RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Revival and Evangelism: The Light of Evangelism
I want to welcome you to week 2 and day 1 of our study on revival and evangelism. Today we’re going to talk about the light shattering the darkness.
Now, when we talk about revival – revival is a display of the glory of God. It’s His light being made known in very dark places. One of the things that it’s very important for us to understand is that God doesn’t send revival just so that we can all say “Oh, boy, this is fun. This is exciting, Hallelujah, don’t we have wonderful fellowship!”
Oh, I tell you what – there is great joy when God revives our hearts. There is great fellowship with other Christians when God revives our hearts. But what God does is – He gets us back to that real purpose to which we were created .. to which He had saved us. And that purpose is to shatter the darkness – to go into the dark world with the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, as you read in your daily readings, you read in my book Fire in Your Heart .. about me penetrating and going into the communist youth world festival. And what I discovered was that God does extraordinary things when we get out of just dancing in the light and we start going into the darkness and penetrating the darkness with the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And there was an old German-Lutheran pastor who had said – uh – that he had been arrested under Hitler’s regime because he refused to ‘heil hitler’. And when the communists took over East Germany, then they wouldn’t allow him to preach. And – so I went into East Germany – East Berlin and I met this old man and I’ll never forget what he told me.
Because he couldn’t preach when someone would come visit him he would – he would always point his finger and preach at him – and he was preaching to me you know and he said – he said “Oh I tell you, next year there’s going to be 100,000 communist young people gathered from all over the world to be trained to evangelize the world for atheism and communism. I want you to pray about coming and telling them about Jesus.”
And I said, “Wait a minute .. they’d never let me do that.”
He said, “You pray about it. With men, it may be impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Well, I prayed about it and God spoke to my heart. Two friends of mine and myself went and we saw the most extraordinary thing .. people ask me all the time, “Sammy, how did your ministry of evangelism get started world-wide?” It started at that communist youth world fest.
We walked around just saying Lord, we’re here, the light of your son is shining inside us but we don’t know what to do. And as we walked around, people could tell we were from the west and not like them. So they would come up to us and these communist young people wore these scarves and on .. and they’d come and they’d say would you sign our scarves – give an autograph.
And so we would write the gospel .. one of my friends wrote “God loves you and has a plan for your life” and would sign his name and then my other friend would write “but we’ve all sinned and come short of God’s glory” and he would sign his name and I would write “but Jesus is God’s provision for man’s sin” and I’d sign my name.
Before we knew it, there were hundreds of young people gathered around us and we just were signing scarves and then I became more courageous and I began to preach the gospel. I don’t have time to tell the whole story .. maybe later on I’ll share a little more with you of what happened. But we saw thousands .. literally thousands of young people hear the gospel and hundreds of them came to Christ.
In fact, they were from all over Eastern Europe, places where Christians were persecuted. Ninty-five percent of those young people followed through with their commitment to Christ. We began to go to their cities and towns and follow up with them and discovered that they were involved in churches and those churches began to ask us to come and preach and that’s how our ministry started all through Eastern Europe.
It began by getting out of the place where the light was – having fellowship with the light – and going into the darkness. That pastor – that old pastor understood something that most Christians today don’t understand. God works mightily when we’re willing to take the light of the gospel and to go into the dark places and let the light shine in and through us.
We saw God move and work in an incredible way .. you’ll hear more of that story later on. But I just want to encourage you to do this .. begin to pray about it and say “God, where’s the darkest place in my community. Where’s the darkest place in my family .. where’s the darkest place in our country.”
“Lord, would you not send me there to reach those people with .. for Jesus Christ?” God will take you – and use you in the darkest places.