Your Missionaries Need Your Prayers

He said, my father owned a museum and my father died and we’ve sold that museum. And his request was whatever we get out of that thing to send it to you. And it was like $120,000, $130,000. And I told him, I said, brother, if I ever have a prayer request, I’m not going to give it to you. Amen. But God can answer your prayers, but we need to pray specifically.

And there are different types of missionaries and they have different needs. And if you understand that, then you can, A, understands how missions really works and B, understand the exact needs that they have. And the thing you need to do with the missionaries you support is to read their prayer letters. I had a pastor tell me, he said, if it don’t have pictures in it, I’m not going to read it.

Well, hey, mine never has pictures in it, but you need to read your prayer letters. And the gist of it is a lot of missionaries will say, well, OK, we did this, this, and this. We had so many people saved. And most times we need laborers. We’re trying to raise project money or whatever. And you need to pray specifically for that. Second Thessalonians chapter 3, the first four verses, the Bible says, finally, brethren, pray for us that the word of the Lord may have free course and be glorified even as it is with you and that we may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men for all men have not faith.

But the Lord is faithful who shall establish you and keep you from evil. And we have confidence in the Lord touching you that you both do and will do the things which we command you. Let’s pray just a minute. Father, we love you tonight. Thank you, Lord, for what we’ve heard and seen and the Bach ministry there in Mongolia, these other brethren. God, I just pray that you’d meet with us tonight.

Teach us, Lord, and help us to understand in Jesus’ name. Amen. Different kinds of missionaries. And I’m aware of the time. And I know we have to get up tomorrow and do this again. But the first kind of missionary that you get are deputation missionaries. So deputation missionaries have a certain amount of support they have to raise. But to do that in the independent Baptist movement is instead of this church supporting your missionary for the whole thing, which you can’t afford, you support part of it and then other churches of like faith help in that ministry as the Lord leads.

All right. Deputation missionaries, what do they need? Well, first of all, they need meetings. And that’s not as easy as you think it is in the splintered independent Baptist movement. In my day, the first question they’d ask you is, have you ever been divorced? And the second question is, what school did you go to? And if you didn’t go to our school, we’re not going to support you.

We’re not going to give you a meeting. So it’s difficult. There’s different camps of independent Baptists and I’m not getting down on the independent Baptist. I’m just telling you the real thing here. So that missionary calls all he knows. He’s got a list and he got it off of the internet or he got it from his mission board or from some other missionaries. In my day, we didn’t have computers.

So we had to carry a notebook around and we get in a meeting like this. And Brother Bach would say, hey, I was just in this conference over here and they’re taking on missionaries. And I’d write that down and somebody else say, oh, over here, man, they’re really on fire for missions. And I’d write and I’d go call them to see if I could get in there for ministry.

Now you’ve got the internet and all that stuff and cell phones, pastors. They’ll never give you their cell phone number, but they want to, why brother, why didn’t you call me? You were in the area. Anyway, I’ll go on here, but they need meetings and to, the family has to be in complete agreement for the ministry that they’re getting involved in.

I mean, a hundred percent, you have to be in, you can’t be in and out or you can’t walk the line. You both need to be in it. Now the man, he’s called God. Well, that woman’s getting drug around by the man. Y’all with me today, but her heart has to be in that ministry the same as his. And that’s difficult sometimes because the man, he’s just going to go preach, man.

That’s all he’s interested in, go preach somewhere. But the lady, she’s not thinking about riding a reindeer across the steps. She’s thinking about where are we going to live and how am I going to educate my children and what kind of things that do we have to make a life, to make a home. And maybe you guys are different, but to me, you know, it’s not a big deal, but it is to that lady.

So, but her heart has to be in it. And it’s hard when you get to these places like Mongolia, even though you’ve been there, it’s difficult to adjust to that culture and it takes time. And I would encourage you missionaries, if you’re new at this, you go and get your family settled first. Don’t just stick them under a bridge and go preach somewhere. You have to have a good place to live and some place where that family can function.

So to the church, I’m saying we need to pray about these things that that missionary can get acclimated, that he can find proper housing, that he can raise the support that he needs. And when they leave America, they sell everything they’ve got. Well, that means when you get to Mongolia, you’re going to have to buy everything that you have. I say, well, that couldn’t be very expensive in a little backward country like that.

It is when everything is imported and the import duty is a hundred percent on everything. It’s expensive. All right. So he has to raise money. He has to raise setup funds. He has to raise transportation funds and plus his ministry funds because we’re not just sending them there to live. We’re sending them there to minister and it costs money to minister. It costs money to run this church.

It costs money for the tracks that we passed out today. It costs money to run that van out there for gas and different things that you have and the maintenance on the building and you can go on and on and on. Well, that missionary has the same thing, but he has it somewhere else. And so we need to pray that he can get the meetings. He can get the support that he needs a hundred percent support.

Now, listen, guys, we got a hundred percent God. We don’t have a 75% God or 50% God and it is not spiritual to go under supported. 40 years ago, they used to say, well, if you don’t go under support, you don’t have any faith, but I’ve never found a pastor that wanted to give up 25% of his support so he could live by faith. There you go.

We’ll get that in a minute. Deputation missionaries. All right. The family has to be in agreement. He needs the meeting. He needs the liberty when he goes to that meeting to present that work. All right. And the support comes in and when you first started, doesn’t come in fast.

These missionaries before they became missionaries, they worked for a living. Thank you, brother. You got it. Yeah. So when you do that, let’s say, let’s say one of your brothers from here was called to go to Mongolia and help brother Greg. All right. And then you had to raise support. So what do you have to do? Well, you have to call all these pastors and first you call local pastors because you can go on Sunday, generally Sunday night, not Sunday morning, rarely.

And maybe a Wednesday night. So you can go present your ministry from here to Virginia and come back and still go to work on Monday morning. But there’s going to be a time where you exhaust that and you’ve got some support coming in, but maybe it’s not quite all you need to run your family because while you’re on the road, you’ve still got a family to support.

The rent still do. You still have to buy gas and pay school fee and do all those things. And so that missionary gets to the point where he has to make that break. And it’s a hard leap of faith because he has to give up that job and that guaranteed income that he has and step out on faith and live from the hand of God. Now you don’t ever live out of the offering prayed brothers.

You live out of the hand of God. All right. And it’s difficult. It’s a step of faith. What I’m telling you is you pray for these guys because this is not an easy thing. All we see of them is they come in and present their ministries and boy, that was a fine presentation. We saw tonight. All right. If this was not a conference, this was just a Sunday night meeting, you’d say, man, brother Greg, that was a great service. Thank you.

I got a prayer card. We’ll pray for you and he’s gone. And you may not see him for four or five years and you don’t know anything about him other than that. What’s on that screen. All right. First of all, you need to get acquainted with these guys and their wives. All right. And second of all, we need to pray that God would meet the needs for them as they step out on faith to go and, and trying to help you tonight.

Here’s a church. They have to line up sponsors in the country they’re in. They have to be sponsored in to get a visa to go. And I told you the other night, if you send out a missionary out of this church, you are responsible for him. And if he goes and makes a big financial mess in a country and he’s out of this church, you sent him out, that bill is going to come to you.

All right. That’ll make you pray. Amen. That in itself will make you pray. Missionaries, I would encourage you to burn your bridges behind you because when you get in that foreign culture and then all the lumps and bumps of learning come into play.

And if you have an easy road to get back to America, then the first bump in the road, you’re going to say, man, I’m not doing this. I can always go home. But if you burn those bridges, you can’t go home.

You can’t go home. When I got into New Guinea, they gave me a visa, but they gave me a visitor’s visa. Then you have to have it changed to a resident visa. And when I was sent in my application, I said, I need this tourist visa changed. Well, it wasn’t a tourist visa that I was on, but anyway, I had to have it changed. And I used the wrong terminology.

So they sent me a deportation notice. I called the American embassy there and they said, we can’t get involved in internal affairs of this country. This is a sovereign nation. You have to deal with it. And I’m thinking, man, I don’t even have money to get home and I don’t have anything to go to if I get home. So then you become a giver and you start fixing things and finding a way.

And finally I went down to the capital and in these countries, strictly third world countries, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And I got with a missionary. He said, I think we can take care of that. And he went to see his friend in the immigration department. He said, there you go, all done. But anyway, burn your bridges so you can’t go home just for a little bump in the road.

Listen, the devil is waiting on you to get there. And it is, I told the guys this morning, you know, in Acts chapter 13, verse three, and the church prayed all of them and sent them away. And by verse six, the devil showed up. It doesn’t take long. And there was opposition there, isn’t it? There’s opposition in every single country you go in and the devil knows just exactly which button to push to bother you.

Some of us, it don’t take much, but we’re bothered anyway. So deputation missionaries, pray for them. It’s a hard life. You’re always traveling. You’re wearing out a car, you’re wearing out a body. Your son has an elephant joke book in the back seat and every three seconds he’s reading another elephant joke and laughing like a fool, you know, and you’re trying to find your way through Boston or somewhere.

I told my son today on the phone, I talked to him and I said, man, I would miss that little boy that was in the back telling all them jokes all that time. All right, didn’t you have first term missionaries? You get off the field or you get on the field, actually get off deputation on the field. You gotta get your family settled. A lot of times you’re working with a national or working with a veteran missionary.

You are under the authority of that missionary. You’re working in his work and he is the boss. You need to make it clear exactly what he would have you to do and if he goes on leave, exactly how much authority do you have over his students or his church or whatever. Get into a lot of trouble with this thing because missionaries are, they’re not shy and they’re not over there just to fill in somebody’s shoes.

Man, they wanna go, they wanna do, they wanna win souls and disciple people and plant churches but if you’re in somebody else’s ministry, you can’t make changes, that’s his ministry. That’s like me coming in here and say, man, I don’t like the way these seats are, brother, let’s change them. Or you say, brother Ted, I’m going away for the weekend, you preach and you come back and these chairs are in a circle.

So you can’t do that, he’s the pastor. That’s exactly right. You don’t have that authority. So that veteran missionary is in authority. You have to humble yourself to that authority. Not only that, if there’s a national pastor in that church, you’re under his authority while you’re in that church. He has, that national pastor has just as much authority in that national church as this brother has in this church right here.

And as a missionary, you don’t go in and boss him around, man, that’s his church, amen. And sometimes that’s hard when you go into a place and you say, well, he’s just a Bush man. Well, he might be just a Bush man, but he is the pastor. So I don’t like that, go on down the road. You don’t have to work here, amen. So these first term missionaries, because they have all this pressure on them and they have to learn the culture, they have to learn the language, they do all these things and they’re trying to get their children settled.

The best quality for a new missionary on the field is teachability. If you come to me and you say, man, you know, I’ve had them tell me this, I’m not gonna have anybody tell me what to do. And I said, well, just go on down the road, pal, we don’t need you here. If you’re not teachable, then you won’t even allow the Holy Ghost to teach you.

All right, if you don’t have that teachable spirit, I don’t want you, because you’re not gonna be anything but trouble in that ministry. Because you think you know everything, you may in America, but I guarantee you, New Guinea or Mongolia or Nepal in these places, you gotta learn when you get there. So pray for these missionaries. Again, they have that pressure of the language, they have the pressure of the culture, they have pressure from family, because this wife is saying, man, you brought me over here and I thought it was gonna be this way and it’s not this way.

And I thought my kids were gonna have this, that, and the other and they don’t, and I don’t know how to do anything and I’m having a hard time learning the language. In language study, it’s hard to study, but your children will pick up that language faster than anybody. And if they play with children and there’s two or three different languages involved in their ball game, they’ll learn both of them.

And you’re still at home trying to find out how do you say hello. Seriously, and it’s hard, the older you are, if you’re over 40, something in your palate won’t move, won’t change, and it’s hard for you to make sounds that that foreign language makes. So it’s difficult. So that’s pressure because you’re going places and people are talking to you and you don’t have a clue what they’re saying.

And then so you say, well, I got a translator. You don’t have a clue what that translator’s telling you if that’s the same thing that this man is saying. I’ve had my students, you know, in New Guinea, if you’re under 40, you speak the Melanesian pigeon. Well, if you’re over 40, you don’t. So I would use one language and he would turn that into the dialect. Well, after a while, I caught onto that dialect and I stopped him and I said, hey, that’s what I taught you in Bible school today.

That’s not what I’m preaching here. You know, you got it. You can’t use a translator all the time. You have to take the time to learn that language. And I’m telling you, church, it’s hard and it takes time. So you have to have some grace with these missionaries. Don’t send them a letter and say, how many people did you win this week? Well, how many did you win today in downtown Greenville?

It’s not an easy thing. All right. So have a little grace. That’s pressure on that missionary. So he’s got pressure to learn the language, pressure to learn the culture. He’s got pressure and it’s self-imposed because he feels like I have drugged my wife all the way across the world and here we are and I don’t know what to do. So that’s pressure. Plus you’re sending him support.

So he feels obligated to you. We feel obligated to God because he’s called us and sent us over there and that’s pressure. And you need to learn the outlet for that pressure is prayer.

And you can’t carry all this pressure. Church, these missionaries, we look at them, we say, boy, this is easy. I wish I could do that. Well, you could if God called you, but I’m telling you, it’s just not that simple as you see them coming in here and preaching and telling you about their ministry. Pray that God give them souls for their labor. There’s nothing better than somebody getting saved.

That’s wonderful. I mean, that’ll encourage you. That’ll give you a desire to do more and win more and work more and stay longer. Amen. I don’t have time to read it, but you can see the opposition in Acts 13, six through 12. All right, so you got the first term missionary. You got the deputation missionary, the first term missionary. Then you have the veteran missionary. That’s that guy right there.

All right. And he’s agreed to let you work with him. You need to pray for him because not only does he have to do his work, he has to put up with these new missionaries and try to teach them something in his work. And it’s not easy. That veteran missionary is doing his job and one of the hardest things in the world and my prayer request was always this, pray that God would continue to break my heart for the people of New Guinea.

Because when you’re there for a while, it all becomes just every day. Just like you, you go downtown and we saw those people and their lost condition and you see them every day. Well, when you first got saved, you had a burden for them, but somewhere along the line, that burden wears off. And some of the things that they do that used to bother you terribly, now it’s just, well, that’s just how it is in Greenville.

Same thing happens to a missionary on the field. You get used to it. The old illustration used to be when you walk in a cave with no lights, you can’t see, but after you’re there for a while, your eyes get adjusted and you can see some illumination somewhere. It’s not that the dark changed, it’s just you got used to the dark. And we do that in the American church and the missionary will do that after a while.

You get there and it’s madness is national geographic, the open markets and the fruit and camels and yaks. And I can just see brother Greg riding that reindeer through there, man. That’s all new and it’s exciting. And you see these people and you’re studying the culture and it’s very interesting. But then after a while, it just becomes normal. All right, when you first get there, they say, missionary, we love you.

And then missionary, what are you gonna give us? And when you say, I’m gonna give you the gospel. Missionary go home. Yeah, amen. Pray for that veteran missionary. He has to continue to burden. He needs more open doors for ministry. He needs to maintain a good reputation among the people. He needs to have patience with these new missionaries and that’s really hard. Pray that he could win souls and God would give him students to teach.

All right, listen. Paul says, Thou therefore my son be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus and the things that thou’s heard me among many witnesses the same commit thou to what? Faithful men, why? Who shall be able to teach others also. All right.

We’re there to work ourself out of the job. We win souls, we disciple those people, we organize a church, we train national leaders, we organize a Sunday school class and watch for the maturity of the church and a national pastor, you’ve trained him. Turn that church over to him. That national pastor doesn’t move on, the missionary does.

Say, why did you go to four different areas? That exact same reason. We need to train the nationals. It’s a must if we’re gonna do mission work and if it’s gonna, listen, we’re not thinking just about today, you have to think long-term. What’s gonna happen when I leave and you want that church to stand and you want that church to be a soul-winning church, a Bible preaching church and have confidence in their pastor.

When a missionary leaves, there’s a leveling process. That is that missionary’s experience and education is here. That national pastor who takes over his level is down here because he doesn’t have 250 years of pseudo-Christianity history in his family. All he knows is what you’ve taught him. And so he doesn’t have the props and the overhead projectors and all that stuff that a missionary has. So I never would use that in my church.

And the reason for that is because when I take all those props out and they get sick, well, pastor, why don’t you teach like the missionary did? I put a national pastor in front of me as soon as I can. And I say, you preach and you talk to the people. They got a problem, they come to you. If you don’t know what to do, you come to me and I’ll tell you.

All right, I wanted him to have that authority. I wanted people to look at him as their pastor, say, what did that do? Well, when I left, nobody missed me.

That’s what we’re supposed to do. So you have to train the nationals, take the time. And it’s time consuming. It’s the easiest thing in the world to put off because you say, well, we’ve got a Bible Institute here, but hey, listen, this valve broke on my water tank and I can’t get one except in town. So guys, we won’t have Bible school today. Let’s all go to town and I’ll give you a ride to town.

We’ll pick up this valve and come back. Well, that’s easy to do. We’ll say, well, we’ll make it up tomorrow. I told somebody today, the tomorrow in the dialect of the Weider tribe is Pondolio and Pondolio is any time after today. It might be 24 hours tomorrow. It might be two weeks tomorrow, but it’s any time after today. So you put off this Bible school, this training program, and it’s just the devil, man.

I mean, you have these problems every time. It’s a day that you teach in Bible school. I’m telling you, listen, this is a spiritual battle that we fight and the devil is real and he wants to discourage you. He wants to hurt your ministry. He wants you to get frustrated and not take the time to do the things that you need to do. Church, that’s something to pray about that God would help these missionaries to make the right decisions and to do the right things.

These are veteran missionaries. And then you go back from a furlough, veteran missionary, and somebody else is doing your job and nobody missed you. And you think, man, what am I here for?

And I’ll tell you, the first thing that comes in your mind, I’ve just come from America. Why don’t I just go back to America? They don’t need me here.

Yeah. Need to get involved. You need to know what your next step is. You might not know 10 years down the road, but you ought to know what tomorrow’s gonna be. And you need to be prepared for these things as you do them. And stay on that schedule as close as you can, because everything gets gray and fuzzy when you get in this work. Because you got a fight over here and a fight over here.

And every time you walk out that door, somebody is complaining. Somebody is, you got my land. And one of your church members did this and his pig destroyed my garden. And what are you gonna do missionary? And we’re gonna take them to court and all this stuff. So you got all these things coming at you from all different ways.

And the place that you have solitude, number one is in your home. People, home is not supposed to be a battlefield. Home is supposed to be a place of refuge. Where you can, man, I have been so tired from walking across those mountains. My first, I didn’t know I had a bad heart. And I’d walk across those mountains and I’d stay a couple of days and I’d come back dragging through that swamp.

And I was so tired, my wife would have to take my boots off. Sometimes I was too tired to eat. But I knew no matter, doesn’t matter what the situation was where I was, or even what day I got home, I knew when I got home, there was gonna be some hot food waiting on me. And I knew that I was gonna be welcomed there. Y’all with me tonight?

Listen, this is not dressed up snow whipped cream missions. I’m giving you the bottom line here. This is the real deal. And that family unit needs to be one and you need to be together in this. And this may not be normal life for somebody in Greenville, South Carolina, but cowboy, it’s normal for you because this is where God has you. And he knows where you are.

He knows what your problems are. And he’s alive and well, and maybe he’s allowing you to go through some things so you can learn some things. Amen. I wish it was that easy, but it’s not. So you have veteran missionaries. And then you have old dinosaurs like me. We’ve given all we had to the mission field and there comes a time when you wear out your usefulness or you can no longer go.

Had my third heart attack, I couldn’t work at 6,000 feet anymore and spent half my time in bed because I was so tired. I couldn’t breathe and I had damage to my heart. And so I had to make a decision. And the decision to come home was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. For these missionaries, it is harder to leave the field than it is when you first go to the field because that’s where your heart is.

And these people that you look at that are so different on that screen tonight, man, those are your friends, your church members, your, the deacon in your church. And those are people that you pray over and you’ve wanted to Christ and you’ve loved on them and you’ve helped them to mature in their beliefs.

And so leaving the field is difficult. And the first thing churches do when you come home, you said, let’s pull his support, he’s not on the field anymore. That’s a hard thing because he still has to eat.

You say, well, he’s not on the field anymore. Listen, he gave all he had. His family gave up everything to go. And now we want to quibble over 50 bucks a month.

I’m trying to help you here. I’m not, y’all don’t support me. So this is not self-serving, but I’m trying to tell you there’s reasons people come home. They’re sick, they have family problems, they have support problems. That dinosaur, all the guys call my board back there, a dinosaur board because it’s made out of oak. It’s not made, you don’t just pull it up and there’s your picture.

It’s heavy. Actually had the pastor help me carry it in. But anyway, there’s needs for them. We need meetings. We just, maybe I can’t preach a whole week of meetings, but once in a while I can preach a mission Sunday. So pray for that. These are real needs and real people and medical problems. The other kind is widows. Now listen to me.

That widow has given everything and she’s gone to that mission field with her husband and she’s raised her kids there and she’s paid the price. And that husband dies. She has no income, none. Don’t you dare drop her support.

She has enough. She gets married, that’s a different story. But while she’s a widow, you continue that support. Here’s what I believe people. I believe taking on a missionary is a spiritual decision. Now you pray about it as a church, you get the will of God in there and if God says do it, then you do it. If it’s a spiritual decision to take them on, then it’s a spiritual decision to drop their support.

It’s not because you don’t like them or I heard this or I heard that. When God tells you to drop them, you can do it. But until then, you continue on.

That was free by the way. And then the fifth type and I’m almost done. The fifth type is those that crash. Now I’m not talking about somebody comes home for health reasons or whatever. I’m talking about a missionary that goes to the field and it crashes. And that is he’s gone and it is not what he thought it was or not what he thought it was gonna be.

It’s not as easy as he thought it was or maybe it’s as difficult as he thought it was but he’s not, doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything on the field. That missionary feels obligation to his family and to God and to this church because you support his ministry. And when it doesn’t work out the way he thought it ought to or every place there’s opposition. And he looks at that thing and again, we’re talking about the devil here can get in there and he works on the mind.

And so the devil comes in and said, well, you know, I don’t know why you’re here. You’re not doing anything. You’re not accomplishing anything. You’re wasting the money of these churches. Drug your family all across the world and you’re not doing anything. And that missionary will feel that pressure. And if he has no place to unload it, look, if you’re here in Greenville tonight and you’ve got a real serious problem, you can pick up the phone and call your pastor.

And if you need him, he’ll be there in 30 minutes. He’ll pray for you. He’ll minister to your heart. That missionary is on the other side of the world all by himself. You say, well, there’s cell phones everywhere in the world. No, there isn’t.

I guarantee on the steps of Mongolia, you get out there, there’s no cell service out there. Pastor told me, he said, there’s no place in the world where a missionary, no matter where he is, can’t send a prayer letter out. I said, I beg to differ with you. We were in, I think it was in Kikori at the time. And they’ve brought the mail up on the plane because there are no roads out there.

And the government was supposed to pay the airline for hauling it and they didn’t pay it. And so all this mail just stacked up and stacked up and stacked up, waiting for the government to pay this airline. And finally, all the space got full up. So they took everything and dumped it into the sea. Yeah, so for six months, no mail went out of that place, any place along the south coast of New Guinea.

It all just stacked up. So I told this fellow, I said, that might be true in America, but there are places where it just doesn’t work that way. So that missionary is working in that place and he’s not getting any letters from home. It just doesn’t seem like his ministry is going anywhere and he gets discouraged. And then here’s the thought process. Well, if it wasn’t for these wicked people, somebody would get saved.

That’s the thought process. So the problem is the people. And then, well, if it wasn’t for my family, they’re holding me back. If it wasn’t for them, people get saved. And we blame everybody but self. And sometimes it’s not even your fault. You’re just there. Would any of y’all supported Jeremiah? What, 33 years? Did he have a convert? All he did was preach. And you say, well, that’s not a productive ministry.

It was for God. This is what God called him to do and this is where God put him. And the fruit of this thing is up to God. We just put it out. We don’t win anybody. We can’t save anybody. All we do is carry the mail. We carry the message and we give the message. We give a testimony and then it’s God’s turn. It’s God that goes in and convicts that heart.

It’s God that does the saving. It’s God that tries the heart and the reins. Who knows? I mean, listen, in New Guinea, you can come and you say, you’re a white man and you say, let me give you a gospel track and read it and it’s a picture track and you go through it with him. Would you like to pray this prayer? And he said, yes. He said, well, that was quick.

Well, yes, I’ll do that. But I know you’re gonna give me something if I do it. I’m doing it to please this white man. I’m not doing it because I’m under conviction. I’m doing it. It’s well, it’s just like Greenville. They say yes at the door just so they can get rid of you and go back and watch the ball game. Amen. They’re not saved. So you have to be careful about this thing.

So anyway, when the fruit doesn’t come and Americans are geared towards doing and we think that if there’s nothing, there’s no profit to it or you’re not gaining anything by what you’re doing, you must be doing it wrong. And there are times in ministry where God’s gonna put you in a hard place and all he wants you to do is be a constant, good testimony and witness for him.

It’s not up to you, it’s up to God. But that’s hard sometimes for a young missionary to get. The older guys, they understand it a little bit, but the younger guys, that’s why I said burn the bridges because it’s easy just to turn around and go home. Those that crash, listen to me now, listen very carefully.

The church is supposed to be a spiritual hospital for those that are hurting. We don’t need to get these missionaries that, we need to get them back in the church, but we don’t need to condemn them. We need to minister to their hearts because they have spiritual problems. It’s gonna take a while to get them back in the work. It’s gonna take them a while to regain that confidence in God.

And they may never go back to the field. But listen, we can’t throw them away. We can’t just cut them off because you say, well, man, he crashed, he’s no good, he’s out. Minister to him. They say, well, he did this over there. Okay, can God forgive that? Can the church forgive that? Can you forgive that? God, man, God can forgive anything. But sometimes with the brethren, it takes a long time.

And we hold that against them their whole life. And they’ll leave the church or they won’t come very often. They need help. They need your prayers. And the church needs to be not only a sending place, but a safe place that they can come back to and know regardless, I can come here and get some help regardless of what I’ve done. All right, pray for your missionaries.

They need your prayers. Let’s pray.