Serious Christianity — George Verwer

We're expecting George to come shortly, he's on his way. For those of you who have just joined the ship, we want you to stay behind after George's talk this morning, I'm not quite sure when that will finish, but it should finish between quarter to nine, at nine o 'clock.

And all the department heads, if all the department heads could also stay behind, this morning those of you who have just joined will be assigned to your department, so you'll be meeting your department head, and then you'll all go off together to your respective departments and learn your new jobs.

Any questions about that? Yes. Sorry? Oh, boat drill. Is there a boat drill today, Captain? Okay, we're going to postpone the boat drill today. Well, let's just commit our day and our morning to the Lord, and ask for God to have his hand upon George and speak to us.

Heavenly Father, we do thank and praise you for this new day, and thank you for giving us the sleep and the rest that we've needed. We want to commit ourselves to you this morning, we pray that you would have your hand upon us, we want to hear your voice, we want to respond to your word to our life, and I pray that this morning we will really have an ear to hear and a heart to respond.

We pray that you'll be speaking through George, and speaking to our hearts. We also want to pray for all of us that are beginning new jobs today in different departments, we pray that you would help us to learn and to understand, and also to become effective in our service for you here on board the ship.

We ask these things in Jesus' name, Amen. Okay, Andrew's giving me the thumbs up that George is there somewhere. Okay, here comes George Brewer.

Personal Stories and the Ministry of Small Acts

Well, it's great to be back on the famous ship Dulas. Sorry I wasn't with you in Japan. After I was with you in the Philippines, I went to Japan and got really injected with a vision for that country, so I'm going back there on Sunday very briefly.

I don't know how many of you have seen this book, The Unseen Face of Japan. How many have seen this? I wish I'd gotten this to you before Japan, but I'll give this to Lloyd to put in the library, and if some of you got a little bit of vision for Japan, I think you'll find that very interesting.

I spoke at Sunbridge Baptist Church outside London just before I came here, and that man, the author, came to the meeting, and I hadn't seen him in years, David Lewis. So I'm hoping someday you might be able to link him into coming to the ship.

I'm sure I don't have to say this, but let's be in prayer for the program here. I think we're a long way from the city. People that come out here are probably fairly serious. I had a most exciting thing in the meeting last night.

When I was a student at Moody Bible Institute, that's a long time ago, one of my close friends was a man named Dick Nusher. He was a very complex, introspective person, and I don't think I realized, we were all going through so many struggles, I don't think I realized how deep his struggles were.

He married a rather unique woman named Ruth. They were both original people in the early days in Mexico. To make a long story short, they were just sold out for the Lord. They went to Turkey. In fact, I think their names are mentioned in the book about Canaan, that book about the land of Turkey.

They went back to the States and had a very hard time. They divorced years ago. He backslid completely years ago, left everything. I'm pretty strong at keeping people's addresses, but after seeing Ruth once and talking to him on the phone maybe 15 years ago, somehow they kept moving.

I lost their address. I never ceased to pray, and their daughter was here last night. She is going on the youth of the mission strong in God. I got her email. She had to rush off with the YWAM group, but I had a chat with her and got her email, and we'll be able to get back in touch with her mother and father.

I think one of the things you may learn from my visit, which you probably already have learned, we've got to keep relearning, but it's one of the many things that are on my heart for this morning is that little things can mean a lot to people.

Sometimes little things just mean a little, but if you keep doing little things in the name of the Lord and unto the Lord, they can mean a lot. My uncle is a millionaire. He's an atheist. His name is Wilbur Dutchess.

He's the vice president of a very famous company called Borden's. He's moving around the 90-year mark. My aunt is, I think, a nominal Christian. I'm not really sure. My mother died the same year we lost the Lagos.

I found out somehow, I have a lot of relatives, that it was my aunt's 90th birthday tomorrow, and so I just phoned my aunt. It's still a good evening time there in the east coast of the USA. I just was able to wish my aunt her happy 90th birthday.

If you don't think that helps make a person's day, then you don't understand too much about people. Just before that, I phoned a guy named Charlie Schottmeier. That's a funny name. He's a Dutch background guy in my part of New Jersey.

If you're not Dutch, you're not much. I phoned this Charlie Schottmeier who just happened to be in the fuel oil business. We have been friends since 10 years of age. It's not easy to maintain those friendships that started at five and six.

You've got to head start. You're also young. If you start making a list and praying for people that you met when you were five, you're six, you're seven, you're eight, I'm in touch with people that I met at almost every age level, including...

Well, I won't comment on that. But I just called Charlie this morning. It's his 60th birthday, a couple of years behind me. They wanted me there in New Jersey. I had a big surprise party for him. He's a very well-known political figure in town and business person.

They donated all the money from the birthday surprise. They encouraged people to give all the money to Operation Mobilization. This was such an encouragement to Charlie. He just told me on the phone because he wasn't sure where his wife stood about O .M. and me.

Because I blow into town and usually have time with him. She's not always available. Her mother's very ill and sort of dying. Anyway, his birthday party took place on the weekend. It was a surprise. I had a little e-mail blurb that they read out to everybody.

But his actual birthday is the 27th. It's still the 26th there. So he said to me in our conversation, My birthday actually is the 27th. I said, Charlie, here in Taiwan, it is the 27th. I think it blew his circuit.

He said that phone call was the best birthday gift he could ever, ever get. We've been linked together for 52 years. And I hardly ever go to New Jersey. And he has put a lot of finance into Operation Mobilization.

So little things count. You can't always easily pick up the phone. Your budget may not always allow for that. But in the future, you probably will be. Telephone calls are coming down. I was with a friend in Dubai.

He talks hours on the phone, all through his PC, costing next to nothing. PC phone calls is one of the most radical breakthroughs in communication the world has ever known, especially for those of us who like to hear the voice.

In PC phone, there's a little bit of a delay for prayer. I'm excited about Mosbach and what they do there. This is one of the latest things that came to me out of Mosbach. I only have one copy. I've ordered a whole lot.

A lot of letters I'm dictating on this trip, hundreds and hundreds of letters. A lot of them will get this enclosure. This is the advantage of old-fashioned post mail over e-mail. Enclosures. So now with e-mail, though pictures consume a lot of time on the screen and all that, in the future it will be much easier to use enclosures with e-mail.

And I hope all of you, sooner or later, will take a look into my website, georgeverwer .com. I urge you to get your own domain name listed, because if not, somebody else will. Maybe even open a porno site on your name, which, if you're married, doesn't always enthuse your wife.

So anyway, they're celebrating 30 years of ship ministry. A little brochure. And I'm sure the communication experts in Mosbach would be happy to send extra copies of that to your prayer secretary to get out.

If you get any difficulty from them at all, please e-mail me, and we can try to work on that, send them some money to pay for them or something. But we want to get the word around. A vast percentage of all believers around the world still don't know what the ship ministry is actually about.

People even come on the ship, they don't know what this is about. You have to communicate, you have to tell them. I hope all of you get these copies of Relay Magazine. But I won't get into that now. I want to share something God just put on my heart this morning.

I'm always praying, I just have these few opportunities to share, and I really want to get God's mind, and I'm sharing a message that I've never shared by this subject ever in my whole life. How can you come up with something new at my age?

Let's pray together. Our God and Father, we praise and thank you for the opportunity to look into your Word. We praise and thank you for the reality we have in your Son, Jesus Christ. We're all earthen vessels, including George Verwer, that is for sure.

And yet, this treasure dwells in this earthen vessel. And we want to learn how to see the release of your Spirit in our lives. And help me as I attempt to put some rather strong thoughts across this morning.

In Jesus' name, Amen. Many times I've come to the ships with a lot of humor. I've even dressed up like a clown. I've worn my funny hair pieces. And we've had lots of laughs here in the past. We're probably not going to have so many laughs at this particular session this morning.

Though when you attempt to be serious, of course, sometimes it can be quite amusing. For our God does have a great sense of humor. I've emphasized that. There's been a greater influx of humor into OM in the past, say, 20 years.

And we get criticized for it in some denominations. They teach that humor is not from God. I won't name the parts of the world. But humor is greatly misunderstood. I have been highly criticized for my humor, especially things like my global under trousers and different things that I have done.

And in the name of balance, as I was praying about what to share, I decided to speak on this subject, a brand new title, Why We Are God's Serious People. Anybody who knows me knows that even from my earliest Christian days, I was an incredibly serious person.

I became over-serious. If you listen to my original orientation tapes, nine tapes that tens of thousands listened to for a period of 25 years, you will find the over-serious, sort of missing humorous George Verwer.

I tried to listen to some of those tapes as part of a 40th anniversary celebration or some other celebration in my head. And I got, I think, about halfway through the series. And as I was listening, I thought, who in the world is this?

We all change. We all change. I was, as a student at Moody Bible Institute, over-serious. When I went to the first party, I walked out. I believe there was a lot of superficial nonsense. I just walked out, the first party of the freshman class at Moody Bible Institute.

I'd already met another rather serious director named Dale Rotas. We met at Maryville College in Tennessee, where I was a first-year student and he was a second-year student. He was older than me in the Lord as well, and he was hyper-serious.

I was almost superficial next to him. He was also more of an intellectual, more of a thinker. When I went to Maryville, Dale was a huge influence on me. I was warned about Dale. I was told that he was actually baptizing people in the showers.

And so I wanted to find this fanatic. And I met him on Sunday morning. I'm still in touch with the pastor who preached that Sunday morning. In fact, just talked to him on the phone. He had a very difficult pilgrimage as well, a man named Jim Kren.

And Dale and I walked home from church, and we've been linked together ever since, 42 or 43 years. Dale could especially be serious when George Verwer was doing something foolish. And he was my Nathan.

He had the ability to take me aside and say something along this line. Well, God is using you, George, praise God. Throw these little butts. You know, if you did this or if you didn't do that, if you said this or didn't say that, how much more, Brother George, God would be able to use you?

And, of course, I had to repent. We are, at the end of the day, however, with all of our personality quirks, with all of our humor, and I hope you're able to laugh at yourself, but very, very basic. I picked up a very strange habit, according to my wife, on airplanes, where you often sit silent for quite a while.

Automatically, when I walk into the toilet on an airplane, I start to talk. I make faces. I make jokes. I talk out loud in Spanish and English. There's something also about the flush of an airplane toilet.

I always feel it's the end of the world. You know, you push the little button, and then a few seconds later, it reminds me of my toilet on the very first ship, Lagos, which was also my office. And I covered the toilet, one of these powerful seawater toilets.

I covered it with a very nice box, and you'd come in for fellowship with me, and you'd sit on top of that box. But the handle was a pretty strong piece of iron or steel, and we couldn't change that. And some people, when they'd sit there, they'd get nervous, and their elbow would hit.

And, you know, the guy would sit on the box, wondering whether this was Berwer's way of punishing people for breaking the social policy. Well, it's good that we can laugh, because some things in life are so humorous.

We need to be able to laugh at ourselves when we do something silly, and we need to be able to, at times, really be a lot less serious. Many of us really are too serious about ourselves. We take ourselves too seriously.

Jill Briscoe, Stuart Briscoe's wife, in answering questions to a group of leaders at an OM conference, how was she handling all this fame? How was she handling all the invitations to speak all over the world?

She's as good a speaker as her husband. And one of the things she said was, don't take yourself too seriously. It's a beautiful, beautiful thought. However, this message is a serious message. We are God's serious people.

And as often in my messages, I've got seven points. And if one year from now you send me the seven points and your home address or some land-based address, not the ship, we will send you seven books, one book for each point.

Do you know what books cost? We get spoiled here on this ship. I hope tomorrow to be able to give you a load of free books. And for one of the first times, I have Mark Knight around to help me find the books.

I was giving away books the other day on Lagos II. I've just come from Lagos II in Istanbul. I hit my head six times in the book hole, very low ceiling. Fortunately, I had a hard hat on. And that was really helpful.

But some of us don't realize just how expensive books are. And so when you can get a free book, especially if you're the kind of person that also wants the giveaway books, take advantage of that. Even if it's a book you don't particularly want to read, you can give it away as a birthday present or something.

Seriousness About God and His Word

Number one, we are serious about God. We believe in God. We believe we're created by God. We believe we shall spend eternity with God. I'm not one of these characters that understands much about heaven.

Praise God for those coffee machines in the cabin. Do you have a coffee machine in your cabin? I guess I'm in one of these luxury cabins. Coffee machine. I don't drink coffee, so it's very handy. I may give lessons later in the week on how to make good tea in a coffee machine.

The key is to remove that center little place where they put the coffee filter. Just push that aside. Let the water go from the container tank in the top directly onto the teabag. You must make sure the teabag, and I bring my own teabags from England, is in the right place.

And as you try to move it into the right place, the water dripping is hot. So you get your finger burned in order to get a cup of tea. I can see that this message is going to be difficult this morning.

I'm probably not in the right mood. I need to be in a more serious mood. Let us understand this, that no matter how much we love God, no matter how serious we are about God, our pursuit of prayer and fasting, which is a huge thing, especially when I was your age, that we are still incredibly human.

And we are a mixture. As human beings, we are a mixture. We're not an amoeba. We're not some kind of single-celled being. And in our lives, personality factors, emotional factors, burdens to know God get mixed up with all kinds of things.

And that's one of my ways of speaking, is that I'm very open, I'm very honest. Something pops into my head that I think may help people stay awake, and I just throw it out, even though it seems ridiculous.

I've already done that. But at the end of the day, let's go back to the wheat. Let's throw the George Burwer straw away and go back to the wheat. I'm also very, very aware of the limitation of preaching in people's second language, and that there can be easily miscommunication during my few days.

And I've had people at times listen to me and actually become angry. And you can't imagine how people have attacked me on certain occasions, not many, by the grace of God, because we're all such a wide range of personality and background.

There's bound to be someone that does not get encouraged by what George Burwer says, but becomes angry or upset or difficult even believing that this character could be the leader of this great movement.

There were people that thought that O .M. was really a great movement until they met me and my sort of ragamuffin approach to communication. Fortunately, I have a majority of people in my camp, and I've had about 150 ,000 of them stand up in my meetings repenting and giving their lives to Jesus, including many non-Christians.

And last night, again, by the grace of God, many stood in this auditorium to pray that prayer, Lord, here am I, send me. I also get enormous feedback from the majority of people that they appreciate me just being open and honest and vulnerable and, again, I'm not saying that's the only way to speak or the only way to be.

And my prayer is that this message may help bring balance. We believe in God. At the end of the day, that is a serious thing because there's so many people who don't believe in God. This morning I was especially praying for Taiwan, and my burden for Taiwan jumped about 20 on my spiritual thermometer this morning.

Especially as I realized just the vast number of lost people in this country, but at the same time, a phenomenal church. I would guess, looking at Patrick Johnston's old book and realizing it's 10 years ago, there must be a million people here who are followers of Jesus or sympathetic or a nominal Christian.

From what I understand, there's a lot of nominalism. There must be a lot of backslidden people here who once were on fire. Presbyterians are very strong here, but this is a challenging place for us to be.

And let's try to increase our prayer. Yes, we believe not only in God with all of our heart, but we believe in knowing God. And we look through the Word of God and we discover that basically the Word of God is a very serious book.

That leads me to my second point. We're serious about God's Word. We're serious about God's Word. I've read through the Bible quite a few times, spent time in the Word of God almost every day since my conversion.

There is not that much humor in the Bible. There is some, and certainly there's inference. There's certain things that we look at that can be inferred. There's certainly funny situations, but some of them would be considered actually quite serious.

Have you ever had the situation where something very tragic happened and you started to laugh? Have you tried to explain that? My Grand Canyon stories. Have you heard my Grand Canyon stories? I mean, it's wild.

People go to Grand Canyon on their honeymoon and they're taking a photo. I don't think this was their honeymoon, but this is a true story. They're taking a photo, and they said to the guy there on the edge, you know, back up just a little bit more so I get a better picture.

And a man backed up to improve the photo, went right over the edge and was killed. Why are you laughing? There's something about us human beings. What about the guy that went around in a circle in his car as fast as he could and then drove off the edge of the cliff and was killed?

What about the lady who tried the same thing and her car hit a ledge and she jumped out of the car and then had to jump herself over the next cliff? That's enough for my Grand Canyon stories. God knows everything about us, and he loves us still.

Some of you are way more serious than others. You're more like the way I was in 1959 and 60 and 61. You don't see the point of some of the humor. You don't appreciate it. We are serious about God's Word.

At the end of the day, those of us who love humor and find it a therapy for our soul. I mean, I'd just love to watch Mr. Bean if I had to choose between the Olympics and Mr. Bean. I mean, come on. Mr. Bean, this Olympics thing is way too serious.

See the faces of these people, especially lifting these weights. They look like they're going to pop their brains. I'm definitely not going to try to lift those weights that I saw that guy lifting yesterday.

We're serious about God's Word, and as we look through God's Word, though we may have a sense of humor and with the things we don't understand, we know that we must seek the Lord. We must seek the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We're told to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Working that out is a lifetime pilgrimage. And I would just urge some of you who have just come to this ship, welcome all you new people who I was with there in Debron, a lot has happened since then, to try to find balanced expectation here on this ship.

And beware of unrealistic expectation. This is just one little step in your lifetime pilgrimage. And often it has to be a smaller step than you were dreaming about when you had some of the fantasy ideas of life that you lost.

Look at Romans chapter 12, one of my favorite passages. Romans chapter 12. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice wholly acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is that good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. Every single statement in this Mount Everest chapter is serious.

There are over 20 serious exhortations about grace, to think seriously about God's grace, and we don't have time to go through it. You can go through dozens of other passages and you'll find it all very, very serious.

The Lordship of Christ

We're serious about, thirdly, the Lordship of Christ. This is one of the strongest, most significant messages of our fellowship. The Urbana Convention in 87 or 86 asked me to speak on the Lordship of Christ.

If I had not done that at 17, I would not be here today. I'd probably be dead from age. And many people are dying from age. And I would just urge you, and I'm aware of the struggle, especially after some months in this kind of environment, to stand strong in God and moral purity and having Him as Lord of your life every moment of the day.

And I would be happy for anyone at any time to come to me anywhere, including my wonderful wife, and when I do something that's wrong or sinful, to say to me, No, I don't think Jesus is really shining through you right now.

That's what Dale Roton did for me and other people as well. I know that can go overboard. I know also people that may exhort you can be wrong. You can't have a Nathan in your life. You can't have someone to correct you in your life without them making mistakes.

So if you want a perfect mentor, a perfect Nathan, forget it. It won't work. And you have to have the discernment to know what is from God, what is part of their own prejudice, their own humanity, or miscommunication.

Evangelism, Time, and the Gospel Mission

Fourthly, we are serious about reaching men and women for the gospel. One of the things that is so different from OM today that is such a huge burden for me compared to those very early days is the lack of personal evangelism, the lack of passion just to go after people.

Now I know we were accused of being fanatics. We would just go overboard in reaching people, and sometimes we would offend them, and we struggled as going door-to-door was almost as basic on OM in those early days as having breakfast.

Everybody went door-to-door in the movement in the early days. It was almost a requirement. Or if they didn't go door-to-door, they had to be out in the street thousands of times. Parenters like me have been out in the streets giving out tracts or going door-to-door.

Before we ever went to Mexico, I went door-to-door in my hometown selling Bibles and Christian books. We've come a long way. If you want to talk about change in OM, there are certain things that are far bigger than some of the changes people talk about.

They only talk about things that they know. Hardly anyone was there in the 60s who's still on OM today, much less the late 50s. And we have a distortion of Christian leadership because we're now a movement over 40 years of age.

Leaders have to be strongly committed to relationship maintenance. I don't like that maintenance word, but relationship cultivation, you know, calling people on their 90th birthday, calling people on their 60th birthday, being there at their funerals, being there at their weddings, their children's weddings, their grandchildren's weddings.

I never dreamed how complex and how many responsibilities would come upon me. I was just a young man at 17 going door-to-door, winning my high school Friends to Christ. One by one, I saw my friends come to Christ in high school.

I went back and took that one meeting. 600 came. I preached the gospel. 125 stood up, among them my own father. When I went to Mexico, I just gave out tracts, did personal evangelism, and went from door-to-door.

That's all we did. I did open a few bookstores. How can we take on all these new things? Holistic ministry, vision for justice and transformation, all kinds of other things that we're into, a huge amount of work, a phenomenal amount of work to keep this old ship going and maintain that passion for souls, that concern for the Lord.

When I have gone to many Bible schools, I have been dumbfounded at the superficiality I have found among the students. You could barely get anything serious out of them. It was just one game after another.

Even the studies was considered sort of a joke. And people had jokes about serious things in God's kingdom. I remember a woman preaching to me at Moody's. She became a close friend, Angela Datuma. And by the way, I've always believed in women preachers.

I never had a period in my life where I didn't believe women couldn't preach. But boy, did I run into opposition on that one. It's lucky they didn't crucify me upside down, the anti-women crowd. And they're still out there with their clubs and their baseball bats and their out-of-context Bible verses.

But I won't get into that this morning. But this woman shared with us students, her name was Angela, that we must handle the Word of God carefully. We must always be careful not to mock anything from the Word of God.

And I think at times in my desire to communicate and bring humor, especially with teenagers, I have at times probably misused some scriptures. We become serious about reaching people with the Gospel. Because we're serious about reaching people with the Gospel, we become serious about our use of time.

This is not one of my points. I'm putting this under reaching people with the Gospel, so you don't get an extra book on redeeming the time. But I would urge you to realize how valuable time is. I would urge you, as you have a multiple things of choices, of things you can do in your so-called free time.

I don't believe and never have believed in free time. Jesus bought all my time. I belong to Him. And I want to pray. I do see films, but I pray and try to seriously do what I sense God wants me to do.

And so all that kind of thing in my life, a lot of stories about it, as far as I know before God, with a few failures thrown in, it is with moderation. I'm a great believer in moderation. You hear about my rollercoaster thing.

Believe me, it's hyper-moderation because you can't find decent rollercoasters handy all the time. You've got to travel to get there. And I'm not always willing to do that. I'd urge you to understand most of you don't have a lot of money right now.

If you do, boy, you better seriously pray about how to use it. And we may want to have some fellowship together. But you have a lot of time. You have 24 hours a day. You have the same amount of time that I have.

And I know that I could not carry out my ministry these few days in your midst if I don't really pray and carefully use my time because I have these goals and I have these aims. When I'm here, I have to somehow squeeze in five or six hours in which I'm mainly talking to people, preaching, teaching.

I've got to squeeze in five or six hours for correspondence and phone calls or things go through the cracks and then I pay for those things later on because my other job, the international coordinator's job, the leadership of ICT, the fundraising job, a lot of my work is just relationships.

I cannot let that sort of disappear on any one day. Again, we're all different. I'm not asking you to copy me. But I am asking you to seriously evaluate how to use your time to work for moderation in things that are more on the side of recreation and we all need a certain amount of recreation.

Christian Relationships and Unity

And then fifthly, we're serious about our relationships with one another. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Would you pray for my son in Idaho? I'll be with him a week from today. Are you Eric?

Yeah, greetings from my son. But his next door neighbor, the non-Christian next door neighbor, things have gone wrong and this neighbor now hates my son and hates his kids and one of the kids just tried to run down one of my grandchildren and they had to bring in the police and it is a mess.

They're in little Nampa, Idaho and they are under a lot of stress. They love the Lord. But maybe you could just pray about that. Building relationships at the end of the day is a serious business so don't get discouraged if you have a few collapses along the way.

We need to work hard at our relationships here on this ship. Now that OM is so big, we are having some real stress in relationships even in the top leadership level of the movement and with this transition going on of my stepping down three years from this month, some new things have come to the surface.

So far, it's going relatively well but Satan is trying to bring disunity into this movement and if Satan can bring in disunity at a top level, which I believe is the bottom level, the servant foundation of the movement is not really the top, it's the bottom because that's all we are, is servants.

Do you think I have some great authority in the ship ministry? You don't understand how OM works. I can exhort them and I have a lot of relationships and can try to persuade if I think there is something that needs to be changed but that's not the way OM works.

It's team led, it's waiting upon God, it's prayer, it's persuasion, it's discussion and it's not easy to maintain a movement of this size in which we are trying to keep sort of a degree of participation from everybody in the movement, especially long termers.

It's long termers who have chose the names that are on that list right now that's confidential until the 9th or 10th of October as to who will be the next international leader of the movement. Now that the list is created and long termers have had all kinds of input, discussion and decisions, the decision will be made by a team of leaders and the selection committee then it has to go back to the leaders and then it has to go back to the general council for sort of general acceptance and consensus one year approximately from today.

The law of hard work maintaining relationships. Who wants to go to someone and share that they've sinned against them? I mean let's forget I'd rather go to bed. But we have to if we feel someone has sinned against us we have to go to them and we have to share what's in our heart.

Esteeming them as better than ourself. If you can't esteem them as better than yourself as you go to share where they have sinned against you it's probably not going to work. If you've got a bad attitude if you're angry therefore often you need to do a little repenting or it's how you say it.