Good morning, I bring you greetings from Frontline Fellowship in Cape Town, South Africa. It's wonderful to be with you again, although I know the venue was different last time. Lovely place to be, and we love your name as well. Heritage Baptist Church. I'm a Reformed Baptist myself. There's not many of us in Africa, but we're making more. Let us hear the word of God as it's found in Matthew 28, 18 to 20, the Great Commission. And Jesus came and spoke to him, saying, all authority has been given to me on heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things that I've commanded you. And lo, I'm with you always, even to the very end of the age. Amen. This is the word of God. Our mission, Frontline Fellowship, has been going for over 42 years now, and our vision is Africa for Christ. It is a tremendous privilege to live in Africa. I've been born and brought up in Africa. Africa is my home. I've always lived in Africa. I have people saying, you know, are you coming home here to America? No, I'm an African missionary who works in Africa. I've never lived in America. And I've never been tempted for a second to move here, even though there have been people saying, I remember when I got married to Laura, and she is an American citizen, although her parents were missionaries in Eastern Europe. And I was told, when you're moving to America, I said, I'm not moving to America. Then why did you marry Laura? Well, not because she's American. More in spite of it, actually, because honestly, I grew up feeling sorry for all of you. I felt sorry for kids brought up in boring countries like Australia, America, Canada, England, because I was brought up in a paradise. Africa was a paradise when I was born and brought up. I was brought up in the old world. I'm like a creature from gone to the wind, a different world. When I grew up in Rhodesia, it was a country just filled with wildlife. I distinctly remember, 12 years old, putting on my bush knife, bush hat, putting on my water bottle, and walking 20 miles out of town. I checked on the, sorry, 20 kilometers out of town. I checked on a map recently to walk to Kami ruins is 20 kilometers, about 14 miles. And as I walked there, I was walking through wilderness, seeing giraffes, wildebeests, buffalo, a whole lot of wild animals. Not in a game reserve, this is just beyond the city limits. And my parents didn't know where I was going, and they didn't care as long as I was home by the time the sun set. And we lived in such a wonderful country, and it was really a paradise. And I had a lion as a pet, and I felt so sorry for these poor kids born in boring countries like America. I just thought how terrible it must be to be an American. I thought Africa is the best. We've got taller animals. We've got the fastest animals. We've got the largest animals in the world. We've got lions and cheetahs and just magnificent. Even where I live now in Cape Town, we've got whales and great white sharks. We've even got orca whales that have migrated from the Pacific to the Cape. They're eating our great white sharks, which is a bit of a shock. Now, as we do dragon boating and paddling and kayaking and so on, and you've got these magnificent sea creatures around us, we can swim with the penguins, for example. So I must say, I love Africa. And Africa, by the way, is en route to becoming the most Christian continent on the world, present trend continuing. Our mission symbol is the sword, the word in Africa. We seek to be Bible-based, Christ-centered, Africa-faced. And this is our vision, putting feet to our faith. Now, this morning I want to speak on the greatness of the Great Commission. We know the Great Commission. The Great Commission is great. It contains a great truth. Jesus is Lord over all areas of life. He has all authority. It contains a great commission. We are to make disciples of all nations. It contains a great command. We are commanded to teach obedience to all things that the Lord has commanded. And it contains a great promise. The Lord himself promises to be with us for all time. Lo, I'm with you always to the very end of the age. And a careful reading of the Great Commission should make it clear we call to do far more than merely share the gospel. Jesus declared, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Lordship of Christ must be proclaimed, and it must be practiced. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. We're not called to make decisions, but disciples. And to make disciples not only of individuals, of course, we must start there, and of families, which is vital. Families are the basic building block of society. But we're not only to disciple families, but congregations, and not only congregations, but communities. The Great Commission commands us to make disciples actually of nations, all nations. That includes Saudi Arabia, that includes North Korea, all nations. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Complete submission to Almighty God is essential. Teaching them to observe all things I've commanded you. Education is an essential part of the Great Commission. And we are not just to teach faith or a selection of a few of our favorite things. We have been instructed by Lord Jesus Christ himself to teach obedience to everything that he has commanded. What is our greatest priority? Well, when I was a guest of Dr. Ian Paisley and Martyrs Memorial Church, downtown Belfast in Northern Ireland, he made it clear what his priority was. We preach Christ crucified. That's what's behind his pulpit. And a big open Bible in front of it. The Great Commission must be our supreme ambition. The last command of Christ must be our first concern. For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation of everyone who believes. We must never allow distractions or danger or disappointments or determined opposition to deter us from obeying Christ's great commission. Our purpose in this is to make disciples, to teach obedience. The lifeblood of the church is its evangelistic zeal. If we're not evangelistic, the church is one generation away from extinction. Every generation must appropriate the faith and evangelize that generation. And let's face it, God does not have grandchildren. I have, by God's grace, three grandchildren, but God doesn't have any grandchildren. We must all be sons and daughters of the king ourselves. We can't expect my parents' faith to be good enough for mine. We have got to evangelize our generation, each generation. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke. exhort with all longsuffering and teaching. We're commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature. Repentance and remission of sin should be preached in his name to all nations. Jesus also declared at the end of John's gospel, as the father sent me, so I send you. So at the end of each gospel, you have a giving of the great commission to a different group of people with different words and different emphasis. And Christ made clear before he ascended, beginning of the book of Acts, we are to be witnesses for him in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. When you consider the greatness of the Great Commission, that Christ is commanding us to follow his example, to be sent even as he was sent, to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all nations, to be as witnesses to the ends of the earth, to make disciples of all nations, teaching obedience to all things he's commanded, we're overwhelmed. The task seems absolutely impossible. Which of us could possibly feel adequate to the incredible responsibility of discipling the nations? But remember the promise power. Every command of Christ comes with a promise. In a sense, you could also say every promise comes with a condition. When I was converted in the 1970s, promise boxes were popular. You'd buy a little plastic box, and there's a whole lot of scripture versus promises. You know, ah, lo, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age. Yeah, that's nice. But they've cut off the conditions. As George Verver of Operation Mobilization said, no go, no lo. The lo I'll be with you always to the end of the age is in the context of go into all the world, make disciples of all nations. We can't keep cutting off the promises from the conditions. Every promise comes with a condition, but every command comes with a promise. He has all authority in heaven, earth. That's the context in which he told us to go into all the world and make the South for all nations. Lo and with you always, even to the very end of the age. When the Lord command us to go into all world and preached the gospel to every preacher, he promised miraculous power. And they went out, we read at the end of Mark's gospel, and they preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, confirming the word through the accompanying signs. And this is something you particularly see in a mission field. Now, I noticed that in America, there's many of these miracle-working characters who organize whole crusades, and they're very carefully stage-managed and select who can come up. And they came through doing signs and wonders and miracles. Well, I think most of those have been proven to be frauds and fakes. However, we do see miracles in the mission field, real, genuine miracles. It does happen, and it seems at the frontiers of the Gospel, there are more of these miraculous occurrences. And Mark's Gospels speak about being bitten by snakes and scorpions and recovering. Well, I believe there's actually a strange cult in America where they actually play with snakes and they put their hands in tanks full of snakes and so on to prove that they're believers. I think that's unnecessary and that's foolish. That's not the context of the verse. But I've been stung by a scorpion, one of the little transparent ones, light ones with the small clippers and the massive thick tails, the ones that kill you. I was in Nuba Mountains. When I say shower, you would be envisaging something wrong. It's a whole lot of sort of reed coverings, and you're bouncing on some rocks while you take a jug and pour some water over you, and then soap up, and then rinse off. So my face is sort of covered with water, and I'm barely seeing what I'm doing. I reach out my hand for my towel, and there was a scorpion stung me on my hand. And immediately, I felt the poison moving up my arm. Now, I could feel it heading towards up my arm and towards my heart. Now, what can you do? We were assuming we had an aircraft, which we didn't. We were three hours flying time from the nearest hospital, Red Cross Hospital, Glockenspiel. There was nothing I could do except call for the elders and ask for prayer, James 5, prayer of faith. And this was done. And I felt the poison going from my shoulder down my arm out through my fingertips. I mean, it was that miraculous and that sudden. Now, these what do we call them, the Benny Sins and the Kenneth Copelesses and the Kenneth Pagans of this world. They have their miracles on show. But notice, Jesus healed people completely, permanently, and immediately. But these present healers, they heal you temporarily, partially, and you'll lose your healing somewhere along the line as well. Because it goes along with confession of faith. You must confess, I'm healed. You're not healed, but you say, I'm healed, and you hope that you'll speak in his existence. So they teach people to lie, and they call it faith. Well, that's not particularly what we're seeing in the mission field at all. When we are experiencing healings, they're genuine, real healings. Notice Jesus also generally told people, don't tell anyone about this, which is in the context of the Messianic secret, not wanting to attract the hatred of the Pharisees too quickly so that he didn't need his ministry curtailed at the beginning. So generally, when Lord healed people, he told him, don't tell anyone about it. How different that is from those today will do it in front of TV cameras and make an entire ministry around spectacles like this. Well, anyway, when you're busy with a great commission, you can expect science to follow. Miracles do happen. When the Lord commanded that repentance and remission of sin should be preached in his name to all nations, he promised power from on high. When the Lord commissioned his followers, as the Father sent me, so send I you, he breathed in them and he said, receive the Holy Spirit. At the ascension, when the Lord commanded his followers to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth, he promised, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. Nothing that God has commanded us to do is impossible. As we read in the book of Acts, the Lord went up, the Holy Spirit came down, and the disciples went out. And that's what should always be happening. We should always be lifting Lord up, experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit coming down, and we should always be going out. A handful of disciples in the Upper Room went out and they changed the world. And it's come to the ends of the earth, like us in Cape Town, yourselves in Arizona. People all over the world have been impacted by what happened in that Upper Room at Pentecost. The greatest experience is to come to Jesus. The greatest task is to disciple the nations for Jesus. The greatest priority is to go for Jesus. Have you come? Are you going? Change lives, changing the lives of others. Forgiven sinners, sharing the way of forgiveness with other sinners. Blessed Christians, seeking to bless others. You've been saved to serve, you've been blessed not to be a blessing. We're not to be buckets, we're meant to be hose pipes, in a sense. We're not just to receive God's blessings, we're to be channels of God's blessings. All too many think that The Holy Spirit is there just to bless me. But if he blesses us, it's in order to be a blessing to others. The first recorded words of Christ in his earthly ministry were repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Follow me and I will make you fishes of men. Now, Lord's call to repentance and to discipleship. Follow me and is called to evangelism and I will make you fishes of men. They interrelated. We are to come to him for salvation and we to go for him to bring the message of salvation to others. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, not just the sins of the church. Jesus is the light of the world, not just the light of the church, the light of the world. We need a world vision. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him. We are lost. Jesus is the way. We are deceived. Jesus is the truth. We are dead in our trespasses. Jesus is the life. No one comes to Father except through Christ. There is no other way. There is no other religion. There is no other hope for mankind. Just think of our dear atheist friends. They came from nothing. They're going nowhere. And life is meaningless. No wonder so many poor souls commit suicide. And what's the point? You came from nothing. You're going nowhere. Life is meaningless. How sad. I mean, what do they do at the atheist camps? No one loves the little children. I mean, what? No one loves me. This I know. Poor Charles Darwin told me so. Go into the highways and the hedges. Compel them to come in that my house may be filled. Freely you have received. Freely, freely give. Jesus said, he who is not with me is against me. He who does not gather with me scatters abroad. If we're not gathering, then we're scattering. You're either a missionary or you are a mission field. You cannot be neutral in missions. Walking behind the other side of the road is not an option for Christians. The parable of the Good Samaritan tells us you can't walk behind the other side of the road. There was a Story told of a man who stood up in a church service saying, you know, the parable of the Good Samaritan is not just for other times. It's for our time, too. Just this last week, I was on my way to a luncheon engagement. And on the way, I saw a man lying in the gutter, bleeding. And people were walking by on both sides. No one was stopping. No one was helping him. And you know, said the man with rising indignation, when I came back from lunch, he was still there. No one had helped him. And I think that's so common. You get people, they see the problem, and they say, why doesn't somebody do something about this? But what about, what can I do about this? We can all get indignant about why no one is doing anything, whereas we're not asking, well, what can I do? And that's the heart of the message of the Good Samaritan. There are people in this world who are lost, dying, without any hope whatsoever, going into a priceless eternity. We need to be serious about the Great Commission. Lift up your eyes, Jesus said. Look at the fields, for they are already ripe for harvest. All around us are lost dying, depressed, miserable people, people in need and crisis. And whether it's at the shop or at the gas station, whether it's at the airport counter, we're meeting people going through all kinds of crises, a word in season. Now, I find it's very easy to bring up the gospel these days, especially with Americans, because they say so often, I'm good. Almost anything. Would you like some tea? Would you like some coffee? No, I'm good. How are you? I'm good. And that gives us the opportunity to say, but Jesus said, no one is good except God alone. Now you've introduced the holiness of God, the privacy of man. Nice start for a gospel conversation. I've been in the middle of a shopping center speaking to a person at a till, but Jesus said, no one is good except God alone. The person stopped and said, you know, that's so right. Sometimes I've walked up these information desks and airport terminals or in shopping centers and said, do you know the way to heaven? The information and after a while, I've had some people say, I don't know which is the way to heaven. I said, you turn right and you go straight. And then, of course, we expand a bit more, but there's many ways we can start a gospel conversation. Jesus command us to look at the fields. We need to investigate. We need to understand the missionary challenge. How well do you know your world? Now, this is a great map. This is provided by Operation World. Our good friend, Patrick Johnson, absolutely magnificent work of Operation World. They've got a great website, operationworld.org. But the book, Operation World, is more than 1,000 pages. And that guided me into our mission in the earliest days, to know the world. Right here, by the way, the deeper the green, the higher the percentage of evangelicals. And then you see also subgroups of what percentage Christians are the population with the green on the bottom left, the little blue triangles. And then you can see the least reached states, the dark red in the bottom sub-map. And then, of course, there's India and China, which is a massive part of the mission field. How well do you know your world? Do you know that there are 12,000 ethnolinguistic people groups in the world? Now, many people get confused when you speak about nations. Because the United States deceives itself that it is a nation, like one nation under God. Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Indivisible. Why? I'm glad the Soviet Union wasn't indivisible. The people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and so on, they were very glad that it wasn't indivisible. They broke away, and people were delighted. My friends in Slovakia were glad that Czechoslovakia wasn't indivisible. Czechoslovakia was a bad idea. It didn't exist before the Versailles Treaty, and it doesn't exist now. Friends in Yugoslavia are thrilled that Yugoslavia wasn't indivisible. My first ministry behind the Iron Curtain, I was meeting people in Croatia, speaking about, we will be independent. We are going to secede from Yugoslavia. Not possible, I said. Well, they were independent for the next three years. And I'm glad South Sudan was not indivisible either. They've broken away too. But a nation is not just a geographic entity or an empire. It's funny, the two greatest empires of the 20th century are in denial that they ever were empires, Russia and America. An empire is many groups of nations. If you think what a nation is biblically, the people of Israel were Israelites. They were Hebrews. Even after 400 years in Egypt, they didn't become Egyptians. In the Bible, a nation is an ethnolinguistic people group of a shared faith. And it's just deception today to have this multicultural lie of the United Nations. That confuses people, too. There's 221 countries or government representatives in New York who call themselves the United Nations. They're nothing of a sort. They're the biggest group of gangsters, drug dealers, human traffickers, mass murderers, unelected dictators on Earth. They're just a bunch of gangsters with flags. They're not united, and they're not nations. But there are 12,000 ethnolinguistic people groups in the world. Missionaries think in terms of ethnolinguistic people groups. It's not enough to say, we've got a missionary in Indonesia. But there are 1,300 language groups in Indonesia. You need a missionary to each one of those subgroups. Do you know there's 148 different language groups in Sudan? There are more than 480 different ethnolinguistic people groups in Nigeria. We need to think in terms of ethnolinguistic people groups. South Africa has 11 national languages. I mean, how's that for confusion? Do you know that there are 21% of the world's population are Muslims? One in five people in the world is a Muslim. 13% of the world's population are Hindus. The darker the red, the smaller the percentage of evangelicals. The brighter the yellow, the higher the percentage of evangelicals. Just a snapshot of the world. Do you know there are 67 countries in the world which restrict religious freedom and persecute Christians? 67 governments in the world. Over 400 million Christians live under governments which persecute believers. That means one in every six Christians in the world today lives under a government that persecutes the Christian faith. And we're not just talking about it's hostile to Christian faith like the United States government, where you're still able to have religious freedom like we're having this morning. We mean governments which actually lock up Christians for being Christians, ban Bibles and so on. Maybe you've seen some people wearing a T-shirt, the Bible is a banned book in 67 countries. I would be illegal, and so on. So that's part of that reality. Now, the purple is high persecution. The red are moderate levels of persecution, or medium. I don't know what's medium or moderate when you're living in a place like Algeria. I don't know what's moderate about that. We know many Christians who've been persecuted there severely. Africa occupies 22% of the world's land surface. 41% of Africans are actually Muslims. That's, as you can see here, the green. The darker the green, the higher the percentage of Muslims. We have seven countries in northern Africa that Arabic is their official language. And of course, Christianity is persecuted in all of those. 14 countries in Africa have less than 1% evangelicals. Do you know, we have got 680 million churchgoers in Africa today. 680 million people call themselves Christians in Africa. But 500 million of them don't have a Bible, not even a New Testament. Church growth in Africa is so great, we haven't been able to keep pace with Bible production. 150 million Bibles have been distributed in Africa and New Testaments in the last 20 years. The average life expectancy of Bible in Africa is considered to be about 20 years max. Some of the places I work, a Bible won't last five years. You live in a pretty You've got walls and roofs and floors and windows, doors. But imagine living in a mud hut with thatched roofs, and you've got the termites all night. You can just feel bits of the thatched roof falling on your face of what the termites, while they're biting it off, it comes out the sides of your mouth. I come to my bed, and I find my bed just covered in dust. And that's dust from the thatch that's been eaten by the termites. And you can imagine bibles don't last very well in a place that's damp and dusty. Then there's fires, and wars, and bombings, and migration, and refugees. So we calculate the best estimation is there's only about 150 million Bibles and New Testaments in Africa for 680 million Christians. Half a billion Christians in Africa don't have a Bible. This is another way of understanding where the persecution is the worst. The worst country in the world for Christians is Saudi Arabia. Second worst is North Korea. And it goes downhill from there. But you can see the darker the red, the higher the level of persecution. The lighter, the less persecution is. This is a snapshot of the 10-footy window. The 10-footy window is missionary shorthand for the most neglected, needy mission fields on Earth. It's from the 10th degree latitude in the North to the 40th degree latitude in the Northern Hemisphere, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean through the Pacific. In that 10-footy window are more than 3 billion non-Christians. I think it's more than 4 billion non-Christians now. Most of the persecution in the world, most of the wars in the world, most of the terrorism in the world comes from that 10-footy window, which, by the way, overlaps the birthplace of Christianity. Christianity was born in the Middle East. Bear in mind, Antioch, which today is in Syria, was the church that first sent out the first missionaries, Paul and Barnabas. And these places are, in many cases, war zones and places of persecution today. This is the mission's final frontier. These are the most needy, neglected mission fields on Earth. Do you know there's something in the region of 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today? But there are less than 3,000 missionaries to the Muslim world. That roughly works out to one missionary for every half a million Muslims. One of the toughest mission fields on Earth. We don't have enough of them, and I am a missionary in a Muslim world. And I'm continually horrified by the fact that there are people, even from my country, and Christians in the Middle East coming to America. And you think, America's got a million full-time Christian workers. You don't need more Christian workers. You need to send more out to the rest of the world. Same with Bibles, by the way. Bible production North America is huge. The amount of Bibles in Africa and Middle East is very, very, very low. When you think that many pastors don't even have a Bible, I know pastors who I gave them the first Bible. They didn't have a Bible, didn't even have a New Testament in some cases. Forget about library. Some of them don't even have a church building like this poor soul Episcopal Church of Sudan pastor and Church had been destroyed by helicopter gunship that week. And here's Pastor Vasco looking in the west wall of the Loi Cathedral, bombed. Well, it's been bombed 10 times. It's been destroyed three times. It's been rebuilt each time. Loi Cathedral, birthplace of Christianity in southern Sudan. And here we are on the outside at war. Just shortly after Christmas, they were bombed and absolute destruction. Gravesites desecrated because they're Christian. If this bomb had exploded, it would have taken the church and the compound where we were staying off the map. But by God's grace, it didn't explode. And I wouldn't recommend playing with unexploded bombs. But the SPLA resistance pulled this out, they dug it out, and asked why they risked themselves to do that. They said, we need the explosives to give back to the Muslims. I suppose it is more blessed to give than to receive, but anyway. When it comes to bombings, and I've been bombed a number of times while preaching gospel. I've been in church services preaching on a mighty fortress of God and Psalm 46 expounding it, and the bombs have come in, rockets, artillery, and sometimes aerial bombardments. It does disrupt church services when your village is bombed while you're having a church service, and that happens. It's hard to preach to the children in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan because they're often hiding in the caves to escape from the bombings. And so it's hard to do the work in the schools, because schools are abandoned and bombed. Before America liberated Iraq, there were 1.6 million Christians in Iraq. And these are Christians who had survived Muslim persecution for 1,400 years. But they didn't survive liberation by the U.S. government because the U.S. came in and banned Bibles, literally churches in America that ship Bibles to the soldiers who are fighting in Iraq. These Bibles were intercepted, burned. U.S. State Department ordered Bibles sent by America to U.S. troops were burned in Iraq. They could have Bibles in English, that's fine, but not Bibles in Arabic. And so literally, the U.S. government took a government that was protecting Christians. Do you know Saddam Hussein? donated a beautiful organ to the Baptist Church in downtown Baghdad. You can actually go and see it. Gift of His Excellency President Saddam Hussein. The Baptist Church provided most of his bodyguards and his cooks because Saddam Hussein was clever enough to know that Christians don't assassinate. So he surrounded himself with Christians who wanted to keep him alive because they knew the alternative was a bunch of radical Islamicist lunatics were going to murder him. So The moment America put radical Islamists into power in Iraq to replace the secular governments of Saddam Hussein, the Christians started to get genocided. Today, there's not even 100,000 Christians left in Assyria. And by the way, you've seen some of them because in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, he recruited Assyrian Christians from Iraq. because they could speak Aramaic. And so there was, in the Passion of Christ, there were quite a lot of Iraqi Christians actually playing in those roles, because they could speak the ancient languages. And it's not just Iraq, it's also Syria. Syrian Christians are being genocided by the ISIS, which Obama's administration started. And Biden, when vice president, had to admit, yes, we did start ISIS. In fact, Ambassador Stevens, who got himself wiped out in Benghazi, was the bag man who took the first $500 million to ISIS to get ISIS going. And the man who founded ISIS was in prison in Guantanamo Bay under George Bush. But the moment Obama came to power in the first week, he released this character from Guantanamo Bay, who then started ISIS. With money provided by Qatar, but Ambassador Stevens carried the money to them. and got them going. And so Syria, the Christians have been getting bombed and murdered, and Christians beheaded by a CIA-started group of mass-murdering thugs, ISIS. And then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who we call Billary, she backed what they call the Muslim Brotherhood. Hillary Clinton famously said, the Muslim Brotherhood is a force for peace and moderation in the Middle East. They're the people who had murdered President Sadat for signing a peace treaty with Israel. And next thing we knew, with the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt after overthrowing the most stable American ally in the region, the result was in one weekend, 76 churches down. Car bombs in Alexandria and Cairo. Christians kidnapped, murdered. Horrific things. Little Christian children being kidnapped by the Muslim Brotherhood. The previous president, Mubarak, had been ousted from the State Department. He protected Christians. He put Egyptian soldiers outside every church in Egypt to protect churches. The Muslim Brotherhood removed the protection and started to persecute and burn them with American blessing. Can you imagine churches that stood 1,400 years being destroyed because of the Muslim Brotherhood, all part of the Arab Spring? The Arab Spring under the Obama administration, his worst legacy of all, left many churches in absolute ruins. I mean, imagine surviving 1,400 years of Islamic persecution, but they couldn't survive the Obama administration, the Arab Spring, and Hillary Clinton's State Department policies. And I know you probably don't want any foreign guests to speak politics on the pulpit, but let me just make an observation. Democrats in the White House lead to millions of Christians dying in Africa and the Middle East. Every one of them. Bill Clinton, his administration led to a massive increase in persecution and Obama's administration led to a basic genocide of vast amounts of ancient Christian communities throughout the Middle East. In 2010, as part of the Cape Town 2010, the largest missions conference in history, shortest distance ever to travel to a missions conference. It was just 10 minutes down the road. But I've been to missions conference around the world. Cape Town 2010 was looking at the situation in the Middle East, amongst other places. The Middle East had in 2010, there were 15 million Christians in the Middle East, not much, most of them in Syria, Iraq and Egypt. But now there's not even 12 million Christians left in the Middle East. We've lost millions of Christians in the Middle East, either fled or killed as a result of the Arab Spring, which the Obama and Biden White House engineered, supported, funded, paid for and unleashed, especially with ISIS and so on. These are just some of our Christian brothers being buried in Egypt as a result of the Arab Spring murders. These are some, just a few, of the Egyptian Christians murdered by the Muslim Brotherhood, thanks to the Arab Spring. And in Iraq, more names of Christians murdered there under liberation. In fact, so many say, you know, we didn't think Saddam Hussein was good at the time, but now we look back, that was the golden era of religious freedom. And what came with American liberation, or what they call it, Operation Iraqi Freedom, some kind of George Orwell 1984 type of name, these four people, you have to feel for the Christians in the Middle East. They've suffered the worst. And you know what happens? Every time America bombs somebody or does something overseas, Christians get killed in the Middle East. They're not Americans. They had nothing to do with it. But it's perceived America is a Christian country. If America does anything they don't like, they take it out on the poor, local Assyrian or Chaldean or Coptic Christians. And I mean, imagine these people worshipped in this church for generations. And I was speaking on the radio in California, KKLA, about this, and I had somebody phone up saying, who cares? No, sorry, forgive me, let me quit. Who the hell cares about the Coptic Christians? They're not real Christians. I said, excuse me, when were you last in Egypt? Do you know what these people suffer for Christ? And how easy it would be to get the privileges, just convert to Islam. They have suffered for Christ. They're willing to die for Christ. I said, I'll question your salvation before I question theirs. And click on the phone button. Arrogant people, damning to hell, brothers in Christ, who are dying for Christ and suffering for Christ in the Middle East. They're not real Christians, they're not our brand. Shocking. Well, I've ministered in Coptic Church, like this is St. Mark's, and these people love Christ. These people are willing to die for Christ. I can't think that there's any greater love than that. Jesus said, there's no greater love than to be willing to give your life for another. So for some comfy Christian living in California who believes that the rapture's going to rapture him out of persecution, tribulation, well, there was no rapture for the poor Chinese Christians. There was no rapture out of tribulation for the poor Russian Christians. But lukewarm, laudacious, backstabbing Californian Christians, no, they get wrapped up in bubble wrap. They get sent to Margaret's Heaven. Do not bruise, bump, or inconvenience on the way. My father-in-law, Bill Bethlen, said, it's not that Christians today are not willing to suffer for Christ. They're not willing to be inconvenienced. I got this postcard from my friends in Egypt. If you don't read Egyptian, they may destroy our churches, but they cannot destroy our faith. Now, these are real Christians. And we need to pray for the Christians suffering persecution in Africa. In the world, one in six Christians are suffering persecution. Sorry, in the world, it's one in six. In Africa, one in three Christians are suffering persecution. We need to understand Islam, and we need to evangelize Muslims. So I wrote the book, Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam, Historical Roots and Contemporary Threats. And I got a death threat fatwa as a result of it. So the book's thesis is that Islam is intolerant and violent. And to prove that I'm wrong, they gave me a death threat for producing the book. So I thought they basically proved my point. So I produced a second edition, which was double the size, and a third edition, which was triple the size, thinking if they like it that much, I must be on the right track. And I've taken in filmmakers like Jeremiah Films to help produce films on the persecution of Christians in Sudan, for example. And this is one of our prayer maps for Pray for the Muslim World, which you can download off our website if you want to have a prayer map to guide you for the Muslim Middle East. Our Lord Jesus said, the harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. That is an understatement. There's no exaggeration there. The harvest is colossal. The workers are minuscule. It's staggering. Therefore, pray the Lord the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest field. The Lord command us to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to all creation. This is a command not just to go into the whole geographical world. You know, we have a missionary in India, but into every level of society. We must go into the world of business. We need Christians in business, honestly. To find an honest businessman is almost like a contradiction in terms. Let's go into the world of education. Education now is basically the ministry of indoctrination. Very little education going on. When I was in school in Rhodesia, I had an education. They taught us to think critically. My history teacher, by the way, was a member of Parliament. I said, sir, how can you be a member of Parliament and a history teacher? He said, we don't get paid for being members of Parliament. We've got to donate our time. We need a real job, too. Now, that was the way it was in the 1970s. Our members of Parliament donated their time. Our city councillors, mayors, they didn't get paid for that. I don't know if America had that experience. I don't know how far back you've got to go. Right now, going to politics in Africa is a get-rich-quick scheme. When I was growing up, they would ask questions like, what do you want to be when you're big? And people would say, farmer, farmer, farmer, policeman, soldier, game ranger. That was me, game ranger. But you might have one weird kid saying, I want to be a medical doctor or something. But nobody was saying, I want to be a politician. Nobody was saying, I want to be a sportsman or an entertainer. But that's where the money is now and just what's happened to our society. But we need Christians in education. There was a time that every single school and college in all of Africa was run by missions and churches. And, you know, it's not just that the government stole some of those schools. In many cases, the denominations abominations gave the schools to the government. You know, education is expensive, it's complicated. Why don't you take over our schools? Mission schools and colleges that had been produced by dedicated churches were given to governments. In some cases, the government just stole them. But in many cases, the whole denomination just said, please take our schools. You know, instead of bringing people up in the faith, please bring them up in atheism and evolutionism. Teach them we all came from goo to the zoo to you and that sort of thing. The judiciary, we've got corrupt, corrupt communist judges. But I think you've got a few of those too. And government, I mean, the governments now are filled with thieves and crooks. That's putting it nicely. Governments is not the solution, they're the problem. First time I came to America in 1988, I heard Ronald Reagan, and he said the most terrifying words in the English language is, I'm from the government, I'm here to help you. And we all laughed because we knew exactly what they're talking about. But there's a generation who doesn't understand that, who actually thinks, I'm from the government, I'm here to help you, something to take seriously. Entertainment. There were people who produced God-honoring films. I mean, to see that Hollywood used to produce films like The Ten Commandments, and Ben-Hur, and The Robe, and Quo Vadis, and extraordinary what happened. Well, praise God, you've got people now like the Kendrick Brothers bringing out excellent films, Fireproof, Facing the Giants, Flywheel, Overcomer, War Room, and lately, Life Mark, which is superb on adoption. We, in our country, have got Frans Kornier, who's bringing out excellent Christian films, and this is an encouraging trend. We need missionaries in the field of medicine. The amount of crooks in medicine. How can you trust people who went along with the masquerade madness, COVID cult, salvation by vaccination cult? I mean, really. the biggest lie that we've had perpetrated in our lifetimes. I think the credibility of medical doctors has plummeted to below congressmen and used car salesmen, because for them to have gone along with that whole Fauci-Alci plot shot, salvation by vaccination, safe and effective propaganda, really. Sports and the arts, well, it's very important. So we need Christians in every sphere of life. And we're to proclaim the message of repentance and forgiveness of sins. And we're to deal with a primary issue, and the primary issue is sin. In English, it works out quite well. The middle letter of sin is I. The middle letter of lie is I. The middle letter of pride is also I. The middle letter of Lucifer is also I. There's only one place that I should be in the middle of, and that's Savior. Because our real problem is we're not innocent victims needing deliverance. We're guilty sinners needing forgiveness and mercy from Almighty God. People saying God's not fair. I heard at one point somebody asking Dr. Arcee Sproul and I've had the privilege. the terrifying privilege of preaching from R.C. Sproul's pulpit with him sitting in the front row. But R.C. Sproul was asked at one conference, why do bad things happen to good people? And he said, well, there was only one, and he volunteered. And it's true. Only Jesus is good. As the Father sent me, so send I you. You are the salt of the earth. You're not just the salt of the church, you're the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world, not just the light of the church. We're to be getting out into the world. Let your light so shine before men that they will see your good works and glorify your father in heaven. The best sermon illustration is the life of integrity of a Christian neighbor, a colleague, or family member. It doesn't matter what Billy Graham or any of the greatest preachers on Earth might say, that's not going to impact people as much as the life of a neighbor or family member who lives a Christian witness with integrity. That is the most effective sermon illustration on Earth. At evangelism workshops and great commission conferences and at biblical worldview seminars I've conducted throughout Africa and Europe and the USA, I've often done surveys and I've found that the vast majority of delegates surveyed came to Christ through personal evangelism, from friends, family, even strangers, in one-on-one witnessing and counseling. So far, I've never come across anyone who's reported being saved or converted through gospel music. Music is for worship. It's for Christians. It's not generally the way you get pagans converted. And once in a conference of 400 pastors in Nigeria, one individual reports being saved through gospel TV. I'm skeptical. I wasn't able to speak to him to find out if he was really saved, but one person once said to me he was saved through TV. I wouldn't take that too seriously. But even in large groups of several hundred, I've seldom found more than 3% who could, along with myself, report they were saved through an evangelistic crusade. Now, I was. I was brought up in a secular family. We never prayed. We never went to church. We never went to Sunday school. We didn't read the Bible. And at age 17, I walked into a cinema expecting to see the film advertised outside. But I've just come from Rhodesia, where we had cinemas on Sundays, but South Africa had no cinemas on Sundays for decades, in honor of the Lord's Day. I walk into the cinema, I think, that's strange. People are very well dressed, hats, and gloves, and stockings, and dresses, and all this, and suits, and ties. And I think, well, maybe South Africans do this on Sundays. And then they start singing hymns. And I thought, this is strange. But maybe South Africans sing hymns before cinemas on Sundays. So when the pastor stood up and started preaching, I thought, I'm ambushed. But the lights were still on, and I was too close to the front. I couldn't escape. I was ambushed. First time I heard the gospel. Now, I didn't go to hear the gospel, but I'm one of the people who went forward, and I bowed to me, and I knelt in front of the temple, and I gave my life to Christ. So I am one of the 3% who can say I was saved through an evangelistic crusade. Praise God for evangelistic crusades. But that is not the way to fulfill the Great Commission. It's only one of the ways. The best way to fulfill the Great Commission is if all of us witness our faith on a weekly basis amongst the people we meet. There's normally a few dozen who report gospel literature. A friend of mine was saved through a Gideon's Bible given to her in a school. And praise God for all the literature. We distribute tons of chapel library materials, like I see you've got here. We distribute lots of gospel literature. I believe gospel literature is the ammunition. But it's most effective when it's used as a point of contact or follow-up from personal witness. There should always be a personal contact. And of course, people wandering the streets normally are one on your knees in prayer first. However, every evangelistic workshop and conference that I've surveyed, the vast majority will always report it through family and friends, neighbors, even strangers, but in one-on-one personal evangelism that they were converted. And I'm sure if you did a survey in your church, you'd find something similar. Dr. James Kendi was a great friend and wonderful supporter of our mission for many years. And the first time I met him, personally, he had me on his radio program, Trees That Transform, often. And he even had me on his pulpit once, which was super intimidating. He was sitting right there. And I thought, I mean, this is one of the greatest preachers in the world. But he was a very dedicated evangelist. So the first time I met him, I I wanted to get his response, so I provoked him. So I said, Dr. Kennedy, I believe you take every Thursday night to go door-to-door in evangelism. I'm surprised that a man with millions listening to your radio and TV programs and so many books published and a congregation of 12,000 has the time. And he's reaching for the door handle. He turned around. He looked at me with such intensity. He said, Peter, that is the most important thing I do. I doubt that most of these ministries around me will last long after I'm gone. In fact, they didn't. They disappeared very fast. But he said, but this ministry of evangelism explosion, one-on-one personal evangelism, the ministry of multiplication, that will last for eternity. That is the most important thing I do, door to door evangelism. Now this is one of the most successful authors, radio and TV personalities, a pastor of one of the biggest congregations in the world at the time. I think he had 9,000 members, 12,000 adherents. He said, there's nothing more important I do than going door to door every Thursday night and witnessing to strangers and non-Christians about the gospel. Jesus said, therefore, whoever confesses me before men, him I will confess before my father who is in heaven. Whoever denies me before men, him I will deny before my Father who is in heaven. Now, this is my firstborn daughter, Andrea, when she was six. She's now a mother of 32, and she's got three sons. So I've got three grandsons. But when Andrea was just five years old, she went to the shopping center with my mother. And my mother reported that in the middle of Cavendish Square, our biggest shopping center in Cape Town, She is skirting the center because there was some kind of magician show on the go. And so to kind of avoid it, my mother was working on the edge. And the magician spotted and said, hey, little girl, come over here. We have magic for you. And my mother reported that Andrea, who, you know, a five-year-old does not need a PA system. She announced for the whole shopping center here, my Lord Jesus does miracles, and it's better than your magic. Well, that told him. Well, shortly after that, I was taking my daughter on a plane overseas. We were flying to America. My wife and her and the other two children were already here in Arizona. And I was bringing her along. And we were flying KLM via Amsterdam. And we'd just taken off. And my daughter announced for the whole aircraft here, we're Christians! So I put down my book and said, well, yes, Andrea, we are. But why do you say that right now? He said, the lady was asking if there's any questions to let her know. I thought for a moment, I think she said, if there's any questions, we should let her know. But she was just like primed, you know, we're Christians, and we should have that joyful, enthusiastic, making a stand for Christ. Out of the mouths of babes, God can bring praise. And we often get just too polite and too respectable. We need to have more of that enthusiasm. And I think that's what the Lord's talking about, confessing him before men. We dare not let opportunities to witness for Christ pass us by. You know, we will never regret sharing the gospel with someone, but we will regret when we didn't. For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the son of man be ashamed when he comes in his own glory and his father's and of the holy angels. This, by the way, is the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere. And I was taking a Great Commission course there to debate with a Muslim imam, who is part of the Islamic Propagation Center International. And this was an interesting confrontation. But we should not be intimidated and disarmed. Not now. Well, when I had my military call up, we had conscription back in 1970s when I was called to go to the army. My friend at St. Paul's Baptist Church warned me, he said, Peter, make your stand for Christ early. Don't wait a few days and weeks. Let them know that you're a Christian and meet them. And the best way to do this is when you have your meal, pray. Always give thanks. And don't just look like you're scratching the back of your head. I mean, really pray over your meal. So first day in the army, I did just that. I knelt over my meal and prayed enthusiastically. And when I lifted up my arm, I asked everyone around the table. Then I saw why they were laughing. My meat was missing. I never got it back. And one of the chaps commented, didn't Jesus say, watch and pray? So after that I realized, in the army you stick your fork in and you put your arms around you, you pray protecting your meal, otherwise it may not be there by the time you finish. So at my first chaplain service in the South African army, I asked the chaplain if I could speak, and it was intimidating, but it was the most important witness I had to make. So as we finished the chaplain service, I asked the chaplain if I could speak, I stood up and I turned around I addressed the men and I said, and here you've got another 500 men in the hall, all in brown uniforms, all with hair shaven off. And I turned around and I said, I love the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart. And I want to honor him in my next two years here. If anyone else feels the same, please see me afterwards. Let's start a Bible study and a prayer fellowship. And that's how our mission began. It was that confession. Three men came and spoke to me afterwards and joined our Bible study and prayer fellowship. But that was a small beginning, but it was the beginning. Soon we had 12, and then we had 50 and 60. And at the end of our time, there were 84 of us meeting for Bible study and prayer. One of the most important witnesses I ever did, starting a Bible study and prayer fellowship in the army, and that grew our mission and many, many other missions. And the teamwork you learn in the Army, drums, poles. One thing that's such an important lesson, they build obstacle courses and they send you through obstacle course in the Army not to stop you, but to train you to overcome obstacles. Obstacles are not there to stop you. Obstacles are only there to be overcome. And we train to get over obstacle course in the Army so that when we come across these Obstacles in real life are very fast, and with teamwork sometimes. But as Christians, so often you get this attitude like the door handle comes off as a person gets up and says, God's guiding me to stay at home. No, God's guiding you to fix the door handle. We mustn't come up with excuses not to do things. We must just be innovative. We've got a saying in South Africa, in broad and mark and plumb, a farmer makes a plan. So you can either make a plan or you can make an excuse. And I think a lot of Christians have specialized in how to make an excuse why it can't be done. We need to make a plan to adapt and to overcome. There's always a way to overcome. And I found my time in the army, I thought my two years in the army would be wasted. I always wanted to serve in the military as a youngster. And my father fought all six years in the Second World War in the Eighth Army, North Africa. A lot of my relatives had been in the military. My brother had been in the Russian army. And so I was looking forward to my time. But by the time my call up came to serve in the South Korean infantry, I was now a Christian and a missionary and working in a hospital Christian fellowship. So I went to army with a bad attitude. I was thinking, you know, what a waste of time. Here I could be saving souls and I'm going to be doing some worldly thing. Well, that was ridiculous. It didn't take me long to see. Is this not a mission field? And it's like God had speak to me, you know, wake up from what you're hearing around you. A lot of these people do not know the Lord. I mean, plainly, there were a lot of religious people around me, but many of them. It's just kind of funny in the South economy. We had something that you would not have seen the American army. You know, pagans rule. Pagans suddenly stop swearing and getting drunk on Saturday night, midnight, and they behave all through Sunday. Then they go on Monday back to being a pagan. And that's religiosity. A whole lot of the people there were so religious. Now, I was a convert from a secular family, so I did not understand that. But these people there, they were baptized. They were confirmed. They were in a denomination. And they thought they were Christians. And you could see they were Christians because they didn't swear or get drunk on Sunday. But the rest of the week, they were as pagan as everyone else. So I quickly realized I'm in a mission field, and I became a chaplain's assistant and ran a Bible study and prayer fellowship along with all my other training duties. And the best was when we got to the border and we were able to multiply in many places because our battalion had three companies. So we went to three different bases, and we were able to multiply our Bible study fellowships all over the South West African border, what today is Namibia, during the war with Angola. My generation experienced a lot of hostility in Angola fighting the Soviets, and it was a wonderful experience. I'd say I learned more in my two years in the army than I did in my years in theological college. We went through the whole Bible. We studied the Bible every night. prayer meetings. The answers to prayer we experience, and of course you can imagine there's all sorts of strange things happen to me. I remember one particular foul-mouthed staff sergeant, he was taking the Lord's name in vain. One of our people said, God will judge you stiff-necked. Next thing he broke his neck on a obstacle course activity and he's walking around with one of these neck braces for the next several weeks. And even the pagans are laughing saying, you stiff-necked and God judge you. Another pagan took the Lord's name in vain and picked up his coke tin, and there was a bee on the tin, stung him on the tongue, on the tongue, swollen tongue, putting off week for the next few weeks. And there's all sorts of strange things happened, and answers to prayer, and miracles. And as a result, many of the people who've been in our units and our power, end up in youth with a mission, Operation Mobilization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and all over the world. We have missionaries end up in as far away a field as Kazakhstan and so on. And it all started in the South Ghana. I mean, that's where our frontline fishermen began. And in Angola, we saw the persecution of the church. We'd ask people, what can we do to help you? And you see these starving, thin, wounded, hungry people. Biblia, Biblia, they wanted Bibles. And so along with our preemptive strikes and our battles in Angola, we would be taking Bibles and ammunition pouches to give to Christians in their language, Ovumbundu, Lavali, Lichazi, Chokwe, and so on. And of course, we destroyed a lot of Russian tanks while we were about it, too. In fact, you can Google Earth's Lombo River. A big battle took place in Lombo River, and you can still see the Soviet tanks. There's graveyards of Soviet tanks still there, as a testament to where the Cold War was lost by the Soviet Union. The Russians have even produced books on Angola, the beginning of the end. And Angola, we never saw it, not even in Afghanistan. And there's Russian military specialists who say the end of the Soviet Union began, the collapse of the Soviet Union began in Angola. We knew we probably couldn't beat NATO conventionally, but we thought we could surely beat the South African army, who after all we were completely and utterly sanctioned, no weapons allowed to be sold to us and so on. When the Soviet army could not defeat the South African army with even their most advanced technology and weapons, they started to lose confidence that they were capable of winning a war against NATO. And so the end of the Soviet Union began, in many ways, in Angola, where we as South Korean Army were fighting the Cubans, the best that Cuba had to mobilize, and the Russians. There were even Vietnamese, North Koreans there, or just like a through the communist world. This is, by the way, taken down by an American Stinger missile. I remember being in Angola at the time in 1986 that Ronald Reagan made a speech. And we were sitting around the campfire listening to shortwave radio at night, BBC World Service. And on came Ronald Reagan. We're going to send Stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola. Now, we'd been bombed that day. We still had bits of tree stumps and garbage down our necks. And we were rattled still from the bombings that day. Fortunately, they had no night fighting capabilities. So we're sitting around the campfire at night. And on that radio, we suddenly run the radio. We will send Stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola. And there's a long silence. And one of our people said, well, that would be nice. But will they do it? And they did. And I've got all kinds of pictures of American tax dollars doing something good for a change. The Stinger missiles actually came and shot down a bunch of Soviet weaponry, and that brought an end to the bombing of churches and the rest by the Cuban Air Force. So these are just some of our South Africans fighting in Angola, and we had a lot of fun there, a lot of Bible study and prayer meetings, and most of all went through the whole Bible, from beginning to end, Genesis to Revelation. And if there's a similarity between a Rhodesian flag and a frontline pilgrim flag, it's purely intentional. Jesus assured us there's no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my sake and for the gospels, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers and children and lands with persecutions as they come eternal life. So Jesus makes it clear. Sacrifice is required, leaving a lot of comforts and our comfort zone. sacrifices required. This, by the way, was a big red line on the map, a main road in Angola. It takes imagination to recognize where the road used to be. When I speak about the developing world, in many cases, it's weeds, rust, corruption that's growing. But the developing world is not often developing in a positive way. This road might have been overgrown. We spend more time under the bonnet fixing the car engine than behind the wheel driving it. But this is one of our Land Rovers, which reminds me of the time when I sent. four vehicles into the field in December 1994, and only one vehicle came back. And that was my vehicle that I was driving in Zambia at the time. I was running a biblical worldview seminar in Zambia and learned that our team to Angola had been arrested, ambushed, our vehicle destroyed, men in prison, another one had a head-on collision, and one of the people had died in it. Terrible December 1994. Four vehicles went to the field, only one came back. That can happen in missions. We've had to cross many a river, crocodile infested rivers, with World Missionary Press gospel booklets, with evangelistic materials, tracts. And this is interior decorating by Gorbachev and Sons. Your home too can look like this. All you need is communism, which I believe you've got some people in Washington would love to bring you. I've got a solution to America's problems. I was thinking, why not let the Cubans who want freedom come to America and those who want socialism and communism go to Cuba? Because Cuba's already got socialized Medicare, gun control, everything a Democrat should want, they've got in Cuba. So why don't you just do a swap? Now, Angola is a place where there are more landmines than people. And in many cases, the only way we could transport our bibles was on people's heads. Back to days of David Livingston, boxes on your head and walking. And here's a father with baby and mother. She's got a baby on her back, too, by the way. And that's typical in Africa. We don't have prams. The baby gets strapped to the back. That's far more common. But they walk in areas where landmines are the national plant. Our people came to this village. Now, what do you see that's missing at this church? The building, there's no building. The communists destroyed the building. This evangelical church continued to meet, even though their building was bombed, because nothing was going to stop them from their highest priority, which is to worship Christ. But they pointed out they had no Bibles, by the way. They had no Sunday school materials. They asked us to bring in communion elements, which we did on the next mission, so that they were able to distribute communion elements. So these are just some of the things we would take in the field that you might not think there's much need for. People send us all kinds of Bibles and books. Some churches have upgraded their communion sets, send some to us, and we see they get to the field. And then Sunday school materials that we're able to deliver. And Bibles. The amount of times I've heard people say in Angola, this is the greatest gift anyone could ever ask for, the word of God, my own language. I've been praying five years, my own copy of the word of God. And I've had people jumping up and down, laughing, crying, kneeling, singing to receive a Bible, dancing around to the Bible. Most awkwardly, when people kiss you both cheeks in the Portuguese style, which for somebody brought up with Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, we get stiff enough as it is. You've got to be kidding. That was so rough in Russia. The Russians, I mean, they come in these men with these bristles, and they're my brother, and they're kissing on both cheeks, and just about get barber's rash from it. That, by the way, is common in Russia, that everyone greets one another with a holy kiss, as they call it. So instead of just shaking hands at the end of church, you get people going and giving you a barber's brush for their raspy beards and growth. Just another funny thing, by the way. In Africa, they will say, we can't hear you without the tie. Literally, if we've arrived on a motorbike, dug out canoes, crawled through the mud, we arrive at the church, I've got to be able to pull a suit out. They won't let you stand up and preach or lead a service if you're not wearing a tie. Russia, it's the opposite. If you turn up in a Russian church, they often ask you, could you please take your tie off? You've got to wear a suit and jacket and a shirt, button-up shirt, but no tie. And the reason is a tie is so extravagant. Only the Communist Party members had ties. And so for the Christians, a tie is a sign of the Communist Party, basically, extravagance. Who would have a tie? I mean, a shirt and a suit make sense. So literally, take off your tie in Russia, put on your tie in Africa. And this is another person. I prayed five years for my own copy of the Word of God. Here I took my young son. That's the great thing about homeschooling. You can take them to the field and learn mathematics by calculating fuel consumption and conversions to different currencies and maps and all this sort of thing. So this is where we used to swim across the river to deliver Bibles across the minefield on the other side into communist Angola. This is where our mission headquarters is in Cape Town. In the shadow of Table Mountain, our vehicle preparing to go 8,000 miles by road. I'm sorry, 8,000 kilometers by road. That's 5,000 miles. Basically, like from Miami, Florida to Anchorage, Alaska. But the roads are not comparable. Roads kind of stop at about St. Louis. And then you've got this sort of thing. This is the roads in North Africa more often. And then you start seeing disturbing things. If you want to revolutionize your prayer life, go on a mission to Sudan. When you see the tanks didn't make it, you go through Ambush Alley, and you're coming in a soft-skinned vehicle, that will revolutionize your prayer life. You will know that you are right with God, and you've confessed every sin you possibly can. Because when you're driving in a soft-skinned vehicle, and you're seeing all these tanks that got destroyed, only the grace of God can keep you alive. These are our vehicles, as we take out the number plates of doctored vehicles. And this is an ambulance that we bought in South Africa, drove overland to Sudan to connect to them, to be an ambulance in the four-wheel drive areas. We'll frequently have the Christian flag up, because we don't like friendly fire. And you come along in a four-wheel drive vehicle, they might think you're an Arab, or worse, they might think you're for the United Nations. Then you're a target. So it's one thing to be bombed and shot at by the Arabs, which I have been, but I'd rather not be shot at by our side, by the Christians. So having a Christian flag visible often is quite a good idea. Remind me of what my dad said about the Second World War. He said, We'd look for the aircraft. If they were Italian, we wouldn't bother diving for cover. If they were Luftwaffe, we'd definitely dive for cover. If they're American, we had to dive for cover, because we called the US Air Force the American Luftwaffe. They specialize in friendly fire, and they love bombing everything they saw, which included the poor 8th Army of the British. So anyway, friendly fire. This is a typical road. If you think you've got problems on your roads, they can get worse. And we calculated that we took longer to cover the same distance that bicycles in the days of 1920s could cover. A bicycle could cover the same distance faster in 1920 than a four-wheel drive vehicle can today because of the deterioration of the roads. And if you think the roads are bad, try the rivers. And the bridges are blown up, and so as a result, Before I cross a river in Sudan, I've got to go out to the hiking stick and walk through. And these are where the rocks are. And you guide the person, the vehicle coming after you. All of our boxes and bibles need to be waterproofed and packed so that they won't get wet. Because you drive through, and you can have the water coming up to your chest. And you're in a high-rise, four-wheel-drive vehicle. And of course, a lot of people want a free ride across the river. That's why they're sitting on a roof rack. Well, South Sudan was fighting the longest war of the 20th century. From 1955, the day the British left, the South, the Christian black South, were fighting for their lives, for survival from the Muslim Arab north that the British had left them in the tender mercies of. And where did they get their weapons? Well, from the Arabs. They said, the Arabs are our quartermaster. The enemy are our quartermaster. They capture the weapons from the enemy. And these weapons, all red Chinese, provided to radical Islamic Sudan for the jihad. And these folks would ask me, do the Christians in the West pray for us? Initially, I'd say, they don't even know you exist, but we will change it. So the pictures, the films, the books helped make the conflict in Sudan better known. And many of these pictures actually got published in military magazines around the world as some of the first pictures of war in Sudan. These are some of our friends at the battlefront. And my father-in-law, Bill Bathman, when he was 71 years old, for his 50 years in ministry, I took him to the battlefront in Sudan. Now, he had worked in 114 countries in the world, but he'd never been to Sudan. So here's a man like Caleb. Give me that mountain. And after flying him in Sudan, he came back to Cape Town, bought a four-wheel drive vehicle, and drove overland. A man of 71 drove overland across Africa to get to Sudan, 5,000-mile drive to donate the vehicle and the Bibles we packed it with to the church in Sudan. And here are just some of the SPLA, Sudanese People's Liberation Army. They once were Marxists. They had commissars and all this. But today, they've got chaplains and fly the Christian flag. Flying into these places, you're flying into areas that don't have airstrips and airfields properly. And so sometimes the planes crash on landing. Nuba Mountains of Sudan, probably one of the most neglected and remote mission fields on Earth. No cell phone towers, you need satellite phone over there to be able to communicate. And these people have been an island of Christianity and a sea of Islam, bombed, targeted under every kind of siege, scorched earth. And these are some of the Christians who are under fire. So this is the Persky Church. Their beautiful stone building down in the valley had been destroyed by the Arabs. They were up about 4,000 feet elevation in the Nuba Mountains. A chap next to me is holding a Faith Under Fire in Sudan book. Very coveted over there. And these are some of my translators and guides walking around the Nuba Mountains. We would bring in Bibles in the first planes, and our extraction flights would be packed full of food, which we'd then give to the local pastors to feed widows and orphans and the people whose crops had been destroyed by scorched earth. So these are some of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army fighting behind lines. Notice, a barefoot army in May. And it's so important that we go to visit them. And to me, it felt so much to know we're not alone. We're not forgotten. And here they are looking out over the fields where they. They used to have their farms, Arabs burned their farms, and they're up in the mountains. And then a Christian under siege, or people under siege, basically. And there were a couple of hundred thousand Christians in Nuba Mountains, while 1.2 million Nubans were in concentration camps, Dar al-Islam, or peace camps, as Muslims call them, where they were being indoctrinated and forcibly Islamized. So this was part of the congregation I was ministering to. These soldiers said, we are not like the South Sudanese who've been fighting Arabs for 50 years. We've been fighting Arabs for 1,500 years, which is not too much of an exaggeration. Because the Nub mountains are descendants of slaves who were kidnapped and being taken through the desert to get to Khartoum, where they would be sold as slaves. So these people have a heritage of resistance. And I heard them say, my grandfather fought the Arabs. My father's fought the Arabs. My sons will fight the Arabs. We will never bow to Islam. And this is part of the landscape. It sometimes looks like lunar landscape. Lots of scorpions, all kinds of glow-in-the-dark creatures that bite and so on in the 1040 window. And we had to keep moving, because the Arabs put a big price on the heads of Christians or missionaries who came to these areas. So we'd have to keep on the move. We couldn't stay in any one place more than a day, because information could travel too quick, and then we could get ambushed. Sometimes we really had to run to escape teams that were after us. After I witnessed to this particular Arab in the marketplace, a riot broke out. And my escorts are running and shooting and whacking people in the face with rifle butts. former security around me and pull me out just because I was witnessing in the marketplace. Now, on that particular occasion, I left my AK-47 outside with our group. I thought it would be better to go in the Arabs not carrying a weapon, and that ended up in a violent riot. So in future, after I always carried my AK-47 with me, I'd be witnessing with my rifle over my shoulder, and I found an armed society is a polite society. Never had a problem witnessing as long as armed and visibly armed. But the moment I'd left that behind, that's when the violence took place. Just interesting point. I saw something that made my mind spin. My eyes couldn't believe what I was seeing. A man without feet. How does somebody lose both feet? He's an evangelist. The Arabs chopped his feet off, axed his feet off at the ankles. Now the Bible says how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. This brother doesn't have any feet, but he has beautiful feet because he continues to take the gospel. He has not let the inconvenience and not even feet stop him from taking the gospel to neighbors, either riding on a donkey or walking on his knees, which are quite calloused. This is a Cessna Caravan. We can fly in a ton of Bibles on a Cessna. One tonne of Bibles. And by the way, a Bible is roughly one kilogram each. That's about 2.4 pounds per Bible. I mean, a decent Bible that's not made in China with microscopic prints. There's a lot of American ministries that buy their Bibles from China because China will give you Bibles with such microscopic print, the average person can't read it. You can say, you know, we distribute so many thousands of Bibles, but they're not readable. except those people got really, really good eyesight or big magnifying glass. But a real Bible, a good Bible that you can comfortably read, it's a good one kilogram each. So 1,000 kilograms of Bibles is 1,000 Bibles. And that's what you're looking at here. So the logistics of getting it in, flying behind enemy lines, And here's the first 3,000 Bibles in a moral language, which we got taken in one of our biggest projects, printed in Singapore. We can print more Bibles in Singapore than we can Africa for the same price. So you can get a Bible at one fifth the price printed in Singapore as you can in Kenya. And that counts even the cost of shipping it there. So that's a major part of what we do is putting Bibles in the hands of people throughout Africa. My father-in-law, in his 70s, preaching in Sudan. I mean, what excuse is there for youngsters when you've got people in their 70s and 80s going into the mission field? And this is a typical church conference in the forest because they don't want to be in a town. You've got too much of a target to Arab air attacks, so the people would tend to have their meetings more. camouflaged in the forest. One of our projects is bibles and bikes, putting wheels under the wood, flying in bicycles and bibles so that the people, in this case chaplains, could minister more effectively. You might have one pastor having five congregations to care for. And these are some of the chapels we trained. This is Easter Sunday in Louie in Moorland. And under this tree, the Arab slave traders used to tether the local people before they took them up to the slave market in Karchoum. And that's not that long ago. That's just a century ago they were doing that. And this church, this now, they have Sunday school under this tree. And the church you can just see in the distance behind there, that's the church that's been bombed 10 times. There's about 140 bomb crates around the church, shrapnel lying everywhere. These people know what they're fighting against and what they're resisting. Here's, in the middle, is Commander Silver Keir. 02, I was having an argument with him. He's second commander of the SPLA, that you need to fight for secession, for independence. And he said, that's a good idea, but it won't work. It'll never work. We are fighting for autonomy. And I said, you will always be a persecuted black Christian minority in the Arab Muslim majority country, unless you break away. You need to be a free and independent country. He said, it's not possible. Today, he's the president of South Sudan. He is sworn in 2011, 9th of July, first president of South Sudan. And it just goes to show that many people doubt whether secession is possible, but it has happened many a time before. One of our good friends, Jeffrey Kianga, he's with the Lord now, he was often my guide and co-worker that we've worked with. Their stories are told in Faith on the Fire in Sudan book, which has three times been produced now, three times the size of the first edition, because the story just keeps growing. And some of the films we helped Jeremiah Films produce in Sudan. Today, there are Christian schools in Sudan where we're able to have chapel services. Film evangelism is very effective. We've often used the Jesus film. I must have seen it more than 100 times. Our mission has had the Gs from about 100 languages. I've shown about 20 languages. And in the old days, we would be using 16-mil projectors. So between each reel, you've got to change a reel. So you'd be able to preach between each reel. In some ways, the video projects are so much simpler, but it's given us less preaching opportunities. It made such an impact. Many of these people said, I've never seen a film before. And it's good to get there before Hollywood. every word from the Gospel of Luke. So we'd sometimes show the film, say, you've seen the film, now read the book. We handed out the Gospels of Luke in their language, Arabic in some cases. And now meet the star. Let's have an altar call, call you to the front to give your life to Christ. This is one of the first chaplains we trained, Chaplain Peter, Peter Jonathan, one of Sydney's People's Liberation Army chaplains, Chaplain Moses, And by the way, these Reformation Study Bibles, I asked R.C. Sproul, could he produce a Reformation Bible in time for 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation? And he not only did that, he donated 2,000 copies of the Reformation Study Bible to our mission, which we Treated like gold, but we very selectively gave to people who passed exams and all sorts of things like that all over Africa. We had a Bible exam designed for people to earn a Reformation study Bible. And many people throughout Africa wanting them. And there's always a requirement. They've got to memorize passages of scripture, pass the Bible exam, things like this. And one of our friends at the libraries for pastors, it's one of our big projects, is trying to put enough books in the hands of pastors textbooks for teachers, libraries for pastors. This is a bishop, Bishop Bismarck in Sudan, and the Reformation Study Bible is certainly the most popular of all the books we distribute there. So our mission produces different prayer posters, and this is one that one can download from our website, Pray for South Sudan. Well, in 2017, I was sending a team to the field, which included my son-in-law, and And he's married to my first-born daughter. So I was very nervous. And the other team members, there were four of our team members, they all were young, married men with young children. And I was so nervous. And I was so much in prayer. And I was so afraid. Send him to the New Mountains. And my wife was saying, why are you so concerned? You went there many times when the war was worse. Well, it's different if you go in when there's others being sent. And as the mission leader, I was deeply concerned. Well, as a standard, they came back with the most astounding report. The war had stopped. There was no fighting in the northern mountains, and the marketplaces were open again, the schools were open again, and I couldn't understand why. Well, at the end of 2017, we discovered why. Because America, under President Donald Trump, lifted sanctions on Sudan and ended their status as a terrorist-sponsoring nation. So all over America, people are outraged. How could President Trump take sanctions off Sudan, evil government, terrorist-sponsoring governments? Well, the story came out bit by bit on the ground in Sudan that when he won the election in 2016, he sent his negotiators to Sudan and gave them a part of the deal. I know what you want, end of sanctions, and you want to have your name taken off terrorist sponsoring nation. Let me tell you what I want. No more bombing of the Nuba Mountains, no more ground offenses, no more scorches, no fighting in Blue Nile, Darfur, end. When you've done that for 12 months, I'll lift the sanctions. And so we walked into, I never read this in any article, any newspaper, I just know it from the ground. And I don't know how many people in America know that. Just one of the side issues, which I don't think has ever been mentioned in a presidential speech, but President Trump brought an end to the longest war in African history. Over 50 year war in Sudan, and the Nuba Mountains had been the longest of it and the worst of it. And because of this offer, carrot or stick? You want the carrot or do you want the stick? Carrot will lift the sanctions. Stick, you better stop all the fighting in these areas. And the fighting stopped. We have not just had one year, we had four years of no war in the mountains. And during that time, we distributed Hundreds of thousands of Bibles, no exaggeration, hundreds of thousands of Bibles and books were distributed to schools. We got to 280 schools and distributed many times the first thing those people have ever owned, their own Bible. And for the primary school children, a comic book with the Gospel of Christ in it. And this was all done during this window of peace and opportunity that we had a rare opportunity, the only time of peace when they weren't doing scorches in the mountains. Can I ask, how many people here know that? or knew that before. Is this news to most people? Well, it was news to me. And so that was one of the most amazing opportunities. I thought I was sending my son-in-law into a war zone where there was danger, but that war zone was on a ceasefire, and the ceasefire's held so far. And these are just one of the shipments. And by the way, these Bibles, were printed in Belarus, which is surprising. But Belarus even out-quoted Singapore for the costs of this. In Eastern Europe, they're surprising us with some of their free enterprise. And there's different titles that I've even got a table here. You can see The Greatest Century of Missions and Faith Undefined Sedan, several of our different books available amongst the printing. And all this was printed in Belarus and shipped by container into Sudan, which is quite a major logistical operation and challenge. just part of the shipments. Hundreds of thousands of Bibles and books distributed in Nuba Mountains during this window of peace that President Trump negotiated. And many people, by the way, this shell is the school bell. They take a piece of shrapnel and whack the shell, great Chinese manufacturer, no doubt, but a shell that they just picked up now, it's the school bell. So praise God for these, the gospel seeds. So in the Bible is the best missionary. And the Bible speaks to the people in their language. Another poster to pray for the Nuba Mountains of people and the sea. It's an island of Christianity and a sea of Islam. Well, amongst the books we've taken, every year I try to produce a new book, which is history to pastors, build up their libraries. expounding the Ten Commandments, expounding every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, providing pastors with sermons that they can preach. One sermon summarizing every book in the Bible, which is a six year project for me to produce this, but it's providing pastors all over Africa with A biblical agenda, I mean, it's all about just expanding one book after the other, going from Genesis to Revelation. And we regularly run great commission courses in Cape Town and around South Africa, which are body, mind, and spirit. We stretch minds, we stretch muscles. We teach people to overcome obstacles and get out of their comfort zone. And as a mission leader, I've always believed in leading by example. So I'm the first one through the mud. to, yes, we can get dirty and muddy, and we can get through these obstacles. This is nothing for me. When I was in the army, they had barbed wire above us, and they were throwing grenades around us, stun grenades, and shooting live rounds over our head to simulate good operational situations when we were crawling through the mud. So this is really not a problem. Going underwater, for many people, is a real claustrophobia moment, going in a tunnel through water to come out the other side. And when we say water, we mean mud. And getting people to reach. You can all reach higher. We can all do more and last longer than we think we can. And it's so important to get our people, again, knowing self-defense and having the confidence to know you can disarm a person coming at you with a knife or whatever it happens to be. We get our people knowing how to fight, how to work a whole bunch of martial arts. Sword fighting is my personal sport, but all this is part of our camps and courses, training people for missions. We need so many more missionaries around Africa, making your own rafts to get across rivers. My daughter, Daniela, her best friend, she's the artist who designs a lot of many of my books have been designed by my daughter, Daniela. She's got national colors for our country in ice skating. You may not know that there's a South African ice skating team. She said they really got used to the Finnish national anthem because the Finns could win the first, second, and third prizes in many synchronized skating competitions. Nobody has a chance to beat Finland at things like that. They've got like 100,000 lakes which freeze over in winter. We have one ice rink in Cape Town. But anyway, our mission is primarily a mission of literature. We get container shipments of Bibles and books. There's one arriving tomorrow at our mission. And it's like camels through the eye of a needle to get these Pentecnicans to 18-wheeler trucks to reverse in to Livingston House. And we offload. Sometimes we have two container trucks arriving on a single day. And if we get a 40-foot container, we can't fit it in our driveway. It's got to be parked outside, and we've got to offload outside, and with one of our pickup trucks, carry everything in. And this is 17 tons. And so we call it Frontline Gym. We need a gym membership where you can handle tons of gospel literature. And this is the ammunition we need. So this is the quartermaster store for missions throughout Africa. And it's regularly, when this happens, everyone, every department stops. IT comms people, the webmasters, the computer geeks, everyone comes and helps stores offload for literature for Africa. And this is everything ready, our pallets and so on, ready before the shipment arrives. And then the shipment arrives, tons and tons of Bibles. We've got inside stores, outside stores. And I normally lead the sorting section, where we sort through. And my wife and daughter is helping me to categorize English Standard Version, King James Version, New King James Version, and so on, study Bibles, Bibles that need repairs, paperback, hardback, whatever they are. And we are categorizing them and then designating them after we organize. some of the shelves that we, the amount of, you know, who needs to go to gym when you've got your own stairs and steps that you can practice? And who needs weights when you can carry Bibles? So sometimes we get the indigenous African language Bibles. This is a special project. These are expensive because they're not as much unit cost. So English Bibles are fairly cheap because there's so many people in the world who speak English. But if you're getting Corsa, Chochewa, Chokwe, Shunga, and so on, well, that's going to be a lot harder. So we get people to designate for Sosutho, or any of the other local African languages. But they are like gold. People really prize that. Sometimes we need to pelletize things and get everything completely waterproof, and then hire a forklift. Because we have some missions, like Open Door, say, can you provide us with 28 tons of Bibles and books? And they come and collect it, and normally early in the morning. loaded on a flatbed truck that can go all the way up to Zimbabwe or Zambia or something like that. And so this is logistics, how to make sure it gets there, not getting wet, and everything designated, what's going to which church, which mission, which Bible college, and so on. But normally, we're just reading by our vehicles. And this is our main frontline four-wheel drive vehicle crossing Africa, get up to Sudan, and so on. Equipping chaplains and pastors with Bibles and bikes, putting wheels under the word, And part of our training is mountain climbing. We've got some of the best mountains in the world, Table Mountain. And get our people up. We have prayer meetings on top of the mountains, sing hymns. Anyone can hike in a day. So we often do our hikes at night, far more challenging. And we do Bible smuggling ops. This is Sunset on top of Table Mountain, MacLear's Beacon. These are the people who made it. This is the high point, literally, of our Great Commission course. We have people who start with us, like we had one lady from Arizona. Father-in-law's secretary, Christy Blanchard, she came to us. And first day, she said, I've never run anywhere. And so she couldn't run around the Common, 2.4 kilometers, so she just walked. But at the end of the week, she was running. At the end of the three weeks, she took Table Mountain to the top. She came back to Arizona, started doing long-distance runs, started doing half marathons, ended up as a missionary in India, and four children and so on. So there's a success story. It's so important to get in the shopping malls. That's the marketplace of today. And so we frequently set up stalls in the shopping centers. We distribute lots of gospel literature. We love great comforts materials where the master as well. My daughter, Daniela, she's very active in everything of our mission. My son, Calvin, in front of Parliament of Cape Town, we regularly, on the anniversary of the legalization of abortion in our country, march to Parliament. We've designed trailers to protest, and here we are outside an abortion mill. This one's now closed, by God's grace. Mary Stokes is the main abortion provider in Africa. Mary Stokes is like the Margaret Sanger of Britain. And so Planned Parenthood in America, Mary Stokes in English-speaking world in Africa. And abortion is a national sin. Now, praise God that you've reversed Roe v. Wade, and that puts the battle back in the hands of the states. But in South Africa, abortion is still legal. Mandela legalized it the 1st of February 1997. 30 years, we have had, 25 years, we've had 2 million babies killed in South Africa officially, legally. But a person is a person no matter how small. And so part of training mysteries to the field is we get them involved in the pro-life battle. Because if you can handle the opposition, the hatred, and all that comes at you for making a stand for life. If you can do sidewalk counseling, then you're better prepared for the field amongst persecuted churches. So this is one of our training grounds for people in South Africa before we send them into the field. And the dean here. last minute counselling somebody who's going in on a Saturday morning for an abortion procedure. And we have turned people away. And we've had people give birth to children who would have been aborted, naming them after the Missionary Council of Manusago. Marching to Parliament with a bagpiper, make a stand. In God's court, abortion is murder. We do a lot of opening preaching and often use visible things that people can see. Coffins, flowers, crosses. You must not murder. There's the gates of Parliament in South Africa. Having mothers, pregnant mothers and others, as part of the demonstration makes it even more powerful. Just so they don't miss, this is what life is and this is what abortion is. And when they complain about the images, we say, well, if it's too horrible to look at, then it's too horrible to have legal. But every abortion stops a beating heart. Here we are outside the High Court in Cape Town, saying in God's court abortion is murder, and saying they will have to answer to the real Supreme Court Justice, who is Almighty God on Day of Judgment. I've marched tens of thousands of people to Parliament to protest our government's paganization policies. We live in Cape Town. Cape Town's our parliamentary capital. We have three capitals in South Africa. Executive capital, Union Buildings is in Pretoria. Cape Town has the legislative capital. We have the lawmaking parliament 1,000 miles away. And then our Supreme Court in South Africa is in Bloemfontein. So geographically separate, three separate capitals. I think that's a nice way of separation of powers. You've decided to put all your corrupt criminals in one swamp, I believe. Separating it out does help divide and conquer. But these are some of the marches we've mobilized to Parliament. And just showing you, there is a remnant. God's got a 7,000 to have not bowed the need to bow. So even in a communist country, and we've got horrible communist leaders in South Africa who want to expropriate all farms, who want to take away property rights, everything like that. But we are able to mobilize people on a Back to the Bible campaign and calling for the Constitution to be on God's law. This is in front of our union buildings, which is equivalent to your White House. Christians involved in National Day of Prayer and Repentance about the National Center of Abortion. Streets evangelism, sidewalk counseling, chalk talks, visual aids for evangelism in some of the worst places. But in shopping centers, we've had a great response to offering people a free Bible, or New Testament in this case, if they will answer a few spiritual survey questions. You know, who do you think God is, and what do you think God should do with murderers and rapists, and what kind of punishment would be appropriate? Would you consider yourself to be a good person? Have you ever lied? Have you ever stolen? Have you ever looked with lust? Have you ever hated anyone? And then to explain, well, by your own admission, you're lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterous heart. Tell me again why you think you're such a good person. And we've managed to lead people to the Lord in our shopping centers and in the streets. It's a wonderful opportunity to just get out there and offer people something free and ask them questions. And we've had the opportunity of praying with people in the shopping centers. I know it's difficult, because I tried to do some evangelism in an American shopping center, and we got shut down so quickly. But praise God, we've got more freedom of religion in Africa than you have in America. We've got American missionaries in South Africa saying, I could never do this in America. Preaching in schools, preaching in prisons, school assemblies, no problem. All throughout Africa, we can get opportunities in virtually any government school. to take the assembly and to preach the gospel. Our radio station is also pretty free for the gospel, and we train people in radio evangelism too, film evangelism, super effective. You get into the playgrounds and the streets and work with the local people. This dear friend here, Shana, she's the granddaughter of P.W. Burt, who was president of South Africa, the last Christian president. She's a missionary in Ukraine right now. You can pray for her, Shana, in Ukraine. And when people contacted, are you coming back to South Africa? Because the war in Ukraine, she says, why? They need me there more now than ever. Why leave the field when just because there's a war? That's when we need to be there, which is our outlook as well. Christians should go to the worst places. And we've had the chance of making an impact in people's lives. These are some of our training courses that we have. Great commission courses are smaller than our biblical worldview summits, but we mobilize a lot of young people who get excited about how to apply the faith to all areas of life, preparing young people for going to university, for example, and for the mission field. So these are boots on the ground. I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for that purpose I've been sent. Jesus is an example. Do not bottleneck the gospel in the gospel-hardened countries. Reach out across boundaries. If you're a fisherman, where do you go? Where the fish are biting or where they're not biting? It makes no sense that we would not go to the places that are the most responsive and open. Let us cross over to the other side. Overcome all obstacles for the gospel. I went to Sudan at this point when the river wasn't flooded. It flowed seven times its normal volume, and the bridge got washed away. The original bridge had been blown up, but this was a footbridge we had to help build. We had to cross it hand of hand, ankle of ankle. The man on the left of me is a ranger, and he said, let the ranger show the way. And he went first. But part of the way through, his hands were so cut up, I was passing pieces of his skin and blood all the way along the metal thing. I had my leather gloves. I've got my leather gloves in my bag here, too. Always want my leather gloves. He didn't have his leather gloves. He cut up his hands. He fell in the river at one point. And we were quite concerned. But we managed to get across. Just another thing you may not think of for the mission field, bring leather gloves. Jesus said, on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And when I first heard that, I thought, we're going to be in our trenches, and we're just enduring all the attacks in the world. But at the last minute, the Seventh Cavalry Rapture arrives and rescues us. But that's not what it's saying. The gates do not attack. Gates defend. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. The church is meant to be on the assault. We meant to be on the offensive. The best form of defense is attack, and victory is assured. The kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing. Forceful men lay hold of it. As Christians, we've got to get more forceful. Must stop being so passive. We're not meant to be doormats. We need to be bold, innovative, persistent, and seeking first the kingdom of God. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. Nothing is impossible. Nothing is beyond the reach of prayer, except what's beyond the will of God. Nobody is unreachable. This is the largest ship that the Bibles ever smuggled into a Muslim country. And it's a Second World War vintage DC-3 plane, ex-South African Air Force, turboprop conversion. The ambulance had been driven up from South Africa 5,000 miles in order to be able to help us distribute. Here's 9,700 Bibles and New Testaments in about seven in different languages. The will of God will never lead you, but the grace of God cannot keep you. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a witness to all nations. Then the end will come. People ask me if we're living in the last days, and I said, I don't believe so, no. The Great Commission must be fulfilled first. The main fulfillment of the conditions for the Lord's return is the Great Commission will be fulfilled. The Lord who gave us the Great Commission will enable us to fulfill that Great Commission before he returns. The Lord's not going to return for a defeated church and a spoiled bride. He's going to return for a victorious church, a church in revival. Our priority is the Great Commission. The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. When I first read this, I thought, you know, 70% of the world is covered by water. We can expect the world to be 70% evangelized. But that's not what it's saying. It's not saying as the waters cover the earth, it's as the waters cover the sea. Now, about what percent of the sea is covered by water? Pretty much 100%. That at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow of those in heaven, of those on earth, those under the earth. Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. So speaking to Muslims, sometimes I say, I believe as Mohammed believes. And I say, then you must become a Christian. I said, but Mohammed didn't believe in Jesus. And I said, well, he didn't, but he does now. And this is the thing every knee will bow, including Karl Marx. Mugabe, Mandela, Stalin, Mao Zedong, every knee will bow, including Charles, who's this horrible character in Oxford, the God delusion character, Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins' knee will bow. His tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Now, they can do it today in the day of grace, when salvation is freely available, or they can do it in the day of judgment. The question isn't, will you bow to Christ? The question is, when will you bow to Christ? And will you bow to him as your savior or as your judge? Is your church consistently praying for the fulfillment of the Great Commission? It is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already ripe for harvest. This is what we pray in the Lord's Prayer. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to pray for God's will to be done, not just in the church, that would be nice, but in the world. We're not just to be the salt of the church, we're to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This is the word of God. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. Give up your small ambitions and follow Jesus. Whatever our ambitions are, God's got a far greater goal than we could possibly have. Africa for Christ. So you can find a lot of our resources on our Frontline Mission SA.org website, SA short for South Africa. I've brought some newsletters, and I've brought some of our books. And if you want to receive our newsletters more regularly, I've put a clipboard out if anyone wants to sign up on it. But I'd now like to introduce you to a song you may not know. I believe Gabby might be able to give us musical accompaniment, which would be better than my spontaneous extemporaneous leading. From Greenland's icy mountain was the most popular missionary hymn of the greatest century of missions. In 19th century, people didn't need the words in a book. They all knew it off by heart. It was David Livingston's favorite hymn. It was Hudson Taylor's favorite hymn. It was C.T. Studd's favorite hymn. They say more missionaries were mobilized into the field through this hymn than any other. And for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Let's stand and sing from Greenland's icy mountains. If you don't know it, you will not forget it and hopefully enjoy going back to it. Thank you. Sorry, I got that wrong. Do you want to give the cue again? I'll try to leave it properly. It's not easy, but it's worth it. From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strands, Where Africa's sunny fountains, Roll down their golden sands, From Indian ancient rivers, From India's palmy They call us to deliver their land from Aaron's chain. Waft through the spicy breezes, low soft Ocelot's Isle. Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile. In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strewn. The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. Can we whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high Can we true men be knighted, The lamp of life denying? Salvation, O Salvation, The joyful sound proclaim, Till earth's remotest nation as learnt Messiah's name. Waft, waft ye winds his story, and ye waters roar. Till, like a ray of glory, it spreads from pole to pole, till o'er our ransomed nature the land for sinners slain. Redeemer, King, Creator, in bliss returned to reign. Amen. Shall we pray? Lord God, we want to thank and praise you for your love and your mercy, for the privilege we have of being your children. You've given us a reason to live, a song to sing. You've given us a message to share. And we pray, Lord God, that you may mercifully and graciously enable us to be more effective in your service, more brave and bold in proclaiming your word. We pray in Jesus' precious name. Amen. Thank you, I apologize for going over time there. No, thank you, brother. We're just gonna have communion. Join you with communion, so you may be seated. Brother, thank you so much. I mean, I think, wow, right? That was like, that was like 40 sermons in one? Did you catch all the alliteration? What was it, sin, pride, and what? Lying, I'll have eye in the middle. I mean just he just he's just he he has uh sermon after sermon He just worked through them and wow, what a perspective, huh? Like takes your perspective. Oh, we came to church today with this perspective, right and we hear this. It's just like Right, that's what it does and that's that's good It's good for us. It just broadens our perspective. So thank you for giving us. Thank you for the message to persevere all right, we persevere and And what God is doing in the world? right through much tribulation we enter the kingdom we preach the gospel we make disciples and Wow, so Thank you. And we got resources. Um, if you'd like to donate finances to their ministry, their information is there. We're going to give them a love offering today. So, um, if you'd like to contribute to that, you may. So the box is in the back, but we just are very blessed. So we're going to wrap this up by breaking bread together, remembering that we are breaking bread with all of our brothers and sisters around the world. You know, They don't even have Bibles. They had to give them the communion stuff, right? That one picture, right? They didn't have that. So, you know, we went without a building for a couple, for a while, but we always had communion crackers, unless we forgot to get them ourselves, right? Man, good stuff. Well, we thank you for this time that you have used your servant to broaden our perspective, to call us to account, to go into all the world, to make disciples, to preach the gospel, to endure, to persevere. I do pray that you'd raise up missionaries from among us, some of these young people here that you call into your mission field. You're calling us all to go, and in the joy of the Lord, lay down our lives, and persevere in the great gospel work of the Great Commission. We thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming and saving us. We thank you for the Word of God. Thank you for the incarnation. Thank you for your death, burial, and resurrection. We gather only In the name of Jesus Christ, it's in your name that we take this communion now. It is in your name that we confess our sin, that we believe that you died, that you rose again, that you're coming again, that you're building your church. We do this now in the name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen. So let's prepare our hearts to break bread together, to take communion. Let's judge ourselves, as the scripture says, that we be not judged. I ask the ushers to come forward as we prepare our hearts to take communion and break bread together.