Lance Tells His Story

Narrator 00:00:00 Welcome to the Lance Lambert Ministries Podcast. For more information on Lance’s ministry, visit <a href="https://www.lancelambert.org/">www.lancelambert.org</a>. Today we go back to July of 2008 when Lance testified of how the Lord spared him as a young Jew in the midst of the Holocaust, and shared his testimony of how the Lord met him personally when he was 12 and a half years old. Listen on to hear Lance tell his story.Lance Lambert 00:00:30 I was asked if I would give my testimony and I do not normally do so, so I do trust that it will be worthwhile. I want to read a psalm. <h1>Psalm 103</h1>Bless the Lord, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy desire with good things, So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle. The Lord executeth righteous acts, And judgments for all that are oppressed. He made known his ways unto Moses, His doings unto the children of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness. He will not always chide; Neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, Nor rewarded us after our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, So great is his lovingkindness toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, So far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, So the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; And the place thereof shall know it no more. But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, And his righteousness unto children’s children; To such as keep his covenant, And to those that remember his precepts to do them. the Lord hath established his throne in the heavens; And his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, ye his angels, That are mighty in strength, that fulfil his word, Hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless the Lord, all ye his hosts, Ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. Bless the Lord, all ye his works, In all places of his dominion: Bless the Lord, O my soul.<h1>Chesed</h1>Wonderful Psalm. You have noticed in this version, which is the American Standard Version of 1901, that the word lovingkindness comes again and again and again. Seems a somewhat old-fashioned word. In some of the modern translations it is steadfast love; in some it is prevailing love. It is an extraordinary Hebrew word. The word in Hebrew is chesed. It simply cannot be explained in any language by one word, or even by two words. You have a whole number of words that have to come together for this word lovingkindness. Mercy is the old King James Version. Lovingkindness is the Revised Version and the American Standard Version. Steadfast love is the Revised Standard Version. So one can go on. It has this idea of loyal, covenant, enduring, overcoming love and mercy that God shows towards them whom He saves. It is a wonderful, wonderful word, and it explains the Bible.<h1>Lovingkindness is the Explanation for our Salvation</h1>It also explains my salvation, and it explains your salvation. God never saved you because you were good enough. He never saved you because you were worthwhile. We are dust, but in some extraordinary way, the Lord loves us. Why he loves us, we will never know, not even, I think, in eternity. Why the Lord should ever love such as you and me, we give him so much trouble. It is bad enough that the whole of us were born in sin, that we were a fallen people from the beginning. But the extraordinary thing is, once he saves us, we give him no end of trouble. We rebel, we murmur, we hang on to our own self life. It is extraordinary, really, just how much trouble we give to the Lord.<h1>The Beginning</h1>I was born in Britain by basically an accident. That accident was the reason for my survival. My father was the premier count in the house of Savoy. This is the royal house of Italy, of Bulgaria, of Hungary, of Portugal and originally of Brazil. He was the premier count. He carried the flag before the king on all state occasions. The old king, King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, had Jewish blood, [unintelligible] and was for that reason, very sympathetic to Jews. My father was a Jew, as was my mother, she was a Jewess, but I never knew that. My father had nightmares in the end of the 20s, and the beginning of the 30s of the last century. It was basically over Mussolini, who was the dictator of Italy. My father warned the king that he thought that Mussolini would be the downfall of the Royal House, and would be the downfall of Italy. His nightmares grew to such an extent that he told my mother to take me — I was only a year or two old — and take me back to England. I had been born near my grandmother because my mother wanted her firstborn to be somewhere in the vicinity of my grandmother, who would help in the very early days. So that was the accident, seemingly the accident. At that time Britain was receiving no refugees, not even babies, but my mother had a British passport. She came from the Jewish community in Dublin, Ireland; originally they were from Lithuania. For this reason, when mother came back to Britain, already pregnant with my sister, she was able to enter Britain, she had a British passport and because I had been born by this seeming accident, I was also allowed to come back into Britain. We never thought, my father, my mother never really thought that it was more than a couple of years that we would be parted because Mussolini was introducing some of the laws that were to end in the murder of the Jewish people. But nobody thought of Adolf Hitler. Now I don’t know how much you know about history, or about the Holocaust, but of course, they were Latins, Mediterranean people. Mediterranean people don’t normally think about Anglo Saxons or others very much. So they thought that Mussolini was the trouble, nobody else. Mussolini and Franco of Spain, they were the trouble. They didn’t think really of Hitler. But just behind Mussolini was a far more serious and terrible demonic being. It was Hitler.<h1>The Escape</h1>I was born in 1931. In 1933, I was taken as a little boy from Italy to Britain. I, of course, don’t remember any of it, the journey or anything else. It was exactly at the time that Adolf Hitler took Germany by force. From that point onwards, developed into the Second World War, in which 55 million people died, and in which six to eight million Jews died in the most horrific circumstances. I never saw my father, I never saw my grandmother, and I never saw the 56 other members of the family who all died in Auschwitz. In actual fact, the old king tried to save my father. He had a very good intelligence network. He heard that the Nazis were going to take all the Jews in the middle of the night in the whole of northern Italy, and he knew that it meant they would be killed. So he said to my father, “You have to flee. I will prepare the royal car, we will pull the blinds down, we will put a standard on the car, and we’ll take you to Turin and then up into the Piedmont Mountains, where a guide will wait for you to take you over into safety in Vichy, France, where my grandmother lived. She had a chateau, south of Lyon. So my father accepted it, he had no trouble. The Nazis were very superstitious, when it came to aristocracy or royalty. They allowed the car to go through without any searching. So my father was able to go through. It was a mistake because if my father had only gone into a monastery — or as one of his friends went, [his friend] dressed up as a monk, a priest in the Vatican Library as the Chief Librarian. He wasn’t, of course, he didn’t know anything about books, but as a result, he was saved, he survived the war. But my father instead went to Vichy, France, which was an ally of the Nazis at that time. I hope I’m not boring you.At the point he arrived, Klaus Barbie, called the “Butcher of Lyon” was the gauleiter, or the man in charge of the Nazi side of things in Vichy, France. He hated my family, and my father in particular. My father met my mother simply because the old king was so worried about his outspoken views that he sent him as the [unintelligible] attache, to the Italian Embassy in London, and there at a cocktail party, he met my mother. That’s how it all happened. They were then married in the Great Synagogue in Rome. That’s a little bit of the background of the family. My father’s family [is] of the tribe of Judah. My mother was of the tribe of Benjamin. Both of them knew something of their family background. My father’s family have been called Judah in every single generation for 1000 years. So my circumcision name was Lance Judah Jair Lambert Dobskey. Our family name was Dobskey. My father August Julian Julio, which is the Gentile way of taking the name Judah. Julian and Julio both mean Judah, “praise”. Count Dobsky. That was that side.Now, the agreement that father and mother made was that we would come back to Britain. Mother had deep red hair and green eyes, and my father said, “I don’t think anyone will think you’re Jewish. You take Lance, never tell him he’s Jewish for these two years until we see what happens.” Of course, then my sister was born in Richmond, Surrey, England.<h1>Sunday School</h1>So, we grew up not knowing we were Jewish. One thing that was very interesting was that we were excused all religious instruction at school. We didn’t have to be part of the prayers that were said first thing in the morning in the school. I was very happy about that, I have to tell you. I asked my mother, “Why? Why are we different to all the rest of the children at school?”Mother said, “We are modern. We believe that you should choose your religion when you are of age.”So I said, “You mean, I can choose to be anything?”And mother said, “Oh, yes.”Of course, she did not mean it. “Oh, yes,” she said, “You can you can be anything.”“Can I be a Muslim?” I said.“Oh, yes, if you wish,” she said.So we were excused all religious instruction at school. We grew up not knowing anything, we never went into a synagogue. We never went into a church chapel. We had no contact with Christian people. I never read the Bible. I understood the Bible was a whole book of legends and myths and exaggerations. I really didn’t even believe that Jesus had lived. I used to speak to the boys at school that had the Crusader badge, you know, they belong to a Christian organisation for boys. I used to say to them, “I don’t believe Jesus existed.”They said, “Oh, you must be mad.”So I said, “No, I think you’re mad. I don’t think he ever really existed.”So that’s how we that’s how we went until one day, can you believe this, Mother came back. It was the Blitz, when many people were dying on every side. She said, “There’s going to be a children’s rally in one of the movie houses.” We call it a cinema, a movie house. She said, “I think you children should go.” I don’t to this day know what entered her head, but off we went to this movie house, which was packed with kids. I went with my sister and our two closest friends who lived in the same Avenue. We couldn’t understand this. I’d never seen anything like it. They sang hymns. I’d never heard hymns. They seemed so odd to me all standing up and singing. The next thing that happened was that this man acted something on the platform of the movie house. I couldn’t understand what he was doing. It seemed very stupid to me. He was a famous missionary from South America. Then they all went out to Onward Christian Soldiers, each Sunday school marching out, you see, which left us four in the centre of this movie house on our own. A lady sped across and said, “Don’t you children belong to a Sunday school?”“No,” we said.She said, “Would you like to?”And I said, “No.”And my sister said, “Yes.”So she said, “I will get someone to come to you every Sunday and bring you to Sunday school.”That is how I came into the Sunday school of a famous evangelical Church, a baptist Church in Richmond, Surrey. It was very interesting, basically because I endured it. I could not understand them. Everything the Sunday school teacher said went in this ear and out that ear. I could not even say the Lord’s prayer at the end of those two years that we were there.<h1>How Could a Man be a Famous Cricketer and a Christian?</h1>At the end of those two years, this old Sunday school teacher, who was one of the deacons of the baptist church, went to an old bag and took out books and gave every one of the boys a book, but he did not give me one. So I sat through the whole of the lesson thinking, why did he not give me a book? These boys are terrible. They let off stink bombs. They took mice and let them go into the Sunday school to cause a great fuss. I mean, especially in some of the ladies who were the teachers, I remember the leader of the Sunday school standing up on her chair. She was so afraid that this white mouse that was running around. I mean, I couldn’t understand, why did he not give me a book? It is the Lord’s way. Listen to this. I went up to him afterwards, and I said, “Why did you not give me a book?” He looked at me and he said, “Didn’t I give you a book?”“No,” I said, “you did not.”So he put it in his hand — I believe he deliberately did not give it to me, he was so afraid of my mother — he took the book out and said, “Here, here’s a book. This is your book.” I took it and I saw on the cover, C.T. Studd: Missionary, Statesman, Cricketer, and Pioneer. I thought to myself, this is weird. I understood that all Christians were weird. They were eccentric, unhygienic. My idea of Christians was either very, very ancient people with white hair — like mine — bent over and very old, who could hardly talk or breathe. Anyone young, I thought, could never be a Christian. So I was intrigued. How could a man be a famous cricketer and a Christian?Well, this was the first Christian book I ever read. I would never have read it if he had given it to me at the beginning. The only reason I got this desire to read it was he did not give it to me and I had to ask for it. Then when I got it, I began to think, how can this man be a Christian? Then I read that book in one week, in six days. I finished it on a Saturday, a Shabbat. I was so moved by what I read. Three things captured me. The first was, this man gave away a fortune. In today’s measurement, it would have been some 30 million pounds. He gave it away in one week. Then I thought to myself, this man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than money. Now you have to understand how I felt because we were always getting little things through the letterbox to ask us to help the local churches, either their organ, or their bell tower, or something else that was perishing in the church or chapel. I used to hear my mother saying, “Oh, it is disgraceful sending things to us. We don’t believe in God, and they ask us to help their God.”I remember being in my pram when I was a little boy, and we went past the local parish church and it had a great notice outside asking everyone to help with the bell tower. It had a thermometer on one side with a tiny little bit of red at the bottom, then right up to the top the money that was required. My mother said to me, “Lance, do you understand what this is?” Of course, I could not understand any of it. So she said, “This belongs to people who believe in God, and when they are in need of money, they ask us who do not believe in their God to help him.” I never forgot it. Now, I thought, this man has found something worth more than money, and was able to give away a whole fortune in one week.Then he went out as a missionary. Here was the next thing. When he went for his medical, the doctor said, “You cannot be a missionary.”“Oh,” said C.T. Studd, “God has told me and called me, so I shall be one.”“No,” said the doctor, “you are a museum of diseases.”But he went out to China, with the Cambridge Seven, then to India, and finally to Congo, and he never went back to England. He was a famous cricketer, and he sacrificed his fame and popularity. Then I thought to myself, this man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than fame and popularity.Then the third thing that I read in the book gripped me. He and his wife were very much in love. She came from a very aristocratic family, as did C.T. Studd. They decided they would part, that she would be in England — they were no planes in those days — she would be in England, and look after the home-end for prayer and for the finance side, and he will remain in the Congo. I thought to myself, this man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than human companionship.There was one other thing that gripped me — his humour. I had been born with humour, and I always thought that God had absolutely no humour. Then I found this man C.T. Studd, who could laugh with God. I began later in my life to understand why Abraham called Isaac, laughter. That is what it means Yitzhak in Hebrew laughter. I began to understand from my own experience, the humour that God has with those that become his friends. So for me, this was extraordinary. I always remember one thing in particular, in a prayer meeting, with all the other missionaries, C.T. Studd saying, “Your word, Lord, says that you will give us everything that the soles of our feet tread upon. I take size 14. We are putting them down on this particular ground in Congo, which the Lord gave.”<h1>First Time at Church</h1>Well, at the end of reading that book, I did not know what to do. So I stood because I thought that was the way you prayed. Then I thought, no, I think they kneel. So I knelt. Then I felt uncomfortable kneeling, and I thought, no, I think they stand. So I stood up. Then I prayed a very unscriptural prayer, for the Bible says that those who come to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those that seek him. But I said, “Oh, God, if there is a God, would you please do in me what you did in C.T. Studd? Would would you please make me what you made him?” That was my prayer. I did not feel anything, but the most extraordinary thing had happened.I went off that afternoon to watch movies, Charlie Chaplin. You would have said, “Well, nothing has happened to him. He is watching Charlie Chaplin.” That evening, when I came back from watching Charlie Chaplin, I said to my sister, “I would like to go to church.” She looked at me as if I was a ghost.She said, “You want to go to church?”“Yes,” I said.“I will come with you,” she said. So the two of us, for the first time ever, found ourselves in the presence of Christians in the church service on a Sunday morning. We found it very odd, the way they stood up, and sang, and then sat down, and then a plate went by and people put something in it. We had never seen anything like it, you see, so we found it all very strange. Then they read the Bible, then we stood up and sang, then they had announcements, and they all sat down again, and then they stood up and sang, and then finally we had a kind of sermon. In the announcement, they said, “This evening, eight people are being baptised on confession of their faith in the Lord Jesus.” So we two, we thought what in the world is baptism? What are these strange people going to do? So we went up to our old Sunday school teacher and said, “Excuse me, what is a baptism?” “Well,” he said, “when people have believed in the Lord Jesus and received Him, they are baptised in water by immersion.” Well, that did not mean anything to us.My sister said, “What do you mean? Do you put them under?”“Yes,” he said, “we put them absolutely under and then up.”Then my sister said, “Do they wear robes? Do they have crowns on their head?”I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but we were kids. I was 12 and a half. My sister was 10. Then the old Sunday School teacher said, “Why don’t you come and see for yourself? I will keep you a seat because it is packed.” So we came, my sister and I, we sat on the front row overlooking the baptistry so we could get a full view of the strange rite that was going to take place. I spent the whole time watching the bubbles come up from thing while the poor man preached his heart out. It was Alan Redpath, a famous evangelist, and teacher. I remember the eight people who were baptised were absolutely ordinary people, bank clarks, secretaries. There was one girl, if I may put it kindly, who was simple. I think she was a little autistic. They all confessed how they had come to the Lord. The pastor said, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God?” And then they told their testimony.Now I was so shocked because I discovered that every one of these the very ordinary, eight people had the same experience as C.T. Studd. I thought he was unique. I thought, he’s the only Christian in history.Now I suddenly saw eight very ordinary people who had had the same experience, they all went down into the water, they were all baptised and came up. Then Mr. Redpath at the end of it said, “If you have been challenged by what you have seen and what you have heard, will you give your life to the Lord Jesus? And if so, will you stand up?” Well, I felt an extraordinary kind of power that hit me. I was like in a quandary, what should I do? Should I stand or should I sit? Then I whispered to my sister, “Shall I stand?” and she said, “No!” but I stood. Then a terrible — I was only 12 and a half — a terrible sense of sin came over me. I wept and wept and wept. Then the old Sunday school teacher put his arm around me and tried to comfort me. Two old people came up, so old, they were exactly what I had always thought Christians were.He was white haired, she was white haired, bent over. This dear Sunday school teacher said, “Ah, Pastor Rose and Mrs. Rose, do you need something?”“No,” they said, “when he stood up,” — I was in a bright red jacket — “when he stood up, the Lord said to me, ‘Pray for him. He will go to the ends of the earth and speak for Me because he is a chosen vessel.'”Then he turned to me — I had never had anything to do with Christians — and he said, “Young man, I and my wife are going to pray for you every day because God will be with you.”<h1>A Baptist?</h1>Now, I did not know I was Jewish. I had no idea of our background. It was all kept from us. The next day, at tea — you know, we always have tea — at tea time, my sister says, “Mama, Lance stood up in church yesterday.”My mother wheeled round and said, “What?”My sister said, “He became a Christian.”My mother looked at me, and she said, “You silly boy. You have become a Christian? If you are going to become a Christian, at least become a Catholic, or an Anglican. They are respectable. But,” she said, “a Baptist? Barnstorming people.” She said, “I will sue the minister for wrongful influence of a minor.”“Well,” I said to mother, “but you said I could choose when I was 13.” Now, 13 is an interesting figure because, as I now know, it is Bar Mitzvah. I did not know it then.“Yes,” my mother said, “but not what you have chosen.” But she never explained. Mr. Redpath came round to see mother. Now, my mother was a very fashionable lady, and a very, very normal kind of person. She expected to see some weak, old gentleman crawl up the drive, you know the thing, and ring on the door. Instead, there came this huge fellow, a bit like Malcolm. This size, blond like him, an international rugby player, 31 years of age at that time, and Mother positively could not believe it. So she said, “What right have you got to influence a child who is not even have age?”He said, “I did not influence him, God influenced him.” Of course, Mother did not know anything about that book and my prayer the day before. So Mother collapsed. She said, “Okay, let us see if they are happy.” Then mother never told us anything about our background because she had an idea that if the church knew that we were Jewish, they would discriminate against us. So we never knew it.The thing that I ought to say is this. The one thing about C.T. Studd that has gripped me then as a youngster, and has gripped me all the way through my life is his words, “All or nothing. If Jesus died for me,” he said, “and gave Himself for me, there is nothing that I can withhold from Him.” I said to the Lord, that night at that baptismal, I, by Your grace, will be all. I settled an issue the very beginning of my Christian life. I surrendered. I did not have any arguments with the Lord. I surrendered. Two or three days after that, I cannot quite explain it, but it was like a dream vision, the Lord appeared to me. I remember it very well. He was clothed in white, down to the bottom. A great mist obscured His face. In his hand, was a vivid, huge light. He just said to me, “You shall serve me.”I said, “I will.”I thought He was going to send me to Mongolia. One point a few months later I said to the Lord, “Lord, if I had 10 lives, I would give every one of them to you. One for China. One for Mongolia. One for Tibet. One for Korea. I went through the whole lot of these nations. I think the Lord had other ideas. But from that point, I determined with all my weaknesses, failings, and besetting sins, I determined I would be all for the Lord or nothing.<h1>Mother Explains Everything</h1>Basically, that is my testimony. Years later, my mother came to the Lord. Donald and Jerry Adcox, some of you will know them, came across to England to stay for a week or two in England with Robert and Miriam Vickery, the man who built Disney World in Orlando. My mother had never met Christian like these. They were normal in every way, and they invited mother to go to the States. She went to the States for, I think, it was four weeks. We noticed a very great change when she came back.After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, it was clear that Mother had had dealings with the Lord. Then, one day, when I came back from Halford house, Mother said, “Take your coat off and sit down, I want to talk with you seriously.” Now, I thought she was going to say, as she had so often said, “You have had all those studies at University on classical Chinese and Oriental philosophy and Chinese history, and I do not know what else, and you do nothing with it. You should be a journalist or something like that.” I thought she was gonna say that, but instead, she said, “I have had a voice in my ear for the last whole year, telling me to tell you the whole truth.” Then she told the story I began with, who our father was, how he had died in Auschwitz with 57 other members of the family, and how the cable had come from the International Red Cross, shortly after we were saved, to say that a Count Dobsky had been shot in Auschwitz, and the rest had been gassed. She never told us because she was so afraid that we would say something in the church. And she said, “The two of them are so happy.” My mother used to tell all her friends, “I have a monk and a nun for a son and a daughter.” She said, “They live in the Bible.”When Mother told us the whole story, she said to me at the end, “Are you shocked?”“No,” I said, “it explains everything. It explains why the whole Jewish community in Richmond had always tried to look after us.” Why, the old Rabbi himself had often said, “If I could only help you, if you would only let me help you,” but Mother always said, “We are not Jewish.”<h1>God’s Provision at Halford House</h1>You know, the whole story of Halford house is another story. It would take far too long and you would be bored stiff, I think. But I could tell you story after story of miracle after miracle on the physical side. People falling off of roofs and not even being bruised, without a bone broken. I could tell you how God supplied money. I have never forgotten it, when we needed money, and the builder came to me and said, “I need so-and-so,”“When do you need it by?” I said.He said, “By two o’clock this afternoon to get it into the bank by three o’clock.”Then I said, I heard myself saying, “You shall have it.”Now when we first had this builder, I had said to him, “We are believers, Christian believers. We believe in God. We believe in the Lord Jesus.” I told him, I said, “We are young people. We have no money. Are you prepared to work for us? Because we shall pray and God will provide the money.” He was a Cockney, a weightlifter. He said — this is years later, he told me — he said, “I thought to myself, pfff, they have all got money, of course they have got money. It is just their way of saying, ‘You take it out of the bank, God has provided it.'” So I thought to the hour, but I never forgot that day when he said, “This sum of money.” Then I waited for the second post and nothing came. Then I said to Margaret, who was looking after the house, “Margaret, we must call everybody together, and have a quick lunch. After lunch, we will go in the library upstairs and we will get on our knees and we will ask God to meet us by two o’clock.” We went up, all of us, 13 of us, up into the library and we all knelt in a circle. Bill, the builder, came into the back door looking for us. He looked in the kitchen, nobody there. He went into the main room, nobody there. He went across to my study, nobody in there. Then he thought, I know, they are upstairs. So he came up the stairs while this old Cockney man, who had been a seaman all his life, was praying. He was saying, “Lord, we ain’t got this money. We have to have it right now, Lord, two o’clock, just 10 minutes away. And Bill opened the door to hear him praying! I saw the door shut, and I heard a terrible groan. He went down the stairs. You could hear him groaning like an elephant giving birth. Then he stopped. At the bottom of the stairs, he found exactly the money in a great pile on the doormat. This unsaved man scooped it all up in his arms, came rushing up the stairs, threw open the doors and said, “You can all stop praying. It’s come.” But how did it come? He had only come past that doormat a few minutes before. Do you mean to tell me that someone stood outside the front door with a great pile of notes flicking them through this tiny, little letter box? You know, they had as much faith to give us the money as we to receive it. But what about the workmen? the unsaved workmen that were building? They could have stolen it! Where did it come from? I could tell you so many stories.<h1>Return to Your People</h1>There came a time when one evening as I was going to bed, I heard a voice behind me. I cannot explain it. It was human and not human. The voice said, “Lance, go back to your people.” Then I thought to myself — I never turned — I thought to myself, who are my people? Are they Polish? Irish? Italian? Who are my people? I never said Jews because I knew deep in my heart. I got into bed and fell asleep. Three months later I was going to bed and exactly the same thing happened again.And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. This is my mind playing tricks. I got into bed and fell asleep. In those days I slept very easily. Now I am old, I sleep fitfully. So, three months after that, as I was getting to get into bed, this voice said, “Lance, return to your people.” This time, I knew, as I had the previous two, that it was the Lord. I said, “Lord, You have to understand. I have seen this work here grow from the beginning. I cannot. How am I to come out of it? How am I to get free, as it were, it’s an impossibility. Nobody will understand it.” So, I said, “Now, Lord, don’t be angry with me. I have grown beyond having to ask for fleeces.” Do you understand what I mean by fleeces? Gideon’s fleece, you know, confirmation? I said, “I haven’t asked You for years to confirm something. I know that I have to discern what is Your will. But this is too big a matter. Will You confirm it? Will You confirm it by giving me a home in Jerusalem that I would find suitable?” Within two months, God gave me the home. It was miraculous in every detail. The way the money came, I never asked for money, I never let anyone know what the need was. It came in its entirety. Extraordinary. Then I knew that I had to be in Israel, and I had to be part of my own people.So that is the story. I hope it has not bored you.<h1>Christians Must Have Fire</h1>Let me say something. It is not good enough to be a Christian. If you are going to be a child of God, you need to be 100% for the Lord. If you are 100% for the Lord, the Lord will be 100% for you, in all your provision and all your need. It is very simple. Frances Ridley Havergal the great hymn writer — we sang one of her hymns earlier — said, “They that trust You wholly, find You wholly true. That is one of the first lessons I would underline. Here is the second. It is not good enough to just be a Christian. There has to be fire in you. The thing that caught me, like Moses when he was caught with the thorn-bush that burned with fire and was not consumed, was that old missionary, C.T. Studd. A very difficult man, but there was a fire in him, a fire that God Himself had placed there. And I, with all my unbelief, it arrested me. I do not think anything else would have ever arrested me, but something as remarkable as that.I am old now. I have seen a number of servants of the Lord who had that kind of fire in them. It puts that service and ministry into another dimension.<h1>Christians Must Have Experience with the Lord</h1>Well, I must finish. I think we are in for a time of enormous turmoil, not just in the world, but in the United States. Economic, political, religious, social, on every level. I have no doubt in my heart at all, that we — myself, I am not asking you to believe what I believe —but I have no doubt in my heart at all that we are at the very threshold of the appearing of the Antichrist. I am not suggesting that any of your presidential candidates could be the Antichrist. That is not what I am trying to say. But what I am saying is this, that in this time of enormous turmoil, these monsters arise. Hitler came out of turmoil in Germany that wrecked the whole economy and the whole nation. Out of that Hitler came. Mussolini came in Italy, out of a time of enormous turmoil. Franco came in Spain, out of a time of enormous turmoil. Mao Zedong came out of a time of such turmoil. These, if I may say, are small fry compared with the one coming. Daniel 7 speaks of the four winds beating the sea in a typhoon driven sea and out of it came four beasts. Revelation says exactly the same thing in chapter 13. John said “I stood on the seashore, and I saw coming up out of the sea, a beast.”That means that you cannot depend upon your parents’ salvation. You have to have your own experience of the Lord. If you are going to stand in the days that lie ahead, when everything that can be shaken will be shaken, you have to have your own original dealings with the Lord, a relationship with the Lord that comes from spiritual birth. Make your calling and election sure. Do not just trust the kind of assembly here or the other assembly on the east side. Do not just put your trust in the fact that you have friends that are believers. Do not put your trust in the fact that you have Christian parents, you younger ones. You have to have your own genuine, real experience of the Lord. Nothing else will carry us through in the days that lie ahead. Don’t be afraid.I have a suspicion that God is going to do something in Israel and in the Jewish people — I am pretty sure it is in the Word — that is salvation. I also have the strongest suspicion that God is doing a work in China, such as He has never done in its long, long history. You have a responsibility, as I have a responsibility. You may be American citizens born in America, many of you. Some of you are more American than Americans, but you have a responsibility for the country, and people from whom you originally came, as I have a responsibility for the people and country from which I originally came. May the Lord take this poor testimony of mine — which is, I hope, more to do with the lovingkindness and mercy, the steadfast love of the Lord than of Lance Lambert — and may He make it real to you in such a way that you will not be able to be the same again, but God will take hold of you as He took hold of me and make you His own vessel for service.Beloved Lord, we pray together that you take these poor words of mine and somehow make those words real to every one of us. We are living in days of change of enormous change, of turmoil, of confusion. Lord, we need you. You are the one unshakeable rock in the midst of all this. We pray that every one of us here may dig deep and lay the foundation upon the rock, not upon parents, not upon friends, not upon second hand experience, but upon the Lord Jesus Himself. Hear our prayer Lord. We commit this to you in the name of Jesus. Amen.Narrator 1:01:59 We hope that this message will encourage you in your walk with the Lord and that each of you would know Jesus and have a personal relationship with Him. We pray that each of you would know the deep, deep love of Jesus.

Lance Tells His Story

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