In this sermon, the speaker discusses the concept of surrendering various aspects of our lives to God. He emphasizes the importance of giving our possessions, time, reputation, health, talents, and family to God. The speaker shares a story of a Baptist Deacon who surrendered his right to be healthy and experienced healing. He also shares a personal story of surrendering his wife to God when she was seriously ill, and how surrendering her led to her recovery. The speaker concludes by urging listeners to surrender to God and learn from their experiences.

When I started talking about the pineapple story, really, the thing started long before that. As a matter of fact, it started right at the first day we came to that mission field there in New Guinea. I won't easily forget that first morning I woke up. Savages all around the house, yelling and shouting, and we had been so tired. We'd traveled so far the night before, the day before, that I woke up at a start. They were all there to be paid for unloading the boat and the things that we'd brought with us in there. I was so glad there was an older missionary there with me who had brought the boat up, and I thought, well, as long as he's here, you know, I've got somebody to lean on. He's a veteran, but of course, he didn't know the language of his people, so it wasn't much good. Now, of course, I didn't know neither, but I opened the door and there stood this crowd of people yelling at me with their hands out. Everybody in the village was there. Now, I'm supposed to pay him for unloading the boat, but I didn't have a clue who to pay. I know there wasn't that many items to carry, and there was at least 300 people there, and so who am I supposed to pay? And as Dutch people, we don't pay people for not working, and this was a hardship to me through the years because I was so tight on things that when I tried to figure out who worked, they were all with their hands out, and I'm trying to find out, and I can't find out because we couldn't communicate, so I hesitate, and when I hesitate, they think I'm not going to do it, so the pressure comes on. That's the way they do it, all the group pressure against an individual, and so they yelled, and they got tougher, and they start shaking their spears, and I thought, I've got to get Chuck out here. This guy, maybe he knows. He was at the boat handing it to him, and I said, Chuck, come on out here. I said, what do I do? He didn't want to come up. I said, what do I do? He says, pay them all. Pay them all out. I said, well, they didn't all work. He said, so what? What are you saving it for? He says, if you're not going to be here, you won't need anything. Just, I should have really given them everything I had that first day, but half of them went home just laughing, you know, this missionary, you know, we got this stuff. Then stood the guys that must have really worked, and they looked at what the others got, and they got the same thing, and they were, oh, one group of angry people outside my door, and their demonic eyes, and man, it just made chills go up and down your spine, and I didn't know what to do. You know what I did? I pointed at the, you know, told them to go away. Of course, they don't point with their finger. They point with their chin, so they didn't know what I was always showing my finger for, and so they, I finally, I just went in the house, and locked the door as if that was going to help. It's on post. They could get a fire underneath it, and get you out real quick, and you know, there's no windows. There's just mosquito screens, and I was pale. I met Carol inside the kitchen door. She says, what's happening? I said, Carol, I think we're going to set a record, you know, martyred the first day in. That's got to be a story, and now you don't say that to your wife, man. I found out later that's no way to say it, but, oh, man, it really shook me up. That was my first encounter, and I didn't know anything about rites, you see. I had learned that, and so I was hanging on. We had breakfast. Chuck said, the water's going down. The tide is, we're a hundred miles up this river, see, and there's still a 13-foot tide. He says, the tide's down. I can't buck the tide. I've got to leave right now. I hated to see him go. He's going to leave me there, and I wanted to go with him so bad. I was a quitter after one night, but I walked him down to the river. He's a big guy. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and he says, Otto, now all, remember, all this natives are with us, the flies, the mosquitoes, the bugs, and they never bathe. It all comes along. Wherever there's people, there's all kinds of things swarming. So, two of us, you know, foreigners in one village, that was, I mean, they all followed us down the river, and then he, in the middle of this throng of people, Chuck, before he gets on the boat, puts his hand on my shoulder. He says, Otto, be very careful with all your dealings with these people, because they're the most unpredictable people on the whole southern swamplands. Now, he shouldn't have told me that and got on his boat. You know what I mean? And, and so he, he said, you can't predict them. See, he was here with that other missionary a year before and built that house that we moved in, and that other missionary lasted nine, nine months. And so, he, he said, be very careful in all your dealings with these people. He was referring to the mess I made that morning and almost got us all burned out. And, and he said, now, be very careful, everything you do, pray before you do anything. And then he said, now, I'm going to pray for you before I get on the boat. Hey, this guy's got faith. He bows, he closes his eyes. Now, I happen to know that you can pray with your eyes open, and I, I mean, this guy's around with his spears. I mean, you, I don't know how many of you would have that kind of faith. Of course, with your eyes open, you would, you know, what good would that do anyway? But I peeked around to see his praying, and I was listening to him, and he said, oh God, oh God, somehow, somehow, help Konings. He shouldn't have put all these somehows in there. It told me he didn't believe it himself. You know, somehow help him to, you know, I don't know what he said, but I remember those somehows. I went back to the, I, I went back to the house, and I couldn't get this off, I couldn't hold it. I had to share this with somebody who's on my wife. I said, Carol, you know what? This is the, these are the most unpredictable people in the whole island. Now, he had said on the southern swamplands, but it hit me like they were the most worst people in the whole world, and, and I said, they put us here, you know. Well, the mission, the mission took care of us, though. They sent over another missionary to take, to help us get an, uh, orientated, you know. He was in the eastern area, different language, but, um, and then when he left, we, you know, were supposed to prove to the whole world we were good missionaries, you know, and we didn't even want to prove it anymore, but because I'm Dutch, and us Dutchmen, we hang in there. We're stubborn. Uh, we, we don't want to quit. I didn't want to quit because my father said to me, you'll never amount to anything, and, uh, and so I had a proof somewhere along the line that I was worth something, so I couldn't quit, and so, um, oh, we, we started off trying to learn language, and it was a mess, and then my wife got sick on me. Now, that, I didn't think that was fair. She got hepatitis. Now, I had to wean this baby. We had this brand new baby. How old was the baby? About six, six weeks old, she says. All right, and so now, um, I had a, she, she was sick. She couldn't feed the baby anymore, so I had to put him on this bottle. Now, my wife had this Playtex bottle. Uh, Playtex bottles are terrible things. Don't ever allow those into your house. They, you can't be a Christian and own one of those at the same time. Uh, I, I tried. Honestly, this thing, they, they, they're plastic sacks, okay? Do they still have them? I wonder. Yeah, they do, and I, they have plastic sacks, and they, we had to have this contraption. You had to get this plastic sack on this spring loader, and then, and then, and then you got to get it on there and jam it in, and it's transfers. I understand that maybe the new ones are better than that. I hope they are, but this thing was, it's absolutely no good. It's, um, it leaks on both ends because my, my baby would pinch the bottom. We'd lost that bottom thing that's supposed to be, I don't know where it was. Anyway, what a mess this bottle was, and now, I had this, uh, my wife says you have to heat the milk to a certain temperature. I had this terrible stove, a kerosene stove, that was left over from yellow missionary. It had rusted. It was gravity fed. It was a tank up here and a copper tube down here. It was one of them temperamental things that either all the kerosene would come at once or none would come at all. You know, one of them, and oh, what a mess this stove was, and I tried to fix this stove several, I'm not a mechanic. Uh, I would, I would have traded in all my theological studies for some mechanical ability at this point, and I couldn't get that stove. I took it apart, folks, and I, I, there was, it was complicated. Three burners on the top, two on the bottom. There was a little oven that sat on there, but it was, it was a terrible thing, and, uh, it had more parts in it. For, for a wick stove, the thing should have had been very simple, but it had more little wicks and screens and valves and tubes and all were dirty, and I blow through them and clean it out and, um, put it, but I never, I, those engineers, whoever made it, uh, they, they didn't do a good job. They, they never allowed for all the parts. I could never get them all back in again. I, oh, it was bad, and, uh, so I'd leave out whatever I thought wasn't necessary, and, and, you know, I find out that sometimes the smallest pieces are the most important. You know, did some of your mechanics know that? Uh, oh, I had fires. I just, that thing went on fire, and I, I had this big 55-gallon drum there with rice sacks soaking wet that I could just blanket the whole thing at once, so I was a one-man fire brigade. I had to be. I almost burned the house down the first time. Oh, it was terrible, and so I'm, I'm, I'm fussing with this mad stove. Now, this bad stove, and then this baby bottle, the milk had to be warmed on this stove. Can you mention it? Now, my first child was a screamer. I don't know if you've ever had a screamer in your house. He wakes himself up screaming, wakes everybody else up. He woke the natives up, too, and that was bad, because now I had them out the door screaming at me, too. I, I've got them screaming on the inside and the outside, and I don't know who to shut up first, and, and that's now, and now Satan comes at me, says, you didn't have your devotions this morning. Don't let, don't let Satan pull that one on you. I mean, you, you, hey, you know, he, sure, before I was married, I could have my devotions in the morning. Sure, I was, you know what I mean? Why you don't have the children? Don't get me wrong, young lady. I, I, I, I, you know, when the children come along, they scream at you, okay, and sometimes the wife will, too, but, you know, I, I'm, I'm in a mess, so he says, nothing's going to go right today, because you haven't had your devotions. Well, what kind of talk is that? But I fell for that. Yeah, that's right. I didn't have my devotions. I didn't have my devotions yesterday, neither, or the day before, and so it wasn't real good anymore, and so he said, everything's going to go wrong, and it was going wrong, so I started believing Satan. Now, that's, when you believe Satan's lies, then you become vulnerable to him, then he begets, gets a hold in your mind, and I didn't know anything about that, but anyway, that milk, oh, it was powdered milk. It had come, come from Australia. It was a long time coming, no doubt about it, because by the time I got back there in the jungle, it was hard. I had to pound it with a hammer. I, I pounded the milk to get it, you know, small enough to mix, you know what I mean? So, I'm pounding this milk. I never get it, oh, then you got to get it to go through that maybe, baby bottle. Uh, it was bad. It was just a bad situation all the way. Now, I'm pounding the milk while this baby's screaming at me, and that gets to me, you know what I mean? Just shut up. I'm fixing the milk, you know what I mean? But the, oh, he won't shut up until you get something in his tummy, and, oh, what a mess. So, I'm pounding the milk and, uh, kicking the stove. Oh, I did, I mean, I did. I tried, I tried to warm that milk up, and once I threw the bottle at the stove, I thought I'll get both of them at once. Yeah, I, I'm not given to anger, but the stove really brought it out. Uh, it was the circumstances. Um, I, I, um, I beat the stove, and I threw the bottle at the baby once. I, oh, it was bad, folks, and I know it doesn't sound, I am a Christian. I, I, I am saved, although my story today will not, you, you would doubt, and you once that don't know me well that I knew here, please accept this. I was born again, uh, 12 years before this, but anyway, I, uh, finally, I, I couldn't. You know what, you know what? Those of you, parents here, those of you that have little children, don't let those kids push you around. They'll, they'll, if they get hungry enough, they'll get it, they'll take it cold, and, and I, and I just fed that baby to, I mean, hey, just bypass your problems, you know? I was running away from the problem, but, but then he was still screaming, and I, uh, asked my wife, uh, what those little bottles of baby food that she had brought, when do we start on those? This kid is hungry, and, um, and, um, she says, well, in a few more weeks, well, she didn't know I was already giving him some of those, and, um, I just wanted to check. I said, when I start, how much do I give him? She says, well, a little half a jar of this, and half a jar. I was going to give him a couple whole jars, just, I mean, just, and never heating it at all. I mean, just giving it to him cold, just keep him from crying, you know, if you feed it to him fast enough, he hasn't got a chance to cry in between. I, but you have to burp him after that. I sure found that out, but, you know, oh, and then, and then I, oh, what a mess, folks. Then I dumped the baby in bed with me, with my wife, and, and I'd go outside, try to take care of this gang, and I was already angry, you see, to start with, but anyway, what a mess it was. So, several times I tried to fix this stove, to no avail, the fires kept getting bigger, the more I touched it, the more mess it was, and I finally said, Lord, I can't do it. I can't fix it. I thought, you know what made it so bad? This stove was made by Phillips, a Dutch stove. How could any Dutchman be so dumb to make a stove like that? That really got me, but, you know, I finally realized I couldn't fix it, so I started praying over it. I laid my hands on the stove one day. I didn't have to anoint it with oil. There was oil all over the place anyway, and, and I, I prayed. I, when I finally, when the baby finally goes to sleep in the afternoon, I, I kneeled by that stove, put my Bible on the stove, trying to, thought something might rub off. I know there wasn't much for me to rub off, but maybe the Word of God, but I never got that thing healed. It never did work, and so I'm struggling out. I could, I'm outside with this big black pot, and I opened fire. All the natives now standing around coughing and sneezing, and they got TB. They got all the diseases, and I have no lid to this pot, and I'm trying to cook my rice because I can't cook it inside, and I, and these guys are getting their dirty sticks. See, they, they, they want some of the rice in exchange for the firewood, so they get their sticks, and they're going to help themselves with their dirty sticks. I said, get my, get your sticks out of my pot. Quit coughing near. I'm getting, I'm becoming like a nurse. I'm starting to see germs, and, and oh, what a mess, and then, then I, well, the cooking wasn't all that good, so my wife stayed sick. She was sick nine months that first year. What a mess this was, and I'm trying to cook this food, and do all this work, and try to give out the medicine, and so on. Now the radio, there was a two-way radio, the Coast MEF base, or my mission board would call us every, the roll call in the morning, and so they'd say, go down the line, Jufo. There was my Jufo. I'd say, Jufo standing by. How's things going, Otto? I'd say, fine. Now why did I say that? Do you ever do that? That's terrible, and I'm losing it. My wife is sick. My baby, my people are all angry. My nerves are at edge. I, I don't know how long it can last, but I'm hanging in there. You know, I thought it can't get any worse. It can only get better, you see, and so you have hope, but I'd say fine, and they always marveled. See, when Chuck went home with that boat, after he left us there the first day, he went back to his wife, Bernita. Bernita later became my wife's good friend, and she said to Bernita, she told her that 10 years later. She said, you know, when Chuck came home that first day, he was weeping. He's got the gift of mercy. He says, Bernita, we've got to pray like there was never, those two are so green. I've never, I don't know why they ever sent him out here. He says, we've got to pray. I, I don't give them three, three weeks, or they'll be out of there. Those awyu will drive them right out of that place, and Bernita said to my wife 10 years later. She says, it's amazing. It was amazing. We, we prayed our hearts out for you, but then when you sit on the radio, fine, you're doing fine every day. We thought maybe that you were different people than what we had seen, and that there was much more to you, so we quit praying so hard. When you tell people everything's fine, you're facing your problems alone, and Christianity was never made to face alone. We're one body. The hand can't make it, folks. The eye can't make it. It depends. It needs the foot, and it needs the ear. Friends, and when we say we're doing all right, everything's fine, and things aren't, then you're cutting yourself off from the prayers of God's people, and you're in this thing alone, like a hand without the foot, and you're going to hurt, and you're going to go down, and that's the, that's the culture we live in. Hey, but I, see, I'm not going to tell the whole island I'm losing it after a few weeks. You know what I mean? Everybody stands by for the road call, not only our mission, all the other missions. That's the only news you get, and so I'm not going to broadcast all over the world that I'm losing it, and that I'm finished, you know, and so every day I say, fine, and the radio, oh, the battery needs to be charged, and I had this little Briggs & Stratton gasoline battery charger. Don't ever get a Briggs & Stratton gasoline engine. They'll ruin your Christianity if you have any left. I mean, this is terrible. I pulled that thing to charge my battery. The natives start talking to me, Tuan, why don't they send you, send us a smart missionary? You've been pulling that thing all morning. The other missionary pulled it one time. Oh, man, I tried to tell them I had a BA degree. I guess they didn't know what that was. I, uh, but they couldn't even write. I mean, they said, wow, he carves fast when they see me writing, and they're calling me dumb, and, and that's, I haven't given my reputation to God at this point, and so finally we went off the air, and boy, they wondered what had happened to the Konings, and they were glad that we were still alive, and they had a new battery, a new aerial, a new radio, and, and a battery charger. He had that with him, the pilot, and I said, the battery charger, so he took it. This fella, Chuck, the guy with the boat, fixed it, put this little note on the top, you know, on the spark plug, Otto, don't touch anything, just start it, and I mean, that's, that's hard, but anyway, they had this boat for me for evangelism, Evan Rood, 18 horse, don't get one of those. Well, in a way, when it didn't start, I liked it, because I wasn't going anywhere on that boat. I didn't like those crocodiles in the river. It was just a little bit of a boat. I'm not much of a navigator, and I thought, man, as long as that motor doesn't go, I don't go anywhere, you know, and then we get letters. Now, these letters, that's something else, you know, letters from supporters, letters from churches, and saying, Konings, how many souls have you won? You know, how many churches have you planted? Hey, I haven't even fixed my stove yet, and the expectations are so high. The home church thinks missionaries have, you know, halos and furloughs, I guess, and here, man, so when you write missionaries, give them a, give them a break, okay? Now, I had this medical work. Yes, Carol had started it, and then she got sick on me, and so the natives said, give us medicine, and I said, I don't know how to give medicine, and they said, well, Tuan, the box is just inside the shed there. Get the key from Nyonya. Get the key, and we'll show you where the medicines are, and they all had favorite colors. They told me which colors they wanted, and I thought, oh, brother, I should have just let them all have the favorite color, and then they wouldn't have been angry at me, I guess, but I said, no, the nurse is sick, no medicine, and that was good for a couple of weeks, but then they said, Tuan, you're eating all the pills yourself. Well, they saw us take vitamins. Pessimists always take vitamins, and so we, they thought I was eating all the pills myself, so finally, they said, Tuan, you're just stingy, you're a long nose, and finally, I said, Carol, I've got to give them medicine. I don't know anything about it. I brought the box inside. She's smart. She took the potent drugs out that I could kill people with, and you know, the codeine and stuff, and sent me out there with the malaria pills, and the, you know, the aspirins, and whatever, bandages, taught me how to give shots on a lemon, and so I'm out there, you know, and all these hundreds of people, oh man, and the flies, I don't know how my wife could stand this, and they all yell at once, and I don't know the language well enough, so we're not communicating at all. It's just noise, and finally, I said, no more of this. I said, you line up, all in a straight line. They were all up to a hundred a day, and stretched out to the front fence, and I said, now, when you come to my table here, you put your finger where you're sick, because I said, you know, they point with their chin. They couldn't put your finger, and I said, no talk. I want no, if you talk, you don't get anything. I won't talk. You don't talk, and I said, just so I tell these guys that they came by, and they point here, point here. If it was above the belt, I'd always give them aspirin. If it was below the belt, I'd always give them sulfur. I just took two medicines. That's all I worked with, and I just dumped those out on the table, and just had a whole pile of it, and I say, point, man. Now, this one man, he says the evil spirit shot him up here, and it went below the belt, so he got both, but all the others, I just gave him aspirin and sulfur, and they weren't any the worst of it, and so, but then, see these guys with the tropical ulcers. Oh, they had these huge tropical ulcers on their thigh, under their arms, and women under their breast, huge open sores. Sometimes the maggots in them, it's just green, and so I had to give them penicillin, so we had to use penicillin G. It's a very, I don't know if they still use it today. It's a very thick thing. You really have to shake those bottles to get that to come out. You have to use the big needles. I like those big needles anyway, because these guys are stealing my pineapples, and I just, just, you know what I mean. They want a needle. They get it. You know, I didn't sharpen them neither. I just, I, and they were, but you had to have them for penicillin G, and, but the amazing thing was, when I gave them that shot, that thing would dry up. The, they responded to penicillin, one shot of that, and after about three or four days, that whole sore would dry up and heal, and that was a miracle to me and to them, and so they said, Tu-An, we don't want those pills anymore. We want that powerful medicine, the medicine with the big bite. I guess they meant that big needle. I don't know, and they, and they spat out my medicine, and I said, I hate to see that waste, and they said, Tu-An, we want that big needle, and I'm, I don't want to give it to them, and they're fighting with me, and I'm standing there with this needle, and they're standing there with a nine-foot spear. What do you, what do you think I did? I gave them this shot. I, uh, I didn't, I didn't, couldn't afford all this penicillin, so I gave them, I shot them up with water. They didn't know the difference. I shot, everybody wanted a shot, got one. Now, I didn't hit them. Now, my wife would hit them back here somewhere, but there's a lot of wires and arteries, whatever you call back there, and so, so I, I had a method. I get them right here in the leg, right here on the, you know, and I, you have to be careful. You don't hit them so hard that you hit the bone. Yeah, you got to, but some of them, I wanted, I mean, some of them, I, they wanted, they got it, and, and it left a mark, you know, and they had gotten the big medicine. Now, you medical people, don't, don't, don't fuss up this. This was sterile water. We sterilized the water we put in them, so I didn't think it did any good. It didn't do them any harm. I don't know about the needle, but anyway, the most amazing thing happened, and I, I'm frustrated because I know I'm not doing them any good, and yet, but they're all at least getting something, you see what I mean, and they, but in their minds, Satan so programmed them when they got sick, he had them thinking that, that they were going to die, but when they had that medicine with the big bite, and they had the mark of that medicine on their leg, they knew, they said, I'm not going to die. I've got the big, big medicine in me. I'm going to be all right, and they started drinking water again, and they pulled out of it, but, and, and so it's amazing. I was saving lives. Can you believe it? I didn't think there for a long time I was saving any. I know I was losing some, but you know, doctors here at home do the same. They lose some, and, and so, but anyway, oh, have you ever had a job that you were totally unprepared to do, and frustrated to do, and I begged God to heal my wife, so I, so she could have her job back, you know what I mean, and, and, and the longer I pled with God, and, and, and frustrated at the work, God never answered my prayer. You know, when he answered my prayer on this medical thing, and finally I said, God, if you want me, because nine months is a long time for her to be sick, if you want me to do medical work all my life, I'll surrender. That was hard, folks. That was hard for a person who didn't know anything about me, and then I had a look at that sore ulcer, and that, or whatever it was, and I dug out spare tips out of their backs without any, can you imagine, without any anesthesia. I pulled their teeth from my pliers without any anesthesia. I delivered babies. I mean, complications. It was unreal, and friends, and finally I said, God, I'll do this as unto you, and until I saw, a man came one day, and he had this terrible ulcerated leg, and I said, God, Jesus, if that was you, what would I do? I'd give him the best bandages, and the best salve, and I'd give him the best penicillin, and I'd treat him, you know, wouldn't you, and, and then I learned to do it as unto him. That's when I got out of this thing, and was able to surrender, and, and that's when my wife got better, see, and oh, what a, what a rough way to learn, isn't it? That's learning Plan B, folks, and, and I think many of us are learning Plan B, you know, experience rather than obedience, Plan A, but friends, that's, that's what I get into. Anyway, this fellow came along, and then he was always falling into the fire, and this was a demon-possessed boy, lived next door, and constantly gnashing at, at me, pulling at his bandages. I'd get him all healed up, he'd fall in the fire again. Oh, start all over again, what a mess he was. I'd get the diapers on the line, glad to get them washed, and then he'd come along with his greasy hair, and wipe himself on all, I would have gladly sacrificed one or two diapers, he could have, but he'd mess them all up. What, oh, that got to me. Well, I wasn't going to wash them, I'd put them on the baby the way they were. I thought, well, he's going to have to toughen up, this is, I mean, if he's going to live here, and, and, and, and that went on right until my wife caught me on that one, and then, oh, brother, I had more trouble. Don't marry a nurse, they see too many germs. But see me get up on the windows and scream at the, at our bedroom window in the middle of the night, we'd open the curtains, try to get some air, you know, it's all so humid and so hot, and he'd scream, and oh, man, I'd go clear off the bed, you know, and I wouldn't sleep a wink the rest of the night. Man, then about five o'clock, there's the baby starts screaming again, and the whole scenario again, no wonder my nerves were going bad. Now, my wife can go back to sleep, that made me mad, but she, she can do that, and that's why she lasted. But, you know, he'd get in my water drum, I had a clean water drum there for kitchen use, we caught the rain off the roof there, the zinc roof, and he would get, he would steal a piece of soap sometimes, and he would get in that drum of nice, clean kitchen water, and soap himself up, and he's got all his filthy bandages on them, infections, and he's in my water drum. Oh, man, that got to me. I said, CB, get out of that drum, and I hollered at him, and finally got him out of there, and threw all that water away, and man, I gotta pray now for more water, and I prayed, and that afternoon, we had one of them real storms, and man, the whole drum was full again, so praise the Lord, I'm in business again, but the next morning, he was in it again, twice in a row. Oh, that got to me, and finally, you can see now why I hadn't had the rights message, I hadn't surrendered anything, you know, I'm still fighting, any of you like that, I'm fighting my own way through, fighting for my rights, pushing, and pulling, and trying, and going down, but the second day, he was in it again, I got him out of the drum again, and I'm almost worn out after the medical work anyway, and now I've got to clean this drum, and dump it out, and dump it out again, pray for more rain, God gave me more water. Third morning, he's in it again, I hit him. Now, I shouldn't have hit that boy, a missionary should never hit a national, but he was, he couldn't get away, I mean, he's inside the drum, you know, sticking out that fire above the drum, I hit him right in the mouth, when I hit that guy, I just lost it. Now, please don't tell me afterwards, you weren't a very good missionary, I already know that, okay, but I'm a good confessor, you know, like David, he was a good repenter, right, and that's, God was still, never left me, but you know, when I hit that boy, there was like fire coming out of his eyes, I mean, the demons, just ice, never been so scared in my life, I mean, it's just like fire coming out, and I ran, and finally he climbed out the drum himself, and man, that was my first encounter with this demons, and I was dealing with this boy every day, with the medical, see, so this gives you an idea of our start, so I had the physical problems, you know, and my nerves are bad, and I don't last, and every day I'm still saying, fine, you know, how you doing out of fine, and I say, why do I, why don't I just confess that I'm a failure, and somehow my pride wouldn't let me do it, pride will kill you, if you keep it up long enough, and so all these things, the physical problem, then the demon possession, and the spiritual problems, then my own besetting sin problems, that I am still confessing the same sins over and over again, and so struggle, struggle, and then our children get sick, I remember, and that's, and we gave our first daughter to the Lord, and that was a part of the pineapple story, surrendering our children to God, our Debbie got so sick, we had this little lamp, she was just a little child, she was how old, six months, something like that, nine months old, and so see, we had this little oil lamp outside our bed, we had this mosquito net that we had, we were in the native house, and we had this little oil lamp hanging there to get some light, and this baby's fever, and she was just vomiting, and she couldn't hold anything down, and it got worse, and we have no contact with the coast, so all you have is the Lord to pray to, and we prayed all night, my wife took her out and bathed her in cold water, and she still, she was getting worse, and by midnight, we had prayed, and prayed, and prayed, you know how you do, you plead, and plead, and prayed, and prayed, and finally, it seems like the prayers wasn't even getting outside of the mosquito net, and finally, the death rattle in her throat, my wife held that, and all, I think of it, and finally, you know, I realized that I've got to surrender this child to the Lord, and I said, God, I give you my child, and that was how close it was, you know, I give it to God, that's what I do with the pineapples and everything, I give it to God when I lose it, if we could only learn to give it, turn things over to God before we're losing it, before you lose your health, and so I gave that little, I said to Carol, I said, Carol, she said, Otto, pray one more time, she's dying on this, pray one more time, and she's weeping, and I said, Carol, we've prayed all night, but just to please her, I'll pray, I said, God, dear God, that's about a fire, and he says, you know, what happened when you gave the pineapples to me, I said, God, you blessed, you blessed everything I ever gave you, what happened when you gave your time to me, and I said, God, you blessed my time, and now it was, I said, God, you take the baby, and I said, Carol, this isn't a time for prayer, this is a time for surrender, I said, Carol, give the baby to God, give her while you still have her, and she understood, and she held that baby up, and in the dimness of that light from the little oil lamp, she says, God, I give you my child, I give it to you before she dies, and I'm praying, God, your child is dying, as if he didn't know what foolishness was that, and you know, and as if he needs a warning, God takes good care of his property, remember that, and that child started to breathe better, and the death rattle went out of her throat, and she started to breathe, and she seemed to be coming out of it, and she soon started to drink from her mother's breast, and it was amazing, and she didn't vomit again, we were both so, so emotionally drained, that we fell asleep, but the little lamp was still on, and the morning I woke up, and that thing was just a little blue flame, burned all the kerosene out of it, and when I got, we were so tired, we, I, first thing I thought of, your daughter died, your daughter died last night, and I didn't want to confirm it by opening my eyes, but finally I had to, and I felt, and she was in between us in bed, and I felt, and her chest was just going up and down, breathing like normal, and she was ready to eat, and God healed that child, but wow, that's waiting too long, folks, let's give them to God while we still have them to give, well, our son, oh, that little fella, the next one, well, the next one was born, no, the oldest son, we were in Bandung, Java, and that's a story in itself, but there, the driving is notorious, there's no stop streets, or no stop lights, it's the, you know, survival of the fittest, you know, whoever's the bravest, and my son's out there with his bicycle, okay, and these motorcycles, and scooters, all over the place, and he got hit by a motorcycle, and broke his collarbone, I had to send him to school on one of them, Betches, one of them old taxis, they're the old panel trucks from the, from America that they ship over, I don't know where they come from, they were GMCs, and Chevs, and forth, and they were so rusted, so bad, they had to pump the brakes to get them to stop, they had to go up a mountain to the school where my son went to school, and I had to put him on that, and later my daughter's on that thing, and I thought, you lucky people riding with my kids, you know, you'll probably make it, but I was still given to anxiety, hadn't surrendered that to the Lord, anyway, they had a jerry can, a plastic jerry can, in the cab on the, usually on the passenger side, see, the tanks had rusted long ago, so the little line, plastic line to the fuel pump, and that's how they pumped it up out of there, and they're sitting there with that thing bouncing around in the cab, and then they're sitting there smoking their cigarettes, I mean, it's a, you know, it's, I mean, it's unreal, and so you learn to surrender your kids to the Lord. Well, my son ended up in that seven-day Adventist hospital, and they took good care of him there, dear people, and I sat in that hospital with him many times, and they came with these whole loads of people that had gone over the cliff, missed a turn, and all these wounded people, and that's, I mean, it really shakes you up, but anyway, I, at that, that night, I gave my oldest son to the Lord, I said, God, I can't keep this lad any longer, there's no way, I'm giving him to you just like I give Debbie to you, and so now two of my four children were in the Lord's hands, and I wish I should have given them all, you know that, but I wasn't losing the others yet, you know what I mean, so I hang on to things as long as I can before I lose them, so this, the third one I gave to God, that little boy, oh man, he was, well, I can't describe all, he was so sick, and we went on this little bicycle taxi in the middle of the night, took him to that same seven-day Adventist doctor, and he said to me next morning, he says, when you brought Charles in, I thought that he wouldn't make it through the night, he says, I was afraid for you, but he says, God's been good, that doctor and I knelt beside that little boy and prayed our hearts out that night, anyway, now that, but that one girl of mine, Jessie, she would never get sick, so I could never give her to God, and so I worried about Jessie quite a bit, and finally I said, God, she doesn't need to get sick, and I gave her to, now I had to remember to give these kids to God every day, and that gave me a whole lot of peace, but then my wife gets sick, now I've only got one of those, and I knew what God was saying, hey, are you willing to put her on the altar and give her to me, and I said, God, I can't make it here without her, she's a stabilizing force in our family, I can't raise these kids alone, and I've given God all these sob stories, you know, I'm praying, please heal my wife, and then I had a chance to get her to a doctor, came in, there was a flight, I sent her to the doctor, and the doctor says, I can't do anything for her, how to prepare for her death, I don't see any way, she isn't responding, and she was really sick, and what do you think I did, when I was losing her, I quick gave her to God, before I said, God, I'm giving her to you, she's better off with you than with me, anyway, I know that, I'm a pretty good husband, but I'm sure that God could take better care of her than I can, and so I gave her to God, and I've got her here today. How many lessons do we learn, how many experiences do we need to go through before we surrender, folks? Surrender is the hard way to learn, you will learn, and it's that way in all these areas of our, remember in the pineapple story, I talked about the possessions, giving it to God, and then on the second tape there, God's great school, I talked about the time, giving time to God, and then reputation, but then there's these other areas that came up, and one was family, that I just described to you, and then there's health, when you're hurting, then you give your health to God, you surrender your right to be healthy, and I preached this once in New Hampshire, and there was a church way up there by the White Mountains, there was this big Baptist deacon sitting on the aisle, he couldn't bend his knee, he had a stiff leg, he had something, he'd been to many doctors, couldn't get healing, and when I told this story, he gave, he surrendered his right to be healthy, he said, God, I'll be the best bad need guy you've ever had serving you, that's the kind of thing God wants to hear, if we're not willing to say that, you'll not likely get healed, I say that to all pastors and leaders of churches, don't annoy people with oil, and pray over them until they surrender their right to be healthy, because that's likely why God's got them hurting, for them to surrender, that's the main, that's how God works with us Christians, and so he gave his health to God, he said, God, I'll serve you with this, he had to have a long shoehorn, you know, on a stick to get his shoe on, he couldn't bend his, he couldn't fly his plane anymore, he had a little plane, and he said he couldn't push the pedals anymore, and so he, that Wednesday night, he gave his health to God, especially his knee and his leg, and we were there for dinner, the pastor and I, on the Friday night, two days later, and he took us out to his, he had a flagstone walk, a root had pushed a flagstone up, he tripped on that root the day before, Thursday, and he says, guess where I hit, right on my bad knee, and he says, I was sitting there on that flag, he took us right out, sitting on this stone, rubbing my knee and rubbing my knee, I thought I was going to lose my whole leg, and he says, you know, I had given my knee to God the day before, and it looked like that was the wrong thing to do, wasn't it? That's, no, he says, you know, I thought about it, he said, God, I gave you my knee, I gave you my whole leg, you've got a right to take it, it looks like that's what you're going to do, and he says, as I rubbed my knee like this, he said, as I rubbed my knee, he said, I meant it, I meant it, I meant it, God, I meant it, I meant it, I meant it, that's, he says, that's right, he says, finally, I had to get up, I couldn't sit there all day, so he says, by the time I got to the front door, he says, Mr. Koenig, you know what, I could bend that knee, he says, when I, when, when my knee hit that rock, something went into place, or something went right, and God healed my knee, I said, no, he didn't, he says, yes, look, he did, I said, no, no, the timing, he says, he didn't heal your knee when you hit the rock, he says, well, what do you mean, I said, he healed your knee when you showed him that you were serious about him, and you weren't bitter against him, and when you said, I meant it, I meant it, I meant it, and you stuck with God, and you said, God, you can have the whole leg, I still with you, I meant it, that's when God healed your knee, he says, I guess that's right, and so, I've told this story in many places, and wherever I get on this area of health, now, you know what the verse of scripture is, it's on that verse where Paul has his thorn in the flesh, you know, and he prays three times, remember, for God to remove that thorn, and God says, no, my grace is sufficient for you, Paul, my strength is made perfect in your weakness, and then Paul has this terrific answer, he says, most gladly will I therefore glory in my infirmity that the power of Christ may rest upon me, and what would you rather have, the power of Christ, or perfect health, you say, I don't like that question, I don't either, but that's what Paul faced, and he never prayed again, he said three times, and then he left, and said, okay, God use me, and maybe because of that problem, he was usable, he was, maybe otherwise, he'd been too proud, and so God used him, could use him more than any other apostle, maybe than any other person ever lived, because he learned to live in his problem, and rejoice in his problem, and so I want you to know that when you surrender an area to God, that doesn't mean that everything's going to turn to gold, and everything's going to, God has a choice, Joni Eareckson Tadda, remember that girl, paralyzed from her neck down, at 17, I believe, and she says herself, I prayed, and at first bitter against God, then prayed, and prayed, and do you think she's still praying for God to heal her? No, no, you read her book, you listen to her radio program, she is not asking God to heal her anymore, she says, God use me. Now, that's surrender, and look how God is using that woman today. It's been about 17, 18 years now, and I look forward to the day God's going to heal her completely. He could do that. Some people say, well, no, God's, I mean, she's so used of God, God wouldn't, God could put somebody else in her place, couldn't he? But, you know, when God's seen that faithfulness, and yet she may be that way the rest of her life, but God doesn't always answer your prayer. If you surrender your right to be healthy, you say, I quit praying about it, quit struggling, quit fighting, quit being bitter, and you leave it with God, that doesn't mean that it's going to turn out all right. Now, when I give my pineapples to God, I got more pineapples, I still get more pineapples than I want. When I give my, when I give my time to God, God increased my time. When I give my reputation to God, God exalted me. But here, on this one, you give your health to God, doesn't mean God's going to heal you. So, I want you to know that. But this, I've been preaching this all over the country, you know what's happening, 95% of the people that surrender their right to be healthy, become healed. Now, that shows you that about that many people, that they suffer because the Lord is trying them, and drawing them to himself, and bringing them to the end of their rope, so that they can surrender. He's giving them an opportunity to surrender their rights, and that many get healed. Now, I'm not a faith healer or anything, but people get healed when they surrender their rights. That's such a beautiful, amazing thing. And then, there's the other area of talents, and I want to talk this to you, because so many of you are young. Talents, if you do not surrender your talents to the glory of God, if you don't give God the glory for what you have going for you, you're inviting God to take it from you. It's a pride thing. I had a buddy in high school, and he was a long-distance runner. He became good at it, long-distance running. He was winning prizes. And then, he was a Christian, and he went to church with me. But then came the place where the track meets start to meet on Sunday morning, and he had a choice to make. Is he going to stay coming to church, and learn about God, or is he going, and he made the wrong decision. He dropped out of church, got away from the Lord, and became a greater runner. And then, he was in a terrible car accident. He lost one leg. They had to amputate it. He never ran again. But you know what? He was back in church again with his one leg. Hey, give God the glory for what you... I met a young woman in Kentucky. She asked me the strangest question. She says, Mr. Koenig, she had heard me several meetings. Can you believe that I won a beauty contest my junior year in high school? Boy, that's a hard question to answer. I can't lie, and I can't, you know, and I hesitated. She says, go ahead and say it. You can't believe it. Everybody, see, and this dear lady, she is now in her 30s. She had scars. She had all kinds of... She looked bad. Besides that, she was grossly overweight, and she looked bad, and she was weeping. She says, Mr. Koenig, I wish I'd heard this message so long ago. And she said, I did win the beauty contest. And when I stood on the center with the runner-ups beside me, I knew that I should give God the glory, because I had, you know, thought of that, and everybody said, if you win it, you got it. And so, I knew I should speak for the Lord. But he says, we're in a rural school, and all the villages around, this was rural country, and all the people know each other, and everybody goes to this school. So, everybody was at this contest. And he says, there was all my friends, and all the neighbors, and everybody there, and I just got so scared. And so, I didn't say anything about the Lord, and I just didn't give Him the glory. And I kind of took all the glory for myself, and everybody clapped and cheered. And she says, oh, I felt so miserable. I knew I let the Lord down, and I asked Him for forgiveness. And I said to him, God, if you allow me to win it one more time, I'll speak for you. And that's exactly what happened her senior year in high school. She won the beauty contest again. And now, she stood there again, and she had a talk for God, and she was petrified again, and she didn't do it again. And now, she said, I knew God was angry at me, and He would never forgive me again. And he says, I was so sick of myself, and I was so down on myself for chickening out like that. And she says, I got away from the Lord then, and never went to church anymore, and I ran around with the wrong crowd, married one of them, got into a bad marriage. He used to beat me. That's some of the scars you see. I was in accidents, because he was drunk driving. And she says, my life just went bad and worse, and my emotions were all shot, and I overate, and that's how I got to be. You know, she didn't give God the glory for what she's got going. She lost it all. And that's the way it is with talents, and this is a sport. So, whatever you're better at than I, if you can run that computer better than everybody else, and everybody else knows it, be careful, be careful. You've got to give God the glory. You can't take glory for yourself. And all of us are made that we can do something better than somebody else. And this is so, by the way, I met this lady again about several years later, and she had lost considerable weight. She had put to practice the things. She'd been to the seminar then, and put to practice some of these things, starting to believe, but lost weight. There's a smile on her face. I said, you're going to right there. I didn't even recognize her. She says, I'm the lady, you remember? And I said, good for you. You're going along. She says, I'm living for the Lord. Praise the Lord. There is forgiveness with God, but this area is very it's an amazing area. Then the area of our future, giving our future to God. If you give your future to God, you know, some people are afraid to do this. They say, if I give my future to God, surely He will send me to those cannibals and headhunters Mr. Koenig's been talking about, you know. Or, you know, He'd put me in the worst place if I left it to Him. Now, that's Satan's lie. You don't go for, you resist that lie. You don't listen to Satan's lies that way. Some people say, well, if I give my future to God, probably, oh man, will I have any money to live on? Will I, you know, people worry about their retirement if they give it to you. Friends, when you give, you can't give to God. Let Him control and all. He works things out for you. Oh, there's a, I don't know what I told you that story about that 1938 Buick in Ecuador. There was a dear missionary family owned in 1938. This was about, no, this was many years ago, but that was probably back in the 50s. The missionary told me, he said, we were driving, we had to cross the Andes Mountains. He says, they're high and sharp turns. And he says, our old car broke down. He says, there was something wrong with the brakes or something in the wheel. And he says, I didn't dare go down the mountain with this one broken brake drum shoe, whatever. And he says, we, and we were there and my family and I, we were praying and another car came along. We were on a turn. It was very dangerous. And the other driver says, come on, let's push the car. Let's get it down to a safer place. You're going to get hit on this turn. There's this very dangerous spot. So he says, he helped us. And we got it down to a safer spot. And there we parked. And there we prayed and got the kids together and prayed. And we didn't, there was nothing I could do. I said, I took that, we needed new brake shoes or whatever parts. And we prayed. And how is God going to get his parts there in the middle, top of the Andes Mountains in the middle of Ecuador for an American-made Buick, you know. And so the boy and the family went down the hill and they just to play and down the mountainside. And he came back up very excited. And he said, Daddy, there's a car down there just like ours. He says, it's black just like ours. Well, his dad said, this is a 1938 Buick. You know, I mean, what did he see down there? And they crawled down the hill. And there it was, a 1938 Buick. All right. Put there years before, overgrown with vines, they cut it free. But then when he got to it, the wheels had all been taken and didn't have any of the parts he needed. He said, God, I can't believe this. You put this 1938 Buick here right in front of our nose, and there's not the parts I need. What do you mean by this? And the boy said, well, Dad, look in the trunk. Well, and then finally he pried it open. And there was a box, brand new brake parts and brake shoes for that very model of that car, which he took up, put on his car, and he could get off the mountain before night came. Now, I say, can we give our future to God? God plans our future, folks. We can all afford to give our future to God. Even if God has to have a drunk guy drive over the cliff on a mountain road 15 years before you and your family are going to come along to do it, He knows where you're going to be 15 years from now. And that's so unique. God knows our ways, and we can safely put the future in His hands, and He knows what we need when we get there. All right? So then that takes care of all the retirement money and the life insurance and so on, okay? But the Bible characters that surrendered their rights, have you ever thought of them? Think of Abraham. Abraham surrendered his right to where he was going to live. Remember, God says, go, and he goes. He doesn't make his own choices anymore. If you can surrender that and leave your choices with God, and so, and then, you know, he gets to the promised land, right, in his family. So God made a good choice, and he followed. Abraham, again, he offers his only son Isaac on the altar. He gives the only son away, and now he's known as a father of a great nation. What a paradox. You can go with God and surrender, and God will take care of you. And then there's another time, Abraham, you know, when Lot, his nephew, and they look at the land, and the lush land of Sodom and Gomorrah, and that, and Lot went for it, and Abraham went on the poor ground. Abraham got so rich on this poor ground, folks, that he had so many servants, that when Lot, the Sodomites were taken, remember, he had enough servants to, he had an army to beat the kings of Sodom, or the other. I mean, God can bless you on the poor land. God can bless you anywhere, as long as you walk with God and surrender to God. Now, then the story of Ruth. I love this. What did Ruth, and Naomi, and Orpah stood on that dusty road there in Moab, and Ruth surrenders her right. What does she surrender? She surrenders her right to be married. She's going to take care of an old lady in a strange land in Bethlehem. Orpah went back, you know, to take up her life, but Ruth says, no, your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. And Ruth was the girl that married the prize of Bethlehem, Boaz. He's the most eligible bachelor in the Bible. He was rich. He was handsome. He was, he sat at the gate. He was a ruler. He was godly, spiritual. I mean, what else can you have? He had mercy on his workers. He was a good boss. And she got the prize of Bethlehem, the biggest fish in the pond, because she surrendered her right to be married, and she got him. Okay, the story of Hannah. What a beautiful story that is. Hannah had no children. The other wife had many children, and when you have polygamous, they compete for children. And she was hurting, and finally she cried to the Lord, and remember, until Eli thought she was drunk. She was praying, and begging, and pleading, and that's not the way to go, folks. Finally, what does she do? She surrenders, right? And when you surrender, friends, you get much more done by surrendering and rejoicing than by begging and pleading. Remember that. Give it to God. Put it on the altar. Surrender, and then God will know. He'll give you what He wants you to give you. And so, Hannah finally says, God, if you give me a son, I'll give him back to you. That's only half surrender. Really, she should have said, God, if you never give me a son, I'll serve you the best I can the rest of my life. But no, she didn't say that. She went halfway. God, if you give me a son, she's going to get a son anyway, but she says, if you give me a son, I'll give him to you. So she went about halfway with God, and God went for it. And so, she gets Samuel, and she gave Samuel to Eli in the temple. Remember, every day she brings him a new coat. How long did she take to knit this coat, or to fix it? I bet she had it done a month after she got back, you know, thinking and counting the days when she could go and see little Sammy again and give him his new coat. But she meant it. And you know that she had five more children? She would have never had those five, if she hadn't given the first one away. And Samuel, what a son he was, became the whole leader of the circuit of writing, prophet of Israel. And in the end of the book of Samuel, it says that Samuel dwelt with his mother. She got him back. That was his headquarters, and from there he went to the different places. She got him back. Apparently, his father had died by now, and there was his mother living in Silo, I think it was, and there was Samuel living with her. She got him back, and what a blessed son she had. Well, that's surrendering rights. Job said, the Lord's given, the Lord's taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. He surrenders his right to own things, and at the end of the story, Job is twice as rich as he was in the first part of the story. And he was already the richest man of all the men of the East in the first chapter. Now he's twice as rich. But he's the man that says, the Lord's given, the Lord's taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Esther surrenders her right to live when she goes into the king's presence, and she could have been killed for doing that. And by giving her life, surrendering her life, she won the lives of all her people, including her uncle and her own life. She saves the life of the whole Jewish nation. It would have been done that she surrendered rights. Noah, can you imagine the scoffers? Noah, what are you doing building a boat? He's been building this ark for a hundred years. Noah, you're wasting your whole life on a boat in the middle of the land. What fool! You're wasting your time. And after the flood, he was the only one that had time. Isn't that right? And how many more years he lived, several hundred years. And then Jesus, of course, the prime example, gave his reputation and says he surrendered his reputation, became like a servant, and the likeness of man. And then God highly exalted him and gives him a name above every name, that in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. So he went so low, you know, he surrendered his reputation, died like a common criminal on a Roman cross, despised and rejected of men, and yet he is the one that's going to be king of kings, lord of lords, and every knee's going to bow to him. Can't go any higher than that. And so the Bible is really full of these illustrations of rites. So I encourage you, plan A is obedience, folks. Surrender. Let him be lord, lordship. That's the only way to the spiritual life. You'll be spiritual when he's lord. But if you fight and you don't surrender, then you're in plan B. Automatically you're in plan B, experience. God will allow the experiences to happen in your life, and you'll get so many experiences till you surrender and give it to God, because he will have his way in your life. And I encourage you now, tonight, let's all bow our heads, and I encourage you just to get out of plan B. Well, plan B hurts, folks. It's not... And say, God, I want plan A for my life. I want to obey what your book tells me to do, because if I don't, I know you have ways with us, and you will deal with us accordingly until we finally surrender. Heavenly Father, help all of us at this night to surrender to you, to let you be lord, to let you be God. Father, for it goes so much better with us. Those of us that are older know this, because we've been in plan B so long. We've struggled and fought and lost. And Father, I pray for the young people here that you might help each one of them to totally surrender. And the older ones, too, that Father, we might have joy, because we see your blessing on our lives and on our ministries and on our families. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.