…yourself and you went whithersoever you chose to go, young, strong, alert in the mind. And, of course, with Peter, a very forward moving kind of person, often in the lead whether right or wrong, up front.

And then He (Jesus) said, “When you are old, another will gird you and you will go where you do not desire to go.” And it said that he spoke that of the death of Peter, probably martyrdom. And there was a great difference between that youthful liberty to do what you will and the state of an old soldier of the Lord who would be sent to martyrdom. And, no doubt with Jesus words with him prophetically, surrendering even to that, though he would not in a sense go.

When a young believer is a civilian who loves the Lord, they apparently have a great liberty to choose in the Lord what their course will be. They’re responsible to God for the conduct of their lives and the path that they take. And they appear to be uninhibited so to speak by circumstances.

When a young person is in the military, that appearance is somewhat different, because this is a highly hierarchical order that goes from what they call buck privates—they haven’t even got a stripe yet—or recruits, all the way up to five- or four-star generals. And the four-star general can order anyone under him to do anything almost at any time. And indeed the corporal can order—these are non-commissioned officers—so he can order the private.

Wherever you are on that ladder, everyone on a lower rank is subject to your orders. And you are subject to their orders. So you’ll be a buck in a week. [man: A second lieutenant.] A second lieutenant, which is the lowest order of the commissioned officer ranks.

You’ve been what? You’ve been a cow somewhat once, haven’t you? [man:  (inaudible).] And what were you before that? [man: (inaudible).] A first one.

They do something in the military called “cutting orders.” It simply means that someone in authority in effect points to the name and the number of the soldier and tells someone to cut orders, to send that soldier to Thailand or some place that it suits the military to send him.

And there is no counsel taken with the person whose orders are being cut. They do not call you and say for the most part… There may be some exceptions, but on the whole, they do not say, “Would you like to go to Thailand in nine days?” But they say, “You will go to Thailand in nine days.” And you get everything ready to do exactly that, because you’re going to go, unless you get very sick. You’re headed there because they have told you to go.

I was a baby Christian about five weeks old when the long arm of the government reached out and took me by the back of my collar and yanked me out of civilian clothes and put me in drab khakis and began to tell me what I would do and where I would be for the next whole two years of my life, because that was the term for which I was drafted.

In the church where I had been recently saved, they asked me to say a kind of farewell word. And as a baby Christian, I could say only a few lines really. But I testified of my thankfulness for salvation. And then I said by faith that I knew God would be with me in the military. And I didn’t believe that. That’s about the whole testimony, that God would be with me in the military. And that was it.

And then the day came for me to report, take the physical, have a photograph taken in the uniform they kind of gave us to have a photograph at the induction center. And the people who had gone in just before they had their photograph, this [?] came out and looked at me and said, “Bah! Such a rookie.” They were ones just ahead of us.

And I was taken into the army. And I was filled with a sense that God would have His way, though I was very aware that the army would also have its way with me. And I spent three days in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, having come from the Boston area.

And then they cut orders. And the orders were that I should go to the war raging in Korea at the time. And the reason we were drafted was because of that war. And the intention on the whole was to send young people into that war to fight it.

The orders were cut and I was sent to Fort Holabird, Baltimore, which is as close to being a country club, a beautiful campus like a fine college campus. It was in fact a school; I wasn’t involved with the school, but it was a school to train counterintelligence agents. And it had a broad campus and trees and lawns and fence around it. A very protected atmosphere and, you know, I never left that post in Baltimore until the day I was released from the service. They didn’t even have facilities for basic training. So one day a week on Friday we were sent over to Fort Meade, trucked over to Fort Meade for one day of basic training for eight weeks. We had eight days of basic training.

And the Lord blessed and stripes began to appear on my arm, and before it was over, I was the top sergeant of the whole outfit operating with the troops of the officers.

But I believe that though there was a war raging in Korea, that the Lord put me on hold for two years in Baltimore. That the Lord in effect said to the army, “You cut one order, and you will cut no other.” Because there was another war that I was to be called to. When that hour of transition came and when I realized I was no longer subject to anyone’s orders, that I was a young man in Christ who now must follow Him and receive and obey His orders as my commander in chief for life.

The war that He led me into was first having to do with the occupation of the media entirely by unbelievers. It appears that there may not have been a born again Christian in the news department of The New York Times for half a century, before the Lord placed me there. And it was, I can assure you, a warfare. And then partly because I was so pressed into the Lord and had to spend so much time in the Word, He led me into a warfare having to do with the establishing of the church as the Body of Christ.

Well, there were obvious differences between being under the command of a military system and being without any command. Now there are young people who remain to some degree under other kinds of command. You can be under a command at times of your parents, who have your best in their souls; they want what’s good for you, they want what will work for you, they want you to be blessed, yes. But they may not in some cases be so much in the Lord that they really can assess what is best for you in Christ.

I wasn’t under that at all at the time I was released from the army. My parents were not of the kind who would insist upon anything basically, good or bad, they let me [?]. So that I was truly free to follow the Lord without hindrance.

But you know there isn’t all that much difference in fact between the military situation and the civilian situation. Because being subject to authorities in the military does not remove one from being subject to the Commander in heaven who stands above the military and can as easily reach into military life as He can into civilian life and who can in effect without their even knowing an order, some officer, to order you to do something that God wants you to do or to be sent some place. But the military needs you, but God wants you there. And the things you would do in the military may connect in some real ways to what he is doing…. But you may do other things, make associations, get burdens in prayer, meet people, etc., that will be wholly His appointment for you, the new [burden] through the military. Is God above the military?

You know, when Egypt sent its entire highly built-up military force to do one thing: just get those slaves, Jew slaves, back into Egypt again; stop them from escaping. And they went into the miraculously parted waters, which waters then closed at God’s command over the entire military of Egypt. And they were rendered without authority or power to effect anything on the earth because God said.

And there are other times in the military when the struggle is not all that perfectly clear and perfectly clean. Yet God is with one side and He is against the other side. And God will see to it through the fray and through the horrors even that the side that he wants to prevail will prevail, and that the side that He is against will finally falter and fail. And He will work His will as He has many times in history through a military instrument.

It’s wonderful to be civilian and free in the Lord insofar as we really seize that to give God the chance really without hindrance, without preconceptions, without prescriptions from us as to how he will order our lives ahead. I’m not speaking about being without [?]—that would be abnormal; people who just become blank slates, etc. But rather yielding to God the freedom to be highly original with you because He is so original. And He may not—He did not take any counsel with me at all about being in New York City or about being at The New York Times. He did not whisper that; it was revealed in the moments that it occurred. It occurred overnight, Thursday evening at 9:00 or so for New York, and the next morning around 9:00 for The New York Times. None of that was any…. I was on the train ride. My destination on the ticket was Boston; I was going to a [?] room of that [?] room house there with two people in it. My job was waiting for me. God said, “Here, now, there.” Thank God. Let Him have His way with you. It may not always be clear what He is doing, but as it goes on it will be abundantly clear, thoroughly spiritual and very much to the good. Amen.