Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] I want to speak tonight on the adventure of serving God in faith. If you have your Bible, if you'll take those and turn to the gospel as Luke records it, the fifth chapter, Luke, chapter five.
[00:00:42] And it came to pass as the people pressed upon Jesus to hear the word of God.
[00:00:47] Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret. That's another word for the Sea of Galilee.
[00:00:53] Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret and he saw two ships standing by the lake.
[00:00:59] But the fishermen were gone out of them and were washing their nets. Now pause a moment. That's because the Sea of Galilee is so clear that fishing happens at night.
[00:01:11] So they have fished all night. Now they're washing their nets to put them away and go home for a good day's sleep.
[00:01:18] And he entered into one of the ships which was Simon's now that is Simon Peter, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land.
[00:01:28] And Jesus sat down and taught the people out of the ship.
[00:01:32] Now, when he had left speaking, he said to Simon, launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a draught.
[00:01:42] And Simon answering, said unto him, master, we have toiled all night and have taken nothing.
[00:01:49] Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.
[00:01:53] And when they had this done, they enclosed a great multitude of fish and their net broke. And they beckoned unto their partners which were in the other ship that they should come and help them. And they came and filled both the ships so that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus knees, saying, depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. For he was astonished and all that were with him at the draught of fishes which they had taken.
[00:02:23] And so was also James and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon. And Jesus said unto Simon, fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men.
[00:02:36] Put your hand on your Bible if you will, and let's pray together.
[00:02:39] There's a brother here tonight from Ghana. He speaks TREE so let me pray for you in the tree language.
[00:02:48] Let us pray.
[00:03:14] Lord, we praise you, we thank you, we give you honor and glory. Thank you, God, for your goodness, for the beauty of your holiness. We Praise you, God. Thank you. Now, Heavenly Father, I pray that you will speak to our hearts tonight. Call us out deeper, out further.
[00:03:35] We believe you for it. In the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God.
[00:03:43] Amen.
[00:03:49] Yes, God wants to bless us.
[00:03:52] Yes, God wants us to have a good life.
[00:03:57] Yes, Christianity is joyful. Yes, Christianity is wonderful.
[00:04:03] Having said all that, I do want to say that sometimes we in the west have gotten the idea that the whole purpose of Christianity is to make us comfortable.
[00:04:17] And I want to say to you that biblical Christianity, the heart and soul of serving God, is actually a high risk adventure.
[00:04:29] Pastor, I'm not trying to run your people off, but I want to say something to you tonight.
[00:04:35] It's not safe for you to be here.
[00:04:39] This is not a safe place to be.
[00:04:42] Because God is here.
[00:04:44] And God has. God has the power and the authority to say anything to you that he wants to. He see. He's like, see God and all.
[00:04:55] And he expects to speak to any of us at any time. And he expects to be obeyed.
[00:05:01] Every time you drive up in the parking lot of this church and tuck your Bible under your arm and start into this building, there ought to be a lump in your throat. You ought to say to yourself, ooh, anything could happen in there today because God is here.
[00:05:19] And God. God wants to stir us, to move us, to change us, to challenge us.
[00:05:27] His whole purpose in life is not necessarily to make us comfortable. Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion.
[00:05:36] So there are times when he wants to stir our lives up, and that's not bad.
[00:05:42] I believe there is an appetite for adventure inside of us, in all of us, which is there by the thumbprint of our Creator. There is something inside of us, all of us, to one extent or another, some of us have bludgeoned it into insensibility.
[00:05:59] But in all of us, there is some residual appetite for adventure.
[00:06:05] I can prove it to you.
[00:06:06] Why does anybody go to a scary movie? We take our popcorn and our Coke and go sit in a dark theater and say, okay, come on, scare the liver out of me.
[00:06:18] Why? Because it's a vicarious adventure. Or here's a better example.
[00:06:24] Anybody here ever do bungee jumping? I'm not talking about see it on tv. Has anybody here ever actually done bungee jumping? Will you raise your hand? Anybody? One right there. Anybody else? One right back there. Anybody else? Well, let me just say this. My mama didn't raise no fool.
[00:06:43] Climb up on a tall tower, Let a stranger tie a rope around your ankles and pay him to push you Off.
[00:06:55] What is up with that?
[00:06:57] I'll tell you what it is. It's the adventure of watching that ground rush up at you. That's an adrenal rush. And praying to God Almighty that they measured that rope. Right?
[00:07:14] Sometimes I get afraid that we have told young people in particular that Christianity is a, how can I say, a prissy faith, that it's easy and cushy. And I want to say something to you. When you read the stories of the New Testament, read the Book of Acts, saturate yourself in the Book of Acts, people that were on an adventure day to day, beaten, whipped, thrown in jail, shipwrecked, snake bitten. I'm talking about an adventure with God.
[00:07:53] And it is with us still may not all, they're all the same, but God calls us into a life of obedience. And when you step out onto the edge of obedience, the adventure starts.
[00:08:08] That's how it began with Simon Peter.
[00:08:12] He, Jesus walks into his boat and he says, look, the people are so crowded. Let me just go out from the land a little bit. Sit in your boat and preach. And he does.
[00:08:23] And then he turns to Simon Peter and he says, launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a draught.
[00:08:33] Sometimes Jesus could say things at two different levels and at the same time so that the words said one thing at an intellectual level, but they said another thing at a spiritual level. I think Peter realized when Jesus said that.
[00:08:50] I know he's talking about this boat, these nets on this lake, but something tells me he's not talking about this boat, these nets on this lake.
[00:09:03] That is actually the call of God to every one of our lives. Don't play it safe. If you wade in the shallow water, you may catch little tiny fish, but the big fish, the big fish are out in deep water and he summons us out. Peter learned that lesson. Do you remember later on, there's the night in the middle of the storm where Jesus walks out to the boat on the water? The disciples have gone ahead. Do you remember this story? The disciples have gone ahead and then they see Jesus coming through the storm and they think it's a ghost. The Bible says that. And they thought the King James Version calls it a spirit. They think it's a ghost, so they're all frightened.
[00:09:47] Am I the only one? Don't you think that sometimes Jesus must have laughed, can you know he's walking across the water toward him. And now it's a ghost. That's a ghost.
[00:09:58] Jesus said, not a ghost.
[00:10:01] It's me.
[00:10:02] It is I. And what Does Simon Peter say to him? He says, if that's you, bid me to come out there to you.
[00:10:12] Now why would he say that? He could have said, if that's you, make the storm be quiet, if that's you, turn the boat to a donut. He could have anything.
[00:10:21] But he says, if that's you, bid me to come out there to you. It's because he had learned from Jesus, from walking with Jesus, that Jesus summons us out where he is. He calls us out deeper.
[00:10:37] Now, the adventure, sometimes it doesn't always work, right?
[00:10:45] And I was in the ninth grade, right at the end of the Civil War, I, for some unimaginable reason in the ninth grade I made the varsity football team at my high school.
[00:11:01] I was a third string quarterback and a fourth string defensive back and a ninth grader on a varsity football team is really just a blocking dummy for the people to knock over and practice. But we were behind in one game so far. I think it was 42 to nothing when the coach sent me in to play cornerback. He just didn't want to risk the life of any good player. And he sent me in and I was playing defensive back on the first play. The other team had a running back that later became a college All American. He was a great player, I'll never forget. And they handed him the ball and he broke through into the deep secondary. And instead of coming at me, he went at a 45 degree angle across in front of me. And I said to myself, I'm fixing to make my reputation.
[00:11:56] I am going to deck this boy right here and put my helmet in his ribs.
[00:12:02] And I went at him.
[00:12:04] When I, when I woke up, I was, I was looking up at the stadium lights.
[00:12:12] He moved, he moved so fast he turned. I never saw him change direction. And in fact it was minutes before I saw anything.
[00:12:25] Now the whole thing is this.
[00:12:28] If there's no genuine risk, it's not a genuine adventure.
[00:12:35] So there are times when God will call us out in the adventure of faith. And it feels, let's just be honest, it feels scary because you're walking in faith and obedience doesn't mean that you won't ever feel fear. That's just something that you feel.
[00:12:56] But the, the adventure of serving God, the joy of it, salvation is like that to a certain extent.
[00:13:05] You get used to living your life lost and in bondage and in addiction of some kind. You can't really imagine what your life will be like without those things. They become so much a part of you. You can't really Imagine what life will be like without it. The idea of letting God carve that off of your life and take you into a new life is a little bit of a breathtaking adventure.
[00:13:30] The baptism of the Holy Spirit is like that. You don't really know what life in the Spirit is like.
[00:13:36] So the idea of God filling you with his Holy Spirit, of his sanctifying fire coming into your life and changing everything, it's a, it's a little bit of an over the waterfall in a barrel experience.
[00:13:50] When I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit when I was 28, a Methodist preacher, I had preached against it for seven years.
[00:14:00] I had never heard anybody speak in tongues until I did.
[00:14:04] I didn't even know what it was. When it first happened to me. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown.
[00:14:09] And suddenly it dawned on me.
[00:14:13] This is worse than a nervous breakdown.
[00:14:16] This is the end of my career in the Methodist church.
[00:14:20] And I realized that I was, I thought I was speaking in tongues. The man that prayed with me for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I looked up at him and I said, sir, do you think I may be speaking in tongues?
[00:14:33] And I have to forgive him, he burst out laughing.
[00:14:37] He just put his head back and started laughing.
[00:14:40] Here's this over educated 28 year old PhD laying in the floor, weeping, crying and speaking in tongues. And he said, son, if that's not tongues, there's no such thing.
[00:14:55] I was shocked. I said, what do you think I ought to do?
[00:14:59] What do you think I meant about my life?
[00:15:03] Look, suppose you were a paleontologist and you travel around lecturing everywhere that there's no such thing as dinosaurs anymore. The dinosaurs are all gone. The dinosaurs are all dead. Dinosaurs don't exist anymore. And then you come home one day and in your living room there's a Tyrannosaurus rex.
[00:15:25] Then your scientific theory has to give way to experiential reality.
[00:15:33] So I preach there's no such thing as tongues. And now I'm speaking in tongues. I realized the adventure had begun and everything changed. Everything changed. My life changed, my ministry changed, my career changed. I had no idea. The afternoon on December 5, 1975 when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I had no idea that between that day and this night that I would preach on every inhabited continent of the globe multiple times. That I would preach around the world more than once. That I would be held at guns point in an African coup d', etat. That I would be robbed at gunpoint. Listen, people say to me all the time, I don't know how to get my prayer life going.
[00:16:22] Okay, I can tell you how.
[00:16:26] A drunken African soldier with an AK47 jammed in your belly button. Your prayer life will jump.
[00:16:35] You'll be amazed what it will do for your prayer life.
[00:16:41] When I just received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, God brought me under the tutelage of an elderly non denominational Pentecostal missionary named Jim Mann in Mexico.
[00:16:58] Jim was not educated. He was a businessman who just felt led of the Lord to begin missions.
[00:17:08] And he just worked in Mexico. And I began to go to Mexico with him and travel around.
[00:17:13] And I saw face in that old man.
[00:17:18] We were going to speak. Every time I went, I would preach in the penitentiary at Tamaulipas. But he said we can't go in the penitentiary tomorrow. He said, I want to go find a village named Kanitas.
[00:17:31] I said, well, what about it? He said, I don't know.
[00:17:34] He said, many years ago I was in a restaurant and I heard some men talking at a table behind me. And one of them said something about the village of Canitas. It means in Spanish, means little canes. And he said, I just heard that word. And he said it's been in my heart all these years and tomorrow I want us to go find it. I said, what are you talking about?
[00:17:55] You heard the name of a village years ago. Do you know where it is? He said, no, I don't know where it is, but I think it may be near Tula. I said, oh God, Jim, Tula. It's over the mountains, it's down in the desert and you don't even know where it is. He said, don't go.
[00:18:12] He said, I'm not asking you to go.
[00:18:15] I said, I'll go. I couldn't let the old man go by himself.
[00:18:19] We drove. We went over the mountains. We drove down in the desert. We stopped at every Pemex station from Dan to Beersheba. Donde esta Canytas? Donde Estacany? Nobody, nobody ever heard of it.
[00:18:32] I said, jim, we're going to get lost. We're to going. We got lost.
[00:18:36] I knew we'd get lost.
[00:18:38] I was so irritated at that old man. Finally we got off the road.
[00:18:44] In the desert sometimes you can't tell where the road is and where the desert. We got off the road, we're out in the desert and the truck broke down.
[00:18:56] I said, jim, what are we going to do? He said, do you know how to fix a truck? I said, I have no idea how to fix a truck. He said, neither do I.
[00:19:08] I said, what are we going to do? It was hot. It was so hot. The Mexican desert. You can't believe you feel your brain melting.
[00:19:15] And I said, jim, what are we going to do? He said, I don't know what you're going to do. He said, I'm going to go right over here. There was a little tiny shrub of a tree that had a puddle of shade at the bottom. About the size of this right here. He said, I'm going to lie down right here with my head in the shade and I'm going to see how God fixes the this.
[00:19:34] I can't tell you how that irritated me.
[00:19:38] I said, this crazy old coot has gotten us killed. We're out here in the middle of the desert. I am 29. I don't want to die like this.
[00:19:49] I'm pacing around. He's just laying there. Finally I went over and kicked the sole of his boot. I said, jim, we've got to do something. He said, what?
[00:20:00] What do you want to do? Well, I said, I don't know. But we can't just lay here. He said, I'm going to.
[00:20:07] He said, mark, when you come to the end of your hoarded resources, our father's full giving has only begun.
[00:20:16] I said, now here in the desert, you're going to quote a hymn to me.
[00:20:22] He went back to sleep.
[00:20:24] In a little while, coming out across the desert, God is my witness.
[00:20:30] A cloud of smoke, little tiny. And it got. Came closer and closer and closer. And I realized there was a truck coming toward us across the desert, rattling.
[00:20:40] It came closer and closer. Jim lifted his head up and lifted his hat and he said, ah, that would be it.
[00:20:46] I said, that would be what? He said, God's answer.
[00:20:49] And he laid back down and went back to sleep.
[00:20:53] That truck came closer and closer. It was a beat up old blue panel truck, just rattling like it was going to fall to pieces. It pulled up to us in a cloud of dust. A teenage boy got out and the panel truck door was held together with a rope. And he untied that rope. He jumped out with four or five tools and a blue bandana. He climbed up on the hood of our truck, lifted the hood up like that and he pointed at me and went like this. So I went inside. I turned the engine. He tinkered around with it. He said, otra, do it again. I turned it again. It fired up. He slammed it down and he got back in his van and they took off.
[00:21:34] I said, do you know those people?
[00:21:37] Jim said, how would I know? Them. I've never been here before in my life. I said, where did they come from? He said, you know everything I know.
[00:21:45] I said, are you telling me that out here in the middle of the desert God spoke to some people to send a Mexican teenagers with four tools and a blue bandana?
[00:21:55] He said, did you see it or not?
[00:22:01] We got in the truck. I know this sounds unreasonable.
[00:22:04] I should have been overjoyed. I found myself irritated at that level of faith.
[00:22:12] We drove along for a while.
[00:22:13] I said, we still don't know where Canytas is.
[00:22:18] He said, now, Mark, if God would send people from nowhere into the middle of the desert to fix our truck and ride off. They never said another word.
[00:22:28] Don't you think he can guide us to Canytas?
[00:22:33] We finally found another road. We drove along and at one point there were three people, two men and a woman sitting beside the road.
[00:22:41] And Jim said, let's ask them.
[00:22:43] So we pulled up beside them. I rolled the window down and I said, donde esta Canitas?
[00:22:49] And they got up, began to brush the dust off there, opened the door of our truck, began to get in the back seat. I said, jim, they're getting in. He said, something's going on.
[00:23:06] They said, we're from the village of Kenitas.
[00:23:09] They said, we're the only Christians in our village.
[00:23:12] And they said last night we were praying. One of the men said, and he said, this woman had a word of knowledge.
[00:23:20] Go out to the main highway and sit there and tomorrow I will send men to you that are going to build a church in your village.
[00:23:34] They said, we've been waiting since sunup. We thought you'd never get here. And Jim said, well, we got a little lost.
[00:23:42] We went to the village and in faith they had taken the edge of a shovel and they had marked out the dimensions of a church.
[00:23:55] And I went back to the United States and Jim and I raised the money. And I want to tell you something.
[00:24:00] There is a church today in the village of Canitas, Mexico.
[00:24:09] It was my first full fledged immersion into the adventure of faith.
[00:24:17] And it seems like God has never let up.
[00:24:24] In 1981, Ministry Global Servants was doing well, beginning to preach all over the United States.
[00:24:35] But the only place I'd ever been out of the States was to Mexico.
[00:24:40] And anymore you can't tell when you've left Texas. But it was, it was not what I wanted to do.
[00:24:49] Foreign missions wasn't what I was after.
[00:24:53] I was in my house one night in Georgia.
[00:24:59] I woke up suddenly and I had the feeling that somebody was in the house.
[00:25:05] Somebody had broken into my house.
[00:25:08] It was very startled. I'm fully awake.
[00:25:12] I got up and came down the stairs, you know, yelling, I'm coming down there. And I'm really big too, you know.
[00:25:22] And this, this sawed off shotgun gonna hurt somebody. Of course, I didn't know I have a gun in the house.
[00:25:27] There was nobody.
[00:25:29] I went all over the house, there was nobody there.
[00:25:34] But I felt wide awake and like there was somebody in my house.
[00:25:40] I sat in a chair and to this day, I don't know what to call it.
[00:25:47] Call it a vision or something.
[00:25:53] I just had a sense of countries.
[00:25:59] And I realized as those countries came up off of the map that God was saying, those are places I'm going to take you to preach.
[00:26:07] And became so real to me that I could see them place names.
[00:26:13] And then the word came in my heart.
[00:26:17] I'm going to take you to all those places, but first I want you to go to Ghana.
[00:26:22] I have to tell you the honest truth. In 1981, I wasn't 100% sure where Ghana was.
[00:26:30] I got my children's encyclopedia. Anybody remember actual books?
[00:26:40] I got the G Encyclopedia and began to read. And when I began to read about Ghana, for some reason I just began to weep.
[00:26:50] And I was crying, my tears were falling on the encyclopedia.
[00:26:54] And I had this second sort of.
[00:26:59] I don't know what to call it. Vision is a hard word for me. I don't know what to call it.
[00:27:04] I saw myself as clearly as I can see you all. I saw myself standing at the. At the foot of a tree.
[00:27:16] And there were African people in front of me, all like this, hundreds of them.
[00:27:22] And there was a man standing beside me with his Bible in his hand.
[00:27:27] And I. I saw him clearly. I mean, I just looked in his face. We were this close.
[00:27:35] And I heard again, go to Ghana.
[00:27:40] No direction, no clarification.
[00:27:45] I said, lord, what do you want me to do?
[00:27:49] Now? Here's the thing. On an adventure, you don't plunge.
[00:27:53] You wait.
[00:27:54] Wait for confirmation. You wait for direction. I began to wake. But I wanted that to happen a month, two months, three months, five months.
[00:28:05] In July, I went to a meeting at a Methodist church where they said there was a college president from Ghana that was speaking from some little College in Ghana. Dr. Brew Riverson. I went there, introduced myself. He gave me his card. I didn't tell him anything, but I got his card. He went home. I wrote him a letter. Dear Dr. Riverson, I met you at the Methodist church. I. I Feel like God is telling me to come to Ghana, and I would like a letter of invitation from you. Would you write me and ask me to come to Ghana?
[00:28:39] I never heard from him.
[00:28:42] July went, August went. September went.
[00:28:46] I. I wanted this to happen. And I began to complain to God.
[00:28:51] You're calling me to come to Ghana. How?
[00:28:55] Finally, I went to hear a man preaching. He was from Kenya.
[00:28:59] And the second temptation when you're trying to serve God in an adventure is that you'll make it happen yourself.
[00:29:07] And so I said, okay, Kenya, Ghana, they're in the same continent. God's probably not choosy.
[00:29:17] So I went to this guy and told him I wanted to come to Kenya and preach. He said, great, come.
[00:29:23] And the closer I got to that trip, the more nervous I became. Something was wrong. I began to feel something's wrong. My wife begged me. She said, don't go. Don't go. If you have that feeling, please don't go.
[00:29:36] The night before I was to leave, that man called me from Nairobi. He said, something has happened in my church and you can't come.
[00:29:46] I was so relieved that the trip was off.
[00:29:51] Finally, I began to feel that what I should do was just buy a ticket and go.
[00:30:01] So I went to my pastor, and I thought surely he would talk me out of it, that he would say, no, Brother Mark, don't do that. He said, oh, that's what to do. He said, do. He said, nine months you've been struggling with this. Go on and do it. Buy the ticket. Just go. He said, and put the monkey on God's back. I said, you're not the person I would need to talk to.
[00:30:28] So I went, I talked to my wife. Surely a man's wife doesn't want him to plunge off into Africa without. I said, baby, you think I. Oh. She said, that's the answer. Go on and go do it.
[00:30:41] So I went to a travel agency, and I said to the girl on the travel agency, I want to get a round trip ticket to Ghana. She said, you know, the State Department has put a travel Advisory on Ghana, 1981. You may not remember, but it was a communist military dictatorship. It was under the control of a man named J.J. rawlings, who had taken the government by the gun.
[00:31:03] The borders were closed. There was no food in the country. It was a horrible, horrible time.
[00:31:08] Awful time. Secret Police everywhere, curfew, 10 at night until 5 in the morning. They shoot you on the street and no questions asked. She said, there's a State Department travel advisory on the to go. I Said, just give me the ticket.
[00:31:25] I flew to London. The airline that I went on, this is so long ago. The airline that I went on doesn't even exist anymore. British Caledonian.
[00:31:34] I flew on BCAL to London, and when I got to London, there was a lady there with a sign said, Mark Rutland. I went to her. She said, the airport in Accra is closed.
[00:31:45] You'll have to get on a plane and go back to the U.S. i said, that is great.
[00:31:50] That's wonderful news. And I felt the Lord say to me, I told you to go to Ghana.
[00:31:58] So I told her, I said, I need to go in the restroom.
[00:32:02] I ran in the men's room. I know she was thinking, wow, long flight.
[00:32:08] I raced in the men's room, put myself in a stall, and I said, lord, I'm trying to go.
[00:32:15] Do I? I can't swim.
[00:32:17] What do you want me to do? And the thought came in my mind, ask British Caledonian how long they have to put you up in London because they can't get the flight to Accra.
[00:32:28] So I went out to the lady and I said, look, I've got a ticket to Accra. You should put me up here in London. She said, here's what we'll do. We'll put you up here for three days.
[00:32:40] On the third day, if Accra airport doesn't open, you have to pay your own way back to the United States. If our airport in Accra opens, your flight, your ticket is still good.
[00:32:52] On the third day, they call me in my hotel room and they said, your flight leaves in 45 minutes. It was a airport hotel. I dashed down to the gate, I got on, got to Accra.
[00:33:07] It was awful.
[00:33:09] It was horrible. People had stolen the light bulbs. There was people yelling. It was. It was a nightmare.
[00:33:18] Now, Ghana is a beautiful country. Great country, Great Airport. 1981, the airport, Kodaka Airport was a nightmare. I was frightened. I was out of place. I didn't know what I was doing. I got through, got through the first isle of the thing. And a soldier came with a gun and said, go in that room. I went in and he held his gun on me and he said, I want $400American.
[00:33:45] I was so scared.
[00:33:48] I was shaken. And I reached in my pocket and pulled out my passport. Listen to me, don't do this, don't do this.
[00:33:58] I pulled my passport out and said, I'm an American citizen. Like anybody would care.
[00:34:05] Don't do that. Stand up and start singing. Oh, Canada. Nobody's mad at them.
[00:34:11] I said, I'm an American citizen. He jerked my passport out of my hand and slapped me with it. He said, CIA.
[00:34:19] CIA.
[00:34:21] I said, now give me that passport. I was shaken. I said, I'm not giving you the money.
[00:34:27] I said, I'm an important man in the United States.
[00:34:32] At least I'm important to my wife.
[00:34:34] I said, if you shoot me, there's going to be an international incident. But I said, I'm going out of this room. I'm going out. I was walking out, I could feel those bullets in my spine.
[00:34:47] I went out, I opened the door, stepped out and there was a captain standing there. I had his captain bars on. And I said, I said, captain, this soldier is trying to rob me.
[00:34:57] And he came in and he yelled at that guy and they were speaking tree. I couldn't understand a word of it. And he yelled at him and he went out and the captain drew his sidearm and stole my watch.
[00:35:11] It was a cheap Timex and I felt really I'd trade it up.
[00:35:18] I walked out on the front of that airport with my suitcase and it dawned on me. I had no idea what to do.
[00:35:31] So a taxi pulled up and this guy's yelled to me. I went and got in the taxi. He said, where do you want to go?
[00:35:39] I said, okay, see, that's where we've got a problem.
[00:35:44] I said, I don't know where to go. He said, well, why are you here? I said, okay, I don't know.
[00:35:53] He stared at me like I was crazy.
[00:35:57] And I said, where do the British Caledonian flight crews, where do they stay when they come? He said, no, England won't allow them to stay. They don't leave the airport.
[00:36:06] He said, it's dangerous and they stay in the airport.
[00:36:11] I said, do you know a hotel where there are foreigners to stay? He said, I'll take you to the Continental Hotel, the Intercontinental Hotel. We went there. When I got to the desk, the man behind the desk said, you're an American? I said, yes. He said, this hotel is full of East. This was before the Berlin Wall.
[00:36:30] He said, this hotel is full of East Germans and they're all drunk and they're mean. He said, now you listen to me. You go in your room and you stay in your room.
[00:36:40] And he said, do not come out on the street. There's a siren that'll go off at 10 o' clock until 5 in the morning. You walk out on that street and they'll shoot you, no questions asked.
[00:36:51] They'll machine gun nests at the intersections.
[00:36:55] Yet again, I do want to say to you, your Prayer life, people say, I just don't believe I can pray all night. Oh, yes, you can.
[00:37:12] Next morning, the siren went off. The water came back. They turned the water off in the hotel. Water came back on. I took a shower and got dressed, sat on the end of my bed.
[00:37:27] I said, well, I'm here, Lord.
[00:37:32] There was a knock on my door, and there stood a man there.
[00:37:37] He said, Are you Dr. Mark?
[00:37:39] I said, yes, I am.
[00:37:42] He said, my name is Godfrey Bampfo. I've come to find you.
[00:37:47] I wanted to kiss him on the mouth.
[00:37:52] I said, who are you? Why are you here?
[00:37:57] Listen. Listen to what had happened. Listen to this.
[00:38:01] The letter that I wrote to Dr. Riverson, that college president, I mailed on July 1.
[00:38:09] It arrived in Kumasi, Ghana, on December 3, the same day that I arrived in Accra, 150 miles away.
[00:38:21] He put the letter in his inside coat pocket and went to a faculty prayer meeting.
[00:38:26] And he got there, he pulled it out, and he said to the faculty members, I got this letter from this American. He wants to come and he wants us to invite him. But he said, it just seems like a terrible time to invite an American to come to our country, but we ought to pray about it. And they knelt down to pray. And one of the professors at that little college, his name is Mack Obremenu, he later went to be on the faculty at Harvard. I know him very, very well. They knelt down to pray, and Mack Obremenu had a word of prophecy. He said, we got to quit praying. He said, that man is in the country. He's already here.
[00:39:02] And they said, well, where is he? He said, I don't have any idea, but he's in the country right now.
[00:39:06] So they called a man named Godfrey Bamfo. The only telephone number they knew in Accra. If you understood the telephone system in 1981, you'd understand what a miracle that was. And they said, there's a white man in this. We think he's in Accra. His name is Dr. Mark. And he said, where is he? They said, we don't know.
[00:39:27] And he prayed and he went to three hotels. And the third hotel he came to, he said, do you have an American here? They said, yeah, he's upstairs in his room. He came up and knocked on my door. I was there from the 3rd of December until Christmas Eve. And I never went a single day without preaching multiple times. I had no agenda, didn't know anybody. God opened every door day after day after day after day. It was an absolutely miracle trip. But the greatest miracle.
[00:39:57] I was at the President's house, a little tiny house at Wesley College in Kumasi, and somebody came and said, they want you to come and preach at a fellowship out at the village of Santasi. Would you come and go out there?
[00:40:12] So I said, yes.
[00:40:14] I went out there to the school at Santasi, and it was empty. I said, well, nobody came. They said, no, there was too many of them. We couldn't get them in the school. They're down in the cocoa grove.
[00:40:24] So we went down a pathway to the cocoa grove, and they said, they've been here for hours waiting for you to come. They've been singing and praying and everything else, but they're ready.
[00:40:35] Don't wait. Just go on up there. They said, go to that tree and preach.
[00:40:39] So I took my Bible and stepped up to the tree. A man came out of the crowd and stood beside me, and he said, I'm going to translate. I'm ready to help you when you want me to. And I turned and looked at him, and it was the man I had seen in my house.
[00:40:57] And we have worked together. He is my dearest friend, my. He is closer to me than my own flesh and blood brother. His name is Samuel Odano, and he has worked with us ever since. All the work in Africa, all the work that we've done in India, all that we did in South America, all that we've done in Thailand, all that, every bit of that. None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for that one splendid moment at the foot of that tree in. In a communist military dictatorship at a horrible time.
[00:41:30] I'm telling you.
[00:41:33] Here's what I want to be clear on. This is important.
[00:41:37] People might say, boy, wasn't he brave. I was frightened every single day.
[00:41:43] I kept feeling like a fool. I kept saying, I'm in the wrong place. I've done the wrong thing. This is stupid. I'm in the flesh. I've gone out ahead of God. And every day God would open a door and another door and another door, and all that has happened was because of that.
[00:41:59] Look, whether it's the. The gifts of the spirit, the operation of the gifts, that.
[00:42:08] That takes a sense of adventure.
[00:42:11] So you. You think people ask me all the time, they say, I think I may have the gift of healing. How would I find out? I said, pray with sick people.
[00:42:26] But. But I think we want to wait until somebody gets healed before we pray. You. There comes a point where you have to stretch your hands out and pray.
[00:42:37] Does everybody get healed? No.
[00:42:40] There are times when you feel foolish, somebody you pray for and they don't get healed. But I. Not everybody I've prayed for ever got healed. But I will say this. I've seen enough healings to keep me praying.
[00:42:54] Who gets healed, who doesn't, that's up to God.
[00:42:57] All. All gifts.
[00:43:00] The church where I was pastoring, Methodist church, people begin to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Power of God. Moving.
[00:43:09] One was a lady, a single mom.
[00:43:12] She was raising two wild boys.
[00:43:16] What were their names? Jesse and Frank, I think.
[00:43:19] And she got the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
[00:43:26] And God lit her life up.
[00:43:30] Lit her life up.
[00:43:32] She changed the look on her face changed, her posture changed, her life changed. And God began to use her in a word of knowledge.
[00:43:41] And I, you know, I don't rush into things. But over and over and over again, she began to be proved correct.
[00:43:49] I was preaching at an out of town revival one time.
[00:43:52] The phone rang in the pastor's study and pastor answered and he said, oh, Brother Ellen, this is for you. It's a woman at your church. I said, hello, Margaret, is that you? She said, yes. She said, brother Ellen, I was just praying for you while I was washing the dishes. And God said to me, there's a lady in that church named Ruth, and she's having trouble with her daughter, and she's come tonight to get prayer about her daughter. I said, thank you. I turned to the pastor, I said, pastor, that's a woman in my church. God has used her so frequently. And she says, there's a woman named Ruth that's there tonight and needs prayer for ministry. He said, well, Brother Rutland, the only thing is this is a small church. I know everybody in this church. There's nobody in this church named Ruth.
[00:44:34] I said, that's fine. Great. Let's go.
[00:44:37] He got up, the study was like right over here.
[00:44:41] And there was a diamond shaped window in the little study. And he put his hand on the doorknob and looked out. He looked at the front row and he stepped back. He said, oh, my God.
[00:44:50] I said, what is it? He said, when I told you there's no woman in this church named Ruth, I wasn't lying to you.
[00:44:56] He said, ten years ago, a lady named Ruth in this church spit on me. She spit in my face and cursed me. And she's left. He said, she's sitting in the front row now. I had faith.
[00:45:10] I said, bring her to the man of God.
[00:45:16] He went out and got her and brought her in.
[00:45:19] And I told her I Said, look, a lady just called from my church.
[00:45:25] And she said, there's a woman named Ruth there tonight that needs ministry about her daughter.
[00:45:30] Is there something wrong?
[00:45:32] And that woman fell out of her chair on her stomach and grabbed the pastor's ankles.
[00:45:38] And she said, oh, Pastor, I'm sorry.
[00:45:42] She said, I'm sorry. Can you ever forgive me? I'm sorry.
[00:45:46] She said, my daughter just called me tonight from San Francisco and she's marrying her lesbian lover. And she said, I know I planted the seeds for this.
[00:45:59] Can you ever forgive me?
[00:46:01] Look, that, that didn't have anything to do with that pastor or with me.
[00:46:07] That had to do with a single mom washing her dishes who stepped out into the adventure of serving God.
[00:46:15] It's not always going to be a breathtaking journey to Africa or a truck broken down in the Mexican desert.
[00:46:22] Sometime it's just going to be doing what you're told.
[00:46:27] And I fear that that's the kind of Christianity that we quit talking about you young guys listen to an old dude. I, I pastored. I, I was the president of two different universities for 16 years.
[00:46:41] And I, I love the little brats. I did. I mean, our beloved students.
[00:46:48] Sometimes they would ask me, they'd say, brother Roland, will you.
[00:46:52] I don't know what God's destiny for my life is. What should I do? I said, I can tell you pass algebra, go to class right now. You do what's before you.
[00:47:10] You do what's before you. You keep doing that, you learn obedience. You grow in obedience.
[00:47:17] And then God calls you, and he calls you out deeper. Launch out into the deep is part of the command of God. For real Christianity, Deep water Christianity.
[00:47:29] It can be anything.
[00:47:33] I preached at the First Methodist Church in Marietta, Georgia, one night on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I was staying in some people's home. Beautiful, beautiful home.
[00:47:43] Multimillion dollar home. It was gorgeous. They were childless couple, older couple. And I had driven over to the church with the husband. The wife came in her car. When I gave the invitation for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the lady came forward, she knelt. It, you know, it was a Methodist church. Those communion rails. You know what I'm. She knelt at the communion. I was on the inside. She said, oh, I want the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But she said, I'm afraid. I said, what are you afraid of?
[00:48:11] She said, you've been in my house, Dr. Oland. My whole house is decorated with antiques. She said, I have no idea of the money in those antiques.
[00:48:23] I said, what are you afraid of? She Said, I'm afraid God will make me give them away.
[00:48:31] She said, can you promise me that if I receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, God won't take my antics? I said, I cannot not promise you that. I say, he may want them all tonight.
[00:48:42] I said, I said, absolutely cannot promise you that. I said, the only thing is, if you want the baptism of the Holy Spirit, give them to him.
[00:48:52] Give them to him. Leave that to God. And she did.
[00:48:57] She broke. It was so beautiful. She said, God, I give you everything. It's all yours from this moment on. My house, the antiques, everything I've got, it belongs to you.
[00:49:07] So we were standing after the service here, like at the front talking. Her, me, the pastor and her husband came over and said, it's starting to snow. I'm going to go home and put the dog in the garage. She said, get a blanket for the dog and I'll be home. I'll bring Dr. Rutland in my car.
[00:49:21] We drove. Later, we pulled up in the driveway and the headlights shined into the garage and she stopped the car and put her head on the steering wheel and started laughing.
[00:49:31] I said, what's so funny? She said, the dog. The dog.
[00:49:35] I said, ma', am, I see the dog. I don't know what's funny. She said, I sent my idiot husband home to put a blanket on the dog. She said, that's a $40,000 antique quilt.
[00:49:51] I said, well, run and get it. She said, no, no. She said, I gave it to God. If God wants to give it to the dog, that's God's business.
[00:50:04] The adventure of serving God sometimes is scary.
[00:50:07] Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's joyful, it's powerful. It's the character and nature of high risk Christianity.
[00:50:18] I'm not saying you can't go to heaven without that kind of a risk.
[00:50:22] What I'm saying is you miss a lot of what biblical New Testament Christianity is supposed to be about.
[00:50:30] Listen to the voice of God come up higher, come out deeper.
[00:50:38] Do what I say, follow me, obey me, launch out into the deep, and I'll show you things that you'll never be able to have any other with it.
[00:50:58] You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x@ Dr. Mark Rutland, or visit his website, Dr.markrutland.com, where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
