In this sermon, the speaker expresses his concern about effectively communicating his message to new listeners. He acknowledges that his passionate and extroverted style may not resonate with everyone. He emphasizes the importance of spending time with God through worship, prayer, praise, thanksgiving, and adoration. The speaker identifies five barriers that hinder people from truly knowing God and experiencing victory in their lives: busyness, worry, materialism, love for the world, and love for money. He encourages the audience to seek God above all else and to prioritize their relationship with Him.

Chapter 3, verse 16. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us. 1 John 3, 16. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. For whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? 2 My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed, and in truth. 3 And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him. 4 For if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. 5 Beloved, if our hearts condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. 6 And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. 7 This is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he gave his commandment. 8 And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him. 9 And hereby we know that he abideth in us by the Spirit which he hath given us. 10 Let us pray. Father, speak to us from this passage of your word. Open our eyes, and help us to see truth, and to obey at any cost, in Jesus' name. Amen. I find it very difficult to try to communicate from the pulpit the deep burden that's on my heart. And I'm especially concerned, I want to speak in the context, especially for those of you who are new. I think if I were in the situation of many of you, that what I would be hearing here today would not particularly impress me at all. I'm also probably the kind of person that would be extremely critical of a rather extrovert American who talks as if the world could be taken by night if people would just wake up. And I perhaps would be the greatest critic, in fact I am the greatest critic of this whole mixed up movement. But I hope you will not get trapped this afternoon in a semantic jungle. Nor will you be hindered by your own prejudices and biases. Because that can hinder what the Holy Spirit wants to say. If somehow my intonation, my voice, my face, my gestures, or anything about O.M. or me turns you off, may you ask the Lord Jesus to help you, that you may think and clearly analyze what you're hearing without being put off by people, including me. I realize that it's very hard to communicate to a mixed group of people such as yourself with so many different ideas and backgrounds. And people, because of their particular psychological situation that they're in, often misconstrue what I'm trying to say and get themselves into a real bondage and a real bind and confuse the whole issue of discipleship. We're speaking this afternoon about revolution in discipleship. First of all, let us realize that the Bible teaches that we're all disciples. We're all disciples. If you're born again, you're a disciple. You might not be a good disciple, but you're a disciple. You might not be a true disciple in the full sense of the word, but you're a disciple. The word disciple is not some grande word for spiritual bigwigs or the Pharisee clan. It's a group or a name given to the ordinary believer and follower of Jesus Christ. Our burden, of course, is to live up to our discipleship. Discipleship basically is living up to the name you already have. Just like Christianity, a real Christian is living up to Christ. He's living up to the name he already has. So when we call a man a Christian, we are basically saying he's a disciple of Jesus Christ. And if you're not a disciple, you're not born again. And if you're born again, then you're a disciple. Where you are in discipleship, where you are in Christian growth, that's another thing. And it's true, some people are so behind in their Christian growth that one would feel a little funny calling them a disciple. Some of you know very well that your own Christian life is at a state where to call yourself a disciple, you feel like you're overstating the situation. But the Lord Jesus used this word for all those who had accepted him. The book of Acts speaks about the number of disciples multiplying. Most of us have read those verses. When we speak of a revolution in discipleship, we're speaking of the need, to be plain this afternoon, the need for change in our Christian lives. The need to know reality. The need to be experiencing Christ daily. The need to know what it is to live the kind of life that we know we're supposed to be living. In Acts chapter 17, we have some penetrating words. Verse 5 it says, or verse 6, When they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. These who have turned the world upside down. In the Berkeley translation of the Bible, it says, These world revolutionists, I believe is closer to the meaning, have come here also. The early disciples, the early followers of Christ were spiritual revolutionists. They were men who were experiencing dynamic changes in their character and in their personality and in their life by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And they were being transformed into revolutionary, loving, dynamic, witnessing, praying, broken individuals. I think one of the problems today is that we really don't realize how large the gap is between what we say we are, what we believe, and what we actually are. Hoser in his book Root of Righteousness says, So wide is the gulf that separates theory from practice in the church, that an inquiring stranger who chances upon both would scarcely dream that there was any relation between them. An intelligent observer of our human scene who heard the Sunday morning sermon and later watched the Sunday afternoon conduct of those who heard it, would conclude that he had been examining two distinct and contrary religions. It's true. He goes on to speak about this enormous gap. And he says, We can prove our faith by our committal to it. No other way. Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief at all. It's a pseudo or false belief only. It might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. That's what O.M. ends up doing. Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. Right. And a vast number of young people, and I'm sure some of you are that way today, confess one thing and live another. Think about one thing and live another. And the life in Sunday in the church or in the young people's meeting and the life on Saturday night and other times of the week is very, very distinct. And so this dichotomy builds up. And I think that many of us, and I believe myself as well, we're not really conscious of how great this dichotomy is. This double compartment life, this spiritual schizophrenia in which we become almost like two people. And though we can pray with great intensity and we may even exhort someone else, we may even argue over doctrines and argue over whether hell exists and argue over the deity of Christ and argue over all these things. And sing about this. Sing onward, Christian soldiers. Sing, take my life and let it be. Sing when I survey the wondrous cross. All these fantastic hymns. And yet over in our lives the reality is not there. The love, the brokenness, the grace, the ability and desire to witness and all the other things that we've heard about again and again. One of the biggest evidences of this is the lack of prayer. Prayer has always been the spiritual thermometer of the church. Prayerlessness is rampant. Churches have dropped prayer meetings as something that just do not work in the 20th century and have replaced it with other more interesting activities. And prayer to the average person is purely a bore. When I talk to people about spending a night in prayer, their teeth almost drop out. Can't believe it. What do you do all night in a prayer meeting? You know, back when I used to spend all night on the dance floor and sometimes start at nine o'clock and dance till three and then go out to another club and dance till the morning and then take a swim and wake up and do something else. No one ever questioned me. Well, what do you do all that time? We seem to count it off as quite normal to get out in the middle of a wooden floor and to go around in vicious circles for four or five hours with the same girl in our arms. But if someone comes up and says, well, I spent three hours in the presence of the triune God, we think there's something wrong. Well, I'll tell you where something's wrong. It's wrong with us. We have been brainwashed into a false set of values. We have been brainwashed into putting importance on that which has no importance and on taking away importance from that which is really significant in life. And I believe fellowship with God, prayer, worship is the most significant part of our creature-creator relationship. And to me, the man who doesn't understand this is the man who needs help. And oh, what a blessing it is to be able to spend time with God. It's true, at times it will be boring. But this is one of the great problems of life. But as we get to know God more and as we learn not to live by feelings, we will discover that these things aren't boring and we'll enter into a whole new area of reality that will be a tremendous blessing to our own soul. The problem with too many of us is that we're spiritual sensualists. Forgive the word, but it's true. It was Howard Butt, an outstanding layman, who once said, so much of my life I have been a spiritual sensualist, always wanting to feel God's presence in prayer and being depressed when I did not. I saw that until I could believe without spiritual goose pimples that I would always be vacillating and my faith would be at the mercy of my emotional feelings. The average young person today has a faith that truly is at the mercy of his emotions. When they're riding high, maybe through a special message, maybe because things are going well, their favorite boyfriend has just seemed to be showing some interest or they received a ten-pound bonus at work or some other thing, their Christianity is great. They're ready to witness, they're ready to get on tracks, and they're singing, they go around the house whistling their favorite gospel jingle and all the rest. But it can be the very next day when they maybe wake up feeling tired, maybe the flu, the Hong Kong or one of her relatives hits, and they don't feel so well, and so they wake up, there's no more jingle on their tongue, and the Bible is just an old dry book, and they're just hunting around for their cup of coffee or tea, and everything seems to be caving in, and when you meet them, it's like meeting a polar bear in the woods. And so many people are like this, up and down they go, like a lift, and their Christianity is spasmodic, and it confuses not only them, it confuses everybody who's watching them. And I believe with all my heart that if there's anything God wants to produce in us today as young people, it's stability, stickability, and steadfastness. Three S's. I know people who one minute they're talking to me about some great experience, blessing, this and that, they're going to go to India, and the next minute they're down in the doldrums, they're depressed, they're wondering if God exists, they're not sure they're saved. How can this be God's plan? I believe it's God's plan that we press on, as it says in 1 Corinthians 15, 58, I believe, be steadfast, unmovable, sort of like one of these pillars, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Someone can ask me, do you think really 20th century young people can be stable? In this age of neurosis, instability, psychosis, schizophrenia, and everything else, do you really think that you're going to come into the 20th century and produce a stable generation? I believe that with all my heart. I think of one of our young men in India who was as unstable as you could get. He had a religious neurosis, which is quite common, and he tried to find religious peace in Hinduism, and he didn't find it. And everything to him was depressing, I guess he had extreme melancholy and all the rest, so he decided the answer was a couple of bottles of poison. So he drank two bottles of TIC-20, the hottest cockroach killer you can get on the shelves of India. And he was in the hospital about moments from death. Unstable, lost, suicide case. That was this young man, Hindu. Then someone gave him a gospel tract, you know, the little insignificant superficial gospel tract that you're going to give out by the grace of God this afternoon. And he read that gospel tract, and it formed some hunger in his heart, and soon he was at the feet of the Lord Jesus. Today, he is one of the most stable leaders we got. I wish all of our foreign leaders were as stable as he. When many of our foreign brothers are putting in for the holiday, this brother is going on and on and on and on. Well, I keep waiting for the bottom to fall out because I've had it fall out all over the world so many times. But there he is, pressing on. Stability, stickability, steadfastness. And I don't care how emotionally up and down you are, or how inconsistent your Christian life is, or how much of a spiritual sensualist you are, God can change it. God can make you and give you that stickability. It may take years, it usually does. But I know he can do it. Through the rest of faith, through the all-sufficiency of Christ, through the Word of God, through the Holy Spirit. I don't want to get tangled up in the semantic jungle of theological vocabulary. I always have people come up to me with their favorite jingle for quick sanctification. There must be hundreds of them. And have you experienced this? Have you done this? Have you experienced the sovereignty of God experience? And the Keswick experience? And then, of course, the OM experience? And the sleeping on the floor experience? And all these, and other ones that are talked about far more than that. But, you know, I've said this before and I say it again to those of you who are new. God can give you a crisis in your life. This weekend may be a crisis in your life. Good! But any crisis not followed by a process will soon become an abscess. And we've got an awful lot of that everywhere today. God is desirous of doing a deep, permanent, lasting, sticking, never-changing work in your own heart. I find a lot of young people that feel that backsliding is a part of the Christian life. That's right. That depression and getting away from the Lord is all part of growing up. Everybody's got to be backsliding for a while. Everybody's got to be depressed. That's a lie of the devil. And as you believe the lie, so you experience that. It's true that these things are common and one should not be overwhelmed by it. Nor think that something special is coming upon him. Depression is more common than colds. By far. But it doesn't necessarily have to be so. And as you believe in your heart that God is going to give a victory, that he's going to teach you to live over feelings, so it will be. And I just, for myself, just refuse to believe that any time in my Christian life I have to live away from him. I have to live in a cellar of despair. No matter how many times or how many problems I may have. May God open our eyes in this area because it's one of the most important. Anyway, I'm discovering that most people don't need to be convinced that they don't have reality in their Christian life. I don't usually have to harp on this subject. Most are well aware that they don't really have the kind of reality the Bible talks about. The kind of reality in prayer that is talked about in the word of God. You know, Samuel Chadwick who once said, the one concern of the devil is to keep the saints from prayer. He fears nothing from prayerless studies. A lot of you are spending a good amount of time in that. Prayerless work. We specialize in that including OM. Prayerless religion. He laughs at our toils. He mocks at our wisdom. But he trembles when we pray. He trembles when we pray. And I believe that's true. And I believe that one of the biggest important areas of this whole area of reality is in prayer. And we need to know reality in prayer. You know, it's obvious that we are a religion of words. Tozer said any factory that needed so much raw material to produce so little finished product would go bankrupt in two weeks. And it's true. The church. All kinds of men who are deacons and elders in our churches would never run their businesses that way. They'd go bankrupt. It's true. Somehow we're satisfied with slow progress. We're satisfied with just getting by. That's not God's plan. Dr. Edmund, the former president of Wheaton College said, not somehow, but triumphantly. That's the Christian life. Not somehow scraping through, getting away with as much as possible and still being able to feel that I'm at least on my way to heaven. No, not somehow, but triumphantly. A whole new level of Christian living. C.S. Lewis, in his book Screwtape Letters, said we have the tendency to think, but not to act. Doesn't he sum up the situation with so many of us? Think. Argue about it. Talk about it. Never act. Never move. He goes on to say, we all write a book, but not act. You know, I've met authors of books who don't even live what they talk about in the book. You know, the day I stop moving out door-to-door, the day I stop track distribution, I hope somebody will construct my coffin quick and drop me in it. Please take notes, OM leaders, that you may be cooperative in such a project. I want to tell you the greatest blessings over these past weeks, though I've had so many letters and I've been preaching and counseling day and night, the greatest blessings have been out door-to-door. I've been out door-to-door at times almost every other day. And that's where I get soul energy, so that I can answer my letters, so I can pray, so I can do my work in the energy of the Holy Spirit. Because if I'm not out facing a lost world for Christ, I'll soon dry up and blow away, at least to some degree, though it may take years to notice it. He goes on to say, we all write a book, but not act. He says, the more we feel without acting, the less we will ever be able to act. And in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. Have you ever been in a church, maybe your own church, where no one is really doing anything, apart from a little minority? Every church has a little minority that are usually grinding away, trying to make up for everyone else sitting around. And you wonder, why don't they do anything? Why is there no action? Why does no one win anyone to Christ? Why, there's churches in Britain that don't have one new person come to Christ from one month to the next. Why, to see a man come to Christ in their church, they wouldn't know what to do. What would we do with such a creature? It's true. And it's just what C.S. Lewis says. The more we listen, the more we feel without acting, the harder it will ever to be able to act. It's almost like a disease. It's like a spiritual cancer. And that's why most people, I don't agree, but most people would say there's very little hope for the older generation. The older generation has written into their Bible, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. That's not in my Bible. And I believe God can use the older generation. I have seen Him use the older generation. Many of them more than He's using us. And if He can use a few, He can use many. I'm convinced that spiritual revolution is possible at every level of society. And I've seen it work. And I believe it can happen. But it does become like a disease. The hardest thing to do when you send one of these spacecrafts out to the moon is to get into orbit, is to break the Earth's pull. And this is the same in our Christian life. Most of us, our spiritual problem is one of inertia. Inertia which is very much linked with the pride of the human heart. The pride of the human heart that says, well, I know better than him. The pride of the human heart that's quick to say, well, he really doesn't know what he's doing, and I do. May we see this torn out of us. You know, Nietzsche was the first man to say, God is dead. He was the man that was responsible for giving Hitler his views on the super race. Nietzsche himself said this. He said, maybe I would have believed in a Redeemer if the Christians had looked more redeemed. Perhaps a quotation from a believer is better than Moody's would do. He said, lukewarm Christians have produced more agnostics in unbelievers than all the unbelieving books that have ever been written. And unfortunate but true, missionaries and Christian workers have received a reputation in many places for being lazy. I know young people on OM who if they were in the secular world would lose their job in three weeks. Because when you get in the secular rat race, if you're in a company that's going, not just a little tick over job, you're going to have to keep up the pace. You can't come to them and say, well, look, I didn't have my quiet time. I want to spend the morning in my Bible. Your boss will trounce you out. But we get all kinds of spiritual excuses within the church. And basically laziness is one of the biggest problems in the church of Jesus Christ. Men have come to me in India, OM leaders. We met together. I said, what do you feel is your biggest problem? You know what they said, many of them? Laziness. The inability to break inertia and to get into action. We will think, we will talk, we will argue, and yet we will not act. And God, I believe, is calling us to action. I believe with all my heart that this is the core, to some degree, the core of the problem. We put a high emphasis on the intellectual, but that isn't the answer. That isn't the answer. You can have intellectual clarity with very little reality, and you can have a lot of reality even before you have intellectual clarity. Of course, so many things that we feel or we know we should do, we don't want to do. We don't want to do. We don't feel like doing. I'm sure that many of you this afternoon don't feel like giving out tracts in London. That's all the more reason to do it. Don't you realize? That's one of the most important things of life, to learn to do what you don't want to do. How many married women do you think want to spend several hours every day with the bottoms of their little babies? Changing nappies, cleaning every day, sometimes up to 20 years, depending on how many you have. That's not something you want to do, is it? If that's something you want to do, people think, well, if I'm going to go on OM, I better become a disciple. That's nonsense. If you're going to live on this earth, this 20th century rat race, you need to become a disciple. True disciple. Girls think, well, if I get married and go on OM, I'm really going to have to get discipline. Therefore, I better not go on OM, because I know I'm not going to get any discipline. But don't you realize what's causing these divorces across our country? What's breaking up home after home? It's the lack of discipline. Before I was married, I talked to a man who had 10 children. Ken Taylor. I think he has more than 10. No, he has 10 now. He's the man who paraphrased living letters. He said, George, what's your philosophy on marriage? I must admit, I was trying to think ahead what answer he wanted. But it caused me to think. And the answer that I came up with, and when I said it, I really began to believe it. I said, well, I believe that marriage is mainly a discipline. Now, at that time, my love affair was mainly emotion. At least it seemed that way. Although, of course, I was allowing it, trying to allow it to be logical. It's very hard, you know, when you're in love. But I have seen, in these past 10 years of marriage, or 9, that it is a discipline. And I praise God that I have a wife who knows something of discipline. Because if she didn't, we'd be through. And it wouldn't matter if we were living in America. In the past week, I've stayed in homes that are worth 50,000 pounds. I've been driving around in cars, some of them that cost 2,500 pounds. Those people have just as many battles. I was just with a businessman in Chicago. I tell you, if I had some of his problems, I don't know what I would do. You need discipleship if you're going to be a businessman in the 20th century. To keep from corruption, graft, and all the other things that are everywhere in business in every nation in the world. You need discipleship if you're going to be a housewife. That you'll know how to have a disciplined life before your children. That you can set the pace. And that they don't develop the same lazy traits that you already have. And so discipleship is not something you get when you go on OM, or you're going to be a missionary. Discipleship, in its full sense, is what you need if you're going to live on the earth. And up to now, there's no moving out. Billy Graham said, Life at its best is filled with sadness. The problem with many of us young people is that we've not seen enough sadness yet. And when we do see it, it's too late. When men are getting around 30 and older, when men are getting around 30 and older, before that oftentimes, they begin to see how rough life is. Begin to really see the suffering. They see people, friends die, suffer for hours. They see their relatives, their parents, their grandmothers. They see the world as it really is in the raw. One of my best friends, a young man who went to Mexico with me in 1957, one of the first men to ever go, went with Dale Roton and I on the first trip. He's been away from the Lord for eight years. He went and studied psychology at college, and the Christian college that threw him off the rails. He thought he was a neurotic. The more you think you're a neurotic, the more neurotic you get. And so he thought his Christianity was making him a neurotic. So he started to throw his Christianity. He became more of a neurotic. And so he decided to live wild and he did that. None of it solved his problems. He got his master's degree in psychology, went into social work to help people in Chicago. And he would give his testimony himself if he were here. And there for eight years he worked as a social worker. He also took psychiatric help, which cost him a load of money and didn't solve his problems from unconverted psychiatrists. And some months back, he came back to Christ in a way I can't understand. He was down in Mexico again with us this Christmas. And he was talking with me. We spent a lot of time together and just sharing with me just the atrociousness, the suffering, the agony in the city of Chicago. Not among those who the social workers are working with. Of course they've got problems. But the social workers, half of the social workers need psychiatric help. He was talking to a man who was in charge of alcoholic investigations at Yale University. And as he talked to him, he discovered the guy was an alcoholic. And time and time again, as he was interviewed for a job, he discovered that the man in head of this social department and that social department was in desperate, desperate, desperate condition. And he's convinced absolutely today, the only answer is the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ. And for all these cycles of nonsense, he's come back to the place of rest and faith in Christ and is living a victorious and loving Christian life and applying it to his social work, praying about doing something else. I want to tell you, don't wait until it's too late to get concerned about your life. Don't wait until you have some heart disease before you learn how to take care of your body, eat the right food and get some exercise and fresh air and all the rest that's basic to proper physical environment or living. In one of his books, I believe, Root of Righteousness, Tozer said, to want a thing or feel that we want it and then to turn from it because we see that it is contrary to the will of God is to win a great battle, he says, on a field larger than Gettysburg or Bunker Hill. It's true. When we want something and we feel our whole body is almost pulling us in that direction, our mind, our subconscious is in action, moving in that direction to by the grace of God through the Lord Jesus, not do it, is to win the greatest battles in the Christian life. And if years ago, God hadn't given me that kind of grace, I would not be here. I would not be here, that's for sure. Because I was a weak person. I still am a weak person. We need to realize that this is probably one of the most important areas. Billy Graham said in a message at Urbana 1957, if we don't develop a disciplined life, we'll never, never, never live the Christian life. The Christian living is a cooperative program and you must cooperate with the Holy Spirit. It's in the inherent nature of man that he be free. If man is not free, then he is a slave. Then he becomes a robot and there can be no love with robots. So you're free. That love to God should cause you to live a disciplined life. Well, as I said, I don't find too many that are not already conscious that they lack this reality in their lives. Prayer, witness, loving one another. How many of us go out of our way because we love people to make friends of people of other races, of other backgrounds, of other denominations, of other groups, of other structures of our society. And I'm convinced that the whole core of the issue centers around this thing that I often term a revolution of love. And it centers around the need to experience the cross. This is just the problem. We want the blessing. We want the resurrection. We want the life, but we don't want the death. We don't want the cross. Those are also said the cross will cut into our lives where it hurts worse, sparing neither us nor our carefully cultivated reputations. And perhaps you're experiencing that even today. The Holy Spirit is cutting into your carefully cultivated reputation and is about to take you on something that's really going to shake you and those around you. The cross will defeat us and bring our selfish lives to an end. It means rather that current Christianity has moved away from the standards of the New Testament. So far have we moved indeed that it may take nothing short of a new reformation to restore the cross to its right place in the theology and the life of the Church. Leonard Ravenhill was right when he said that the Church today has its accent on commotion rather than on devotion. And we think everything in terms of what we're going to do, where we're going to go. And this is the typical danger that comes on O.M. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? How am I going to get there? What date are we leaving? When do I come back? Do this. Go here. Give out this. And so it becomes a lot of commotion with a little devotion. Do you know the best preparation to go on O.M. this summer? An hour with God every day between now and the summer. In worship. In prayer. In praise. In thanksgiving. In adoration. Sure, let these books stir you up to prayer. Let these passages you listen to on the recorder or the messages you read challenge you and stir you. But the goal, the aim should be to be with God. To worship God. To know God. Because without that we're not going to accomplish anything really. What are some of the barriers that keep us from this reality? I've already intermingled some of them. You can list some of these. It will help you. Because there's five major things that I have seen that keep people from reality. That keep people from really knowing God. From really experiencing victory. And knowing the essence that there is in Jesus Christ. The first of these is unbelief. We don't really believe that God can change us. Like that statement of J.B. Phillips. We don't really believe that God can bring to pass a revolution in our own life. He says this disbelief is our incalculable loss. And the word of God from Genesis to Revelation speaks of the necessity of faith. Faith is substance. People always come to me and say, do you have the ship? I say no. Do you have the money? Well, no. What are you, nuts? Forgive my Americanism but that's what they've been saying. Faith. Faith is ship. Faith is money. Faith is crew. Faith is diesel fuel. Faith is safety. Faith is substance. What's the biggest thing that keeps people from coming on O.M.? Do you know what it is? Unbelief. Especially in regard to money. They hear, boy, I gotta trust the Lord for ten pounds. Trust the Lord for ten pounds? The God of the impossible, ten pounds. The Holy Trinity, ten pounds. The God who raised Lazarus from the grave, ten pounds. Why? Extremism. But really, it is funny that we can come into church and sing these fantastic songs. I think there's one, isn't there? God Omnipotent, God All-Wise. And, uh, no wonder Bishop Robinson has stolen the crowd with his book. He's right. He's right. Most people have that kind of a God. He's an old man upstairs and he's a miser at that. He's not gonna give you ten pounds. He'd rather beat you on the head. And I believe, with all my heart, that we, we, we, with our unbelief, we cut God's legs off, we cut his arms off, and we make him into a little man upstairs who can't do anything. Instead of a vast, great God, a Spirit beyond anything that we can begin to calculate or Robinson or anyone else can begin to put into writing. And to supply that money is no problem. Once he's got your heart right, once you're trusting and resting, he can supply any amount of money. And if he holds back, it's because he has some more loving, wonderful plan for you that you may grow in faith. Because some people, if you gave them ten pounds, they didn't know what to do with it and that pride would develop in their own heart. And if there's anything that God hates, it's pride. He might let you go without money for twenty years. You may be humble and you discover that's worth more than treasure in the bank. Unbelief is an enormous hindrance. Sure, there's all kinds of Christian work you can get in Britain and a good pay. And you say, well, I've got to get a job this summer. I'm a university student. I've got to pay my way. And so you're going to get a job. As if there were no money around. I want to tell you there's so much money laying around in evangelical bank accounts, you can't believe it. If I told you what I've seen in the past weeks, you probably wouldn't believe me. Evangelical men who love the Lord Jesus Christ, who have literally millions, millions, they'll never give it unless God from very heaven breaks into their lives. But as we pray, God can touch lives to give. Why, why should there be a lack of manpower on the mission field when there's both men and money to do the job if just through faith we link the two together and move forward? It can be done. I know it can be done. Unbelief is a crippling thing. It's a sin. It's a sin. I have to repent of unbelief almost every day. Now, for some of you that have Wesley's doctrine of sin or definition of sin, well, that's fine. He had one definition, but he had another practice. But I tell you this, my definition is very high. And I believe that unbelief in my heart concerning anything is sin. And if I have to repent of it ten times a day, twenty times a day, I'll do it. When I walk into an airplane, I hate to fly, I'm scared of planes, I'll be very honest. When I walk onto an airplane, unbelief grips my heart. I start doubting God, I start doubting heaven, I start doubting all kinds of things. If I'm with my wife, it's a lot easier because my problem is not myself. I always think of leaving my family behind. I've heard of all these stories that families get left behind. I think, what a massive confusion. And then I think, well, God wouldn't do that. Then I think, well, yes, he would, and my mind starts gyrating around and all my intellectual doubts from thirteen years come in. And I think, let me out of here. I want to walk. And then you get to the Atlantic and you haven't got the faith. So, it doesn't work. And I have to repent of unbelief. And lo and behold, five minutes later as the plane takes off and we hit an air pocket, I've got to repent again. And we get up to 36,000 feet and I look out the window and I have to repent again. And the man next to me starts chewing his nails and drops down a whiskey and I have to start praying and repenting again because I can't have any whiskey. Well, maybe that's not your problem. Many of you have never flown. But, you've got your problem area, don't you? I don't have to tell it to you. You know it. And that's where unbelief keeps coming in. Because the biggest thing the devil says to our unbelieving hearts is you can't do it. It's just what the devil says if you think about going out on a wind from the sunrise. You can't do it. You're too weak. You haven't lived a Christian life long enough. You aren't reformed enough. You're not emotionally stable enough. You're not good enough. You've got this little idiosyncrasy. You've got this bad thing in your background. You can't, you can't. The Bible says that the devil is the accuser of the brethren. And that's the major ministry as in many lives. Constantly accusing. Constantly condemning. Constantly running you into the ground. Constantly saying you're no good. You're too weak. You've backslidden too many times. You've failed the Lord too many times. You're too fearful. You're too shy. You're too this, too this, too this. And unbelief just squeezes the heart and we freeze. We spiritually freeze. Oh, that we might let go and let God fill our hearts with faith. Faith cometh by hearing. And hearing by the Word of God. And I believe as you get into the Word of God you read some of these faith-building books including some of these books that prove the Bible to be the Word of God. And as you begin to exercise the little faith that you have it will work. Just like our morning exercises. We have on OM. We're supposed to have. And most people are doing quite well this year. We get up in the morning and we usually get up about 6.30. We're supposed to. And we do some push-ups. Well, some people started out at the beginning of the year and when they got to 5 they caved in. But now they're doing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60! More push-ups! Because they exercised the little they had. And it's the same way in the spiritual realm as we exercise the little faith we have God will increase it. But if you're a miser with the little faith that God has given you you're not exercising it you're not using it. You're not trusting the Lord for ten bobs. You think He's going to give you faith for ten thousand pounds? This is why we have to grow. And OM causes people to grow in faith. It throws them into situations where their props are knocked out. I guess that's really the biggest ministry of OM. Prop destroying. People come and they're dependent on this kind of food. They love this food every day and they never see it for the rest of the summer. Or they want to be with this particular girl all summer. She's their fiancée. And then they find out that they have to go on separate teams. Boom! The prop is knocked out. Or they like to travel but they always like to sit where they can see out the window and get fresh air. Boom! Into the back of a truck the prop is knocked out. And they're ready to go and they want to witness for Christ but they can't stand the heat. And the Lord leads the leader to say, I believe it's God's will for you to go to Seville in southern Spain. Boom! The prop is knocked out. And all along in this work your props are knocked out. I want to get with a good group of real spiritual people. That's what I'm coming at. I want to get with a group of spiritual people and I'll grow. You get on a team and they're all weaker than you are. Bang! The prop is knocked out. And again and again you'll find that the Holy Spirit is doing almost anything to get you to that place of dependence upon Him. Of faith. Of rest. In which you're not trusting your spiritual crutches any longer. But you're resting on Him. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful. Unbelief. The biggest, perhaps biggest, enemy of unreality in the life. And then another thing that keeps so many young people from this reality is impurity. Impurity. Billy Graham said that if we lose the battle of purity we have lost the battle of the Christian life. Wherever I go I find young people being beaten down by impure thinking, impure living, impure actions, impure literature. And it's not the plan of God. And you can pick up hundreds of books on the newsstand that will give you the sweet little sugar-coated poison jingle of the relativistic thinking, but it's not true. It's a lie of the devil. And men are caving in as they take this sugar-coated poison pill. I believe this is an area that is hindering perhaps even more than unbelief. Young people fall into some sin in this area. Of course they don't feel they can go in the summer. How is someone going to feel crossing the English Channel to evangelize France when three weeks later he is doing something in the area of impurity that he knows is wrong? The devil is condemning him and pointing to it and pushing him into the ground. How can we walk into a prayer meeting and pray, perhaps even to cross from a girl that we've just done something wrong with a week later or a week before? And again and again I see that young people are defeated in this area. Some because of acute wrong ideas. Some are defeated because they think that sex is wrong, sex is dirty. This is a lie of the devil. Why do we have these clear verses in the Bible that speak about sex being clean and wonderful like Hebrews? The bed is undefiled and marriage is honorable if this is something that is wrong. No! There is nothing wrong with it in God's given place. And everything that God has given to us can be used wrongly. We must run the race according to the rules of the race as said in 2 Timothy 2. And so it is in this area of sex and marriage. God has given rules. He has given plans. He has given a pattern. In the pattern it's wonderful, it's glorious. And every time we see a child and it's born, we can give him praise. But out of the pattern taken by the hands of lust, it becomes one of the most destroying factors in the whole of our society. So that today it's become almost like a plague. You know, I want to say this. I know with all my heart that the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ can meet the needs of men and women in this area. With girls, often times, it's not lust but worry. There's a strange similarity between the two. Both very much linked to the ego. Worry. I know girls that would never, never be involved in any kind of immorality but who will engage in worry as if they were drinking cups of tea. And worry can do more to destroy the body, the soul and the mind than almost anything you can think of. Half of all of our illnesses today are basically caused by fear, worry, anxiety or one of her brothers and sisters. And until you and I learn victory over worry, until you and I know what it is to rest in the Lord and to cast our cares upon Him, we'll always be beaten down in our Christian lives. I don't believe in lust and I don't believe in worry. And when either one of them come, I have to, by the grace of God, cast it upon the Lord. Excuse me, even if it means doing it many times a day. If you haven't read that little book How to Win Over Worry or Dr. Adolph's book Hell Springs Forth or Naramore's book This Way to Happiness, other books along that line, Christian psychology, read them because I've seen many people receiving answers to their problems and finding victory. We may talk more about that tonight. Another area very quickly that keeps people from knowing this reality is materialism. Materialism. This is unbelievable. How this love for things overwhelms us. John says in this same book Love not the world, need not the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. What are you going to do with that verse? Now that was John the Beloved. That was John the Beloved. That's not George the Hard. That's John the Beloved. The one who loves you. The one who loves Jesus. He's saying Love not the world, need not the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. In this verse over verse 17 in chapter 3 it says For whosoever has this world's good sees his brother have need and shuts up the bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him. William McDonald goes all over the United States preaching. He's one of the most esteemed Bible teachers in America today. By the way, he's coming across to be with us again this coming year. And he preaches wonderful messages on Ephesians and Colossians. He's written most of the Bible correspondence courses used by a mass. Very highly esteemed. There's only one message he preaches that is disliked. And that brings the cases of the argues, brings cases of all kinds of things. And that's when he talks about the relationship of the Christian and the material world. Whenever you touch a man's pocketbook, you begin to touch something more vital than the inner part of his brain. And you just better not do it unless you want to get in trouble. Billy Graham said the hardest thing for a man to give you is his money. Because his money represents his talent, talent, time, energy, inheritance, work, education, everything converted into currency. And so actually when a man gives that, he is giving his life in action. When I come up in a church meeting, raise my hands and say, I dedicate my life to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's words. We do that so often it just becomes almost ridiculous. Though I'm still not against giving invitations from time to time. But I want to tell you when a man goes into his bank account and takes out all that he saved for twenty years, that's his life. Do you know that there were many men in the depression in the United States, when their money went they blew their brains out. Why? Because there was nothing left. That was their life. And when that was gone, there was nothing more left. I want to tell you the love of money is the root of many, many evils. And though maybe some of us are only experiencing it in the siege stage because we haven't got into business and we haven't got our hands on much yet, the same characteristics are true. And I believe that there must be a sweep of the Holy Spirit through our universities and through our colleges that's going to do what it did with C.T. Studd when he took his fortune. Threw it to the wind. And some of these other early movements, in fact, if you study your own movement of your own particular denomination, back when it was alive, if it isn't alive now, you'll discover this was a vital part of their message. A stand against materialism, against the love of things, against the hoarding of possessions. How can we hoard when millions do not have enough food to eat? How can we selfishly accumulate when millions will starve to death this year? When the situations like Czechoslovakia, Biafra, East Pakistan, India, and a host of other crisis situations around the world, too many of us are living in a crisis as if no crisis existed. I want to tell you God is going to eventually judge us for it. Another thing that has kept so many from this reality is prejudice. Prejudice. Biases. We don't know how to honestly study the Bible. I challenge you to honestly study the Bible in context. Not the favorite verses of Joe Blow, but chapter by chapter, line by line. George Whitefield, it was said of him that he studied the whole Bible upon his knees word by word and line by line and he got more out of that than all the other books he had ever read in his entire life. And I'm sure that it's true. And I believe that we must go back to our homes and to our schools and take the Word of God and study it in a new way, line by line. Wherever I go, I meet people who have a little twist on scripture. Some favorite little verse and you can't talk within one minute without getting that verse pushed down your throat. There is no biblical basis for that kind of living. And we get on our different hobby horses since there's so much truth in the Bible, there's a possibility for a hundred hobby horses. And so many are riding their hobby horse. And we at OM may God have mercy to keep us off any particular hobby horse, whether it be Luke 14, 33 or John 1, 9 or whatever verse it may be. Any truth without the balance of surrounding truth becomes a perversion and a tangent. And that's the greatest enemy, one of the greatest enemies to Christianity. Take the Word of God, study it as a whole, study it in context, compare Scripture with Scripture, ask God to keep you from bias and from prejudice, and you will see that there is a reality. There is a kind of life we've been talking about today. There is a knowledge of God that satisfies beyond anything we can imagine and yet still leaves us unsatisfied that we may hunger for still more. There is a life that is equal to what we read about in the New Testament, a revolutionary life, a dynamic life, a witnessing life, a powerful life, a broken life, a humble life, a crucified life. Whatever other word you want to take out and put on it, this is the need of the hour. Not more tracts, more crusades, more organizations, more men. The Church looks for machinery, God looks for men. And God is looking for men this afternoon and I believe He has brought you here because you're one of them. He's looking for women this afternoon and I believe He's brought you here because you're one of them. Yield to Him. Submit to Him. Come to the cross and let that edge cut into yourself, your pride, and these other areas. And you will discover it's real. By His grace it can be real. It may take 10 years, 20 years, but it's real. Let us pray. Our Father, as we go now out into the streets, we hunger for reality. We don't go out as a group of apostles. We don't go out as a group of people who have all the answers. We go out because we want to act. We want to move. We know that you'll understand if we make some mistakes. Help us. Give us the words. Keep us from foolishness. Protect us, Lord, if there's any kind of rioting today. And oh God, above everything else, break through these barriers to reality in our lives. The barrier of unbelief, God, tear it down. The barrier of impurity, Lord, break it down. The barrier of undisciplined living, God, smash in and bring an end to it. The barrier, Lord, of prayerlessness, of worshiplessness, break in, Lord, and bring it down. The barrier of materialism, oh God, smash it. We may know you and worship you and experience you daily. Keep us from being religious centralists, living by feelings and help us, Father, to truly deny ourself, take up the cross and follow you. God, keep us from tangents, from overplaying one little particular truth to the neglect of hundreds of other fantastic revolutionary truths that you want to use to penetrate into our lives, to balance us out and to make us into revolutionary New Testament individuals. Oh Lord, you know it's so hard to communicate. But we look to you and we believe that today is going to be the beginning of spiritual revolution, renewal, revival, reformation and restoration in many hearts. For we pray in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.