We'd like to give all of you a
copy of this book.
Some people can help.
If you miss getting here, you can go
to our OM exhibition and just tell them
I sent you and they'll give you one
of these free.
This is just published in the States.
It's an international edition, which is a little
more wild picture of me and my globe
on the cover.
So I don't have my globe with me
this afternoon.
I believe we're just here for one hour.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Because we got to do this three times.
Sorry for some of you that didn't get
a seat.
It's only one hour.
I'm going to stand so you can stand
with me.
If you're taking any notes, that's great.
I'm going to give you seven words about
this comfort zone challenge.
And if you email me a year from
now, there's seven words.
You get seven free books.
Not next week.
You can email me next week as well.
If you go into my website, georgeverwer.com,
you can find my email address or you
can see me after the meeting and I'll
give you one of my little year 2001
calendars that also has my email.
But I'll read it to you, georgeverwer.ict.
That's three little letters.
I-C-T.
That's the name of the team.
And O-M.
We're all divided up on teams.
georgeverwer.ict.om.org.
Sorry, we didn't get the parkavenue.com.
But I did get that from my website.
Somebody else already had my name.
I had to negotiate with one of my
cyberspace nerd friends to get it.
And that same cyberspace friend produced this book
just for Urbana.
We're giving you one of these as well.
It's called God's Great Ambition.
And send your friends over to the O
-M exhibit and they can get a copy
of this completely free.
This is a book for non-readers.
Some of you have got to read so
much at university, you want a non-reading
book.
Just look at that.
You can handle that on one page.
About ten words.
But these are all quotes from different wildcat
spiritual people that left their comfort zone.
Norm Lewis.
I'm going to mention one of his books
in a moment.
Selfishness is not simply unattractive, it's deadly.
Norm Lewis.
So, that's a gift.
But this is the book that our lecture
is based on.
Did everybody get one of these?
Are we all out?
Okay, they're in the back of the car
of my friend who drove me here.
Go find him.
His name is Cliff.
Cliff, are you back there?
Jeff, you've got the whole hour to do
that.
And then we'll figure out.
We won't be able to be as generous
with the next batch who come in here.
Let's just pray.
Father, it's a bit wild here running from
one place to the next.
We thank you for the beauty of the
snow that protect people who may slip on
it.
We thank you for what you did this
morning.
Oh, Lord, what a powerful time that was
together.
The willingness for that dear woman, Brenda, to
apologize about something that the world would think
of as being small, and yet you touched
her heart.
And we thank you for all the seminars
that are going on.
We thank you, Lord, that as you call
us out of our comfort zone, it's not
that we will never be comfortable again.
And help us understand the meaning of these
words.
And help us, Lord, to understand what it
is to really deny self, take up the
cross, and follow you, whether it's across the
street or across the world.
We ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, I had the advantage of being able
to speak to you briefly already if you
were there on the opening night, so I'm
not going to repeat my testimony or what
I said at that time.
But I wanted to just have you turn
to Matthew chapter 9.
In my prayer, I touched on the core
principle, biblical principle that I believe is linked
with discipleship.
It's linked with true spirituality.
It's linked with being a biblical person.
It's linked with being a missionary, whether in
the big sense in which we're all missionaries
or in the narrower sense, a career missionary
going out to plant churches in a place
like Turkey.
And that's the words of Jesus, that we're
to deny self, take up the cross every
day, and follow Him.
Did I say Matthew 9?
Verse 35.
Then Jesus went about all the cities and
villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good
news of the kingdom, curing every disease and
every sickness.
When He saw the crowds, He had compassion
for them, because they were harassed and helpless
like sheep without a shepherd.
Then He said to His disciples, The harvest
is plentiful, but the labors are few.
Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to
send out labors into His harvest.
Brothers and sisters and friends, there's no way
that we can evangelize the world without people
being sent out.
We have to be willing to be sent
out.
Isaiah chapter 6.
Isaiah experiences the greatness of God, the holiness
of God, the wretchedness of Himself.
We've had that passage referred to already.
And then He prays, Lord, here am I,
send me.
And as we look at the world represented
on my little jacket, we realize that a
lot of people who have never heard the
gospel are living a long ways away, and
they are living in places where generally it
would be somewhat uncomfortable for most of us.
In my own pilgrimage, God first sent me
to Mexico.
It was uncomfortable because the culture and the
language was so different.
To be honest, that was not a huge
problem because I fell in love with Mexican
people very, very quick.
I've had a lot more problem at times
with my own so-called people back in
little suburbs of New Jersey than I had
with Mexicans.
But I had some difficulty with the food,
and then I got really sick with a
little thing that's around the mission world called
the amoeba.
And it gets inside, and if you're already
pretty skinny, it can be pretty big combat
for life.
I never got into that serious situation.
But I especially found the heat uncomfortable.
I found working out in a garbage dump
a refuse tip.
By the way, I'm from London, England, so
I have a lot of funny words.
And discovering people where children were eating garbage
soup and just being out there, and then
working among the braceros.
These are poor people waiting to get jobs
back then on the other side of the
border.
It was two summers in a row I
went to Mexico.
The first was very short.
The second was when our work OM was
really born.
It was uncomfortable.
And yet God sent me there.
And that was one of the greatest experiences
in my Christian life.
And I'd encourage you to consider going somewhere
next summer where it may be uncomfortable.
We know that also can be in an
inner city situation in the USA.
If you're basically a suburban person living in
a fair degree of ease, we know it
can also be uncomfortable there.
But if you move into the heart of
New York City or Brooklyn, which is part
of New York City, or Chicago where I
met my dear wife, that also can be
a great challenge.
The Lord of the Harvest told us to
pray that laborers would be sent forth into
the harvest field.
My wife and I soon found ourselves in
Spain.
That was also uncomfortable because it was there
we discovered, especially me, that I was really
an ugly American.
That I was a racist by default, not
even really understanding that issue.
That I had things that I thought were
Christian, like thou shalt not drink alcohol, which
was mainly American culture.
And I discovered it most all believers in
Spain, who I also fell in love with
very quickly.
They all had wine over their meals.
I remember going off for a prayer retreat
and these Spaniards wanted to stop at a
bar.
Well, the devil's committee room and have a
drink.
And God just set me free.
I was about to take this whole movement
that was being born.
I was already taking it into Phariseeism and
legalism.
Doesn't mean God wasn't working, because He's very
merciful and very gracious.
And I went to one of the capitals
of the universe, Phariseeism, a place called Moody
Bible Institute.
And if you think that's a criticism, read
their new book.
Moody has just published a book, Extreme Righteousness,
showing that most of us as evangelicals have
a strong Pharisee streak.
And of course, mix that with good old
anti-communist, which I was really into, Americanism,
and you come up with an interesting cocktail.
By the way, my view is there's no
straight drinks left in the body of Christ.
It's all cocktails.
And a pure Calvinist, forget it.
Pure Arminian, forget it.
Pure charismatic, forget it.
Pure fundamentalist, gone with Noah's Ark.
Everybody's a bit mixed.
Cocktails for the kingdom.
And it's not necessarily harmful if it's in
a grace-awakened mode.
So God changed our lives in Mexico.
He continued to change our lives in Spain.
And then He sent me to Russia.
When I was living in Spain, my big
passion was the Muslim world, the communist world,
and closed countries.
God was about to completely change that through
failure.
As I went into, and that's my first
word.
You better get that first word, failure.
You only get the seven words.
And the next summer, went into the Soviet
Union.
I was doing Bible smuggling.
I had a printing press hidden in the
dashboard of the car.
A lot of people praying.
I had learned how to type the Russian
language.
We were going to get in the country
and then send literature out through the post,
through the mail.
We weren't going to try to give it
out.
And we had done that in Spain, which
was semi-closed.
Nothing like Russia or the Soviet Union.
So, anyway, to make a long story short,
some butter melted on one of the Gospels.
I told this guy who was with me,
Wheaton College football player.
He was doing the printing, and I was
doing the typing.
And some butter melted on this one Gospel.
I said, well, we can't send this out
through the mail.
And he wanted to flush it down the
john.
I thought, how can we flush the word
of God down the john?
So, I decided the next day, we'll just
give this out where nobody's looking.
So, we're driving down a country road.
Nobody was around.
I threw that Gospel out.
That sealed my fate.
That changed my life.
Because the farmer found it.
Immediately, they were watching us.
Phone the police.
KGB, major roadblock.
Full newspaper publicity through the whole Soviet Union.
American spy arrested in Rovno.
God answers prayer.
Yeah, that's right.
How many of you have ever heard of
God's smuggler, Brother Andrew?
He's a great character.
This afternoon, you've got a similar kind of
a character, known as God's bungler.
Name's George.
His name's Brother Andrew.
Through that failure, eventually, after they decided, after
three days of interrogation, that we're religious fanatics,
they gave us a submachine gun, escorted out
of the country.
I went off for a day in prayer.
And God changed my vision.
And that's my second word, vision.
And one of the reasons that we're here
at Urbana is to increase our vision.
Don't worry about getting too much information, too
much vision.
Take what you can.
Try to get a good night's sleep.
And remember God's love and God's acceptance.
But that was a real failure, and I
was sort of groaning over that, feeling bad
about it.
I went for this day of prayer.
Before that, our work was very small.
The vision was Muslims, Communists in closed countries.
We were known as Send the Light, En
Via La Luz in Mexico and Spanish.
And God showed me in that day of
prayer that we didn't really have it right.
He wanted us to fall into the ground
of Western Europe first.
He wanted us to esteem the church, to
get into the church in Western Europe.
That led me to leave Spain where we
didn't have so many churches.
That was a semi-closed country, so we
had many friends.
I was just back in Spain a few
weeks ago, celebrating the 40th anniversary of all
this exploding there.
But I moved to the UK and started
to minister in the universities, an incredible open
door.
And soon hundreds of British students were launching
out, and that became the real birth of
Operation Mobilization.
Failure so often is the back door to
success.
Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church wrote a book
on that subject.
You may try to find it.
The book, I've never read it.
The title was just so inspiring.
Failure is the back door to success.
Don't be afraid to fail.
Over one of my countries that I love
the most, the land of Germany, when some
young people fail their exam, they actually commit
suicide, even in high school.
If you're a committed believer in Jesus Christ,
if you know God's grace and God's sovereignty,
you work as hard as you can for
that exam.
If you fail it, you just jump up
and down on the table and praise His
name.
You've been delivered from something.
The same thing in the whole area of
romance.
You might be madly in love with some
girl.
You feel you can never live without her
or vice versa.
Your best friend ends up walking off with
her.
Naturally, you feel like weeping or punching or
doing something.
You get in a spiritual mode and jump
on the table and start praising Jesus.
You were delivered.
She's probably going to be an absolute bear
anyway.
So you just start praising God.
All present company, of course, excluded from such
statements.
Failure is the back door to success.
Don't be afraid to fail.
Some of you feel you've already had failure
in your life.
Maybe you're not playing A or B anymore,
right?
You may be playing F.
You've had some big failures.
You've made some wrong turns.
You've been backslidden a while.
You've had a few broken romances, maybe even
a broken marriage.
Maybe you're on plan M.
You know what I say?
Praise God for a big alphabet.
Press on.
I said that at Urbana four years ago.
I tell the audience that thing came unglued.
Because we know it's God's grace.
And that's been emphasized this year as well.
God wants to increase our vision.
God may want to change our vision.
At that moment in my life, through that
failure, He changed the vision.
Here I thought I was going to go
work among the Russians.
And I was diligently learning Russian.
God was going to move me where I
never, ever expected to go.
Great Britain.
You know, my kind of temperament fits in
Great Britain.
You know, like a dinosaur on a ballet
floor.
And I'm loud.
I'm non-British.
I'm way too American.
But somehow God sent me to Britain and
gave me a love for the British people.
It's been my home now for 38 years.
And Britain became the main sending field of
Operation Mobilization.
It was there in a converted bar.
We call them a pub.
And God gave me a vision for a
ship.
People thought this was really bizarre.
So did I.
But as we prayed, as we did some
research and homework, as we got to meet
merchant navy people, because I wasn't into that.
Though I went to Europe initially on the
old Queen Elizabeth.
Tells you how old I am.
The one that ended up in Hong Kong.
You know, doing James Bond movies.
I've seen almost all of those.
And the one thing that's good about James
Bond movies, you can see them a second
time later when you're my age.
It's just like seeing it for the first
time.
Because it's all just so balled up in
your head.
Even whoever played the characters.
And now I know some of you are
going to get in trouble.
I went to a seminar with a guy
who listened to these sexy James Bond films.
But anyway, forgive me for that.
I am a bit of a film buff.
And if you're not into films, you need
to be.
Because there's such a major thing in our
culture.
There's a movie magazine produced by Ted Bear.
Send me an email and they'll send you
a sample.
That reviews all films from Hollywood from a
Christian viewpoint.
You can know how much nudity and swearing
and F.U.C. and these words are
all there before you go.
So you don't have to go.
But there are a lot of great films
coming out.
I'm stuck on airplanes often for 13 hours
at a shot.
And after doing letters and praying for 7
-8 hours, I usually watch a film and
there are great films.
Anyway, that's a separate seminar that I'm not
being allowed to give.
The third word that I leave with you
is the word grace.
That's my favorite word.
This book, Out of the Comfort Zone, is
actually a book about grace in disguise.
It looks like a book about world missions.
And the red-hot disciple-type, surreal, over
-committed characters, they pick up this book.
Boy, Out of the Comfort Zone, go for
it.
But as they read it, it's not quite
what they expected.
Because it's a book about grace.
And it's a book about grace in mission
work, grace in discipleship, grace in reaching the
world with the gospel.
Because there are so many agendas, there are
so many strategies, there are so many visions
that even as missionary workers, we're sometimes at
each other's throats.
And some of you thinking about going into
world missions, you need to understand it's messy.
You need to understand missionaries are ordinary human
beings.
They get in the flesh.
Some of them are impatient.
You may find it very hard to work
under this new leader in this field you've
just gone to.
You may find that your team leader of
your little team, even though he looked real
nice when you first met him, is sort
of a selfish ego-tripper and not somebody
you really want to work with.
And my appeal in this book is that
we need a grace awakening.
We have a lot of talk about grace.
Some of the most ungraceful people I know
talk about grace.
Some of the most pharisaical churches on planet
Earth have the word grace in the name
of the church.
Now, they're usually only talking about being saved
by grace, which I believe in 100%.
And one of my favorite books, I just
happen to have a copy with me, is
Charles Swindoll's book, Grace Awakening, which is in
many different languages.
The first two chapters of this book, which
I found a little boring, are all about
salvation by grace.
And if you don't understand that yet, the
Lord bless you, you can read those chapters.
I started in the middle, guiding others to
freedom, the grace to let others be.
Oh!
And gracious, this is my favorite chapter, graciously
disagreeing and pressing on.
This is how my wife and I have
stayed together for 40 years.
Though another chapter has helped us as well.
The marriage oiled by grace.
This is the greatest Christian book, I believe,
in America in this decade.
Now, competing with it is a newer book,
my good friend Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing
About Grace.
These are in competition, but they're very different.
And you can decide which one is better.
But this is more about, not only grace,
but grace awakening.
You say, what is grace awakening?
Grace awakening is 1 Corinthians 13, exploding in
reality in your life.
That's going to take you out of the
comfort zone of smugness, of selfishness, of Phariseeism,
and make you a radical disciple of Jesus.
It's not firstly location or geography, it's firstly
reality.
It's firstly spirituality.
And that can be true in the streets
of Pittsburgh or Chicago, as well as Calcutta
or Bangkok.
And I'd urge you to make grace a
priority and try to understand the grace awakening
that Swindoll talks about, that the Word of
God talks about, which is also the theme
of my book, which I'm trying to get
into your hands, and I haven't completely succeeded.
It's a call to be big-hearted.
It's a call to really love people in
practice.
It's a call to brokenness.
Have you ever read the book Calvary Road?
If you can't find it here, send me
an email and I'll send you one as
a gift.
Because Calvary Road was a Christian classic up
till about 10 years ago, when there was
a lot less reading among Christians, and being
written by a British author, the book somehow
never got widely distributed in the States.
If you read Calvary Road and don't get
help, don't get blessed, one of the most
influential books in my life, I will apologize
and send you 10 free books.
Calvary Road is written by Roy Hesschen.
Roy Hesschen was an evangelist, but he was
in his comfort zone.
You can be in Christian ministry and be
egocentric.
You can be in Christian ministry and be
selfish.
You can be in Christian ministry and basically
you're living off the nice things that people
may be saying about you.
And he went to Africa at the time
of the East African Revival.
Revival, by the way, is not the end.
Revival is the beginning.
And if you're praying for revival, let me
tell you, if it happens on Saturday, Monday
will be the messiest, toughest, toughest, most difficult
day in your life.
And a lot of the praying for revival
in America, God bless all those who pray,
because we're known as the nation of the
most naive people on planet Earth, it's not
really what sometimes we're praying about.
In fact, when the Bible talks about revival,
and that's the core of Roy Hesschen's book,
it's really talking more about personal revival.
It's talking about the crucified life.
It's talking about you and Jesus.
Revival is Jesus living through you.
This treasure is in earthen vessels.
And we're often calling for the presence of
God.
We're often getting tremendous music to get us
all to feel more Christian.
And I love the music, don't misunderstand me.
But we're to live for Jesus, with or
without the music.
You got a Holy Ghost built-in band.
You got a Holy Ghost built-in violin.
That's my favorite instrument there.
I watch that woman on the violin play.
That's one of the toughest things to learn.
I mean, you go out of your mind
trying to learn that.
I think people have, you know, even killed
trying to learn how to play the violin.
But that's so powerful and so beautiful.
But brothers and sisters, if we're going to
be God's ambassadors, if we're going to be
marathon runners in God's race, we got to
learn to draw on those internal instruments.
They're there when we feel lousy.
They're there when we're hurt.
They're there when we're rejected.
They're there when we fail, like my Soviet
Union failure.
The Inner Harp, A.W. Tozer, one of
my favorite authors, you can find some of
his books here, talks about worship, the missing
jewel of the Evangelical Church.
He didn't have the same view of worship
that people have in 2001 or 2000.
That's okay.
But I believe we can learn from some
of these great saints of yesteryear, like St.
Francis of Sici, or A.W. Tozer, or
Andrew Murray, or Watchman Nee, or Bhat Singh
of India, who just went to be with
the Lord and was one of my major
mentors as I lived in India a number
of years.
It's all of grace.
But grace, functioning in our lives, produces a
grace awakening, which is another way to describe
the Spirit-filled life.
The Spirit-filled life.
And that's my fourth word, the word Holy
Spirit.
If you could turn with me in your
Bibles very quickly as we're battling the clock,
and I want to give a little time
for questions, you could look at the Book
of Acts.
I've done a whole series of 11 messages
on the Book of Acts.
I don't think it's available on the bookstore.
You can take a look.
A lot of my other books are there.
But if you can't find it, send me
an e-mail and I'll send you as
a gift.
If you could send a few pounds or
dollars to pay the postage, that would be
great.
But I'd be thrilled to send you those
11 messages from the Book of Acts, mainly
under the inspiration of John Stott and his
commentary on the Book of Acts.
I was speaking at the Maranatha Christian Conference
Center, one of my favorite states, Michigan.
At least it's in my top 30 group.
And I gave these words.
We don't have time to look at the
whole passage, but looking at Acts 13 right
now, where these five men get this tremendous
vision, and then while they're waiting on God
and worshiping, pick it up at verse 2,
chapter 13, verse 2, while they were worshiping
the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said,
isn't that powerful?
Some of us are reared in more conservative
places, and we hear or read about extreme
things that are done sort of under the
name of the Holy Spirit.
We overreact.
And so sometimes even when you start to
talk about the Holy Spirit, some people get
nervous.
For brothers and sisters, the fullness of the
Holy Spirit, which is the only thing that
can really get us out of our comfort
zone and keep us out of it and
keep us cutting edge in Kingdom work, is
for every believer.
You don't have to have the Pentecostal label
to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Praise God for the great Pentecostal and charismatic
movement.
The growth of that movement, which we work
with, though that's not our particular roots, is
the most phenomenal growth aspect of the Christian
church in the world today.
It's gone from 70 or 80 million, maybe
30, 40 years ago, to 800 million people
who would be Pentecostal and charismatic in places
especially like Latin America and Africa.
One of the things I love about Urbana
is the bringing together of people of different
backgrounds, including those who are known more as
evangelicals, others known more as charismatic.
That started a long time ago.
In fact, Floyd McClung of YWAM and I
were together in a major thing at Urbana
way back in 1986 or 87.
It's exciting.
We find a lot of people don't understand
Operation Mobilization in America because we're European.
And being European, there's more of a mixture.
So about 50% of all the people
on YWAM come from Pentecostal or charismatic churches,
and about 50% come from evangelicals, some
even fundamental churches, from all over the globe.
We're from about 80 different nations, I will
tell you.
People predicted it would never work.
We now have 40 years without hardly any
major disunity.
40 years.
We've had 100,000 people from all those
backgrounds work together.
We have 3,000 on the staff right
now.
We have 300 on one ship, 180 on
our other ship.
You can get info about it at our
exhibit.
Learning to live together in unity.
Our first ship had a Pentecostal captain and
a Plymouth brethren chief engineer.
If you don't know what that's about, well,
blessed be the naive, but believe me, it's
a hard drink.
And I remember them once almost coming to
blows.
Engineers don't get together with captains anyway.
And I was supposedly director.
But I saw the Holy Spirit humble those
men.
I saw them repenting.
I saw them beginning to live in the
light of grace and allowing the Holy Spirit
to fill them.
Billy Graham, who has often spoken at Urbana,
my spiritual father, often talks about the need
to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
D.L. Moody, from the last century, before
there was a lot of talk about all
this, emphasized the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
D.L. Moody, boy, he would look great
in one of these global jackets.
Yeah, secular encyclopedia said of D.L. Moody,
overweight American evangelist who depopulated hell by 2
million souls.
That's not bad.
How are you doing?
Better to be overweight and spirit-filled than
skinny and empty.
That's original.
I never said that before, and I'm probably
not ever worth saying it again.
One day when D.L. Moody was emphasizing
the need to be filled again and again
with the Holy Spirit, a little lady in
the front row raised her hand, and she
said, why do you talk about being filled
again and again?
He looked her in the eye and he
said, Madam, because I leak.
Can any of you relate to that?
Filled with the Spirit on Sunday night, tremendous
meeting, fellowship with the saints, recommit your life.
By Tuesday, a lot of it's leaked away.
Praise God for the free refills.
There's not many things in America that are
better than my adopted country, Great Britain, but
one of the things that's definitely better over
here is the free refills.
In Britain, even to get a coffee cup
filled again, you'll pay.
Maybe a pound.
That's $1.40, so I drink tea.
But the fullness of the Holy Spirit is
for every believer, and I'd urge you not
to leave Urbana until you know you're filled
with the Holy Spirit of God.
We all have the same gifts.
I don't believe it means that we all
have some great emotional experience.
Some people have more crises.
I'm a more crises-oriented person.
I've had too many crises.
I thought I was going to come into
this midlife crisis.
Have you ever heard about that?
You're too young.
But guys like me, we've got these books,
midlife crisis.
I was doing great until I read this
book.
All these horrible things that were going to
happen to me.
I even ended up taking up golf.
This was supposed to help me through the
midlife crisis.
Golf for my temperament, that is a crisis.
I had to develop my own way of
playing.
I go late in the day when people
are leaving.
I jog between holes.
I make my own route.
Forget those numbers.
I managed to survive.
Generally, I have to play alone.
Be ye filled with the Holy Spirit.
Another great mistake we make about the Holy
Spirit is we think that somehow when we're
filled with the Spirit, when we're really spiritual,
then more or less we're going to sort
of be perfect.
Not quite, but we're going to be fairly
together.
The fact of the matter is it's a
pilgrimage.
I'm still struggling with some of the things
I struggled with when I was your age.
It's a pilgrimage.
It's a pilgrimage of grace.
It's a pilgrimage of repentance and brokenness and
forgiveness.
Here's something I hope you'll remember.
No matter how filled you are with the
Holy Spirit, you're still incredibly human.
You'll still have to go to the toilet.
You'll still need to blow your nose occasionally.
You'll still probably stand up someday in front
of your friends and forget to zip your
fly.
No matter how filled you are with the
Holy Spirit, you're incredibly human.
That has so helped me because I was
trying to be other people.
I was trying to be sort of a
combination of Buck Singh, Andrew Murray, Billy Graham
and Watchman Nee, which of course could drive
any thinking person, especially from New Jersey, completely
out of his mind.
It was a glorious day in my life
when I accepted myself.
I wish I were black.
I wish I were a woman.
I sometimes wish I were just a dog,
but here I am.
George Verwer, son of a Dutch immigrant, a
bit too loud, way too much energy, gets
on people's nerves.
Even my dear wife, she looked at me,
I remember years ago, she said, darling, looking
at you makes me feel really tired.
We just tried to have lunch together.
You know how much time they give you
for lunch on a day of fasting?
The fasting caught me by surprise.
We were going to have lunch with a
non-converted friend.
Actually, my wife's uncle, he canceled out because
of the snow.
Then another guy called and said, hey, you
want to have lunch?
And so we had a little, it was
actually breakfast because we never got breakfast.
It was an omelet.
In the middle of it, my friend Jeff
calls me, hey, the seminar, we're all here.
What do I watch?
I tell you, it's amazing.
We wouldn't have made it here on time
except the man in charge of driving me
around just happened to go by this little,
tiny, dumpy diner where we were having this
weird omelet.
And God's providence, we jumped in the car,
and who knows what's going to happen in
connection with this omelet by the time I
get to the third seminar.
How many words have I given you?
The fifth word.
I think we just had the Holy Spirit.
That was preceded by grace.
But the fifth word is, I know, not
going to make you so happy.
You may not even want to write it
down.
You may even get angry.
But it's the word discipline.
And let me just say this as a
great proponent of grace.
I even push books like Ragamuffin Gospel.
Last time I was at Urbana, I helped
put Ragamuffin Gospel on the map.
This guy, Brendan Manning.
Some people even accuse the book of having
heresy.
There's articles written against him, written against the
book.
I got people hassling me because I'm pushing
this book.
You know, I didn't even complete reading the
book.
It's a great, I only read parts.
I'm more into parts than wholes.
That didn't sound right.
But the cover to me was so powerful.
Ragamuffin Gospel.
Because I've always felt I'm a bit of
a ragamuffin.
A ragamuffin, if you go back to the
dictionary, came out of Charles Dickens, England.
It's a little kid on the road.
He's only got one sock.
The other one's got a hole in it.
His nose is running.
His hair is uncombed.
He's got a torn shirt and dirty trousers.
And he's there in the corner.
He's trying to, you know, like Charles Dickens
film, Oliver, Oliver.
Oh, everybody's going to see that.
He's trying to get some money in his
cup.
That's a ragamuffin.
Well, the Word of God teaches all have
sinned and come short of the glory of
God.
We're all ragamuffins.
And I believe after we're saved, we're saved
ragamuffins.
And that has so helped me to understand
people.
So many people I had such high expectation
for.
One of the things that's going to blow
some of you apart spiritually.
I'll just predict it and I'm not even
a prophet.
You have unrealistic expectation.
Maybe about your parents.
Maybe about your church.
Maybe about your inner varsity leader.
I'm very involved with the Christian Union Movement
in Great Britain.
Ministering in inner varsity chapters for 38 years
nonstop.
Probably more than any person in the nation
except maybe John Stott and one or two
others.
And I can tell you many of our
inner varsity chapters called Christian Unions.
They get deep problems because of unrealistic expectation.
What God's going to do in the next
month as we pray and fast.
Especially if we fast.
Boy, that really gets God moving.
And by the end of the term, you
got people at each other's throats.
You got people discouraged.
You got some immorality that usually comes in
when people do get discouraged.
And so my plea.
My plea is that we understand the message
of grace.
And yet grace without discipline can easily lead
to disgrace.
The key out of your comfort zone verse
is from Jesus repeated in almost every gospel.
If any person come after me, let him
deny self, take up the cross every day
and follow me.
That's so basic.
That's so bottom line.
We need to remind ourself of that in
the morning.
That's how we become better husbands.
When we deny self.
That's how we become better wives.
That's how we become better fathers, better students,
better learners.
It is not self-denial.
It is not asceticism.
It has to be kept in balance with
all the other great verses.
About all the riches we have in Christ
Jesus.
About God supplying all your needs.
When I was a young student, I especially
overwhelmed by the challenge of the poor.
And by certain things I saw in the
New Testament.
I especially started to preach the message of
forsaking all.
When I was a student at Moody, people
would meet me.
They just start forsaking their possessions.
They brought them to my room.
I opened a store in my room at
Moody Bible Institute selling people's possessions.
To get money for missions.
People would come and buy things.
After they bought it, we'd give them the
message.
Some of them would bring the same item
back.
Because they felt it was bad that they
had bought that.
And they didn't really need it.
Then it spread to Wheaton College.
And things really went bizarre out at Wheaton.
And we made a lot of mistakes.
Because we overemphasized one truth and failed to
bring it in balance by other truths.
Our big verse was Luke 14, 33.
Except you forsake all that you have, you
can't be my disciple.
But we didn't.
Philippians comes much later.
We didn't get that far.
My God will supply all of your needs
according to His riches and glory by Christ
Jesus.
I'd urge you.
This is my next word.
To seek balance in all of these things.
Even as you go to different seminars.
Even as some main stage speakers, we say
in England, may seem to contradict one another.
It's often more paradox than contradiction.
Can I repeat that?
It's often more paradox than contradiction.
God is leading different people in different ways.
Though I'm trying to challenge people to the
1040 window.
Though my first passion is the millions.
About 20% of all the people in
the world that have never once heard.
That is my passion.
I want to talk about that.
I want to preach about that.
I want to challenge people to go to
the Muslim world.
That's where I've spent a lot of my
life.
If I meet someone and they tell me
God's calling him to Hollywood to go into
the ministry of film for the kingdom.
I'll give him a hug and say praise
God.
If someone else comes to me and say
they're going to take over the local Wal
-Mart and give the profits to World Evangelism
or whatever.
I'll give them a hug.
If someone else comes to me and says
they're going into politics.
I'll give them a hug.
If someone says God's leading them to stay
in their own hometown in Boogadoonga, northern Minnesota
and be a farmer.
I say hallelujah.
God's leading different people in different ways.
But I want the privilege of being able
to share my vision.
And you need the privilege of sharing your
vision.
And that's why the answer to that is
Grace Awakening.
The answer is to state things in a
more balanced way where other people are not
made to feel like they're second class citizens.
And we can learn how to communicate in
a Grace Awakening way.
This is why I see more results in
this stage of my life than I did
when I was 22.
Though God was using me in my high
school when I was only 19.
Because already the message of 1 Corinthians 13
was becoming a major factor in my life.
If it wasn't for coming to understand biblical
balance.
And what it is to live at the
center of a lot of biblical tension.
I would not be here this afternoon.
I wouldn't have made it.
Because I'm a natural extremist.
And to find balance you don't have to
forsake good extremes.
But you have to let them come under
the control of the Holy Spirit.
You have to let them be brought into
balance by other major scriptures.
And for me learning this book and growing
in a knowledge of the word is a
lifetime pilgrimage.
Do not think of us, especially those of
us who speak there on the main stage,
that we are some kind of special people.
Please do not think of us as some
kind of evangelical superstars.
I've had people call me that.
We are just such needy people.
We are so ordinary.
But God has given us gifts.
God has given us, in my case, 45
years of experience.
Every single day walking in the power of
God's grace.
We are therefore responsible to share that.
I didn't even want to come to Urbana.
I prefer to stay in England right after
Christmas.
Because we have Boxing Day.
And as British people, Christmas time is family
time.
We don't go to conferences after Christmas in
British culture.
They have a big conference in Europe over
in the Netherlands.
British people traditionally never go there.
I'm in a campaign to try to get
them to go there.
We had 180 out of 9,000 people
that went to the big Urbana of Europe
called DEMA.
The leader of it's here, Trevor Gregory, he's
British.
Hardly any British people go.
Because in Britain we stay home at Christmas.
Even the students, many of them, stay home.
Of course, there are many exceptions.
So praise God.
That word balance is very, very important.
And then my final word is proactive.
I know that's out of date, used too
much.
It's a business word.
Some spiritual people don't like it.
The verse that comes to my mind as
I bring this to a close and open
for questions.
I hope we got 10 minutes for questions.
Be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the
work of the Lord, knowing that your labor
is never in vain in the Lord.
There were Paul and Barnabas on this team
that were sent out in Acts 13.
But there was another guy.
Did you spot him there in verse 5
or 6?
His name was John Mark and he was
a helper, it says in some translations.
He was an assistant.
And in the work of God, for every
dynamic speaker, every dynamic leader, every dynamic church
planter, we need many helpers.
Most of the people who initially came on
Operation Mobilization, about 100,000 of them now,
they just came as helpers.
Came to work in the engine room of
the ship.
Came to go door to door with literature
in Paris or to help meet people's physical
needs in the back streets of Bombay or
in the middle of Central Asia.
They were just helpers like John Mark.
That's such a beautiful passage in Acts 13
because it shows failure.
It shows failure.
It didn't work.
They had to send John Mark home.
He failed.
But he bounced back.
Later, Barnabas said, let's bring John Mark.
What did Paul say?
No way, Jose.
Paul was choleric, temperament, a little bit impatient
probably.
Barnabas was a more loving, grace-awakened kind
of person.
Paul hadn't read the book yet.
They split.
They went their separate ways.
Later on, Paul admitted, maybe John Mark would
be helpful.
Isn't it wonderful?
That there's so much about failure in the
Word of God.
One of my closest friends is a man
who was going to speak at Urbana once
and last minute some things went wrong and
it was all canceled.
None of us will ever forget that or
are linked with intervarsity.
Through that failure, he became one of my
closest friends.
His name is Gordon McDonald, who God used
to write one of the most off-the
-wall great books in the history of the
church, Rebuilding Your Broken World.
Brothers and sisters, I stand before you, not
as a director or founder of a great
mission society.
I stand before you as a needy ragamuffin
who's failed the Lord many, many times with
my wife, with my kids, with my movement.
But every day, I experience the grace of
God.
Every day, I discover He still loves me
with all my unlovingness and my impatience.
And I know that if a character like
me, with all my struggles, even doubting the
faith, even doubting the very existence of God,
can live in the power of God's grace
every day for 45 years, what will be
your excuse, especially after coming to this seminar?
God bless you.
Let's pray.
I think a few of you know that
my dad died this year.
And now my wife's mother just died two
days ago.
We were just with her as she was
dying, but had to leave before she actually
transferred to Gloria, a wonderful woman.
We had to go right from here on
the first back to the funeral.
Lord, I just thank you for this opportunity
to share my heart.
And Lord, we know that getting out of
the comfort zone isn't perhaps what we think.
It's not really that uncomfortable because there's grace.
There's your Holy Spirit.
There's ministry.
There's fulfillment.
There's the Holy Spirit working in our hearts,
bringing the fruit.
And it includes a lot of joy.
It includes victorious life.
It includes that abundant life spoken about in
John's Gospel.
I have company and I have life, and
you may have it more abundantly.
Lord, help us to be proactive.
Help us as we count the cost, as
we see the problems, as we feel intimidated
and weak, to somehow go for it anyway.
To be those persevering, proactive marathon runners right
to the end of the race.
For we ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
We've got 10 minutes for questions.
Feel free to ask anything you want.
You can put me on the spot.
I love it.
I do a lot of television and radio.
They put you on the spot, try to
make you look like a real idiot.
And it's great training.
And I may not be able to answer
the question, but before you go storming out
of here...
Or is that the end?
Does that bell mean the end?
No, that's a college bell or something.
We do have more copies of the book
that will be given as you go out.
See Jeff.
Jeff's pretty tall.
Every year for 40 years I've had a
student working with me.
He's been one of the greatest blessings in
my life.
Jeff is the present...
well, he's a graduate now.
And of the 40 people that travel with
me, work with me, live with me, almost
every single one of them is going on
for Gone Today.
So I challenge you to, you know, get
somebody to mentor you, get somebody to travel
with.
Team up.
Who wants to ask the first question?
Okay, forget it.
Second question.
First question, it's always hard to get that.
You got the seven words?
One year from now, seven free books if
you send me an email.
The man with the lovely hat.
I'm a hat person by the way, I
don't know what I did with my hat.
Go ahead.
When you're filled with the Holy Spirit, I
believe you will see some of the fruit.
It won't all come at once because that
would blow you away, but you'll start to
see the fruit.
Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness,
temperance, against such there's no law.
People around you will start to see fruit.
You will also have the witness of the
Spirit of God in your heart.
That's a little bit mystical, a little bit
unexplainable, but it's a reality.
It's not there every hour of the day.
There are times when it's there, especially when
you're worshiping.
There's times when you feel blah because you're
human.
And you'll also begin to bear fruit.
You'll begin to see people touched through your
life, through your ministry.
There's different degrees of anointing.
The anointing of the Spirit is a whole
separate subject, but you'll start to feel and
experience something of the anointing, and lives will
be touched through your ministry.
There'll be a lot more peace in your
heart.
However, you'll continue to have struggles.
You'll continue to have doubts.
Great faith is not in the absence of
doubts and struggles and tears, failure, disappointment, but
in the midst of all those things and
much more.
There are great books on this subject.
I'll be happy to send you one.
Someone else.
Yes.
Part of the vision started to come before
I was a Christian.
The question was, how did the vision develop
in my life?
This lady prayed for me.
She sent me the Gospel of John.
I joined the organization that distributed that Gospel
called Pocket Testament League.
They were an organization trying to give the
Gospel out to the whole world.
I got interested in that before I was
born again.
That was the beginning of the vision.
Before that, as a non-Christian human being,
influenced by Christian culture and nominal Christianity, I
had a concern for the poor.
I had concern for alcoholics because my grandfather
was an alcoholic.
To make a long story short, it was
evolutionary.
Forgive the term.
The big thing after my conversion was my
high school.
After that, it was more New York City.
After that, I traveled across the whole of
America distributing Gospels.
I was still in business.
I used to sell firefighting equipment.
I'd light gas fires on people's front porches,
put them out with my little extinguisher, then
I'd take out the Word of God and
try to go for the fires of hell.
That's the truth.
Then, as I began reading, as I got
exposure to missionaries and missionary materials, it just
began to explode.
I went to Mexico, and ever since then,
it's gone off the charts.
I left university, a liberal arts college, which
was great for a couple of years, but
I left that, went to Moody Bible Institute,
where I got overdosed with all kinds of
missionary exposure, people coming back like Lionel Gurney
from the Muslim world.
It just grew and grew.
It's still growing.
When I've been through the book Operation World
three times, we actually publish it, so I
sort of had to read it, but every
time I go through that book, my vision
increased.
The holistic vision, which I always thought was
for other groups, not OM, 15 or 20
years ago, OM made a huge change and
became a dynamic, holistic ministry, so that now
we have a much better understanding of the
kingdom, where the business person and the arts
person and the church-planting missionary and the
pastor and the guy who collects the garbage,
it all fits together for the kingdom.
Boy, questions get me so excited.
I was fortunate.
My generation had a lot of people going
ahead of us, starting just to write those
books about family and acknowledging problems with family
on the mission field.
And I read that material, and our whole
movement was born in the 60s, really, with
a sense of family's priority.
And so we made changes, even where people
lived, on the basis of their family.
My associate director, Peter Maiden, who will probably
take my job two years from now, has
never left his hometown.
When he took on this job, I felt
his family, his kids, his church, he was
an elder in his church.
Even though I wanted him to come to
London, where I was, I said, stay up
there in Carlisle, that's way up in the
boonies.
If you know anything about Great Britain, it's
almost in Scotland.
And that proved to be the right place
for him.
So that's not always possible in mission work,
even like our ships.
But family is important.
I did have some failure.
I didn't have this grace awakening in me
in the first ten years of my marriage.
It was very slow in coming.
I hurt a lot of people.
I hurt my wife.
Surely hurt my kids.
I was a pioneer, but again, God's grace
for failures.
Dr. Schaefer was a great influence in my
life, together with hundreds of other people.
And I remember Dr. Schaefer, as we walked
along the park one day in London, sharing
the struggle between how much time to take
in and how much to give out.
And I learned.
I learned from other men and women of
God.
I learned how to relax.
I learned how to get...
I go, whatever I do, I go big
time.
Recreation, my big thing, roller coasters.
I've been on over 150 of the most
wild roller coasters in the planet.
Tremendous for the prayer life.
So, again, balance.
Balance is very important in all this.
And realizing that what's true of one person
of one temperament may not be true of
another person for another temperament.
And my life and what God's done in
my life, in this ministry, has been a
lot easier for me than it has been
for my wife.
Very different temperament.
Rougher background.
When I met her, three psychosomatic illnesses.
Father killed in the war.
Stepfather threw her out of the house.
It was a long pilgrimage for her.
But I wish she were here speaking instead
of me.
Instead, she's over there working on her word
processor.
She's a full-time secretary, and that's her
profession.
Because she is a phenomenal trophy of God's
grace to a person who had a lot
more hurt, a lot more hurt than I
did when God saved me.
Just one more question.
You've been a wonderful audience.
And I hope all of you got that
free book.
If not, get it as you leave.
But one more question.
Yes, right here.
What has been your greatest experience of doing
mission work?
I think my greatest experience next to just
fellowship with God and worshiping God.
I am a worshiper.
My kind of temperament.
We're the last to learn how to worship
because we're so impatient.
And we want to tell God, what are
you doing sitting around up there?
We've got a job to do.
But you repent of that bad attitude and
press on.
But I think next to that, it was
seeing the birth of the ship ministry.
That was a vision God gave me.
It seemed impossible.
And when that ship, Lagos 1, there's a
whole book about it, was born in 1970,
71.
My wife sailed around the whole of Africa
on that old ship, shaking all the way,
wondering if it was going to sink, and
turning the next corner.
Eventually, we did lose that ship 17 years
later on the rocks in the Beagle Channel,
right down here on the bottom of my
jacket.
But that first year on the ship, seeing
God put all that together, the engine room,
the relationships, arriving in India where I was
no longer allowed back into India.
I was no longer allowed visas.
When the ship came in, I was given
a shore pass.
And as the ship came in India, I
just wept and wept and wept for joy
that I could get back to India, my
first love.
Today, we have 700 workers in India.
We've given the Word of God to 500
million people in the land of India.
And it's a story that would fill 10
books.
God bless you.
I look forward to your emails.