to call that particular revival movement the Pharisees—I was the Pharisee of the Pharisees living in the home of their superintendent,

his protégé with great destiny in his mind, one of four or five picked

or called for every major convention where there was a speaker.  I still remember preaching the third time to the largest Church gathering of its kind in the nation of Australia, watching the same people go through the same gyrations, returning to the same water level of spiritual experience that I watched them go through the previous times.  Third trip you start recognizing them!  They would attain this spiritual blow-out stage and then slip back until the next year for refilling.

I went to Sydney with a week off, prepared to go back and be the floor director in the major organizational annual meeting of the denomination I’d been working in.  I sat down in the Wentworth Hotel in the city of Sydney.  An American recognized my accent as I was ordering, introduced himself to me.  He was an M.D. graduate from Stanford so we had an immediate alma mater connection.  Introduced his companion who was a cowboy from Montana.  He was a medic in Vietnam; the cowboy was his helicopter pilot.  They were there in R and R.  They asked me to join them.  It was the height of the R and R period when they’d put $166 in the pocket of one of those service men, fly them into Hong Kong or Sydney or some other recreation spot, leave them 2 days, and they would try to get whatever they could out of their system and into their system before flying back into those jungles to death and maiming and terror.  We toured every pub in that city.  The last one to close was the Taxi Club at 5:30 in the morning and the first pub to open was 6, so it consumed the walking time between the Taxi Club and the pub. 

I left them about 6:30, very disturbed over a simple thing.  As I witnessed that night, I came irrevocably to the conclusion the Church

is involved in transplanting saints.  It not only is not reaching the world, it doesn’t even know where the world is at.  I promptly resigned my position in the denomination and made up my mind that I would try to get on that beam of revelation where God moved into the stuff of life and made God and His Word intelligible to ordinary people.

And that’s what started me on this trip of separation from the establishment and the preaching of God’s Word from which Faith comes and the wonderful good news of the Gospel that Paul could take and shake an empire—that God’s looking for people that trust Him.  Whatever your condition He takes you where you are, as you are, and if you’ll trust Him He’ll do the work of changing you.  You don’t have to memorize all this theological jargon and you don’t have to go through all these theological gyrations.  You just learn to trust God because of His performance.  He’ll take care of the changing.

Now how many of you here hadn’t been in a Church for 10 years when you started coming to the Church I preach in?  Would you stand?  Well now, that’s something isn’t it?  You may be seated.  That makes it worth the 10 years that we’ve been here.  Lots of people left the Church because of the bunk.  You never left God and He never left you.  And the rest of the churches in town can compete for the saints and the church tramps can move back and forth.  I’ve said all these 10 years “Send me every sinner in town that knows his need of God.  You’re welcome here as long as God’s Word is respected.”  And this university platform for the teaching of God’s Word will remain with that sense of direction.  We know how to sing hymns but we’re not gonna fall over dead at Great Balls of Fire. 

Well, this is another Sunday where I’m not too sure God knows what He’s doing.  I had a good message planned and He’s impressing me to do something else.  So if you don’t like it, blame Him.  And tell