Reading: Video Transcript - The Opportunity to Go

We've seen in exploring the concept of missional vision that we have to be aware of the opportunities that God gives to go out and sow the seed. And those opportunities that God gives usually are involved when there’s some kind of national turmoil or even a local city-wide turmoil going on like we learned from Acts 8. When God allowed Satan to persecute the church and spread everybody but the apostles out into Samaria and out into the desert to Ethiopia and on to the Philistine city of Azotus.

There's a strange thing in scripture, and it's going. God is always asking us to go. And it starts with Abram back in Genesis where he comes to Abram and he says, "Abram, I want you to leave." Now Abram's 75 years old. "I want you to leave your family and everything else, and I want you to go to a land where I'm going to show you."

Abram says, "Well, what's this land?" I don't know whether he actually said that or not, but he said, "Where is this?"

God says, "Just trust me. I want you to go."

And in Abraham's going, even in his old age, God sets the type, the figure of what a Christian must be. We must never be settled back. We must always be going, moving, getting in some way or another.

Jesus, of course, is the ultimate picture of going. Read Philippians 2:6 and following, where Paul tells the Philippian Christians and all of us that Jesus laid aside his Glory and came down and put upon himself the clothing of humanity.

Whenever you look at Jesus, as he's pictured by the way in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you're seeing Jesus undercover. That's not Jesus totally as he appears. You're seeing Jesus as he reveals God to us. I don't mean that. But Jesus in his Glory today is not like the Jesus you see in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus in his Glory is the man of white.

Some of you may have had a vision of a man of white because he's appearing to people all around the world that way today. And that man of white stands among the golden candlesticks, which are the church. And he stands as the glorious, perfect Lord of the universe. And he's that because he obeyed God's call to go.

And then you have the story of Philip, a very simple little story, simple person. He wasn't an apostle, he wasn't a disciple. He was just an average, ordinary Christian. He was a deacon in the church I think. But God called him to go into three of the most difficult and troubled areas that you can imagine. God called him to go to Samaria. No good Jew ever went to Samaria, always walked all the way around it except for Jesus. He had to go through Samaria we're told in Luke 4 or 5. Philip went there, then he went out to the desert, talked the Ethiopian eunuch, then went to the Philistine city of Azotus.

Over, and over, and over, we are called to go. Now I want to tell you one of the most unique stories. It's the basis of an old, old book written at the turn of the 20th century by Bishop Pickett. It's called Mass Movements in India. And the whole book revolves around this story. It's a story of Mr. Ditt, who was an untouchable and who was won to Christ by an Anglican mission that had been there for 25 years. This was only the sixth convert that they had won to Christ. And Mr. Ditt was illiterate, he was lame. But anyway, the missionaries felt he knew enough to be baptized. So they baptized him and then he said to him, "Mr. Ditt, you cannot go back to your people now. You've got to live here on this mission compound. First, because we've got to train you and teach you. And second, if you go back, you'll probably get killed.

And Mr. Ditt just looked at them and said, "No thanks. I'm going out to my people." And he left the mission compound.

Six months later, he came back with his wife and daughters, and they couldn't believe how he, an illiterate man, had planted so much seed in their hearts. And they couldn't deny giving them baptism. So they baptized them all.

And they went through the same thing all over again. They said, "Now, Mr. Ditt, you cannot go back."

And he said, "I'm going back to my people."

Then a year later, he brought some of his brothers, who had nearly killed him, to be baptized. Well to make a long story short, during Mr. Ditt’s lifetime, God used him to win 300,000 Chuars to Christ - that was his tribe - while the mission sat on its compound and didn't grow at all. This is the problem with churches today, especially churches in the West - sitting on our compound, trying to invite people into the church. Folks, that doesn't work in evangelism.

There are two causes of crop failure, people. One is to forget to plant the seed. That's what we talked about in sowing. But in this one, we're going to talk about farmers who think they have to plant the seed in the barn. They think they've got to move the field into the barn. How utterly idiotic. That's the same thing as forgetting to plant the seed. In order to plant the seed, you need to get out into the field. You cannot plant seed just by inviting people into your church.

Now, we have a tremendous story about this that happened in Calgary, Alberta Canada. There's a tremendous Indian immigrant community in Calgary. One of the pastors there had made friends with a Hindu family, and that family had three or four children. I don't know exactly how many. He had invited them to come to church. Three times, they came to church, but it always seemed as if they kind of had a shade over their eyes. They couldn't understand what was going on. And he talked to a staff member of Mission India. He said, "What am I doing wrong? How come I can't get through to them?"

The advice was, "Stop inviting them to church. Go to their home. Pray with them. Eat with them. Befriend them that way."

And just so amazing, two years later, he came up to the staff member of Mission India and he said, "Hey, it really works." He said, "I just baptized the whole family last week. But what's more important, we have prayer cells all through the neighborhood of people praying for each other and for their families."

That's what happens. You see, birds of a feather flock together, don't they? And we just love being together. We don't want to be disturbed. That was a problem in the church in Jerusalem. That is why God let persecution come. He had to break that church open because his principle is going.

This was the problem that I faced when I began wrestling with all of this way back in 1967 in that church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We loved to be together. We don't want to go out. And yet, we do want to go out. The only way you can get the seed is to get into the field. But how in the world do you get into the field? Well, in the western countries, especially in the United States, you can get into the field very simply by mail.

You say, "By mail? Who reads mail?"

Let me tell you something. Who reads mail? Anybody who gets a gift card hand addressed will open that. You can talk all you want about electronic means of communication. I get about 80 emails a day. And I want to tell you, it's the most ineffective way to penetrate me. But when I get a hand-addressed letter in the mail, I want to tell you something, I go right in and open it. It's such a curiosity nowadays.

And what we're advising churches to do is to take Freedom from Fear, this beautiful little pamphlet that outlines the five reasons why we're afraid. And we have people put it in an envelope, hand address the envelope, stamp it, put a response card in it, and mail it out. And once they've done that-- and there's a response to send this Guide to Happiness to follow up to that response. And we're having tremendous success with that.

What are the advantages of mailing? Personally-addressed seed, hand addressed. You're going to get it opened. Probably it is the single most effective way of getting people to look at something.

The second thing is, everyone can send it. We started this 40/50 years ago. We had people tear up telephone directories, write an invitation to study the Bible, and send it out. It's still going on today. We have a group of ladies, senior ladies, in a church who mail to a zip code area in Pennsylvania, northern Pennsylvania. They send out 9,000 invitations to study the bible. We never saw a response quite this great. But they have over 210 cards came back of people wanting to study the bible. And that's happening today, now, in the 21st century.

A personally addressed envelope with an offer to study the bible by mail still works. We challenged a church recently to do this, and the leader of the middle school kids came up, and she said, "Can we start tonight?"

I said, "What do you mean, 'Start tonight'?" She said this is a project for middle schoolers to do.

I said, "I never even thought of that."

"Oh, they're great."

But I said, "You've got to organize it a little bit."

So she had the families of the middle schooler pray in unexpected income to cover the cost of the mailing, and each family with a middle schooler personally addressed the letters and mailed them out. And everyone will open and read them. And you know what happens? You get the seed, this seed in every single home. It's a very easy response with that mechanism of sending the card in.

So what we're doing in the United States now is trying to move in a systematic and measurable way to sow the seed in every single home in this country. We're moving state by state, county by county, zip code by zip code, residence by residence. And here's something that you can really see.  You know that you can do this. One of the initial experiments in this, we had a church send out about 10,000, and they had 50 responses to it. So they knew just exactly where they were. They had placed in a systematic and measurable way the seed of eternal life in 10,000 homes. They had 50 germinations.

You say, "Well, that's not much for sending 10,000."

Wait just a minute. As you'll see in the final section here, that's a lot of work. All of a sudden, you've got 50 people studying the bible. You've got to get to those people, you've got to grow those people. And that can be a very difficult thing.

But here in the United States, we're moving in what we call a county by county plan to saturate this country with prayer and with the seed of God's Word, putting it by direct mail in every single home and following up with a Guide to Happiness course.

We'd love to have you join with us and write to Project Philip Ministries, and ask for more information if you're in the West here. Or if you're in another country, looking at this, why don't you adapt something like this for your own country like we're doing in India. In India, we move state by state, district by district, PIN code by PIN code across so that we get every single people group in a geographic area. That's the way God wants us to go.

And one other thing I'd say about this mail program, anybody can do it. It was a significant thing for Abraham to leave his country. God's not calling us to do that. God's calling us to do the simplest possible thing. As families address 100 envelopes. Send 100 of these out. You can get the zip code, names, and addresses for your area by just writing to Project Philip. So anyway, this is what we believe will bring a revival to the United States and to other countries that follow something like this. Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we bow before you today and we pray that this systematic and measurable plan to plant this seed in the field and not in the church may be blessed by you. Bless it here in the United States, oh God. You know how badly we need it, how desperately we need to be called back to you. But you also know the other countries. You know India, Lord. How we praise you that it's actually spread to every single state in India and just about three-fourths of all the counties or districts, we just praise you, Father. We ask that it starts here in the United States, that it spreads out to anyone around the world. Give to them the vision of systematically and measurably moving across their areas with your precious word, planting it with prayer. For we pray it in your name alone. Amen.