In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of being either hot or cold in one's faith, rather than being lukewarm. The speaker also highlights the strong emphasis on unity and friendship within the organization Operation Mobilization (OM), which is described as a family. The sermon mentions the goal of bringing 90,000 people who have been on OM into the global partners program for world missions. The speaker also addresses the opposition faced in promoting world missions and dismisses the notion that charity begins and ends at home.

We sort of have the idea that if we put the bucket in front of the church, which is great, that somehow it will all come in. But that's just part of the picture. And I can testify in OM, a movement whose income has increased every year, who knows almost nothing of indebtedness, that we also spend nights of prayer and go out to find, as led by the Spirit of God, the finance. In fact, we have a man right now in Australia who is just about doubling any money I receive from a business person for the 1040 window vision. He will double it. And he doubled it last year to the tune of one million Australian dollars by the end of the year. There's money out there, but we need people willing to go and help find it through prayer and biblical fundraising. One of the greatest mistakes the church ever made in Britain was years ago to think that somehow fundraising was from the devil. And in the process, we engaged in other kinds of fundraising. Just didn't call it fundraising, and some of it became foolish raising. And we looked like hypocrites as we had to close mission societies, and we had people return and not go back to the field, and we always sort of blamed God. You know, God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply, which if misinterpreted means, if you don't have money, you're a jerk. That really encourages missionaries tremendously to press on in what they're doing. So I, again, just thank God for the vision he's given you here at your church. I'm sure over the years you've had some opposition to this vision, emphasizing world missions. You always get someone walk up to you and quote something. They think it's from the Bible. It's not from the Bible. They just got it from their great-grandmother. Charity begins at home. Charity begins at home. It may begin at home, but is that where it stops? Praise God for your vision to send out workers into the harvest field. Let's just pray once again together. Lord, I just thank you for the privilege of being here, hearing what I've been able to hear this morning. Thank you for these great songs and hymns. Lord, I thank you for this tremendous mega band. And just bless them. May they all have the music in the heart as well as in the instrument and in the mouth. And that's always more difficult. Just guide, Lord, as I share this message that you gave to me only this very morning. In Jesus' name, amen. I've never shared this particular message because God only gave it to me this morning. To make sure I didn't lose it in the process, he woke me up at 6.30 and poured this into my heart. I wrote it down, which is unusual for me. And I appreciate the fact that this is going to be put on tape because I'd like to get a copy of it to share with the people actually on Operation Mobilization. Now, this sometimes happens with my team in London who meet with me almost every week when I'm in the country. I live in London. I'm there about one-third of the time. They sometimes have to be the guinea pigs as I share a vision that I feel is for the whole world or at least the whole work of OM. But they're the first people to hear it. And this morning here in Hollybush, and this is so appropriate for a farm situation, you are a guinea pig. I don't know if you use that term here. But anyway, the Lord will have mercy because I believe he's going to take this message through video and audio and spread it right across the world. And some of your other messages that have been recorded here have gone out across the world. And now let me share what's on my heart. The title of this message this morning is The Ten Ingredients That Made Up the Ministry of Operation Mobilization. Now, in one sense, you can forget about OM. You can think about your own ministry. You can think about your own church. You can contextualize what I'm sharing from my 41 years of living under the control of the Holy Spirit into your situation because every situation is different. But I want to share the ten ingredients. There are probably more, but these are the ten that just flooded into my heart this morning as I just recently had my 41st spiritual birthday, as I'm launching perhaps the biggest thing I've ever launched in my life, Acts 13 Breakthrough 2000. Many of you picked up information about that. I did a new tape about that just a week and a half ago, the whole subject of why we need at least 200,000 new missionaries because some people who don't understand the situation, population explosion, the 1040 window, the fact that 90% of all existing missionaries are working where the church already exists, don't realize that this is a minimum number. And we're not counting on this number to do the job of world evangelism. We're counting on their disciples to do the job, the national disciples in the country. So the results don't hinge on the number of missionaries. The results hinge on the effectiveness which is tied in with intercessory prayer and tied in with these ten biblical ingredients that we must find in a work of God. Now, I don't share this as a message that I picked up out of a book. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. I share with this because this is what I've lived in for 41 years since my conversion. I'm reading a book by Morris Rowland, Life with Billy Graham. It's kind of a book I'll never finish. I just sort of dip into different sections of it. But for those of you who are new, I was converted in a Billy Graham meeting in March of 1955. My grandfather was an atheist. My father was sort of a materialist, but he was somewhat seeking God. My mother sighed. My grandfather was a drunk. That marriage broke into two awful pieces. So my spiritual background was not very much. And a dear lady prayed for me, sent me a Gospel of John through the post. That led me to Billy Graham meeting where March 5th, 1955, I was powerfully converted. And I can share that's been a reality every day ever since. Hell, I didn't walk out of Madison Square Garden, New York City, planning to start a missionary society. I walked out of there just wanting to somehow live for Jesus one day at a time. But as I look back over these 40 years, I see different ingredients that God, through His Word and through other people, has brought into the very ethos of OM and become sort of the core values of OM. And I just share these things with you probably in the way of remembrance because hopefully you have these same core values in your own life and in your own family. And this morning, this is just a testimony these things work. These things work. We're not talking about pie in the sky. We're not talking about theological tidbits. We're talking about dynamic, practical, life-changing truths. The first ingredient in any work of God and certainly in our own history is the sovereign working of God, the sovereign, mysterious working of God and the leadership and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We've been focusing on Acts 13. I didn't get to read it last night as my New Testament here got hidden away underneath my books. But praise God, someone had a major search and found my New Testament. And so now I can read to you those words from Acts 13 which we're focusing on so much during this weekend where we see the first major missionary movement being born. In the church at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers, starting at verse 1, Barnabas and Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaan who had been called up with Herod the Tetrarch and with Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. So after they had fasted and prayed and placed their hands on them, they sent them off. Notice who did that? The Holy Spirit. Verse 4, Two of them sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. An amazing part of O.M. history that very few people know is that our O.M. roots were very much in the more basic evangelical camp, Moody Bible Institute, Billy Graham. And back in those days, Pentecostal people were looked down upon and they were persecuted. We sometimes forget that. And it's a miracle in God's sovereign working of the Holy Spirit that this sort of anti-thing that was taught to me, actually taught to me, never, it just never took hold of my heart. Because God led me as a young man to Mexico and God opened the door for me to minister in the Pentecostal churches in Mexico. And I saw, I didn't understand everything, but I saw the Holy Spirit working among very simple, humble people. And I saw that the greatest reality of the Holy Spirit wasn't firstly the gifts, as important as that was, but the first and great reality of the Holy Spirit was love. And I saw love in those people. Love even to listen to me, just a young man at 20 years of age with horrendous Spanish. They had so much love that even when I said things that were completely off, they were so excited, I don't think they actually understood what I said, they just kept praising God and encouraging me to learn how to preach in Spanish, which I've been doing ever since. God shortly led me out of North America to Spain, but even there my environment, quite different from Mexico, was very much more in a non-Pentecostal environment. In Spain in those days, the church that was really on the cutting edge, we're talking 1960, were the Brethren Assemblies. They were persecuted, but they flourished in Spain under Franco because they didn't have a clergyman that people could nail and put in jail. They couldn't figure out who was the clergyman. These Brethren Assemblies had many, many men ministering. If you know anything about the Renewal Movement, you know that a high percentage of leaders all came out of the Brethren Movement. The fastest growing movement in the world is probably ex-brethren. But in those days, I was there among these open brethren, sometimes referred to as Plymouth Brethren, in Spain. And God did a work. Of course, I... I didn't feel that you ever arrived, you know, in which you now can declare, we are the New Testament Church. To me, we all needed so much more. I was very much into radical discipleship. I was very much into wanting to see people really move in the power of the Spirit in evangelism and missions. And one time, when I... The only time I had the privilege to speak in the largest assembly in all of Spain, in my broken Spanish, I told them quite clearly they weren't a New Testament Church. Wow! A bit of O.M.'s history that perhaps should not be written. But through experiences in different countries, through books... I remember Ken Taylor, who was the head of Moody Press. The head of Moody Press said, here's R.A. Torrey's book on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I think Moody had discontinued selling this book. He was in charge of Moody Press. He said, you can have all the copies you want if you give them to your workers. And so all of us in O.M. were reading Torrey's Baptism of the Holy Spirit in the very early days. And I remember even before that, as a college student, actually that book came into my hands as far as my own personal copy before I ever went to Moody. And I remember reading something about the baptism and the reality and the fullness of the Holy Spirit and getting on the floor of my bedroom as a college student, university, before going in Moody and asking God to fill me with the Holy Spirit and to give me that power and that anointing that I needed for ministry. Again, I didn't understand it all. But the next week when I went into the jail to minister, there certainly was far more power in the ministry than I had experienced before. Maybe it was just the beginning. I don't know. But in that jail, before the Spirit of God was done, almost everyone had accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. That, by the way, opened the door for me to go to the Nashville State Penitentiary. I visited there twice recently as I correspond with prisoners. And here I was, a young man of 19 or 20, speaking to almost all the inmates at the State Penitentiary because some of my jail friends had been transferred there. From the earliest days of OM, we have believed in the power and the reality and the fullness, the baptism of the Holy Spirit of God. And this is one of the ingredients that sometimes doesn't always get talked about. But in any work of God, without that, whatever the particular terminology and the fine-tuning of how this works out, without that, you cannot really have a work of God. It's clear in the Book of Acts that the Holy Spirit is the chief executive officer of all missionary work. And this is why God has birthed a very unique movement in which about 50% of our people come from Pentecostal and Charismatic and Renewal churches, and yet 50% come from other churches where they don't perhaps have that total emphasis or that's not their particular ethos. And God has kept this together for almost 40 years by the power of His Holy Spirit and the reality of I Corinthians 13. Now, the sovereign working of God is just that. It's sovereign. It incorporates mystery. And we made many mistakes and we had many failures. But we saw God again and again overruling our failures. And that's why, I guess, grace became such a major emphasis. We saw the reality of God's great program in the book Ragamuffin Gospel, which so many of you now have. I was reading one of the latter chapters about God giving you a second ministry, a second chance after major difficulty or failure or tragedy. That chapter alone is worth the price of that book. Again and again, we discovered the joy in the reality of Plan B. Plan C. We had people come into our work with a lot of failure, even as Christians. We always like to say to them, even if they think they're on Plan D, praise God for a big alphabet, press on. Press on. And I hope that's true of any of you that may have gone through serious struggle or failure in recent years. The second ingredient is the practice and the reality of prayer, both personal and corporate prayer. How encouraged I was this morning to hear about your own special prayer times. On our international coordinating team based in London, and we'd love to have you visit us sometime. It's an incredible story how God now has given this place to us where we could have been asked to leave with one month's notice, two and a half acres in London, God in His sovereignty has given it to us. Touching the heart of a dear man from Singapore, a Chinese man who came there, saw this tiny little office where I work, blew all of his circuits, and he went back and sent us a check for 200,000 pounds. Well, it was four checks for 50,000 each. Does God supply? We were hardly even asking. We were asking to stay there, but we weren't asking Him to give us a place with a two and a half acre garden, which now has been declared by the neighbors as a nature reserve. We still, by the way, have a few more payments, but we got a lot of years to do that. The reality in practice of prayer, what I wanted to share is that a few weeks ago, we had a whole week in which even part of the time we closed the office, unheard of these days in Christian ministry. We closed the office to give ourselves to prayer. We had a 24-hour prayer retreat in a little different location that was given to us as a gift for 24 hours, including the food. And we saw God give us the grace, weak, needy ragamuffins to pray and intercede for the nations of the world. Not a matter of either or. Is it personal prayer or is it corporate prayer? It's both. And the idea that we have to be super spiritual to pray, we have to be totally victorious to pray, is really one more intimidation from hell. Prayer is for ragamuffins. Prayer is for needy people. Even as we go to the prayer meeting, we may have a bad attitude. Maybe you're down on yourself. Because you go to prayer meetings with a bad attitude. Hey, join the club. You think I've gone to nights of prayer, which I've been into for 35 years, always with, you know, a nice attitude. Oh, praise God, four more hours with the same boring people I've been with. Oh, I hope they don't see this video. They're not really boring on my team. Just a few of them. But praise God, we can repent when we have a wrong attitude. And the Lord, He understands. He understands. And there's again an illustration in that book about how as His children, even if our prayer is completely cuckoo, He still loves us. He loves to hear us pray. And I tell you, I have heard many cuckoo prayers over the years. Praise God, He's got more patience and grace than I do. Somehow by the mercy of God, even 35 to 40 years later, prayer and prayer meetings and personal prayer has remained the heart of Operation Mobilization Strategy and Ethos. Though often it's an uphill battle and it would be a lie to tell you that everybody in OM was some kind of great prayer warrior. The hardest thing to teach this generation often is how to pray. Praise God, you now can get Operation World on a disc. You can use your computer to pray. Encourage your young people to use their computer in prayer. You can get maps of the world through the World Wide Web and OM has a homepage on the World Wide Web. You can sit there in front of your computer and have the greatest worldwide prayer meeting probably you've ever had. Very soon, all information, everything that's ever been recorded or a high percentage of it, in all of history will be available in your living room on your computer. The changes in the world of computer and computers and information are phenomenal. Now we know the devil can use this just like the devil used electricity. But for Christians to start campaigns against computers saying they're from the devil is again to play the fool. So don't bother. The third ingredient into this spiritual movement is the emphasis on commitment to evangelism. And praise God, though there are many struggles, OM today, worldwide, and it's true of any great missionary movement, is committed to evangelism. We're involved with literally millions of unconverted people, many of whom never go into a church. We had a hundred thousand visitors in two weeks on our ship in Mauritius, a little island off the coast of Africa. Can you imagine? A hundred thousand visitors in a week or two. These are people that don't know Jesus. These are Muslims. These are Hindus. And again, I would like to thank you for your support of OM and for your support of the ship ministry. And only eternity will tell the results. I had a letter recently from Dale Roton, the director of the ship ministry, saying that now 1.4 million who have come to the ships have gone away with Bibles or New Testaments. 1.4 million. And we have a bigger emphasis, actually, on other books. Not because it's bigger, but because it's just such a bigger variety. And so millions of books and bookazines. You can get a free sample this morning of one of our bookazines from that book table. As you pray for OM, pray that our zeal for evangelism will not diminish. Pray that we may never become lukewarm. The Word of God says, Be ye hot or be ye cold, for if you're lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. The fourth ingredient is the strong, it was almost extreme at times, emphasis on unity and friendship. In OM, we're a family. We're even connected with many ex-OMers and OM graduates, working with them, helping them, supplying them with free literature all over the world. Not so easy, as there are 90,000 that have been on Operation Mobilization for a short time. And we're on a new campaign to bring them into our global partners program, people who have been on OM, partnering together to do the great work of world missions. In the early days of OM, for about 20 years, you had to listen to nine orientation tapes, the old reel-to-reel tapes, before you came. And on those tapes, we especially emphasize, going from verse to verse, from verse to verse, the need for unity. The need for unity. 1 Corinthians 13 became the Mount Everest passage and the foundation passage of the whole movement. Everybody had to memorize that. And ten other passages from the Word of God, we required people to memorize. And I believe meditating and memorizing Scripture is becoming a lost discipline in the Church of Jesus Christ and we will pay a big price for that. Because we know the Word of God is sharp and powerful. God used those tapes and that one tape on the subject of unity was especially used to teach us from the Word of God the basic foundation that's needed in a spiritual ministry. We became friends with one another. We would emphasize a lot the need to spend time together. And so we had conferences, we had times of waiting upon God. Even to this day, the ship closes for one week. It costs a lot of money to close a ship in a book exhibition for a week. And they have prayer and the ministry of the Word of God and some rest and recreation as well. This is the ingredient. And one of the reasons I'm excited about this message is because even people in OM or people that have been praying for OM often make generalizations as to why OM has been so effective over the years. And usually they've just touched on one or two things. And if we only focus on one or two things, like people would emphasize our strong emphasis on faith and prayer. But if we only emphasize one or two things, we get lopsided. Paul was very clear to emphasize the whole counsel of the Lord. That's not easy. But one biblical principle brings other biblical principles into balance. And OM, because of our tremendous zeal, our conviction that men were lost and going to hell without Christ, we had a natural tendency to go extreme. And God used the balance of Scripture and books by great men and women of God which were constantly flowing through OM like a river to bring us back in brokenness and repentance to that place of biblical balance. All of us here in Britain have seen whole churches blown away because they overemphasize something that may have been a truth, but when it was overemphasized, it became a distortion. The fifth ingredient is the endless effort and zeal toward recruiting and mobilizing workers. Even in the early days, thousands of meetings were taken. Any kind of meeting. I would go to meetings and speak to three people. I remember going to one of the largest churches in Great Britain in a place, if I can pronounce, we'll be bordering on the miraculous in Scotland, Strathpifer. There was a great convention there, but I was not invited to the great convention. I was invited to a Sunday evening service. This huge church that must have died a long time before I got there and hardly anyone at all was in the meeting. I'll never forget that night standing among all these empty pews with a few people thinking of this great convention once a year that filled the place. Somehow, I gave it everything I had. I can hardly ever remember preaching. It used to be 900 times a year and not sort of with whatever energy I had giving it all that I could because the Word of God says whatever you do, whatever you do, do it with all your heart and with all your might. Somehow this vision for meetings, this vision for recruiting and mobilizing became contagious and soon O.M. had hundreds of people crisscrossing the whole world and then eventually two ships crisscrossing the whole globe taking tens of thousands of meetings, yes, among believers for renewal, for a call to the Lordship of Christ, but also to recruit and mobilize. Isn't it amazing that our name given to me in that tree after I was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1961, that name which had never been used in Christian ministry before, Operation Mobilization, the word mobilize is now more popular in mission circles than ever before in history. There are only 34 years late to grab onto this great, mega, motivating, life-changing word, mobilize. You too can be a mission mobilizer. I even have a tape now, how to be, practical steps, how to be a mission mobilizer, using books, using tapes, using video, loaning things out and unless we find an army of people, what some people call the grassroots, who are willing to start getting excited about missions, we're never going to see the job done. Now, I'm always looking for freebies wherever I go, I'm looking for freebies. I tried to get Jen's tie, it didn't work, but as I walked out of here, I saw an entire newspaper sitting out there just about the alpha courses. The whole newspaper is just telling you how great the alpha courses are. It's what I call overkill. I guess an American produced it. But it's great. It's great. People are excited about this. Why? Because this influences their church and people are concerned about their church. Sometimes I meet people who are so extreme about the local church, they would never have me or anybody in OM into their church because we are classified as parachurch. We're not a local church. We are the teams, according to what I see in the book of Acts, sent out by the church. And of course, China Inland Mission, now OMF is the same, WICDF is the same, and there's a strong group of churches, newer churches, that have rejected all of this completely and said in one big sweep it's unscriptural. Now, a lot of those people have changed and apologized and that situation doesn't exist so much in Britain, but it's still a big thing in America. Doesn't the devil like to divide us up? Imagine a group like WICDF Bible Translators, one of the greatest missions in the history of the church that's led to the planting of thousands of new churches, being rejected by local churches because they are not a local church. Sometimes people go on about the importance of the local church, but in fact, if you talk to them carefully, what they mean is their local church. And that can be sometimes tied in with our own ego because a fear of failure and a desire for success on a local church thing is normal for us human beings. I praise God for people here this morning and last night from other churches. I praise God that Jim and others here encourage you to go where the Spirit of God leads you as far as church, especially if you're from some other part of the country. I know Holly Bush is a great place, but I don't think people should commute here from London for Sunday morning services despite better train service to the eastern part of this country. Mission mobilization. We need each other. I will tell you if the church in Great Britain got as excited about world missions and the unreached people in the 1040 window as they are about this Alpha thing and a few other things, we would see thousands of new British missionaries thrust out into the harvest fields very, very quickly. But it takes extra faith to get excited about things that seem distant, things you can't easily feel or touch, things that you don't think will be a blessing to your home or your family or help you in the midst of your problems. But in fact, that's also a deception because it's often when we get involved in the bigger picture, some of our own problems start to get much, much smaller. Sixthly, the sixth ingredient is the strong focus, and perhaps this should be the first, the strong focus on the Lord himself. I've hardly known a movement in history and I do a lot of study that devoured more books on spiritual life than Operation Mobilization. We were the ones who mainly introduced A.W. Tozer to Great Britain. We're the ones that launched a lot of the Watchman Knee books. Some of them, of course, led some people into extremes, but the Watchman Knee books are still powerful books on basic spiritual life that God has used. And all through these years, we've been tied in to some degree with things like the Keswick Convention. Wherever people exalt the Lord, even though we may not agree with everything, we felt that's where we should be. Focusing on the Lord himself, not firstly the work, not firstly what we can accomplish, where we can go. Reality first, geography second, has been one of the slogans of Operation Mobilization, and I hope it will be of your ministry and of your life as well. Of course, focusing on the Lord led us into a greater reality of the cross. This book, Calvary Road, became required reading in OM for 25 years, and Roy Hesschen then ended up speaking at the OM conferences together with men like Alan Redpath and so many others that were obviously men filled with God's Holy Spirit. The emphasis on the crucified life and the emphasis on brokenness have been part of the core values of OM from almost the beginning, and it should be a core value in your marriage, in your home, in your ministry, and I know that at this church it is. Seventhly, the seventh ingredient is the constant push toward the more unreached people of the world. Before there was ever talk about the 1040 window, that's where OM missionaries were, not just short term, but hundreds of them long term. In fact, as I stand before you this morning, by God's grace, after years and decades of prayer and work with endless disappointments, we have a thousand people laboring in the 1040 window, and amazing enough, largely unnoticed by a great vast percentage, even of Christian leaders. Brothers and sisters, God has honored this commitment to Acts 1A. There are verses in Corinthians and verses in Romans as well that emphasize the need to go to the more unreached part of the world. People ask me, why do you always wear this global jacket? I've had people tell me this is ugly. I've had every kind of insult heaped upon me because of my global jacket. I've got global socks. I got in big trouble with my global underwear because in a big meeting I just, you know, I wanted to show them my underwear, and my wife got really upset by that. I promised her now not to do that anymore. But I do this because I believe there is some value in being a fool for world missions. Whether I'm a fool for Christ, you have to judge. I hope I am in a biblical way, but I am willing to be a little bit outlandish to somehow just try to bring things into balance. We're not expecting all of you to put on a global jacket and run around with balloons. Oh, praise God, if you're that free in Jesus, that would be a nice sight. But we're attempting to bring things into balance. Some of you know the story about the practical value of this jacket. I was in a jumbo jet flying from here, Brazil, down to Argentina. I went up to the cockpit, British Airways jumbo jet, to talk to the pilot, and they were having a discussion about where they were. They thought they were flying over Ecuador. They used this jacket in the cockpit of a jumbo 747 to see where they were going. They were flying over Uruguay. So this isn't just, you know, some kind of a gimmick. This is very practical and basic for survival as we go into the 21st century. Everybody needs a map, a globe, and a torch as they go along life's road. Praise God for the 82,000 movement that has at least brought a grassroots movement in some nations to emphasize the more unreached. We know this is not something new. It goes back to Pentecost. It goes back to the Apostle Paul who said, I want to preach Christ where he's not been named. I don't want to build on somebody else's foundation. We can talk about Hudson Taylor. I just saw this movie about the life of Hudson Taylor. You can get it on video where he was persecuted by fellow missionaries because he dared to think about going to the interior of China. We follow with weakness as missionary ragamuffins in the footsteps of men like C.T. Studd and Hudson Taylor and George Mueller and a host of other men and women who have been the great pacesetters in reaching the unreached across the world. The eighth ingredient is the constant effort, I've already touched on this, to be biblically balanced. Grace and discipline as we talked about last night. Work and worship. In fact, in my old Bible that I don't always carry with me anymore because it's falling apart, there's page after page of notes that the Spirit of God gave me on balance. Fifteen ways to be balanced in the home. Twenty ways to be balanced in world missions. I even wrote a book about balance. I never forget when my daughter accused me of being extreme in the area of balance. I guess eventually I had to confess I was extreme. But at least I'm still making my effort to be balanced and to find a balance of biblical truth. And then the ninth ingredient is the practice of disciple making. Leadership training and turning the work over to the nationals within the country we're working. It's amazing how God brought us into this in the very beginning. Because when I first went to Mexico I had to go back and finish college. I left university and transferred to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, not because, to be honest, I was so keen on studying, I did want to study, but I wanted to evangelize Chicago. And so God brought me to Chicago. Little did He know that's where also I would meet my wife. And God sent us to Mexico. But we first went to Mexico in the Christmas and in the summer. So we had to turn the work over to Mexicans. That became the ethos of OM. So soon in Spain, the second country I pioneered, the work was turned over to Spaniards. Shortly after that I was in other European countries. In each case I was moving on, we turned the work over to others. Then my wife and I ended up in India and within a short time the work was in the hands of Indians. Today, OM India has 600 workers, 98% Indian. God has honored that. That means we have to be willing to take risks. That means we must avoid missionary perfectionism, where when we turn the work over to a national brother or sister, we see them make a mistake. We feel we have to rush in there and pick them up and sort of carry them around. Actually in some fields the work has not grown until the missionary got out of there. That doesn't mean there's not a need for missionaries today because there are 2,000 people's groups where there are hardly any missionaries. And some people believe, like Ralph Winter, a great missiologist, that we need a redeployment of some of our missionaries as the nationals can take over where they are and they can go to places where there are no nationals or churches in existence. It's an important concept. I know it's controversial and it brings some criticism, but I'm convinced the Spirit of God reveals this clearly in the book of Acts and in apostolic New Testament missionary work. Disciple-making is 90% of the work. 10% is to bring the man to Jesus. The Holy Spirit has prepared people throughout the world. Through prayer, the Holy Spirit does His work. People come to Christ through the proclamation of the gospel. But then they must be discipled. They must be taught. They must be grounded. That takes a full-scale movement that is, of course, very much based on planting churches or working with already existing churches. And that leads me to my final ingredient. Did you think I'd get to 10 so quickly? Some of you stand or sit there aghast. You're going to get lunch after all. But my 10th ingredient is the emphasis from the early days on the importance of the local church. O.M. And we don't want to boast saving Jesus Christ. But we can say, and it's not always true of groups called parachurch, which we don't like. It sounds too much like paralyzed. But from the earliest days, O.M. esteemed the local church. Even though the church where I was saved was totally liberal and I had to leave that church, God linked me with other local churches in my own hometown, my own little mini-Antioch. And though I had the vision to go to Mexico sort of on my own, I went to a local church on a Wednesday night. They let me preach. And I said, Would you pray for me and commend me to this ministry? This, brothers and sisters, is 1957. I was 19 years of age. And some of the men in that meeting became the board of directors that I later submitted to. And one or two of those men, including my own father who got converted meanwhile, are still alive today. My dad's 90. He visited here once. And I appreciate your prayers for him. God gave us the understanding of the importance of the local fellowship. That's why O.M. started church planting not in the 90s, as some people think. We started big-time church planting as far back as the mid-60s. And in France and Italy and Spain and Turkey and other parts of the world, there are local fellowships planted by O.M. teams. Personally, I feel we're often better at working with a church planter in doing this than attempting to do it on our own. No time to go into those reasons. And, of course, that's one of the reasons O.M. never became a denomination but phased out of the picture after the church was planted and allowed that church to become part of a national network or of an already existing denomination. There's so much more I'd love to share, especially about what can happen when there is dynamic partnership between a local church and a missionary fellowship raised up by the Spirit of God. This is one of the reasons I'm so excited about Acts 13, Breakthrough 2000, the goal to see 200,000 missionaries mobilized across the world from the whole body of Christ. Not O.M., not even all the mission societies that all the world put together, but the whole body of Christ. And many churches today have their own mission societies like ICTHUS down in London and send out workers directly to the field and work in very unusual and profitable ways. The church is exploding across the world more than ever before in history. Just because it's not exploding in your back garden doesn't mean it's not exploding. The church in Britain had its heyday. We did miss many opportunities, but God is sovereign. The church in Britain today, even though there's not huge church growth, stands surely among the top ten nations in the world as regard to potential to send out workers. Two days ago, God gave me another message. Maybe I'll share it some other time. Ten reasons, or ten great positive things that are happening in the body of Christ in Great Britain right now. I think the Lord again gave me that message as a balance to so much negativism that's going around among God's people. Some of it quite extreme with Christian leaders even saying, Oh, Britain is such a mission field. We can't really send out workers anymore. What a lot of eyewash. How could a Christian leader ever say such a stupid thing? Where was he ever educated? Where has he ever traveled? The fact of the matter is though there are needs here, there always will be needs everywhere. For narrow is the way and few there are who find it. And broad is the road to destruction. Britain is still surely among the top ten nations in the world as far as potential. Probably a million people who claim to be born again in Britain. Probably half of those claim to have had some powerful experience with the Holy Spirit. We have no reason for not being, even as Brazil becomes a great mission sending country, as Korea maybe leads the pack. Doesn't matter who leads the pack. What does that mean? That is not even a Christian way of expressing things. Great Britain is to still have a major vital role in the great commission and the completion of the great commission. I would urge you to look over again this list of ingredients that we need to have in any work of God. To double check to see if you have these in your own personal life. To see if you're working on these things in your own church. And believe me, as people buy into the Word of God, as they turn determined to follow the Word of God wherever it leads, and believe me, at times it costs. I haven't had time to talk to you of thousands of disappointments. I haven't had time to share about terrorists attacking our ship in the Philippines with hand grenades and blowing two 19-year-old girls into eternity. I haven't had time to share about how we eventually lost Lagos too after 17 years of ministry, one terrible night in the Beagle Channel off the very southern tip of South America. But I can say this, in the midst of all these things, the heartbreaks as well as the victories, we've seen the sovereign, powerful working of the Holy Spirit of God. That same Holy Spirit that lives in every single believer. Never forget that. And the potential of those of us just sitting here this morning is almost beyond measure. If God can take one needy, loud-mouthed, difficult kind of character, son of a Dutch immigrant in New Jersey, and save him and send him and use him in world missions, then I don't believe anybody really has any excuse. Let's go for it. Let's build these ingredients into our organizations, into our churches, into our lives, and many others that we get from the Word of God. And let's believe that everybody in this world could be given the Gospel in the near future, and that a church could be planted in every people's group, in every nation of the world. Let us pray. Our God and Father, we thank you for your Word. We thank you for this dynamic example from Acts chapter 13. We thank you for what we've seen over these years. And Lord, I just thank you for your mercy to our own fellowship, Operation Mobilization. God, you know my first burden isn't OM. My first burden is your church. My first burden is the whole kingdom and the whole world. But Lord, you do put us in different fellowships. You put us in different churches. And we have to be faithful to the particular ministry that you give us, even if there are things in that ministry we don't particularly like. So Lord, somehow by your grace, in the weeks and months to come, we will deny self, take up the cross and follow you. Somehow in the weeks and the months to come, we will allow, as it was in Acts 4.31, to be filled afresh again and again with your Holy Spirit, that we may go forth and speak your Word across the whole world in boldness. We pray, Lord, on the basis of Matthew 9, raise up workers to send forth harvesters by your Holy Spirit into the harvest field. We pray, Lord, for at least 100,000 churches around the world to send at least one. Many could send five or ten. Big mega churches might be able to send a hundred. But we pray specifically on the basis of your Word for somehow at least 200,000 new workers to at least begin to move the training, the short term that they may ultimately end up in church planting situations and back up situations throughout the entire globe. Oh, God, we thank you for what you're doing. But we know you want to do so much more. And we commit ourselves to that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.