Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Much better. So we turn together tonight just for a moment or two to Acts chapter sixteen. Those of you who are visiting will find out that we are not particularly giving exposition to Scripture this evening. or on any of the evenings during this week, but we're giving overviews of continental areas of mission in the world. But those overviews of continental areas are really dependent on the work of the servants of the Lord Jesus that have spread His word in many, many parts of the world. And so it is right that we should begin with the Word of God. Verse six of chapter sixteen, Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia, and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia. After they were come to Mycenae, they assayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suffered them not. And they, passing by Mycena, came down to Troas, and a vision appeared to Paul in the night. There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed them, saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us. And after he had seen the vision immediately, we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them. Therefore, loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracea, and the next day to Neapolis, and from thence to Philippi. I read these verses. because they are connected with my topic this evening. My topic this evening is the continent of Europe, and this is the call of Paul and his company to go for the first time into Europe with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. If you remember Paul's second missionary journey, and this is the middle of his second missionary journey, he had started out from the city of Antioch in Syria in the north east corner of the Mediterranean Sea, and had gone overland into what we call central Turkey today. It was called then Galatia. Paul had started assemblies in four different cities in southern Galatia, the other Antioch of Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra and Derby. And on his second missionary journey, Paul and Silas, who accompanies him and also Luke was accompanying with them as well, came to these cities and they confirmed there the disciples that had come to know the Lord Jesus. And Timothy joins them in the city of Lystra. Timothy had been saved during Paul's first missionary journey. And now as a disciple and being commended by his brethren, he joins the little team of Paul and Silas and Luke and now Timothy. And they begin going north-westward together. They tried to go northward, and the Spirit suffered them not. They tried to go westward over into Asia, where Ephesus was. And the Spirit did not suffer them to go that way. And so they went the only way they could, which was straight ahead. Going northwest, they came to the extreme northwest corner of Turkey, where ancient Troy was, place of the Trojan horse, and a lot of very interesting Greek history. But Paul wasn't interested in Greek history nearly so much as in the present advancement of the Gospel. And as they are preaching in Troas, and while we are not told of it, we assume that an assembly was begun during those times, days, or weeks that they spent in the city of Troas, or Troy, ancient Troy. One night Paul received a vision. called the Macedonian vision. And there he sees a man of Macedonia in Europe, Macedonia's northern Greece, as you know. And he saw a man of Macedonia calling out, come over and help us. And after discussion and prayer with the others, they assuredly gathered that this was the mind of God for them to go into Europe. And so it is that they bought their ticket, and they sailed across the narrow gap of sea in between and came with the gospel then into Europe for the first time. By the way, if you ever get to that part of the world, you may be as excited as I was to walk on the old Ignatian way there that goes from Neapolis to Philippi. It's only about five miles going behind the hill. But those same stones on which Paul and Luke and and Timothy and Silas walk are still there, and you can walk on them. And you can see Philippi where they came. And you can see the river where they met Lydia. And you can see the theater where there was such a commotion taking place, and all these things. I get quite excited about this kind of thing. But not so excited that I forget that we live in a present day. Paul was interested in his present, not the Greek past of Troy. and we should be interested in our present and not the past of New Testament times. For some of those areas where Paul had gone, Turkey, Greece, are today some of the darkest areas in all the world. There's no place so dark as a place where the light has gone out. And some of those areas which saw so much activity, so much evangelism, So much fervent pressing forward with the establishment of local assemblies in the first century is now an area as dark as any on earth. And some of those areas of central Turkey are just like that. Now, Acts XVI, and I'm not supposed to be preaching tonight, is a chapter of open doors. There's a door of witness. to Macedonia that was opened in the first part of the chapter. Then there's the door of salvation to Lydia, whom Paul met down by the riverside in Philippi, just over into Europe. And then there's the door of the prison to Paul that was opened when he and Silas were thrown in prison, you remember, and were singing at midnight, and the Lord sent an earthquake, and had them released, and the jailer and his household all gets saved, and there's general rejoicing. But God is able still to open doors. And as we consider Europe tonight, and some of the challenges in which that continent has in our day, I want you to pray that God is going to open doors in Europe. For there are lots of dark, dark places that need doors open. By the way, it just occurs to me, I did mention the first night that I had some of these Missionary books, none dare say no, an introduction to missions. And I was not overwhelmed by the number of you that rushed up wanting to purchase one right away. In fact, not one single person asked me a single question about it at all. You know how deeply hurt I was, how, you know, with a skin like a rhinoceros, I was, but not too much indentation. But I would give you another opportunity if you happen to be interested. I understand also that the bookstore has run out of this other little book called God's Voice in the Stars. I have three copies here. If any of you are interested in them, you may get them from me. I would not mention that I had copies until I saw the bookstore had run out. I'm not in competition with the local business at all. So let's look for a few minutes tonight at the continent of Europe. When we look at Europe, we're looking at a continent where many of you have your own roots. My own parents both grew up in Europe, and my wife's parents both grew up in Europe as well, and I imagine some of you yourselves grew up there, or your parents did. And most people in North America are very interested in what's going on in Europe today. Sometimes it's called the Overlooked Continent, because we think of darkest Africa. Or we think of the islands of the sea, and Alan Patton and men like that. Or we think of the jungles of Burma and Adniram Judson. Or we think of the plains of India, and William Carey, and Anthony Norris Grove. Or we think of other great pioneer areas of the world, and we somehow forget that civilized, modern, western Europe is lost. and a mission field more so than most mission fields in the world. I spent twenty-five years of my life with my wife in South Africa. South Africa is a Christian nation compared to any nation in Western Europe. South Africa is a wonderful place where perhaps a third of the people know the Lord Jesus, black and white and colored and so on, all different groups. That's not true in any country in Western Europe at all, including England, where only four percent of British people go to church, and ninety-six percent never go to church. I didn't say we're saved. I said ninety-six percent never go to church, period, in England, Christian England, home of the great missionary enterprise. England is better than most countries in Europe. Let me just give you a kind of kaleidoscope in the beginning. I try to vary the approach a little bit each night just to give you a little bit of rest and relaxation. But Europe today certainly is as unevangelized as most major mission fields. France, for instance, has more spiritist healers than medical doctors. And yet there are few nations on earth that have provided more martyrs than France. Sorcery is very widespread in the birthplace of the Reformation, where Luther and Zwingli and Melanchthon and others of the great reformers held forth in Germany. Germany is the sorcery capital of the world for witchcraft, black witchcraft. We're almost half of the population professed to be Catholic, and yet only five percent ever go to church. And even then have little chance of ever hearing the gospel if they do go to church. In Holland, a youth worries about death and judgments. He wakes up his reformed pastor to ask about hell. He is told to forget it. That medieval fancy the young man is told. He goes out and tries to kill himself in front of a train. Fortunately, in this case, he survives and later found Christ. But the church had failed him. In Spain, Picture, if you will, a black-clad peasant woman toiling up the steps of the shrine of Montserrat to the black virgin at the top of the steps. And she moans as she crawls up those steps. God is so hard to please. And one behind her is walking in the bloodstains left by her cut knees. Others during Holy Week stagger along in Spain with heavy crosses, and their feet are shackled, and they hate their slavery, but they fear for their soul. If any of you have been to Lourdes in France, you may have watched there the copy of the Kalasanka, which is supposedly the steps above which Pilate convicted the Lord Jesus and down which he went on his way to the cross. And there's a copy of them there. And in Lord, you can see people by their dozens crawling up these steps on their hands and knees, kissing each step as they go. And at the top of the step, what is there? A mother dog. picture of Romulus and Remus suckling at the mother dog that is the top of the steps, the mixture of the beginnings of pagan Rome and Roman Catholicism. You go around the corner in that same place in Lourdes, and you see literally tens of thousands of people crowding forward to buy tons of candles. They buy so many candles in the summer. It takes the priest all winter to burn them all, and to get some water from the fountain there of Bernadette, or whatever her name is. People on crutches, people being helped along by others, people on little carts, a sad, depressing place. Great shrine to Mary. Go to Denmark. the highest suicide rate in the world, young people by their hundreds taking their own lives. Or move down into southern Europe, into Italy, and they are a farmer. He's seen tying a red tassel on the yoke of his oxen. He says it's well worth it to ward off the evil eye as he trudges down the hill to his own communist so meeting he wonders how much is his place in betting in the next week's football pool what a mixture what hopelessness is there or if you come down to the Peloponnesus that's the island at the bottom of Greece on which Corinth stands and on the Peloponnesus a Greek lad is studying his New Testament in a tree because he's afraid of his family And then his father comes home and sees him, commands him to come down, and knocks him into unconsciousness. Now I'm not talking about nineteen-twenty or eighteen-fifty or some other date. I'm talking about the nineteen-eighties in modern Europe, where the Lord Jesus and the Gospel is very, very little known. These are not isolated cases. Europe's spiritual malady. is very, very real indeed. The fact is that Europe is turning pagan. She's tired of religion. Great cathedral, darker landscape. And most of you have been there, no doubt, and seen spires and towers all over Europe, but they're empty. And there's little reality anywhere around. They're little more than tombs or a very dead space. John Stuart Mills said, Europe is destitute of faith and terrified of skepticism. Here are some facts. Europe has fifteen percent of the world's population, yet only two percent of North America's missionaries serve there. More Europeans than the whole population of the United States. had yet to lay a hand on a copy of the Bible. There are two hundred and thirty million people in the United States, and there are more Europeans than that that have never touched a Bible with their hands, let alone read one. There are more evangelical missionaries in Haiti and Jamaica, two small Caribbean islands, than there are in all of Europe. Over a quarter of a million towns and villages in Europe do not have any evangelical church witnessing in their little town. Most of Europe's seventy-five million children, age five to fourteen, have never heard the gospel at all. Now these are children that look like our grandchildren, but they're as pagan as pagan can be. A well-known American Bible conference had a missionary map of the world and across Europe was written, not considered. They were looking at Africa, they were looking at Asia, they were looking at South America, but not Europe. Maybe that's the point that has been too much true. And so it is that Europe is a place where the light has gone out, where once the light of the Gospel and of Reformation And I wish I had time to give you a little overview of mission history. Sometime if I ever came back, maybe I'd do something like that. And to see the various waves of the gospel that have washed over that land. And yet today, it is so dark. In Spain, only one-twentieth of one percent are Protestants. That's .OO-five percent are Protestants. In Italy, only one half of one percent. In France, under two percent. And many of those are part of the dead Protestant Church in France today. In Germany, less than five percent ever go to church at all. Why is it that some of us in America get so moved by wildly dressed people speaking drums and making strange noises in Africa. We get so excited about that kind of thing, and yet we forget that these people are lost. Why do we, for instance, I was talking to somebody not too long ago, and they were very, very thrilled with the possibility of translating the Scripture into a tribe who did not have the Word of God in their own language, and so I said, well, How many people are in that tribe? Well, they fought between eight and ten thousand. And yet we're not talking about tiny tribes in the middle of nowhere that will be learning Spanish or French or one of the other world languages in any case. We're talking about vast multitudes of people that have never heard of breath of the Gospel of Christ. at all. And yet they live in a fast world. Some of them are driving Mercedes-Benz cars and things like that. And yet they know so little about the gospel. You know, in the beginning days, Christianity grew like wildfire in Europe until the time of Constantine. That's about three hundred and ten, three hundred and twenty-five A.A.D. And then after Christianity ceased to be persecuted in the Roman Empire, the vast majority of people sort of slipped into a kind of family Christendom, and most of the people in following generations turned out to be unregenerate and uninstructed, and the church began to descend and went down and down until what we know as the Dark Ages came. And even when the Reformation came, even when Luther in fifteen seventeen nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, in Germany. Even then the Reformation was fairly limited, and it was limited in spiritual deaths for many millions of people that went along with the Reformation, only switched names from Catholic to Lutheran, and they never had any conversion or rebirth inside at all. It was limited by its political opportunism as well, and there was a great deal of infighting. If you know anything about the history of Europe during those times, you will understand this, and I'm not going to go into it now. It was limited by territorial principles. Really, the Reformation only touched northern Europe, Germany, Denmark, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. to a certain extent part of Switzerland and part of France, but that was very soon nipped in the bud. And then, of course, it was limited because of internal strife among the reformers, and you want to read some buts and battles royal, well, you can read some of those. I'm not going to inform you on them if you haven't read yet. So there was a great deal of illiteracy as well. But Europe today... offers some very, very wonderful opportunities. Maybe I ought to give you a little background as to just what we're talking about when we're facing Europe. Religiously, when you look at Europe, you're looking at a country that has four basic religious backgrounds to it. There is the background of Roman Catholic Europe. stretching from Spain and Portugal through France and Italy and the big islands, Sardinia and Corsica and Sicily, and then over into some of the Eastern European countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And Roman Catholic Europe is a very strong block of Rome-dominated people, of course including Erie or southern Ireland. Then there is the Lutheran Europe, that which was touched by the Reformation, starting in parts of Switzerland, stretching up through Germany and part of Netherlands and Denmark, and then into Norway, Sweden and Finland in Northern Europe. This is Lutheran Europe. And if you're going to reach that part of Europe, what you're reaching are people who call themselves Lutherans. And then there's Orthodox Europe, the green area here, and dividing some of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Romania, most of Russia, and Greece, and so on, and running further eastward all through Russia are the great Orthodox churches, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and so on, Maronite, not Maronite, but others of the more Orthodox groups there. And that's a factor to be faced if you're working in this part of Europe. And then there's Anglican Europe, including Northern Ireland and the rest of the British Isles, Scotland, Wales and England. Now, it will make a great difference as to which part of, as to how you approach your mission view of Europe, as to what background the people there, or at least the bulk of them, will have. and you will not work the same in Lutheran Germany as you will in central Portugal or on the island of Corsica or in some of the Orthodox areas like Yugoslavia and so on. That makes a difference when you think of Europe and when you pray for it you ought to be aware of some of that as well. Some of the giants that would stop the spread of the gospel need to be looked at as well. There's the grip of Rome, and there's no doubt about it. Rome has a tremendous hold on a great deal of Europe, particularly that part in the South. There's this vector of communism. Europeans are much more worried about this in a different way than we are, and to them it is very, very real indeed. for they don't like the fact that America places its own armaments on their soil and they feel that if there's a confrontation with Russia that they're the ones that are going to be hurt by it. And you need also to remember that communism is a Western European philosophy, not a Russian philosophy at all. It came from Western Europe. Its philosophy came from Germany. Its revolutionary outlook came from France. Its economic theory came from England. Together, this thing we call communism is very much a Western European phenomena. The Gospel, according to Marx, is a very real thing to many European people. And with it, it carries a kind of elastic morality. They do not see ultimate truth. They do not see this book as the absolute source for truth. They do not listen to the Word of God. Even Christians, very few Christians in Europe would believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, but have very elastic views of morality itself. And so the specter of communism is a very real thing in Europe today. The deadness of Protestantism is one of the real factors. We deal with many dead churches in our country, but they're not nearly as many and not nearly as dead as the dead churches in... in Europe today. And even many of the once solidly evangelical churches are fairly dead. We have visited assemblies in Germany, and the people all roll up in their Mercedes-Benz, and they have wonderful breaking of bread, and they shake one another's hands, and then they go out to party with one another in their homes. But they're not interested much in reaching out with the message of the Gospel to the rest of the world. There, by the way, are a hundred or so assemblies in Western Germany, not a hundred in Eastern Germany, which I think are faring much, much better. Then there's the hope of humanism. Because they have rejected God, they hope that somehow the pushing of mankind in humanistic effort and scientific or what they call scientific humanism is going to one day have some sort of... success and the explosion of cults. I've already referred to witchcraft and sorcery in the country of Germany. And that's something as well that is very, very true. Now, German, I mean, European people will look with great deal more favor on Russia and its hope than we do. And some of the reasons why they see red or see things as they do is because Christianity that they know has broken down. Liberalism began in Germany. As you probably know, it spread to much of the rest of Europe very quickly and then spread across the sea to our own country. The rise of humanism is on the march, as we've mentioned. The revolutionary traditions that are there in terms of of Europe's history. It's the appeal of materialism. And, of course, like everybody else that's human, they try to get as rich as possible, as fast as possible. The political instability country you ought to be watching is France in, I don't know if you've been looking at news recently, but France is in a politically bad way, and people are getting sick of the present government because it has not been able to fulfill on promises that it may, even though there were socialistic promises. And then there's alliance with labor and socialism and some of the attendant problems that have gone with all of that. Now, that's a pretty black picture and a pretty bleak picture. But that's not all that's happening in Europe. When you look again at this continent, it is still true that God is at work. And there are some very fine things going on in Europe today. One of the great strong points of the assembly movement, for instance, is in the country of Italy. Way back in the days of John Nelson Darby, there was a man by the name of Count Guichardini that was put in prison because of his fate. Because he was rich and wealthy, he was allowed to go if he'd only leave the country for a while, which he did, he went to England. he met some brethren there and came back and began the assembly movement in Italy which is now second only to the Pentecostals the largest group of evangelicals in all of Italy the assembly movement there and there are many assemblies most of them small and struggling but they're there and you can go up and down Italy and find assemblies there you will find some assemblies in in many other countries the largest evangelical group in Spain outside the Pentecostals is also an assembly movement there's a very large assembly movement in Portugal France is not so good there are forty or fifty assemblies in France all of them small at least almost all of them small and struggling I think for instance of a an example of the assembly in Vichy maybe some of you have been there that one that assembly has been there for fifty or sixty years and yet doesn't seem to grow, although tremendous amounts of effort have been put in. But there are assemblies in France that are growing, and we can give thanks to God for that. All over Western Europe there appears to be only small things going on in this day. Now some of you brethren that like that verse, this is a day of small things. You would apply that to Western Europe very happily. By the way, I don't like that verse very much, and I do not feel satisfied because I serve a big God, and my big God is not always satisfied to do small things because of my lack of faith, or my lack of resource, or my lack of moving. And so I don't like to blame little things on God, unless God intends to definitely hold us back. But in Europe, There are mostly little things going on. One very encouraging place at the moment is the work in northern Belgium, in the Flemish area of Belgium. I ought to be interested in the place where the Flemings came from. Well, I am. And there are a couple of Canadian missionaries up there, Gelling and Habercamp. And God has peculiarly blessed those men as they move in and establish some witnessing with contacts, friends of people that they know in Ghent and other northern Belgian cities. And God saves a few people and they gather them together in a local church and a disciple of believers. And then after about six months or a year, they get out of town and leave them. And they tell them that their job is now to reach out. And they go and establish another one, ten, fifteen, twenty miles away in another town. And they've established an average of one and a half to two assemblies a year for the last ten years in that part of Belgium. And for Western Europe, that's a simply amazing story of growth. I think you could be very thankful for what's going on in that part of Belgium today. There are not many stories like that in Western Europe. There's another very interesting work going on down here in Austria where Fred Colvin and his wife are laboring in Salzburger land near the city of Salzburg. Most of you would recognize the sound of music, I guess. But around in that area, and he has started Bible studies, eight or ten Bible studies in little villages around the city of Salzburg. And those Bible studies are turning into local fellowships of believers in Austria. Austria, by the way, is notorious. They're one of the hardest areas of all of Western Europe. But in the few minutes that remain, I would like you to now move over into Eastern Europe, where they have been under repression, where they have been restricted in terms of meeting places where they cannot get permits to build their their chapels or halls where the government comes in and does not give the privilege of going to college to many other Christian children of Christians and things like that in Romania and Bulgaria and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland where the church is growing much, much faster and much, much more healthy than it is in Western Europe where they have all the money and all the freedom and all the other things. God's people, when they get under pressure, depend on the Spirit of God and what they find is reality. And when they've got something real, it attracts people and they begin witnessing. And the church is growing in Poland and growing in Romania and growing in Hungary and some of these others, not easily and openly, growing with great birth pains, growing with people suffering, growing with some people being thrown in prison, growing with people being denied certain privileges that ought to be there, their human rights we would call them. But growing nevertheless. we need to be praying for our brethren in Eastern Europe for they are under pressure and of course this also is true in the Soviet Union and back as far as the Ural Mountains over here in all of European Russia but there are tens of thousands of believers one of the great works of a last century with a doctor Baydecker a man from the assembly that traveled right across Russia visiting people some of you have written have read a very wonderful book under that same name, Dr. Baedeker of Russia. And Lord Radstock, another British man, did a great deal in some of these Eastern European countries. And there are assemblies in every one of them, as well as other evangelical churches, Baptist churches, and so on. And for them we can give thanks. Now, my time is gone, but I do want to remind you The church in Europe needs our prayers. It needs our missionaries that are willing to go and to work with them. And particularly in Western Europe, our sympathies tend to go with Eastern Europe. There's not a great deal we can do there. Some people, like William Grunbaum, whose picture is on the bulletin board at the back there, have managed to take truckloads of stuff in quite legally without clandestinely or illegally running borders with it and so on, getting permits and taking help into believers in Poland and Czechoslovakia and other countries in Eastern Europe. Others are running Bibles illegally in vans and so on, and sometimes they get these confiscated and they can't complain because they're doing illegal things. Sometimes people get thrown in jail over this very thing. But there are people concerned about the work of God and the spread of the name of the Lord Jesus in Europe. And I think particularly those of us who have our own forebears coming from Europe ought to be very concerned about what God is doing in Europe in these days. Now, my time is gone, so I'll just leave it here. And trust that God will bless us and bless his own work as a result of this. Shall we just pause for prayer? Father... having looked at another area of the world in a very brief way, and yet once again aware of the fact that we live in a world where there are huge needs, help us, Father, to respond in ways which we can. We can become intercessors. We can become givers to a certain extent. And we can become involved in some of the work that is being done by faithful servants of Jesus Christ in the continent of Europe. Oh, we long that that land may once again see the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ. And so we pray that you would bless those who are working there now and encourage others to get involved in what are today wide open doors for the Gospel. Now we ask your blessing on each one tonight as we are in Jesus' name and for his glory. Amen.