Crisis reveals character. You know what character you're of when a teabag is placed in hot water, you discover what its flavor is. You notice the symbol for the Great Commission course is laced up boots, feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Our vision is Africa for Christ. Crisis reveals your character. In the South African infantry, we were taught, you have never lived until you have almost died. And for those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know. What causes failure? General Constant Villon, who was head of the South African army when I was in the infantry, addressed the issue of character under stressful situations most effectively. General Villon was confronted, actually ambushed, on SATV. He was on there dealing with somebody else, and they suddenly showed this documentary about the ruined lives of those psychological casualties suffering what they called the Angola syndrome, obviously cribbing for America the Vietnam syndrome. After showing a clip, including interviews with emotional basket cases with long hair and overflowing ashtrays and piles of beer cans around their armchairs, they turned to General Fillion and asked, don't you feel responsible for those suffering from the Angola syndrome? General Fillion's answer was most insightful. He noted that those who evidence character in times of peace are the same people who show courage in time of war. Those who are moral failures in civilian life are the same ones who become failures in the military. It's not the military or the war that ruined them. The severe stresses and the crisis only revealed what was already there, either strength of character or lack of character. Those who fail in wartime would have failed in life anyway, said General Fillion. The intensity of the war just revealed it earlier. Here you can see a armor-plated SAML truck which hit a treble-decker anti-vehicle mine, anti-tank mine, actually, and killed the driver. Not even the best anti-mine vehicle can survive that sort of intensity. You have never lived until you've almost died. And for those who fight for it, life has a flavor to protect it. We'll never know. In the army, we were continually reminded, winners never quit. We had these signs all over the place. Winners never quit. Quitters never win. Never give up. How many times did I hear, ikani mieni kopo rau? Never give in. You can always do more. Yep, that is. Brick PT. Let's not give Calvin any ideas, but this is how we used to do our planking. It was the other way around, you know. Not pushing ourselves up, but we had to keep this brick above. And you couldn't believe how long you could actually hold it. And the pain tame. No pain, no gain. And yep, rifle PT. Oh, that's a lot of fun. And buddy PT. You see, in the infantry, you've got to be able to run with your kit and rifle and your buddy with his kit and rifle. Because what happens when your buddy is injured? You need to be able to run with him and kit. By the way, just another reason why it's completely immoral and wrong to force women into combat, to expect a woman to carry Another woman or man with kit and rifle and run is not physically possible for the vast majority. And you've got to be able to dig quickly a trench that you can go into an air strike and artillery barrage. The average woman doesn't have that upper body strength and it's just not reasonable. And who are the people who've put women in combat? draft dodgers like Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein abomination. I mean, the people who themselves, they're the ones who sent the woman into combat. By the way, this is an interesting Pole PT variation. The army had a way of dealing with slackers. You see the person there hanging on to the pole? He would have been a slacker who didn't carry his weight. So he was then forced to hang on while his buddies had to carry his full weight without him contributing. You can be sure the rest in the platoon dealt with the people who were making their life miserable by not pulling their weight. Pole PT, running with poles, And as you can see, the army likes us running with poles. And then just to make it more fun, they'd give us tires and drums as well. And you quickly learned that the only way you could manage is as a team. That's why you got some ropes in your backpacks, and you string the ropes, you manage to carry the drums, you put the tires on, and you work as a team in step. And the stronger have to help the weaker. And sometimes you had the stronger men carrying the kit for the weaker ones because you win as a team. The goal was to strive for victory. The army disciplined us, not just because they were sadists who wanted to make our life difficult, they wanted to save our lives when it came to combat. discipline. Interesting, the army could take 18-year-olds who their mothers could never get to make the bed and get them to iron the bed and get everything precision and cleaned and boots shone. I can still iron and clean better than any domestic. This is how we had our bungalows looking. We would never touch the floor with our boots. We had taxis. We would actually have the dusters, and you'd shuffle. So once you'd polished it to a high shine that's like a mirror, You'd never let your boots sacrilegiously desecrate the floor again. You'd slide on your taxis, and the person might come to the door and say, who took my taxis? His dust are gone, that could be a problem. And so everything shone amazing, how people couldn't make their room at home. Suddenly in a few months, we're able to have common sense inspection standard, everything clean, everything polished, everything shining, whatever could be polished was polished. ready to pray and bow their heads in prayer, kit inspection, everything working order, clean, orderly, and when you're in the Panzer unit, there's a lot more to clean. They forced us to do without, like do without sleep, do without food, endure hardship, to persevere in spite of all obstacles and discouragement, including live fire, obstacle courses where you've got thunder flashes being thrown. Obstacles are not there to stop you. Obstacles are there to make you overcome them. What Reverend Krantz said today. The doors sometimes shut, and the opposition sometimes there, not because God's stopping you, but because there's spiritual warfare, and the devil's trying to stop you, and also God may be testing your perseverance. We had obstacle courses. We did the obstacle courses at such speed. It was spectacular how fast we could get over obstacles. And all those people who had fears of heights and claustrophobia, somehow got over it. And it was amazing how whole units could dominate. Even when deprived of sleep and food, we went to three-day period without any sleep. They just worked in shifts and upflossings and the corporals keeping us awake. They called the longest day, kept whistling the longest day, showing you, you can keep going for three days without sleep and so on. Pushed to the limit. to never give up, to never make excuses. You get people who make excuses, and then you get those who make a plan. We need to be like in Bor, Mak and Plan. Selection in the army and in sports teams is aimed at weeding out those too weak, physically, emotionally, or mentally. If we had a problem, they used to give us boxing gloves, force us to slug it out, and then you had to shake hands, and then it was over. Verbae. In the military, instructors would deliberately discourage and tempt candidates to give up. You've just got to hand your number in. Easy. You don't have to stay in the infantry. And it was a lot harder when you got to parabats or when you got to the reconnaissance commander. But even in infantry, they would be tempting. You know, you can end up in some other units and so on. They tempted you. There were times we were on these long map work, compass work, finding your way through the mountains. And then you'd come to a place and there's the braai going, and there's the cooler box with the ice and the cokes. And the corps would say, oh, do you want this? Just hand in your number, and you can be off the course, and you can have the meal. But that would mean you'd given up. They were tempting us to see who had what it took to endure, to adapt, to persevere, to keep on keeping on, to overcome. You, therefore, must endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 2 Timothy 2 verse 3. This is a biblical concept. God compares a Christian's life to that of a farmer, to an athlete, to a soldier. We need that kind of discipline, work ethic, and perseverance and self-sacrificial spirit. When General Sir Walter Walker was head of NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he visited the border in Southwest Africa. I happened to be there at the time. And General Sir Walter Walker chose to quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the book The Great Boer War. You know who Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was. He was the author of the Sherlock Holmes, of course. So this is the quote that Sir Walter Walker took and applied to the South Korean army back in 1980s. Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for 50 years against all the power of Spain. At a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix them with a strain of those inflexible Huguenots. French Huguenots, who gave up home and fortune and left their country forever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon Earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts in circumstances under which no weakling could survive. Place them so that they obtain, acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship. Give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then finally, put a fine temper on the military qualities by a dour, fatalistic, Old Testament religion. By that, they mean Calvinism. And an ardent, consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer, the most formidable antagonist to ever cross the path of imperial Britain. Our military history has largely consisted in our conflicts with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us as roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles." By that, she's referring to the Mauser 7.7s. The Bitter Ender epitomized this. And General Sir Walter Walker applied that to the South African army in 1970s and 80s and said, there is no finer army in the world. There is no other army in the world that has such intense training, such high standards. He said, it is superior to any other army in the world at that time. And we actually proved him right. fighting the communists, the Soviets and the Cubans and their surrogates in Angola. Our men achieved absolutely amazing efforts with so much odds against us, under sanctions, fighting against the best that the Soviet Union and Cuba had thrown at us. We managed to fling the bridges up, when I say we, I'm talking about General Mulder and his engineers, managed to defeat the Cuban mechanized divisions in Angola. Our men managed to defeat them even in dogfights in the air. 61 mechanized battalion group was the armored punch, the armored fist of the Southern Defense Force. I had no idea we had so many only front tanks, main battle tanks, except in 1987, they suddenly all came out Opps, Hooper, Modular, Packer, and because it was moving into conventional warfare at that stage. And I was a regular guest up at the border as a guest speaker by the chaplains and com-ops and I was ministering in these different areas. So I got to see quite a lot of intriguing things that were on the go during the last battles of the Cold War, the hot parts of the Cold War in Angola. Our G5s, Soviet tanks, Soviet tanks. In fact, can you imagine what takes a 60-ton tank, lifts it up in the air, smashes into pieces, and drops it down on its back? That's a 155 howitzer, the G5 Southern Artillery, which flings such a phenomenal round. One round directed, flung a Soviet tank into air, and turned it into this unbelievable work of modern art. All over Angola, you can see today the wreckage of the wars, the last battles in 1986, 87, 88 in Angola. Even the Soviet tank dug in like this. It didn't protect it, didn't save it. And this is all over Angola. In fact, you can go up there and we can show you. Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid, for the Lord is my strength and my song. He has also become my salvation. We used to have scriptures like this printed on cards by commanders. When we went on external operations across the border, every man in the unit would receive a scripture and a prayer from the commanding officer. That was one. Greater love has no one than this than one lays down his life for his friends, Jesus said. John 15 verse 13. At one hostile press conference in Vintook, Colonel Dion Ferreira, the operational commander of Ops Modula, Hoop and Packer. You can see he's wearing the camouflage beret of 3-2 Battalion. He was challenged to respond to accusations that South Africans had just been beaten in the just concluded battles in Angola. So tongue-in-cheek, Colonel Ferreira responded this way. If defeat for South Africa meant the loss of 31 men, three tanks, five armored vehicles, and three aircraft, then we lost. If victory for FAPLA and the Cubans meant the loss of 4,600 men, 94 tanks, 100 armored vehicles, nine aircraft, and other Soviet equipment valued at more than a billion rand, then they won. Fred Bridgeland, a British author, wrote The War for Africa, 12 Months that Transformed the Continent, which documents how South Africa won the Cold War, defeated the Soviet Union and the Cubans in Angola in the most spectacular conclusion in 1988. The Battle of the Lomba, 1987, is one crew commander's account of pivotal armored battles, the last hot battle of the Cold War by Peter Pollock, Battle at Crete-Connaval. We were there. General Yanni Heldnace's book documents, Winning the War for Southern Africa, also available as a general story. The Tempered Sword by Colonel Jan Breitenbach. And even from the Soviet side, we now have translations into English, like Kuita-Konoval, frontline accounts by Soviet soldiers. I did not know until recently that the Russians record 800 casualties. They lost 800 men in Angola for their Spetsnaz. Their special forces lost 800 men in Angola. I had no idea they had so many there, let alone lost so many. So the Soviets themselves, the Soviets have written books like Angola, the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. And we never saw it, not even in Afghanistan. And there are Soviet officers writing books for Soviet universities and military colleges documenting how the Cold War was lost in Angola. Because the Soviets were convinced that, yes, we couldn't win a nuclear war with the West, but we could win a conventional war, they thought. But when they couldn't even beat the South Africans in Angola, the morale in the Soviet Union army, the Red Army, was undermined. And along with what was going on in Afghanistan, and Mozambique, and what was going on in Nicaragua, and of course, there was a lot of other things that Ronald Reagan was doing in this fight in bankrupting Soviet Union, the Star Wars, as part of it all. But the last dramatic part that shattered the morale of the Red Army was we couldn't even beat South Africa after all the sanctions, after being isolated. Do we have a chance against NATO? And so this is what Russians who were there are saying. Interesting. Well, I've got a few pictures of Soviet weaponry on the ground, MiGs, Mi-8 helicopters. MIG, taken down very effectively. You can see rust buckets of an old MIG-17 on the banks of the Lomba River. In fact, there's a lot of places in Angola where they're just littering the bush. I can take you to a place in Angola, and we've been there since the war, where there are just graveyards of hundreds of armoured vehicles, BRDMs, T-34s, T-54s, T-62s, a whole range of weaponry. You can even Google Earth's Lomba River and see the Soviet, the wreckage of the Soviet weaponry on the landscape of Angola, destroyed by the South Korean army. Many cases, 61 mechanized battalion group by G-5s, G-6s, and others. Spectacular. Well, this is how our mission began. Frontline Fellowship was once called the Motorbike Mission, and this was at one time the only vehicle we had. And this was the Baira Corridor, Ambush Alley leading down to Baira, and there wouldn't be any warnings of bridges out. Viva Filimo, guardian director of the revolution, socialist, red flags, red stars, clenched fists, Marxist propaganda, and cannibalism. When you see human bones and skulls broken up around a fire, you know that cannibalism is back. Bibles burnt. Congregations massacred. people without both limbs because of landmines. Landmines were the national plant. Missionaries had to design a bicycle or tricycle, actually, that was hand-pedaled that people who'd lost both limbs would be able to navigate. A barefoot army, RENAMO, the Mozambique National Resistance Movement, barefoot, some of them without even weapons. I said, how can you go into battle without weapons? They said, we must get our weapon from the enemy. Can you imagine going to battle without even enough weapons? If the person next to you drops, take his weapon. That kind of attitude. They didn't have enough weapons. Even women fighting. Alfonso de Cama, the leader of RENAMO, the National Resistance in Mozambique, he used to be a communist. He was an officer in FILIMO. He said, the revolution's been betrayed. We've exchanged Portuguese colonials for Russian colonials, and the Russians are worse. And he ended up going back into the bush to fight against the Communist Filima that he once fought for. Where did he get his weapons from? The enemy is my quartermaster. 12.7 anti-aircraft gun, captured from the Soviets. On this occasion at Baira Corridor, you can see these men all holding scripture gift mission and gospel materials I've got from all nations gospel publishers. And there's their T-34 tank. Well, if you look up above, you can see, actually, a Russian radar station. So when I got there and I gave them the literature, I asked if I could take a picture of the hill. They said, no, that's forbidden. And I asked if I could take a picture of them and their crew, and they gathered around. And I positioned myself so I could include the radar station, too. This man was trained in Patrice Lumumba University as a revolutionary, as a Marxist. He was converted to Christ by Christians in Russia. came back as a Christian, left Filimo, became one of our evangelists in Mozambique. Another man who had trained in Patricia Lumumba University in Russia as a communist, left Filimo when he came to Christ, later when he came back to Mozambique, came to Christ, also became one of our evangelists in Mozambique. My motorbike that I bought with my Time in the fire brigade, when I left theological college, I bought this Honda XL 500 scrambler, rode from Cape Town all the way up to Mozambique with saddlebags filled with World Missionary Press gospel booklets, a hundred of the New Testaments in Portuguese and Shangon, and the Jesus formed 16 mil projector. Here, this church was consecrating, commissioning a man to go off to Cuba to take the gospel there. And I asked how it can be that they are able to send missionaries to Cuba. And he says, oh, we have no choice. The government assigns tasks and says, you are called to go and work in the sugar cane plantations in Cuba or in the factories of East Germany or wherever. And so he says, we Dedicate them, consecrate them, we train all our people to be emissaries. And when they head off into the field, we command them, take the gospel of Jesus Christ to Cuba, take the gospel of Jesus Christ to Russia, take the gospel of Jesus Christ to East Germany. And when I expressed some sympathy, I said, don't cry for us. We were a selfish church. We never prayed for other churches. We never even evangelized the next village. But now we train all our members to be missionaries. What a privilege to have 40% of our members on a foreign mission field in the world and the communists paid to send them there. Their attitude had changed. Schools without any textbooks, schools without any desks, just a few poles to sit on. All I had was blackboards. We took in the chalk and we gave them Bibles and the teacher said, the Bible will be our textbook. The children, in fact every village I went to I found that 60% of people would be children under 12. Thirty percent would be women, there'd be very few men, not even ten percent. Where are the men? Concentration camps, killed, conscripted into Filimo, or joined Rinaldo, or overseas working as slaves in Cuba. And so, we were ministering mainly to women and children in most of the villages. And what a tremendous need there was in Mozambique when he started. In 1989, just six months after I was married, I was captured by communist forces, Soviet helicopters. These are not the actual helicopters we were captured in, but they were like these. We were captured in MI-8 HIP helicopters, Russian crews. They said they were from Moscow, and I asked them. We were captured. Myself and six American medical missionaries, another South African missionary, there's eight of us in total, and we're taken from Tet, up in Tet province to Tet city, interrogated, all the way down to Meshava Security Prison of SNASP, the security people in Maputo, where we were interrogated. And that was part of one of the captures. Over the years, our mission has had over 20 of our missionaries locked up in communist Mozambique, in Zambia when it was under the socialist dictator Kenneth Gohunda, and also in Sudan. I was involved in three of those episodes personally. I've also been detained in Zimbabwe, but that didn't end up in prison. And one can tell you a whole lot about different types of people, but just to give you a feel of what we had to face, as I was led into this room for interrogation. It looked like a hardware store. The tools on the table, the battery with the crocodile clips and the wires, the chair that I was sitting to had leather straps for the arms and the legs. suspiciously next to the generator, the battery, and the crocodile clips. Of course, they didn't get enough electricity. Reliable, it was mostly power failure. So I think you're generally charged with electricity over there. And as I walked in, this man's comment to me was, I am the devil. So I said, you're not the devil. He said, oh, I'm the devil. I'm not only a Marxist and a Leninist, I'm a Stalinist. I was trained in Czechoslovakia. Well, how do you respond to that? So I said, I'm a Christian. And a man exploded. He spat out, I hate Christians. And I can't do justice to that. He really spat it out. And he launched into a tirade about how evil Christianity is. And then, strangely, he turned to, but Jesus was the first true communist. And Jesus taught from each according to his ability to each according to his need and so on. And the early church were the first communists because they even executed people for not distributing their wealth and so on and so forth. So I said, well, what you've said doesn't sound consistent, because if Jesus was the first communist, and if the Bible teaches communism, why are you burning Bibles, banning Bibles, forbidding missionaries, and why am I being locked up? And then he rant and raved against Margaret Thatcher's economic policy in Britain. This is the 1980s. I'm thinking, communists like politics and history. So I can swap lectures. So I started giving lectures on the Renaissance and the Reformation. And then he went into a tirade against Ronald Reagan. And then I went into a lecture on Reaganomics and how Soviet economics fails. And we swapped lectures for six hours. There was a clock on the wall at the back, not that big. I was watching this clock because I didn't have a watch, I didn't have shoes, you know, everything had been taken away from me. And I was thinking, this is so much more pleasant than having my fingernails ripped out and being charged electricity. So if any of you wonder what's the point of learning history, well let me tell you, history saved my neck that day because I could talk history with this commie who just loved discussing history and he probably was happy to have somebody to have an intelligent discussion with. And I'd been to Czechoslovakia, I knew a whole lot of these things. I understood a lot of the names that he's talking about, and of course Voltaire and Rousseau, and understood all that stuff. So I could, you know, Marx and Engels, and I could quote Das Kapital as well, no problem. So we could get our way through. And after six hours, he stood up, announced the interview over, and sent me back to my cell. I was just, he hadn't even got my name. In fact, one of the things that was so amazing about God's mercy on this arrest back in 1989 in Mozambique. just last year's the 30th anniversary of that event, was that they never got my name. My British passport had Peter Christopher on the top line and Hammond was on the second line. And all the time through there, they kept referring to Peter Christopher, Mr. Christopher, Mr. Christopher come here, Peter Christopher. They missed the Hammond part and I was like, well, I don't need to correct them. That's fine. Because I had in my files back at home a letter from the Minister of Justice, the Ministry of Justice Department of Religious Affairs, on letter it's signed, you come back to Mozambique, we'll kill you. And that predated this arrest. So because of my Mozambique report, because of my work exposing the fact, just the year before, I'd taken the Mozambique report to America in 1988, and Jesse Helms had read it into the congressional record, and had cut funding for Mozambique foreign aid because of the atrocities that are documented in this. And so Mozambique really hated me, the government, And so the people were very happy with us. And so I was in a very, very, very dicey, difficult situation. And to show you the difference between Americans and British, after excruciating days of interrogation and being in sultry confront, when I speak with sultry confront, I could lie in my cell, touch both walls at the same time, while my toes touched the other wall and my head touched the other side. So that's how big the cell was. And the door had a bit of a gap under it. I discovered this because first time I woke up on the concrete floor, there's no furnishing, it was just a foul smell. As I opened my eyes, I was being tickled by something. So a rat, whiskers, and all that, and foul smell. And of course, they could come in and out as they liked under the door. And it was, at least I wasn't alone. So on the last day, of our excruciating experience, we were led into a room. And it was a very smart, blonde, tall American woman standing in the room and said, where are the Americans? And six hands went up and lots of hugs and shrieks and excitement. And she's taking them down the corridor saying, let's get to American Embassy for some hamburgers and Coke. So off they went. And then there's a man in a pinstripe suit who said, And who's the British gentleman? Well, I was the only white person there not wearing camouflage and carrying an AK-47, but I raised my hand and he shook my hand and said, had a spot of bother, have you? Well, let's get you to the British Embassy for a cup of tea. And as we walked down the corridor, he said, well, see if there's some cucumber sandwiches left over from tea. That's the only time in my life I would have preferred to be an American. That's the difference between British and Americans, right there. Well, as we were on our way to the British embassy, the man stopped and he says, as you'll see, we're on the corner of Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse Tung streets. Not that this was called that when we built the embassy, of course. As we went in, he walked around the side. We didn't go in the front door and walked to the side of the embassy and he says, You see this plaque, on the wall was a plaque, after escaping from the Boers, Winston Churchill sought sanctuary at this consulate. And he said, who knows, Mr. Hammond, one day we may have a plaque up here for you. So I looked at him, skewed, and he said, no, yes, we know all about you, Mr. Hammond. We need to get you out of this country before Fulima realizes who they had. They had a charter plane fly me out early the next morning, very early the next morning, in order to get me out. And I can thank Margaret Thatcher for that. So we still had a couple of friends pulling strings on the other side. We have been able to see many times where crisis reveals character. First views of Angola, shot out, bombed out. Here we are flying over Soviet gas trucks pulling 75 millimeter artillery. and in Jiva. I think Colonel Breitenbach used this church as his HQ for the Parabats when they were doing some operation. And you can see, the Portuguese built a nice civilization, but it was pretty wrecked by the commies in just a matter of months. Exterior decorating by Gorbachev and Sons. Your home, too, could look like this. This is what communism can do for your society. And as you can see, the communists are very religious. They worship three gods. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin. And I'd say to the Angolans, these three men have one thing in common. They're all dead. But there's an empty tomb in Jerusalem. Jesus is alive. You have a dead religion. You've got a religion of death. Those who hate God love death. We have a religion of life, eternal life, abundant life in Christ. Agostino Neto. was a psychotic Marxist poet who said he had destroyed the Bible. He said in 20 years you'll have to go to a museum and see what a Bible looks like. I've destroyed the Bible. Now in this he is copying Voltaire. Now to show God's sense of humor After Voltaire died, this is the philosopher, the Karl Marx of his time, who inspired the French Revolution. After he died, the Geneva Bible Study bought his home and his printing press and started to print Bibles from his printing press in Voltaire's home. And Voltaire said, within 100 years, there won't be a Bible left in the world. You'll only find them in a museum. Now, Neptune made the same prophecy. Well, I can tell you our little mission, Frontline Fellowship, has smuggled more Bibles into Angola than there were when he made that false prophecy. So, that was Neto. Angola will be for the fountain of the propagation and triumph of the revolution throughout Africa. This is Huambo. By the way, do you see the UNITA flags there? The red, green and red. UNITA soldier in the foreground. Huambo fell to UNITA. They nationalized the 600 factories and so on in Angola. And as you can see, this is what nationalized factories look like. They nationalized the bus service. They nationalized the trains as well. And in the end, the people only had bicycles. This is the National Bank. And as you can see, it's a functioning bank, Banco Nacional de Angola. You could say socialism broke the Bank of Angola. Why are people in the second biggest city in Angola carrying buckets of water? It's a city of a million people. Well, it's been liberated. It's a communist city. You wouldn't expect plumbing and electricity in a communist city, now would you? How many people without limbs? Well, landmines became the national plant. UNITA was once fighting against the Portuguese and ended up fighting against the Cubans and the Russians and became an ally of South Africa because Jonas Savimbi said, I learned in China how to fight a revolutionary war. And I also learned how not to run a country. And he quoted a lot from American Founding Fathers, George Washington, and so on, Jefferson. And at breakfast, Jonas Lindby made a couple of jokes. If our American friends can excuse me saying them, but it's interesting. He said, do you know why America's not at a revolution 200 years? There's no American embassy in America. And then he said, it's better to be America's enemy than America's friend. He said, if you're America's enemy, you will probably be bought. But if you're America's friend, you will certainly be sold. And he wasn't anti-American. He was very pro-American. He kept quoting American constitution, finding policy. He liked American principles. But of course, he recognized the State Department was an enemy of liberty. And UNITA was betrayed many times. There's a whole story behind that. Well, UNITA Freedom Fighter Free Angola was well run. We had the opportunity of going through training, ministering with them. These were weapons captured by the Salafis on ops across the border, and it's more blessed to give than to receive, so UNITA would be the beneficiary of the shopping expeditions, these affirmative shoppings of the SADF, who were recycling Soviet weaponry into the hands of the Freedom Fighters. Now, you may wonder why I've got black and white pictures and why I've got colored pictures of the same events. Well, back then, it never crossed my mind that there would ever be something like PowerPoint or that you'd have colored pictures in a newsletter or book. So, I would have black and white prints for stills to put in your newsletter, and I have colour slides for when we use the slide projector. You could only have one type of film in at a time, and that's why some of my pictures are in black and white and some are in colour. Notice this man has lost his hand. Left hand has been chopped off. These people are UNITA. These are the freedom fighters of Jonas Zivimbi fighting against the Soviets and the Cubans. And it was our joy to smuggle Bibles and books across the rivers to them. Here's World Missionary Press and also The All Nations Gospel Publishers materials heading into Angola, across the river, pushing these canoes across while we swam, because there wasn't space for us and the Bibles and books in the canoes. On this occasion, our team was lost, and the people who came up in the Watu and said, are you lost? Are you missionaries? Can we show you the way? Well, of course we're missionaries. Who else is wandering around this marsh like this in the middle of nowhere? And people would come and help carry the Bibles. And it's just like Days of Livingston, porters with Bibles on their heads, having to carry it in areas where landmines were the national plot. More landmines than people. The roads were, this was a big red strip on a Michelin map. But you get there and it took imagination to work out where the road was. When I speak about the developing world, well, the main thing developing was rust and weeds. You couldn't see the national road. And we spend sometimes more times behind or under the bonnet of the car, fixing the car than we did actually behind the wheel. There were times we had to leave our vehicle, it couldn't manage, in the soft sand and get cows to pull sleds of Bibles. Bibles being pulled on sleds in the 21st century, can you believe it? This is the only Bible the church had. Well, we replaced lots of good Bibles in books. This is a reformed church. In Angola, and what did we hear? This is the greatest gift anyone could have asked for, the word of God, my own language. I've been praying day and night for five years for my very own word of God. This is the greatest gift anyone could have asked for. This was when they were having offerings, people would be bringing grain, the only thing they had to give. What's missing from this church? What looks different to you from your church at home? There's no building, no. The building's been destroyed by the Cubans. But it hasn't stopped them from gathering to worship the Lord. Their priorities are right. And you can see our vehicle in the background. Well, in Angola, meeting different leaders. See this poor man had lost his leg to a landmine. This man's lost his leg to a landmine. And these are people who were without limbs at one church service. At one point, I'm talking about 1988, 80,000 amputees from landmines in Angola. And there were more landmines than there were people in Angola. More than 10 million landmines and not that many people at that time. And so where have you seen a thatched hospital? And this is a clinic that we resupplied. They had no quinine, no antiseptics, no antibiotics. When we brought that in, they, with great ceremony, reopened the clinic. reusing disposable gloves. This dispensary was actually mostly empty boxes. There was effectively no medicines here. We'd taken tons of medicines to these people. And one of the medical schools, notice this chap with the Jonas of Inby t-shirt back there, and the skeleton staff. But they operated, functioned, and received aid from the South African army and medics as well so that they could sometimes do some good operations. This radio broadcaster came from South Africa to Radio Freedom for the United Freedom Fighters in Angola. Well, there was the opportunity for us to travel with him and minister and preach and be as chaplains with the UNITA Freedom Fighters, as we were with RENAMA in Angola. And there was this one time after a tough day when we had been strafed and rocketed in Angola. It's 1986. And we're listening to the radio, shortwave radio, at night, around a campfire. And on shortwave radio, who should come on but Ronald Reagan? On shortwave radio, BBC World Service. And Ronald Reagan was speaking about Angola. We are going to send Stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola. You know, this was really strange. We were in the outermost parts of the earth, Kwandokwabunga province, what the Portuguese called the outermost parts of the earth, most remote place imaginable, being bombed by the Soviets that day. And there we are sitting around a campfire, and Ronald Reagan is speaking about our situation and our most perceived need. We are going to send Stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola. There's this long silence. And one of our people said, well, that would be nice. But will they do it? Indeed, they did. America was good to the word. And here I can show you some documentation of US taxpayers' money doing something good for a change. Hind helicopter gunship shot down. Hind helicopter gunship totally and utterly destroyed. Mig totally destroyed. In 1987, I and three other frontline missionaries were arrested and imprisoned in Zambia. It wasn't always the warm heart of Africa. Back in 1987, it was under one party dictator, Kenneth Gohinda, UNEP, who had locked up all of his critics. And I was locked up in this prison, Lusaka Central Prison. There's the main gate. Here's the interrogation block. There's the machine gun tower. And the only entrance into the prison courtyard was under here, a very small one that you had to duck to get through. Talk about going through the narrow gate, but I wasn't getting into heaven, that's for sure. And here's the cooking area, big, big, big cooking pots, big enough for a family of Michelines. And it was just starch, and the only protein would have come from the flies. And there was no No plates, no food utensils. They dished up the food in your hands and you had to eat like this. There was no bowls and knives, no cups, nothing like that. And there was 1,200 prisoners in this prison. Now, the British built it for 80 prisoners, 80. When Kenneth Goynda was locked in Lusaka Central, it had electricity, it had plumbing, he had a room to himself, he had bedding, he had record player, desk, access to the library, three cooked meals a day, and all that sort of thing. When we were locked up in there, Well, there were 60 to 65 of us in the cell at a time. Now it looks repainted. This is after our prison experience and they'd repainted it. It didn't look that nice when I was there. This is where we entered in and where we were locked up. And there were 60 to 65 prisoners in each cell, no bedding, no beds, no mattresses, no plumbing, no electricity. 60 to 65 people in a cell, 25 feet by 15 feet. And we spent an excruciating couple of weeks at the hands of Zambian security in filthy cells, blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, incarcerated in these overcrowded Lusaka Central Prison. Friends of ours, including Father Arthur Lewis and Dennis Walker. Radhesians, had ensured that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was informed of our plight just before departure for the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver. We're talking about October 1987. And all the Commonwealth were coming together in Vancouver, and their primary goal was to attack Margaret Thatcher. And the lead man was Chairman of the Frontline States, Kenneth Gohundur, whose guest we were. We were presidential detainees in Lusaka Central. And Kenneth Gohundur, led the assault on Margaret Thatcher, haranguing her because she is refusing to place economic sanctions on South Africa. So Margaret Thatcher responded, why doesn't Zambia herself place sanctions on South Africa? Kund respond, well, that would place many people out of work. Exactly, responded the British Prime Minister. And as South Africa is one of our most important trading partners, many British citizens would be placed out of work if I was to impose sanctions on South Africa. Quite a sight for many South Africans themselves who'd be placed out of work. She then went on to relate how Zambians were dependent on South African maize grown in the Orange Free State, millimille, how Zambian airways were maintained by South African airways, how Zambian railways was maintained by South African railways, how Zambian Cattle were cared for by South African veterinarians. If a Zambian was bitten by a snake, the anti-snake bite serum came from hood sprays in South Africa. And how many Zambians, hundreds of thousands were migrant workers in South Africa, and how many hundreds of millions that contributed to the general economy of Zambia. Kenneth Gonder then declared, because of South Africa's human rights abuses, Britain should impose sanctions. It's at this point that Margaret Thatcher produced our information. Who are you to speak about human rights abuses? You are the unelected dictator of a one-party state. You have four British missionaries being held without trial as presidential detainees in Osaka Central Prison, tortured and abused by your own security forces. And she gave more details of us. Kohunda was dumbstruck. He was humiliated. He ordered our immediate release. In fact, they said the first words he said when he came off the plane in Lusaka was, get those missionaries out of here. And this wasn't this mission. This was on a later time when I was brought into Zambia for Kohunda to apologize for our mistreatment. And I just couldn't stop without getting a picture of the Freedom Monument in Lusaka, which is behind bars. And I just thought this is so funny. We made many friends during our time in prison there. We preached every day. A lot of people in the presidential detainees cell. And one of the good friends we made was General Godfrey Mianda. General Godfrey Mianda was locked up in Osaka Central Prison by Kohunda because he said sanctions will hurt Zambia more than South Africa. And for that unpatriotic comment, they put this military general into prison. Well, he later became Minister of Education and Deputy President in Zambia. And we went from being prohibited immigrants and presidential detainees in 1987 to VIPs in 1991, when we were being invited in as guests of the Zambian government. In 1991, on Reformation Day, 31 October, Zambia declared itself an officially Christian country. Frederick Choluba, who I did not personally meet, but who was also in Osaka Central Prison, it's a big prison, when he came out and he was mentored and led to Christ by God Vimyanda, he declared Zambia an officially Christian country. Outlawed abortion, outlawed pornography, General Meander asked me to please, when I gave him a pile of books on biblical economics and all the rest, he said, I love books. I love reading. But the demands of half has given me little time for reading. Don't you have a small book that summarizes all of these? And so I produced Biblical Principles for Africa. In English, later translated into Afrikaans and into French, delivered to the Congo. Our biggest biblical worldview summit was actually in the Congo, in Lubumbashi. 3,000 people attend there. Now, Godfrey Meander invited us to run biblical warfare seminars in the schools, in the teacher training colleges, able to minister to people. This is the chaplain, this is the chappies from Lusaka Central Prison. Bishop Bonali Fili, he found me in the prison. He was shocked when he discovered, you know, what are you doing missionaries in Lusaka Central? He's the one who blew the whistle and got the news out about these missionaries being abused and tortured. in Lusaka Central. He became our best friend in Zambia, introduced us to lots of people. Here he is with the Understander Times book, which the Biblical World Week Summit's built on. There's so many ministry opportunities that came from this imprisonment, and I'm mentioning these as just examples. My son Calvin, when he was eight, joined me for a mission to Zambia. And I was able to emphasize to the people the importance of training your young people, because I saw many of the fathers would ignore their sons, thinking it's beneath them to teach their sons, leaving it to the wives. I said, no, a father must train up his child in the way he should go. And from the time Kelvin was five, he could give that gospel presentation, EE, Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, Apostles' Creed, the whole lot. And here I showed Calvin where we used to swim the rivers in Tangola, smuggling bibles by canoes and so on in Tangola. And there were times that I'd have my own meetings, and Calvin, at 80 years old, would go off and take classes, recite a whole lot of scripture memory to pastors' conferences, and he even got on national TV in Zambia, introduced him to General Godfrey, no, this is General Shikapasha. General Ronnie Shikapasha is another Zambian general, good friend of ours. He was head of the Zambian Air Force, crippled in a car accident, told him never walk again. His wife got converted. He got converted. He got healed. He became Minister of Information, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Home Affairs, successively over many years, and was our host on many occasions. We were his guests. And he took us to meet the state president, Levi Moana Wassa, who we had a good hour with, praying, Bible study, present him with a Christian flag. came from a Jehovah's Witness background, had been excommunicated for getting involved in politics, was without a church, and shortly after this, he has baptized and joined Zambia Baptist Church. Well, I could give you a story about Colonel Jan Breitenbach. Let me conclude with that. Colonel Breitenbach, the legendary 3-2 battalion founder When he retired from the army, he joined Frontline Fellowship. He spoke at our camps. He spoke at our Biblical World Week seminars. We went up to Southwest Africa, Angola, ministered in all the bases, and Colonel Breitenbach preached hard, tough messages. We camped out in the field with the troops. We went on patrols with them. We ministered in every base in the whole of Southwest Africa in 1989, in one month, in 1989. multiple meetings a day, and when we were at the end of this month, I remember waking up one morning, looking over at the colonel's sleeping bag, and the colonel said to me, Peter, let's go into Angola and preach to the communists. And that's what we did. We walked across the border into Angola. Now, there's not many pictures that day, but this is one picture. The colonel's sitting in a camping chair with his hands behind his head. And I'm the one with the black shirt standing up there. And we're speaking through our Portuguese translator from 3-2 Battalion. At three separate places on that day, we went across and we preached to Cuban and communist troops in Angola. So we walked across the border into Angola. Colonel Breitenberg. He stood up there and he said, I'm Colonel Jan Breitenbach of 3-2 Battalion. My men and I, we've killed thousands of you. Thousands. We never had any trouble killing you, our trouble was catching you. You ran so fast, you broke Olympic records running away from the fight. He said, you're so afraid to die. Why are you afraid to die? Your God is Karl Marx, your religion is atheism. You're lost, you're damned, you're commissars of the priests of Satan, you're gonna burn in hell. If you knew what was waiting for you one second on the other side of the grave, you'd crawl across the minefield and beg three two battalions to show you the way of salvation in Jesus Christ. And he preached like this. Now every word is burned into my memory. I remember my hand going to my browning nine mil on my hip and thinking the colonel wants a short way to glory. I didn't think I'd see the sunset that day. And we did this three separate occasions. And there we were, we were surrounded by commies fingering their RPGs, PKMs, unreal. And there we were really rubbing their noses in the dirt and antagonizing them no end. Well, when we got back that day, we got to Roe Connor Base and the commandant at Roe Connor Base came out to greet us as we came in on the Puma helicopter that the colonel had hitched a ride on. And he said, oh, colonel. The lines have been humming today. From the Bastion, Fort Recorder, Pick, that's South Africa's foreign minister, Pick Porter, is really the hell in with you. You and Hammond are to be expelled from the country tomorrow morning first thing. What are you trying to do, restart the war? And interesting, Colonel Breitmark apparently fired the first shots of the war in 1966. And we were then expelled from that place. Anthony Duncan died 25 years ago in the service of Christ, missionary of Frontline Fellowship. He had survived being trampled into mud by a rhino during a rhino rescue. He was charged by two lions at one occasion while a game ranger. Although he had a rifle and a revolver, he put down his rifle and threw rocks at the lines to deflect them. Because like myself, he's a real animal lover and couldn't bring himself to shoot a magnificent line. He came off his motorbike at 160 kilometers an hour to Millie Patch and survived. So we said Anthony had more lives than a cat. Well, 1994, 25 years ago, Frontline sent four vehicles and teams into the field and only one vehicle came back. That's the vehicle I was driving. I was in Zambia running a biblical warfare seminar as a guest of General Meander in Kenneth Govinda High School. And I got the call from our mission back in Cape Town. And it was, none of our mission was in Cape Town. We just had a few volunteers holding the fort. Because in November, December, we were all in the field, always. And they said, the team's been arrested. for breaching the blockade in Zangola. Anthony's team, which had smuggled in a ton of bibles and medicines in Zangola, had been ambushed on the way back and captured and imprisoned, and the vehicle was written off. Took it to General Meander. General Meander was at that point hosting a peace talk between UNITA freedom fighters and the Angolans and the Cubans in, sorry, the Cubans are gone, it was just the Angolans and UNITA, in Lusaka. So he said, you must get these missionaries released. And Angolans said, well, they've been arrested by a Namibian government, it's none of our business. He said, it doesn't matter, get them out till this peace conference has ended now, and our people are released the next day. On the way back, Anthony died in a head-on collision. And that was quite a story, because Anthony had come to Laudan Etosha Game Reserve. And so on the way back from this incredible mission where he had succeeded in smuggling, it was a very complex mission actually. There was a lot on the go, five country, complex mission with four teams. And after the imprisonment, arrest, successfully delivering a ton into Angola, on the way back, he stopped at the very hill where he had come to Christ in Etosha Pan went up the hill, prayed, saw the sunset, came down, and everything he owned had been stolen out of the vehicle. All he had was his Bible, his boots, clothes he was standing in, his backpack had gone, and his backpack was all he owned, actually. He gave away everything he had. Twenty-eight years old, lived a very simple life. The most godly and spiritual-minded person we had on our mission, I'd say. Went through the night, didn't see the sunrise, died in a head-on collision on the way back. Extraordinary testimony, all sorts of things came out of that. Not one of his family was right with God. I was gonna send him up to N7, and last minute I sent him up to N1. And I didn't know his whole family lived up in Transvaal. And on the way up, he stopped off and he spoke to his father and his mother, who were divorced. and his brother and sister, who were not right with God, and challenged him. They ignored him. Within a month, he is dead. And at the funeral, they all gave their lives to the Lord. They were all shaken by his testimony and his love for God and how he was ready. And he had told them, you're not ready. He challenged his family. He loved his family enough to confront them with the truth. Call him to Christ. A lot came out of that and Calvin interviewed me over Anthony's testimony and we spoke about it. We've got an article on Anthony Duncan's death, died in service to Christ 25 years ago on our frontline web. But all of this just reminds me of the importance that character your crisis situations tell you of your character. And it's absolutely vital as we seek to win the unreached countries going to the Muslim world that we have the character of those that God wants to use to win the loss, to fulfill the Great Commission. Let's pray. Lord God, we thank you for hard times, for difficult times. For your hard words in scripture too, because we recognize, Lord, you're seeking to train us to be better people, stronger people, more effective, that we can win the lost, bring backsliders back to the throne of grace. Help us, Lord God, to even win our enemies to Christ. Lord, we are called to win nations to you, to disciple the nations and teach obedience to all things you've commanded. Help us, Lord God, to be more faithful to your word, the Bible, and more effective in your service. We pray it in Jesus' precious and holy name. Amen.