Lloyd Troyer shared on evangelism and discipleship in light of eternity.
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Transcription:
That which I have greatly feared has come upon me. I want to tell you I’m a human being like yourself, and I feel a great responsibility this morning. I feel that God wants to speak to us this morning, and I want to yield to Him. I want Him to use me, but I realize I’m human, and I could come in His way.
I remember some time ago a man, and this man blessed my heart so much, and I always wondered where he went. And I’d like to tell you a little story. We had a Christian Day School, and on Monday mornings, we had someone come and share a devotional period with us children – something about God. Often if there was a visitor that came through, they would ask them, “Would you come and speak in the school?” So this man came there. He walked in there and he had his head hanging down, and he stood there for a while and didn’t have anything to say, and finally, he said, “I’m going to have to confess something to you. There’s something happened. I just did something really foolish. I have to get this off my chest before I begin to speak.” Then after he told us what happened – it was very simple, nothing big at all.
And then he began to speak to us. He spoke in a stammering tone. He could hardly speak. But I was only a little boy, and I was so impressed! I was so impressed by that man that I sat there and I listened to every word he said. Because I believed that this man was totally different than a lot of people I had ever seen. To think, he would come there to me, and confess to me that he had shortcomings, he was weak! And I want to tell you today, I’d like to tell you – I am a weak person. I’m not coming here to present to you me. If I was going to do that, I’d go home right now. I wouldn’t be up here. But I want to tell you, there’s a great God in heaven! He’s got a message He wants to tell you, and He sent His Son Jesus into the world to die for us, to make it possible that we could be His children! And I share the wonders of God, what He did for us. It makes me want to preach my heart out!
A brother told me before I came up here, “Lloyd, when you get up there to preach, preach as a dying man to dying people.” It reminded me of a time back some years ago. I was just uneasy, and I didn’t know what was going on, but there was just something not right, and I began to pray. I said, “God, what is it? What is it, God, that You are trying to tell me?” I just cried out before Him. And these same words echoed in my mind. I must have read it somewhere, I don’t know. I think someone else once said it. These words came to me – I had preached a number of years by then, and it seemed like I had become a little bit lukewarm. I began to be like – you know, I’d get up in front of the church, and I’d fill my place, and I did what I was supposed to, I spoke a message. But somehow I felt like I wasn’t feeling the anointing of God. But then it seemed like God was saying to me, “Lloyd, preach as a dying man to dying people.”
On another occasion, as I was again kind of slumped back into an indifferent stage in my preaching life, I just felt tremendous uneasiness in me. I just didn’t feel good. I just felt like something wasn’t quite right. And I said, “God, what is it? What are you trying to say? Why is it that any more I didn’t feel what I once felt – that tremendous burning in my heart to preach and to turn the people to Christ? Why is it that I don’t feel that way anymore? It seemed like God was saying, “You don’t believe in hell.” I said, “God, if I don’t believe in hell, please, I say, please God, will you show me what hell is. Show me, give me a message about hell, and I’ll preach about hell.” I don’t remember if ever before that I really preached on hell. But God gave me a message. God began to speak to my heart. He began to show me these thousands and millions of people are going into hell without Jesus. There is really a place like hell, a terrible awful place like hell!
Before the week I was going to preach, I was called to West Virginia to build a man’s fire place in his cabin. He was not a Mennonite. He was a man who claimed to be a Christian. I believe he was a Christian as far as he understood and knew. He seemed like a very outstanding person. He asked me, “Would you go over to my cabin in West Virginia and build me a fire place there?” So I went over there, and my sons and I were working on that project. While I was working there, he said, “I want you to stay here with me overnight. I want to tell you a story.” He said, “Lloyd, I grew up in these West Virginia mountains, and it was a rough place; it was a terrible place. The people were sinful. They were ungodly. They were cursing swearing people. They drank. They lived it up. It was a horrible place to be. I grew up in that situation. When my uncle died, it was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever experienced in all my life! That uncle of mine when he died, he cursed and swore. He said, ‘I’m going into hell!’ He swore and cursed and raved in his dying. He screamed and shrieked. I was a young man. I went out from there to seek God. I went out and I prayed, ‘God, help me to find you.’ I sought until I found Him.”
I want to quote to you a poem:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And life is not as it seems.
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
I want to tell you something. What it’s speaking about, “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return,” was not spoken of the soul. We say we believe that Jesus is coming again. We believe that we are going to die someday, but sometimes I look at ourselves and I say, “It doesn’t really look like it.” You know, if we really believed this was our last day, would we be indifferent? Would we sit here indifferent? I don’t believe so. I don’t believe when we walk by people that we wouldn’t stop and say, “Hey, do you know Jesus?” and we would talk to them. I believe if you really knew this was your last day, you would. But we say we believe Jesus is coming. So this poetry says,
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Life is not a dream!
When I was a boy and I went to school, there was a little song we sang, a parched song. And this little song went like this:
Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
I want to tell you, dear brothers and sisters and friends, life is not but a dream, but life is real and life is earnest and the grave is not its goal. “Dust thou art, to dust returneth” was not spoken of the soul! We are going to stand before God someday.
I want to tell you something. When I was thinking of discipleship and evangelism, and I thought and I prayed and I said, “God, how would I preach this message? I’d like to preach this message with 1,2,3 and a,b,c motion where you can make notes and follow me up today, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do that very well. That’s what God laid on my heart. I believe God is telling me to warn the people. He said to the prophet, “Cry out aloud, warn the people of their sins.” I think the reason a lot of us don’t have any interest in evangelism is because we don’t see the seriousness of life. We don’t think about that our life is going to end very soon. I don’t believe we are going to be here long. I believe the world is coming to an end, according to all indicators. I believe we are pointing to the very last time, the last of last. You know, the Titanic, when it was steaming across the ocean from England, a big mighty ship! That thing was an eloquent, beautiful ship. The man who built it said, “Not even God could sink it!” Oh, have mercy on us! I believe a lot of us are sailing on the Titanic. We think we’ve got a lot of time yet.
I know before the year 2000 people said, “Ah, the year 2000 is coming. When 2000 comes, there’s something terrible going to happen. The computers will collapse. There’s going to be a financial collapse, and everything’s going to go wrong, and there’s going to be chaos like you never saw.” People were afraid. They bought thousands of generators and they bought all kinds of food and they stored it in their basements, and they tried to get ready for 2000! 2000 came and went. One man told me, “You Mennonites are ignorant people. If you really knew what’s coming, you would get yourself a generator and you’d get yourself all kinds of stuff and put it away.” I said, “Look, I’m not concerned about that. I believe in God, and I’m ready to go. I’m not worried about all this stuff. My God’s in control of all this stuff.” I didn’t have to go down to the gas station and fill my tank up yet before 2000. I didn’t have to get me a generator and put it out there and lock it down and build a concrete thing around it so nobody stole it from me. I didn’t have to do that. I had a God in heaven Who is in control of everything.”
I want to tell you something. We have a great God, and He’s coming someday, and He’s going to hold us accountable for the life that we live. I want to tell you, He is going to hold us accountable. It is time that we stop playing around, playing church. I get frustrated, and I’ve been frustrated for many many years with the splits among the churches, and the church of Jesus Christ, and I say, “What a horrible testimony to the world!” — while people are dying and going into Christless graves! How can we fight together?
I don’t know where to go from here. There’s something on my mind. You know, we make all kinds of excuses. Jesus gave example of those that made excuses. Once a man invited people to supper. And it says they began to make excuses. One said, “I bought some land. I’ve got to go observe, I got to go and see what’s what, what’s going on, I can’t come.” Another one said, “I bought me some oxen. I got to go check them out and see how these things work. I can’t come.” Another one said, “I can’t come. I married me a wife. I can’t come.” I think there are so many excuses why we can’t evangelize, why we can’t do things. Or, we say, “I can’t speak. That’s what Moses said. God said, “I want you to go over there and I want you to deliver my people out of the land of bondage, and Moses said, “Oh, God! I can’t speak.”
I want to tell you something. I felt that many a time. I felt like I couldn’t speak. I want to tell you something about myself. I want to encourage you not to be afraid to talk to people. I was one of the most backward people. I sat in the corners when I was a little boy. At recess, I would run outside, run around to the furnace room, and I’d sit behind the corner there, and I’d watch the ants, because I was so afraid of everybody. I was afraid of everything. I couldn’t speak very well, and I’ll tell you something. I am going to ask a few questions – just a crude example. Why in the English language is the plural for goose geese, but the plural for moose is not meese? Why in the English language is the plural for mouse mice, but the plural for house is not hice? There are so many things like that. We can squirrel the English language, and we can twist it around. We can use phrases that were never used before, but then if enough people use it, it becomes proper. So I’m not sure if I know how to speak. I wasn’t good in English. I was born in the southern region.
I will tell you something that happened many years ago. I have been ordained about 40 years. I’ve been excited about Jesus. Not always excited, but God always brought me back, and He would again give that fire in my bones. But I was tempted. When I was first ordained, I would pass out. I’d get up there and I would tremble. I would tremble so bad I could hardly preach, but God used that. People listened to me; they saw how I would hold onto the pulpit. One time I was holding there, and I guess I passed out. I was still standing right there holding that pulpit. So people say, “I can’t speak. I can’t tell people. I can’t talk to people about Jesus. I’m not able to.” Like Moses said, “I can’t speak.”
So I grew up in the southern part of Virginia, and it was the African-American section, and they spoke a tremendously heavy accent of something different. That’s what I grow up in. And when I go to preach, when I was first ordained, people would say, “I don’t know. I about can’t understand you because you have such a southern accent. I just can hardly understand you.” One place I preached – and I preached my heart out! Afterward this one young married man came up to me and said, “I’ll tell you what. I didn’t understand a thing you said today. I acquired a splitting headache.” I said, “Oh my God, what shall I do? People can’t even understand me.” I prayed God, “Please help me. Help me that I can speak that people can understand me.” People don’t say it as much now that I have a southern accent. I hope you can understand me. But I’ll tell you what, I believe God can make you understand. You know what God told Moses when he made excuses that he can’t speak to people? What did God tell him? “Have not I made your mouth? Didn’t I create you? Didn’t I make your mouth?” I’m convinced He did!
I’ll tell you what. I was a standing miracle that there’s a living God, and that He still lives today. Four years ago, I should have been dead. Three times I was out, where I was out for a day. They had to fight for my life. They tried to put a needle in here, and I was in intensive care for six weeks. They said I was full of cancer. There was cancer down there, cancer up there, and it looked like it was in my lungs. I acquired pneumonia so bad I could hardly breathe, and I was strangling to death. I couldn’t swallow anymore. I couldn’t eat food. I lost 70 lbs. in a short while, and I was a rack of bones! I should have been dead.
Then because of this that I had cancer up in here, I got a muscle disease, something like muscular dystrophy. This muscle disease, they called it Myasthenia Gravis. It’s a terrible thing, they say. They say you will stumble and fall. You will begin to see cross-eyed, and double vision. There I lay in the hospital. Before I went to the hospital, this is how I walked. I walked like this holding my head, because I couldn’t hold my head up. It wanted to fall down, because I didn’t have strength in my neck anymore.
Well, I finally got so bad that I couldn’t eat anymore, and finally I couldn’t drink anymore. I told my wife, “This is it. I’m finished. I can’t drink. I can’t eat. I’m finished.” She took me to the hospital emergency room. They rushed me in there and they tried to put needles in me. At one point, they tried and tried. They tried my main artery up in here, and they tried to get in there, but they couldn’t get in there. I was just like strangling to death. I was in terrible pain and strangling. They were trying and trying. They would say, “Put the needle in this way. Put it down the other way.” And they were just gouging me and gouging me. I was in such terrible pain, I could hardly make it. I was about to lose it in my head. There I was lying. Finally, they just laid it down and went away. I think they said, “There’s no hope for him. We can’t get him back.” But you know what? I’m here today.
I told my wife one day, “Mandy, please. I’m tired. Please let me go.” They told me, “If you live, you probably will never be able to swallow again.” They finally got a tube in here, and got a needle into a main artery down in here, and they began to feed, and they began to do things. My blood veins were trying to collapse on me. Everything was trying to stop. My heart was trying to stop. But you know what? God had a work for me. I believe He intended that I’d be here today. He wanted to speak to you today. He wanted to use me to speak to you. I’m amazed at that, that God would use me. I stand as a miracle before you. I have no more cancer. They said if I lived, I’d have to take a medication for this muscle disease the rest of my life. It was driving me crazy, because the side effects were making me so I couldn’t even feed myself right. I told my wife, please take it off of there. People came like Joel and different ones, and they prayed for me. They laid hands on me and anointed me. And God, through all the prayers of a lot of friends I had all over the place, raised me up out of that bed. I was brought up, and here I am.
One of the last times I went to talk to the doctors, they said, “You have no cancer. There’s no cancer in there that we can find.” And they say, “We don’t understand this thing about the muscle disease, because this is just so unusual. We can’t explain this. You should have been dead. There was no one believed that you wouldn’t be dead.” But God is a real God, He is a living God. He is a God today. He lives today! Hallelujah!
So God calls us. Jesus says, “Ye are the salt of the earth. If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” I often thought about it, you know, Jesus says, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel.” One day I was reading there in Matthew 5 where it says, “Ye are the salt of the earth. If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” And I ask you today, how is it going to be salted? That’s what God is saying. How is the world going to be salted? How are the people going to get a message if you don’t take it to them? If you don’t show the right type of example, how do you think they’ll get it? It’s a serious thing that we band together in unity and we fight forward for the cause of Christ. We go forward. And we go forward with love for each other. We love each other intensely. That’s what the Bible says. “Love each other fervently.” Do you love your brothers and sisters fervently? If you haven’t, then I believe either you have backslidden, or you never slid forward. Lord, have mercy on us.
I want to tell you something. While I speak about this, I want to remind you again that Jesus is coming very soon. I’m going to give you a little bit of statistics – or I don’t know what to call it. They say from Genesis to the time of Noah was approximately 2000 years. From the time of Noah to the time of Christ was approximately 2000 years, and from then till now, another 2000 years. And God has done things in sixes, and then seven. And we believe that it points to the end of time. I believe we are running out of time. The clock is ticking away. It’s going away, my friend, and soon it’s going to be finished and done. What have you done for the cause of Christ? Have you been the salt of the earth? Have you been evangelistic? Have you been a disciple of Jesus?
Now they spoke about discipleship. And I would have liked to have spoken today more about discipleship, but I find all these notes here. I’ve got stacks of notes that I’ve written out. I said, “God, I want You to get a hold, I want You to speak, I want You to get the people on fire for You. I want them to see the necessity of speaking to people about Jesus. Oh, that I could make it real to you that the time is running out! Since I got up here, 15-20 minutes are gone already, gone for all of eternity, never to be reclaimed. I’ve said already, “When I look at the time, and I see that I don’t have much time to speak anymore, I’d like to grab that clock and squeeze it and say, ‘Stop a little bit. I want to speak some more.’ But I can’t do it. Time is going away. I can look back to my childhood days, and I can think how I set there and how I played when my little pet Fidel, the dog, and I thought of things I would do. I never imagined that time would fly away so fast, that here I am almost to the end of my life. It’s gone forever. What have I done for Jesus?
Have I been excited about carrying that message that Jesus said. He said, “Pray: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” “Thy Kingdom Come!” I believe was the cry of Jesus. Jesus gave His life for us, and He suffered a terrible death. It is a witness of two things to me: one is of God’s hatred for sin. Sin is an awful thing in the sight of God. I think all of us should have a hate for sin, absolute hate for sin. We should flee from it. Think what it did to Jesus. When we talk about evangelization and guiding people to Christ, we need to take them back to Genesis and show them the most horrible thing that happened in all history. It was a beautiful thing that took place. God created this beautiful garden, a beautiful paradise. He gave it to Adam and Eve, our first parents. He said, “Here it is, you can have it. It’s yours. It’s free. You can live here. But there’s one thing you can’t do: don’t eat of that tree in the middle of the garden. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”
But Satan came into the picture. I would have liked to have spoken a lot of those things about evangelism, what we need to think about, our vision of what Satan is, of what God is, of what sin is, and about the Judgment of God. I would have liked to have spoken about that, but I won’t have time. But I want to tell you something. We need a proper vision of life. It’s what took place in the creation story that men fell away from God because of the trick of Satan.
We can go to Isaiah and notice there the words of the prophecy speaking about Jesus. It speaks about what He is to us. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach Good Tidings unto the meek. He has sent Me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” Oh, Hallelujah! This is what Jesus came to do, to set at liberty those who are bound. What were they bound to? I want to make it clear to you that they were bound to Satan. Satan played a trick on them. He fooled them. He is a liar; He is a thief. I want to tell you my friends, I think a lot of you are following him, and you don’t even know it. Have mercy! If you take the Bible, and you seek after God, God says, “I will come to you, I will bless you, I will give you wonderful things, if you will humble yourself and repent from your sins, and pray and seek My face. Pray and seek Me.” You were bound. I believe a lot of you are bound, you are led around by Satan. You think you are a Christian.
I think of Samson. It says he had this great strength. He had this assurance that God was with him, but he fooled around, and played around with sin. He messed around, and it finally came down to the time when he was tricked. Delilah enticed him and said, “Tell me what is your secret, what is your strength.” Finally in his desperation as he was tired of her nagging at him, he said, “It’s my hair.” Ah, she knew she had him then. And that night she cut his hair. In the morning, when she called, “Samson, they’re coming for you,” it says, he got up like he always did before, and he wist not that the spirit of God had left him! Oh, have mercy on us — if we play around with sin, and we don’t see the seriousness of sin, we don’t witness to people, we don’t tell people that God hates sin.
The cross! I was telling you about the cross! One witness of the cross is that God hates sin. There was only one thing that had to be done. There had to be sacrifice made. It had to be the Son of God. It had to be Jesus Himself. Jesus said, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done.” I could speak about that, how He went those three times. He agonized in His spirit. He prayed. He was in agony because of sin when in the garden they took of that fruit, that thing that shouldn’t have been done; there was a death that took place that day. We were separated from God. It was one of the darkest things in all history, when sin came into the world and separated man from God. They went and hid from the presence of God. But God today wants to reunite people with Him. We as people should go out to tell the world about Jesus! Tell them about the awful impending Judgment that’s coming. We should tell them. We should be the voice of God. We should be the voice that carries His message.
About two years ago, I was praying. I said, “God, I want a message from You. Would You please speak to me, Father? Would you give me a message to preach Sunday morning? Please God, I want a message from You. I don’t want to just fill in time.” Just like that, I felt a tremendous moving of God. Just one word fell upon me. This was the Word that came to me. A simple word. You’d be surprised what it was. “Stewardship.” Stewardship!
Now I talked with God. I talk with Him all the time. Me and Him is friends. I was talking to Him. I said, “Lord, you know, I like to get excited. I like to jump around. I like to beat the pulpit every now and then. (I don’t want to beat this one, because it’s too small here,) but I like to beat the pulpit, and I like to stump my feet, you know. I like to get people’s attention. I want to wake them up.” But anyway, God says, “Preach on stewardship.” And I said, “Lord, I don’t know how to do this, because people are allowable to fall asleep. How am I going to keep them awake? Can you show me what I should use?” Just like that a verse fell on me. I didn’t even know it was in the Bible. I wasn’t sure if that was Charles Spurgeon or if it was someone else that said that little statement, but I felt assured in my heart it was God speaking to me, wherever it came from. But it came from Peter, 1 Peter 4:9. These are the words that fell from heaven upon me. “Stewards of the manifold grace of God.” Oh, I tell you, it got a hold of me. I got so excited, I could hardly hold myself. I was ready to go to church right then and preach a message. I felt God’s anointing on me. I felt my hair like start to crawl, and my skin was just like crawling, and I wanted to go to church, and preach on stewardship.
I told the people that Sunday – I shouted, and I carried on, and I told the people, “Why do we miss it? We’re stewards! We’re stewards of the manifold grace of God! The big big grace of God, it’s so big, you can’t imagine how big that grace is. And it’s the grace! Oh, the grace of God! Jesus! He died on the cross, and He takes care of my sins.” Oh, Hallelujah! And I said, “We walk around like we don’t have anything to do, you know. But we’re stewards of the manifold grace of God! How can we be so indifferent? We are stewards of that grace! Oh, that grace, to go out and preach and evangelize the world and disciple them.”
I want to tell you something. Hah! That time is just getting away from me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go from here. But I’ll tell you what: we need to be serious about it. Time is running out. People are going to hell. Since I’ve been preaching here, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands have slipped into Christless graves. Without Christ!
That time I preached about hell on Sunday morning, I told them, “Sunday morning you didn’t call me to preach an evangelistic message. You didn’t ask me to give an invitation, but God has been speaking to my heart, and I saw hell. I saw it as it was, exactly what it was. I told them about hell, and the people were sitting there weeping, and I felt the spirit of God speaking to the people. And I said, “If you could stand right here with me and look down here into hell, and you saw and heard the people shrieking from hell, you saw them burning down there, you would say, “Lloyd, scream, stump your feet. Do what you want to. Preach as long as you want to preach. Even though it’s a Sunday morning, give an invitation; preach it, whatever you want to do.” I want to tell you something. It’s true! God told me it’s true. People are going to go to hell, and what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? Oh, God, have mercy on us. Help us that we can be on fire for Jesus.
I remember speaking to a man on the job one day. I want to tell you a little story. I was on the job, and I felt like God wanted me to speak to people whatever He prompted me. We often think, well if God gives me special prompting, then I will talk to people about Jesus. Well, we need to listen to God. And I think often God speaks but we don’t hear it because we don’t want to hear Him. Then because we don’t want to hear Him, He doesn’t speak anymore. Do you hear God speak? Do you have the Spirit of God living inside you? If you don’t have the Spirit of God living inside you, Paul said, “you are none of His.” If you can’t sense the spirit of God inside your life, then you need to find Him. You need to do something!
But anyway, God spoke to me that day. This man was cursing and swearing. He was a violent man. I was working on the job, and he was down there doing some plumbing work and he was beating on this thing, and he hit his thumb, and he cursed and he swore. Every couple words in his sentences, he was using God’s name in vain. He was using “d___” so many times that my skin was almost to crawl. I finally went over there and I didn’t know what to do, but I thought it’s time to do something. I went over to him. He was kneeling down there. I didn’t know if he would jump on me like a tiger or not. But I went over there and I laid my hand on his shoulder, and I bent over and I said, “Frank, if you don’t quit damning, you may be damned eternally.” He got so mad. He began to scream and holler. He used the Lord’s name in vain, and he said, “I’m going down there in that place, and he used the word, and he said, “I’m going to be damned eternally, and I don’t care. I’m going to be digging coals down there.”
Oh, God! I said, “Why did I talk to that man? Wasn’t there a better way to talk to him?” The devil said, “You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have done that.” I walked away, and I felt like, “I guess I just can’t speak no more. I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.” The devil said, “You are really ignorant. You made that man mad.” So I went away.
A few days later, Frank got bit by a little tick. A little tiny tick, and that tick bit him, and he got sick and he got Rocky Mountain Tick fever. He ended up in the hospital writhing in death, almost died. So close he came to death! He didn’t die. But something happened to Frank in that hospital. The next time I saw him, Frank was a different man. He came to me and said, “Pastor, preacher, I want to tell you something. I’m a different man now. Something happened to me.” Yeah, I knew what happened to him. He came to Jesus! He gave his life to the Lord!
You know, I could have said, well, I won’t talk anymore. I shouldn’t have done that. I praise God I said something to him. It gave him another chance. It gave him another thought about eternity. I believe God sent that little tick to bite him. He said, “I told my wife what happened, and she said, “Oh, yes, Honey, I know. You went through something terrible there.” He told me, “She didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was talking about. I couldn’t tell her. I was so overjoyed with what happened to me. I gave my heart to the Lord.” Hallelujah. And Frank changed! The same man that cursed and swore – everybody knew him for how he cursed and swore. Now, no more cursing and swearing. It was gone. Frank was different. He was talking about Jesus. He was as excited about Jesus as He was foul the other way. He was like Paul the apostle. He was going for it. He was just so happy about Jesus.
But I want to tell you something. Satan wants to blind our eyes. That’s his business. That’s his business – to blind our eyes. In Isaiah 61:1 it talks about Jesus. “The opening of the prison to those that are bound” (bound by Satan), “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, and the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” Oh, He wants to set the people free, and will you help Him? Will you be His mouthpiece? Will you be the salt of the earth? Will you be, as He said, “Come follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men? “We’ve heard about that – disciples walking with Jesus and being fishers of men. Are we going to be fishers of men? Or are we going to be fishers of wealth? And all those things that are going to fade away while men are going to burn in everlasting hell? Do we love the world more than Jesus? It breaks my heart. I believe I am tempted with the same thing myself.
The uncertainty of life. You know, I’m getting older. My health is very fragile. I am surprised I am able to stand as I am today. I believe God gives holy anointing upon me. Sometimes I get up and I feel like I can hardly get up here, and God overwhelms me with His power, and He gives me strength, and I’m amazed myself that God gives me the strength. He’s a living God!
Go into all the world! “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel, teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you. And lo, I will be with you until the end of the world.” This is the promise of God. “I will be with you when you go and do what I tell you to.” He says, “Go,” and you want to say no. As the brother said, “It’s not ‘lo’ it’s not ‘go.’” He, lo, will not be with you. I agree with that.
A lot of you probably feel destitute, like there’s something not quite right in your life. I want to call you, and plead with you, make that choice today. Recommit your life to the Lord and say to God, “God, I’ve sinned against you.”
I would like to tell you one more story. – No, I think I’m going to quit right now. It’s time to quit. I think I was looking at the time wrong. I’m sorry.
If I can get this story straight here – I think the devil would like to hinder me right now. I think he would like to stop this thing, but God is greater than he. He does this to get your attention from God, because if God gets the attention then Satan tries to stop me.
And so, I want to tell you, it’s a serious thing to play around when God calls you. When He speaks to you and you don’t hear Him, you reject that, I want to tell you there comes a time when He’ll call no more. He won’t call anymore. I believe God wants to speak to us.
I think God is saying, “No,” so I believe we’ll stop with that. The Lord bless you. Seek the Lord with all your heart. Call upon Him while He is nigh. Someday He won’t be there. Revelation says you’ll hear His voice no more. God help us. God bless you.