Michael Youssef - Celebrating 20 Years of Ministry in the UK - Part 1

We have a special program for you, and I don't want you to miss it. We have recently celebrated our 20th anniversary of ministry in the United Kingdom. It included a special night of praise and worship, and there were incredible testimonies I shared from God's Word, and I hope that you will be encouraged as you listen.

Steve: We got Premier Radio in our car. We're going to work, and all of a sudden, Dr. Michael Youssef come on with "Leading The Way," and he just spoke straight to me, directly to me.

Michael Youssef: God is meaningless for those who do not feel a desperate need for forgiveness of their sins.

Steve: He's in Atlanta, I'm in Rotherham in my car, and he's connecting directly with me. It was unbelievable.

Emma: Five days a week, we had Dr. Michael Youssef, "Leading The Way," every morning. It just set us up for the day.

Steve: I think we'd still be struggling a bit now.

Emma: Because before we knew God or before we'd even heard of Dr. Michael Youssef, we just had no idea, no clue whatsoever. Changed his life so much.

Michael Youssef: Who forgave me all of my sins and gave me the assurance of eternal life with him in heaven.

Steve: All scripture that's hard to understand, he just made it so simple for me.

Emma: And I love the fact that he talks about the culture and the history, so it gives you even more understanding of what Jesus was speaking to the people at the time. And it just makes me confident in spreading this message to people. So in our local area, we have quite a big Muslim community. And obviously, with how "Leading The Way" and Dr. Michael Youssef reach out to the Muslim community, it'd be the ideal ministry to bring to the Muslim community.

Steve: Our area can be a bit unforgiving sometimes, and we want to be able to provide a safe place for people to be able to come and worship God. And God showed us a coffee shop cafe where we can get Dr. Michael Youssef and "Leading The Way" to people.

Emma: We want to be able to put that on in the coffee shop so people that come to get a coffee can hear it, can listen to it, or have his books around so they can come and sit down and have a read.

Steve: We've already started the process of teaching people God's Word. It's just on a bigger scale.

Emma: Everything has been uncompromised biblical truth, and I think to preach that so strongly in this day and age as well can be quite a challenging thing. We don't see it in many places or hear it in many places, and Dr. Youssef just doesn't budge from that.

Michael Youssef: How can you doubt that he loves you? When Jesus left the splendor of heaven and came to earth and died for you in order to pay the wages and the consequences of your sin and mine. Would you respond to him? Would you respond to his love?

We live in unprecedented times, certainly in my lifetime and probably in most of our lifetimes. On July 24, 2021, your Daily Telegraph paper here asked the question, "Is this the end of the world"? And then the article went on to delineate a litany of global events and catastrophes that have taken place. For a different reason and for a different purpose, the head of the United Nations declared that our world is in peril and paralyzed. Now, I just published a new book and the title of the book asks the question, "Is The End Near"? In that book, I look closely to what our Lord Jesus Christ said to the disciples in Matthew 24 and 25. Our Lord was asked the question as he sat on the Mount of Olives.

And I'm so thankful R.T. Kendall wrote the forward for that book. The disciples were asking regarding the sign of the nearness of his time, or the signs that are going to take place immediately before his return. And our Lord Jesus Christ give them six signs in Matthew 24. We are seeing every one of those in our lifetime, just in the last few decades, couple of decades. But this is not what I want to talk to you about tonight. You can read the book, and I'm not selling it. It belongs to "Leading The Way," so. But during the height of COVID-19, and it was amazing between two openings, two closings, actually. My wife and I came here on our way back from Egypt where we recorded for Kingdom Sat a special Christmas service and we stopped here, and that night, your Prime Minister was announcing he's gonna close the country again.

So we were here in the very height of it, but we saw fear and panic on the faces of people. Even the masks could not hide that fear. We saw the rise of authoritarianism in many parts of the western world. People in Sydney, Australia will get arrested if they found five miles away from their homes. My personal view is very simple and that's gonna be the last about my personal view; everything else gonna be the Word of God. When I say "Thus says the Lord," it's the Word of God, but when I have a view, I say it up front. I'm perceiving two things that are happening simultaneously, that while people who are in persecuted lands, people who are suffering greatly if they convert to Christ, are coming to the Lord by the thousands, even, I say, by the tens of thousands, and we hear from them literally every day at the risk of losing their own lives by family members.

By the same token, church people, professing Christians in the West, are turning their back on the faith. So the question is this, can it be, and I'm only raising the question, can it be that God is gathering his elect from every language, every tribe, and every nation? By the same token, as I look the world as a cultural anthropologist, not as a theologian, I see Satan also preparing the world for the coming of his own personal emissary known as antichrist. So I came all the way here to tell you about God's prescription for the best place to shelter from the coming storms. I came here to tell you about the place where you can find peace of mind in this coming earthquakes. And while we may not know all of the whys and the wherefores, there is confidence that we can have today.

Proverbs 18:10, 11, and 12, the Word of God tells us about that place of refuge, that place of peace, that place of security. There you will have all the peace that you need. There you're gonna have the one who's in control of all events even when things look like it's out of control. There you find a huge contrast in this few verses. A contrast, what contrast? The contrast between the Word of God that gives us, between those who place their hope and faith and strength in Jesus Christ, and those who place their hope in all the wrong things. So let me read that passage for you. "The name of the Lord is a strong tower". The name of the Lord, what? "The righteous run to it and they're safe. The wealth of the rich is their fortified city. They imagine it to be unscalable wall. Before his downfall a man's heart is proud, but humility comes before honor".

Father, in the name of our precious Lord Jesus, our Redeemer, our Savior, our Intercessor, who's interceding even now for us with the Father, in his name, I come to you asking for the blood of Jesus to cover us tonight, to speak to us, to guide us, and to lead us so we can go from one point of glory into another. In Jesus's name, amen.

I want you to imagine with me two different people. One feels safe and secure behind a fortified tower. The other is behind a flimsy wall with an impressive-looking facade. With that outward impressive facade, they deluded themselves into thinking that it is impenetrable, that is unscalable wall. First, let me tell you about the strong, powerful, impenetrable shelter. As some of you know, now, there are a number of names for the name of the Lord in the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. First is Elohim, the name of the creator God, and it occurs 2,700 times in the Old Testament and occurs 32 times in the New Testament. He is the strong tower of creation. Then there is the name El, which means the Lord of power and might, and is mentioned 250 times.

Then in the book of Numbers 32:22, he is the powerful God who brought Israel out of Egypt through his might. He is El. Then there's Elohim; he is a living God who is to be worshiped and obeyed fully, completely. Then there is Yahweh, who's the God of the covenant, which occurs 11,600 times in the Old Testament. Jehovah-Jireh, the Lord who sees ahead and provides all of our needs ahead of time. He is Yahweh-Rapha, the Lord our leader or our healer. Yahweh-Nissi, the Lord is our banner. Yahweh-M'Kaddesh is the Lord our sanctifier. Yahweh-Shalom, he is the Lord our peace. Yahweh-Sabaoth, he is the Lord of hosts. Yahweh-Tsidkenu, he is the Lord of righteousness. Yahweh-Shammah, he is the Lord who hears or the one who's there. Yahweh-Elyon, he is the most high God. Yahweh-Rohi, he is the Lord my shepherd. Everything you need is provided in him, in his name.

For good measure, Exodus 15:2, he is Yah; describe him as God who inhabits eternity. Adonai is the God who's in control of everything. Don't you ever fear for a moment that he has lost control or he's worried is sitting there on his throne drinking Mylanta or whatever else you have for your stomachs here and saying, "What am I gonna do? What I'm I gonna do with these people? What am I gonna do? They're disobeying me". No, no, no, no, he is a God, he's Adonai, which means that his lordship is absolute, and it occurs 300 times. And that is why I chuckle sometimes when somebody says, "I made the Lord, I made Jesus to be the Lord of my life". I said, "He was Lord before you discovered him". He is Lord overall. No wonder Solomon, who was the richest man in the world at the time, could say the name of the Lord is what?

Now you got it. Think about this with me, okay? The strongest building that's built by man can be taken down by siege or destroyed by powerful hurricane. But the name of the Lord is strong and indestructible tower. I am fond of telling the story because it really touches me deeply, that in the Welsh-English border, there are a lot of ruined castles there on the border. There are strong towers that were built. One of them they thought was indestructible, yet now it's nothing but ruins. In Northern Somerset here in England, there is a rocky crag known as the Burrington Combes. Around the gorge, there are all sorts of sheep and cattle grazing. There are also some small villages that sort of clung into the hills, into the valleys.

One of these villages, Blagdon, a man by the name of Augustus Toplady, he was a curate. He was a curate serving there. I was a curate back in 1975 in Sydney, Australia, but I'm so glad I graduated from that class. One day, while Augustus was walking down toward the combe, a violent storm suddenly sent him scurrying for shelter. He saw a great gorge cut between the towering cliffs, and it looked like a good hiding place for him, and so he looked in desperation and he saw in the rocky limestone there near the gorge. And there he scurried toward, and he found a place he could barely just stand, not quite comfortably. As soon as he took refuge there, he witnessed how the rain was pouring and how the down, the torrents were coming and thunder was belting. And he stood in that tight spot in that protective space, and there his soul welled up within him and uttered these words that blessed the Christian community for years and years and years.

"Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. Let the water and the blood from thy riven side which flow be of sin double cure. Cleanse me from its guilt and power". As I said, the church has been blessed by those words for many years. In fact, Gladstone, the Prime Minister, translated it into eloquent Latin. For a long time, every July people would gather, thousands will come near that spot where he stood, Toplady stood, the cliff and the rock, and they sang those words, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me".

You know in 1 Corinthians chapter 10:4, the apostle Paul said that rock is the Lord Jesus Christ. That rock is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only safe hideaway place for us, he is the only secure protector, he's the only assured guarantee, he's the only indispensable and impenetrable tower. His name is our only guarded defense, his name is the only insured place, his name is the only defended shelter, his name is the only wall of fire and hedge of protection for the believer. The name of the Lord is? The righteous run into it and they're safe. Now, I want you to remember this when you start panicking about all of the uncertainties that we are facing and we will be facing. But you notice he did not say, "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; everyone runs into it and they're safe".

You notice that? How many of you notice that? You noticed that, some of you have. The righteous run into it and they're safe. Listen to me, please. Only those who know the name of Jesus, only those who love the name of Jesus, only those who are in Christ Jesus can run into that name and are safe. Only they, in that place of triple-lock protection, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By contrast, in verse 11, Solomon said those who place their own protection in their own strength, whatever strength for them may be, and several people have different strength and they place their hope in different things, but they're like somebody who's standing behind a flimsy wall or a prop as they do in the movies and they think they're protected, but they're not. In their foolishness, they think that they are unscalable walls, and they're not. Oh, how they will sorely be disappointed on the day of judgment, how sorely they're disappointed in the day of trouble.

In the New Testament, it tells us about three people and that's what I want to talk to you about very briefly. I'm not gonna take a lot of time. They tell us about three different people who have placed their hopes in different things and they were sorely disappointed. They were devastated because none of these could protect them. One of them came to Jesus. He wanted really, genuinely, wanted to follow Jesus, but because he could not place his total trust in Jesus, and not in his net worth, he was devastated. The Bible calls him rich young ruler. Then there is a rich man whose strength was focused, was only on growing of his business. And then there's a third one who's so self-centered. He lived for self, he worshiped self, he cared for nothing about anybody else. You know the Bible, very clear; then the Bible never condemned riches for riches' sake.

Listen to me very carefully. But the Bible condemns those who place all of their hope and all of the confidence and all of their security in their wealth. This was the case with each of those three men I'm gonna talk to you about tonight. But you know what, I wanna stop here for a moment and tell you, that also work for nations. When nations, like the one adopted me, United States of America, which I love, that's been blessed of God because of the hard work of the founders and the founding generation. When it begins to be arrogant and conceited and think that their source of their blessing is in themselves, not in the God who blessed them, then the wall of security is easily scalable. I lived long enough to see impenetrable financial institution fall overnight. We have experience, everyone who's here today, I mean, within just in the last two years, we all have experienced the imprisonment by a tiny virus that can only be seen through super microscope. In the midst of all this, the Word of God assures us that "The name of the Lord is... The righteous run to it and they're safe".