Turn your Bibles now to Mark, the Gospel
of Mark, the 12th chapter, verse 28.
I'll ask George Marley to read the passage
to save me a little voice, and I'll
be doing this also in other meetings, so
it's good for you to open your Bibles
and be ready to read the passage of
28 through 34.
And one of the scribes came, having heard
them reaching together, and perceiving that he had
answered them well, asked him, Which is the
first commandment of all?
And Jesus answered him, The first of all
the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one Lord, and thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy mind.
This is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
There is none other commandment greater than these.
And the scribe said unto him, Well, master,
thou hast said the truth.
For there is one God, and there is
none other but he.
And to love him with all thy heart,
and with all thy understanding, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind, And
when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he
said unto him, Thou art not far from
the kingdom of God.
And no man after that neareth to ask
him any question.
Heavenly Father, please reveal to us what you're
trying to say in this passage.
Open our minds, our hearts, and show us
really what the need is, in the world
and in us tonight.
We ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
I believe with all my heart that if
you miss that which I will feebly try
to say tonight, you will miss what I
believe God is trying to say through the
scriptures and through O.M. If he wants
to say anything through us, as members of
the body of Jesus Christ, if there's any
uniqueness in what the Lord has done and
is doing in this world, I believe it's
this.
And there have been people who have been
with us one year, two years, three years,
still missed it.
And that's many times the reason I like
to see them stay on.
Because if there's anything that hurts me, is
when someone comes into this work, goes out
of this work, and never comes to see
this message.
The message of love.
The message of the two most important commandments.
There are no more important commandments than these.
And it's given very straight from the Lord
himself.
And it's very clear.
They came to him, the scribes, and they
said, which is the first commandment?
And Jesus said, the Lord our God is
one Lord.
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, with all thy soul,
with all thy mind, with all thy strength.
This is the first commandment.
Most Christians spend most of their life on
the periphery of what the Bible speaks about.
Churches have divided.
People have fought.
Wars have been fought.
Churches have been divided.
Every possible thing has happened within the ranks
of the church, over the peripheries, the details
of biblical teaching.
And you can remember, and need to remember,
any good orator can take minor doctrines and
thump so hard you'll think it's the major
truth in the Bible.
We've all heard it.
He can speak loud.
He can go into antics.
He can weep.
I know preachers who can turn tears on
like faucets and get us to think that
some minor truth is the most important thing
in all the world.
But let us calmly and let us intellectually
approach the scriptures without our biases and our
prejudices and our bends, and let's see what
the scriptures say, and we're going to discover
that certain truths in the Bible are emphasized
to an unbelievable degree, whereas other truths are
only minor, are only touched upon.
Now, no one can argue the fact that
the deity of Christ is a major Bible
truth.
No one would argue the fact, as far
as I'm concerned, that the crucifixion and the
resurrection of Jesus Christ is major Bible truth,
and the second coming of Christ is major
Bible truth.
But I think we'd have a little bit
of trouble saying that some of our other
little doctrines are major Bible truths, and I'm
not going to get into what little doctrines
they are because some of you will get
too upset over that, and then I will
be able to get through with you in
the positive message I want to give because
if I just have to touch on one
of your favorite little doctrines and say that
it's not major truth, you'll probably be all
upset the rest of the night and won't
hear what God has to say because this
is what happens.
This is why it's so hard to speak,
and I know some of the greatest preachers
in Britain today.
They can't speak to their congregations.
It's impossible.
I know one of the leading preachers in
this country today, and every time he gets
to preach, the only thing they do is
compare him with the preacher who was there
before him and who they all idolize.
And although he's a tremendous preacher, he's not
quite as good as that one who was
one of the well-known Bible expositors of
the past century, and so this man hasn't
got a chance.
So, sooner or later, he'll be sacked by
the deacons, and someone else will be brought
in, and then they'll sack him and bring
someone else in all in an attempt to
get a man who's dead.
And this is the same way with our
truth.
We get on our little hobby horse of
truth that we've got our favorite six verses
on and sometimes less verses than that, and
we ride it and ride it and ride
it until the horse falls into the ground.
We fall into the ground.
But it's obvious if you'll study the Bible
in a purely objective way that you'll see
that this message of love is absolutely the
basis of the teaching of Jesus Christ and
the teaching of the apostles.
I don't believe we can separate Christ from
his teachings.
Now, this is one of the great errors
that we're talking over here about Christ and
about being crucified with Christ, about letting Christ
live within us, and Christ is all in
all, and it all becomes very wonderful.
It sounds terrific, but we can't separate this
Christ whom we say we love, whom we
call our all in all, from his teachings,
from what he simply told us to do.
You get some people who they don't like
you to teach and to say, well, this
is what Christ said.
We need to do it.
They always want to refer you back to
some great truth like Christ is in you
and let him do it through you.
Now, if this was true, why did he
give us all the teaching?
So we can have Bible colleges?
So we can have concordances and Bible dictionaries?
Of course not.
So in Christianity, it is not a matter
of discovering some magic formula, Christ in me,
filled with the Spirit, any little formula.
That is not the basic issue, because otherwise
the Bible would not have been written.
God could have just given us a postcard,
and on the postcard he could have said,
just believe in me, die to self, and
say I am crucified with Christ every morning
after tea.
But he didn't do that.
He gave us a whole book to study,
that we might have the whole counsel of
God, and Paul said he shunned or he
failed not to declare the whole counsel of
God.
I believe that as we have an initial
experience in our life, and we come into
this rest of faith, and we realize the
principle of Christ in us, and these are
great truths, great truths, I believe that as
this happens, we come to the place where
God can begin to teach us.
The experience, a deeper life experience, or a
commitment experience, or whatever crisis experience God has
brought you to, is not the end.
It is the beginning.
At that point, you now become teachable.
The Spirit of God now can lead you
into all things.
You do not become led already into all
things.
Now the Spirit of God can lead you
into all things.
Now you can be taught about the revolution
of love.
Now you're ready for the revolution.
Before that time you weren't ready.
It all bounced off.
But now you're ready.
It's not the end, it's the beginning.
So if you've had any crisis this summer,
if you've had any experience where God has
broken you down and filled you up, you're
at the beginning.
You're at the beginning.
Now you must learn the walk with Jesus
Christ.
The Word of God says, as many as
believe in Him, let Him walk even as
He walked.
Let us stop spiritualizing this.
I'm convinced this must involve studying the life
of Jesus Christ and seeing how He walked.
Otherwise, why all this Bible, why this terrific
amount of information about the life of Jesus
Christ and His love and His compassion?
Why do we have Matthew 9 where we
see Jesus Christ going into all the villages?
Why do we have this story of the
Good Samaritan?
What is this, all Sunday school material?
Flannel graph?
No, this is basic teaching, basic truth, that
God expects us as Christians to study and
to apply and to live, not spiritualize and
sort of put over here in an outer
compartment so that our message and our hymns
and everything else is over here and all
these other things are over there.
Now many of you have heard me say
that I believe in Christianity today and now
I'm speaking of Evangelical Bible Christianity, not Modernism.
I have no hope for Modernism at all.
But Evangelical Bible-believing Christianity is degenerate everywhere.
Everywhere.
I'm convinced of this.
I've been convinced of this for nine years.
It's the only reason I'm still Christian.
Because if what I had met was the
real thing, I would have cast it off
and become a Communist.
If what I had encountered in Bible school
were real Christianity, I'd be a militant anti
-Christian.
If what I've accounted in more than 500
churches that I've ministered in all over the
world were Christianity, I would be militantly anti
-Christian.
But what I've encountered and what you have
encountered is not the real thing.
It is the degenerate form of the real
thing and within that degenerate form, that degenerate
state, there are real sparks of the real
thing.
And we've all seen that happen.
We've all seen, in some of the most
dead churches, real rays of light.
And in most churches today, even in Evangelical
churches, it's a small minority.
It's a small minority who have any desire
to witness, any real desire to pray, any
desire for missions, any desire for real spiritual
things.
Now, when George Berwer, especially nine years ago,
states that Christianity is degenerate, well, I mean,
about everything is hurled at him, including with
the kitchen sink.
Who is this young pipsqueak saying that Christianity
is degenerate?
What does he think?
All the churches are dead?
And everything comes in up.
Of course, when a man of God who's
lived five decades longer than I have and
is esteemed as a great world leader, like
A.W. Tozer makes those statements, well, then
people, of course, well, they begin to listen,
you see.
So, rather than me just saying things, maybe
I'd better read some quotations.
But let me just, let me just read
one or two little quotes that I put
in my Bible that I think will give
you an idea of what I'm saying.
This is what A.W. Tozer described in
one of his books, the situation within the
Christian church was.
This is from the book of God and
Men on page 11.
Here's what he says.
But the spiritual climate into which many modern
Christians are born does not make for vigorous
spiritual growth.
Indeed, the whole evangelical world is to a
large extent unfavorable to healthy Christianity.
We may as well face it.
The whole level of spirituality among us is
low.
We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the
incentive to see higher plateaus in the things
of the Spirit is all but gone.
We are making converts to an effigy type
of Christianity that bears little resemblance to that
of the New Testament.
The average so-called Bible Christian in our
times is but, if you think my words
are strong, a wretched parody on true sainthood.
Yet, we put millions of dollars behind movements
to perpetuate this degenerate form of religion and
attack the man who dares to challenge the
wisdom of it.
It's only been since the death of Tozer
that he has been declared and esteemed as
one of the greatest saints with the deepest
insight into truth in the past 20 years.
Now, it's not only Tozer who has said
this.
Other men who have studied, who have lived
longer than any of us, have come to
this conclusion that the Church has been disease
-stricken.
A spiritual cancer has invaded the Church in
every possible road so that today to find
true, living, evangelical, loving, life-giving Christianity is
almost impossible.
And this is why the majority of Christian
youth are turning from the Church in the
20th century.
This is why the majority of people today
are discouraged about religious matters.
This is why our nations have basically overthrown
Bible truth and evangelical Christianity and are accepting
everything else that comes its way and all
kinds of things are coming as a substitute.
This is why Mormonism, with their little center
in Salt Lake City, not so little anymore,
can send forth more ambassadors for Mormonism than
all the evangelical, Bible-believing, hell-heaven-believing
churches in the United States of America.
This is why the Jehovah Witnesses produce more
literature than all the evangelical publishers put together
outside of English-speaking countries.
This is why the seven-day Adventists and
the Christian scientists make us look like we've
got sleeping sickness because a disease has hit
us, a cancer.
And I'm convinced, and I've said this many,
many years, that our situation in the 20th
century is worse than the situation that Luther
was put into in his day.
In his day, the people walked in darkness
because there was no light.
Now, that isn't so bad, is it?
When you walk in darkness when there's no
light, that sounds like a pretty logical result.
There was no Bible.
There were no Bible conferences.
There was no Keswick.
There were no gospel films.
There were no gospel recordings.
There neither existed Dr. Schaffer or anybody else.
All there were were dead churches reading Bible
verses in Latin and money-hungry, overgrown priests
who were living off the fat of the
land and a hundred other things to make
the situation so black that no light could
be seen.
Luther came in with a ray of light,
a beam of light, and we knew what
happened.
What is our situation today?
We, we walk in the midst of darkness
surrounded by great light.
This is impossible.
And yet this is the 20th century situation
of the Church.
We've got books.
Do you know that a New Evangelical book
comes off the press approximately every couple of
hours?
That's right.
Every couple of hours we get a new
stack of truth.
Folded between some cardboard, written usually by someone
who has not experienced what he's written.
Needless to say, he makes good money because
they pay high.
I even got $300 for my literature manual
and if you get paid $300 for that
piece of nothing, imagine what you do when
you write a good book.
And there's money in writing Evangelical books.
They're the easiest books to get published because
Evangelical publishers divide so quickly.
And when they divide, they each start their
own publishing house.
And all you have to do is go
to the competitor and he'll publish your book.
And I can get any book I write,
if it was pure rubbish, I could get
it published.
And so we have this great, mammoth amount
of Christian books coming off the press, one
every couple of hours.
You haven't even seen 98% of the
books.
I could just pile them, I could fill
this whole room with Evangelical books.
It's just unbelievable.
You can't even imagine it.
You can't even imagine.
I discovered new publishers, though I thought this
was my business some years ago, I'm discovering
new publishers.
And there's hundreds of publishers I'm sure I'm
not even conscious with because every nomination has
a dozen different publishers of all different kinds
and pamphlets, pamphlets.
Like I say, you can fill the room.
Truth!
Truth a la Mount Everest.
Missionary films, every possible kind of film you
can ever dream of.
We've seen them, we've wept at them, the
Bob Pierce varieties, the Billy Graham varieties, the
poetic types, the types that show Jesus bleeding
on the cross, the types that show homes
being wonderfully delivered as Jesus comes walking in
the door, all the terrific dramas, everything to
move the Church.
The Church loves to pile in to see
the films and remains unmoved.
Slides, phonograph records, tape recordings.
I used to sell audio Bible studies.
Fantastic.
I was really convinced about this.
Back a number of years ago, before I
think I went to Mexico, this was it.
I thought this was the answer.
This was Bible school in your home.
And it cost about 60 quid for this
audio Bible studies.
All the best Bible teachers on record.
Never have to leave your home again.
Follow up all the churches and listen to
your phonograph player.
And we had just unbelievable records.
And I used to go from home, and
I sold these things.
I won the award for top salesman one
week and then sold Dale on the idea,
and he won it for the three weeks
after that.
Made all kinds of money.
Because people bought these audio Bible studies at
60 quid a shot so that they could
get all this Bible teaching.
And they could then sit in their living
room and listen to Billy Graham one minute
and Bob Pierce the next minute and Dr.
Tenney the next minute.
We've got everything.
You can't imagine the number of organizations I'm
in touch with.
You know, there's several thousand evangelical organizations in
the world, but there's several thousand.
And we have separate organizations to put up
posters, separate organizations for putting stamps on the
backs of envelopes, special organizations for children, special
organizations for adults, for teenagers, for middle ages,
for old ages.
We get a multitude of organizations out of
all of it.
There comes light.
There come challenges.
Who can doubt the challenges, the challenge of
various Bible conferences, the challenge of finding the
challenge of Billy Graham, all these things I'm
in knowing.
Bob, what a position this puts us in.
What a position.
How different from those in the Reformation or
before the Reformation.
We, with all this light streaming at us,
just what you're receiving in this conference, just
what you've read in these books, is more
than all those pre-Reformation people have ever
had a chance to even dream about, and
even many people after the Reformation.
Light, light, light, light.
Bob, many of us still, with all this
light, live in darkness.
And in John it says that if we
do not love our brother, we are in
darkness still.
And this is the message.
This is the message that you've heard from
the beginning.
That you believe in Christ and that you
love one another.
And you know what we've done in the
20th century?
We've just cut the last half off.
This is the message that you believe in
Christ.
And we want to separate believing from loving.
And when you separate believing from loving, it's
like separating your head from your body.
And if you think you can operate without
your head, or if you think you can
operate without your body, you've got real, you're
really deceived.
And if Christianity thinks it can operate without
love, it's just completely deceived.
No matter how much truth, you see, it's
the head without the heart.
It's the head without the body.
No matter how much truth, no matter how
much orthodoxy, no matter how many final verses
you memorize, no matter how many people you
can convince, you can start churches, you can
start a new sect.
But without love, you're bodiless.
May God show us this is the message,
that we love God and that we love
one another.
And unless we in this work experience this
revolution of love, which starts with a crisis,
I believe some kind of a crisis, it
might be a quiet crisis, and continues with
the process of daily breaking, of daily transformation,
without this revolution of love, there is no
hope to make an impact in the 20th
century.
What is the 20th century man interested in
tonight?
He's not interested in our Bibles anymore, especially
in the countries where the Bible has been
for so many years.
He's not interested basically in our open air
meeting.
You can go out in the streets in
England, as I have done, and you can
preach until your lungs are gone, and if
you get a few people to stop.
I know I preached in the streets of
Bromley and hardly got anyone to stop.
I did have one girl, she was dressing
in model behind me in the show window,
she heard, came out and was quite stirred.
But this isn't the usual case.
Basically the world today, the secular materialistic brainwashed
20th century world, is concerned about things that
they can see and touch.
And spiritual things are much harder for the
20th century man to perceive than the 18th
century man.
We're in a completely different age.
We have been completely brainwashed into a materialistic
age in a materialistic way, so that we
no longer can perceive.
We no longer, even those of us who
are Christians, are able to respond to religious
truth like our great grandfathers.
And the message that Jonathan Edwards gave in
his day that brought people to a crushing
realization of God, and a holy fear of
God, and a trembling before God, relieved the
20th century man completely dry.
It was Dr. Schaeffer who focused this in
on me one day when we were in
Hyde Park together speaking.
And he said, all of us in the
20th century have been affected by the brainwash.
We have all been affected by modern advertising,
modern materialistic gimmicks, and everything of this age,
the age of relativity, in terms not only
of atoms, because that wouldn't be too bad,
but in terms of morals.
And all of us have been affected by
it from our very childhood, and that's why
some of you find it hard to respond
to spiritual things.
And you can hear a message on hell,
and you're cold as a fish.
You can hear a message on the glories
of heaven, and it doesn't stir you, it
doesn't move you, you've been brainwashed.
And God no longer in our generation has
the spiritual foundation to build upon.
That's why it's going to take five times
as much a revolution.
That's why it's going to take people who
are more disciplined, more concerned, more rugged, and
more desperate for this revolution than it ever
did two generations back, when people had a
foundation of morals, and a foundation of truth,
and a foundation of background, of spiritual background
that is nonexistent today.
And I'm convinced that the only hope for
the 20th century is a revolution of love.
And I don't use those words just because
I was the first one perhaps to begin
to use it.
But I use them because to my mind
it sums up the message of Jesus Christ.
It says in the Berkeley translation of the
New Testament, which is a very solid translation
by evangelical scholars, it refers to the Apostle
Paul, the book of Acts, as a world
revolutionist.
In the King James Version it says he
turned the world upside down.
Here are these men that have turned the
world upside down.
That wasn't exactly child play, to say the
least.
Christianity is a revolution.
And O.M., the little part of Christianity
that you and I are in fellowship with,
this name has been put on, and I'm
happy for the name, because if the name
wasn't given to us, we didn't take that
name of Operation Mobilization.
You know what you'd be called.
You'd be called Berwerites, or you'd be called
Forsakites, or you'd be called some other name
that the world would give you, just like
the dear brethren who met at Plymouth, until
they realized that all their life they'd be
called Plymouth brethren.
And just like some of the people I
meet here, of course, they get named too.
Wherever you meet, you get named.
And everybody gets a name.
And if you don't like names, or you
have a hard time living in the world,
you'll be unidentifiable.
But we realize that these names aren't important.
It's the body of Jesus Christ that's significant
and important.
And yet, God has raised up this testimony.
And God has raised up this little group
to do something, to say something.
And the group, of course, only says as
much as the people who are in it
say.
The name means nothing.
But I am absolutely convinced that if this
work is going to be used, if any
of us are going to be used, we
must be revolutionists, and the work must be
a revolution.
That's why I think it's worth 20 years
to get your spiritual foundation.
That's why I believe there must be training.
That's why I believe this work is a
trained work.
And I'm not interested in missionary candidates, in
terms of people who think they're ready to
go to the mission field, but I am
interested in people who want to learn, who
want to experience how people can come into
OM, go to our conferences, and go out,
and not begin to perceive this, I don't
know.
But I know I had one fellow come
to me once.
He had listened to so many tapes and
so many messages on love, and only after,
I don't know how many messages and how
much time, he finally said, I'm beginning to
understand what you mean when you speak about
love.
I recommend, if you're going to study the
New Testament, you've got free, you're quick to
take those New Testaments.
We offered last night, if you read the
whole New Testament, some of you may have
met a counselor, of course, bring the Testament,
put it back on the table.
If you don't learn it well, you won't
read it.
You'll get up to Revelation 1 at the
most.
From there, even though it promises special blessing
to those who continue reading, you'll stop.
Maybe some of you won't even get that
far.
But if you do read through that New
Testament, you might want to underline, every time
you come across the word love.
That's what I did.
My Bible, I had, well, I changed the
system in this Bible, and I put a
little heart next to every place where I
find the word love.
My Bible's full of hearts.
Because love is written right through the whole
New Testament.
And if you take and do the same
thing with the synonyms of love, such as
peace, joy, long suffering, all the fruit of
the Spirit are basically synonyms of love.
They're love in different situations, responding to different
problems.
And you'll find your Bible is just full.
And you'll find that these words appear together,
the synonyms and the word love, almost as
much as the name of Jesus Christ.
That's right.
You study for yourself.
Now believe me, shoot me down.
You study for yourself.
I spent hours, nights, whole nights, weeks, months,
going through my New Testament, again and again
and again and again and again and again.
And although I read many other books, this
is the book that I swallowed.
Before I ever opened a book on Tosin,
before I ever opened a book on Watchman
Knee, I'd been through the New Testament I
don't know how many times, and I had
seen for myself how many other people influenced
me.
This was the message.
And I don't believe we can separate the
word Christ from the word love.
We can't separate them.
Right away you'll have some doctrine bug go,
oh well, he's preaching that love is important.
We know that Christ, it's only Christ, just
Jesus, Jesus Christ.
Look, that is a lie.
Because why did God give us the Bible?
Why did he teach us so much about
love?
Why did he give us 13th chapter of
Corinthians, where the name of Jesus is not
even mentioned?
Oh well, we can spiritualize, don't we?
So we take out the word love, the
charity we put in Christ.
Well that's true.
I believe that.
But it must not become a dichotomy.
It must not become a great divorce.
So that we no longer are very concerned
that there's no real love in our life
as long as we're able to pronounce the
formulas.
And so tomorrow morning, hundreds of places all
over Great Britain will gather around the Lord's
table and they'll go through a ritual that
is no different, absolutely no different before God
than what happens in the Roman Church.
It's no different before God.
Oh, Romanism, Pope, Rosary beads, Hail Marys.
It's all mild compared to what we have
in our churches.
It's all mild.
They, in darkness, walk in darkness.
They've never had the messages we've had.
They've never heard the challenge.
They've never read the books.
They've never had the ministry.
What do you expect them to do?
We have heard the messages.
We have read the books.
We have been through the conferences.
And yet we'll gather continually around the Lord's
table and go through a ritual that has
no more life than a stone in the
Arabian desert.
And it's killing and it kills young people.
It kills new converts.
It kills anything that gets in its way.
It kills.
Dead Orthodoxy.
The Bible says the Lamb killeth.
The Lamb killeth.
The Spirit bringeth life.
And unless in our worship, unless in our
evangelism, unless in our daily living, their spirit,
their life will kill.
36,000 people will accept Jesus Christ through
Billy Graham and the Church will kill 35
,000.
And it's rapidly doing it right now here
in Great Britain.
And not just the modernist churches, not just
the liberal churches, but some churches where they
claim to have all the truth, nothing but
the truth all the time.
The truth without love can kill.
And it will kill.
And the most arrogant, bigoted men I have
ever encountered in the 20th century were men
whose basic doctrine was the same as mine.
Apart from the fact that they didn't consider,
as I do, that love is a major
doctrine.
Teaching.
It's a major teaching.
The teaching of love.
We always think, well, major Bible teaching.
Second coming of Jesus Christ.
Eschatology.
Christology.
And we go to our seminaries and get
all this material.
And I would love to debate, I won't
do it because I don't believe it's God's
will, but I would love to debate any
president of any cemetery anywhere in the world,
seminary, excuse me, and show that we are
not teaching sound doctrine.
Because we're not teaching love, and love is
sound doctrine.
And you can't separate love from Christ any
more than you can separate Christ from God.
We have the great Trinity.
They're inseparable.
God, one God, praise God.
Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
And the same is true.
The same is true in terms of our
relationship with God and the life we should
be living.
You can't separate love, truth, and Christ.
It's all one.
The man that says he has Christ and
doesn't have love, he's a liar.
That's what the Bible says again and again
and again.
All we have to do is look into
1 John.
The epistle of 1 John is so revolutionary
that most people read it.
Well, I mean, I've read some spiritualizations of
1 John.
It's just a pity, really, what we do
with the Bible.
We can twist it and distort it and
make it say anything we want.
And we read, Love thy neighbor as thyself,
and we come up with all kinds of
amazing things.
And we read some of these verses instead
of just accepting it for what it is.
Now, it's amazing.
We evangelicals, we like to accept John 3
.16 just the way it is.
We don't want to change that one.
Because our heaven depends on that one.
Yes, God so loved the world, he gave
his only begotten Son, and whosoever believes in
him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
I literally believe in John 3.16. Now,
the verses that bring us blessing, we literally
believe.
The verses that bring hardship, we spiritualize.
It's right.
We can jump on something that's going to
talk about heaven or a blessing.
We literally believe that this is our explanation.
You come across some verse like Luke 14
.33 or 1 John 3.16, and we
spiritualize it.
Now, if you're going to approach your Bible
that way, you might as well not approach
it at all.
And many of us, for an artist, we
have to admit that we approach the Bible
with a bias.
We've already got our doctrine from some other
book, and so we approach the Bible and
get the Bible into the doctrine.
And it's amazing.
You get these different young people come from
different Bible schools, and they're all brainwashed the
same way the Bible school is.
And they all want to get some very
good arguments.
Instead of being open to what the other
brother might have to say, you might have
something to contribute, even though you've gone through
three years of the D-by-D Bible
school, where you've got all the D-by
-D teaching, and you've come a D-by
-out, D-by-ite.
You might be able to learn something from
the X-Y-Z Bible school, or from
someone else from a different denomination or a
different group.
There might be some truth in what the
other fellow thinks.
There's a possibility that he also might have
encountered some truth along life's road, and that
you might have made a mistake.
You might have twisted it a little bit.
It's at least worth thinking about, isn't it?
And that's what I challenge you to do,
to study your New Testament.
Look at some of these verses, such as
we find in 1 John.
Look at this very perplexing verse in 1
John 4.20. And the man say, I
love God, and hate his brother.
He is a liar, for he that loveth
not his brother, whom he hath seen.
How can he love God whom he hath
not seen?
Now, I want to try to briefly show
you tonight how this revolution of love, this
message that's here in 1 John, this message
that's in 1 Corinthians 13, this message that
runs between Matthew and Revelation, that love is
the answer, that when Jesus Christ is in
us and is in control, we become revolutionists.
I want to try to show you how
this is the answer to the world's dilemma.
Because, as I was saying back a little
bit, the world is concerned about terrible things.
It's concerned about what's happening.
What is the world concerned about now?
What are they shouting about tonight?
The race issue.
The biggest thing in the paper, you know
what it was?
Dean Rusk's daughter married a Negro.
This is hot.
Almost made front lines.
The race issue is hot in the 20th
century.
And unless we have the answer to the
race issue, how can we communicate to modern
man?
Because we're going to get this thrown in
our face everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
Does Jesus Christ have an answer to these
problems?
What about the man who's evangelical, who's Bible
-believing, who's fundamental, but who wants no contact
with people of another race?
What about the man who says, I love
Jesus Christ, but I don't like Negroes?
What about him?
I'll tell you what about him.
He's going to hell.
That's right.
He's going to hell.
Beloved, we need to pray.
We need to pray for many of our
friends we think are saved, because they're not
saved.
They're not saved.
Because this love has not entered their heart.
Now look, when you go out to India,
you're going to face a terrific problem.
You're going to look at a Hindu population,
a Muslim population, and now your little belief
is going to become harder.
Your little belief that people are going to
hell becomes five times as hard in India
because you're living within a culture and a
population of people who have never heard the
gospel, and you're going to have to say
that they're going to hell, and that's not
easy to say if you have anything on
your mind.
And the only way I have been able
to come to the conclusion that these people
are lost is to realize that the majority
of people in the religious circles are also
lost.
Because if a man in America who has
a head belief in Jesus Christ has never
experienced a revolution of love, who does not
love his Negro neighbor or any other neighbor,
I say if he's saved, then a Hindu
worshipping a tree, who also has no, had
no change in life, he's also saved.
But I don't believe a Hindu worshipping a
tree is saved because he does not know
Jesus Christ and has not experienced his life
-changing love.
And some religious trees, evangelical trees, and he's
worshipping at all kinds of evangelical shrines that
are just as bad or worse than anything
the Hindus have.
You say, well, you don't believe many are
saved.
Well, that's a divide.
And we have come to the idea, some
of us from the United States, that the
United States and Christianity run together.
We stamp it on our coins, it's almost
blasphemy.
We know very well we don't trust in
God, we trust in that coin, and our
whole environment, life, advertising system, way of planning,
world construction, all proves it.
And you know, when you go out to
witness for Jesus Christ, and you can explain
some of these things, and you can explain
the various problems of the world in the
light of the fact that man does not
know how to love, people are going to
listen.
People are going to listen.
And this is the problem in the 20th
century, that man does not know how to
love.
The unsaved man does not know how to
love.
And the Bible teaches it's love or perish,
and modern psychology has confirmed it, it's love
or perish.
Most of our juvenile delinquency, most of our
crime, most of our drug addiction, most of
the problems in the highway and the home
can be traced back to a child that
did not get enough love.
That's right.
And it's only been in the past few
decades that psychology has confirmed what Jesus said
2,000 years ago.
When he taught very clearly that love was
the basic ingredient of life.
When he taught through the apostle Paul that
without love we were nothing.
And man has proven in this age, through
mental breakdown, that without love he becomes nothing.
And when you see mentally, completely mentally sick
people, you almost think you're looking at a
vegetable.
It becomes as nothing.
The Bible says, without love we're nothing.
And the great result today of unlovingness is
that we become as nothing.
Why do we have wars?
Oh my, today we have great councils sitting
down, why do we have wars?
Why do we have wars?
It's simple, just look in the book of
James.
Have you had the answers written 2,000
years ago?
Nobody can add to it.
The United Nations can't improve on what James
said.
He said, from whence come wars and fightings
among you?
Comely not hence, even of your lusts that
war in your members.
Ye lust and have not, ye kill and
desire to have and cannot obtain.
Ye fight and war, yet ye have not
because ye ask not.
Ye ask and receive, not because ye ask
and miss.
Not because ye ask and miss, that ye
may consume it upon your own lusts.
There's a message to the 20th century man,
he does three verses.
How can you explain Vietnam?
The capitalist has his position, the socialist has
his position, the communist has his position.
None of them understand.
I've talked to brilliant capitalists, I've talked to
brilliant communists.
I spent days under arrest in Russia when
they sent some of the top men in
town to convince me, get me to be
a communist.
I never heard such rubbish.
The communist position, the capitalist position, some of
us are strong Americans.
Materialism, dialectical materialism, deadly, dangerous, it's the cancer
of the earth.
No it isn't.
What's in your lousy heart is the cancer
of the earth.
James said it.
And what do you have between America today?
You've got two different opposite types of materialism.
It's the God, the same God in both
places.
The same God is ruling in Russia that's
ruling in America.
The God.
And the love of things is just as
strong in both places.
And the love of self and lust and
greed is the same.
This is why we as Christians, we must
be beyond all this.
We realize that the problem in the 20th
century is man's inability to love.
They changed government in Russia.
What did that do?
Just put a new group of unloving people
in power and an old group of unloving
people out of power.
That's all it did.
And they had a whole new set of
standards and before man was rich, his position
within the party, and they're living just fine.
They bring all their food in from special
farms.
Special farms produce special food and it's brought
in by armored vehicles.
These people are living like King Farouk and
all the rest many, many years ago.
They've got a new system.
And men have lived and died for politics.
More have committed suicide, probably over politics, more
than anything else apart from falling in love.
Having a bad deal.
And it's just unbelievable.
And the thrilling thing is that we, in
the midst of this turmoil of the world,
the Arab-Jewish crisis, the Vietnam crisis, the
racist problem, the problems that whirl around us,
we have a revolution of love, a change
of heart.
And when a man's heart is changed, many
people will be changed.
And this is the message we declare.
And we have the thrill of putting it
in full-page form in Reader's Digest.
We have the thrill of giving it out
in the street corner, of preaching it from
the Hyde Park corner, or from a loudspeaker
system to 2,000 Indians.
We have the thrill of talking to people
about it on the door.
We go out into a lost world with
the answer.
Are you convinced of that tonight?
Are you really convinced that we have the
answer?
Even after I became a Christian I wasn't.
I went through intellectual problems and battles whether
the Bible was the truth, but I came
out with this conviction.
If this book is the truth, nothing, nothing,
nothing will get in the way of making
it available to the whole world.
I said that 11 or 10 years ago,
just shortly after I was saved.
If this book is true, nothing can stop
us from putting it into the hands of
millions of people in the entire world, first
of all, because God will be behind us,
because that's the great testimony of the book,
that God is with us, that God now
has come to indwell us.
And I believe one of the things that
you must wrestle with in these days is
do you really believe we have the answer?
You can get the principles, you can get
the discipline, you can get the manuals, but
without a vision, without a definite conviction that
you have the answer, you will not have
the driving power.
This is why I can work with such
long hours.
It's not hard for me.
This is why I can stand in the
street corners hour after hour, day after day.
This is why I can just keep going
on and on and on, because I'm a
man driven by the knowledge of the truth,
a man driven by the fact that he
knows he's got the truth.
He's like a doctor with medicine, facing people
who are dying without it.
It's just logic, isn't it?
These people in the book of Acts knew
that they had the truth.
And we have the truth.
And during this week, I pray that you'll
write down every possible question you can think
of to shoot me down.
You throw up any world situation, you throw
up any problem, bring up the problem of
suffering, bring up the story of World War
II, bring up the subject of Hitler, bring
up the story, bring up any world subject
that you care to.
And if I can't give an answer or
find an answer, now I can't give all
the answers concerning the deep intimacies of the
knowledge of God.
This is something else.
I can't give all the answers concerning the
subjects of predestination and the subjects of the
sovereignty of God.
These deep things that I don't think God
has chosen for us to understand fully.
Because if I could understand everything about God,
what kind of a God would I have?
But as far as the problems in the
world today, we've got the answers.
And basically, it always goes back to the
fact that man has fallen away from God.
He's separated from God so everything is going
wrong.
And our aim, our goal, our drive must
be to bring man back into the knowledge
of God.
Now, when man fell away from God, he
lost the capacity to love.
He lost the capacity for real love.
And this is the problem we face on
the practical level.
This is how we can tell a man
is away from God, isn't it?
The other is a theological problem.
Man is away from God is a theological
problem.
The fact that there's no love going around
in the world today, that men hate, bite
and devour one another all over the place.
You know what history is?
History is hate.
That's right.
History is a story of hate.
And these little wars we're having in these
years are nothing.
They're nothing.
These are little games compared to what's happening
in history.
You can't imagine the atrocities in history.
You can't imagine.
Just read.
If you get the opportunity.
I think of one particular situation I've used
this often.
It sticks in my mind.
One of the atrocities of the Byzantine Empire.
Studying about Yugoslavia, one of the nations that
studied the worst.
And there were tens of thousands and tens
of thousands of Yugoslavs.
And the Byzantine Empire hated these people.
They took tens of thousands and thousands and
thousands of them.
They didn't kill them.
That would have been a blessing in hell.
That would have been pure blessing.
They burnt all their eyes out.
Thousands and thousands of them.
And they left one man with one eye
to travel from Turkey to what's the equivalent
today of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
One man with one eye dragging thousands of
people.
Can you picture the suffering?
This is the world that we've been born
in.
And I could describe to you if I
had the time 100 incidents worse than that.
When Genghis Khan came across from China.
The atrocities of Hitler are not 20th century
and 19th century happenings.
This has happened since the fall in the
garden, since Cain killed Abel.
Man has funneled, has been void.
We've got the answer.
Jesus Christ coming into a life and making
that man a loving individual.
And I've seen Christ do this.
I've seen Christ take killers and make them
into lovers.
I've seen Christ take the most lustful and
make them into the most lovely.
I've seen Christ take drunkards and make them
into men of discipline.
I've seen Christ take dope addicts and make
them into docile lovers of Jesus Christ.
We've got the answer.
Not the United Nations which is crumbling, crumbling
and they don't know what to do.
They have proven in every major outbreak in
the war that they can do almost nothing.
All the nations in the world, don't you
see it?
All the powers of the world, all the
brains of the world cannot do what our
Savior can do in answer to one prayer.
This has been all of history, all the
pacts of history, all the agreements of history,
all the forts of history, all the worlds
of history, all the agreements of history have
not been able to do what one biodiverse
can do when it leaps and explodes and
it touches.
We have the truth, a revolution of love,
a message of love.
Jesus Christ has died on the cross that
we might be brought back to God and
that this love that is God's may enter
into us so that we can love one
another.
So that every man and every nation may
begin to live in harmony and unity in
terms of the individuals who experience this.
And I want to tell you this is
worth giving a year or two.
What are you kidding?
This is worth your whole life to determine
that this is going to be your life,
to spread this revolution, whether it be in
the office or the factory, whether it be
out in India or whether it be in
Great Britain, whether it be in the context
of a secular job or in the context
of full-time work.
This will be the impetus of your life
to spread this revolution of love.
This is what drove Jesus Christ.
He looked over Jerusalem and he wept.
He went into every town and village by
compassion, not by the false motivation that drives
the average evangelical around, but by the compassion
and the love of God.
Now without it, of course, we'll never make
an impact on the Arab world.
Of course, we'll never make an impact on
India.
They've already seen hundreds of unloving people who
declare themselves Christians and they no longer want
our message.
Now they're waiting.
This is why we have a month's conference
before we go out on a year program.
And this is why I will fight and
stand and kick to keep these conferences and
to force these tapes, if necessary, on everyone
I possibly can until we begin to realize
this is vital truth.
This is the message of the New Testament.
This is the first commandment.
Without this, we are sounding brass and a
tinkling cymbal.
Though you have all, you have nothing.
And as we see the problems of world
war, we see the problems of race, we
see the problems of starvation, the only answer
is the revolution of poverty.
This is what saved England many, many years
ago when the situation was almost as bad.
This land, some few hundred of years ago,
there was poverty and plight and child labor
beyond description.
Men, men of God, rose up and spoke.
The history of Great Britain changed, but now
we don't want that anymore.
Oh, may God open our eyes.
We have the truth, a revolution of life,
and it's the greatest thing to be able
to take it out and declare it to
the world and see it individually explode in
the hearts of individuals.
And we can see and we can know
this is the way God would have us
go.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we know the revolution must begin
in us as individuals.
This isn't a community action.
It's an individual transformation.
And we know that we'll have as much
of this revolution as we want.
We'll have as much of this victory, this
reality, as we really, really, really want.
Lord, we pray, God, deliver us from evangelical
rosaryism.
Deliver us, God, from going through the motions,
from playing the game, and meet us as
desperate, needy individuals who will only make a
mess on mission day without this kind of
life.
Who will only cause more confusion and more
problems without this transformation in our own hearts.
Without really getting serious about the teachings of
Jesus Christ.
Without really getting concerned about what Jesus actually
told us to do and how he actually
taught us to live.
Deliver us from the abominable dichotomy and divorce
of truth without love, of a head without
a body, of a Christ without a moral
code.
Deliver us, God, from singing one thing and
living another thing.
Praying one way and walking another.
Talking one line and going another line.
Oh, Father, please open our eyes.
Some of us who have been in the
world for some time, open our eyes, God.
We might see what it's all about.
We have the answer to the dilemma, the
pessimism, the lostness of the 20th century.
The race problem, the war problem, the starvation
problem is answered in the message of Jesus
Christ.
The transformation of the human heart, the man
who will give all that he has, the
man who will follow an absolute commitment and
surrender to win even one man to this
way of life.
Please, God, do the same in our midst.
We ask in Jesus' name, Amen.