Lost — Winkie Pratney

Hi, I'm Derek Hong, Senior Pastor of Church of Our Saviour Singapore. I'm so glad you're listening to this powerful message from the Word of God. I believe that as you do so, the Holy Spirit will touch your heart in a very personal way.

If you would like to know more about Jesus Christ, or speak to someone, or have any questions, feel free to contact me through the Church website or telephone. Now, enjoy this message from God's wonderful Word.

Billy must have a lot of close friends. As a man who's spoken to more people than any other evangelist in history. So, I had the honour of introducing him, not his personal connection, but in the one that was the first global broadcast in Wellington, in New Zealand, as our capital.

And it was kind of fun to introduce him. I was waiting for this link to come in. I told him the story about a young man who was in Bible college, and at the end of his college time they have a special, sort of a farewell service thing.

It was not really a service, it was a huge get-together. And one of the things that that particular college did, is if you had made a choice, you were going to marry somebody, what you would do, instead of giving them an engagement ring first, the boys would buy a bouquet of flowers.

And so I said, this young man, he's going to this Bible college, he bought the largest bouquet of flowers anybody had ever seen. And he kept it for this final farewell thing. And so, this girl that he really loved, spent time with her, and she seemed like she was interested, and so he had his big bouquet, and he came, she offered it, he offered it to her, and she looked down and she looked at him and she said, that's very sweet of you, but I can't accept it.

And he was crestfallen, because he really loved this girl, and he said, well, why not? She said, you don't seem to have any great goals in your life. He said, well, why do you think I'm at this Bible college?

I want to be an evangelist. She said, an evangelist? What kind of job is that? She said, I want a good job, and being taken care of at home, and I'm sorry, but I can't accept it. And he was crestfallen.

He took his little big bouquet of flowers, and there was a golf course out near that Bible college, and he was walking through there, and he had a big kind of a confrontation with God. He said, you know, should I just throw aside evangelism and go do something else?

I was good at selling. I think he was washing dishes faster than anybody else. He was trying to think what else he could possibly do, and sometime very early that morning, he made a decision. He said, no girl, no job, nothing shall ever come between you and your call on my life.

And his friends found him in the morning. His face was kind of glued with his tears and the dew of heaven to the pages of his Bible, and they found him lying there in the golf course, and they kind of got him up.

He got up, and he went on, and he did become an evangelist. And I said, maybe somewhere in the U .S. tonight, there's a lady washing dishes at home who might be watching this. And I said, she probably had a lovely life, and she married somebody that did give her a nice background and sort of home and things like she wanted.

But I wonder there as she's at home, if she ever wonders what it would have been like to be married to Billy Graham. And I, my hand up, curtain open, and Billy broadcast around the world. So it has been a great joy to meet many men of God who've had a passion since they were young people to be his followers.

Youth, Calling, and the Tithe of One's Life

And if you look in history, and you look in your scriptures, you'll see that the majority of people that God has called into ministries have started when they are young. As a matter of fact, still today globally, 19 out of 20 people who are getting saved in the world today become Christians before they reach the age of 25.

And so, this will be my fifth generation of young people that I'm working with. I'm not really, really ancient. Now Billy's beat everybody, he's 92. My father died at some time over 95. So Billy's still hanging in there.

But I'm still a kid. I'm just 66. I was the youngest of that group that you were talking about, the father's thing. And I think the reason they chose me as a father is because this is my fifth generation of teenagers.

And sometimes people look at me kind of with sympathy. Why don't you grow up and get a real job, they say. Stuff like that. And I tell them, well, the reason why I'm still working with young people is this, because God gave me more than one brain cell.

And I've lived long enough to see what God's done in scripture, He's done in history, and He can do it again. So I enjoy working with my special group, You're a teenager, you're only a teenager, you know, for just a very short time, seven years, between what Pat Byrne used to call Twix 12 and 20.

That short block. And even in the Old Testament, if you lived a long time, even if your life had been shrunk from the nearly a thousand years of the original creation, shorter and shorter and shorter, you still got three score and ten, which gives you at least, hopefully, 70 years.

So those of you with advanced degrees in mathematics will be able to work this out, that seven is a tenth of 70, which is a tithe of your life. So I have a friend who's one of the contributors in the study Bible, Greg Johnson, he says this, to the young people he works with, If you give a tithe of your teenage years to Jesus, He'll give you an open heaven for the rest of your life.

And coming to the Lord myself, after ten years, by the way, I need to tell you this, how many people that are here today are not married yet? Put your hands up. Like three of you. Well the others are kind of a bit reluctant, in case people go, she's free, and run over towards you.

There is actually a rule, if you want to reach world class at anything, they've done a lot of research in all kinds of different fields, different kinds of training, whether it's in athletics or it's in music or anything else, and the rule has now become known as the 10 ,000 hours.

If you want to restructure your brain and your whole life, based on one particular thing, you're deciding this is the thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, this is the thing I'm going to give most of my life to.

In order to reach world class, you have to put at least 10 ,000 hours into that thing. Now that works out roughly three hours a day, at least 20 hours a week for 10 years. That's how you get your 10 ,000.

It doesn't matter what you're doing. You could aim to be the world's best cook or the world's biggest crook. It's still going to take 10 ,000 hours to get to that level. So just keep that in mind. When I first...

I've got to show you a few pictures first. No, we've got the little dancing shoes. They're being carried by somebody. Hopefully Jesus. But I want you to see a couple of pictures of my family. I haven't got my wife here.

She's gorgeous and I've got about 8 ,000 pictures of her, but we'll be here too long. My background is I come from a... My dad is there on my left. No, it's still a... Does that go away or become something else?

That's not my father. Yeah, that'll give you a picture. My father is that brown-looking fellow on the side. He's Maori. My grandfather is that and that's... Beside him is his grandfather and that little kid carried by my great-grandfather is me.

So that's my roots. My dad is Maori, but he's really not an ordinary Maori. He had a very strange life. This is my mother. Isn't she gorgeous? She's part French and part... A little bit gypsy, a little bit Spanish.

Mostly Scottish and British. OK? Very artistic, very creative lady. My dad became a professional athlete. He had a very rough background. He was born to a Maori princess who was raped by a passing man who left her pregnant.

She died giving birth to my father and it was an embarrassing thing for a tribe of people but they did. The king, or the chief if you like, his wife, which was his grandmother, moved in to take care of him in the forest.

This chief had actually three wives. One died and then one took care of dad in the forest. And so he only spoke Maori until he was 12 and then his grandmother died which left him alone and then a passing missionary heard a child crying in the...

I'm not actually quite sure how old he really was because all of his tribal... What do you call it? Not only his birth certificate but all of his papers. He would have owned about a quarter of the North Island if he'd kept those papers.

But his grandmother was a Christian but she smoked a pipe and they lived in a warrior which is like a sort of grass hut type thing and he thinks that his grandmother fell asleep and set the house on fire.

It's possible that he also set the house on fire because there was ships going past in the ocean they were near and he made a little ship that had fire in it. So somebody set that house on fire but when his grandmother came to he got her out of the flames and the house was burning down and she remembered there was a little wooden box in there that had all of his royal things all the things that showed people how significant he was and he thought she'd gone crazy and was trying to kill herself and he's very strong.

He held her down until everything burned. So when she died he was left orphaned without any backing. People didn't know. So when he died at 95 he may have been 100. We don't know. We just know his grandfather died at 108 years old.

So he was an amazing man. I'll show you a picture of my dad if I can find it here for you. Oh that's my dad when he was young and that little character was my younger sister. It was like a little Shirley Temple.

And you know Cooley here? That kind of... And there she's at three years old she became a professional dancer travelled with her dance teacher right through New Zealand giving these major concerts. She was a professional hula dancer both fast and slow hula came like a little mermaid out of the sea in an opening shell to do these dances in these large events.

So my little sister is kind of a you know Hollywood girl. My father became a major professional athlete I'll give you a picture of him. When he died I made this t-shirt when he was dying I made this t-shirt for him.

Dad's on the left the other one there you probably recognise. I made a little montage there because in professional cycling on the track somebody holds you then you'll launch and they hold you there. In those days you actually strapped they strapped the feet in there was no quick releases it's almost like making the pedals you're on shoes and they'd strap you in so they had to hold you and the person who launched you was the one who caught you at the end of the race.

So when we all knew dad was slowly dying I made this t-shirt for him that he could wear and underneath that little word always is the one that catches you at the end is the one who launched you at the start.

Lo I am with you always even till the end of the age. And so he wore that t-shirt he only had one but he kept washing it and wearing it. So that's my father when he was young amazing amazing man. So you'll often see this kind of thing Prattney wins 100 mile race he held every race record track, field, road never went overseas never competed in the Olympics because in those days if you won any money at all you were cut out from the Olympics for the rest of your life.

And when he was 16 he won like 5 pounds or something and they cut him out from the Olympics. The first Olympic Games he ever was allowed to compete in was in Australia when he was 86. It was the Masters Games held in Brisbane and it was funny because he's still riding and there was some man who was 70 years old he was an Australian and he trained for 4 years and he was called the world's oldest competing cyclist.

And when the local television knew that he was there in Brisbane and my father was there who was at least 17 years older than him and they put him together for a fun race and put him in this new track that hadn't been yet released for the Olympics and he was there to show how trained he was and Dad just borrowed somebody's bike and put some old shoes on and you know you go in one of those, you go together once around then you cross the line, they trigger Dad killed him he left him behind in the dirt it was like chariots of fire you know, running and pow all like that he fell off the bike, the poor guy at the end he just couldn't handle it.

I don't think he even went into the Olympics but because of that they allowed Dad to compete but not officially because 70 was the official cut off date for being in the Masters Games and against 30 year old ex-Olympic athletes my 86 year old Dad got on his bike and competed you see when he walked at 86 he walked like this.

But when he got on the bike he was poetry in motion. It's a good thing they didn't allow him to win. He would have taken two golds and a bronze at the Olympic Games. The Australian Bible Society got all excited when they heard about this.

So they came to Dad the following year when he was 87 and they said would you do some fundraising for us. How about one of these sponsored lap things where people pay whatever they want for a lap. People looking at my Dad when he's old.

See if I can find a picture of him here. Find it. Yeah there he is. And my gorgeous mother around that track. They asked him how many laps could you go. He said oh I don't know how about three days he'd competed in six day cycle races when he lost his partner half way through and finished him on his own.

It was no big deal. So they had some John's ambulance there in case he died and people monitoring and everything. And I know there were some people that he's an old dude I'll tell you what. We'll give him a buck a lap.

They probably thought he might do like 20 laps and then he'd fall off his bike and die. And so they put in the money. Do you know how many laps my father did. 900 laps at an Olympic pace over three days 330 kilometres.

Look at him there. I know a lot of people went broke that day but the Australian Bible Society did very well. So looking at Dan and thinking of your pastor and how much both Armour Publishing and he and other friends here have contributed this study bible for this my last minute I want to tell you how much we appreciate the investment that Singapore has made in this real world shaking sort of event.

It's actually an amazing thing. It's never been done before in history. It's the largest study bible ever done. It covers 2000 years of church history and not which person killed which person. It's when people were behaving themselves and living like God told them to do.

And evangelism missions and spiritual awakenings. We've put together 2000 years of cross section and 105 contributors. Billy's one but he's not really writing anything more. So all just many many of these wonderful men and women of God who had visitations of the Lord who saw supernatural things happen in their life.

Most of all saw such a revelation of the Lord that it completely changed and transformed their lives. And they found a way to pass it on to other people. So that's the the book pastors talking about. And I want to thank you all for that.

Now the lovely thing too that I've learned about your pastor that if you bribe him he will actually give you more time. I I've usually had like 30 minutes today I have 40 minutes maybe even 45 not. Now it's all kind of worn out.

But yes I want to show you a couple of other things but first I'd like you to find the book of Luke please Luke chapter 15. And I'm just going to give you a very simple parable without actually the stories.

You know what's wonderful about God. He gives great stories. Most of what Jesus taught was not like academic stuff at all. Matter of fact almost all the Jesus words that he used were short words. We translate them to English.

Most of his words in English would be like one syllable words like love. Sometimes he used a big one like water. But most of his words were short words fire, light. And it's strange. But one of the great Quaker writers of the past said you'll notice he's the same one who helped come up with the Alcoholics Anonymous thing he said.

If you read the words of Jesus you'll find that a lot of the words that he uses are just short words. But those words are always words of penetration, light penetrates the darkness and makes it bright light and water penetrates the wood penetrates the ground and makes it soft.

Fire penetrates the wood and makes it burn. Salt penetrates the meat and stops it from rotting. So with Jesus when you listen to him he reveals to you things that may seem very simple to you but actually penetrate to the heart.

And when they get inside you they explode. And it is lovely to study God. So many times the Pharisees in the old days looking at Jesus could not understand why at all he was the way he is one of the big things they were angry with him.

He didn't look like they think he should have looked he should have only hung out with religious people. Instead he seemed to hang out with the people the prostitutes and tax collectors and other horrible people.

And they couldn't understand Jesus at all. And when like this Luke 15 that you should be looking at now opens with some of the major religious figures of his day criticizing Jesus and who he is and what he was talking about.

And Jesus gives them three stories. And I believe that stories are one of the major ways that God communicates truth to people. I love giving children stories and stuff. Little kids understand things they don't have sophisticated cool ways of dealing with you tell them there is a ghost there.

They will stay away from the cupboard for a long time. They are not sophisticated enough to create all these kind of corrections we carry on in our lives. But God's simplicity is loaded with power. This is how he creates the universe like this light be.

And we've got the universe just like that only faster. We would probably think for a couple of thousand years and design this and that he just talks. Here are three great stories and I want to give a little background on these first I want you to see first there are some common elements in this.

The Three Lost Things and the Joy of Being Found

You can see on the shoes are looking at me again there what man of you having a hundred sheep. So we've got actually three different things here we've got sheep. If you go down a little bit we've got piece.

There's a hundred sheep. There's ten pieces of silver. You go a little bit further. You have two sums. So see how the numbers are going down. It starts higher with a hundred then it goes to ten finally ends up with two.

They're different things. One sheep one is silver and one is a sum. They all do start with S. Of course in English. But it's interesting isn't it. And then there's somebody in each case that is out looking for something that is called lost.

I think lost is one of the most understood biblical words in our time. Because we have a whole generation that has fundamentally become lost. It's not that they don't live near people. In terms of young people and teenagers we have probably one of the most sophisticated in most sophisticated ways educated and connected than any generation in history.

Kids today. And those of you who are texting busily while I'm talking and Facebook. I'm on Facebook. Alright but I'm not going to answer your letter. I'm already in 5000 good friends. And I haven't got time to answer 5000 good friends every day.

And to pass on the essential content of a Facebook communication. Just like every single day over over the sky we've got satellites. And in a single day there's over a trillion conversations carried every day.

Trillion. That's a lot of conversations. The average content of those communications is like this. What's up. That's about it. What's up. Second one is I'm having a cappuccino at Starbucks. That's about it.

This is not going to change the world. Believe me it will help Starbucks notice the hundred sheep and you lose one. There's ten pieces of silver. She loses one. There are two sons. One of them leaves.

So I'm going to give you names connected with each one of these. And if you want to take notes on this you can just call this simple at the end of this I'm going to give you a song. It's not a worship chorus.

It's gorgeous and stuff. It's just. My mother was an entrepreneur and all her early life she wanted to be a singer. And when she married dad she soaked her whole life and career into his. She never did actually become a singer.

She wouldn't have been an opera singer. She would have been a pop singer. And she studied some of the top pop divas just like Elvis Presley studied people like Mario Lanza to become great at that thing.

But I remember when I was 12 she bought me a special thing. It was called a stereogram and it had a record player on it. You may not know what that technology is. I don't mind. But I have a thousand albums in my revival library that cover from the 30s through to the 21st century.

And even after they stopped doing albums which had nice big pictures on them they added about another thousand CDs that add those stuff. And the reason I've kept that is because I want to show people what God does in every generation.

John Wesley the great Methodist said this if you want to understand the nation study its entertainment. That's strange. Here's a man who wrote at least 236 plus books. I'm a mentor to musicians spent a lot of time with some very well known Christian musicians.

Every year we had a thing it ran for almost 6 years when Keith Green was alive called the Garden Valley Artist Retreat and we had 300 of the best Christian songwriters singers you can imagine all come together not to do the latest licks and show what kind of cool things they were.

They just came together to hang out together and to learn stuff about God that would help them more in the careers that they came in and it was wonderful. You should have listened. Do you remember Michael Jackson did We Are The World.

We could have done one called We Aren't The World but there was imagine what it's like to have 300 of the best Christian singers songwriters there are all worshipping God at the same time. Nobody song leading them just singing.

It was awesome. And nobody did the Garden Valley album. We just sung. We talked about God we talked about his wonders and what he was like. And they went out and started writing stuff about what God taught us that weekend anyway see these common elements in every case something is wonderful.

The lost becomes found and this statement is made rejoice with me. For I have found what or which was lost. So notice that when this thing is made it brings real joy but not just joy for the person who finds it.

He wants everybody to get in on it and I've learned something about God. So he wants back the things that he's lost and you belong by right to him. I don't care what your background is. I don't care where you come from.

I don't care whether you're religious or irreligious. He is the father is the rightful father of this people. There are no races just the human race. And we are supposed to be his people and the sheep of his pasture and all of these things in the scriptures tie back to this.

God is the rightful owner of this planet. He's the one that made us he designed us. He is our rightful owner and lord and savior all of those things. I remember C .S. Lewis saying enemy occupied territory.

That is the story of Christianity today. Now when the world fell many of us were ripped away from God and have since lost our way. And the thing that is beautiful about us is this little word rejoice.

I'm going to show you in a second something I discovered about two years ago that was really quite wonderful for me as I was sitting with pastor here. I just briefly looked at one of the prayer times you have on the seven mountains.

I want to show you something that will interest you. I am presently fairly fully recovered now from a quite serious it's called it was actually a brain stroke, simplest way I can describe it, not by a clot but one of the main things that fed a section of my brain it just blew, it just blew in my brain.

So the day after Christmas I went up to be with my sister with my wife and my son. We went up and had Christmas dinner with them came back down, fell asleep got up, woke up a bit late my wife was giving me a phone, a young man called asked me about a computer what kind he should buy and stuff and I made computers and stuff.

I am trying to listen to him and I understood fully what he was saying but for 10 minutes he talked to me and I couldn't answer him. The reason is, is because that part of the brain, it blew all the nouns, it's the simplest way I can say it, of 50 years all the names of anything were gone, out of my mind.

I didn't realize that but when I tried to talk to my wife, I called her Lavonnie, that little girl who was when I was a kid that we just had Christmas dinner with, my wife's name is Fayona. I have been married to her 42 years and I called her Lavonnie my poor son whose name was William I called Winky which is my name and I have been married to myself as far as I can remember I couldn't even remember people that I have lived with for a long long time let alone names of computer systems and operating systems and food and places and name it, I couldn't if I gave, if somebody gave me a knife, a fork and a spoon I'd know what they did, I wouldn't stick the fork in my eye, I'd know what they were, but I didn't know the names of them.

You know what it's like to have a doctor of literature in arts sciences history communications and youth culture except you can't remember any of the names in it and your answer would be yeah what is that.

So there's a wild little word here it's this rejoice with me now, another quick thing, I told you about my mother and her desire to be a singer and bearing it in my dad's life. When I finish this I'm going to tell you the story of how my mother finally came to the Lord.

But one of the things I discovered in this trying to fix the brain, when they saw the surgeons found how big this stroke was, they were amazed that this whole side of my body had not become paralyzed.

I seemed to be able to walk and do everything else. It was just the problem with the names and so for almost six months the hospital sent out nurses five different ones at different times to test how much I knew and it was very strange but one of the things I found a book called this is your brain on music made me appreciate just how wonderful God is this man who wrote it is both a neuroscientist that's his research.

He's also a music producer and his book puts together the two things that he found why people are so interested in some kinds of music, why people have special kinds of music, and one of the things he found is this, you all know at least you may know, that one half, one side of your brain processes music.

You can you can remember tunes for things some of you go I know it but you may not remember the words because they're stored somewhere else my words were all vanished blown up, but this is what he said.

If you relearn the music the brain will not only restore that it will take the lyrics and transfer them to another place in your body, on your brain of course, probably it won't show up on your toe or something, which would be embarrassing but my poor wife and my son over the last six months have heard me down in my lab.

I have a lab by the way a laboratory when you're a nerd, that's what you have a laboratory. I have a studio in it I have a darkroom, I have my old chemistry lab. I have a digital electronic design lab.

I have a bunch of things, and they're all behind a wall, like James Bond. You hit the wall and the door opens up. I can show it to you if you come to New Zealand but I have to kill you afterwards because it's a secret but I'm downstairs, they're all upstairs and they hear tiny little shades of songs coming out because I'm taking songs that I learned when I was all the way from before I became a Christian to the time I first got saved.

Cliff Richard and Pat Moon were two of the people, we did a lot of these songs and they got saved about the same time I did maybe a year or two later and so a lot of the songs that we used to do in the band I had for two and a half years, I've been re-recording and what it's what, it not only goes over the music, it starts storing the ideas or the thoughts or the the stuff connected to it.

If you love somebody and you like the song and it reminds you of that person it also stores that so this part of the brain, basically blown up, has 90 back. That's what my son says. Of course I've forgotten what his name is, I was going to ask you but 90 of that data is back from music and Jesus this book biggest book in it, 66 books in here, biggest book in it is Psalms.

So whenever I come to a church and I listen to the worship teams and listen to people sing it tells me something about the church. It tells me something about their dealings with God and God's dealings with them.

Because every time there's been a revival in history, two things have repeated. One is we begin to understand how bad it is when you hurt a God who loves you more than you can imagine. The great grief that is on God's heart is one of the big missing elements in our day the grief of God over the sin of the world.

We put that in the Revival Study Bible as one of the core things that has recurred in every spiritual awakening. The second one is the joy that comes when God gets you back and the tremendous release that actually creates new kinds of music.

So I believe every real revival will have new kinds of music, new kinds of singing these music young people I've had some come visit me in my office and remember all the scary stuff is behind a wall, they don't see that.

But I have about 4 ,000 books in that bit. There's another 6 in the US, but I've got a wonderful set of old books and one of them has got 13 volumes. The volumes have about they're probably .8 type 600 pages and they are the poetical works of John and Charles Wesley and there's thousands of them.

Every time something happened, John or Charles wrote a song about it. No wonder they said over a thousand tongues to sing, they needed at least that number to sing half of what they wrote. So look at this gotta hurry here.

The Lost Sheep and the Cost of Rescue

Sheep. Sheep quick tale about sheep. Sheep are dumb. I come from a nation used to have 80 million sheep and 3 million people. Now it's got over 4 million people and a lot less sheep. Sheep don't like that very much.

We ate them actually in the bible you'll see the word cattle. That doesn't mean just cows, it means domesticated creatures that once they're domesticated they take on care from. You could probably call a cat a cow.

A cat wouldn't like you very much. Dogs are like cows in bible ideas. They're another creature you have by the way I figured out the difference between dogs and cats, do you know the differences. Dogs want to be people, cats want to be God.

That's the difference between them. Basically I don't know why that stupid sheep went out. He's the only sheep probably listened to too many old Pink Floyd albums went out looking at all these other dumb church sheep, they all hang out together and they're just so stupid, actually sheep are really dumb.

They don't even have proper teeth to bite you and little sheep lambs are worse. This one sheep doesn't want to hang out with these other dumb sheep. So he goes out and all they say here you came fine, skipping away and it gets dark and he goes which way did I come.

Then it gets worse. He hears this sound. It is now true blood out there a flock call them wolves that look for sheep just like this and there's nobody else, just him. What would you do if you stuck out on a moor like that and it's pitch dark and you don't know where to run, you're probably running around a little bit, like this and somebody comes and gets him who is it, if I had been a shepherd I'd go, hey I lost one hey I got 99 fine, let them go.

Sheep do never do this again. I'm not even going to show you what's left of your brother. And this lovely old song none of the ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters crossed. How dark was the night the Lord passed through before he found his sheep that was lost you and I don't know what it cost God to pull us and our stupidity and our dumbness out of what we've been into to bring us back to the safety of the fold.

But he did it, and we're alive because of him. Three minutes now I don't know can I just say this. God's laws are descriptions of reality. They're not inventions, you walk away from them. He's telling you the truth.

It's not his own religious invention. It is a description of how things actually work and you can't break them. You walk out, it's like saying yea, if they'll jump us off a 40 story building without a hang glider without a bat suit a spider man situation you will accelerate at 32 foot a second a second and when my head strikes the cement 14 stories below thee thou shalt be paced.