The George Verwer Collection
The Revolution of Love No Turning Back Hunger for Reality
The George Verwer Collection
The Revolution of Love
George Verwer First published 1989
No Turning Back
George Verwer and Tony Collins
First Hodder & Stoughton / OM Publishing edition 1983
Revised 1994
Hunger for Reality
George Verwer First published 1972 Revised 1977
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken Irom THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Printed in the United States of America
Electronically published under license by Davidson Publishing - .
Foreword
About fifteen years ago I agreed to have some of my spoken messages put into print in the form of a book Come! Live! Die!, now entitled Hunger for Reality. To my amazement, since then I have received over 14,000 personal letters, most of which I have tried to answer. That book has now been translated into over twenty languages, so these letters have come from all over the world. It is especially with these people in mind that I have gone ahead with this new book.
As I reread, added to, and subtracted from the material Tony Collins took and compiled from my message tapes, I almost decided to cancel the project. To my mind, there are already so many better books than this one. Being able to mention some of them in this book has helped me to press on with it. Mainly, however, it has been the perseverance and hard work of Tony that has made this book a reality.
I am constantly challenged by the way I see God use the printed page. Even in the past weeks I have found myself making a deeper commitment to the distribution of Christian literature. This firstly means prayer for people to develop a greater spiritual appetite. When this happens, people may even take down from their shelves great books that have been sitting there for years and begin to read them.
It is my prayer that people will not just read books, especially this one, but that they will learn to be a blessing to others by distributing books. Remember there are tens of millions who have never read a single Christian book, or even a portion of Scripture, for that matter. We can, and must, do something about this.
This book is basically for people who already know Christ as their Lord and Savior. Unless you have at least begun in your Christian life through true faith in Christ, you may find it a little difficult to understand. On the other hand, I thought this was also true of my last book, and, to my amazement, a good number have come to know Christ through reading that So where you go from here is really up to you. And remember, what you do with the message of these pages will determine whether many other people will ever hear the message of Christ at all. God wants to use weak ordinary people to do great things for him. God wants to use you!
George Verwer
THE REVOLUTION OF LOVE
Molding our lives to mirror God
Acknowledgments
The message of this book would not have been possible without the dedication of my dear wife, Drena, who has stood with me now in the battle for twenty-nine years.
My thanks also go to my editor, Dr. Ruth March, for her tireless efforts to transform my spoken messages into print.
Introduction
This book is a collection of messages that were first given in spoken form. Two are being republished, and the rest have never been published before. Revolution of Love was originally part of the orientation material that was given to young people joining Operation Mobilization for one-month summer campaigns in Europe in the early 1960s and reflects many of the early emphases of OM. The emphasis on Spiritual Balance came later on in the ministry of OM, and these messages were then published together in book form in 1977 under the title Revolution of Love and Balance.
The name Operation Mobilization came from the vision that God gave a small group of students from Europe and America back in the late 1950s. We felt that if Christianity was a spiritual revolution, a revolution of love, then the important thing was to obey what the Lord Jesus had told us to do in living for him and going and teaching people in all nations of the world to be his disciples. We felt that many of the young people, who in those days were sitting in the large churches of the USA, Britain, and Europe, could be mobilized to tell those who did not know about the good news of Jesus Christ and the need for repentance and a personal faith.
I felt strongly about the need for prayer and evangelism because, without the faithfulness of one elderly woman in the States, I would never have known about the joy of knowing God in a personal way. I was brought up in a home where such things were not talked about. Then, one day, I received a Gospel of John through the post. This Christian lady had seen me going to my high school and had already started to pray that I should become a Christian.
She had to pray for several years before anything happened at all. Then, in March 1955, the evangelist Billy Graham came to Madison Square Gardens. For the first time I heard and responded to a clear message on the salvation that God has made available to us through Jesus Christ, and I surrendered my life to him.
Some people ask if that sort of decision of total commitment can really last. I would like to tell you that what happened to me that night so many years ago has been a reality in my heart and life for every single day since. I can assure you that it is not some late adolescent escape from guilt, but it is a true, living, and real experience with God himself made possible through what Jesus Christ has done on the Cross.
When we presented the challenge of those who had never heard to the young Christians of the western world in the 1960s, they responded in the hundreds. Today, many thousands of young people have spent time with OM, as it is usually known, in one of the short-term or longer-term options, and OM graduates are found in almost every Bible college or missionary society in the world.
The message contained in A Wide-Open Heart was first given to a group of OMers and other Christian workers in Peshawar, Pakistan, early in 1988. The refugee crisis in Pakistan means that Christians from many different backgrounds and organizations are working together in service and evangelism, so that a broad-minded attitude is particularly important. We in OM have always taken a strong stand against extremism, and this plea to be open-hearted in the work of God reflects that view.
Real People, Real Power and New GenerationUnfinished Task were messages from OMs leadership training conference at Birmingham in March 1988. This conference is not primarily for OM leaders but for young people in positions of responsibility in churches, Christian unions, and Christian organizations. I feel that these two powerful messages on discipleship and power in the Christian life and on the challenge of mission in the world today, are relevant not only to these young people but to many in the church today.
Finally, Accepting Yourself and Others is taken from a seminar given to our local OM teams here in Bromley, in the spring of 1988. This seminar helped to answer the need of many people to learn to accept their own personalities as God accepts them, and therefore to learn to accept other people in the same way.
I share these messages with you with the hope that, as you study them, they will help you to be a true spiritual revolutionary for Jesus Christ.
