Church History Conference Part 4 – How God Raises Disciples: Jesus, Paul, and the Biblical Pattern for Workers

(Continued from Part 3)

I’m dreaming…is there someone out there who is gifted in research, and you’ve got a good tape recorder, and you’ve got two or three or four years, and you don’t have anything else to do? Would you at least go around and interview all these people and put it on tape so that men in the next generation can hear it? Why? For the sake, if the Lord does not come back, and I’m not going to make that statement anymore, for the sake of young men, maybe not yet born, who need to hear and to see and to know the work that God uniquely did in those men, the refining that they went through, the heart they had, the sacrifice that they went through, their understanding, comprehension, and living out of the cross of Jesus Christ. They had a testimony of Jesus. When I was a young kid, I used to read these things, and it did something to me. I have to believe that somewhere out there, it will do something again to someone.

I had lunch with Stephen today, and Mike asked him this question. “Is it just going to be the body, or will God in the future raise up a group of men?” And brother Stephen said, and he is absolutely correct, “It seems as though they come in bunches, and not one, but a whole bunch of them all at once, and then there’s nothing. Nothing. And then it starts again.” Well, I don’t know where that next group is. If the Lord tarries, and I said it again, didn’t I; if the Lord tarries. I don’t know where they are, but I want them to know that I had the privilege of hearing it orally, which affected my life. I don’t want to see it lost for that blank page not yet written on.

Now, to go any further, I’m going to be personal for a few minutes to make a point. I am of this land, and I care about this country. We see the passion in our Chinese brothers. We hear them speak. One of them once said to me, “If God opened the doors of China, tomorrow I’d leave, and I’d be back there, and you’d never see me again. They had it right; that’s the way it ought to be. They have such a passion for that place. They grew up there; they are of that soil. You look at brother Lance Lambert. He’s a little different. Here, brothers and sisters, we have the true British Israel. You heard it. It seeps out of every pore of his being. His burden for Israel. Say amen. You can feel it. You can hear it. You don’t even have to hear it. You can sense it. He’s of that land and of those people.

You know, you’ve heard about being born in a log cabin. That’s Americans saying, “Boy, I come from a log cabin.” I wonder if you ever heard of a dugout; that’s one rung lower than a log cabin. It’s a room dug out of the side of the hill. People put a pipe in it so air can get out, and they live in it because they own nothing. I doubt that anyone in this room has ever heard of anyone growing up in a storm cellar. They were about 6 ft. by 8 ft. My mother came from the… and this is a term, a social term; this is not a word of derision. You’ll find it in books on sociology. It’s a group of people just above the slaves. My mother was born poor white trash. My mother grew up in a storm cellar with two brothers and a sister. I saw a picture of my mother standing outside a cellar. Had a pipe on it. She was barefoot. She was dirty. She had on a dress. She had on absolutely nothing else. She was like a wild animal. My mother grew up in the most poverty-stricken strata of free men in America, in unmentionable, unbelievable conditions. My father was an illiterate Cajun. He was born and raised in the poorest county in America. It’s called Wind Parish, Louisiana. There was only one road in that entire county. It was right in front of the courthouse, a few feet long.

By the way, talking of long, that’s where Huey Long came from. My father did not speak French. My father did not speak English. Heaven knows what my father spoke. Till this day, I cannot be assured when I speak a word, if I’m going to pronounce it correctly. I really mean that, because my father had four ways to pronounce every word ever written. Some of my earliest memories are of living in a room, a home. It was our home. It was 8 ft. by 10 ft. My mother and daddy slept on a sofa. Over in the corner was an army cot. I’m sure you’ve seen them. You unfold them, and my brother and I slept together on that army cot. When he turned over, I turned over. When I turned over, he turned over. You didn’t get to sleep flat on your back. You slept on your side.

When I was 12 years old, my mother and daddy divorced. I was sent off to school. My mother went one way; my father, the other. I lived a year and a half after being in the military school for a year. I lived alone in a house for that year and a half. There was a four-room house with a zinc bathtub, and I doubt any of you know what I’m talking about. It had a sink and a bathtub. Do you know what I’m talking about? You don’t know, do you? From the time I was 15 years old to the day I married Helen, twelve months out of the year, I lived in a dormitory. But that’s not what I want to tell you. I want to tell you that my father was a roughneck, and I only remember one woman in my entire life, and that was my mother. Everybody else was 6’6, weighed 300 lb., and they were roughnecks. They are…, and if you’ve never lived in that, I don’t know anything to compare them to, unless it would be a coal miner from Wales.

The first time I ever stepped on an oil field platform, a 4×12 fell out of the top of the derrick and landed on a man’s head. We lived in that kind of danger every minute of our lives. I started working as a roughneck in the East Texas oil fields when I was 14. I’ve seen my helmet crushed over my head with no more than a quarter of an inch to spare. Steel shooting past our heads, sometimes when something would break, within inches of our eyes, our heads, our ears, our necks. We lived in that kind of danger. I can’t explain to you what it’s like to live constantly around steel and men who are illiterate, tough, crude, unruly, uncool, unkempt, nonsocial creatures. I worked in mud all day long up to my waist. I’ve come home and had to have my clothes taken off me by someone else. I lived in the toughest, roughest, meanest world a human being could grow up in.

When my mother and father divorced, I didn’t have anybody to tell me what the social amenities of life were. I remember, on the few occasions I walked into someone’s living room, how strange it felt in a house. I worked in oil fields during the summer to work my way through college. I know you’re saying, “Oh, what an interesting culture to explore.” That was the entire planet as I understood it. I remember when my mother used to get so angry; sometimes she would cry because we were always breaking things around the house. We had the mentality that everything was made out of steel, and it was always breaking because it wasn’t. I never understood anything but straight talk from tough men who probably average getting in one good fight every day like us. I married Helen. God love her. She’s known me for 37 years, she’s been married to me for 33. She’s one of the most socially correct human beings who has ever lived. God knows that woman has tried. I have never understood you as surely as you cannot understand me. I always think of Mel Trotter, the man who was on the Bowery, who went to England to speak after he had been saved to give his testimony. The British people got up and walked out because his language was so bad that it was butchering the king’s English. He said to the people, “Folks, please don’t get up and walk out. Please understand that when I got saved, I had to give up 90% of my vocabulary.

Well, strangely enough, I never cussed, and I never drank the beer. I never did a lot of those…I don’t know why I didn’t…because God chose me, that’s why. But that was the world I grew up in. I’m telling you for two reasons, and you’ve already figured out one of them. Now I’m going to tell you the other one.

This is my country, and I care about it deeply, deeply, and this page is blank. We don’t know what’s going to be written on it, but I can tell you this: you young men sitting down here and all of you, there has never been a deep work of God that originated, had its roots and beginnings, in the United States of America. It has always had to be imported from some other land, for we seem to be totally incapable of handling those things. I don’t believe that has to go on forever. I believe this country can give expression to an organic work of God that begins here among young men as it did in Foochow, with young men who gathered around Watchman Nee. That just can’t be. Somewhere in this country, men and women are going to have to learn experientially what the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ means in its deepest and bloodiest expression. Somewhere within this land has come a deep revelation of Jesus Christ, and a burning for his purpose, his house, and for things invisible in the heavens.