him back.
Don't bring him back.
Well, it's so good to be here 30
years since my conversion.
You see, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday,
today, forevermore.
And what happened to me as a young
man was not an emotional, later adolescent, escape
from guilt, but it was conversion, biblical conversion.
The Holy Spirit entering a human being and
taking control.
Now, since that day, I have failed Jesus
many times.
I've sinned against my Lord, especially with my
big eyes and with my big tongue.
I don't know if you have this problem
in this part of the world, but where
I come from, a lot of people have
this tongue control problem.
Their tongue goes a little faster than their
brain.
Do you have any people like that around
here?
Well, we do.
And I've had that problem all my life,
especially with my dear wife.
And it's amazing how the one we love
the most, I'm just about to have my
25th wedding anniversary, the one we love the
most, we sometimes hurt the most with our
tongue.
And I thank God that I'm here 30
years later, not because I've become some super
saint, not because I have discovered the secret
mysteries of advanced level discipleship.
I'm here because of the grace of God
to sinners.
I'm here because when I've sinned with my
eyes or my tongue or my mind, I've
been able to repent as it says in
1 John 2, verse 1.
What's the first part of that verse?
Sinnah.
What's the second part of the verse?
If you sin, you have an advocate with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
I'm here because that verse has two parts.
My first goal every day is holiness of
life.
It's 1 Corinthians 13.
It's total commitment and obedience to Jesus.
But if I fail and if I sin,
I know where to go for daily cleansing
and daily renewal.
And the amazing thing is, as you I
know are experiencing, the more we drink from
that fountain of God's grace and forgiveness, the
stronger we become and the more we can
stand against the temptations that come the next
day or the next week.
God, in His mercy, has kept me.
And as I mentioned, after my conversion, I
ended up in Mexico.
Before that, I went back to that high
school.
She had been praying.
This elderly woman was praying for that high
school.
Do you pray for your schools?
There are mission fields.
There are mission fields and we praise God
for the opportunity we're having here to reach
some of these young people in school.
But she had been praying for this high
school that not only people would be saved,
but that they would be saved and sent.
That's a good prayer to pray.
Do you pray that prayer for your people?
When you see a sinner come into your
church that doesn't yet know Jesus, Lord, save
him and send him.
Send him to his neighbors.
The greatest way the church is growing in
some countries is when one member of the
family gets converted and then they go for
the other members of the family.
That is absolutely key and strategic in world
evangelism.
So she prayed for people to be saved
and sent.
She was really praying that a missionary movement
would start in that ungodly high school.
Can you imagine such a prayer?
Do you know how many years she prayed
that prayer?
Fifteen years.
I find a lot of people are discouraged
in their prayer life.
From my book, the book's up here, Ten
Cents.
A lot of people have paid four dollars
for this book.
So for ten cents.
If you don't have ten cents, you see
me, I'll give it to you.
This is one of my first books.
It's called Hunger for Reality.
I've had 14,000 personal letters from this
book.
I've read every letter.
I don't answer them all now.
I answer half of them.
And my friends help me answer the other
half.
My address is on the back of this
book.
The Bromley Kent, England.
I've been 25 years overseas.
I never did get back to my home
country.
So I'm sort of a transplant like a
lot of the West Indians who live over
in London.
And you can write me at that address
after you read that book.
But many of the people have written me
after reading that book I think this is
the one they pay to, that's the other
edition people pay ten times as much.
They say exactly the same thing.
Praise God for these magazine books.
I hope you'll take them by the thousands.
It's the greatest breakthrough in economy literature that
I've ever heard of.
But she prayed that people would be saved
and sent from that school.
And you know, after my conversion, I went
back to the school.
Somehow in the process I had become sort
of a radical student leader of the school.
And I was converted in the middle of
that.
And so I had the chance to speak
to the whole school.
And the Holy Spirit in one meeting brought
125 precious ones to the knowledge of Jesus.
Not all of them we found out later
were converted.
And then another 75.
And this movement of operation mobilization can be
traced back to one praying woman, one skinny,
weak, unknowed, loud-mouthed, big-nosed schoolboy, and
the Holy Spirit working in a high school.
And then it just multiplied and multiplied.
You know, when you come and you see
this ship that God has provided in answer
to prayer, don't run down the gangway and
start praying just for some big thing to
happen.
Because God generally doesn't work that way.
You need to be faithful in that small
thing that God has given you right now.
And God kept me faithful from 1955 when
I was born again for 15 years before
He gave me this first ship.
Five years before that in a converted pub
in Bolton, Lancashire.
I was living in Lancashire, England.
God gave me this burden of an ocean
-going ship.
When I shared it with a few people,
they just sort of looked.
What in the world?
You know, some thought they had some ideas
that Verwer was crazy, but now they knew
it.
There were a lot of smiles, but a
few prayed and said, Lord, Your will be
done.
For five years, it was only prayer, working,
finding disciples.
People first, projects second.
Try to remember that when we sail away
in a few weeks' time.
And as I was faithful in small things,
just pouring my life into individual disciples, the
method I learned from Jesus Christ, discipling individuals,
God and His timing brought into being the
tools, the tools those individuals needed to do
the job.
First, vehicles, bicycles, banana carts.
I remember in India when God gave me
the banana cart vision.
In India, we have these little carts.
They're like a table on wheels, and they
sell bananas on those.
Push them down the street.
And I just imagined one of those carts
filled with Christian books.
So I bought a banana cart, ate all
the bananas, and I put the books on
there.
I got some help with that.
Pushed those carts down into the crowded marketplaces
of Bombay and Calcutta.
Soon we had 15 banana carts.
Then the project failed.
I don't know what happened.
I've never been able to figure out what
happened to all those banana carts.
The brothers started to sleep on them, and
they started to disappear.
And others got tired, and others said that
people don't buy the books when they're on
the banana carts, and the project failed.
Have you had any good failures in your
ministry?
If you haven't, you must be going very,
very slow.
Because when you do anything for God, you're
going to have a few failures along the
way.
Praise God for His mercy and His grace
when we do fail.
So one praying woman was used of God
to touch a high school, to touch some
young lives, and this afternoon you had a
little picture of what God did after that.
Now I want you to turn with me
in your Bibles.
I'm known as the longest preacher in Europe.
But I'm going to try not to go
too long this afternoon, because I think people
eat in this room.
It's one of the things I always disliked
about this ship.
I always had to cut my messages so
they could come in and eat.
But I remember I was preaching in Germany,
and in Germany they like everything very punctual,
right on time.
Like some churches, you know these churches they
like to finish dead at twelve.
Many of them are dead at twelve.
But I was preaching in Germany, and I
was going on a long time.
And the young people were listening.
And I found all over the world the
young people, when you give the message straight
under the anointing of the Spirit of God,
they listen.
They listen.
One dear elderly man sitting way in the
back, I think he wanted to go home
and watch television.
And so he held up a watch.
He lifted his watch up.
And he started pointing to the watch to
try to get me to stop.
I was preaching about world missions, evangelism, forsaking
all to follow Christ.
I saw that watch.
I said, praise God everyone, here's a man
donating his wrist watch for world missionary work.
So I don't know what methods you used
here in St. Lucia to stop your preachers,
but I'd like you to turn with me
briefly in your Bible to Acts, the book
of Acts, chapter 23.
I have this burden very much on my
heart.
And I'll just try to quickly share it
with you.
Okay, verse 12.
And when it was day, certain of the
Jews banded together and bound themselves under a
curse, saying that they would neither eat nor
drink.
Verse 12, chapter 23.
They would neither eat nor drink till they
had killed Paul.
In my Bible, this is called a conspiracy.
The burden, the spirit of God is put
on my heart for Christian leaders.
You are Christian leaders.
This is a Christian leadership conference.
I hope that you will get the two
most important books on this ship for Christian
leaders next to the Bible.
The Bible is in a category of its
own, the inspired word of God.
Anything you read in any book here, if
you don't find it backed up in the
Bible, pull the chapter out of the book
or throw it in the sea.
But these are just sermons in print.
If you preach and we get it on
cassette tape and then write it, what is
it?
It's a sermon in print.
These books are sermons in print.
My own books are sermons in print.
Like this book that's just taken from my
tapes, worked on by a man who has
a gift in writing.
Then I put a few corrections.
The best part of my books, what I
take from other people's books, call them quotations.
That's what really makes this a great book.
But here are two really great books.
Oswald Sanders, he was the director of OMF,
the China Inland Mission.
What a great work of God that is
in China.
I'd love to talk to you about China.
What God is doing in China.
It's just amazing.
It's amazing.
They say now there may be 10, 15,
20 million believers in China through the persecution.
When the devil tries to stamp out the
church of Jesus Christ, he gets himself in
mighty big trouble.
And I hope you'll read these two great
books on spiritual leadership and Paul the leader.
But my burden is simply this.
I am convinced after observing and working with
Christian leaders like yourself these 30 years that
there is a conspiracy.
There is a subtle, satanic plan to destroy
you, your family, your marriage, and your church.
You know, I feel sometimes as we look
into the Word of God we are not
serious enough about what it really says.
The Bible teaches that we are in a
spiritual warfare.
I'm sure most of you have preached on
Ephesians chapter 6, the armor of God, the
shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit.
I'm sure you know that verse in Corinthians
where it says the weapons of our warfare
are not carnal but mighty unto God to
the pulling down of strongholds.
I'm sure you know those words of Paul
to Timothy when Paul said to Timothy endure
hardship, endure hardship as a good soldier of
Jesus Christ.
You know the emphasis in the New Testament
on the disciplined life.
So the apostle Paul said I buffet my
body.
Do you know that verse?
You know, I was a very undisciplined person.
My dream when I was 13 and I
went into business was to lie on a
beach with my women and have at least
a hundred guys working for me, the great
free enterprise as I slept.
I was lazy and the word work was
not my favorite word.
And after I became a follower of Jesus
and I discovered the disciplined life, I almost
ran away because it seemed impossible.
And when I hit that verse, you know
that verse?
If a man not work, let him not
eat.
I thought, woe is me, I'm going to
starve to death.
But I could relate to the apostle Paul
who said I buffet my body.
And I don't think you can be a
Christian leader without buffeting your body.
The body wants to do something.
You think today, 30 years later, I still
have some temptations?
I can tell you I do.
And I discover sometimes my body is going
one way, my eyes are going one way,
my feelings.
And so many young people don't go on
for Christ because we don't teach them how
to deal with feelings.
We don't teach them about Galatians 2.20
where Paul said I am crucified with Christ.
And those feelings and those emotions, they have
to be crucified.
If they're good, if they're toward God, if
they're 1 Corinthians 13, fine, nothing wrong with
some good feelings.
Hallelujah!
But if it's the lust of the flesh,
if it's the pride of life, 1 John
chapter 1, 2, and 3, so important, then
they have to be crucified.
And we need to be able to teach
our young people today not only the message
of salvation at the cross of Jesus Christ,
but the message of deliverance over self and
the self-life at the cross.
You know, a lot of times when we
come, people expect us to give a missionary
message, get everybody running all over the world
to be missionaries.
That's not our first message.
Our message is Jesus Christ and Christ crucified.
Many of the great meetings I take all
over the world, I hardly talk that much
about world missions.
I discovered that world missions will be a
spontaneous outflow of a life that's in tune
with God, controlled by the Spirit, and obedient
to His Holy Word.
We haven't come here for some glorified recruiting
campaign.
We have come here with a desire to
see men and women filled with God's Spirit,
obedient to Jesus Christ, and knowing the reality
of what Paul said.
I am crucified with Christ.
I want to ask you, my co-worker,
ones who I highly esteem, can you say
this afternoon you're crucified with Jesus Christ?
The lust of the flesh, the lust of
the eyes, the pride of life.
Even into our Christian work, spiritual pride comes
in.
Many of our churches in England have been
destroyed by spiritual pride.
Men one minute are used of God, the
next minute they're puffed up, thinking they have
some special spiritual power.
And then comes the fall.
The Bible says pride cometh before the fall.
And some of our great Christian leaders have
now been through divorce and have been destroyed.
Some even sleep.
They're dead.
I believe there is a conspiracy for Christian
leaders today as there was a conspiracy against
Paul here in the book of Acts.
Forty men, look at verse 21, have bound
themselves with an oath that they will neither
eat nor drink till they have killed him.
And now are they ready looking for a
promise from thee.
Imagine if you went back to your house
tonight and there's a note on the door.
I don't know if you have any people
who don't like you.
A little difficult to be in this world
and not have somebody that doesn't like you.
Hope you're doing not too bad on that
point.
But what if you go back to your
home tonight and there's a letter from some
people that don't like you.
And they say, we just want you to
know we're not eating until you're dead.
Some of you feel you're a little under
pressure these days.
I dare to say that might increase your
pressure.
It might not be the warmest letter you've
ever read to your wife and children.
It's happened in some countries.
It probably won't happen this way.
You see, today, Satan has a more subtle
conspiracy.
He's using the fiery darts that are referred
to in Ephesians 6.
It says, hold high the shield of faith
wherewith you can stop those fiery darts.
What are those fiery darts that Satan is
using to destroy ministries, to destroy churches?
First of all, there is the fiery dart
of immorality.
You know, I'm at a great advantage here
today.
I know almost nothing about you or your
churches.
I know nothing.
I've just flown here, but I know something
of what the devil has done in Mexico,
in India, in USA, in England.
And Satan is no respecter of persons.
We as human beings are.
Satan is no respecter of persons.