I will read to you the words in Luke chapter 4, which the Lord Jesus read to the congregation in the synagogue, which sums up the nature of His ministry: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Now in this very short few lines, something is repeated twice, which in Scripture means we need to pay attention, because Scripture does not repeat itself for no other purpose. He says, "He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives." And then another line, two down, it says, "to let the oppressed go free." The meaning of these two statements are, of course, identical. The idea is to release captives, to set people free.
One of the most fearful things is addiction. We are more familiar with drug addiction, but there are all kinds of addictions. And I can say, without fear of contradiction, that everyone is under some form of addiction. You may not be under addiction to heroin, or cocaine, or alcohol, or whatever it is. But everyone is under addiction, or bondage of some sort. A great tragedy is often that we are blind to our own situation. And that is why in the middle of these two statements about being set free, or freed from oppression, you have the statement, "recovery of sight to the blind." Of course, in this context, the reference is not as though the Lord is concerned only with healing the physically blind. No, the reference here is to the spiritual. The problem is we are under bondage without knowing that we are under bondage.
The frightening thing about addiction, it seems, is a capturing of the will. We start out with a little bit of alcohol, or whatever it is you take. Now, some people can take alcohol, like the French do in France, and they drink it every day, without becoming addicted to it. There are others who cannot do that. In other words, some things are addictive to some people, but not addictive to others. And in part, it depends for what reason you use that substance.
Now, there are other kinds of bondage. I think without fear of contradiction, I can say that every human being is in bondage to himself or herself, in bondage to self-interest, in other words, to selfishness. Every person is selfish. Until God does something with that person, he is always addicted to selfishness. The ego, the self, is always central. What that does in a society is not hard to understand. When everybody goes for themselves, nobody cares for the other. At least not, if that person's interest has no bearing on my own. I care for somebody else only if that person's interest happens to affect me. Then, of course, I care, because that person's interest is my own interest. That is where the root of the problem of human society is.
Jesus came to produce a new kind of society in which the command to love the neighbor as oneself is meant to be implemented. But it is impossible until we are changed, until we are transformed. And that's why the gospel is about change and transformation. But it can't be done until we are liberated, until we are freed. Those of us who come from China are very used to the word "liberation." It's been thrown around all over the place. We have a liberation army. We have all kinds of liberation. The problem is that sometimes what got liberated was the very thing that would have been better if it had stayed.
In other words, the gospel has to do with freedom. And you will remember that in the camp I used Romans 6 and verse 7: "He who has died with Christ is freed." Freed from sin. To be freed from sin, of course, is the bondage. Now, sin is precisely the kind of bondage that keeps us in slavery. And this same verse here in Luke chapter 4: He came to set the captives free.
Now, how many Christians do you know? If you're in the church, you at least know all those Christians in the church. But let's be honest. How many would you say are free people? These Christians that you know who strike you as being free. The problem is we might not even know what freedom really is. That is the other problem. So we don't know that we are under addiction. We don't know what freedom is. We are in a rather pitiful situation.
It's like the fish in the tank. You may not know that he is not free. After all, he has other fish swimming around with him. Other colorful fish. And they seem to be not too panicky. They look quite happy in there. There are nice coral-looking things. Maybe they are not really coral, but at least they look something like it. And there is green vegetation sometimes even around. So they adapt to life in the tank. If you say, "Now we will set you back in the ocean to the coral reefs that you came from," all these colorful fish, they wouldn't know the difference.
Would you know what freedom is? My wife and I were once looking at an aquarium. I think you see many of these pet shops, they have aquariums, and sometimes we wander in to take a look at these colorful fish. And I looked at the fish that I thought looked like a shark. A shark in an aquarium? Well, I have seen quite a few sharks in open water. Not always very comfortable when they are rather large. I have also swum on the east coast of Malaysia and encountered a few sharks there. One or two got a little bit too interested in me. Especially when they reach four or five feet in length, then you don't care too much for their interest. Since at that size, they can take a reasonably good bite out of you.
But I have also seen baby sharks. And so when I looked at these in the aquarium, I said to my wife, "That looks like a shark." Well, it turns out that it was in fact a shark. But how big was the shark? Not your four or five foot variety. You wouldn't get that into any tank in a pet shop anyway. The shark was not longer than six inches. Some even smaller than six inches. A six-inch shark. That's why I couldn't believe my eyes. I have seen baby sharks swimming near the shore, but nothing quite like this. I couldn't quite understand how come a shark is sitting in an aquarium tank and not eating up all the other fish. But for one thing, it's too small to eat any other fish. At five or six inches, it'd be happy if some other bigger fish didn't eat it up in the process.
But how do you get a shark that small? I later read about it and was surprised to discover that if you take a shark from the open sea, the ocean, and you put it in an aquarium when it is small, it never grows big. It matures. Even at a mature age, it will not get bigger than six inches. Wow, that was a surprise to me. But if you take that same shark earlier on in its life and you let it out into the ocean, it will grow to eight feet in length. In other words, the confined condition, nice as it is in the aquarium, very comfortable, very protected, and well fed, keeps the shark from growing. It adapts to the aquarium and stays like all the other fish swimming around it.
Let it out into the open sea and you have an eight-foot shark out of that very same fish. Oh, I was very surprised to read that. Live and learn, as they say. And I thought that I'd known the oceans pretty well, being a licensed scuba diver and all that.
You see, the question is, we may have a church or churches full of people who grow up in an environment protected, cared for, comfortable, but spiritually never grow. And they don't even know that there is any oppression in it. It is so comfortable to be living in there. A shark is not meant to be six inches at maturity. A shark grown to its full length can be eight feet, at least of that variety. The great whites, of course, become much bigger than that, but we are talking about this one variety.
Many Christians spend all their lives in an environment in which they are comfortable, but never reach the potential which God wanted for them. There are many such Christians. In fact, the open sea is a dangerous place even for sharks, especially baby sharks. There are lots of things that can eat baby sharks. They are a bit harder to eat at eight feet in length, but it takes them a long time to get to eight feet. And many are eaten up long before they get to eight feet. In fact, baby sharks are being eaten all the time by bigger fish. And so, we fear to go out into open water. I notice baby sharks in East Malaysia, they stay very close to the coast. They hug the coastline. They dare not go into deeper water where bigger fish are waiting for them. And the same with Christians. They remain captive to their own fears. They want a secure and comfortable life. You can have that. Very comfortable. And you're going to spend the rest of your life as a six-inch Christian.
What is it that Jesus wants us to become? Why are some servants of God of an extraordinary caliber and others who don't seem to go anywhere? The secret lies in these words: "I came to set the captives free." Do you know you're a captive? Captive to what? Find out the things that keep you in bondage until God can make you what He intended you to be. I hope if nothing else is accomplished in this message, that some of you at least will say, "Okay, I've had enough of this nice aquarium life. Lord, set me free to reach whatever it is You want me to become." This has been my goal, my purpose. I don't wish anything within myself or anything around me to so cramp me into a certain bondage, even religious bondage. And religion can be a real bondage, let me tell you, whether it be traditions or whatever it may be. Let God set us free to follow Him wherever that takes us.
And the fact of the matter is that in the history of the church through the last 2,000 years, there have not been very many. I sometimes wonder what the Lord feels. "I came to set the captives free," and He looks around and He sees His people captive, like those in Egypt. And they were comfortable in Egypt. Remember when they came out of Egypt, they were grumbling, moaning, they all wanted to go back to Egypt. Bondage is good. The whole amazing thing, the story of the Old Testament, is a people who were content to stay under bondage. It was God who took them out. They didn't want to leave Egypt. Amazing, isn't it? Under Egyptian bondage, yes, hard life, yes, but comfortable.
You work hard at the office, don't you? It's a hard life. You work how many hours a day? You sweat it out, your boss scolds you. You dare not talk back. In the church, you dare to talk back, but not at the office. After all, in the church, you talk back, you don't lose your bowl of rice. You go to the office, you talk back, your job is gone. Oh, you're very well behaved at the office. The bondage under this boss, no matter how nasty, after all, he gives you a good pay, right? He expects you to work yourself into the ground. That's also reasonable, right? Who pays you in the church? Nobody. So what's there to lose? And so you enjoy the bondage.
Well, let the Lord open your eyes. I am a person who preaches the word of God and intends to look for results, that His word will be done. I don't preach to please anybody. I preach what the Lord commanded me to proclaim. And that hasn't always made me popular, by the way. But I didn't come to be popular. I came that the Lord who died upon the cross to set us free will have that objective accomplished in us.
Now, I will continue to share the fact that even all these healings that you read about in the Bible, the physical healings, were all intended to show that He can set us free from any kind of oppression, physical or spiritual or anything else. He was not primarily concerned with physical healing. But He did it in order to show that all the kind of things that oppress us, and sickness is a very big oppression. In Canada, where we have something like a social welfare system, the bill is simply mind-boggling what the state or the country has to pay for health. It runs into billions and billions because sickness is something that oppresses people.
Now, one of the things that the Lord taught me when I moved from London to Liverpool in England was a new learning process about sickness and health. The Lord led me to Liverpool, not that I wanted to go myself, but because there was this pitiful handful of people who pleaded with me that I would go and help them out. And so after much reluctance, I went there as the Lord led. And as soon as I arrived in Liverpool, I was sick. I hardly set foot on Liverpool and I was sick. Now, I should let you know that I was very fit and I hardly knew what the word sickness meant. I didn't hardly know what a headache was until that point in time. Medicine is one subject it never crossed my mind to study. I was simply too healthy to be interested in diseases. But I was amazed that as soon as I stepped into Liverpool, I was sick. I had breathing trouble. Very serious breathing trouble. As soon as I left Liverpool, the problem was gone.
My wife was working at a hospital in London at the time, so I had access to the best specialist for bronchial problems. He examined me and he says, "Nothing wrong with you." I said, "Why do I have these problems whenever I go to Liverpool?" He said, "Pollution. There's a serious problem of pollution and you are allergic to that pollution." And indeed, when I went back to Liverpool, I was sick right away again.
And one day I woke up. I had hardly slept for an hour or two. I couldn't breathe. I was struggling for one breath of air. And I was saying, what's going on here? How is it I can't breathe at all? Now, I didn't want to wake up my wife because I felt she needed her sleep. So I just struggled on trying to breathe. Hour after hour, I was struggling. I never knew that one breath of air could be so precious. You sit there and you breathe, right? You never give it another thought. But when you cannot get that one breath of air, let me tell you, the feeling of desperation is really amazing.
In the morning, when my wife looked at me, when she woke up and saw me lying there, I was blue in the face. And she had a shock. She had a fright. She looked at me and I couldn't talk. And she rushed off to look for a doctor. The doctor came, of course. He being in Liverpool all those years, he knew right away what was the problem. He took one look and it was an asthmatic attack. I didn't know what it was. Never had asthma before. So he prescribed some medication for me and in a very short time, all the symptoms disappeared. And the doctor told me that if I didn't want to have asthma, I had better leave Liverpool real fast. But I had already promised the church to come. How was I going to leave now? So I had to stay on.
Five years in Liverpool and I am stuck with chronic asthma. Could never get rid of it again. I felt that at least here was one price I had to pay for serving the Lord, the fellowship of the Lord's suffering. I could have saved my health. I remember my mother pleading with me, tears in her eyes, when she saw me going through an asthmatic attack. She said, "Please, please leave Liverpool." I said, "Well, I can't leave the brothers and sisters, can I? Who's going to look after them?" I knew the Lord had sent me there for five years and five years I stayed. And after that, asthma was chronic, permanent. Fellowship in the sufferings of Christ.
I just read recently about the crucifixion. And one aspect of the crucifixion I didn't know about. That is that when a person is crucified, apart from all the agony of the nails going through hands and feet, what it does to the whole body is described by this specialist. He said, what happens is that as the person hangs on the cross in that agony, it does something very traumatic to the body, and fluid builds up in the area of the lungs and around the area of the heart. And what happens when that fluid builds up is that it becomes harder and harder to breathe, because of all the fluid pressing against the lungs. Struggling in the end just to get one breath of air. Every breath becomes an agony.
That was an aspect of the crucifixion I didn't know about. And as I read it, I thought, that's exactly what happens, how you feel when you are having an asthmatic attack. You just can't breathe. You are just gasping for air. And then I realized that for the Lord Jesus to say those seven things from the cross was in itself a wonder, because you can hardly talk when you are out of air. And yet He had to use all His strength to speak those words on the cross. And then I realized that the sufferings of asthma, being unable to breathe, is something the Lord Jesus experienced in a most terrifying manner on the cross. He bore our sufferings. He knows what it is like. But He did that to set us free.
Now in Liverpool then, as I said, I began to experience this matter of sickness and health, not only in myself, but in at least three cases of healing, which I would like to share with you as examples of the Lord's compassion. Why does the Lord set us free? Why does He do it? Compassion. What is compassion? Well, if you have experienced, you know what it is. You just feel for somebody's suffering, for somebody's agony, for somebody's pain. Now why should we selfish people care about anybody else's suffering, as long as it doesn't affect me? That is something that God does in us.
One Sunday evening, I received a phone call from somebody in our church, and he said to me, "Please, will you go to the hospital quickly? Because my mother is in hospital and she is down with a cerebral hemorrhage, bleeding in the brain, a stroke." And he said, "Will you please go to the hospital to see my mother?" I said, "Yes, I'll go." So I went to the hospital and there was this middle-aged lady lying there paralyzed from the neck down with a stroke. And I looked at her and I said, "Would you like me to pray for you?" And she blinked her eyes, nodded slightly.
So right there, she was waiting to be put in some bed somewhere. She was still on the stretcher, but they had done some tests on her. As you know, the normal procedure is to take a spinal fluid extract, which is a very painful procedure, but then she being paralyzed wouldn't feel much. A needle is stuck in between the vertebrae into the spinal cord to extract fluid to look for blood as evidence of a hemorrhage or stroke. They confirmed that she had a stroke and she had just come out of the testing room and she was there on this trolley thing. And that's when I prayed for her. Having prayed for her, she experienced immediate release. Now that is really bondage, that you can't move anymore. How more of bondage can you be? If somebody shackled your hands behind your back, you can still move at least the rest of your body. If somebody tied your feet, you can still move the rest of your body. But to be paralyzed, that is to have all freedom of movement removed.
I prayed for her and she had immediate release. In other words, she was healed. The doctor didn't believe it. He said, "Can't be. We just did the test. We know that she had a stroke and she's paralyzed." But she wanted to sit up. Can you imagine that scene in the hospital? The doctor wouldn't permit it. "No, no, no. No way. You don't move. Just lie there." So the poor lady was lying there. And after one or two hours, she said to me, "I'm hungry. I'd like to eat something." So I said to the hospital staff, "Would you give her something to eat?" Oh, no, no, no. No food. Not allowed to eat.
So how long does she have to lie there for? Sunday night, until you know when? Until Wednesday, when her back was sore from lying there and not being allowed to move. Even though she could move, they wouldn't let her move. What happens on Wednesday is because it's a teaching hospital, the professor comes with his students in tow, and they come from bed to bed to examine the patients while the professor explains things to the students. Came to her bed, looked at her, examined her, and then they huddled together for quite a long discussion. They called in the doctor who was in charge, and said, "What is this woman doing here? There's nothing wrong with her." "But we did all the tests and so on, she had a stroke on Sunday." So they looked at the tests. It's true. Well, you can imagine there was quite a thing.
Now the poor lady, she couldn't speak English, you see. So eventually after quite a long time, because she couldn't answer their questions, they told her, "Get up and go home. There's nothing wrong with you, just go home." The lady is still there, she's still fine, although well into her 70s now. She experienced what the Lord can do. That was one of my first experiences.
Then there was another lady, another case where again a matter of compassion. A lady in our church, a restaurant owner, and she called me and said, "My mother is in agonizing pain. She has a large tumor in her abdomen, in the area of the womb, and she is due for surgery next week. But the pain is unbearable, and painkillers don't do much." The mother was in terrible agony, and she said, "Would you come and please pray for my mother?" I said, "I'll come."
So I came with my co-worker and looked at her condition. She was all doubled up in agony, and we prayed for her. After praying for her, we left, and that was around the Wednesday or Thursday. On Sunday, she was in church, full of joy and happy. And she went to have her surgery, as listed in the following week, Tuesday or Wednesday, and seeing that she had no pain and no problem, they re-x-rayed her and examined her again, and the huge tumor that was supposed to be in her womb had disappeared into thin air. It was nowhere to be seen. They looked at their old x-rays, they looked at her, looked at the new x-ray. What happened? So the Lord took care of that as well.
The third case, very quickly. A nurse in our church. We had a Bible study for nurses in the hospital. She was one of the nurses who regularly attended that Bible study. She called me and said she had terrible pain in her face, just by the lip. And because she was part of the hospital staff, they agreed to move up the surgery, because there's a long list of people waiting for surgery. But as part of the nursing staff, they moved her to have an emergency operation the next day. That's the best they could do. They would give her the operation the next day to remove the tumor. But she said, "The pain is driving me crazy. I can't wait till tomorrow. And no painkiller is doing anything."
I said to her, "What does the Lord tell you? Have you prayed about this?" She said, "Yes." And she said, "I looked at the passage in the gospel which said, where the person said to the Lord, 'If You are willing, You can heal me.' And the Lord said, 'I am willing. Be healed.'" I said, "All right. If you see the Lord's word to you, I will come now and pray." So I went down to the hospital and prayed for her. And the pain just went, just like that, in one flash, one instant. It was gone. The same thing happened next day when they wanted to do surgery on her. The tumor had also vanished. Everything gone. Now tumors are very unpleasant mass of material. They don't have the habit of vanishing into thin air. They are not psychological things that can disappear. Remarkable.
I remember also another case. My mother had migraine. I guess some of you would know what migraine is. It is a terrible headache that comes and affects people and sometimes will last for days. It is absolutely dreadful. I was visiting my mother at that time and she was going through one of these attacks of migraine that she had from time to time. And when I looked at her, my heart couldn't take it because all the veins on her forehead were standing up. The tears from the pain were in her eyes. Very watery. She couldn't see. And she sat there in absolute agony. And I said to the Lord, "Lord, surely..."
# Freedom in Christ (Side B)
I said to my mother, "Would you like me to pray for you?" At that time she wasn't a Christian. And she simply nodded. But she was a very hardcore unbeliever, you could say. But in the agony and the pain, she needed to be released from this oppression, this unspeakable pain which held her captive. I prayed for her. The pain went instantly. In that one split second, it was gone. And I still remember the amazing look of surprise on her face. I guess she thought that I prayed for her and it was the sort of thing that you would say to somebody sick, "Would you like me to pray for you?" But she never expected this instant release by the power of the Lord. And the look of utter surprise on her face. One moment she's in agony, next moment she's free. I still can see that amazing look of surprise on her face. I think this was one of the contributing factors that led her to come to the Lord when she experienced His power.
My time is fast going. But I want to say this. Though by the Lord's grace, out of compassion, I have exercised the Lord's power for the healing of people, I'm not a faith healer. What's the difference? A very big difference. A faith healer is somebody who makes healing the central element of their ministry. Healing is not a central element in my ministry at all. In fact, it plays very little role in it. I have done it purely out of compassion for people. But I don't use it as a means of furthering a ministry. And that's important to understand. But I know that my God, He is real. He does the most amazing things, as I have tried to testify.
Now let me go on with this matter. Many things oppress us, including the sense of fear, insecurity. I could go on, lists and lists of things that hold us in bondage. Fear is a very powerful element. Life insurance is a multi-billion dollar business in the world. If there were no fear, insurance of that kind would not have much business. Of course, so-called life insurance really cannot guarantee you against death. It only suggests that when you get killed, your family might get a million dollars or something, whatever it is you're insured for. Fear. Fear.
Of course, we insure our property, which is compulsory. In many countries, you have to insure your car. What level of insurance is up to you? Of course, we prefer higher insurance if our car is a very nice car. If you drive an old car, as I often do, there's no point going for high insurance. You pick the minimum insurance required by law.
In Liverpool one day, I went to stop at the church center to do something for a few minutes in the evening after the church service. I popped into the church center, left the car outside. Ten minutes later, I came out and my car was gone. Now, how do you feel? Fear of having lost something? The fear of losing it, and when you've actually lost it, the turmoil that you feel? But the thing that bothered me was not the car in this case. It was my Bible in the car. You say, what? I say, yeah, my Bible. You say, how much is a Bible? Well, my Bible is priceless to me. Why was my Bible priceless? Because inside my Bible were thousands of notes, literally thousands. On every page, there could be dozens of notes, all handwritten. All these notes are tied to numbers within the text from which I could trace my notes and so forth. It represented years of work. So car, they can take the car, but give me back my Bible.
I still remember the surprise of my daughter. She was just a small girl then, about four years old. And when the car was stolen, she was stunned. How can anybody steal a car? But when I told her, I said, "Daddy is not worried about the car. Daddy is worried about his Bible." I think she was even more astonished. So, what's the Bible? But in this way, we convey to our children the things that are of value to us.
The Bible represented years of work. I had so many notes in it over the years, that in fact, I could no longer write them into the margins. So I had to write a separate notebook, all full of notes, so that I had to carry my Bible and another book which was full of my notes. And these notes are all linked into the Bible with numbers. So you can see that if you lose the Bible, you have a lot of problem with your notes. So I said to her, "Let's pray. Let's pray that Daddy gets his Bible back." So she found that a puzzling request. But you know, children's prayers are very powerful. The Lord has a way of listening to children's prayers. They are so much more uncomplicated, so pure, relative to grown-ups anyway. And they seem to have a quicker path to the Father. Their angel, as the Lord put it, stands very close to the Father.
A few days later, I received a call from the police and said, "Your car, we have found it. You can come and collect the car." I rushed to the police station looking for my Bible. To my great joy, yes, the Bible was there. I was so happy. Well, the car also came back with some slight damage, but nothing too serious.
I want to share this point with you as well. I can say that perhaps the central secret of my ministry, in many respects, is the Word of God. I don't worship the Bible. I worship God. But if you worship God, you listen to His Word, and you've got to know what that Word is. I think many Christians dare not launch out into the world because they do not know God, nor do they know His Word. They do err, the Lord Jesus said, because they know neither God nor the power of His Word.
I've spent long years of my life studying the Bible, and I wanted to refer to this because many Christians, even though they've been in the church for years and years, have a pitiful lack of knowledge of God's Word. I recall three important periods in my life when the Lord put me aside to study His Word. One was a period in China of at least about two years where I could do nothing else except study the Bible. And I delighted to study the Word, but initially I couldn't understand it. I think if you were a young Christian, you have had that experience. You read the Bible, you don't know what it's saying. And to make things worse, I had a King James Version. Reading in Old English didn't help very much.
I recall that I knelt down before the Lord and I said, "Lord, I don't understand what Your Word is saying. Will You please open my understanding to Your Word?" Two years I spent studying the Word of God, long hours every day. And one of my joys is that after all these many long years, I still have some of the notes I wrote when I was a very young Christian. And when I read some of those notes, I said, surely I did not discover that myself. Surely the Lord already was teaching me in those days.
The second period of time was in the Bible Institute in Scotland. For two years I studied the Word of God every day, although we had our classes and so on with all the usual things that you do in a Bible college. But my concern was to get through those lectures quickly, because often I did not feel I benefited all that much from the lectures. But I found most beneficial to me was the time I spent in my room studying the Word of God for myself. Another two years.
And a third period of time that the Lord put me aside was in London, where I could again just focus day after day, meditating in the Word of God. And that's where the notes in my Bible come in, you see. That Bible that was stolen in that car represented 15 years of study in itself. I had it for 15 years already by that time. Very, very valuable to me. I never made the mistake of going out with that Bible again. Whenever I went out to preach, you'll notice I carry a Bible that has no notes in it at all. If somebody would like to steal my Bible, they're welcome to have it. I'm never going to let anyone steal my notes again.
Many long years of studying the Word. Because if you follow me, the Lord Jesus says, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." You see, Jesus is all the time concerned about this freedom. And this is the thing I really want to emphasize. The freedom that is in Christ.
Our time is fast going, and I need to close. Let me close with someone else's testimony of this same thing. I love to read testimonies, because I learn from other people what they experience. And I find it so wonderful to see what God does in other people's lives. It refreshes me no end. Even recently, I read a testimony of a Chinese brother who went through so much suffering in China, for the Lord's sake, and it left me very humble, because I felt that nowhere have I suffered as much for the Lord as this dear brother in China did. The unspeakable beatings that he went through, starvation, humiliation, degradation, year after year after year. And he was only, when he first was arrested, in his late twenties. Because he went all over the country, preaching the gospel, and he was arrested, let out, arrested again, beaten, humiliated.
You know, the Lord did an amazing thing for him one day, to set him free. He was locked up for, I don't know how many times already. And when he was locked up on this occasion, he had endured so much, that I think the Lord felt that now it was really enough. You know what happened one day? He experienced what Peter experienced in Acts. The chains came off his wrists. He was in solitary confinement, much of the time. Because every time they put him in a prison cell, all the others got converted. So they found that this guy is exceedingly dangerous. Everybody comes to the Lord when they get put in jail with him. So solitary confinement was a safer thing to do. The Lord opened everything up. The doors opened, everything opened. He just walked out of prison. Through seven layers of gates, they all opened up in front of him. Oh yes, He came to set the captive free. Literally, physically, and spiritually.
I talked to this brother personally on the phone just recently. He visited our Liverpool church. The co-workers told me that this brother is here in Liverpool. Would you like to talk to him on the phone? I said, yes. And so we had a conversation over the phone, and he invited me to visit him. The Lord opened the way for him out as well. And the Lord willing, I hope to see this dear brother.
But this is not the story I wanted to tell you in closing. Because I'm concerned more about inner bondage than physical bondage. And this is the case of a Swiss doctor that I came to know. I visited him in Switzerland once, and he said, "I'd like to tell you my story." I said, "Yes, indeed," because I was a guest in his home.
And he said, "You know, I was a drunkard. Even though I was a medical doctor, practicing in medicine, looking after that area, the countryside." He said he started some drinking, but it turned out he was one of those people who easily get addicted to alcohol. He became addicted. He couldn't stop drinking. He had to drink more, and more, and more, until he was spending most of his income from his medical practice to fuel his drinking habit. In Switzerland, as in many countries, alcohol is heavily taxed, which means that it is very expensive to buy.
And he said to me that one day he found he had no money to give to his wife for the children's daily needs. He said his wife came to him one morning and said, "I have nothing to give the children for breakfast. Haven't you got any money somewhere?" He said, "I haven't." He said, "Then the children have to go hungry today." He said he felt very depressed. He felt that he had failed. His three children were growing up looking at a father who was constantly drunk. He barely managed to carry out his medical practice, but half the time he was unable to function properly.
And he said, you know, the last straw came when one day his son had a little cut on his hand, and came to him. He looked at the cut and he said, "Ah, that's nothing. Go away. Don't bother me with these little things." Well, by the next day, the son was running a fever, and then soon he realized that his son was suffering from septicemia, which is blood poisoning. The little cut was not that innocent. It had become infected, and now the boy was soon fighting for his life.
So Dr. Sartorius sank into a deep depression. He looked at his son and he said, "I can't even look after my own son. I can't put food in front of my children. My life is a complete mess, and this bondage that I cannot break, I cannot break it." He said that in his depression, he felt that it would be better to end it all. So he went to his drawer. In Switzerland, as you know, all young men do military service, rather like in Singapore. And since he had been an officer in the army, he had his service pistol in his office, and he decided that that was it. He couldn't live with himself. He had tried again and again to make resolutions, to try every technique that he knew in medicine to break out of the alcohol. He couldn't.
So he said, "The situation is hopeless. The bondage is unbreakable. I will take out my service pistol and end it all." So he opened the drawer and took out his gun. And then he noticed a Bible lying on top of his gun. Now in Switzerland, of course, you have a state church, and everybody is officially a Christian. If you're not a Christian, you've got nowhere to get buried, so you better become a Christian, at least on paper. And so what happens is that because you're a member of the state church, you get confirmed, and at your confirmation, you get a Bible. A Bible he hadn't read. He didn't even know what was in the Bible. But anyway, there it was lying on top of his gun, so he had to remove it before he could get his gun.
But since he got it in his hand anyway, he thought, well, there's no priest here, no pastor, so I might as well read a verse to myself before I pull the trigger. So he opened the Bible, didn't know where to look, so he just flung it open and took one look in there. And he said the words of the Bible hit him right between the eyes: "I am the Lord, your Redeemer." That's all the words that came. "I am your Redeemer." Now in German, the word Redeemer is very significant. The Redeemer is "Erloeser," that is to say, your Liberator. "I, the Lord, am your Liberator."
His mouth dropped open. The Bible spoke straight at him. He said, that's exactly what I need. A Liberator. He fell to his knees there and said, "Lord, liberate me. Set me free from the bondage in which I am. I destroy my family and now I'm going to destroy myself unless You set me free." A cry from the heart. Remember, this is not a religious man. He doesn't know how to pray. He only knows how to cry from the heart. God spoke something to him. He replied, "I am the Lord, your Redeemer." And he said, "Lord, redeem me." That's all you have to do. God doesn't need you to make a speech. Prayer is a cry from the heart for liberation.
He said something happened right there. He felt the chains fall away. Suddenly, he said, "I was free." And he said, "I don't know what happened, but I was free. I had struggled for weeks and months to become free of this bondage and I couldn't. And in that split second," he said, "medically, I don't know how to understand this thing." Because of course, it goes into your system, into your blood, this addiction. How can you be free just like that? But he was free.
He said he stood up from his feet a new person. Not only free from alcohol, but free from every other bondage. He got more than he expected. He thought from then on he wouldn't have to drink anymore, but the Lord changed his life so fundamentally, he himself became a preacher. He didn't quit his medicine, as far as I know, but he was everywhere. In fact, he took me around with him, going to all these different meetings every day, virtually, preaching the gospel.
Some years later, I was in another part of Switzerland, and I saw the name Pastor Sartorius. Now, Sartorius is a very rare name. And I thought, is there a connection between this Pastor Sartorius and the Dr. Sartorius I met many years ago, all the way in the eastern part of Switzerland? And it turned out that this Sartorius was in fact his son, the one who was going to die of blood poisoning. But now he himself had become a pastor. In fact, I later heard that he was a well-known pastor in Switzerland. So not only did the Lord set him free, He set his family free. The whole family was redeemed. How wonderful are the ways of the Lord.
He told me that the liberation was so complete that you could take a glass of wine and put it in front of him, and it would not even attract him. There was no temptation to him. The desire for it had completely gone. He said, "As a medical man, I know what that means. It is remarkable." Because if somebody gets away from addiction, he's still strongly tempted, just like a drug addict. He's still tempted. Even as he's gone through the whole process of rehabilitation, he still is in danger of being tempted back to drugs. But he said, "I have no desire whatsoever. It didn't bother me in the least. No attraction for me anymore." Not only are we liberated, liberation is complete, unless of course we choose to go back of our own choice. But we don't have to. There is no more power pulling us back.
I wanted to share about this wonderful God that has called me to Himself, has given me the privilege to know Him. A God of wonders, indeed. Of miracles. A God who does all these things, not to impress anybody, but to set us free.
I hope today you will consider what other things hold you in bondage. You know, bondage is a very strange thing. There is something called obsessive-compulsive behavior. Have you heard of that? By the very name, you know, it's a kind of bondage, a kind of addiction. For example, there are some people who have to wash their hands every five minutes. They always feel unclean. If they open a door, the door is contaminated, they've got to wash their hands. These people are always washing their hands. It is an obsessive-compulsive behavior. They're not insane. There's nothing mentally imbalanced about them. But there is a compulsion. They have to do this thing all the time.
You may notice that you do some things also and you don't know why. You're all the time doing those things. There are some people who always have a certain cough. They don't have a cold. They have nothing wrong with their throat. But they keep on coughing. A kind of compulsive behavior. These are minor things. But there are some very serious things that keep you in a bondage that will cripple your life.
So in closing, I remind you of the story I began with. The shark that never got beyond six inches. That king of the sea that ends up being a midget or a dwarf. What kind of a person are you? Are you content with the Egypt in which you live? With your onions and your garlic? Are you content with a comfortable routine? Are you comfortable in the life you live? Or do you say, "Lord, I want to know You more. I want to become the kind of person that reaches the maximum to which You have called me. So that on that day when I see You, You will not have died in vain for me."
Let us close in prayer.