Well, this is a privilege. I know you are excited about my being here, but I am more excited about being here than you can realize. I have looked forward to seeing some of you for a long time. Some of you have changed a little bit.
I often ask people to give their testimony, but when I am asked to do it, that is another thing. I have been praying for the last two or three days, asking how I could somehow focus on something that would not be on me but would be beneficial and focus our attention on the Lord Himself.
I was with a friend of mine at a conference in Florence, Alabama, a couple of months back. He used a diagram from a Richard Foster book—I do not know which book; I borrowed it from Peter—and I am going to use it tonight as a way of explaining the history of God’s dealings and workings in my life.
It will show you how many times I have missed the way, and how faithful and patient He has been. But I have discovered that I am not the only one.
I hunted for a Scripture verse. Usually, you ought to have a Scripture verse. I could not find anything. So this is what I want to talk to you about:
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Should we say that all together? You need to repeat it:
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Now, the question is: What is the main thing?
We will talk about that Sunday, but I will be getting around to it all these times together. What I want to say tonight basically has to do with the struggle and the longing of my heart, all the time, to be obedient to the Lord and to cut through to the main issues in life.
I like wholeheartedness. One thing I hate is somebody slow-pulling and dragging their feet. That is not me. My wife is a little slower than I am, and when we walk, we always have a problem. But I have a problem with a lot of people who are just sort of dragging their feet.
There has been one desire in my heart: to be all-out and wholehearted. That has problems, though. It really does, and you will see it as we get along in our testimony tonight.
What I want to do is show you what Richard Foster calls the mainstream, or the river of God. Then we will see some areas where we sort of get out of the mainstream. If we are not careful, we get off and become a little eddy or whirlpool out there: lots of activity, but no progress.
As I look back and see the faithful dealings of the Lord and His working in my heart, I think these things picture something of a struggle and a desire to really press on.
I am grateful, first of all, that I was born into a family with a mother and dad who really loved the Lord. Mother reminded me for many years that, when I was in the womb, she prayed that I would become a servant of the Lord in her church.
As a boy growing up, we had what we called a fall and spring revival every year. I was back at the altar every fall and spring, getting saved over and over again. Some of you have never been through that. Some of you do not know what that involves.
I remember, as a boy, really longing to please the Lord, yet being typical and mischievous. Each time I would get up, pound my fist, and say, “Pray for me that I can hold out to the bitter end”—whatever that is.
I went through that in college, too, because they had fall and spring revivals again. Never sure. Never really sure of salvation.
Then one day God, in His wonderful mercy, showed me the grace of God: it was not my hanging on to Him to keep saved, but that He had taken hold of my hand. That which I had committed unto Him, He would keep against that day.
The revelation of grace was a wonderful thing to my heart.
In fact, that was all I spoke about for a long time: the grace of God. It keeps being wonderful. You would have to have been through the background I went through and realized the awful uncertainty.
I actually got to the place where I said, “Lord, I will never be able to live this kind of life. I will never be able to hold out. All I need is ten minutes at the end to get right.”
It all depended on me. But the grace of God was a wonderful thing when suddenly I realized that it was what He did, not what I was doing.
After college, I went into Youth for Christ. We were directing a servicemen’s center in Salem, Oregon, just as the war was closing. When the center closed, we started a youth center, and I had the privilege of ministering there for three years as a Youth for Christ director.
There were large crowds of young people going into the high schools day after day. Yet, in the midst of all this activity, God put a deep hunger and longing in my heart for something besides activity.
I was invited to speak at a conference on the coast. I thought it was wonderful to be invited as a conference speaker at a big Labor Day gathering. But on the first night, Brother Bill spoke from Galatians 5 concerning the works of the flesh.
It was as though God put a mirror before me, and I saw myself as I had never seen myself before. I was a good boy, clean morally, raised in a good background—but that night, for the first time in my life, I saw what God saw of me. It was an awful picture.
The speaker asked me, “Did God speak to you tonight?” I thought to myself, I am the other speaker. But he said, “I do not think we should do much talking now. Let us just get alone, and everybody be quiet before God.”
I got to my room that night and cried out, “Oh, God, why did You bring me here? Speaker at a business and professional women’s conference, and I am such a wretched, miserable mess.”
I wrestled through the night and did not sleep. The next morning, I told the director perhaps Bill should speak again. But I had to speak that night.
That afternoon, I went through all the messages I had stored up, but everything was empty and dull. Finally, I cried, “Oh, Lord, give me a fresh word.”
He reminded me of Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
I stood before that group and said, “I might as well be honest with you beginning tonight. I am not sure He has ever been my Shepherd before.”
I grew up in South Dakota, and I used to drive several hundred sheep up to pasture. That is the way we did it in Dakota. But I discovered that in Bible lands, the shepherd went before and the sheep followed him.
I said, “I have had to be driven all the way. But for the first time that I can ever really be sure of, I can say, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd.’ He is not having to drive me. I am following Him.”
As I went on through the Psalm, conviction became so heavy that I said, “Folks, I cannot go on. I need to get down at the altar.” I had always had a haunting suspicion that one day I would be the first one at my own altar call. And I was.
I remember kneeling in that old rough auditorium and crying out, “Oh, God.” I looked around, and I believe everybody in the audience was on their face weeping. God came in.
That was the first time I began to realize that, in our obedience and honesty before God, He is often able to deal with the hearts of others.
From that moment on, I came to realize that God wanted me to be a soul winner: evangelism and the enlargement of that into missionary outreach.
The first emphasis of my life was all-out evangelism—buttonholing everybody to make sure they were winning souls. Evangelism was very real. There needs to be more overflow.
But then I began to see something: a lot of people did not want Jesus because there were too many Christians whose lives did not match up. You would witness to them, and they would say, “I do not want that.”
That led me to the next phase. I began to realize that unless there was some holiness of life, some separation, God could not use us as He desired.
The Holy Spirit began to work, and revival began to come. I saw that if God could really empty, then He could fill. So, for a whole period of time, the emphasis was holiness of life: emptying, that we might be filled.
I thank God for all that I went through. But it was about this time that I came into the writings of Jessie Penn-Lewis, and the cross and identification became very real to me.
Up to that time, everything had been cleansing of the old life. Now, for the first time, I saw that the real problem was me. It was I. I needed to be dealt with.
I began to cry out, “Oh, God, how faithful You are to finally show me that the real root of the problem is the tree that needs to be dealt with.”
I began to see that when Jesus died on the cross, I died there with Him; crucified with Him, buried with Him, and raised in newness of life with Him. I did not understand all that meant, but I knew one thing: there was a proud young man who needed to die.
Guess what I preached for the next five years? “Folks, you have got to die.”
I met L. E. Maxwell of Prairie Bible Institute, who had written Born Crucified. That was a whole phase of my life. I thank God for it.
Then I came to what I can only call the vision of God’s eternal purpose in Christ.
It was a wonderful thing to discover that, while salvation and redemption are precious and wonderful, God had purposed something for His lovely Son that was beyond just being saved.
I began to ask, “What would God have done if man had not fallen, so that He would have nobody to save?”
For the first time, I saw that being saved and being holy was not the be-all and end-all. God had a purpose to work out in and through His Son.
From that time on, the word purpose became my middle name: the purpose, the eternal purpose, the purpose, the purpose. My mother would say, “Do you not know anything but the purpose?” I would say, “Mother, that is what is needed. That is the missing note.”
In reading The Overcomer, I learned of T. Austin-Sparks. At first, I thought he had missed the way. But years later, when I sat with him, I learned that he had seen something of the church: the vessel, the corporate expression, and the life flow that was to come out of the church.
He paid a price because he saw something more: the church as the vessel of expression for the life of the Lord.
Can you see what I am trying to say tonight? Here is an emphasis that the church needs. But is it possible for someone to get off in an eddy and go round and round as though that were the only thing?
I believe there is a refreshing that can come. In all of these things, God keeps saying to me, “Here is something needed in the stream, the body of life, but it needs to have its proper perspective.”
We started fellowships back in Missouri. Our desire was for a New Testament church, a purity of church. We built a boot camp and trained young people. I became acquainted with New Tribes Mission and the vision of a lost world.
I never cease to thank God for the vision of a lost world. It keeps growing in my heart all the time.
At the close of the war, MacArthur called for missionaries to go to Japan. I responded and had a military permit, visa, bags packed, and had said goodbye to the people in Missouri.
Then, while on the West Coast in ministry, I was hit head-on in an automobile accident. But for the grace of God, I would have died.
One missionary with us, Daisy, was killed. My scalp was laid back, my arm was broken, part of my kneecap was removed, and my back was broken. I was not expected to live.
But God.
A man came in after hitchhiking from Portland to Yakima. He said, “God has given me a gift of healing, and I have come to pray for you.” He prayed, and then he vanished. I never knew who he was.
From that moment on, God began a recovering work.
A lady came from Seattle with an autographed copy of a song by Helen Lemmel. She sang:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.
She told me that Helen Lemmel had been blind for years. Yet she had prayed, “Oh, God, if I do not have physical eyes, let me have spiritual eyes.”
I said, “Oh, God, if I am going to be blind, if I am not going to be able to see, I thank You for sending this sister to remind me that spiritual eyes are more important.”
Years later, Brother Sparks told me that Helen had been offered surgery that might restore her physical sight. She chose against it, saying, “Maybe if I had physical eyesight, I would lose my spiritual eyesight.”
Brother Sparks concluded, “There is something better than healing.”
What is it? The Healer Himself.
After the accident, I began to ask, “God, we have had some revival, but things are fading. What is next?” A brother said to me, “What you really need is more of the Holy Spirit.”
He explained that there is a difference between the indwelling Spirit and the outpoured Spirit. I began to move among people who emphasized power for service.
I had moved among the Plymouth Brethren and had seen something of the structure of the church. It was very wonderful, except that you can have all the order without any life or enablement. You can know all about the gifts without having them operating.
So I began to reach out and say, “Oh, God, if there is an anointing, if there is an outpoured Spirit, if there is more gifting that You can work out in my life, I am available.”
One day, alone in the woods, God gave me a prayer language. I was not particularly seeking it; I just wanted to worship Him. I never told anybody for two or three years, but there were times when the overflow and desire simply to worship the Lord brought an enablement.
Later, at a gathering, I saw God use a message in another language to expose a man’s life and call him to repentance. God had wonderful ways of breaking my prejudice.
I spent some time here in a whirlpool, emphasizing gifts and power. I am not disappointed that I went through it, but it is not the thing.
Richard Foster calls the next emphasis social justice. It raises the question: How much of the kingdom can we experience right now? How much kingdom authority can we exercise now?
There are extremes. Some say we must simply wait for Jesus to return. Others say we should establish the kingdom ourselves. I am not in either extreme.
But I do believe that in our homes, communities, and areas around us, there may be much more spiritual authority to exercise than we do. I believe that God can break into this human scene and manifest something of His kingdom.
There is sacrifice involved. It is not merely a matter of principle, but of being sensitive to the Lord.
Finally, Foster speaks of contemplation. I would call it union life.
Do you believe that you can experience a life union with the Lord Jesus? In fellowship and relationship with Him, God can give understanding and release truth. Most of us need more of this life union.
The difficulty is that, while I am spending my time abiding in the Lord and contemplating, I can begin to enjoy contemplation and abiding so much that I become passive.
My struggle all through the years has been, “Oh, God, I want reality. I do not care what the cost is. I do not care how lonely it gets. I want to press on to the fullness of reality.”
If difficult days come, it is not how much of the church we know. It is not how much we know. It is how much we can draw from the life of the Lord Jesus.
Brother Kong spoke of believers in China who had endured the Communist takeover. Those who stood in crisis were those who knew the abiding union—the life of the Lord in John 15.
Which of these six would you vote as the main thing? Evangelism? Holiness? The cross? The eternal purpose? Spiritual gifts? Social justice? Union life?
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Do you believe that, as our life is centered and occupied with the Lord Himself, He can move in and bring evangelism and world vision? He can bring holiness of life. He can enable and gift us with every gift that is needed.
If we are occupied with Him, He can direct us in service, sacrifice, authority, and love.
I once heard Mother Teresa asked whether she had any goals or ambitions in life. She lowered her head and whispered, “Oh, yes, I have a goal. It is Him.”
Then she was asked, “What is love?”
She replied, “Love is giving till it hurts, and then you keep on giving, no matter how much it hurts.”
There has been a history and a struggle all through these years. If I have learned any one thing, it is that the thing I thought was main turned out not to be the main thing, because God has a way of bringing us back.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not putting down any of these things. I am simply saying that, however good things may seem to be, God is doing a much bigger thing than we realize.
The whole Christian world is divided into camps, emphasizing one thing against another. I have been guilty of emphasizing. But there has always been this cry in my heart: “Oh, God, I do not want to finish the race and discover that I put the emphasis on the wrong thing. I really missed it.”
Father, tonight, I want to thank You for the privilege of trying to share a history and background—all the various things that have been an emphasis at times.
I honestly say, Lord, I thank You for allowing me to taste these various areas of reality. I thank You tonight.
I look out over a group gathered here, and I believe we can say with one voice: “Oh, Lord, do not let us settle down. Do not let us become complacent. Do not let us assume that we have arrived. Give us the larger sense of what it means to be flowing in life with You.”
Thank You for giving discernment to distinguish the things that really differ—things that seem so much alike, yet really are not.
Lord, in the midst of tomorrow night and Sunday, do something in a new way to grip us. We want to be an enlarged people, with a larger vision of what You are wanting to do and how You are doing it in this closing hour.
We ask this in Jesus’ name, with thanksgiving. Amen.