Hi, I'm Derek Hong, Senior Pastor of Church
of Our Saviour, Singapore.
I'm so glad you're listening to this powerful
message from the Word of God.
I believe that as you do so, the
Holy Spirit will touch your heart in a
very personal way.
If you would like to know more about
Jesus Christ, or speak to someone, or have
any questions, feel free to contact me through
the Church website or telephone.
Now, enjoy this message from God's wonderful Word.
Billy must have a lot of close friends.
As a man who's spoken to more people
than any other evangelist in history, so I
had the honour of introducing him, not his
personal connection, but in the one that was
the first global broadcast in Wellington, in New
Zealand, as our capital, and it was kind
of fun to introduce him.
I was waiting for this link to come
in.
I told them the story about a young
man who was in Bible college, and at
the end of his college time they have
a special, sort of a farewell service thing.
It was not really a service, it was
a huge get-together.
One of the things that that particular college
did, is if you had made a choice,
you were going to marry somebody, what you
would do, instead of giving them an engagement
ring first, the boys would buy a bouquet
of flowers.
So I said, this young man, he's going
to this Bible college, he bought the largest
bouquet of flowers anybody had ever seen, and
he kept it for this final farewell thing,
and so this girl that he really loved,
and spent time with her, and she seemed
like she was interested, and so he had
his big bouquet, and he came, she offered
it, he offered it to her, and she
looked down, and she looked at him, and
she said, that's very sweet of you, but
I can't accept it.
And he was crestfallen, because he really loved
this girl, and he said, well, why not?
She said, you don't seem to have any
great goals in your life.
He said, well, why do you think I'm
at this Bible college?
I want to be an evangelist.
She said, an evangelist?
What kind of job is that?
She said, I want a good job, and
being taken care of at home, and I'm
sorry, but I can't accept it.
He was crestfallen.
He took his little big bouquet of flowers,
and there was a golf course out near
that Bible college, and he was walking through
there, and he had a big kind of
a confrontation with God.
He said, you know, should I just throw
aside evangelism, and go do something else?
I was good at selling.
I think he was washing dishes faster than
anybody else.
He was trying to think what else he
could possibly do, and sometime very early that
morning, he made a decision.
He said, no girl, no job, nothing shall
ever come between you and your call on
my life.
And his friends found him in the morning.
His face was kind of glued with his
tears, and the dew of heaven to the
pages of his Bible, and they found him
lying there in the golf course, and they
kind of got him up.
He got up, and he went on, and
he did become an evangelist, and I said,
maybe somewhere in the U.S. tonight, there's
a lady washing dishes at home who might
be watching this, and I said, she probably
had a lovely life, and she married somebody
that did give her a nice background, and
sort of home, and things like she wanted.
But I wonder there, as she's at home,
if she ever wonders what it would have
been like to be married to Billy Graham.
And my hand up, curtain open, and Billy
broadcast around the world.
So, it has been a great joy to
meet many men of God who've had a
passion since they were young people to be
his followers.
And if you look in history, and you
look in your scriptures, you'll see that the
majority of people that God has called into
ministries have started when they are young.
As a matter of fact, still today, globally,
19 out of 20 people who are getting
saved in the world today become Christians before
they reach the age of 25.
And so, this will be my fifth generation
of young people that I'm working with.
I'm not really, really ancient.
Now, Billy's beat everybody, he's 92.
My father died at some time over 95.
So, Billy's still hanging in there.
But I'm still a kid.
I'm just 66.
I was the youngest of that group that
you were talking about, the father's thing.
And I think the reason they chose me
as a father is because this is my
fifth generation of teenagers.
And sometimes people look at me kind of
with sympathy.
Why don't you grow up and get a
real job, they say.
Stuff like that.
And I tell them, well, the reason why
I'm still working with young people is this,
because God gave me more than one brain
cell.
And I've lived long enough to see what
God's done in scripture, He's done in history,
and He can do it again.
So, I enjoy working with my special group,
teenager, you're only a teenager, you know, for
just a very short time, seven years, between
what Pat Byrne used to call Twix 12
and 20, that short block.
And even in the Old Testament, if you
lived a long time, even if your life
had been shrunk from the nearly a thousand
years of the original creation, shorter and shorter
and shorter, you still got three score and
ten, which gives you at least, hopefully, 70
years.
So, those of you with advanced degrees in
mathematics will be able to work this out,
that seven is a tenth of 70, which
is a tithe of your life.
So, I have a friend who's one of
the contributors in the study Bible, Greg Johnson,
he says this, to the young people he
works with, if you give a tithe of
your teenage years to Jesus, He'll give you
an open heaven for the rest of your
life.
And coming to the Lord myself, after ten
years, by the way, I need to tell
you this, how many people that are here
today are not married yet?
Put your hands up.
Like three of you.
Well, the others are kind of a bit
reluctant, in case people go, She's free!
Woo!
And run over towards you.
There is actually a rule, if you want
to reach world class at anything, they've done
a lot of research in all kinds of
different fields, different kinds of training, whether it's
in athletics, or it's in music, or anything
else, and the rule has now become known
as the ten thousand hours.
If you want to restructure your brain and
your whole life, based on one particular thing,
you're deciding, this is the thing I'm going
to do for the rest of my life,
this is the thing I'm going to give
most of my life to.
In order to reach world class, you have
to put at least ten thousand hours into
that thing.
Now that works out roughly three hours a
day, at least twenty hours a week, for
ten years.
That's how you get your ten thousand.
Now it doesn't matter what you're doing, you
could aim to be the world's best cook,
or the world's biggest crook, it's still going
to take ten thousand hours to get to
that level.
So, just keep that in mind.
When I first, I've got to show you
a few pictures first, I think we've, yeah
we've, no, we've got the little dancing shoes,
they're being carried by somebody, hopefully Jesus.
But I want you to see a couple
of pictures of my family.
I haven't got my wife here, she's gorgeous,
and I've got about eight thousand pictures of
her, but we'll be here too long.
My background is, I come from a, my
dad is there on my left, you're, no
it's still a, does that go away or
becomes something else?
That's not my father.
Yeah, that'll give you a picture.
My father is that brown looking fellow on
the side, he's Maori.
My grandfather is that, and that's, beside him
is his grandfather, and that little kid, carried
by my great grandfather is me.
So that's my roots.
My dad is Maori, but he's really not
an ordinary Maori, had a very strange life.
This is my mother, isn't she gorgeous?
She's part French, and part, little bit gypsy,
little bit Spanish, mostly Scottish and British.
Okay?
Very artistic, very creative lady.
My dad became a professional athlete.
He had a very rough background, he was
born to a Maori princess, but who was
raped by a passing man who left her
pregnant.
She died giving birth to my father, and
it was an embarrassing thing for a tribe
of people, but they did, the king, or
the chief if you like, his wife, which
was his grandmother, moved in to take care
of him in the forest.
This chief had actually three wives, one died
and then one took care of dad in
the forest.
And so, he only spoke Maori until he
was 12, and then his grandmother died which
left him alone, and then a passing missionary
heard a child crying in the, not actually
quite sure how old he really was, because
all of his tribal, what do you call
it, not only his birth certificate, but all
of his papers, he would have owned about
a quarter of the North Island if he
kept those papers.
But his grandmother was a Christian, but she
smoked a pipe and they lived in a
wari, which is like a sort of grass
hut type thing, and he thinks that his
grandmother fell asleep and set the house on
fire.
It's possible that he also set the house
on fire, because there was ships going past,
in the ocean they were near, and he
made a little ship that had fire in
it.
So somebody set that house on fire, but
when his grandmother came to, he got her
out of the flames, and the house was
burning down, and she remembered there was a
little wooden box in there that had all
of his royal things, and all the things
that showed people how significant he was, and
he thought she'd gone crazy and was trying
to kill herself, and he's very strong, he
held her down until everything burned.
So when she died, he was left orphaned,
without any backing, people didn't know, so when
he died at 95, he may have been
100, we don't know, we just know his
grandfather died at 108 years old, so he
was an amazing man.
I'll show you a picture of my dad,
if I can find it here for you.
Oh, that's my dad when he was young,
and that little character was my younger sister,
it was like a little Shirley Temple.
And, you know, curly hair, that kind of...
And there, at three years old, she became
a professional dancer, travelled with her dance teacher
right through New Zealand, giving these major concerts.
She was a professional hula dancer, both fast
and slow hula, came like a little mermaid
out of the sea in an opening shell
to do these dances in these large events.
So my little sister's kind of a, you
know, Hollywood girl.
My father became a major professional athlete, I'll
give you a picture of him.
When he died, I made this...
When he was dying, I made this T
-shirt for him.
Dad's on the left, the other one there,
you probably recognise.
I made a little montage there, because in
professional cycling, on the track, somebody holds you,
then you'll launch, and they hold you there.
In those days, you actually strapped the feet
in, there was no quick releases, it was
almost like making the pedal-duron shoes, and
they'd strap you in, so they had to
hold you, and the person who launched you
was the one who caught you at the
end of the race.
So when we all knew Dad was slowly
dying, I made this T-shirt for him
that he could wear, and underneath that little
word, Lo, always, is the one that catches
you at the end, is the one who
launched you at the start.
Lo, I am with you, always, even till
the end of the age.
And so he wore that T-shirt.
He only had one, but he kept washing
it and wearing it.
So that's my father when he was young,
an amazing, amazing man.
So you'll often see this kind of thing,
Prattney wins 100-mile race, he held every
race record, track, field, road, never went overseas,
never competed in the Olympics, because in those
days, if you won any money at all,
you were cut out from the Olympics for
the rest of your life.
And when he was 16, he won like
five pounds or something, and they cut him
out from the Olympics.
The first Olympic Games he ever was allowed
to compete in was in Australia when he
was 86.
It was the Masters Games, held in Brisbane,
and it was funny because he's still riding,
and there was some man who was 70
years old, he was an Australian, and he'd
trained for four years, and he was called
the world's oldest competing cyclist.
And when the local television knew that he
was there in Brisbane, and my father was
there, who was at least 17 years older
than him, they put him together for a
fun race, and put him in this new
track that hadn't been yet released for the
Olympics, and he was there to show how
trained he was, and Dad just borrowed somebody's
bike, and put some old shoes on, and
you know, you go in one of those,
you go together, once round, then as you
cross the line, they trigger.
Dad killed him.
He left him behind in the dirt.
It's like chariots of fire ending, you know,
running and pow, all like that.
He fell off the bike, the poor guy
at the end, he just couldn't handle it.
I don't think he even went into the
Olympics.
But because of that, they allowed Dad to
compete, but not officially, because 70 was the
official cut-off date for being in the
Masters Games.
And against 30-year-old ex-Olympic athletes,
my 86-year-old Dad got on his
bike and competed.
You see, when he walked at 86, he
walked like this.
But when he got on the bike, he
was poetry in motion.
It's a good thing they didn't allow him
to win, or he'd have taken two golds
and a bronze at the Olympic Games.
The Australian Bible Society got all excited when
they heard about this, so they came to
Dad the following year, when he's 87, and
they said, would you do some fundraising for
us?
How about, like, one of these sponsored lap
things, where people pay, you know, whatever they
want to, for a lap.
And people looking at my Dad when he's
old, see if I can find a picture
of him here.
See if I can find it.
Yeah.
There he is.
And my gorgeous mother, around that track.
They asked him, how many laps could you
go?
He said, oh, you know, how long would
you...
He said, oh, I don't know.
How about three days?
He'd competed in six-day cycle races when
he lost his partner halfway through and finished
them on his own.
It was no big deal.
So they had some John's Ambulance there in
case he died, and people monitoring and everything.
I know there were some people that, he's
an old dude.
I'll tell you what, we'll give him a
buck a lap.
They probably thought he might do like 20
laps and then he'd fall off his bike
and die, and so they put in the
money.
Do you know how many laps my father
did?
900 laps at an Olympic pace over three
days.
330 kilometres.
Look at him there.
I know a lot of people went broke
that day, but the Australian Bible Society did
very well.
So looking at Dan and thinking of your
pastor and how much both Armour Publishing and
he and other friends here have contributed this
study Bible.
For this, my last minute, I want to
tell you how much we appreciate the investment
that Singapore has made in this real world
-shaking sort of event.
It's actually an amazing thing.
It's never been done before in history.
It's the largest study Bible ever done.
It covers 2,000 years of church history
and not which person killed which person.
It's when people were behaving themselves and living
like God told them to do.
Evangelism, missions and spiritual awakenings.
We've put together 2,000 years of cross
-section and 105 contributors.
Billy's one, but he's not really writing anything
more.
So all just many, many of these wonderful
men and women of God who had visitations
of the Lord, who saw supernatural things happen
in their life, most of all saw such
a revelation of the Lord that it completely
changed and transformed their lives and they found
a way to pass it on to other
people.
So that's the book pastor's talking about and
I want to thank you all for that.
Now, the lovely thing too that I've learned
about your pastor that if you bribe him,
he will actually give you more time.
I've usually had like 30 minutes.
Today I have 40 minutes, maybe even 45.
Not now, it's all kind of worn out,
but yes.
I want to show you a couple of
other things, but first I'd like you to
find the book of Luke, please.
Luke chapter 15 and I'm just going to
give you a very simple parable without
absolutely the stories.
You know what's wonderful about God?
He gives great stories.
Most of what Jesus taught was not like
academic stuff at all.
Matter of fact, almost all the Jesus words
that he used were short words.
We translate them to English.
Most of his words in English would be
like one syllable words, like love.
Sometimes he used a big one like water,
but most of his words were short words,
fire, light.
See that?
And it's strange, but one of the great
Quaker writers of the past said you'll notice,
he's the same one who helped come up
with the Alcoholics Anonymous thing.
He said if you read the words of
Jesus, you'll find that a lot of the
words that he uses are just short words,
but those words are always words of penetration.
Light penetrates the darkness and makes it bright.
Light and water penetrates the wood, penetrates the
ground and makes it soft.
Fire penetrates the wood and makes it burn.
Salt penetrates the meat and stops it from
rotting.
So with Jesus, when you listen to him,
he reveals to you things that may seem
very simple to you, but actually they penetrate
to the heart and when they get inside
you, they explode.
And it is lovely to study God.
So many times, the Pharisees in the old
days looking at Jesus could not understand why
at all he was the way he is.
One of the big things they were angry
with him, he didn't look like they think
he should have looked.
He should have only hung out with religious
people.
Instead he seemed to hang out with the
people of prostitutes and tax collectors and other
horrible people and they couldn't understand Jesus at
all.
And when, like this Luke 15 that you
should be looking at now, opens with some
of the major religious figures of his day
criticizing Jesus and who he is and what
he was talking about.
And Jesus gives them three stories.
And I believe that stories are one of
the major ways that God communicates truth to
people.
I love giving children stories and stuff.
Little kids understand things.
They don't have sophisticated, cool ways of dealing
with simple...
You tell them there's a ghost there, they'll
stay away from the cupboard for a long
time.
They're not sophisticated enough to create all these
kind of corrections we carry on in our
lives.
But God's simplicity is loaded with power.
This is how he creates the universe.
Like this.
Light, beam, and we've got the universe.
Just like that.
Only faster.
We would probably think for a couple of
thousand years and design this and that.
He just talks and it is.
Here's three great stories.
And I want to give a little background
on these first.
I want you to see first there's some
common elements in this.
You can see on...
Oh, the shoes are looking at me again.
There.
What man of you having a hundred sheep?
So we've got actually three different things here.
We've got sheep.
If you go down a little bit, we've
got...
There's a hundred sheep.
There's ten pieces of silver.
You go a little bit further, you have
two sons.
So see how the numbers are going down.
It starts higher with a hundred.
Then it goes to ten.
Finally winds up with two.
They're different things.
One's sheep, one is silver, and one is
a son.
They all do start with S, of course,
in English.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
And then there's somebody in each case that
is out looking for something that is called
lost.
I think lost is one of the most
understood biblical words in our time because we
have a whole generation that has fundamentally become
lost.
It's not that they don't live near people.
In terms of young people and teenagers, we
have probably one of the most sophisticated ways
educated and connected than any generation in history.
Kids today, and those of you who are
texting busily while I'm talking.
And Facebook.
I'm on Facebook, all right, but I'm not
going to answer your letter.
I'm already in 5,000 good friends and
I haven't got time to answer 5,000
good friends every day and to pass on
the essential content of a Facebook communication.
Just like every single day over the sky
we've got satellites and in a single day
there's over a trillion conversations carried every day.
Trillion.
That's a lot of conversations.
The average content of those communications is like
this.
What's up?
That's about it.
What's up?
The second one is I'm having a cappuccino
at Starbucks.
That's about it.
This is not going to change the world.
Believe me.
It will help Starbucks.
Notice the hundred sheep and they lose one.
There's ten pieces of silver.
She loses one.
There are two sons.
One of them leaves.
So I'm going to give you names connected
with each one of these.
And if you want to take notes on
this you can just call this simple.
At the end of this I'm going to
give you a song.
It's not a worship chorus.
It's gorgeous and stuff.
It's just my mother was an entrepreneur and
all her early life she wanted to be
a singer and when she married Dad she
soaked her whole life and career into his.
She never did actually become a singer.
She wouldn't have been an opera singer.
She would have been a pop singer.
And she studied some of the top pop
divas just like Elvis Presley studied people like
Mario Lanza to become great at that thing.
But I remember when I was 12 she
bought me a special thing.
It was called a stereogram and it had
a record player on it.
You may not know what that technology is.
I don't mind.
But I have a thousand albums in my
revival library that cover from the 30s through
to the 21st century.
And even after they stopped doing albums which
had nice big pictures on them they added
about another thousand CDs that add those stuff.
And the reason I've kept that is because
I want to show people what God does
in every generation.
John Wesley, the great Methodist, said this If
you want to understand a nation study its
entertainment.
That's strange.
Here's a man who wrote at least 236
plus books.
I'm a mentor to musicians.
Spent a lot of time with some very
well-known Christian musicians.
Every year we had a thing it ran
for almost six years when Keith Green was
alive called the Garden Valley Artist Retreat.
And we had 300 of the best Christian
songwriters, singers you can imagine all come together
not to do the latest licks and show
what kind of cool things they were in.
They just came together to hang out together
and to learn stuff about God that would
help them more in the careers that they
came in.
And it was wonderful.
You should have listened when you have...
Do you remember Michael Jackson did We Are
The World?
We could have done one called We Aren't
The World.
But there was...
Imagine what it's like to have 300 of
the best Christian singers, songwriters there are all
worshipping God at the same time.
Nobody song-leading them, just singing.
It was awesome.
And nobody did the Garden Valley album.
We just sung.
We talked about God.
We talked about His wonders and what He
was like and they went out and started
writing stuff about what God taught us that
weekend.
Anyway, see these common elements?
In every case something is wonderful.
The lost becomes found and this statement is
made.
Rejoice with me for I have found what
or which was lost.
So notice that when this thing is made
it brings real joy but not just joy
for the person who finds it.
He wants everybody to get in on that.
And I've learned something about God.
He wants back the things that He's lost.
And you belong by right to Him.
I don't care what your background is.
I don't care where you come from.
I don't care whether you're religious or irreligious.
He is the Father, is the rightful Father
of this people.
There are no races, just the human race.
And we are supposed to be His people
and the sheep of His pasture.
And all of these things in the Scriptures
tie back to this.
God is the rightful owner of this planet.
He's the one that made us.
He designed us.
He is our rightful owner and Lord and
Savior.
All of those things.
I remember C.S. Lewis saying enemy occupied
territory.
That is the story of Christianity today now.
When the world fell many of us were
ripped away from God and have since lost
our way.
And the thing that is beautiful about us
is this little word rejoice.
I'm going to show you in a second
something I discovered about two years ago that
was really quite wonderful for me.
As I was sitting with Pastor here we
were just briefly looked at one of the
prayer times you have on the seven mountains.
I want to show you something that will
interest you.
I am presently fairly fully recovered now from
a quite serious it's called a it was
actually a brain stroke.
Simplest way I can describe it.
Not by a clot.
But one of the main things that fed
a section of my brain it just blew.
It just blew in my brain.
So day after Christmas I went up to
be with my sister with my wife and
my son.
We went up and had Christmas dinner with
them.
Came back down fell asleep.
I woke up a bit late.
My wife was giving me a phone.
A young man had called asking me about
a computer.
What kind he should buy and stuff.
And I made computers and stuff.
I'm trying to listen to him and I
understood fully what he was saying but for
ten minutes he talked to me and I
couldn't answer him.
The reason is is because that part of
the brain it blew all the nouns.
It's the simplest way I can say it.
Of fifty years.
All the names of anything were gone.
Out of my mind.
I didn't realize that but when I tried
to talk to my wife I called her
Levonnie.
That little girl who was when I was
a kid that we just had Christmas dinner
with.
My wife's name is Fayona.
I have been married to her for forty
-two years and I called her Levonnie.
My poor son whose name is William I
called Winky which is my name.
And I've been married to myself as far
as I can remember.
I couldn't even remember people that I've lived
with for a long, long time.
Let alone names of computer systems and operating
systems and food and places and name it.
If somebody gave me a knife, a fork
and a spoon I'd know what they did.
I wouldn't stick the fork in my eye.
I'd know what they were but I didn't
know the names of them.
You know what it's like to have a
doctor of literature in arts, sciences, history communications
and youth culture except you can't remember any
of the names in it.
And your answer would be yeah, what is
that?
So, there's a wild little word here it's
this rejoice with me.
Now, another quick thing.
I told you about my mother and her
desire to be a singer and burying it
in my dad's life.
When I finish this I want to tell
you the story of how my mother finally
came to the Lord.
But one of the things I discovered in
this trying to fix the brain when they
saw, the surgeons found how big this stroke
was they were amazed that this whole side
of my body had not become paralysed.
I seemed to be able to walk and
do everything else.
It was just the problem with the names.
And so for almost six months the hospital
sent out nurses five different ones at different
times to test how much I knew and
it was very strange.
But one of the things I found a
book called This is Your Brain on Music
made me appreciate just how wonderful God is.
This man who wrote it is both a
neuroscientist that's his research he's also a music
producer and his book puts together the two
things that he found are why people are
so interested in some kinds of music why
people have special kinds of music and one
of the things he found is this you
all know at least you may know that
one half one side of your brain processes
music.
You can remember tunes for things some of
you go I know it but you may
not remember the words because they're stored somewhere
else.
My words were all vanished.
Blown up.
But this is what he said if you
relearn the music the brain will not only
restore that it will take the lyrics and
transfer them to another place in your body
on your brain of course probably it won't
show up on your toe or something which
would be embarrassing.
But my poor wife and my son over
the last six months have heard me down
in my lab I have a lab by
the way a laboratory when you're a nerd
that's what you have a laboratory it's underneath
I have a studio in it I have
a darkroom I have my old chemistry lab
I have a digital electronic design lab I
have a bunch of things and they're all
behind a wall like James Bond you hit
the wall and the door opens up I
can show it to you if you come
to New Zealand I'll have to kill you
afterwards because it's a secret but I'm downstairs
they're all upstairs and I hear tiny little
shades of songs coming out because I'm taking
songs that I learned when I was all
the way from before I became a Christian
to the time I first got saved Cliff
Richard and Pat Moon were two of the
people we did a lot of these songs
and they got saved about the same time
I did maybe a year or two later
and so a lot of the songs that
we used to do and the band I
had for two and a half years I've
been re-recording and what is wild it
not only goes over the music it starts
storing the ideas or the thoughts or the
stuff connected to it if you love somebody
and you like this song and it reminds
you of that person it also stores that
so this part of the brain basically blown
up has 90% back that's what my
son says of course I've forgotten what his
name is I was going to ask you
but 90% of that data is back
from music and Jesus this book biggest book
in it 66 books in here biggest book
in it is Psalms so whenever I come
to a church and I listen to the
worship teams and listen to people sing it
tells me something about the church it tells
me something about their dealings with God and
God's dealings with them because every time there's
been a revival in history two things have
repeated one is we begin to understand how
bad it is when you hurt a God
who loves you more than you can imagine
the great grief that is on God's heart
is one of the big missing elements in
our day the grief of God over the
sin of the world we put that in
the Revival Study Bible is one of the
core things that has recurred in every spiritual
awakening the second one is the joy that
comes when God gets you back and the
tremendous release that actually creates new kinds of
music so I believe every real revival will
have new kinds of music new kinds of
singing these music young people I've had some
come visit me in my office and remember
all the scary stuff is behind a wall
they don't see that but I have part
of the library about 4000 books in that
bit and there's another 6 in the US
but I've got a wonderful set of old
books and one of them has got 13
volumes the volumes have about they're probably .8
type 600 pages and they are the poetical
works of John and Charles Wesley and there's
thousands of them every time something happened John
or Charles wrote a song about it no
wonder they said over a thousand tongues to
sing they needed at least that number to
sing half of what they wrote so look
at this got to hurry here sheep quick
tale about sheep sheep are dumb I come
from a nation used to have 80 million
sheep and 3 million people now it's got
over 4 million people and a lot less
sheep sheep don't like that very much we
ate them actually in the bible you'll see
the word cattle that doesn't mean just cows
it means domesticated creatures that once they're domesticated
they take on care from you could probably
call a cat a cow cat wouldn't like
you very much dogs are like cows in
bible ideas they're another creature you have by
the way I figured out the difference between
dogs and cats do you know the differences
dogs want to be people cats want to
be god that's the difference between them basically
stupid sheep went out the only sheep probably
listened to too many old Pink Floyd albums
went out looking at all these other dumb
church sheep they all hang out together actually
sheep are really dumb they don't even have
proper teeth to bite you if they didn't
like and little sheep lambs are worse there's
one sheep don't want to hang out with
these other dumb sheep they're all hanging out
together so he goes out there he came
fine skipping away then it gets dark and
he goes which way did I come then
it gets worse he hears this sound it
is now true blood out there a flock
call them wolves that look for sheep just
like this and there's nobody else just him
what would you do if you stuck out
in a moor like that and it's pitch
dark and you don't know where to run
you're probably running around a little bit like
this and somebody comes and gets him who
is it if I had been a shepherd
I'd go hey I lost one hey I
got 99 fine let him go sheep do
never do this again I'm not even going
to show you what's left of your brother
and this lovely old song none of the
ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters
crossed how dark was the night the Lord
passed through before he found his sheep that
was lost you and I don't know what
it cost God to pull us in our
stupidity in our dumbness out of what we've
been into to bring us back to the
safety of the fold but he did it
and we're alive because of him ah got
three minutes now and I've got to give
you a very fast can I just say
this God's laws are descriptions of reality they're
not inventions you walk away from them he's
telling you the truth it's not his own
religious invention it is a description of how
things actually work and you can't break them
you walk out it's like saying yea verily
if thou jumpest off a forty storey building
without a hang glider without a bat suit
a spider man situation you will accelerate at
thirty two foot a second a second and
when my head strikes the cement fourteen storeys
below thee thou shalt be paced amen that
is a description of reality second one simple
woman loses a coin you all lose stuff
like that remember how she looks for it
she takes the light it's just like maybe
a diamond drops off a ring or something
you're looking for everything you don't go look
I've got ten rings it's fine this one's
only worth twenty thousand so fine she's turning
everything upside down she's looking underneath she knows
she lost it in the house she didn't
lose it at the airport it was right
here somewhere she gets the light and she's
looking you know why because it's lost lostness
is not a distance it's a relationship two
people can be in the same house and
be a thousand miles apart two people can
be a thousand miles apart and be this
close because lostness is a broken relationship you
don't know where the person is or that
person is cut off from you and add
this it is possible to be lost in
the house this is a house of God
you can be here you can have all
of the background you can listen to the
voice you can even see the light looking
for you you can even hear his voice
and still stay lost so if you're in
a house of God and you really are
the one he's looking for listen and obey
him don't sit there hoping that just because
you're in the house it'll make you not
lost you need to be the person he's
not only looking for he wants you back
give him back last bit here last lost
song I got my friend John down there
hopefully we'll have a feedback here remember the
last one the son that son he said
to his father give me some money whatever
dad gives him a generous thing gives him
a gift and then he goes out read
the story there this is what I found
two years ago there are over 35 major
vocations they're not at all religious and not
only given to mankind by God and for
God but even rooted in this very nature
and character they're not Levitical religious they're not
family roles husband, father, brother but in every
way genuine divine callings here's just some of
them each one of these is rooted in
God's nature and character each one of these
is what he is and these are the
gifts that he gives to mankind it doesn't
mean you have to be preacher and evangelist
look at these things they're all real sacred
callings get those back you
get a wonderful advantage I reckon the church
needs to rediscover these sacred vocations because then
when you're sitting there you're not going to
think I wish there was something for me
to do you've been given a gift of
God simply acknowledge who gave it to you
and he'll show you some astonishing things here's
a man, 25 year old hungry for God
he had a visitation of the Holy Spirit
he was given a Bible not the study
Bible, it was just done then this is
110 years roughly before Azusa Street the person
who gave it said this is not just
a book about God it's a book about
everything out there, he's starting to worship at
that time his country was the most literate
nation in Europe the most insecure he had
to get a visa to go to another
village extremely poor and no entrepreneurial vision at
all he said as soon as I came
to my senses I was filled with regret
I had not served this loving transcendentally good
God it seemed nothing in the world was
worthy of any regard that my soul possessed
something supernatural divine and blessed there was a
glory no tongue can utter I remember as
clearly as it happened only a few days
ago it is nearly 20 years since the
love of God visited me I wanted very
much to serve God I asked him to
reveal to me what I should do what
happened to Hans Nelson Hauger he lived only
30 more years but he began over a
thousand factories and businesses and over a thousand
home churches sitting here you may know what
your calling is you just don't know who
really gave it to you I'm going to
close with this last thing I'm going to
do and if you like you can just
alright I have so enjoyed my time here
with you does this thing work too now
feedback deal here this is one of those
songs redone from the past I didn't borrow
this from John Wesley he's been dead for
a long time but here's what it sounds
like like
the one missing lamb of old I strayed
from the shepherd's fold so Jesus found me
unbound me mighty Savior like the coin no
one else could find I dropped out of
sight out of mind so Jesus raised me
amazed me what a Savior His love never
failed me He reached from above drew me
back to the Father welcoming me in His
blood like the prodigal son of the Lord
I had forgotten my father's heart Jesus Jesus
gracious Savior His love never failed me He
reached from above drew me back to the
Father blessing me in His blood now I'm
thankful for the price He paid He raised
a rich man in the games I played
my blessed Jesus Jesus Lord and Savior looking
for a place to be lost no no
no no no Thank you,
Winky.
Let's stand together.
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord.
You know, the word of the Lord to
us is to be lost has nothing to
do with distance.
To be lost has to do with engagement,
relationship, intimacy.
That's what God has been calling us to.
And if you know that you are lost,
you can be lost in the house right
here, you can connect with God again.
So as you go from here, let the
word resonate in your heart, restore your spirit,
bring you close to him today.
Amen.
Let's drop our hands and just thank the
Lord.
Father, thank you for your word.
Thank you for all that you are doing
in our lives.
Thank you that you love us so much,
that you keep looking until you find us.
Even though we've been foolish, you never let
us go.
Even though we've been willful, you keep waiting
for us.
So Lord, we cling to you.
Hallelujah.
And we say to anyone here who is
lost, let him today be found by you.
In Jesus' name, everybody say, Amen.
Let's do the blessing song as we close.