It’s a privilege to be with you. I’ve been so blessed yesterday and this morning, I’d like to pack up and go home and not mess up a good mood. But we trust we won’t. We trust the Spirit will work in an abundant way. It’s not very often that that happens, but it’s just been really a delight to hear all of you, and I deeply appreciate it.

Personal Background

Before I begin, I’d like to tell you just a little bit more about myself because I think that’s important. I don’t know most of you and you don’t know me. So let me say first of all that I am a Dutch Calvinist. Now, that doesn’t get much reaction from you. Dr. Nicole will know what I mean when I say that because Dutch Calvinism is the only pure brand of Calvinism. Everything deteriorates after that. I was raised in a Dutch Calvinistic home, and it wasn’t really till I was about 25 or 26 that I discovered that there were Calvinists who weren’t Dutch.

I found that there was sort of a brand out there called Baptists, and I couldn’t quite figure that out, how Baptists could be a Calvinist, and then there was watered down American Presbyterians that still called themselves Calvinists. But anyway, I have never had any education until at 51 I enrolled in Fuller. I have never had any education outside of Dutch Calvinistic circles. I have been in our school system from kindergarten through seminary. And if you don’t think God has an incredible sense of humor, all you have to do is look at me because I am probably the most unlikely person to be doing what I’m doing with my particular background.

I graduated and went into the ministry in Laverne, Minnesota. I served there for three years or for two and a half years. I call it three society seasons to serve my conscience for leaving so early, and then I went to a rather large church in Grandville, Michigan, which is close to Mecca. There I really wrestled with the Lord because I really wanted to build that church, and finally after about three years, got the answer back, “You can’t. Nobody can build a church,” and I said, “Well, what do you mean?”

I didn’t really carry on a conversation, but it helps to talk this way a little bit. I said, “What do you mean? Well, he said, “You can only grow them.” I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. How do you grow a church?” He said, “Well, how do you grow anything? Plant seed.” I said, “What do you mean by planting seed?” He said, “Teach the Bible to the non-Christian.” I said, “Lord, you really are getting funny. You want me to take these Dutch Calvinists and have them teach the Bible to Americans? They’re scared silly of these Americans. They won’t talk to them.” He said, “Well, there’s the coward’s way.” I said, “Is there a coward’s method of witnessing?” He said, “Oh, yeah. There’s a dandy coward’s method of witnessing. It really works well. You write four Bible courses and then give them little postcards, and on those postcards you offer this Bible course and you address it back to a post office, and then you tell them to go out and distribute these little postcards offering this course.”

So I did that. One Sunday I got up and I said, “We’re going to teach the Bible by mail. You don’t have to talk to anybody.” You should have seen them sit up and listen. They thought this was really a novel idea. I said, “Just hand these cards out.” I said, “When you go in the department store, put one under the underwear and two years from now, when that piles down, nobody will ever know you left it there and they’ll send it into the church.” We had one fellow get so carried away with this that he put them in every stall in the men’s room at Penneys. He developed what you call a washroom ministry.

But anyway. Within six months, we had 500 people write to the church and ask us to teach them the Bible. We saw more people won to the Lord in those six months than in all 50 years of the history of the church, and of course, when you do get Hollanders doing something, it’s like a steam engine. You don’t ever change them again. And they now have enrolled over 100,000 people in all the states, the United States and Canada, in this course and are just merrily going along their way after all of these years.

International Ministry

Well, the World Home Bible League heard about this and asked if I would promote it internationally. So I joined their staff in 1970 and we set up what we called Project Phillip. We said Phillip didn’t stand along the road and hand out tracks. He stopped the people, and he said to the eunuch, “Hey, you understand what you’re reading?” And the fellow said, “How can I, unless somebody explains it?” So what’d he do? He took him back to Jerusalem, didn’t he? No, he got in the chariot, rode with a fellow for a little while, taught him the Bible, baptized him, and then brought him back to Jerusalem? He didn’t include him in the church, did he? No, he sent him to Ethiopia to start a new church planning project out there. So we called it Project Phillip.

Well, of course, in developing that, I went to India, matter of fact the very first year, and I spent three whole days in India and in the airport on the way out, I prayed the prayer that changed the whole direction in my life. I said, “Lord, let’s get one thing straight. I’ll go anywhere, but I am not coming back here again.” And heaven rolled with laughter once again. “We got a new recruit,” I’m sure was the idea. After 35 trips back to India over 17 years, God has really broken my heart for that nation. We have the program going in many, many nations around the world, but India has continued to occupy my attention, and I’ll be telling you just a little bit more about India at the close. Let me just say very simply that we designed a little 12 lesson course for children in the United States that began with creation and ends with the Second Coming.

We used all the courses that I had written. Nothing worked in India until we in desperation used this little 12 lesson course and it just went right straight through the roof. We couldn’t understand. I wish we could say today we did all the research and we planned everything, but we didn’t. In 1976, a very brilliant Hindu convert who had studied under John Stott explained to me what was happening with this little course. Rupe Sinkar said that the Hindu mind is filled with baffle plates. He said they have all kinds of terms for God, salvation, sin, and everything else. He said, “When you start with John 3:16 with a Hindu, it just hits one of those baffle plates. It can’t penetrate the man’s soul,” but he said, “When you pick up this little course, you start ‘in the beginning,’” and the Hindu says, “What’s that? He doesn’t have a beginning. And 12 lessons later, you’re at the end and he doesn’t have an end.”

So what you’ve done without ever articulating it is present Christianity as the Bible does in linear time and you break the cyclical mind frame of the Hindu and you penetrate right straight through to his soul. We are just utterly amazed at the way in which the harvest is coming in the land of India.

Falling Low

So that’s just a little bit about my background. Now let me introduce the material that I want to speak about this morning. About five years ago when I was in India, I visited a tribal area and I was informed as I went from one field to another that every spring this particular tribe took a little baby and cut it up and put the pieces in each one of these fields as a sacrifice to the gods. I left with a heavy heart just unable to comprehend something like this. It was my first association with child sacrifice. Last summer I had the opportunity to visit another country, and in this particular country I learned that they were also still practicing child sacrifice. Here they had women who were set aside for the specific purpose of breeding children to offer in satanic worship.

As I spoke in this country, one of the young people in the audience came up to me afterwards and said, “Reverend DeVries, I was at a concert of about 5,000 young people recently. As the music started, halfway through the concert stopped and threw six live puppies in the audience and wouldn’t continue until we tore them to shreds and threw the mutilated pieces back up on the stage as an offering to Satan.” In this particular country, I found out that the average teenager listens to one hour of satanic music every single day and 600,000 of them attempt suicide every year. It is the world’s third-largest unreached nation, and brethren and sisters, I haven’t left it. It’s called the United States of America, and what I’ve related to you comes not from Geraldo Rivera or Oprah Winfrey; it comes from the Chicago Police Department and the Lutheran General Hospital of Chicago where the psychiatric unit for adolescents trains nurses to deal with women who have been involved in breeding children for human sacrifice.

I mentioned this incidentally to somebody that I was talking with last week in Grand Rapids and she said, “Oh, yes. The lady that lives across the street from me has bred two children for our local satanic coven.” And I wonder how many children have been sacrificed to the devil in Minneapolis in 1988? I know of a teenager in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who is no longer with us. Last year, she disappeared and her parents put out a tracer on her through private detectives and they came back with the news that she too had been offered as a sacrifice and no amount of money could buy their involvement. What makes human beings fall so low?

An Incredible, Irrational World

That’s one form of sacrifice. There’s another form of sacrifice. John Cooper is about 75 years old and he’s lived in Holland, Michigan all of his life. He has three or four children, I don’t know how many, but when he was 25 years old, his wife was stricken with polio and went into an iron lung. John retired from his job and for the next 45 years did nothing other than raise his family and tend his crippled wife. Several years ago, a newspaper reporter interviewed John and was utterly dumbfounded. “How is it, Mr. Cooper,” he said, “That you could sacrifice your whole life for a woman that can’t give you anything?” And John got his usual radiant smile on his face, “Oh,” he said, “You don’t understand, sir, how rich life can be.”

Human beings. Can you put it all together? Some sacrifice children to the devil and others sacrifice a life to their wife? Well, what explanation is there for this crazy, incredible irrational world in which we live? I suggest that the explanation and the solution is found in Galatians 6:14:

God forbid that I should glory save in anything but the cross by which the world is crucified to me and I am crucified to the world.

But that that’s not an easy answer to understand. As Fee says in his international commentary, to talk about a crucified Messiah is about as senseful as talking about fried ice. Crucified Messiah? The cross of Christ? The barnacles of familiarity have so entrusted our minds that we just don’t really think much of the ugliness of that cross. Can you imagine Gaddafi crucifying his political enemies and videotaping it for all the world to see them rise in anguish for two or three days as the blood seeps out of them? Have you forgotten what the cross is really all about? It’s the most grizzly form of execution ever devised by humanity. And here you have this book that you’re supposed to pedal in modern America that says, “God forbid that I should glory in anything but the cross of Christ, my Lord.” You talk about a hard marketing job. You’ve just come up against the biggest one of them all.

What does Paul mean? Why is the cross the secret to understanding and curing the mad swings of humanity from child sacrifice to sacrificial giving? And I want to suggest three things to you this morning. I want to suggest, first of all, that I glory in the cross of Jesus Christ and I call you to glory in it because it brings death to the demonic kingdom; secondly, because it brings death to my desire for the demonic; and finally, because it brings hope for a new world.

Death to Demonic Dominion

First of all, let’s look for a few moments at the fact that it brings death to the demonic kingdom or to demonic dominion, and I’m going to pick out from this little text the various phrases. I’m going to readjust them for our own thought flow. I want to start with that phrase, “By which the world was crucified to me.”

Why do I glory in the cross? I glory in the cross of Christ because it brings death to demonic dominion, and that’s what Paul is speaking about when he says, “By which the world was crucified to me.” Now, as you look at that phrase, there are really three phrases in it that you need to examine very carefully if you’re going to understand this. You have to understand, first of all, what the world is. Secondly, what does it mean that the world was crucified? You and I have spent this conference talking about the fact that Jesus was crucified. That’s not what this text says. It says “the world was crucified.” Do you understand what he’s talking about? And then he says, “The world was crucified to me.”

The World

So let’s begin by looking at first of all that phrase the world and what is it? How do we define that phrase, the world? Well, very simply, I guess we can take the standard explanation given in the NIV study Bible that the world is all that is opposed to God. We’ll start with that. All that is opposed to God was crucified, but where does that opposition come from? What is its source? And there we find that its source is that little known demonic kingdom. You see, what really was crucified on that cross of Calvary through the death of Jesus Christ was the demonic kingdom.

I want you to start as we look at a few passages with the familiar one from Ephesians 6:11–12, and that’s really our starting point. Paul says:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

The problem, Paul says, is not first of all in God’s image, bear mankind. You want the solution to child sacrifice? You won’t find it in that creature called mankind. Our struggle is not with flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against the powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. There is behind humanity, this shadowy slavery, this demonic control. Look at Ephesians 2:1–2:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience . . .

Now, this is what Paul is talking about. It’s this demonic kingdom. He’s talking about other things, but the heart of the world, the heart of opposition to God is the prince of the ruler of the air and his hierarchy of demonic beings.

The Inner Workings of Demonic Dominion

Now, how does the demonic dominion work? First of all, it works individually. The apostle tells us in second Corinthians 4:4 that the demonic blinds our eyes and messes up our feelings. I don’t have to develop this an awfully lot, but all you have to do is look at the irrationality of humanity to understand that there has to be some kind of explanation for the peculiar things that happen. How can the same race of intelligent creatures get all warmed up with a Mother Teresa and produce a father that abuses children? How can a race of intelligent creatures get all shook up about two impotent whales caught in the ice, while 30 million people more than the whole population of Canada at the same time are homeless because of a flood in Bangladesh?

They can go on and on and on. There is no reason other than that the spirit of this age has darkened our eyes and has kept us from seeing, and has made us utterly and totally irrational. He’s bouncing us at the end of a string like a yo-yo. But Americans have a tendency to always think just individually.

Corporate Blindness

There’s a second aspect to demonic dominion and that’s corporate dominion. I’ve got a number of things here and I frankly developed this point too far and I want to balance my presentation, so I’m not going to go over all of this, but what I’m pointing out here is that the devil not only blinds our individual eyes and our emotions, but he has created what is called the spirit of the age, the spirit of the group in which you live and work.

Harvey Kahn points this out so tremendously in his critique of homogeneous unit principles in the church growth movement. He said often we’re a bit naive when we think that a homogeneous unit or a group of people is some kind of nice innocent little track along which the gospel can come. The Bible tells us that the demons not only demonize individuals but they demonize cultures, and there’s a strong man that rules every people group that’s apart from Christ. If you’ve tried to penetrate a people group and had your nose bent out of shape because there’s absolutely no acceptance, you can make mighty certain that the strong man has never been pushed out by God’s Holy Spirit or somehow bound or cracked. All of these things are illustrations of it.

Many of you know Phil Parshall or have heard of his writings. Fantastic work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I was with Phil a couple of months ago in Manila. He’s been there for five years utterly frustrated because the Muslims of Mindanao not only are not being converted, they won’t even talk to him. I’m firmly convinced that it’s because of demonic dominion over that particular people group.

I need to tell you a very humorous story about our Yanadis. Yanadis are an untouchable group around Nellore, Andhra Pradesh. There are about 200,000 of them. They are devil worshipers and nobody has ever brought the gospel to them at all. They get so excited in their worship of the snake that they vomit blood at the height of their ecstasy. They’re not exactly the most attractive folks. They also know how to catch snakes and put their hands down a hole. They’ll pull up four poisonous vipers, one between each one of their fingers. It’s a real choice group, you know.

One of the Yanadis had a vision or a dream one night. He had this repeatedly. In this dream, he saw somebody being dipped down into water and raised and dipped down into water, so he went to the local witch doctor. He said, “Hey, what’s going on?” The guy said, “I don’t know. Sounds like something Christians do. Why don’t you go over there to that pastor over in Nellore and find out what that is?” Fortunately that pastor was a Baptist. Had he been Presbyterian, he had not been able to explain this dream or vision to him at all. But God has his own way of providing, and so he explained what salvation was in the picture of baptism and this Yanadi said, “That is what my whole tribe has been waiting to hear. Will you come and will you proclaim this good news?” Well, the pastor was the pastor of the Lone Star Baptist Church founded in 1843. This was called “Lone Star” because it was the only Christian light in 1843 in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh. And it’s a huge congregation by Indian standards. It’s well over 1,000 and it’s the most prestigious church around there, and he was going to go talk to the Yanadis? Well, anyway, he goes out there. He had been given the gift of music. The Yanadis are illiterate, so like a pied piper, he goes from one little village to another and he sings songs about the return of Jesus and all these people come out.

Make a long story short, in the first six months, he had a cluster of 60 believers, and so he said, “Well, you should be baptized.” He said, “You come to my church tomorrow, I’ll baptize you.” “Oh, no,” they said, “We aren’t going to your church. You baptize us here.” Well, he says, “This is the dry season. There’s no water.” Again, had he been Presbyterian, that wouldn’t have been a problem. We take a thermos in. We don’t need as much as others. But being Baptist, he needed more water. So they said, “Look, we are not going to your church to be baptized. If God wants us baptized here, he’ll send water.”

Well, you know about India, the dry season. If it’s dry, it doesn’t rain. The pastor went home, gets on his knees, said, “Lord, you have to make it rain tonight if you want those people baptized.” That night, God sent eight inches of rain and when he went back to the Yanadis the next morning, the footings of their new church were all filled. They had dug footings. They were all filled brimful with water and the Jannatis were dancing around. They said, “See? The Lord has provided a baptismal font. You baptize us in the footings of our church.” So he baptized 60 people in the footings of their new church. That’s what happens, folks, when the spirit of that age is broken and is cracked.

The Power of the Demonic

Well, let’s move on. There’s a demonic dominion individually and corporately, but now I want to add a third thing. What is the power of that demonic dominion? And this is a point that I got from Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his excellent book on the cross. He said, “Don’t ever underestimate the power of the demonic. Even God’s perfect image bearers, Adam and Eve, could not stand.” And as we were impressed with our lack of appreciation about the ugliness of our sin, so I would like to also impress you this morning anew with our lack of appreciation about the power of the demonic. There is not an individual in this room that is able to stand against it. Even Michael the Archangel trembles against this power. Even perfect Adam and Eve could not stand against it. Are you beginning to see just a little bit of why Paul says, “God forbid that I should have a glory save in the cross of Christ,” because that cross of Christ now suddenly begins to loom as the power that breaks the demonic. No human, even sinless, can stand against it, that cross alone.

Was Crucified

All right, we go to the second word. The first word was the world. The second phrase is, “was crucified.” And I’m going to move very quickly here, just lay some stuff down. This is just a review. The only power that can conquer the demonic is God. You and I can export all of our ideas, we can export all of our hospitals, we can export all of our good deeds, we can export all of our education, we can export all of our money, but folks, there is nothing that can break the world’s demonic dominion save almighty God himself. No human being has that power.

The second thing is that in order to break that demonic dominion over man, that power has to get into man. Third, that power flowing into man is blocked by sin. Fourth, the cross fulfilled God’s just punishment for sin and took the blockage away. So fifth, God’s power now flows into us and you and I are in a different position than Adam and Eve. We are new creations, something God didn’t make in paradise, and as that power through that substitutionary atonement has flowed into us, now there is finally the hope of cracking demonic dominion over all the world. This is God’s plan.

I have often thought, “Oh, Lord, I just wish that maybe when I get to glory, I could see a little of what Paul saw when he wrote that you made a public spectacle of them on Calvary’s cross.” The greatest trick of eternity for the demonic world. They leered at him, they incited all the Jewish nation against him. They said, “We’ll get rid of him. We’ll nail him to Calvary’s cross.” And as they nailed him to Calvary’s cross and he cried those words, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” and then the glorious “It is finished,” the demonic host realized they lost the battle, and as that full payment for the sins of God’s own people was made, the doorway flung opened and the Spirit of God was going to start to flow over these 2,000 years breaking one demonic stronghold after another.

Well, just a little extra note here that you get that mystical union: “Christ in me, the hope of glory.” That’s what comes through that cross. It’s the perfect life of Jesus, the perfect substitutionary death. These two things combined open the doorway for God and myself to be joined in that mystical spiritual grafting that is the only hope of breaking demonic dominion.

To Me

The third thing and just very, very quickly on this point is the word to me. Demons have no power to hold me from God at all. We have Christ’s statement, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men to me.” I’m going to say something here and I want to caution you about your reaction to what I’m going to say. I want you to read Number 14:20–23. That’s the story of Israel’s skepticism in the wilderness about what God was doing in the promised land. Is this promise of Jesus coming true? By all estimates that I know of, there was one Christian per 1,800 unbelievers in the year 100 AD. What’s the ratio today? Do any of you have any idea? He says, “If I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”

At 100 AD there was one to 1,800. Today, Ralph Winter estimates that it’s one per seven. If you take the total Christian population, it’s one per three. I don’t much care how you cut it, folks. You can make one to 100. He’s making progress and he is drawing all men to himself, and we are an awfully lot further along than pessimistic Americans want to admit. We tend to look at the world through the garbage that’s happening in our church that’s 3,000 miles wide and a half inch deep. That’s not what’s happening in China, that’s not what’s happening in India, that’s not what’s happening in Africa, and that’s not what’s happening in Latin and South America today. Let’s not interpret God’s action by the rather dismal scene that we see around us sometimes. I glory in the cross because it brings death to demonic dominion.

Death to Desire for the Demonic

The second thing, and I want to go over this rather rapidly now, is that it brings death to desire for the demonic. There’s two phrases there, “By which the world is crucified to me.” Demonic hold on me is broken through the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ in the indwelling Holy Spirit by which now I can operate not in even perfect human strength, but in God’s strength for he alone can beat back demonic power.

But there’s a second problem because it’s not just solved with demonic dominion. You see, I like demons and so do you. We desire them, we love them, we are cemented to them through our old nature, and that’s why Paul adds this second phrase: “And by which I am crucified to the world.” A demonic thing holds me, but I hold the demonic. I just cling to it. I consider it very, very precious. We’ve already touched a little bit on that earlier this morning.

Paul speaks about the power of his desire for evil in Romans 7:19. He said, “I can’t figure out what’s going on. There’s still that old hold. There’s still that demonic desire, that magnetism that draws me so irresistibly over. It makes no sense.” I have an old copy of “Christianity Today” I was reading the other day and it was the one on Billy Graham’s celebration. In it there’s a beautiful little story about a wife and husband who had a marvelous marriage and then she had an affair, and it made absolutely no sense and she knew it was wrong. But she could not control herself, and the only explanation for that is that tremendous desire for the demonic that still lies within us. Sin is fun temporarily. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have so much of it around.

Perfect Seed Planted

The desire for the demonic is broken in here. I’m going to go very quickly across three concepts. It is broken, first of all, by the perfect seed that is placed within me. I and you and all born-again believers have not just had a judicial transaction happening over us in some distant courtroom. We have had the seed of God planted within us and that’s a difficult passage, 1 John 3:9 — “Whoever has the seed of God within him doesn’t keep on sinning.” That’s a tough one to explain, but I explain it in this way that that seed of God is the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and I am commanded to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Does the Holy Spirit sin? Is there any sin about him? Is there any attraction to the demonic in the Holy Spirit? My desire for the demonic is broken by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit within my heart. He is the only one powerful enough to crack that desire and to break it for me.

A New Creation

Second, Paul says, “we are new creations in Christ Jesus.” 2 Corinthians 5:17, and this deserves much more attention. We’re not being remodeled, folks. He started over from scratch. He made a new being. He put it in the old one, but that new being within us has no desire for the old demonic. It is within the old being, and Paul talks about it in 2 Corinthians 4:16. He says, “I am inwardly being renewed day-by-day while outwardly I am wasting away.” It’s a process that doesn’t happen instantaneously, as all of us know. We heard about that earlier this morning, that demonic desire, that longing for sin continues to weigh us down, and the more we look at ourselves and the more we dream about our own success, the more messed up we get, and it’s only when we turn to that cross and echo over and over, “God forbid that I should glory in anything save the cross of Christ,” that there is any hope whatsoever.

Ingrafted in Christ

One final thing for you to think about is that I am engrafted, that I abide in Christ in John 15. And so the cross brings the death of demonic dominion and brings the power to break my desire for the demonic.

Correct Perspective on Missions

Finally, and we’ll bring this all around to missions now, the cross brings then the right perspective on missions and here I want to touch on three things on the right message and the right method and the right motive that flows when you glory in the cross. Paul says, “God forbid that I should glory in anything but the cross of Christ.” I’d like to be very personal with you for a little while and tell you of my own spiritual pilgrimage.

I was born 20 pounds overweight, a condition from which I have not yet recovered, and that condition caused me to have the name Fat Stuff as a little boy, given to me by my father. I also am not well-coordinated. I am the type of person who if you want to lose the ballgame, pick me for your side. So I was always last, ensuring the defeat of the side that I was on. But ever since I was a little boy, I realized that I had something other going for me than playing ball or being slim, I could speak. And since I was five or six, I knew that God had given me the ability to almost mesmerize an audience.

So I’d sit in the back of the church and I’d dream. I’d dream of the day when I could preach and I could stand at that door and they wouldn’t call me “Fat Stuff” anymore. They’d say, “Boy, was that a great sermon this morning, Reverend.” I had one thing on my mind, to get through seminary as fast as I could. Maybe you did too for other reasons. But I wanted to get out there and preach. So I hit the ministry running. And of course you know that having to feed that concept of success, you take every speaking engagement that comes down the line. It wasn’t long before my dear and precious wife began to suffer from this insatiable desire for success that came from a crippled childhood. I was a born again Christian and God was using my ministry and people were being won to the Lord, but I was so miserable.

Then the Lord opened the marvelous door. I could join the World Home Bible League and start an international ministry, and oh my, I became director of phase two for Key 73 and traveled across the nation. Then in 1977 it all collapsed and he sent me back to the church again. I can remember getting up at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, walking the streets, weeping, angry at God, saying, “God, I tried so hard and you let my whole kingdom collapse. Where are you?” I think God was just smiling tenderly and kindly saying, “Oh, John, you don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing the greatest thing in the world for you right now.” I don’t think he gets terribly shook up when we get so angry because he sees things from his perspective, not from ours.

Channels of Divine Power

Well, one day, about 10 years ago, I was out on a lecture tour giving a seminar on self-image. What a horrible burden to have to prove through your works that you are a success. And he said, “John, I lived a perfect life for you and I died on Calvary to pay all your sins and now I put my Holy Spirit in you. Will you stop trying to improve on it because you can’t? You’re what I want you to be. Now just get out there and let me flow through you.” It was such an incredible, mind-boggling freedom and relief. Later that summer, I came across a beautiful illustration from Chuck Swindoll. He has such a great gift and I went through a second crying binge.

He told the story of the little boy who didn’t want to play the piano and his mom took him to the concert. The kid escaped and got up on the stage before the concert started and he went over to the piano and he sat down and he started to pick out Chopsticks and it was off-key. Everybody in the crowd started to hoot and hiss and holler, “Get the kid off-stage. We didn’t come here to hear that.” The concert pianist hadn’t come out yet. He saw what was happening and quickly put on his long coat with the tails and he walked out on the stage, put his hands around the little boy, and he started to improvise a tune to Chopsticks and the audience hushed as the beautiful music filled the whole concert hall and he whispered in the little boy’s ear, “Don’t quit. Don’t quit. Just keep on playing because I’m filling this concert hall with what you’re doing with praise.”

Will you get out of the success syndrome? God made you what you should be. He’s done it in Jesus Christ. That’s what the atonement is all about. He’s given that as a gift to you and me and now let that be our message to people that we’re just channels. God will use us, use us any way, and some days I look at what I’m doing and I think, “Oh, God. This is just so silly,” and Lord says, “Yeah, it sure sounded off-key to me today too.” But he says, “Wait till you hear what I did with this day for all eternity.” Go home and may you never in all your life again — God forbid — ever glory in anything, save the cross of Christ my Lord. Because it’s on that cross that my success was insured for all eternity and I am free from the spirit of this age, the sick self-realization that goes on free to proclaim as I ought.

New Methodology for Missions

The second thing that I want to suggest is not only that the cross has a tremendous message of freedom, but if you glory in the cross of Jesus Christ, you are also given a new methodology of missions, and I would like to warn you that you better hang on right now because I’m going to say some things that might hurt. But let me start with a very tender, beautiful story of Mr. Dit. Now, most of you probably haven’t read Bishop Pickett’s book, Mass Movements in India. It’s long out of print, but in this book, he tells the story many times of Mr. Dit and it goes something like this.

There was a mission that came into Andhra Pradesh, I believe, no matter what state it is, back in 1920, and they decided they were going to win people to Christ. They worked for five years. They won two untouchables, both died and in high-caste Hindus, so they took that as a mark of the Lord that they should go after high caste and they began to work with the high-caste. For 19 years they labored and won five high-caste Hindus to the Lord. Then in the 19th year, one of these high-caste Hindus appeared at the mission compound one day with a lame, half-blind, old untouchable called Mr. Dit. And they said, “Mr. Dit has become a Christian.” They said, “Oh, well we better ask him the catechism.”

So they grilled him and lo and behold, this half-blind, lame, illiterate untouchable knew enough about Christianity to be baptized. They didn’t know how that could have happened. And so they baptized him. Now they said, “Mr. Dit, you stay here because you have to learn more.” “Oh,” Mr. Dit said, “I’m going back home.” “Oh, no,” they said, “You have to stay here. You’ll be killed if you go back home.” He said, “Well, then I better be killed, but I’m going back home.”

So down the road, this old lame, untouchable trudges, and he goes back home. Three months later, here he comes back again. This time he has got his wife and two daughters. He said, “Would you baptize my family?” Well, they grilled these people and they couldn’t believe it. They knew enough to be baptized. It just shocked these missionaries. They baptized them and off the dusty road they trudged in spite of the missionary’s protestations that they were going to be killed. Three months later, Mr. Dit showed up again. This time he had his three brothers who had just about killed him a few months earlier. They too want to be baptized. They said, “But Mr. Dit, you have to stay here.” “No,” Mr. Dit said, “I’m not living on any missionary compound. I’m going back home.” So back home he went. In the next 30 years without the missionaries ever going among those untouchables, all 300,000 of Mr. Dit’s tribe was won to the Lord while the mission sat on its sterilized mission compound.

Not on Our Standards

It’s so easy for us to look back in history and criticize India and those missionaries without realizing, brethren, you’re making the identical mistake in missions in the United States. You want to sterilize your converts. You don’t really glory in the cross, do you? Don’t you glory in the mission compound, the church organization? Do you cripple your converts with cash saying, “Oh, they need my money in order to build a new church”? Do you stifle their evangelism with education? As I said, I’m challenging you. I’m challenging you because I know you love my Lord and I love that Lord, and I know you love this nation, but somebody has to start rocking the boat before it’s too late. You and I lead people to Christ like Mr. Dit, and we expect them to come to our church. Are we any different than the centuries old mistake of India saying the only way you can grow is in my church? Why don’t you see every person that comes to you as an opportunity to plant a new church?

“Oh,” you say, “But planting new churches costs money,” and that’s your mistake. The cheapest way of doing evangelism is church planting, brethren. Doug McIntosh is a pastor in Atlanta. He’s an independent evangelical, a fine brother in Christ and he has a church of 1000 members. He planted it himself 19 years ago, but he stopped growing intentionally. He has planted nine other churches in those 19 years, and all those churches are between 300 and 500 members. He’s never put one dime into any of the churches. He makes the converts pay it all. That’s just exactly what we do in India. We’ll train people to do this, but after the training is over, folks, if they can’t finance it themselves, forget about it because there is no country so poor that they cannot afford to pay their pastors and build church buildings on their own national standards. And you hinder the spread of the gospel when you mess that up.

Are we not saying the only people that can plant churches are seminary people? Years ago, Roland Allen wrote a book called The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and he said, “One of the biggest problems we have is that we stifle evangelism with education. The pattern we set up is to win them to Christ, educate, educate, educate, educate. The biblical pattern is evangelize, evangelize, educate, evangelize, educate.” We make our people degree-oriented, not soul-oriented. And we’re following the pattern of Latin and South America in our ministry, and we’ll take a person who’s just learned how to read and write last week, and we’ll make a church planter out of them. We’ll educate them in the process, but we won’t educate them before. It’s all that apprenticeship type of thing.

Do you glory in the cross of Christ? Is that the most important thing to you, that substitutionary atonement, that glorious gift of God to us that’ll make you all that I want you to be. He is saying, “I’ll touch all your puny little efforts and your five loaves and your two fishes, and I’ll feed 20,000 if you’ll only let me do it and get out of the way. Glory not in your structure and not in your money and not in your education, but glory in me and just dream great dreams of what could happen in this nation.” People of God, I challenge you this morning for the sake of Christ’s glory in your church, in this nation. Look at what’s happening in China, India, Africa, Latin America, and South America, and let us not be so boneheaded that we cannot learn from our brethren and stop glorying in our pride and humble ourselves to see if our methodology really does point to the cross. Or is it a subtle form of pride?

Missions Motivation

One final thing, and that’s motivation. Paul says, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ, my Lord.” And here I want to suggest just two things, a negative and then a positive motivation. We have the answer to demonic dominion, and the question in the negative line is, “Are we sharing it?” I’d like to have all of you take these statistics back to your congregations. Just write down these three numbers: 1,100, 2,300, and 1,700. These are numbers that David Barrett has recently given to us, and at least I discovered them for the first time in January at the Singapore Conference on global evangelization by the year 2000. I, by the way, have a little trouble with that, so I don’t want you to think that I’m pushing by the year 2000. He says there are 1,100, 2,300, and 1,700 units. There are 5,100 units of 1 million people that make up the globe. That’s a neat way of looking at it. I can’t understand 5.1 billion, but I can get a handle on 5,100 units of 1 million people.

He says we can characterize those units. Eleven hundred of those units of 1 million people are in totally non-Christian countries that are not being evangelized. The second is that 2,300 units are in non-Christian countries that are being evangelized. The third thing is that 1,700 are in “Christian countries,” like the United States. David Barrett says the United States is evangelized. Now let’s look at this. Put down 0.1 under the 1,100, 0.9 under the 2,300, and under the 1,700, put 99.9. That represents the amount of money, literature and radio that goes from the Christian community to reach these areas for Christ. For every dollar Christians give, 99.9 cents stays at home, folks, in the 1,700. A big wonking nine-tenths of 1 cent goes into the 2,300 and a whole one-tenth of 1 cent on every dollar we give goes to reach the 1,100 people in totally evangelized areas of the world that are not being evangelized.

God says, “I give you the message. I give you the cross. I give you the power to break demonic dominion, the power to break the desire for the demonic, the power to set people free. What are you doing with it?” When I brought this back to the board of the World Home Bible League, I said, “Brethren, you and I are as guilty as anybody when we look at this.” We’ve called for a time of tremendous prayer and repentance before the Lord so that we can readjust our programming and get over this hump.

And finally, on a more positive note, is God doing it without North America? I’m here not to plead with you to give; I’m pleading with you to get on the bandwagon because God is doing it without us. In 1949 in China, there was a church of less than 1 million people. Ninety percent of all the finance came from the United States to keep that thing afloat. It was stagnant, sterile, and non-witnessing. By 1966, it was totally gone. All vestige had been removed, and of course everybody in the West said, “What are they going to do without our money?”

What happened? In 1966, God’s Spirit moved upon those people and some little evangelists started to go out two by two and they developed a little pattern. They’d go out. All they had was the Bible. It was a mission strategy written by an old medical doctor called Luke. You heard about him, and they took it quite literally. They went from door to door in a village and they had nothing to eat, and that sort of gives an urgency to the spread of the gospel because they were looking for a place that would feed them, and they’d find a house and they’d live in that house, and that person would call all the neighbors together and they’d preach the gospel till it got too hot, usually within two weeks, and they’d move on and say, “Sorry, we got to go now.”

“Oh,” they said, “Well, what can we do? We have no seminary training.” They said, “Here’s just a few scraps of the word and a couple scripture hymns. We’re sure you’ll get it along okay, and we’ll see you in another six weeks. We’ll be back.” So they went to the next village and the next village and the next village, and you know what happened? Today, there are well over 250,000 of those churches, many of them numbering five, six, and 7,000 members each. We estimate that 10 percent of red China outside of the cities in these rural areas are born again.

Our director was in China in January. He interviewed a lady who was the head of a denomination of 180 people. She’s 27 years old. She’s the oldest Christian in her denomination. And that denomination comes down to pick up Bibles every month in Canton. They get 1,200. And so Dennis says, “Well, I suppose those 1,200 are really going a long ways,” and she was a little embarrassed, and she said, “Well, sir, it takes us 12 days to come down and pick up these 1,200 Bibles and usually on an average during those 12 days, we baptize 1,800 new converts to Christ.”

Rapid Growth

Go with me to Mombasa, Kenya, Africa to Dr. Ralph Bethea. Ralph came to five Southern Baptist churches in 1985. They were dying. They had 350 members. They hadn’t grown for 30 years, and you know what Ralph said? He said, “The Lord has given me a vision for 100,000 Muslims,” and they said, “Ralph, go back to Tennessee. You don’t even know how to speak English. Everybody knows that you can’t win Muslims for Christ.” So Ralph continued with his vision and he went from church to church. Nobody listened. And finally after three months, God gave him six people to pray with him, and he had them read through the book of Acts once a week for five weeks. God rattled the houses. You can’t believe what’s happening. I visited Ralph three years later last February, and this little group of five churches had grown at that point to 67 churches with 14,000 baptized members, another 78,000 who had signed the commitment card for Christ.

In May, it had grown to 22,000 baptized members, over a hundred churches, and on and on the story goes. Fuller and SIM have investigated this and they’ve said it’s the greatest outbreak of Muslim evangelism in the history of Christianity.

I want to conclude with India. I came to India in 1970, and as you’ve heard, it is probably the most complex mission area of the world. How can you possibly reach India for Christ? We’ve worked faithfully and diligently. We’ve sacrificed for the Lord. In 1985, God led us to put together a program to teach the average lay Christian first, how to plant a church; second, how to do it in a year; and third, at the end of the year, have that church support him and be self-supporting from that point on. God has blessed that just beyond our wildest dreams. This year, we’ll have 400 full-time students in the fifth year of the program, and now he’s given us a strategy whereby we look at a map of India and we see it just totally black and dark, and I see on that map, 850 different areas of 1 million people, and inside of those areas of 1 million people is a jumble of all kinds of people groups.

God has raised up a massive church in India. There’s no problem with workers anymore. I see in the decade of the 1990s, these 10 years, that God’s going to awaken the American church and they’re going to adopt those 850 areas, and 30 to 40 church planters are going to be trained and there are going to be 60 to 100 churches in each one of those areas that are going to reach out. I believe by the year 2000, that beloved nation of India will be set free from 5,000 years of demonic dominion. I’m praying the same for the nation that gave me birth. I want you to join with me.

Question and Answer

I think there are a few minutes for questions if any of you have any. I’m happy to follow up.

You spoke to the issue of over-education. I wonder about it though because in the context I grew up in there sometimes were pastors and preachers who would almost be praised for their lack of education and then they’d come up with a lot of odd ideas that would do some harm. I wonder if you could speak to that issue in China or India.

We have that problem in China and India. When I say what I did, I’m just trying to be catalytic and make you think. I’m trying to rock the boat. If you press me, I’ll come around pretty fast on this point of education. However, we do have education in the wrong place. We should go into an apprenticeship type of style. George Patterson and Honduras worked with this. He tried to train church planters for 14 years and got absolutely nowhere. So he stopped and he reassessed his methodology and he just decided, “I’ll give them a lesson and send them out to do it, and I won’t give them a lesson two until they do it.”

I strongly recommend you use that in preaching. Preach the sermon. If they don’t do it, give the same sermon to them next Sunday again. I mean, we’d have a lot of changes, wouldn’t we? It’s a rather revolutionary pattern. We can’t adopt it in worship, but you can adopt some of it in education, and that’s what I’m after. I’m not knocking education. But just don’t put somebody all the way through the process because if he spends seven years, you’ve so sterilized him that he’s absolutely worthless for the street. Take that new convert, turn him right around, and get him witnessing a minute after he’s accepted Christ. So he messes it all up. That doesn’t hurt. I think the Lord’s more powerful than that messed up witness.

I visited Campus Crusades, Jesus Film, and heard about a training center in India. Do you all work with them and what do you think of them?

Jesus Film, both Campus Crusades and the one that the Hindus have produced are probably the single best village opener that we’ve ever come across. We do work with them and we highly recommend it. However, we are very concerned once again about blitzing and we use it very sparingly. We don’t just zip across and hope for the best. We’ll use it and then follow up for a year to make certain that a church is planted in that particular area.

You mentioned Mother Teresa and I’m in a predominantly Catholic area. Do you think she practiced evangelism correctly?

There are three definitions of evangelism. You may or may not be aware of them. Evangelism to some people is simply Christian presence in a hurting place. Both Mother Teresa and Mark Buntain pretty much practice that kind of evangelism. Mark Buntain is a pastor of the Assemblies of God who has a work much greater than Mother Teresa’s in Calcutta. He feeds 22,000 people a day. He has an incredible hospital. It’s just a monster work, but there’s virtually no church planting done out of either one of them. I have little doubt in my mind that Mother Teresa is a Christian, that she knows the Lord, but it’s presence evangelism.

The second type of evangelism is proclamation evangelism in which we just simply announce it and having announced it, we leave. And the third type of evangelism is what we believe is biblical evangelism. That’s what we call preservation evangelism. Christ called us to harvest. He didn’t call us to hand out invitations. He called us to fill the house and to seek the lost and the elect and make sure that they got in. Now, Mother Teresa and Mark Buntain don’t fit in the third type, and you’ve just got to accept what definition of evangelism you want and then run with it.

So you believe that she knows the Lord?

I can’t understand all of this. Well, I guess this is kind of public in a way. The fellow that runs a program in India was born in Belfast, Ireland. He never recovered. He still has a speech impediment from it, and he was raised in a very strict Baptist home. He told me a couple years ago, “John, I spent the night in the manse of the Archbishop of Bangalore. Just don’t ever tell my relatives from Belfast.” He said, “Secondly, there’s no doubt in my mind that this man is born again.” He said, “I cannot understand it. I don’t know.” He says, “But there are an awful lot of mysteries with God, and I don’t know how this man can say these things without being born again.”

It’s a mystery to us, and we leave reserve judgment with the Lord. We condemn the system. My son served in Iloilo in the Philippines, and on the side of a huge department building, there’s a great three-story picture of Mary with her arms outstretched, “Come unto me, all you who weary and our heavy laden and I will give you rest.” That’s the Catholic Church. I can’t figure it out.

I was just going to say that once I heard Mother Teresa said that her Indian people die as well as her Christian people.

We won’t work with her. I don’t want to commend her to you, and I would be very upset if you gave her any money. I don’t want to be put in that situation. I want to be as gracious as I possibly can, but I am in no way advocating that style. I believe I answered that question.

I picked up two messages that I’ve had trouble reconciling. I need you to reconcile them for me or correct one or the other. I picked up a message that we are not giving enough money to the cause of world evangelization, and on the other hand that we are giving too much money to nationals in other countries. How do you put those together?

Both are right, all right? Let me put them together for you. Money is like fertilizer. It’s very necessary, but if you put too much on one plant, it’ll kill the plant. My contention is that we are giving with our hearts rather than our minds. These people need our money. We have 85 percent of the Christian resources here in North America. They desperately need our money, but folks, when you perpetually fund nationals, you don’t help the spread of the gospel in that country. Don did a survey in Guatemala, maybe you know that discipling a whole nation movement, and they found out which churches were growing the fastest. There were two things that they showed: the churches with the least resources and the churches that weren’t being funded from abroad.

There are three things, folks, that you need to give that you’ll never be in danger of giving. These are what we call international commodities that cannot be floated down to the economic level of the country. One is financial training for independence and stewardship. That new emerging church must be challenged immediately to give, and you must not give them the impression that they’re poor. That’s one of the most damaging things you can do. We carry out Faith Promise weeks in India, and we have these little churches and these poor little Christians. We say, “Hey, look, folks. You got to give. Don’t look overseas for money at all.” We had one church sponsored 10 church planters, and we of course gave the agreement that when you sponsor 10 church planters, after a year, these people will be independent. They’ll be self-supporting.

So the church went over there and they visited these 10 people and this pastor came back and he said, “John, you really sold me a bill of goods. These guys are dying. They’re starving.” He said, “You should have heard them. They don’t have a shirt on their back.” Well, I said, “I’ll check it out.” So I called Bill Scott and I said, “Bill, this is the story. You better go up there and check it out.” He laughed a little bit. He said, “I’ll go up. I’ll check it out.” So he calls me back in two months. He’s laughing. I said, “Well, what happened up there?” Well, he said, “All 10 of those church planters are converts from Hinduism. I don’t know how they picked this up so fast. When the white face comes over here, it’s like the National Cash Register coming. They can’t see anything but dollar signs in their eyes.”

So he asked them, “You all were converts?” They said, “Oh. Yes, sir.” He said, “Did you smoke before you were a Christian?” They said, “Oh, yes, sir.” He said, “Do you smoke now?” They said, “No, sir.” He said, “Did you go to shows?” They said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Do you go now?” They said, “Oh, no. We don’t go to shows now.” He said, “Did you gamble?” They said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Do you gamble now?” They said, “Oh, no. No, we don’t gamble.” He said, “Did you drink?” They said, “Oh, yeah. We were drunk all the time.” He said, “Do you drink now?” They said, “No.” He said, “I’ve just discovered four new lines of income for you. What in the world do you need foreign assistance for?” And he let them have it. I mean, he chewed them out from one end to the other. And the church got a letter from one of them that said, “Praise the Lord. He’s providing all our needs.” Okay, it’s that type of loving, hard-nosed mission strategy that we need. We get so carried away we don’t realize how rich we are.

These little Yanadis had five churches. We had an American group come through one and one of the churches was nothing more than a rug rolled out in the middle of the village on Sunday, and boy, you cuff a kid, he gets on that rug. That’s where you worship the Lord. You don’t run across that rug. Well, they came in there and they said, “Oh, my goodness. These Yanadis need a new church. Let’s give them 5,000 dollars for a church building.” Do you know what happened? They gave him 5,000 dollars and they killed the church. They wound up quarreling and fighting about the money and just about spread the poison through the whole area. This business of building church buildings, guys, is very, very dangerous.

I got kind of sidetracked on that, but what you need is financial independence. You need, secondly, training for church planting, and third, you need to give them supplies. They cannot afford paper and ink because that’s an international commodity that does not float down to their economic level. What I’m saying is you’ve got to give them Scriptures. They cannot afford to buy Scriptures. However, in India, we absolutely refuse to give anything away. They have to pay for everything. We also will not pay any Indian national. So the whole operation in India — a giant operation — is all run off of the sale of Scriptures.

All the salaries. Nothing is given away and the Indian Church buys everything. This keeps us very clean, by the way, with the Indian government because they look at the books of Indian Bible literature and they say, “Hey, there’s no finance flowing in.” We just pay printers and that also delights the Indian government. We do all of our printing in India. So we’re pouring it into commercial things, then that stuff is given and that’s the way it goes. But it’s very, very dangerous in other ways to give to them.