[0:00] Please turn with me to the Gospel of John in chapter 10. Sorry, chapter 20.
[0:12] We'll read from verse 19, but it's verses 21 and 22 that interest us, especially this morning.
[0:35] This is the way John tells that it happened. On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.
[0:59] When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.
[1:13] As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.
[1:23] And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.
[1:37] If we had been there, we would not have heard John's interposing remarks. We would have just heard and seen, Peace be with you.
[1:48] As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you. Receive the Holy Spirit. My grandmother was a dear, sweet Christian lady, even though she had only done two years of school, first and second grade, she could hardly write.
[2:14] It looked like a scribble. We were often at our grandparents' house with the other cousins. There were eight children.
[2:29] My father was one of eight. And so on Sunday afternoons after church, there were lots of cousins running around.
[2:40] It was big fun. But my grandmother would often say the same phrase whenever she caught some of us little ones acting sinfully toward each other.
[2:54] Now, you are going to know right away where I am from when I tell you the phrase my grandmother said. She would say, Now, y'all don't be ugly to one another. I don't think they say that in Pennsylvania, do they?
[3:08] Now, y'all don't be ugly to one another. Now, there's something profoundly biblical about that. Because sin is moral ugliness, isn't it?
[3:24] And when we look at the Bible, we find that there's something going on about beauty, moral beauty.
[3:36] The sweetness and wonderfulness of sheer goodness, of the goodness, the bright and shining and embracing and warm goodness of the living God.
[3:51] Now, let me just give you a few examples. And you'll see why I want to talk about beauty in this introduction before we come back to our Lord and his resurrection and the Holy Spirit and missions, which is what we're going to talk about.
[4:05] In Psalm 27, David says, There's one thing. Whoa, we're getting to the center of things here. There's one thing that I've asked of the Lord, and that shall I seek.
[4:18] That I may dwell in the courts of the Lord to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
[4:28] Now, that's what it's all about. It's the wonderful moral beauty of the living God. The sheer wonder of his goodness and faithfulness and mercy and truthfulness and wisdom and power.
[4:48] All of that toward us being saving and pardoning and pulling us back up into what he made us to be.
[4:59] It's amazing. The beauty of the Lord. But if we look at the issue of beauty in the Bible, we find another side to it.
[5:10] Because in one of the Messianic Psalms, in Psalm 45, at one point, it's a psalm about Jesus, about the Messiah. And at a point in the psalm, speaking to God's people as the bride of the King Messiah, the psalm says, Forget your people and your father's house.
[5:35] And the King will desire your beauty. So you see, our lives are about two things.
[5:47] To become admirers and worshippers of the beauty of the living God. And to become something beautiful unto Jesus Christ for his sake.
[6:00] For his sake. But the interesting thing is, how do we become beautiful? The Bible teaches that the Lord himself, remember Ephesians 5, he gives himself to save us and to wash us.
[6:16] And so that we don't have any spot or wrinkle. And he presents us to himself in all our splendor, the scripture says, or beauty. So really, salvation is all about God remaking us beautiful with his own image.
[6:35] With his own spirit inside of us. And so, really, we have two aspects to our Christian life.
[6:45] To behold and worship and love the beauty, the sheer beauty of the living God. And to become beautiful unto him for his own sake. It's a wonderful life, isn't it?
[6:58] Yeah. But, when we look around a bit in scripture, and I'm going to finish this introduction. I'm sorry, are you hanging on with me? Everybody likes to talk about beauty, don't they? Well, when we look around, we can cast around.
[7:12] And then, well, we open up in the Song of Solomons. And all over the place, there's a phrase there in the book of Song of Solomons. As the two spouses talk to each other. They keep saying, how beautiful.
[7:24] How beautiful you are. And your neck is like an ivy tower. And your teeth are like flocks of sheep. I guess that was beautiful to the people then.
[7:35] But they keep saying to one another, how beautiful you are. And then, we come to Isaiah and the issue of missions.
[7:49] And we find the same statement. How beautiful, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.
[8:02] Missions is about beauty. And it's about you becoming beautiful unto the Lord as being like Him in that world-embracing, redeeming love in which you just want to take the whole world and grab it and say, you know, oh Lord, lead the blind in ways they have not known.
[8:31] And take the captives. So, now, I want to say three things from the passage, or we want to together, come and get under this word.
[8:45] And let it get into us in chapter 20 and verses 21 and 22. And I want to simply have an affirmation, an explanation, and an implication.
[9:00] But those are two big words. So, kids, I want to say something that's true. I want to explain why it's true. And then I want to tell you why it's important that it's true. Okay? Here's the thing that's true.
[9:10] The power of God the Holy Spirit is given to Christians in a very special way for missionary evangelistic outreach to the ends of the earth.
[9:32] I'm not saying it's the only reason the Holy Spirit is given to us. But I'm saying that when we look at the New Testament, the reason we get the Holy Spirit, especially when the Bible talks about power from the Holy Spirit being given to us, it's for loving, embracing, and seeking, and saving a lost world all the way out to the extremities of the earth.
[9:58] And that you need power for. Is that okay? That's clear? All right. Now, we're going to need to do things. We need to confirm this from Scripture. Is Holy Spirit power really given to us, especially for evangelism and missions?
[10:15] And we're going to prove it by Scripture. We're going to prove it by history. Scripture. Acts chapter 1 and verses 8. If you want to turn there, you can. If not, you can just listen.
[10:25] Listen. Jesus says this in verse 8.
[10:38] But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.
[10:50] Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. Well, that's pretty clear, isn't it? Power for witness. Power for the beauty of the love of someone who's going to get others and say, you must be saved too.
[11:11] Second verse. Luke chapter 24. Verse 46 to 49. Jesus at His resurrection says to the disciples, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.
[11:28] Repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning with Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.
[11:39] And behold, look, pay attention. Stop. Hear what I say. Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, which means the Holy Spirit, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.
[11:56] And the whole context is, You shall be my witnesses to the ends of the earth. And that's what the power is about. In a special way. Now, this corresponds to Jesus Himself and His life.
[12:11] This happening to you as a church and being given power to pray, to desire, to support, to be in missions with your hearts.
[12:22] Well, this sort of power is following just the way Jesus lived as a man. Do you remember His first sermon that we know about in Luke chapter 4? Jesus opens up Isaiah and He reads it and it says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the gospel.
[12:48] The reason for a special anointing is for the preaching of a saving gospel. We could go on farther, but I think that's enough, isn't it?
[13:01] Now, let's look at history. Does history say the same thing as Scripture? That the Holy Spirit's power is given to us in a special way to make us a missionary church here in Hazleton and to the ends of the earth?
[13:15] Well, it does. When we look at revivals in history, great revivals, that's times when the Holy Spirit is given in great power. What is the main great lasting effect of the great revivals in history?
[13:31] Is it just local blessing? Lots of people were converted in America or England or East Africa or somewhere. When we look at them, the great and lasting effect of revivals is it always stirs up the church to a missionary endeavor.
[13:48] Do you know how the modern missionary movement started? A hundred years almost, 70, before William Carey ever set his foot in India, there was a revival that fell in 1727 among the people called the Moravians.
[14:04] A revival came to a town called Hernhut, and just the Spirit came upon those people, and they became a missionary church like you've never seen it.
[14:15] They started a prayer meeting, a missionary prayer meeting to pray for the unreached peoples of the earth in the 1730s. That prayer meeting went on every day for a hundred years without stopping.
[14:31] Some Moravian was always praying in a prayer chain for a hundred years every day for missions. And they began sending out missionaries. They were sending out missionaries to several countries before William Carey ever went to Canada.
[14:45] How did he go there? To wake you up. To India. And some of the Moravians sold themselves into slavery so that they could preach the gospel to the galley slaves.
[14:57] Now, how did that happen? Holy Spirit power produces that. And every revival, there's a revival in the 1850s in America and in Europe, and in the decades right following that revival, 20,000 students went to the mission field.
[15:21] That was the effect of the revival. And so one of our good old banner of truth books says this, sketches of church history. The fact is indisputable that revivals of true Christianity issue in missionary effort.
[15:39] You shall receive power and you shall be witnesses to the ends of the earth. So scripture's behind us. Church history is behind us. In some particular way, God desires that his Holy Spirit be given in power for missionary outreach to the ends of the earth.
[16:01] We finished our first point. That's the affirmation. That's the something true. Let's have the explanation. Why is that true? Why is the Holy Spirit's power connected in a peculiar way with missionary outreach?
[16:15] And now we come to John 20. If you'll come back with me to the passage, we'll just read these two verses again, starting with verse 21.
[16:27] Verse 21. Verse 21.
[16:58] Who do you see in that passage? And what happened that day? Well, we see the disciples. But besides the disciples, there are three persons there.
[17:11] As the Father, one, sent me, Jesus, the Son of God, receive the Holy Spirit.
[17:22] We see the Holy Spirit. We see the whole Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, don't we? We learn three things from the passage.
[17:34] And the first is this. That missions is not something that you're doing as a church. And you go and pray and say, God, get in on this, please. And bless this work that we're about.
[17:47] No. No, not at all. You see, missions is an activity of the triune God. God is a missionary God.
[18:01] Bell stoops down in Nebo boughs, these false gods. They're burdens that you carry along with them, these gods, these statues.
[18:14] They go themselves into captivity. And Isaiah says, they cannot save. But he goes on to say this.
[18:26] He says, listen to me, O house of Israel, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been born by me from before your birth, carried from the womb.
[18:39] You carry the false gods, but I have carried you from the womb. He says, even to your old age, I am he. And to gray hairs, I will carry you.
[18:50] I have made and I will bear, I will carry, and I will save. You see, missions is redeeming, saving love in action.
[19:09] And that's who God is. A sun could more easily stop shining, giving light and warmth, then our God could stop saving.
[19:24] He is that. And so missions is redeemed. It's redemption. It's eternal. It's the redeeming love of God now happening.
[19:36] It's divine zeal. That's the first thing we see in this passage, the whole trinity. As the Father has sent me. I mean, and that, that is sending.
[19:49] When you send someone all the way from the divine living place of, I'm thinking in French, I'm sorry, of heaven down to earth.
[20:04] As the Father has sent me, I send you. So the first thing is that missions is an activity of the wonderful triune, beautiful. It's the beauty of God in action.
[20:16] The second thing that we see is that the church, you here in Hazleton, you are being drawn by the triune God into his very life and character and mission as a saving God.
[20:37] As the Father has sent me. As something that happens in the very trinity of God. So, I will send you.
[20:51] It's astounding. You know, you want to sing the Negro spiritual. Sometimes it makes me want to tremble, tremble. Are you bringing this in on what is part of the Father and the Son?
[21:07] In divine saving love, we're not becoming divine, of course. But we're getting as close as we can to it while staying creatures, aren't we? It's amazing.
[21:19] As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And we talk a lot about likeness to Jesus. And the beauty of becoming like Jesus.
[21:31] And what I want to say to you this morning is very simple in one sense. A great part of what it means to become like Jesus. Is this. You see, because Jesus is the sent one.
[21:47] He's a missionary savior from a missionary father who sends a missionary spirit. He's a saving God. You can't get a...
[21:59] You can't go to the... If you're a small child, you can't go to the lake or to the pool with your mother. My mom and dad were both lifeguards. And here I am as a young child and I'm going to the pool.
[22:11] And I don't know how to really swim yet. I can't be there without my mom being a saving mom. And her eye is on me. She can't be there without being that.
[22:24] She is that for her child. And when I fall in the water, she probably saves me 15 times that day. You know, that's just the way she is. But the thing is that God's bringing us in on what he is as a saving and loving God.
[22:41] That's the second thing. The third thing we see in the passage is the way God is bringing this church at Hazleton in on his very life. And the very life and the very beauty of what he is as a saving God.
[22:55] The way he's doing that is by giving you the Holy Spirit as a missionary spirit. I didn't say as a sanctifying spirit. Sometimes we think the Holy Spirit is given to us to sanctify us.
[23:08] And we define it so narrowly and selfishly that being sanctified means I become really good. And not thinking about anybody else in the world even if they're lost as a goose.
[23:21] No, that's not sanctification. Is that being sanctified? I'm good as an isolated unit? No. What it means to be made like Jesus Christ is to become a world-embracing lover of lost men's souls.
[23:40] That is so beautiful. And that's how God is drawing you in to his very life and mission and character.
[23:51] That's how you're becoming Christ-like. Is in great part, not only, but in great part by developing a heart like him for the world.
[24:04] Now, that's the second point and this is the last point. What's the implication of this? It's simply that it's largely in making you a missionary church that the Holy Spirit is conforming you to Jesus Christ's image and will.
[24:24] Now, where is the image of God in our Lord Jesus Christ who came as the image of God to show us what's God like?
[24:37] Do we see... Where do we see it? How do we see it in Jesus Christ when he comes, when he's incarnate? How do we see what God's like? Is it in those first 30 years when he's a carpenter? No.
[24:47] No. The Lord is restraining himself. I think of Isaiah where God says, For a long time I have restrained myself and contained myself.
[25:01] And now I'm going to pant and gasp like a pregnant woman going into labor. I'm going to lay waste the mountains and lead the blind in a way they know not. You see, for 30 years Jesus is incarnate but we don't know anything about it because it's got to wait.
[25:21] And then these three years come and the Lord goes on mission. You see? And it's when Jesus is on mission that now we see the revelation of who God is.
[25:38] You see, I don't want to see Jesus in abstract, static lines of a character who's doing nothing. That's not who God is to this lost world.
[25:49] Give me my Savior in action. Listen to this in Acts chapter 10. Don't lose me now that I'm quoting a Bible verse because this is key to what I want to say to you today. Listen to how the Bible says God has revealed himself to man in Jesus.
[26:03] Peter's preaching to Cornelius' house. You yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea. How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power and how he went about doing good.
[26:24] Give me my Lord on mission. Healing all who were oppressed by the devil for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all that he did.
[26:37] Give me my Lord in action. Show me when he says, Lazarus, come out. Give me my Lord when he's walking to the centurion's house and the lady touches on the hem and he turns around.
[26:51] Who touched me? Go in faith. Give me my Lord when he's going to and fro. Give me him the night when the whole cities come to his doorstep.
[27:02] And to the wee hours of the morning, he's healing everyone. He's healing everyone. He's loving them all. He's extending power.
[27:13] Be the healed to everybody that comes. Give me the Lord like this. Give it to me on mission that I see who he is. I see it. And so fill me then with that spirit.
[27:33] I'm sending you the way I've been sent. And I'm going to breathe who I am on you. Receive the Holy Spirit. It's amazing.
[27:46] And then once it happens, send us. Send us like he was sent. Send us far away or send us near to our people around here. But send us to seek and save with that spirit, that same breath and attitude as him.
[28:02] Going about. Going about. And he says to the disciples, I'm sending you all out. He sends 12 out and then he sends 72 out. I mean, it's only three years.
[28:12] I've tried to plant churches. I'm telling you, if I had been able to send out 84 people in pairs in three years of ministry, preaching in the villages around me, I would have gone, you know, this is absolute.
[28:27] But the Lord, he's a missionary. He's saying, now you go and preach because you're not going to finish preaching through all the villages of Israel until the Son of Man comes.
[28:41] But send us. Send us near. Send us far. Send us to seek and save the lost. And let that just become everything else as secondary.
[28:53] Because for him, that's what it's like. I want the same spirit. I want that breath. There are lots of important things, but nothing is important like these lost sheep. And, you know, he says, this woman, she lost this one coin out of ten.
[29:10] And she forgot everything and she turned the house upside down. That's what I want. That's what I'd like to be. And I'm not often. But that's what he's like.
[29:21] And he has a hundred sheep. And he leaves 99 of them because there's one that's lost. There's one. And he says, I'm going to turn the countryside upside down.
[29:32] And I'm going to get that sheep. That is the nature and the character of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
[29:47] And that's why we're given the Spirit and one of the great reasons that we mustn't lose. And that's why C.T. Studd's biographer and son-in-law said this.
[29:59] From C.T. Studd, great missionary in China, then India, then Africa. He said, from C.T. Studd, I learned that God's ideal of a saint is not a man primarily concerned with his own sanctification.
[30:11] God's saint is 50% soldier. And he meant missionary soldier. That's what the Spirit does. It's taken him about 40 years to get me, my eyes half off of myself and my own sanctification.
[30:27] To make me realize that some people, they haven't even got into the kingdom yet. How long have I been going?
[30:38] Can I go 10 more minutes? I want to tell you some stories now. It's going to be okay because now it's stories. And I want to show you that this is...
[30:55] When we become a missionary church, and for you that means ascending church, far and near, that your heart's in it, even if you can't go yourself, okay?
[31:09] You're really in it. I want to give you three examples from history to show you that when we're like that, when we become a missionary church, that's where we see beauty in a church.
[31:20] It becomes so beautiful, okay? Whether you're missionaries that are going, or your churches are sinning. Okay, first story. I need to just find my handkerchief.
[31:35] It's 1785, and we're in England. And this man's trying to make ends meet by being a part-time school teacher and a part-time cobbler, a shoemaker.
[31:47] And we go into his little workshop, and there's a stool. There's a Bible. There's a couple of other books. And then on the wall, there's a map of the whole world.
[31:59] Now, he's done it with his own hands. It's part leather. It's part brown paper. And there are all these countries, and written in his scrawl is the moral state of all these different countries.
[32:12] He's just written it on there. And the maps, because he's very, very concerned about it. He's a cobbler. He's a shoemaker. But he's worried about the world and all these faraway places.
[32:27] And the map's on the wall because the map was already in his heart. You got that? And here's what someone who knew him said about William Carey.
[32:38] I knew Carey when he made shoes for the maintenance of his family. Yet even then, his heart burned incessantly for the salvation of the heathen. Even then, he had drawn out a map of the world with sheets of paper and pasted together, besmeared with shoemaker's wax, and the moral state of every nation depicted with his pen.
[33:00] And at school, his students, writes his biographer, quote, saw sometimes a strange sight. Do your teachers do strange things, kids?
[33:12] Well, if you had William Carey teaching you literature or history, their master moved to tears over a geography lesson. You know, Jim, every time the teacher teaches us geography, he starts crying.
[33:33] When he gets into the maps, he just can't handle it. Pointing to continents, islands, and peoples, he would cry, and these are pagans, pagans.
[33:44] So, that's my first brushstroke to show you the extraordinary breadth of the love the Holy Spirit creates in a Christian's heart.
[34:01] And isn't it beautiful? Tell me, where have you seen that sort of breadth of love in anybody? You can't see it outside of the Holy Spirit creating a missionary vision in the heart of a church or a Christian.
[34:17] But when you see something like that, you go, whoa. That's like Jesus. Second brushstroke. Not only the breadth of love, but the depth of love.
[34:30] Okay. Now, this time we're going to go to China. And this is Jonathan Goforth. Jonathan and Rosalind Goforth. They were Canadian Presbyterian missionaries in the end of the 1800s, the beginning of the 1900s.
[34:43] Now, listen to this story. I've got about a half a page to read you, but it's kind of exciting. Now, this is what happened during the Boxer Rebellion when the Emperor of China said, kill all the foreigners.
[34:56] And many, many missionaries were killed. My husband turned pale as he pointed to a group of several hundred men fully armed awaiting us. They waited till all the carts had passed through the gate, then hurled down upon us a shower of stones, at the same time rushing forward and maiming and killing some of the animals.
[35:21] Mr. Goforth jumped down from our cart and cried to them, take everything but don't kill. Now, one man struck him a blow on the neck with a great sword wielded with two hands, fortunately the blunt side.
[35:35] His thick helmet was cut almost to pieces, one blow cutting through the leather lining just over his temple. Again, he was felled to the ground with a fearful sword cut, which entered the bone of the skull behind and almost clefted in two.
[35:51] Rising from this blow, he was again struck down by a club. As we neared the village, men came to drive us away, but I begged them to help us. By this time, Mr. Goforth had sunk to the ground, putting the baby in an old woman's arms.
[36:11] I knelt down beside my husband. The children were crying bitterly. Mr. Goforth looked as if he were dying. The women standing around us were weeping now, even their own looking Chinese women.
[36:24] This was too much for the men who came forward saying, we will save you. When we reached the end, a wild mob of over a thousand men filled the inn yard. And as we alighted from the cart, these men literally drove us before them into one room, which in a few moments was packed to suffocation.
[36:43] For probably an hour, the crowd kept crushing us into one corner. Then those outside became impatient at not being able to get in and demanded that we be brought out.
[36:55] They wanted to kill them. We stood facing that seething multitude until relief came in the darkness. One of the results of our gracious and merciful deliverance from the hands of the boxers was an increased desire.
[37:09] Now listen to this. This is much later in the book, okay? That beginning part was just to get to this, okay? So this is, they've endured some incredible sufferings and they've had to leave and different things.
[37:24] But Rosalind says this. One of the results of our gracious and merciful deliverance, because they didn't die, from the hands of the boxers was an increased desire to make our lives tell in the service of God to spend and be spent for him.
[37:39] After the boxer experience, my husband returned to China in 1901 and with my children, I left for China in the summer of 1902.
[37:51] Mr. Goforth, she calls her husband Mr. Goforth, he's so cute, met me at Tianxing and unfolded to me a carefully thought out plan for future mission work.
[38:04] He felt that the time had come when we should give ourselves to the evangelization of the great regions north and northeast of Changti, regions which up to that time had been scarcely touched by the gospel because of lack of workers.
[38:18] What that proposition, listen to this to Rosalind, what that proposition meant to me can scarcely be understood by those unfamiliar with China and Chinese life.
[38:32] Smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other contagious disease are chronic epidemics. And outside the parts ruled by foreigners is almost completely devoid of sanitation.
[38:46] Four of our children had died. to take the three little ones then with me into such conditions and danger seemed literally like stepping with them over a precipice into the dark.
[39:15] But they did. Now, how could they be like that, this couple? Only by divine power of the Holy Spirit of God.
[39:31] That's the only explanation I can get. I read that and I say, I should probably come back home and make shoes. You know?
[39:42] But, and where do you see such beautiful, beautiful, Christ-like love to the point of profound suffering like my Lord's cross except in the annals of missionary endeavor.
[40:03] And that's why I say particularly there we see the image of Jesus Christ drawn on the souls of men and women in local churches at Sending. My last story has to do with the local church that didn't go but that sent.
[40:21] Probably the greatest missionary statesman of the 20th century in one sense was a man named J. Oswald Sanders. He was pastor for 40 years of the People's Church of Toronto.
[40:35] Now, let me just tell you just a little something about Sanders. He had a great burden for the world. As a young man, the doctors told him that his physical constitution was not suited for missionary endeavor.
[40:49] He should never go but he went anyway. So he went to Latvia and Estonia and those sort of places and he fainted away and had to be brought back to North America. After some years of ministry in Canada or the states, he just couldn't stay and he went to Spain.
[41:07] But he had to come back again because of illness. And then in 1928, he founded the People's Church in Toronto and four years later, he just couldn't resist the urge for the unreached peoples.
[41:19] And so he went to Africa and he collapsed with a serious illness and was brought back to Canada. Then in 1938, he just couldn't hold it in anymore. And so he went to the Far Pacific as a missionary to the Solomon Islands, contracted malaria, and was very, very sick in the Solomon Islands for three years and had to be brought back physically to Canada.
[41:42] So now he begins to spend some decades as the pastor of the People's Church in Toronto that he founded. And during his 40-year pastorate there, they saw, they personally sent out 350 missionaries.
[41:57] 350. He said, I well remember the day we had the first five on the, on the, on the, what do you call this? Yes.
[42:09] And then the five became ten and then the ten became twenty and the twenty became fifty and the fifty became a hundred. And he goes on like this. They raised them up out of their church.
[42:19] It was a big church, okay, I think maybe about 2,000 members. And they sent them out. And, I'm, I'm finishing with, with this. And, and here we're giving a brush stroke of extraordinary love in, in giving and praying and sending.
[42:36] That, that beauty of a local church like yours, just, just having that breath of the Lord Jesus and his missionary spirit among them. Now listen to this.
[42:48] Now, during those 40 years, this church had 12 million dollars of revenue. Okay. Now this period ends in the 1960s so the dollar meant a lot more than the Canadian dollar.
[43:02] 12 million dollars was given by these church members. Eight million was spent on missions. Okay. And this, the way they did it was they had one day each year where everybody would do their missions giving.
[43:15] They would either give for that year, they would be saving up, or they would make a written promise. Okay. So now, listen to this. This day, this is one of these events, and a man who's a missionary in Japan, Fred Jarvis, happens to be visiting the church, and he tells about what he saw.
[43:35] An immense crowd thronged every inch of space. Now we got, we got two or three thousand people in this church for this day. Okay. They've been having meetings for days, missionary conference, and now they're coming up to this moment where the church is going to give for a whole year.
[43:52] Every inch of space, enthusiasm was running high. It was the fourth service of the day. Some nine thousand people had attended. Hundreds were standing. As Dr. Smith mounted the platform, the audience awaited in breathless silence the announcement of the grand total.
[44:09] Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to be given by the church that year. A crescendo of joyful praise grabbed the vast assembly as the people united in singing the hallelujah chorus.
[44:24] Then he says, I think this might have been, yeah, he goes on to say, over fifty thousand had attended during the three weeks of the convention.
[44:35] This was the first time in history that a missionary convention had been held for such a long time. There had been no begging for funds. No solicitors had been sent from door to door.
[44:46] It was God's people getting God's vision, I'm going to add this, by God's spirit, powerfully working in them and carrying out God's program. It was giving to evangelize the world.
[44:58] It was a red letter day in my experience, says the missionary. The missionary says, I caught a mission vision from the home church.
[45:11] Because you got thousands of people who were just singing hallelujah because they just lost I don't know how many hundreds of dollars each. Where do you find love like that?
[45:26] It reminds me of Jesus. Rich that he was, he became poor. That he might enrich. I see beauty. It's so beautiful that day. I want to add something.
[45:38] It's a speculation, but after the hallelujah chorus, let's suppose that that whole group then now sings. O'er the gloomy hills of darkness cheered by no celestial ray, every one of them, son of righteousness arising, bring the bright, the glorious day, send the gospel to the earth's remotest bounds.
[46:00] Because you see, it's especially in the missionary endeavor that we see the Holy Spirit of God by power change our hearts and make them like Jesus's.
[46:13] May the Lord bless us. But we're going to have to plead for the Holy Spirit because we just can't do this. We can't imitate it. This is his work. And he's already doing it in you.
[46:24] I know that very well from my contact with you. He's doing this very thing. And to his eyes, it's beautiful. And all we have to do is plead, step it up, Lord, for your glory.
[46:38] Amen. Amen.