show you all things of the Father. Young people, you gotta understand, what this man from the Philippines, this brother back here, Brother Chocho Wong or Peter Judson, what they've been trying to tell you is that God has shown them something. God has manifested Himself. to them and it was so real that they could not get away from it and some of you young people are wondering if God is real and if the callings of God are real and I gotta tell you this morning that he's real and it is real and the word of God is real salvation is real heaven is real And if you will just give your heart to Christ and if you will put your faith and trust in Him and surrender your life to Him, He will manifest Himself in your life to you and become very real to you personally, just like your mother and your father and your preacher and other men of God that you know. I was saved in 1969. I was 13 years old. I'm 59 now. I've been married for 37 years. I have two grandchildren. I've been in the ministry 37 years, full time. And I've been a pastor. I've been a youth pastor. And 20 years ago, I left the pastorate, and I started something called Solid Rock Youth Ministries, Bible-believing churches reaching out to America's troubled youth nationwide. We saw 36,000 teenagers born again, and many of their families across the country. Governor Pataki in the state of New York asked me to be the chaplain for the Office of Children and Family Services statewide in New York, and I turned him down. And I didn't really know why, because it had a good salary and a lot of benefits, and you had a lot of clout, and you had things, open doors to you that, but God wouldn't give me peace about that. And I was sitting in my office in 2008, and I got an email from a pastor in a jungle in the middle of old Burma, now called Myanmar. And he said, I found your website for troubled young people. He said, I have 60 children who are getting a spoonful of rice every other day. We have to decide who eats and who doesn't eat. Will you help us like you help them? And I thought it was a scam. And I had my finger on the delete button, because like you, I'd received a lot of emails from Nigeria and different places, and God wouldn't let me delete that email. And so I answered this man, his name was Tenwin E. For you phonics people, Tenwin E, his name starts with an H. I said, give me your testimony of salvation and your doctrinal statement out of the Bible of what you believe. And I thought, that'll fix it. But in four days, I received something back from him that was so organized and so wonderful that I went to my wife and I said, we've got to help this guy. We began to correspond. And my wife said, how are we going to help him? And I said, we're going to send him $200 a month out of our own pocket to help feed those children and get the gospel to his people there in the middle of that country. And she said, yeah, right. How are we going to do that? She said, even if we can afford it, how are we going to get it to him? And I said, I don't know. I said, I know this, God's going to give it to us and we're going to give it to him. And so we began sending it from New York to Singapore, and somebody in Singapore that we'd never known. sent it to Thailand, and someone in Thailand sent it to Yangon or Old Rangoon, city of seven million Buddhists and tens of thousands of Buddhist temples. And someone in that city sent it up to this village where this preacher came out of the jungle like 12 miles and picked it up and somehow translated that American money back into Burmese chats. And in six months, we never lost a dime. He received every single penny and he began sending me pictures of his children and I fell in love. And then he sent me an email and he said, Brother Bob, what would hinder you from coming and visiting us in our country? And I said, your government. Because the Burmese government has been a brutal military dictatorship killing millions of its own people for the last 60 years. And so we have, like the Judson's, like Peter or Cho Cho Wong, we have hundreds of thousands of Burmese refugees in 185 cities here in North America today. Some have been here for 12, 15 years. And they're in Atlanta, they're in Chattanooga, they're in Louisville, Kentucky, they're in New York, they're in, and I could go on. Fort Wayne, Indiana has 28,000 of them. St. Paul, Minnesota, why our government puts a tropical people in St. Paul, Minnesota is beyond what I can understand. There's 42,000 there. Houston, Texas, over 50,000 of these wonderful people. I said, I'll pray about it. My wife said, you're nuts. My preacher said, you have lost your mind. And, uh, four or four or five other preachers, they said, if you go, we'll go with you. I said, good. God gave me a visa and about, about a month or two before the trip, all those preachers backed out and a little old lady up in the Adirondack mountains of Northern New York. In a meeting, she kept poking me in the chest. She said, Brother Bob, I think that God always meant for you to go by yourself. I said, thanks a lot. Now, I'd preached in 12 other foreign countries, in 46 states around this country, and I'd never been in Asia, not one time. I got on a plane in New York and flew to Detroit, and then from Detroit to Tokyo, and Tokyo to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Yangon, old city of Rangoon. And took me like 36 hours to get there in traveling. And I got off the plane and went through all the security and military intelligence and all of this and customs and they searched the bags. I was carrying contraband. I was carrying scriptures with me and gospel tracts in English, but it was contraband in a country that uses Buddhism to not only control their people but make lots of money. And they searched the guy's luggage in front of me and behind me and never even looked at me. Let me go straight through. And in the first week in the city of Yangon, I preached in dozens of underground churches. I was in the pulpit and some men ran up to the platform and they grabbed me by the arms and they ushered me off the platform and down in the basement and threw me in a corner and put boxes and burlap socks over me and said, shh. I said, okay. And police and military soldiers came in and they searched the building and they said, we think there is foreigner here. But they did not find me. And when they were gone, these men from the church, they came back and they took me out of that corner, back up, put me back on the platform and said, please continue. I said, okay. And That first week, we baptized hundreds of pure Burmese Buddhist Muslim people who had turned from their idols and their spirit worship to a living savior. In the second week, I got into a 1972 Toyota Corolla with natural air conditioning between your legs. You could see the road going by, and we traveled up the PA road, otherwise known as the road to Mandalay. up the Irrawaddy River or the Mississippi of Old Burma. And eight and a half hours through the night, finally got there to the village of Onglan in Thayet Myu, or Township, along the Irrawaddy River, to the ministry of Pastor Tane Nguyen E, the Onglan Baptist Church, a ministry he had started and gone to jail four times, been beaten and stoned for starting, without government permission. 4.30 in the morning we got off out of the vehicle and by 5 o'clock I was already teaching 60 plus children and hundreds of adults who had come from every corner of the village to hear this white boy from America preach something that most of them had never heard before. And by 10 o'clock in the morning, we were starting our third service. And by the middle of the afternoon, we were getting ready to start our fourth service that day. When the police came, military intelligence put me in handcuffs. Arrested me, took me away, and held me a short time. And when they released me, they said, you must go back to Rangoon. I said, I want to go on to Mandalay. They said, no, you must go back to Rangoon. I said, OK, OK. They tried to take us again and we went up over the mountains another way and we finally got back to Rangoon and I went to the American embassy and have no ambassador because relationships and all of the human abuse and so forth that our country was against and most of the rest of the world. The consul there, I told him my story, and he said, you need to get out of here. He said, you need to take the first plane out of Burma and go anywhere. It doesn't matter where, just get out. He said, you don't want to see the inside of their political prison. So I went back to the hotel, I got my luggage, I packed all up, I went to the international airport, and I tried to get a flight. And every, God closed every single door and made it crystal clear to me that I was supposed to stay another 14 days until my planned departure. And in that time, hundreds more people, Buddhist people, came to Christ. And we baptized them in the river with a government informer standing on the bank, yelling, screaming into a cell phone, foreigner, foreigner. But nobody came. And I came back to America with a national pastor from Burma, and we started Golden Land Baptist missions out of my home church. I made my pastor the president and myself director, the deacons of our church, the board of directors. And that was in 2009. And today, just a few years later, we have literally seen tens of thousands of Buddhists and Burmese Muslims who have come to Christ. We put up a 1,000-seat tent and saw 3,000 people come to Christ in just a couple of days. Because the people in Burma, or now called Myanmar, are hungry for the truth because they have been separated, closed off, cut off from the entire world for 60 years. And they want to know what is true. We've gone to new people groups. It took me three days to get to the Mew tribe. Burma is 150 different people groups and hundreds of languages, not dialects, but different languages. If I say, hello, how are you in Burmese, I would say, mingalaba nikangla. If I say the same thing in Karen, another major tribal group, I'd say, osu, kle, tebludamalo. But it is totally different. They don't share the same alphabet. They don't sound alike. They don't look alike. And it took me three days to get to the Mew tribe. Took a plane, landed near the Bangladesh border, western part of Burma, and then rented a big boat that took us nine hours upriver. Slept in mosquito nets overnight. By 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, we're bouncing down the dustiest road I've ever seen in my life in a Willys Jeep. with five other people in the back of that jeep, get to a village and after eight hours of that road, you get out and walk through this village and rent a canoe and go eight hours up a river that's becoming more narrow and more narrow and more narrow until we come to this village and the chief and a greeting party is standing on the bank in all of their colorful regalia and they have been waiting for us to come. But they have never seen a white man and they have never one time heard about Jesus. But the whole village, including the chief who got saved first, the whole village came to Christ. And we built a church, a bamboo church in that village. And three months later, after people kept coming and kept from other villages and were inquiring and coming to Bible studies, and the man that I left there with a load of scriptures, he escaped and he went out in the jungle and he finally got to another village and he got to a little general store with some email and he reported, he said the Rohingya Muslims from Bangladesh have They heard about our village coming to Christ, and he said, they came to our village, they burned down our church, they killed four of our families, and the rest of our people are hiding in the jungle, and they are being hunted like dogs. And I said, I will send you money. And so it took us three and a half weeks to get these people from that jungle back to Rangoon, where we are still taking care of them three years later. And this is the fight that we have because Burma is a country that has been totally given over to idolatry and spirit worship for 3,500 years. There's a lot of spirits in Burma. A lot of evil spirits. And they're real. Make no mistake about it. There is a warfare, there's a battle. Not just there, but here. And we have an enemy. You young people have an enemy. And he's a real enemy. And we have to smuggle the Bibles. We're smuggling Bibles from Thailand across the border, a little bit at a time, and supplying our preachers who are giving sometimes a portion of the Bible to our people. We sent a million John and Romans And our preacher said, we don't, we don't want those things. We want whole Bible, brother Bob. They call me Bajie. They say, Bajie, we want, we want whole Bible. I said, this is not Bible. This is John and Romans. This is evangelistic tool has plan of salvation in the back. They learned how to do that. We've sent a million. They're leading thousands and thousands of people to Christ. Now after just these few years, we have two Bible institutes. We're working with hundreds of different national pastors. We're training men and sending them out to start churches. And God has given us the vision to plant 700 churches in the 14 states, 50 churches in each of the 14 states. And then to send missionaries not only across the country, but out the spokes of the wheel. But we believe that Burma is the hub of the wheel in Southeast Asia because it's physically bordered by five countries and surrounded by 12. We have an opportunity to send preachers from that country all throughout Southeast Asia to reach these people for Christ, many of whom have never one time heard. Folks, my people in Burma, My people in Burma, they suffer every single day of their life with famine and disease and hunger and poverty. They suffer every single day of their life and then go to hell without ever hearing one single time that there's a savior that died on a cross and shed his blood to pay for their sins. And our people here in America, they hear it over and over and over. They see it on billboards. They see it on TV. They hear it on the radio and they reject and they take it for granted. And they think that there's time. But my people are dying at half of our age. There's no time left. We must go there and reach them with the gospel now. So I've given the rest of my life on this planet. because God has put a people in my heart. When I was pastoring Brother David, I thought that I loved my people. I really thought, Brother John, that I loved my people when I was a pastor. I apologized to God and some of my people recently because the Burmese people have taught me what it's like To love a people. I cannot live without the Burmese people. We're starting churches, we're training these men and sending them out. We now have a school of 300 Burmese and Buddhist and Muslim children who have now accepted Christ. 300 young people on the Burmese border but in Thailand where we have total freedom. And many of them are going through that school and going into our Bible Institute. We're working with probably 600 orphans after just a short time. I held a little girl in my arms, 10 years old, naked, with a hole in her chest. You could ball up your fist and put inside her body. You could look in her body like a hollow tree from tuberculosis. And she and others coughed on me and I got TB. And I have it now. You can't catch it, it's latent. And I think God gave it to me so that I would know something about what they have, what they're going through. But I had medicine, my health department, they followed me around, they dogged me for nine, 10 months. My medicine cost me $9 a month to save my life, to keep me from catching that dreaded disease. But my people are dying of TB, they're dying of malaria, they're dying of all kinds of things, HIV and AIDS. They're dying at half of our age without Christ. without hearing about him one time while we sit in our padded pews. We come to church and we shouted out in camp meeting, but we can't cross the street to tell somebody about Jesus. And I'm sorry, I'm not trying to bring a wet blanket, but we need to shout it. Besides here, we need to shout it out there because people need the Lord. And people die, people die from Murrayville, Georgia just like they die from Burma and Thailand and the Philippines and Albania every day. But God did this in my life after all of those years of ministry, Brother David manifested himself to me and changed my life all over again. Manifested himself made himself real to me again and again and again and again You know what God's trying to do you young people over here this camp meeting. He's trying to make himself real to you You preachers you parrots make God real to your children It's the greatest life. Being saved is the greatest life. Serving God is the greatest thing in the whole world. You'll never do anything more exciting. You'll never do anything better. And I'm so glad that not only did God save me, but he called me in the ministry and I get to see a lot of people getting saved. I saw that down here. Believe God. We believe God. Somebody said, what's your New Year's resolution? I said, two, I just want to believe God and obey him. 2015. When I went to Burma, I did not know why I was going. I had no idea. I thought I was gonna, when I brought that missionary, when I brought that Burmese national pastor back from Burma with me, I thought I was gonna take him around the country, get him a little support, and then send him back and then go back to my youth ministry. That's what I thought. And I was real comfortable doing that. My wife, you talk about wives, brother, My wife, her father is Mr. Bolivia, John Gunner, Maranatha Baptist Missions, way on back on the Natchez River. He went to Bolivia for 46 years, started two Bible colleges and probably 48 churches, I think. And she was raised in Bolivia. When we first got married, she would get mad at me, and it was like Ricky and Lucy in reverse. And she'd rattle off in Spanish, and When we met at Tennessee Temple, she said to me, you're going to be a pastor, right? I said, that's the plan. She said, good. She said, we can go out. She did not want to be a missionary. She had her belly full of missions and traveling and all of that. And it was just about a year ago, she said, do you think God wants us to move to Burma? I said, would that be all right? She said, yeah, I think so. Because God is manifesting himself to my wife. And she is catching the love that God put in my heart for the Burmese, he's putting it. And people say, Brother Bob, you weep a lot. I can't help it. God has put his love for those people in me, and my package is a little small for that, so I leak a lot. And the greatest thing that you young people could ever hope for is not to try to become something or get something, but to get filled up with the love of God for other people. and other souls. Let him fill you and use you. And it's the most wonderful life in the whole wide world. Peter, come on up here real quick. Taking too long. I'm gonna sing a song for you in Burmese. Is that okay? We'll teach it to you. Goes like this. Cesur tembare, cesur tembare, cesur tembare mesuimia. Hallelujah, hallelujah, cesur tembare mesuimia. Cesur tembare, cesur tembare, cesur tembare mesuimia. Thank you very much and miss we is is family means many so it's like thank you for being part of our big family.