In this sermon, the speaker discusses the commands that Jesus gave to his disciples in Luke 9:59-62. The three commands are to follow Jesus, proclaim the kingdom of God, and not turn back. The speaker emphasizes the importance of obedience to these commands and relates them to various aspects of life, such as finance, marriage, and career. The sermon also mentions the training program that Jesus provided for his disciples before sending them out on a crusade, and the speaker encourages the audience to listen to God's priorities for them during the upcoming days.

But before we read the scriptures together, can I draw your attention to the book tables downstairs. You know, when the Logos went into China, the Chinese authorities made it extremely difficult for people to purchase books off the ship. And so, teams of Chinese young Christians, they would come on board the ship, or they'd go to the exhibition, and they would start writing out whole books. They wanted to take a whole Bible dictionary, free, just by writing it out. And I've seen people do the same kind of thing, even here at OM conferences. Not writing it out, but just standing, reading, reading, reading. And then, when they've finished one, they put it down, and they start another one. I mean, what are they going to do? They've given all their money in, and nothing to buy any books with, so they just stand and read. I want to mention some books that you can read during this conference. I'm not suggesting that you buy them. Only buy it if God speaks to you through it. But promise me that if God says anything to you through any of these books, you'll buy it. And you can start with the books of John White. I think I'm on a winner there. God will speak to you through the books of John White. He's a man who's been very much used in various parts of the world. He's a psychiatrist who writes some of the most readable, Biblical Christian books I've ever read. This one is called The Cost of Commitment. The Way of the Cross is a magnificent obsession with a heavenly pearl, he says on the front. It's better in English, I tell you. And Flirting with the World, a plea for disloyalty. These are tremendous books to stand and read. How many of you have read anything by Charles Marsh? Let me see. How many of you have read? Oh, that's a disgrace. He's a man who's been greatly used in North Africa. He's a real friend of OM. People told him that he would never be able to make an impact for God in an Arabic-speaking culture. He wasn't educated. They said he wouldn't be able to learn the language. He didn't seem to have any pedigree. He wasn't a special kind of person. And so eventually he went to North Africa without any society, any missionary backing, no group sponsoring him. And he was giving his testimony in Arabic in 12 weeks. And this is a tremendously practical, challenging book for young Christian men and women who want to go as far with God as they can. This one, Spiritual Depression, Its Causes and Cure. I've heard George Ferber say he reckons it's one of the two or three best books written since the Second World War. For some of you up on the seventh and eighth floors, it might be a particularly good book to meditate on. Where is Your Faith is the chapter. Looking at the Waves is another chapter. It's downstairs. Spirit of Bondage. It's if you get locked in upstairs. You may want to put a brown paper cover on it if you're reading it on the train or on the bus. You know, you wouldn't want people to think that you're spiritually depressed. I remember talking with Martin Lloyd-Jones when he came to speak on board the Dulos in London. Most of his books are simply the transcripts of messages that he has preached. This one he wrote, and he felt that God gave it to him in a special way. He himself believed that God had given him chapter by chapter this book to put into the hands of Christians in our day. He told me a most fascinating story about how God put this book into his hands. I do recommend those of you that want a bit of solid reading this summer to stand down at the bookstore and read this one. David Watson recently gone home to be with the Lord after a tremendous ministry as an evangelist. One of the best evangelists that we've seen in Britain in recent years. He died just a few months ago of cancer. His books and his preaching have had an impact all over Britain and probably other parts of the world too. And he wrote a book about spiritual warfare. How you get attacked. How you can be prepared and on the defensive. How you can triumph against the wiles of the devil and the darts of the evil one. And STL has published this, we think it's a tremendous book that many of you in practical Christian warfare should read. Some of you may not have read The Calvary Road by Roy Heston. You're supposed to have read it. It's on the list of books that you should have read, at least in the English language. There may be some of you who want to learn English. And you'd like to stand down at the bookstore reading a book in English. Just to see whether God can speak to you in another language. Before you buy the book. Now, Roy Heston writes such clear, simple, penetrating English. And for all of you people who want to improve your English and you just want to read books during your free time here at this conference, The Calvary Road is the one to go for. Take your money with you. I'm sure the Lord is going to speak to you through that. Now will you turn to the book of books. Luke's Gospel. And chapter 9. People may be coming and going a bit tonight because there are interviews on. Don't you worry about them. Let's just spend the next 30-40 minutes focusing our hearts on God's word. For the next 30-40 minutes we want to look at the word. Luke 9, verse 51. I'm going to read some in English and then I'm going to ask Werner to read some in German. And they went and entered into a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him. And they did not receive him because his face was as though he were going to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we bid fire to come down from heaven and consume them? But he turned and rebuked them. And they went to another village. And as they went, in the way, a certain man said unto him, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, the foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven have nests. But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. And he said unto another, follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But he said unto him, leave the dead to bury their own dead. But go thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God. And another also said, I will follow thee, Lord, but first suffer me to bid farewell to them that are at my house. But Jesus said unto him, no man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God. Chapter 10, let's read the first five verses. Chapter 10, let's read the first five verses. And can we turn to verse 21? And read 21 to 24. And read 21 to 24. Let's pray it again. Our dear Father, we do not presume every time we read your word that you are going to speak to us. Sometimes we are not really listening to you. Sometimes our hearts are hard and our ears have become deaf. And Father, we want to thank you for this passage of scripture. We believe that it has been given for our instruction and our learning tonight. We want to ask for that gracious work of your Holy Spirit in our hearts. That you would open the eyes of our hearts. That we might see the Lord Jesus and hear him afresh. That our minds would be given understanding and our hearts would respond. Father, we don't want to take your word lightly. And so we pray, O God, that we might hear your voice in our hearts and minds tonight. In Jesus' name. Amen. We have read some verses concerning the Lord Jesus Christ's training program. And I would like you to observe the way he goes about it. From verses 51 to 56 in chapter 9. The disciples of the Lord follow him into an experience. They are misunderstood. They are rejected. They go through something painful. Something that they haven't expected happens to them. And their first reactions to this are all wrong. Only in the previous few verses they have actually seen Moses, and Elijah with the Lord Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. And so their minds and their hearts are full of the great things of past Jewish history. And now they are walking with the Messiah. God himself comes to this earth. And they come into this Samaritan village. And the Samaritans set the dogs on them. The Samaritans throw stones at them. The Samaritans will not have them. And they say, shall we call down fire from heaven as Elijah did, as Moses did? It's not right, Lord, that you should be treated like this. They have an experience that's obsessing, an experience of rejection. And the Lord has to correct their attitudes. And then in the next paragraph from 57 to 62, the Lord is teaching them some of his eternal priorities. They have a little training program, if you like. He gives them a few things to remember. And then when chapter 10 begins, he actually sends them out on the crusade. They're going to go out in small teams, and they're going to go out for two or three weeks, and they're going to do the work of a summer crusade. And we see the way in which the Lord is training them through that. And finally, after they've had the experience following the theory, then they come back to the Lord and discuss it with him. And the verses I want to get through to, towards the end, verses 21 to 24, where we hear the Lord himself praying over his disciples. And I want you to hear God as he prays over you, watches over you. That you might see and feel and know and understand some of God's priorities for you during these coming days, both in conference and on the campaign. What is OM, really? What do you think it actually is? Is it an enormous, great, lumbering, literature distribution machine? Is it something that you join in order to serve the Lord and get missionary experience and training? What is OM? What do you think you've actually come into? Don't say chaos. Why do you think God has brought you in? The fundamental thing I believe you must understand is that OM is none of those things primarily. OM is an opportunity. OM for you is no more than a few months of opportunity to get to know God better. The Lord promises that if you draw near to him, he will draw near to you. If you seek him, he will be found. Our greatest goal here this summer is to know God better. If God spoke clearly to us, we could scrap all the summer campaign teams. We could do away with the vehicles. We could wait on him here for the whole summer, and that would still be OM. And if God takes you out on the team, if some of you go as far as town, even in Turkey, your fundamental purpose is to get to know God better. Now this can mean many strange things. I remember the very first team. I have a lead on OM. A little group of chaps trying to reach Arabs down in Paris. It was a boys only team. I was the team leader and they didn't trust any girls onto my team. There were seven of us. We came from about five different countries, language backgrounds. There was a Dutchman. I don't know whether he was converted. I don't know to this day whether he was truly a Christian. He used to go out in the evenings and steal people's motorbikes. He only wanted to ride around on them. I used to chase him with the director of the French work in one of these little French Decheveaux things, banging on the side of the car, stop, stop! We had three Arabs on the team. They had just come from the Middle East. They had never, ever been in Europe before. It was a hot summer. July, in the middle of Paris. They wouldn't have believed how many clothes the girls could take off and still appear in public in Paris. These poor Arabs would go out with armfuls of books and they wouldn't sell any of them. Their eyes were going out on us. And the Dutchman, every morning when we had our devotions, we'd come and bring something that's blessed us from the scriptures. Albert, the Dutchman, could always bring the most obscure verses out of the back end of the Old Testament about Israel getting more of the land. Problem was, it was these Arabs' land that the Israelis had just got. This was in 1968, just after the Six Day War. I could hear the Arabs on my team sharpening up their knives. It was amazing to see scripture being fulfilled in our day. I had an American on the team. He had a problem that I have always associated with Americans. He had fallen overwhelmingly in love with this girl that he'd met and got equally strongly convinced that God did not want him to marry her. And every time it came for literature distribution, teamwork, he would come to me, go out today. He married her eventually. He's still with OM, he's got about five kids, lives in Egypt. It was an interesting team. So young, so tiny and young, I used to have to expect to change his nappies, his diapers in the morning. The only encouragement to me was an African. Praise the Lord all the time, wonderful. Nothing ever bothered him, he was all enormous, great grin, fluorescent teeth. You don't know what kind of a team you're going to get into this summer. You don't know who God is going to put on your team. You don't know what's facing you on those doorsteps and in those villages and town squares. And whatever happens, it's an opportunity to get to know God in the midst of the troubles and the pressure and the crisis. These disciples were learning to face the surprise of rejection. Often some of our most memorable times on OM are those times when we've had difficulty and been rejected. And your Lord said that the servant is not above his master. If they have rejected me, they will reject you. And you must be prepared to go into many, many Samaritan towns and villages during the course of this summer. God knows what he's doing. One of those two men who wanted to call down fire and brimstone from heaven, John, was the one that was sent back by the other apostles in Acts chapter 8 when the church finally began in Samaria. You may get chased out of some village by the dogs and you leave only just a few little bits of literature there. You feel totally rejected and yet God knows exactly what he's doing in that place. And the apostle John had the joy of coming back into this village, I believe, where he'd wanted to call down God's judgment and he saw what God had raised up in the time that had passed. I remember being with a team with OM in India and I'd been preaching at the back of a truck. Huge crowd gathered all around in the village. Gradually the trouble started at the back of the crowd and eventually they were burning the literature and throwing stones and we got out of the village. We didn't stay to be sort of stoned, you know. We ran away. In the truck we just, we left our literature burning on the ground and about half a mile down the road we stopped in a tea shop. I'm an Englishman, I need tea regularly, intravenously. And we were sitting there rather discouraged. We'd been stoned, we'd been a bit injured, we'd run away. And a young Indian man came walking into the tea shop and he said, are you the people that were up in that village up there? And we said, yeah. And he said, oh I'm so glad. He said, my brother bought one of those gospel packets three months ago. He didn't want what was in it. He gave something to every member of his family. I got a little booklet, I've read it every day since. He'd read this thing through between 80 and 90 times. And he heard us in a village preaching the same message. And so he followed the team, he found us. And he was led to Christ that afternoon round the back of that tea shop. The Lord knows what he's doing. You may face rejection, you may face misunderstanding, God knows what he's doing both in your life and in the lives of others. And then in the next paragraph the Lord begins to train his disciples. Following on from that experience. The experience is the basis of their learning. Sometimes I wish we could have these conferences at the end of your summer campaign because then you would understand some of the things we're talking about. In that paragraph the Lord gives them three commands. Three simple things you are to concentrate on. In verse 59 he says, you follow me. Walk in my steps. In verse 60 he says, go proclaim the kingdom of God. And in verse 62 he says, don't turn back. There were two times in Palestine when the rain used to come. There was the January rains and then there were the spring rains. But the ground only got soft enough for you to plough in January. And if a man was going to have a harvest he had to go out in January and plough in the wind and the rain and the cold and not look back. And maybe his family were in the house and the food was warm on the table and the fire was lit but he had to go on and he had not to look back. Follow me. Preach the kingdom. Don't look back says Christ. And then in the same paragraph he mentions three hindrances. In verse 58 there is the sense of insecurity. You don't know where you are going to sleep do you? When you arrived in this place you didn't know what it was going to be like. What's it like? Has the Lord provided sufficient for you? You are getting by. Nobody dead up in the dormitories yet. You are learning to sleep even though your body clock is at a different hour. Don't worry. Doesn't apply to the Germans. God knows the way ahead of you. You know in Matthew's Gospel chapter 8 this same incident we read that the man who asked the question was a scribe. He was a bit of an intellectual. Bit of a teacher. Knew all the theory. Some of you have been to college, Bible college, you've got theological education up to here and yet you've never ever really lived in total dependence upon God to answer prayer. For you to live one week not knowing where your next meal is going to come from. That is a major spiritual experience. For you to set off on a journey not having enough money to finish it. For you to have to decide what you are going to do with the little bit of money you've got this morning. Are you going to spend money on stamps for the letters or are you going to have some money for dinner? And can God answer prayer? For you to go to a town and not know where you are going to stay when you get there. Do you have a heavenly father? Does he really care? Can he keep an eye on each of these ancient old OM vehicles rumbling around Europe? Things held together with chewing gum and prayer. Can God bless the frightened people inside? There's the problem of insecurity going to be faced. And then there's the problem of religious traditions in verse 59. I have to go and bury my father, it's my great religious duty. What happens if you have to behave in a way that conflicts with some of your religious traditions? I believe God is going to ask some of you some really interesting questions this summer. What really matters most in your thinking, your understanding? Some of you are perhaps going to face family pressure. For some of you the letters may already have been written by your mother appealing to you to come home. Real discipleship means facing real questions. It will affect your thinking about finance, your thinking about marriage, your thinking about what career you're going to have. I've got three commands for you, says the Lord. Simply follow me. Proclaim the kingdom of God. And don't ever dream of turning back. And so these disciples say, right, alright, we'll do it. And then the Lord divides them all up into pairs and sends them out on teams. Seventy of them wondering about Palestine, proclaiming the kingdom. Let me ask you a question. Do you think those pairs of people always got on well together? Do you think they had wonderful, happy fellowships going around Palestine, preaching the gospel? Again, another memory from my first OM conference. We were meeting in an ancient old beer factory not very far away from here. Six thirty in the morning, I got up to read my Bible. Big, thick, bushy bush, just outside the door. And I was having my quiet. Suddenly a voice came from inside this bush. Hallelujah! It was a short, fanatical, Pentecostal brother from Belfast, inside the bush. I thought he was a nutcase. And there were 900 of us at this conference. An afternoon of evangelism down Brussels. We all got divided up into pairs. And he took his arm full of books down one street and I was to go down the other. Now, I had a little bit of French, you see. You couldn't even understand his English. After all, I was a student of Cambridge University. He hadn't even done any high school. He went down the street and sold every book he had. I couldn't even persuade people to touch one New Testament. And he became a great friend of mine in the years later. And he's now gone to be with the Lord. He died young of cancer. But you see, one of the first things the Lord gives them is a practical experience in teamwork. You have to learn to understand and to love one another. The Lord appointed the 70 and sent them out two by two. And probably one made mistakes in the mat reading. And probably one snored at night. And probably one used to get into theological arguments. And yet God had put them together because together they were better, more effective than any one of them would have been alone. And so out these folk went. And another thing you notice from verse one is that they were to go to places where the Lord himself was about to come. I want you to go this summer with real expectancy in your heart that the Lord Jesus Christ is going to not only go with you, but come to the hearts and the homes of people that you meet. You will never ever throughout your life convict anybody of sin. God hasn't put it into our hands to convict anybody of sin. We witness, we proclaim, we distribute books, we preach and teach and pray and it's God who does the work. In England every winter I spend most of my time in university evangelism. Preaching to the largest crowd of students I can get in universities up and down the country. Far larger crowds than we've got here tonight. You can see that people are often angry with the gospel. And then you can watch their faces and see something dawning. And sometimes people go white or they cry. And then suddenly you begin to see a new release of joy and happiness and assurance across their face because they have met with Jesus Christ. That's the goal of our work friends, that men and women meet with Jesus Christ. You go to those villages but He is coming later. Think in those terms. You commend the Saviour to men and women. You speak with them of your Lord. And there will come a time in the lives of hundreds of them when they meet Christ Himself. They get to know the Lord personally. Now they understand what you are talking about. You have preached but the Lord has now come. Chris Short was speaking of churches that have begun to be formed in northern France. A team went in a couple of years ago. Maybe they were encouraged that night or not, I don't know. But they took ground in that village and they prayed that God would come and reveal Himself in that place. These disciples are to go ahead of the Lord but the Lord has promised to come to village after village where they have been. And in verse 2 He tells them to go in prayer. They are now actually on the campaign. Yes they have prayed with Christ before they went. And He has sent them out. And He has given them a message to preach. But the Lord says you will learn to pray on the job. When you see how plenteous the harvest is. Then you pray the Lord of that harvest that He send out even more labourers. You go to France and to Belgium, to London, to Austria, Turkey. May God give you a life long burden for those areas as you go. May your daily prayer be that God would send more labourers into those areas. And may the Lord raise up labourers from amongst those who come to Christ through your ministry. And then in verse 4 the Lord did another thing. He wants you to take no purse, no wallet, no shoes. He said all your money on the table. Empty your pockets before you go. Even we don't do that. Why does He do that? Why are they to go out without one brass shoe in their pocket? It's because they are going to be preaching a gospel of belief and trust in God, the living God Himself. How can you preach something that you are not practicing? The Lord wants His evangelists, if they are going to proclaim faith, to actually be living by faith. If you are going to tell men and women up and down Europe that Jesus Christ satisfies the needs of the human heart, I want to ask you before you go, is He deeply satisfying your heart? If it's right to put faith in God for salvation, is it also possible to put faith in God for your daily life? The Lord wants His great team of evangelists to be living examples of the message that they are going to preach. And so away they go. And they have a fantastic time. They see God do things they never dreamed of seeing. They got hospitality all over the place, they had power in preaching, they cast out demons. And in verse 17 they come home again. And it is a tremendous reunion. You ought to see people when they come back from the campaigns. You can stand at the top of the building and listen to some of these girls meeting each other down the bottom. The shrieks and the hugging and the arms around each other. Every person with a testimony of what God has been doing on their team. And the Lord meets them. He is pleased for them. I beheld Satan falling as lightning from heaven. I have given you authority. Nothing shall hurt you. You have been involved in a great work. Verse 20. But in this rejoice not. Don't rejoice in the work. Please learn this lesson. Don't let your heart's joy be all bound up with the work that you do. May your joy be in the Lord himself. Imagine the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. What is it to be? Burnt porridge for breakfast. A team leader looking more like Stalin every day. Difficulties on every doorstep. Bitten by a huge man eating Doberman pincher dog. What's the worst that could happen? It doesn't matter what happens. You can have joy in the Lord Jesus right throughout those experiences. Because the Lord wants you to rejoice. Not in the authority that you've been given or the work that you've done. But rejoice in his grace that your names are written in his book in heaven. And then we hear the Lord pray. I thank thee, O Father, he said in the Holy Spirit. Lord of heaven and earth. Oh, how tremendous to have God. The great God of heaven and earth as our Father. I am a father. I've got three children. I've watched my children learning to walk. I see them sort of wobbling about on their little fat legs. I've seen them holding on to the furniture with all the dribble coming out. I've seen them falling over and hurting themselves. What does my father's heart do? It doesn't stand over one side of the room and say, go on, walk. Walk, you blighter. No child of mine ought to take longer than ten minutes to learn to walk. You watch fathers as they get hold of them with each finger. They talk the most stupid nonsense to them. Come along. Let's go walking. And the child is looking at dad, trying desperately hard to walk. And it doesn't learn immediately. One day it learns. You are learning to walk with the Lord Jesus. Tomorrow morning when the alarm clock goes off. You've got to get up somehow. You've got to have time alone with God before breakfast. Do you think God is watching you like this in heaven? Go on, get up. On parade. Everything in the heart of God comes to you and says, now come on, I want to help you. Every new step forward that you take this summer in your walk with the Lord, it gives God's own heart so much pleasure. He wants you to grow, he wants you to walk. Oh, father, says our Lord Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth. God owns everything. You may get some temporary hardships. These disciples have been rejected from that village in Samaria. And yet their father owns the whole of Samaria. And the kind of things that you go through are merely temporary. Because our father will one day give the whole universe to us. That we may reign with him forever. As we have learnt to live and walk with him, our hearts in tune with his heart. And so the Lord begins his prayer by just meditating on who God is. And then in verse 22 he speaks of the right of the son to introduce people to the father. What a privilege to know God. Some of you may have earthly fathers who are not at all pleased that you are here. Some of you may be cut out of your father's inheritance. You may be cut off from your home and family. And it faced these first century disciples as well. And Jesus speaks of the way in which he introduces us to THE father. God is a communicator. In Genesis chapter 1 we find God communicating within the Trinity. Jesus comes to speak to you. The Holy Spirit is the teacher, the guide, the counsellor, the comforter, the one who communicates to you. And Jesus Christ wants to communicate more of God the Father to you during the course of this sermon. Turn to John's Gospel, chapter 14. If you keep my commandments, you love me. If you love me, you will be loved by my father. And I will love him and will manifest myself unto him. Jesus promises to manifest himself to you if you love him and keep his commandments. It's one of the greatest verses of my life. Verse 23 then. If a man love me and keep my word, my father will love him and we will come. Father and I will come and take up our dwelling, make our home with you. And then in verses 23 and 24 we read of that personal blessing of Christ for those who are his disciples. You may be ploughing against the wind and the rain. You may have crashes on you from home. You may be thinking through many things as you travel. There may be difficulties in your physical circumstances. God's great goal this summer in your life is so that he might bless you with a deeper knowledge of himself. Prophets and kings wish to see the things that you now see. King David with all his psalms, Jeremiah with all his prophecies. They didn't have a fraction of what you have been given in Christ. You are so immensely privileged in your salvation. Sometimes our feelings may go up and down. Learn to ignore them and base your life on the rock of God's word. Listen to God speaking morning by morning. In preparation for the things of the day. As I said feelings can vary. My life involves me in a lot of travel. And I wake up in many many different places. I don't know whether you are like me but I wake up bit slowly. And as my eyes slowly wake up I don't always know where I am. How did I get to be here? What happened yesterday? You know the day after I got married I was waking up in a small hotel in Scotland. I didn't know where I was. I was very sleepy. It was that sort of early morning Nigel Lee kind of state of mind and I didn't know what was going on. And then a voice said hello. In my left ear. I remembered I got married yesterday. Oh I remembered. Yeah I have a funny mind. I had gone completely blank. My feelings were ones of uncertainty and confusion and bewilderment. The facts were that I was on the first full proper day of my married life. And I reached under the pillow for the wedding certificate that I had put there the night before. Feelings and facts can be completely different. Whatever you feel like you have a sovereign father who cares for you and watches over you. Whatever happens in your life God's great purpose is to reveal himself to you that you might know him better. You are tremendously privileged. Never let Satan take that away from you. This summer may we be a people who seek that kind of blessing from God. And who enjoy being on God's special training program. I am sure God wants to speak to many of you about personal things during these days. He wants you to face sin. He wants you to take new steps of faith. He wants you to learn to love the unlovable. You are in a stretching experience. May you be glad to hear whatever God says to you. May you know at the end of this week that you have moved on beyond the point that you were at when you stepped in here yesterday or the day before. Amen. Let us pray. Now father we do want to go on. I want to know more of your grace and your faithfulness and the accuracy of your word to my own sinful heart during these days. Lord we want to hear not only the good, the comforting, the encouraging things. But we want to hear you speaking of those things that need to be done away with from our lives. Lord your eternal voice brings life to our souls. Speak we pray. Thank you for your word tonight. May we sleep well we pray. So confident and calm with each other around and knowing that we are your children. For Jesus sake. Amen.