And I want to talk about what it
means to be a young person of flame.
I've always been fascinated with fire, I really
have.
When I was younger and much less wise,
I decided to do something very freaky.
Now, we don't have 4th of July in
New Zealand.
We have 5th of November, which is a
little different.
5th of November came about when a guy
by the name of Guy Fawkes, which is
why we call it Guy Fawkes.
They have this in Britain too, I understand.
Do they have that in Scotland?
Alastair, is he here?
Yeah, they have Guy Fawkes there too.
Apparently Guy Fawkes was a guy who tried
to blow up Parliament.
And so we celebrate this because he nearly
made it.
And what we do actually is we, in
New Zealand, we form a big bonfire and
then we dress up a dummy made of
straw to look like what's called a guy.
Like this, see?
And we just stick this dummy on top
of this big old straw pile.
And it's all covered with, you know, everybody
brings old rubber tires and wood and things
they need to burn.
And we put this dummy up on top
of the thing, he just sits up there.
And then when the night time comes, the
kids set fire to the bonfire and then
we dance around like banshees with fireworks and
stuff and watch the guy burn up.
And that's where we get our kicks in
New Zealand.
Now I, for the first time, our school
decided to have a bonfire at school.
They also had a guy competition where the
kids were allowed to make guys and put
them up on the bonfire during the week,
time for Saturday night when the guys would
all be burned, which was Guy Fawkes night.
Well I decided I'd give our school a
bonfire night they'd never forget.
And so what I did is I dressed
up as a guy.
I put straw out the back of this
mask that I bought, these old floppy clothes
and old boots, stuffed them up with straw.
And then I had my sister drag me
to school on this little soapbox cart.
And then she dragged me all the way
across the field until we got to the
place.
And when I got safely behind, and it
was quite early in the afternoon and nobody
had even been near the school by that
time.
And I climbed up on top of the
pile and found myself a rubber tyre up
there and made myself a nice seat among
all the other guys that had been put
up there facing the crowd.
And I had about two or three hours
to wait before everybody began to arrive.
And that was pretty uncomfortable sitting up there.
I was sitting up waiting.
Finally it began to get dark and people
began to arrive.
And then they ran around with some cans
or something throwing it all over the bottom.
I didn't know what that was.
Well I said this big wet grass there
and if I caught fire I'd just roll
over and put myself out.
I had it all worked out.
I'll never forget the time when they began
to light it.
They lit it behind me back here somewhere.
And I was just sitting up there with
all the other guys.
And I remember this lady looking up at
the guys.
And I might have moved or something because
I remember going.
I remember looking at like this see.
And she really started, look I think the
light was glimpsing in behind my mask into
my eyes.
And she's looking like this see.
And my sister, my silly sister.
She's a year younger than me at that
time, still is.
She got a bit freaked out because these
flames started coming up from behind.
She was dead sure I was going to
catch fire.
She didn't know I had all this worked
out with the wet grass and everything.
So she sort of started going ooh, ooh.
And everybody was sort of wondering what she
was doing there.
But I remember this lady.
I figured my stupid sister was going to
give me away anyway in a second.
So I've never forgotten this lady's face.
She's looking like this.
And then I remember I lifted up my
hands like this and went.
That lady went wide as a sheep.
Top to bottom and nearly passed out.
Then I stood up.
And I fell over and rolled around in
the grass.
And that was the last time our school
ever had a bonfire in school.
I've always been fascinated with fire.
I remember in Disneyland, sometimes we used to
live in Anaheim for a while, I'd see
every Saturday night they'd fire rockets up.
And a shell of patriotic stars and sparks
would hit the night sky.
But this afternoon I'm thinking of another star.
The red star.
And this afternoon millions of young people are
marching under its banner.
I'm thinking of that banner unfurled around the
world.
I'm thinking of a movement which is in
15 years going to be the single largest
youth movement.
Signing over 20 million people.
20 million young people.
I'm thinking of Makeda Khrushchev.
He stood in a vast parade in Red
Square one day.
And those thousands and thousands of disciplined young
Russian Communist young people gathered around there.
Makeda Khrushchev stepped up to the microphone to
address the young Communist lead.
And he looked out and he said, You
are all dead men.
Now go out into the world and prove
it.
I believe that we're living in an era
of imminent violence.
Chain of explosion tension.
The world is a chain of explosions apparently
without any way to stop them.
Exploding passions.
Populations leading to famine.
Exploding diseases.
Exploding prejudices.
And the world seems to be sitting on
a powder keg so awesome that tomorrow could
witness the destruction of the world.
Which is why Barry McGuire wrote that song,
Eve of Destruction.
We see the shadow of atomic clouds and
hydrogen bomb clouds and all this.
And it seems like, remember the Atomic Energy
Commission published their little paper.
And over the years they've put the clock
five minutes to midnight.
And every time a significant nuclear advance has
been made, they move that little hand closer
in towards the final hour.
And I believe that most of us here
will probably see the end of the world
in our lifetime.
And I ask us this afternoon, are we
ready?
Are we ready to see that kind of
fire?
I would like to see God's fire flame
across this nation.
I would like to see not the fires
of tension, of riot or revolution, but I'd
like to see God's flame burn.
And to that end I've dedicated my life.
To see spiritual awakening take place in nations
just like this, before revolution takes place.
Now, we've had some pretty rotten days before.
Every time it's dark around a nation, it
seems people want to light fires in it.
And I think we've got a choice.
We can light God's fire or we'll see
the flame of hatred and the devil and
of revolution lit.
In England in the 1700s it was a
very dark day.
During that time, 1700s, for two cents you
could get dead drunk.
Absolutely smashed, right out of your mind.
And they'd even give you some straw to
sleep on, to sleep it off the night.
It was a nation filled with unconverted ministers.
Men stood behind the pulpits and preached garbage,
said absolutely nothing.
They quoted from Time Magazine and Life Magazine,
but they never said the Bible.
And England was sitting at that time for
a bloodbath just like the French Revolution.
And God's eyes searched the nation without light.
Searched up and down.
There on a college campus, he found two
men.
One was a lying, stealing, service-breaking, foul
-mouthed phony.
And another young man was the young man
who'd been kind of an ascetic during his
day.
He was a spooky kind of kid because
he'd only been the youngest member of his
family and his house had nearly burned down.
And somebody just remembered in time that he
was up there, rushed in, dragged him out
just before the roof fell in.
And he called himself a bran plucked from
the burning.
And God's eyes searched that nation and there
on the same campus, he found two men.
One young man's name was George Whitfield.
The other young man's name was John Wesley.
And this young man, George Whitfield, began to
study the word of God on his knees.
He received in his own words a mighty
baptism of the Holy Ghost.
He stood up and preached in an Anglican
church.
His very first message.
Fifteen people went stark raving mad under his
first message.
George Whitfield was 21 years of age.
And the scriptures tell us you shall receive
power after the Holy Ghost has come upon
you.
Time we had some young people who not
only believe in the gifts of the Spirit,
but who demonstrate power in their ministry.
Bristol, an entire city stirred and riveted to
the spot by the fire of the anointed
word of God.
And Kensington, 50,000 people came out in
the snow to listen at 6 o'clock
in the morning to that young man preach.
And they asked George Whitfield near the end
of a fruitful life, Do you have any
hope of getting to heaven when you die,
Mr. Whitfield?
He said, I've been there for 20 years
already.
It was a dark day for the city
of Nineveh.
God had already pronounced sentence against Nineveh.
God had his eyes on that man called
Jonah we began this week out with.
A man he had called who was running
away from the call of God.
And I believe it's possible that there is
Jonah sitting here this afternoon.
If you've got a call of God on
your life, you'll never shake it off.
You may go to the grave shaking it,
but you'll never get rid of it.
It will always be there in your life.
God will always be haunting you with his
call.
You'll never be able to sleep properly, knowing
that God has put something in your heart
that you've turned your back on.
And God found Jonah out in the surging
green waters of the Mediterranean.
Jonah found out he couldn't fight God.
Fish came back, threw up.
Jonah came out.
And that weird prophet with his face white,
permanently scarred by the stomach juices of that
fish, must have walked through that city looking
like a man from out of the grave
or from outer space.
He walked through 40 days and Nineveh will
be destroyed.
39, 38, 37, 36.
Must have taken him a full 40 days
to go through the city.
He scared the people so much they believed
the word of the Lord.
They began to repent.
They even told the cows to repent.
They said put sackcloth and ashes on the
cows too.
Maybe God will spare us.
And Nineveh was shaken with conviction.
And you know the story.
From president to prostitute, from the top to
the bottom.
Shaken by the greatest mass awakening ever recorded
in the scriptures.
120,000 people gave their lives to God.
The greatest mass move in the Bible.
And God reversed his judgment.
Now we've had dark days before.
But God has always found a way to
find a man.
And I believe God's answer to darkness is
light.
People who can shine.
The Lord Jesus said as long as I
am in the world you are the light
of the world.
But in Matthew 5.14 God issues a
challenge to those who are called to world
conquest.
He said you are the light of the
world.
A city that is set on a hill
cannot be hid.
Let your light so shine before men that
they may see your good works and glorify
your father which is in heaven.
And the call of God this afternoon will
only rest on men who are willing to
be exposed to the flame of God.
You can be used to change your world.
I'm convinced of that.
Everywhere I go I believe God is looking
for a man, for a woman.
As part of the great mass move he's
going to do.
Whenever God gets set to shake a nation
he always looks for men.
He always looks for women.
He looks for people, for individuals that he
can call into places of responsibility, of leadership,
of challenge and of inspiration.
And everywhere I go I look for that
man.
I look for that woman.
There could be here this afternoon sitting here
a little unknown Christian that nobody ever heard
of before.
And you're sitting down there and you're taking
notes and you're reading a Bible that God
is preparing you.
You may be a David and all you've
done is take a few lions on here
and there.
God is getting ready to shape you up
to take on Goliath.
You may be a Ruth.
Maybe all you've found in your life so
far is emptiness.
You followed back somebody and God is about
to open up a brand new door for
you.
You may be Esther.
She was a beauty queen, Miss International Israel
and Babylon and everything of her time.
And God had her all set up to
save an entire kingdom.
I don't know who you are.
I do know that God uses some very
freaky people.
The pin challenge of its generation was the
Salvation Army.
And God's man for that era was William
Booth.
He was worn and he was haggard.
His eyes were baggy and his clothes were
baggy and everything about him looked like he'd
just been dragged right over the garbage can.
But he stood behind that pulpit, that ragged,
haggard, baggy man, and his eyes lit up
like blow lamps.
And as his eyes swept, the audience, it's
like, raked them with coals of fire.
And people fell under such tremendous conviction that
they felt literally lifted out of their seats
and dumped at the altar by the presence
of the Spirit of God.
And that man who one day walked through
Thames, nicknamed the Big Stink because of the
filth that had been pouring into it, walked
through the city.
He saw little nine-year-old kids walking
up specially designed stairs up to the counters
of the gym houses.
He saw seven-year-old kids getting their
stomachs pumped out.
He saw nine-year-old kids dying of
cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism.
And he saw these little girls being sold
into prostitution at nine, ten, and eleven years
of age.
And William Booth came back and he said
to his wife, I have found my destiny.
And he put together a little rag-tag
army that he got out of the gutters
of the streets.
He got different people of different races.
He got people that were twisted and broken
that everybody laughed at.
And he put them together into a little
rag-tag army.
And that little rag-tag army, he put
uniforms on them and they marched proud and
straight.
And they played tunes that were too radical
for any church people to listen to in
those days.
And they went into the cities and they
marched.
And they went to the very center and
people as they walked by would throw dead
animals at them and they would have to
catch them and hold them in their hands
so they wouldn't pick them up and throw
them again.
And they threw eggshells filled with paint at
them.
They threw rotten fruit at them.
Somebody came up and spat at William Booth
when he walked past.
And a solicitor said he was going to
try and brush it aside.
And Booth said, leave it alone, it's a
medal.
And they marched into cities.
And I don't know if you know, you
may think the Salvation Army was just soup
and suds and a little bit of salvation.
But in those days there were teenage girls
in there.
And they got armies together to turn the
Salvation Army out of cities as high as
five thousand people.
They roped them with ropes and poured burning
sulfur on them to turn them back.
They took those teenage girls and fired ship's
rockets at them to turn them back.
But the Salvation Army marched into the center
of the city, knelt there in the middle
of the city and the leader would say,
Lord Jesus in your name we take this
city for God and take it.
I think of a young man walking a
lonely night in a golf course near his
Bible school.
In his hands is a corsage, his steady
girlfriend has just curtly refused for the last
time.
And in this young man's ears ring these
words, it's better we don't see each other
again, you're just not spiritual enough for me.
And alone in the silence he fell on
his knees.
And he said, it's no good, I may
as well give up the ministry, God has
failed me.
And finally after a great struggle of life,
he says, what a fool I've been.
And I told God, I promised him I'd
do anything, I'd go anywhere.
And he said, here I am, just because
some girl that I've liked a great deal
drops me, I'm ready to quit, I'm ready
to give it all in, I'm ready to
pack it all in.
And then on his knees in that golf
course he prayed this prayer, Oh God, take
all of me there is.
And I've determined that I'll never have a
girl, a career, anything will come between you
and your call for my life.
And his friends went out to look for
him in the morning.
And he was still there in the golf
course lying down there, his face glued to
his Bible with tears and with the view
of heaven.
And they shook him and woke him up.
They said, get up, get up.
The young man got up off his knees,
and his name was Billy Graham.
And I think of a skinny country preacher,
who just went to Bible school, and was
keen, and spent a lot of time in
the prayer room, but was never particularly the
boy voted most likely to succeed, and never
was student body president or anything.
A young man who just was faithful in
his classes, and didn't seem to have much
going for him.
I'm thinking of that skinny country preacher, who
one day did give up his television set
to make himself available for God.
And he hears a voice in his heart,
as he stands with an unknown burden swirling
over him, from the face of a young
killer in Life magazine.
And Team Challenge was born from the answer
of the heart of David Wilkerson.
Are you here this afternoon?
Has God put something in your heart?
Because if you're here, you're going to need
to learn the lessons of what it costs
to be a man of flame.
And I'll tell you some things I've learned
about light and about fire.
You may be a failure.
God can do a lot with failures.
You see, in this world, where men are
judged by their ability to do and to
be superstars.
A.
W.
Tozer, in his book, Born After Midnight, says,
they are rated according to the distance they
have come up the ladder of achievement.
When we come to Christ, we enter a
different world.
The first are the last, and the last
are the first.
The greatest man is the one that best
serves others.
The one who loses everything is the one
who will have everything at last.
Our Lord died an apparent failure, discredited by
the leaders of established religion, rejected by society
and forsaken by his friends.
The man who ordered him to the cross
was a successful statesman whose hand the ambitious
hack politicians kissed.
It took the resurrection to demonstrate how gloriously
Jesus had triumphed and how tragically the governor
had failed.
The true Christian, especially the minister of the
gospel, should search their own hearts, look deep
into their inner motive.
No man is worthy to succeed until he
is willing to fail.
No man is morally worthy of success in
religious activities until he is willing that the
honor of succeeding should go to another, if
God so directs.
God may allow a servant to succeed who
has disciplined him to a point where he
does not need to succeed to be happy.
Are you a failure?
I think of a man who was a
failure.
He came onto the scene when Israel was
losing its faith.
Israel needed more than a few meetings for
deeper life conventions.
They were backslidden and not only backslidden, sold
out to the powers of darkness.
Feet of hell stalked through the land.
They had all their platform personalities and their
programs and their little church games, but there
was no flame in the land.
There was no fire.
And gloom had gone up.
Fear and trembling filled the whole nation.
And idolatry stalked through the land.
And into the horror of all this hell
stalked God's fireball, a lonely desert commando by
the name of Elijah.
He comes out of nowhere.
He had no pedigree.
Ask Elijah what his qualifications for preaching are.
He had no pedigree.
He had no background.
All you know is suddenly he appears.
God's prophet of fire.
And he puts that challenge up before the
whole of Israel.
And you know the story of the finger
of light that dissolved the sacrifice.
Burned up the water that was in the
trench.
Licked everything up.
The people fell on their knees and said,
The Lord, He is God.
And we look at this man, Elijah, and
we think, What a tremendous man you are.
The Bible tells us he wasn't a tremendous
man.
He was a man of like passion.
A man of like passion.
And this same man, see him just a
few chapters on from there.
And this woman who invented Revlon makeup, Jezebel,
she got mad because he had killed the
prophets.
She said, I'm going to cut his head
off just like he cut off the heads
of my prophets.
And here's Elijah, this man who had seen
the flame of God look down out of
the sky.
And what's he doing?
He's sitting in a cave.
And he's sitting there muttering to himself, Well,
guess it's all over for the ministry.
Somebody went and picked on me.
Jezebel's going to get me if I go
out.
Sitting there.
I told him I'm going to write a
book called My Hateful Hymn Book.
Hymns I hate most.
Well, I got a few for that.
One of them is called Hold the Fort
for I'm Coming.
I don't know what you think of when
you think of Hold the Fort for I'm
Coming, but I know what I think of.
Think of a bunch of chicken disciples, all
scared, hiding from Rome, all up there waving
flags saying, Jesus, please hurry up and come
home.
The nasty, wicked world is killing us all.
Hold the Fort, my eyeball.
That's about as bad as prone to wonder,
Lord, I feel it.
Prone to leave the God I love.
Have I tried singing that to my wife?
Prone to wonder, fay I feel it.
Prone to leave the wife I love.
And Elijah had fallen into the spirit of
self-pitying.
Sitting there.
I'm the only one left.
He's in a cave, full of fear.
And the voice of God comes to Elijah.
What do you want?
He said, what are you doing here, Elijah?
And then he saw a wind, and he
saw an earthquake, and he saw a fire,
and the wind, and the fire and the
earthquake.
The Lord was not in any of them.
Now for me, my testimony, my story, begins
way back there.
I guess, I had sat for a long
time, seen my mother's life change, seen my
dad's life begin to change, and I said,
well, that's very nice.
They can be Christians because they're 40 years
old.
When I get to be 40, I might
even think about becoming Christian, even a missionary.
But I never saw anybody my age do
it.
And for me, the wind, and the fire,
yes, I heard those things.
For me, the earthquake was a rocking sound
of bass and treble guitar.
Thunder was a set of sticks on skins
that my best friend Dougie, name was John
Douglas, used to sit there surrounded by a
string of Ludwigs, and he'd drum until the
sweat rolled off his face.
He'd fling his sticks up and drum his
head up.
The fire was the flame of a Bunsen
under a bubbling retort filled with organic chemicals.
And the Lord was not in the fire
or the earthquake.
And I remember, I had thought to myself,
well, everybody else in their family's religious, I
might as well go too.
So, I found out a slot I could
put in for God.
Whole Sunday.
Now Monday through Saturday was my part of
the week.
That's the week, and I knew that I
could take out my halo, polish it up,
put it away on the shelf, and save
it for Sunday.
Come Sunday, I'd have that halo all ready.
Could fix it on, brush my teeth with
religiously sex-appealed toothpaste, go out and smile,
and I went to church sometimes five times
a day.
Taught a Sunday school class, led the congregational
singing, sung some of the special music, especially
just to close the walk with thee.
Just to walk as close to hell as
I possibly could.
But since our church was about 15 miles
away from my school and my home, and
I never let my parents know what my
friends were like, and I never let any
of my friends ever know that I was
going to church, especially there in town, never
the twain did meet.
And so for many years, I just lived
two separate lives, and it was very simple.
Monday I'd go back to school, I'd put
my halo away, horns would start to go,
and my tail would come out, start waggling.
For a whole week, I'd do this.
Saturday we had our rock band, and we'd
do our thing, and then Saturday night, the
convention would start to set in, so that
I'd repent early in the morning, get up
in time to have a little penance, and
then put my halo out, clip my horns
for the week, stuff my tail into my
suit, and then off I went to church
again.
I'll tell you something about that.
Miserable.
And I had a rotten life.
For six years, from the time I'd first
made some kind of decision to be vaguely
Christian when I was 12 years old to
the time I was 18, I held back
from giving everything I had to God.
I said, that's all right, I've given Him
enough.
He's got a whole hour, church, five hours,
different hours a day, that's enough for anybody.
There was only two things I didn't want
to give to God.
He could have had anything else.
I'd even given him some of that.
I probably borrowed it back following camp, but
he couldn't have two things.
He couldn't have my career, and he couldn't
have my band.
Anything but that.
I didn't mind what else he took, but
he couldn't have those.
He said, that's mine.
I've been good at these things.
Let him take all the lousy things.
It would wreck my life.
Not these.
These are the good things.
Now, I don't know, but you may have
wanted to be a policeman, and now you're
a garbage collector or something, or you may
have wanted to be a garbage collector, and
now you're a policeman.
I don't know what you wanted to be
when you were a little kid, but I
always wanted to be a scientist.
I never remember a time when I wanted
to be anything else except a scientist.
When I was seven years old, I got
my first laboratory.
When I was six years old, I remember
getting some bottles of colored water.
I couldn't find any real chemicals, so I
found some crepe paper, and the running crepe
paper, and the stuff that, you know, all
the dye runs out when you put it
in water.
And then I filled up all these jam
jars with crepe paper water, and I mixed
them all in a different color, put it
alongside a wall, and that was my first
laboratory.
That was when I was six.
When I was seven, I found my first
real chemical.
My dad had a bicycle job, not a
motorbike, but the other kind, and he used
a bottle of hydrochloric acid to clean up
the iron and stuff like this.
And I found this bottle, pulled the top
off it, smelled it.
It was concentrated hydrochloric acid, and it smelled
all, you know, weird and fizzy, and then
I poured it out on the concrete, and
the concrete started fizzing and going yellow, and
I figured, wow, this is a cool chemical.
It dissolves concrete.
So I ripped it off my dad's shop,
stuck it on my lab, and then I
had my first chemical.
When I was seven years old, my birthday,
my parents gave me a first chemistry set
because they realized it was kind of interesting.
From then on, I made friends with all
the local chemists and chemical warehouse supply places.
I remember walking in when I was nine
years old and asking for a chemical a
dude had never even heard of.
And it blew his mind so much, he
said, what are you doing?
I said, I'm going to be a chemist.
So he took me out the back of
his vast warehouse, and he gave me all
their broken beakers and flasks, and I took
on the whole car full of stuff.
And I was in business.
By the time I was going to high
school, I had a better lab than the
high school did.
In my first year in university, I had
a better lab than the university did.
And I told some of you, seven years
old, I got a microscope, and I was
looking for a cure for cancer.
I got this cheese, this old furry cheese,
blue furry cheese.
Have you seen that blue cheese with fur
through it?
You know, that kind of stuff?
And I figured, if Alexander Fleming found a
cure for cancer, you know, penicillin, if he
found that in cheese, if you look hard
enough, you start early enough, I could find
a cure for cancer in cheese.
So I was looking at this cheese under
the microscope, and that cheese walked right off
the slide when I was looking.
And I've never eaten cheese since, raw, unless
it's been irradiated.
This interest only changed in degree.
When we were in primary school, we made
plans to launch rockets on our unsuspecting city,
devised this chemical to color our swimming pool,
bright iridescent crimson.
And when we had our gang wars, I
told you we didn't do the usual trip
with the brass knuckles and that.
I was always skinny, I couldn't use the
brass knuckle thing.
So we devised this thing to look like
a little contact pill.
And you just drop it in the back
of a dude's pocket you didn't like, and
he sat down and broke it, and five
minutes later, when he walked away, the back
of his trousers burned out on him.
I love chemistry.
And in all this search, I'd work about
18 hours a day in this lab, and
I was, I was in love with chemistry.
It was my whole life.
My parents knew, they'd want to get me
something for my birthday, they'd buy me a
chemist's dictionary or something like that, and that's
what I lived in.
And then, there was this weird emptiness, though.
And I thought, well, your problem is, you're
working 18 hours a day in a lab,
you don't see anybody, you need to go
out and meet some people, you want to
go and, it's people that you're missing.
I thought.
So I thought, well, what's the best way
to meet people?
So we started putting together a band.
Now, I'm not a musician, I used to
play drums once, and my teacher told me
to beat it.
Finished me off.
We got together a band of kids that
absolutely loved music.
Most of them were friends of mine, I
got to learn to know them.
And we put together a band, there was
Kerry, who could make electric music, play with
all his fingers, this way, this way.
There was Squash, I don't know why we
called him Squash, but he was our rhythm
guitarist.
And the only redeeming feature about Squash was
that he was an electronic genius.
He could rig an amp to do things
that nobody had ever heard before.
And there was Dougie, my friend, who'd lived
on these drums.
And then there was Rod, Rod was our
bass guitarist.
He never smiled, he just played bass.
And that's the band.
And from the start, there was a success.
It got off well, and we didn't have
television very much, just starting to find out
what it was in New Zealand at that
time.
We were very backward over there.
And radio and that was a big thing
there.
And it started to go well, and there
were a lot of kids, and they came,
and I thought, well, this is really it.
A lot of kids, they're looking up there
and everything else.
But the thing that bothered me was this,
that when the lights were switched off, and
everybody went home, and you turned the amps
off, and you packed everything up in the
truck, and we headed out, that same all
-emptiness came back again.
That same inner, aching loneliness.
And I'd had, I'd done everything that I
knew.
We were well-known.
I had a career.
I had everything fixed.
I had all the money I wanted, and
when I didn't have it, I could steal
it, and I knew everything I wanted was
there, and yet there was still nothing.
And it just bothered me.
I didn't know what.
And I remember the day that God began
to speak to me.
All the time, my mother had been praying
for me.
She didn't come and say, oh, that nasty,
horrible rock music, well, let's take this stuff
out of here.
She'd just come in there and look at
her music, and go like this, and walk
out again, and she prayed for me.
All those years, she prayed for me.
I remember the day that God really spoke
to me.
We're having a rock practice, and we're practicing
in our garage.
We'd set our recorders up in the garage,
because there's a wall of sound effect that
could happen.
And we'd set up the thing, we're practicing,
and creating this wall of sound thing, and
suddenly, right in the middle of practice, I
heard this, BAM!
Which ruined the recording, and practice, and everything
else.
I go out to the front of the
lawn, and there's my idiot friend, underneath this
tree, with a brand new motorbike.
That's a Triumph, big black and shiny chrome
thing, so big he sat on it like
this, you know.
And he'd just bought this thing, brand new.
You know, he loved motorbikes, and this was
a big bike, and do 100 miles an
hour without even trying, and he usually made
him try.
He pulled up, he pulled up on the
lawn, slammed on his brake, and carved a
big groove right through the lawn for my
dad to see when he came home.
I went out to talk to my idiot
friend.
Spent about half an hour, we talked about
things.
He showed me his bike, he was proud
of it.
And I got excited, because our band had
its first real big appearance.
We'd just broken into, what was us, big
time.
And I talked for about half an hour
about the band, and what we're doing, what
we're going to do, and where we're going
to go from there.
And he talked about his bike.
As a matter of fact, we talked about
our God.
And then, he said, listen, he said, I'm
just going to go and visit my grandparents.
He said, would you like a ride out
to the country?
And I looked at the bike, I knew
he wanted to give me a ride, the
pillow on the back, and I said, well,
yeah, and then I thought, no, we've got
to finish the practice off.
And I said, look, I'll tell you what,
you go out now, I'll take a ride
later on.
Come back some other time, we'll do it.
He said, you sure you don't want a
ride?
I'm going to be out about 15 minutes
out there, 15 minutes back.
I just want to show my grandparents it's
only three miles out, and then we'll come
back here and he can finish it off.
I said, oh, no, I'd better not, I'd
better get it finished.
I turned around and went back inside.
And he backed his bike up to the
dirt, you know, ah, ah, ah, ah, boom,
dropped it, and his back went up, boom,
boom, boom, boom.
I saw him go around, it's always cool
when you lean, you know, as you go
around the corner.
And I could still hear him accelerating about
five minutes later.
I finished off the practice.
It was late, late that afternoon, my dad
ran down to get a newspaper.
Now, we live only about 150 yards from
our local press.
My dad, your dad, usually ran down and
got a first pull copy.
They have a little thing in the front
page called Stop Press, it's printed in red,
it's last minute news, you can put it
on in the last hour.
And I remember my dad came back, it
was a very beautiful day, late afternoon, came
out onto that lawn and he showed me
a newspaper.
He said, did you see this?
And I picked it up and he pointed
to this little red Stop Press column.
And I read there how a young man
had left my hometown of Manurewa in Auckland,
New Zealand and had headed out to visit
his grandparents on his new motorbike.
And out in the country, just a few
minutes out into the country, there's a blind
road, curves around, he'd been around it many
times before on many other bikes.
And he came around well on his side
of the road, which is the left hand
side of the road, New Zealand, and a
kid who was drunk who was running from
the police in a stolen car came barrelling
down the road and didn't know it was
blind.
He came in at about 100 miles an
hour.
He came into the corner, he realised it
was a blind corner, he realised he was
going too fast and he chopped the car
down, he got it down through the gears
and he got it down to about 60
miles an hour.
But he came around the corner on the
wrong side of the road and he hit
a boy on a motorbike travelling 60 miles
an hour head on at a combined impact
of 120 miles an hour.
He hasted the two ends of the bike
to go and the observer said it seemed
like the bike was just pushed together and
it somersaulted twice in the air and blew
up.
And when the ambulance came to collect the
body they couldn't find enough parts.
And I've never forgotten because I'd read there
the name of one of my closest buddies
Alan Charles Dawson.
Suddenly it didn't seem such a bright sunny
day and I remembered a verse that had
been buried down there from my summer school
days.
What is your life?
It's like a mist.
It's here and then when the sun comes
up it's gone.
And suddenly God spoke to me that still
small voice that came to Elijah and he
said what are you doing like this?
And I said God I don't know.
I'm certainly not serving you.
And I saw before me two roads.
I saw a road a road that I
was heading a broad road a road where
all my friends had been going and I
saw beside that road a little skinny road
and a man standing there with holes in
his hands.
And I remember choose you this day and
you'll serve.
And I knew what it would cost.
And here's something you better learn about fire.
It purifies.
I realized that if I was going to
really be a Christian it was going to
cost me those two things I'd held on
to all my life.
My career and then this band.
And I want you to know I didn't
just simply say oh joyous ravenous joy I'll
do this.
I had to I felt like somebody just
said would you like me to cut your
arm off and take your eye out.
I just there was no way but I
knew there was only one God spoke to
me and said if you'd been on the
back of that bike do you know where
you would be.
And I knew it.
Alan and I had talked about our God.
He went to church I went to church.
And I remember I was supposed to be
the Christian one out of the two.
After all didn't I lead a Sunday school
someplace?
Wasn't I a song leader in a church?
What did I tell them about Jesus Christ?
Nothing.
I talked about the thing I was most
interested in which was me.
And that's when God began to deal with
me.
It was only a short matter after that
that I said goodbye to the band.
I took them out it was the evening
of this big meeting.
And I'd seen a girl just before that
that helped me because I saw her really
live for Jesus Christ.
And I said it's possible you can do
it.
Somebody's done it.
Seven years later I married that girl.
But it helped.
She was leaving for England the following day.
She was going to spend two years there
in Bible college.
She'd been the first Christian I'd ever really
met.
And that night I decided I'd say goodbye
to the band.
So as I dropped them off just prior
to picking them up and taking them out
for this engagement I explained to them what
I was going to do.
And all of them with the exception of
one of them said, you're nuts.
We have spent three and a half years
putting together this thing and now you're going
to drop it.
The guy who took over when we left
went on to make their band the number
one rock band in New Zealand.
Larry and the Rebels.
And they all laughed.
Except my friend John, Dougie.
He was the guy who used to help
me break into houses and stuff.
And Dougie said, listen Winch, he said, I
know what you got is real.
Something's happened in your life.
But he said, I don't want to do
that because I know it would cost me
my drums if I gave my life to
God.
And the friendship there that we'd had ever
since primary school was finished.
I'd only seen him twice in my life
since then.
He left and went to New Guinea.
And he's on a plantation today still playing
his drums and drinking.
And I said goodbye.
Now I didn't know what I was supposed
to be doing.
I've already told some of you the way
God called me to come over to this
country.
But I do want to share with you
another thing about fire and that is it
energizes.
Now, I am not a very brave type
of person.
My wife says, listen, there's a big bug
in the bathroom.
I say, oh really?
Well, let's open the door so it can
escape.
I'm not exactly built like Tarzan.
Now, this is the body the Lord gave
me.
It's the best one I got.
And you wait till the resurrection, brethren.
I hope the Lord gives us bodies according
to our desires.
But this is the only one I got.
So you put up with yours and I'll
put up with mine.
I have never been a very particularly strong
person or a brave person.
When I was a little kid, I was
skinny.
And there's something about a skinny kid that
everybody wants to pick on.
Primary school, the big dudes, there was a
guy there, he had three eyes.
One right in the center of his forehead.
Two others.
Here's the one who always picked on me.
His name was Ross Wibley.
He came from a children's home and I
was skinny and I remember this dude, I'd
seen some movie somewhere with Douglas Fairbanks or
somebody was being attacked by some dudes and
he swung on a raster and kicked them.
You know, kicked his way right through the
hole.
I thought it was a cool movie.
And this guy, these guys were chasing me
and I waited till this guy came running
up.
I went and swung on the tree.
I pulled myself off too far and I
kicked him right in the mouth.
And he was so mad, he chased me
all around primary school and he finally chased
me into this classroom and I had this
little lunchbox.
My mother gave me a little lunchbox with
a handle on it.
And I was so scared, I rushed in,
I grabbed my lunchbox, he came down and
I grabbed my lunchbox and I beat him
over the head with my lunchbox and busted
the lunchbox right over his head.
He was about to eat me and then
this teacher came out because there was all
these screams and beats and weird sounds and
she came out and she said what's happening
here?
And I pointed at my lunchbox and I
said he broke my lunchbox.
And I beat that dude up, see.
But there's something about a skinny kid everybody
picks on.
Now I have known, I believe my only
similarity with Elijah is that I'm a man
of like passion.
I know what it's like to be scared.
I remember one time we were in Detroit,
Troy, my wife and I, and we were
going to work on the streets and boy
we were praying.
We were sitting, praying away in this room.
Oh, we were praying and I told some
of the kids in the university about this.
We were praying in this room and we
were sitting and the director said you better
get close to God because it's going to
be rough out on the streets tonight.
And I was praying and singing and I
felt the presence of the Lord come really
close and as I was praying somebody put
hands on the back of my head just
like this and they were going to pray
for me.
And I thought oh it's this dude behind
me thinks he's Earl Roberts or something.
And I have my head down like this
and the hand went off and I said
well thank you you know and I began
to turn around and you know we segregated
in Teen Challenge they put all the girls
on one side and the guys on the
other.
And I turned around thinking this guy behind
me would be the one that was praying
for me.
I turned around and the seat behind me
is empty.
And I looked over and he's way over
in the corner like this.
I thought boy if he prayed for me
he must have really got over there fast.
And then I looked in the aisle I
thought it must be somebody walking looked in
the aisle and nobody in the aisle.
And I thought well that's kind of weird
because I felt somebody put their hand on
my head and I turned around and I
thought if he didn't pray for me and
nobody in the aisle put their hand on
my head then who did that thing?
And I turned around and just as I
did I felt that same hand back.
And I tell you brethren I didn't say
anything.
I didn't say oh hello Lord or something.
I felt like climbing under the carpet.
And right next door this girl went vroom
off in unknown language and I thought boy
this is the supernatural thing I've ever seen.
I thought maybe the Lord wants me to
enter but I've never done that before.
And I didn't know what.
All I knew was that the presence of
God filled our room with a stove.
And then I got up and we went
out.
My wife was sitting right up the front
here and we walked out and as we
were walking out I said do you know
something weird happened to me.
She said what?
She said I think the Lord touched me.
And she looked at me and she said
you too.
Same thing happened.
We went out in the streets and there
we were in the equivalent of Black Panther
territory.
And I saw, I've been walking on the
streets this guy who was with me so
scared he decided he'd split immediately.
He just got there.
Half an hour later he said look man
I just got to go.
And we just arrived there.
Jumped in the car and drove off.
Here I am standing around with my Bible
trying to look like a spiritual superstar or
something.
I'm out in the streets looking and I
keep an eye on my wife over there
with her girlfriend because they're witnessing to these
girls and I see a whole bunch of
black Muslims follow, surround them.
And I'm looking over there.
Uh oh, now what are we supposed to
do if guys surround girls?
Two guys are supposed to go across and
begin to talk to the guys and then
the girls excuse themselves alright but I don't
have this other guy.
And I'm looking around for some guys and
everybody's gone and I'm the only boy in
the whole, you know, twelve miles it seems.
And I'm standing there and here's these guys
and I said well how would David Wilkerson
do this?
So I put my Bible and I walked
across the street, picked this guy who had
the loudest mouth and started talking to him.
I figured he must be the leader.
In the middle of this talking and suddenly
in a sweet, kind, gentle voice this car
pulls up.
Some guy says, Get off the road!
I look up, I see the meanest policeman
I've ever seen in my life.
He had no neck, the Lord just stood
his head boom right on his shoulders, two
little blue glassy eyes like diamonds, glinting and
there were three other guys in the car
with him and I learned this is the
tech squad.
It's the toughest, roughest police squad in the
whole of Detroit.
As they get out, that's bad news.
They have sawn off shotguns and machine guns
and tear gas and the whole thing in
their car.
So I figured, well, you know, they don't
want a big crowd gathering because there was
one gathering.
So I took this guy and we took
right off the street, we went back into
this gas station and I'm starting to talk
to him and I look up and suddenly
I see these two bright lights.
I hear a car accelerating and I just
see these two lights and if you can
believe it, a car horn being hit at
the same time as brakes being hit right
in front of you.
Like that.
And I saw these headlights.
I went, ah, I jumped this way, he
jumped that way and then I looked up
and here's the big four.
Dude gets up, grabs me, lifts me up,
said, what's your name?
I forgot my name.
My name right here, this name right here,
this name, see.
Not a kid can remember his name either.
I go, here we go, we go to
jail and they're preaching the gospel and then
they take this kid, this black kid, throw
him in the street, in the car, drive
him down the road and leave me standing
there and of course all his friends come
all over.
And I'm standing here alone, the only white
boy in the whole of the black community.
And I see all these kids come down
and then his friends surround me and they
said, you know what they're going to do
with him?
I said, no.
They're going to take him down the road
and beat him up.
I said, I wouldn't do that.
So I'm waiting.
I look down the road and here he
comes.
And I saw him walking.
This is the way he's walking.
And I don't mind when people talk or
anything but nobody's saying anything.
They're just standing there waiting.
He comes up this far away.
He says, you know what they did to
him?
I said, no.
They took him down the road and beat
him up.
And I said, shhh, now what do you
say?
You know all that prejudice and hatred and
anger?
Just because a white guy is talking to
a black guy about his soul.
And I tell you what I remember.
I remember the hands.
I remember the promise.
Hello, I'm with you always even to the
end of the world.
And I preached.
I preached like I never preached before.
I preached to the whole street.
I preached for an hour and a half.
And we finished almost friends because of the
Holy Ghost.
You don't have to be brave.
You don't have to be smart.
You've got to be available because fire energizes.
And listen, fire burns.
And this is something I'll finish with here.
Fire burns up everything except the eternal.
I remember the day I got a call
to the mission field.
I was sitting in a meeting.
It probably couldn't be very much larger than
this.
The guy was preaching on the launch of
the first man into space.
He'd never gotten his message because nobody had
ever gone up into space at that time.
And he's talking about this guy who's sitting
in an astronaut's couch and he's locked in
there.
And he's looking at the clock and that
automatic clock, it'll tick round and then when
it hits zero an automatic firing sequence starts
and it's right out of his hand.
And this guy is sitting there like this
and any time before that touches its automatic
sequence he can hit the abort button and
cancel the whole mission.
Now understand nobody's ever been up to space
before.
He doesn't know whether he'll make it.
He's going to be sitting riding an explosion
out into the furthest reaches man has ever
been.
And he's sitting there.
He's probably got a girlfriend or a wife
or kids.
And he's sitting there and he's watching that
clock in his mouth getting dry and he's
starting to sweat and he's watching that thing
tick off at final seconds.
If he wants to tick it out he
can hit that button and abort the whole
mission.
He said I can't go, I can't do
it.
But once that button touches its automatic sequence
he's committed.
It's no longer in his hands.
He's going to ride a tail of fire
out into space.
And if he doesn't come back it's out
of his hands.
And he talked about that man that God
could launch him to a place he'd never
been before.
With no guarantee that he'd ever come back.
And then he made a decision.
He said listen there are a few of
you in this room that God is calling
you to the regions beyond.
And he said there's not many of you
but God has a few of you in
this room.
And if you feel the call of God
in your life to ride the rocket then
I want you to stand.
There was no music.
There was no real music.
There was no real invitation.
But I felt God speaking to me.
And I stood with two or three others
across that big hall.
And I walked down the front and I
said oh God here I am.
He didn't really counsel us very much.
I can't remember what else.
Nobody gave me a super packet of literature
that showed me how to be a Christian
without being religious.
All I simply had was the fact that
God had called me.
And one and a half years later the
reality of that decision was confirmed.
And I stood on the steam and waved
goodbye to my family and my friends.
Heading out to a country I knew nothing
at all about with no provision or no
promise that anybody would support me other than
the sure call of God that called me.
And I remember I was going out to
this country called the United States of America.
I didn't know anything about it.
And I remember coming into San Francisco.
There was a fog in the harbor.
And this was the first visit to the
United States proper after Hawaii.
And I was getting rid of the stuff
that I had in my pocket.
I was getting rid of this tape recorder
that I had.
I had some nice packing and boxing and
stuff for it.
And I was throwing all my junk overseas.
I couldn't really sleep very well.
It was about two o'clock in the
morning.
And I remember going out to the thing
and I was just about to throw this.
It was a very pretty box.
I wished I could have kept it.
But I said well you're going to be
doing a lot of walking around.
You don't want to be sleeping in practice.
No sense lugging this box around.
I'm just going to throw it over.
And the Lord spoke to me.
And he said, son, you make that abandonment
of the box the abandonment of your body
to me.
And I said, alright Lord, here's my body.
And I threw it in.
And then there was a packing inside.
He said, I want your soul too.
I want all of your personality.
And I threw that in.
Splash.
Then I stood there and I had two
little pieces of metal.
One was shaped like a boomerang.
The other one was shaped like the letter
L.
And as I stood there with those two
pieces the Lord spoke to me again.
And he said, son, that boomerang represents your
return home.
And that letter L represents the one earthly
love you have.
This girl that you really love.
The one that you first saw.
That everyone challenged you to give your life
to me.
The girl had moved from England now to
the United States to continue us going over
there.
The one girl I felt if I was
ever going to marry at all I was
going to marry her.
And the Lord spoke to me and he
said, son, if I asked you from this
day on never to go home again and
never see your family again.
Would you be willing to do it?
And if I asked you to say goodbye
to that Christian girl you love so you
go on from this day alone and you
never marry.
Would you be willing to do that?
And I tell you, I hang on to
those two pieces of metal for a long,
long time.
And then I remember that little verse.
A poem.
Except you make him Lord of all.
You cannot make him Lord at all.
And I remember taking that piece of boomerang
metal and I threw it in the water
and I held that letter L for a
long time.
And then I dropped it in the water
and I remember it seemed to shine.
And I seemed to see it go all
the way down the water.
I could watch it was still glittering going
way, way down.
And finally it passed out of sun.
And I remember straightening up from the side
and as I did I felt a sense
of the presence of God cover me and
it's not left me to this day.
And now I've had one desire.
Preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to as
many people as possible in the most effective
way in the shortest possible time.
Bow your heads in prayer please.
Lord Jesus, you have not called us to
an easy task, but you have called us
to be faithful.
We thank you that you have said you
are the light of the world.
Deliver us from the fear of God of
being set aflame.
We love you, the flame will burn, the
oil and not the wick.
Help us Lord to expose our lives to
the light.
You are the cleanser of the world.
You are
the light of the world.