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

Back in the 1920s, I suppose it was, I’m not exactly sure the dates when this happened, a missionary left Kentucky and went to China under the Methodists, a single woman, who remained single till she died at the age of 76, I think, in the city of Los Angeles. She left the Methodist mission, very much like Sister Barbara left the CMS. She left the Methodists and joined the work where brother Nee was, becoming part of a group of sisters from the Caucasian world, the Western world. I didn’t have a sister Barbara, but I had the help of a saint. Her name was Beta Sheirich. No one seems to know her very well. I knew her well.

Somewhere God took from Beta the ability to sleep when she returned to America, and she could not sleep; this was her testimony. So, she began to pray, learned to pray, and became a living prayer. She’s a kind of human being…you only meet one or two of these in your lifetime…that if she were standing on the other side of a 12-foot brick wall, you could feel her presence. She was a hidden vessel. I sat one day on the steps watching her swing a little child. It was the greatest presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ I have ever beheld in my life. I sat there on the steps for an hour, awed by God and that woman. From the time she returned to the United States till the day she died, she always prayed that the Lord might raise workers: American workers in this country. She died. The brother she was living with said she’d walk around the house muttering to herself, “Lord, where are the workers?” She prayed so long. One day, the Lord took her, and she was still asking, “Where are the workers?”

That woman did me a great disservice. She met me in my wild youth. I was 31, and she began praying for me. I don’t know why in the world that woman started picking on me. I was told later that she picked up the names of three brothers. This is one of my legends. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I do know who the other two brothers are. And you know, one ended up in a messed-up life, and the other one is somewhere doing something, I don’t know what, but I felt like that woman’s prayers have dogged me and protected me all of my life. But before I had ever met her, before I had ever met the brothers and sisters who were to affect my life so profoundly, when I was 29 years old, the Lord showed me what to me was something that had to come if ever we were to see the next step in restoration, recovery.

And now I’m getting old. I’m only 55, but the fact is I’m 103.  And this is spontaneous. There’s nothing subconscious to this whatsoever. I literally find myself walking around the house spontaneously saying, “Lord, where are they called? Lord, where are they called? And every once in a while, I meet one, and he’s going off to Bible school. And every once in a while, I meet one. He’s at my front door, and he stays for six weeks, and he didn’t like the way someone in the fellowship parted their hair or sneezed into their handkerchief. I ask myself, where is the mettle? Where is the fiber that makes the kind of men who recover the ways of God? I pray, and I ask, and I talk to myself, and I find myself in the uncomfortable place of that dear sister from Kentucky who died some years ago. I don’t want to be in her place. I don’t want to die saying, “Lord, where are the called?” And the next page of church history is blank, and it has not yet been written on.

Now, I’m going to tell you one other simple little thing I think we really need. I think it’s one of those paramount things that’s got to come. It’s got to come. How it’s going to come, I don’t know. By some work and the amazing mercy and grace of God. Okay. I was trying to trace the origins of seminaries and became one of the world’s leading living scholars of the history of Western education, seeking to find where they originated. I think I know everything there is to know about the history of Western education, including religious education, and I never found a single sentence about where seminaries came from. I wanted to know, and I had one of those lucky strikes here just a few weeks ago. I was at Southwestern Seminary, met one of my professors in the hall, and we were talking, and I asked him, and he said, “Oh, they began in 1545 at the Council of Trent.” Man, I went to the library and started looking for the Council of Trent.

I could tell you, and take a week to do it. Show you the history of how ministers are trained and how workers are raised up throughout all of the last 1700 years, and where the whole blooming mess came from, and why it won’t work, and why it’s not proper, and why we are in seminaries. It’s another thing that the Western Christian mind can look straight at the Bible and find the seminary. Now, that’s a trick. When God came out of heaven… when God came to this earth in human flesh, He knew what He wanted to do to raise up some workers. Now, can you agree with that? He didn’t get that from Judaism. He got that from Himself. And He chose a way.

Now, why in the world the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ has never been fought to be restored in the raising up of workers, I do not know. Well, I remember being taught in the seminary that I never preach on anything…my professor said that doctrines are like a curry comb; oh, my cow, you’re not from Texas. A Curry comb; you clean horses with them. The big teeth are on this side, and the little teeth are on this side. We do this. He said it’s like a curry comb. Always preach on the things where the big teeth are, never the little teeth. And if we had the Lord Jesus ministry alone to present to us, we would have very little.

Now I have tried to saturate myself with an understanding of how the Lord Jesus Christ raised up those 12 men. I’ve read books written on the subject. I’ve looked it up in the Scripture, and it just drenches me how God raised up workers for recovery. But if it were only one example, we might say it was a happenstance, but boy, when you get two witnesses, you don’t ever go start seminary or a Bible school. You don’t ever start anything. You go back and become faithful to the word of God.

And brothers and sisters, there were two times that God distinctly and clearly raised up workers in exactly the same way. One was in the life of our Lord on this earth with 12 men, all Jewish men, being raised up by the Lord Jesus Christ for the building of His church upon this earth. I’m going to say a few things. First of all, those men lived in the presence of God. That’s where they lived. Would you disagree with that? They lived in the presence of God. They learned from Him. Not just His teachings, and I’m sure they got those, but those teachings were lost on those men until He came inside of them.

But I tell you what they did, do they? They watched Him fellowship with the Father, and they watched Him like a hawk day and night because they knew something was going on inside, and He made it evident to them. Then, when He was inside of them, they set up those same wondrous lines of communication, but He’s not here anymore, so what shall we do? Well, then, we shall look to the ministry of Paul of Tarsus, and we will be very, very careful as we do. We’ll try to stay as unemotional as we can, and we will realize that he was a young man who had the privilege of sitting under Barnabas, who sat under the 12 who sat under the Lord. I’m going to give you apostolic succession here. Okay, here it comes. He also learned from his Lord, whom he met in heavenly realms. Then he went out under the tutorship of one Barnabas in the planting of churches, and then he got on his own and went out and planted some others with Silas, who was also a balance to him. Then, on his third journey, an older man who had been through everything. The Revelation speaks of having gone through blood up to the horse’s bed. Well, he had gone through blood up to the horse’s bed. He now leaves, taking a young man named Timothy with him.

Now, please mark this. He is not young. He is old, and he has never tried to bring forth gentile workers when he was young or middle-aged. In fact, he is going to be raising up some Gentiles in what he believes to be the last days of his life. All the prophecies and everything are indicating this is it, Paul. I want to show you the greatest genius that I have ever found in the New Testament, and a witness to the ways of the work of God to which we must return. But I want you to look at those young men more than you look at Paul. Please look at Timothy. Let’s say he came from the town of Lystra. He gets saved, watches the birth of the church in his hometown, lives there, and grows up a brother in that church. He’s been through every experience of that church. He’s under the elders, is in church life and background, and he’s learning about the Lord Jesus.

Down here in Berea, where they go to the Hebrew synagogue and read the scripture, is Sopater, who gets saved, and he is at the beginning of a church, and he watches it grow, and he’s part of it, and he’s a young kid, and he grows up there. There’s Aristarchus, and the second child of somebody, named Secundus. Both of these men, pagans living in the town of Thessalonica when Paul came through preaching the gospel, got saved. They watch the birth of the church and the maturing of the church, and they grow up there, and they see all of its needs and all of its problems, and they are not looking for heaven on earth. They have a gut-level view of what the church really is.