An Answered Prayer

It happened at the most unusual moment and from the most unlikely of people. I needed some encouragement. To say that the past several months have been difficult would be an understatement. The challenges of this season have sapped my spiritual vitality and left me unsure about many things- especially prayer. So many of my prayers seemingly haven't been answered. I needed something to bolster my confidence and reassure my heart that Jesus was still aware of where we are and what we have been going through. Have you ever been there?

I pulled into the gas station to fill up after lunch. As the attendant, a guy named David, pumped the diesel fuel we exchanged pleasantries. Then came the question, "Do you remember how we met?"

"Yes." I asked unsure of where he was going with it.

I had filled up at the gas station after preaching in the college service at a church on the other side of town. Two services, close to 600 young people had packed the building. The message was called, "On the way to pray." (The notes are on my fb wall in early June).  God moved powerfully that morning. Over 15 had surrendered their lives to Christ, many were healed, and several felt a sense of calling into full time ministry. I had challenged the group that day to make themselves available for God to use them, particularly in the area of healing.

Bailey had been too ill to accompany me due to the post procedure recovery and ongoing typhoid challenges.  I had stopped into the gas station on the way home to fill up and get her a small snack at the nearby coffee house.

The gas attendant was particularly friendly and the first thing I had noticed about him was his puffy red eye with an opaque cataract. He was in his 20s and clearly something was wrong. I asked him about it: a basketball injury from 3 years previous that left him without sight in his right eye. The doctors had been unable to correct the problem.

I asked to pray with him and he had accepted. My prayer was a simple one- healing for his eye to demonstrate Gods love for him. Nothing had happened that day. I saw him on and off several times over the course of the next several weeks- and David even invited me for a visit to his house to meet his wife and two kids (a huge step of friendship in Kenyan culture.)

The eye had pretty much stayed the same and I resigned myself to just not bringing up the subject again.

"Do you remember what you prayed the first time we met?" He continued.

"Yes, we prayed for your eye to be healed." Some 8 weeks had passed since that moment and I hadn't seen him for a while.

"God healed my eye," he beamed with enthusiasm.

"What?" I asked in disbelief.

"I can see again."

"What happened?" I asked.

"I heard about a free medical camp on the side of town. I went and an eye specialist was there who told me to come back the next day for a surgery to remove the cataract and replace the lens. It was a $600 surgery, money that I don't have, but they did it for free!"

"It's a miracle! Praise God. My eye is restored."

He was beaming; I was stunned.

"Thank you for praying for me! And praise God He answered." His countenance had changed and his eyes beamed. I had completely overlooked the change.

Bailey quickly asked him, "How do you feel now?"

"I have so much more confidence now."

What David didn't realize is that my heart was surging with new confidence as well! I had prayed believing for a miracle. 8 weeks had passed. God had come through- not at all how I had thought it would happen. Yet, the end result standing in front of me was an exact answer to prayer.

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him. (1 John 5:14, 15 ESV)

The Joy of a Bath

This AM I sat in the little garden in front of our house reading.  A bright red bird darted through the air near me to eagerly splash in the little bird bath.  We haven't had rain for over a month now so things are starting to dry up.  He, apparently, needed to cool off- he splashed and chirped joyfully as I sat quietly watching.  A few moments later, he was gone ready to face the dryness of the Malagasy day.

I turned in my Bible to I Timothy 1.  A verse leaped off the page at me, "The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus."  Paul is talking about his conversion experience.  A few verses later he says that he was the worst of sinners.  Then just to make sure everyone is clear he states it again.  He was a blasphemer and a persecutor of Christians.  How does the worst sinner of his day become an apostle, missionary, church planter, and author of 13 books in the New Testament?   One day on the road to Damascus he had an encounter with God's mercy.

What did God's mercy look like practically speaking? He bathed with abundant grace, abundant faith, and abundant love.   When a sinner, which according to Romans includes everyone born on planet earth, has their first encounter with Christ three glorious divine virtues are lavished on us.  Grace speaks of God's strength to accomplish God's plan for our lives.  Love speaks of God's kindness and limitless and tender compassion exhibited in the sacrificial death of His Son.  Faith speaks of an inner lift of expectation and anticipation that life has much greater significance than the daily grind of routine and human monotony.

I thought back to my own conversion experience.  I remember praying with my mom to invite Christ to enter my life, forgive my sins, transform my heart, and give me the assurance of eternal salvation.  While my experience wasn't nearly as dramatic externally as Paul's, I believe it was just as glorious internally.  At that moment, grace, love, and faith were poured out on me abundantly. I remember getting up from the bed where I had been kneeling with tears pouring down my face as joy and hope swept over me like nothing I had ever experienced.

It was from the inside out,  something that lasted and produced a radical shift in how I saw my life.  I had a new love for my brother, my parents, and the precious people of Kenya.  I felt alive both physically and spiritually.  My heart felt clean and free.  God's presence was very near.  I had a desire to talk and sing to Jesus almost immediately.  I was alive by the mercy of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

I was a dangerous person to the Kingdom of Darkness.  It may seem ridiculous to you, but I can remember just a few months later witnessing to a professed British atheist in our driveway.  At 6 years old it was hard for him to argue with me.  Why?  I was just so full of grace, love and faith.

So if these 3 components are the basis of a genuine salvation experience, then it only makes sense that these will be the three primary areas that our enemy, the devil, will attempt to erode at all possible costs.

He assaults the grace on our life by luring us to attempt life in our own strength and human striving.  We base decisions on our own logic and emotions.  We do it our own way.  Soon grace is a distant memory.  We are striving, and there is nothing quite so draining in life as striving in your own efforts.  Our walk with Jesus becomes a heavy burden, a ball-and-chain to pull around.  How so?  Simply because we are carrying the weight of our salvation instead of allowing Christ to do so.

The enemy also assaults the love of God deposited in our lives by tempting us to pursue our own selfish interests.  The world begins to revolve around "me".  We no longer pursue His will and His purpose.  We pursue our goals, our ambitions, our selfish desires.  We turn deaf ears to the needs of others around us or worse we meet other peoples needs in order to personally profit from their need.  Even though its prevalent and acceptable in the 21st century, it will still destroy God's glorious deposit in our lives- every time!  

Finally, I believe he undermines our faith.  He diverts our focus from God to our troubles and problems. Instead of seeing God's capacity to remove every mountain, we focus on our mountains capacity to swallow us alive.  Faith quickly diminishes.  As faith diminishes God seems distant and almost impotent.  Worse we focus on people around us allowing our hearts to become drunk on their failures, duplicity, and hypocrisy.  Soon God's greatness is a distant thought as we become consumed with offense.

End result?  Christianity becomes a dry, empty, lifeless experience full of religious activities and professions that lack any kind of authentic expression.  It's rote and ritual.  It's draining and life-sucking.  We feel dead and dry.  We teeter on the verge of total hypocrisy.  Why?  Religion always kills the internal life of the Spirit.  

So what's the remedy?

 I think it's the joy of a bath.  The dynamic Christians that I personally know and whose lives I have studied all possess one consistent principle: they take spiritual baths frequently and intentionally.  They asked for a fresh out-pouring of grace, love, and faith over their lives and hearts.  They cooperate with God's deposit of mercy.  They defend their hearts against hell's schemes.  They repent where they have strayed.  They get back to the basics: love, grace and faith.

I can promise you this:  a 1 Timothy 1:14 experience in your life will change everything!  Whether you have never invited Christ into your life or you have fallen prey to the enemy's strategy, heaven has limitless resources to fill your life with God's mercy again.  Grace! Love! Faith! 

Kingdom Evangelism Part 2

So why is part 1 of this blog important? 

Good question. 

The idea of Kingdom Evangelism elevates the evangelism discussion to new levels of importance in the life of Christ-followers.   It's a mental shift from attempting random acts of Christian communication  to a much larger and intentional endeavor:  the demonstration of the King's authority and power.  In effect, evangelism becomes a yearning for people to meet Jesus, the King.  This is a far more than bringing people into a church building, or asking them to parrot some spiritual sounding mantra, or requesting them to adhere to some staunch denominational doctrine or position.  All such things easily become empty platitudes and/or religious systems  that may be totally devoid of the main thing: JESUS. 

What do I mean? Imagine a Kingdom without a King.  It is non-sensical. In the quest to make sense of Christianity to a lost and hurting world could it be that we have effaced  "Christ" and developed a complicated system around the "ianity"? The Kingdom has often been superseded by the building.  Church activities focus on systems and procedures for practicing Christianity.  In so doing it's entirely possible to completely miss Christ.  The whole process becomes nothing more than an empty religious system full of do's and  don'ts based on external criteria, but totally overlooking the necessity of the internal: the depraved heart and mind of  a world in desperate need of heaven's regeneration.  The Kingdom always starts from the inside out.  Religion from the opposite perspective, but lacks any real power to transform the interior.  

No wonder religion is mocked in the 21st century.  Man's best efforts can never change the heart of man.  Nice sounding messages and religious activity lack any intrinsic power for transformation.  It is mere external conformance to a predetermined human model. This is a legalistic system based similar on what is found in the Old Testament.  Such teaching only reveals how far we have fallen short, but never deals with the power necessary to recover.  The Kingdom, however, is never about human conformation to religious structures and systems; it is about core transformation by the power of Christ's Spirit in our lives.  Once this has been accomplished we are then invited to be conformed to Christ Jesus Himself.  This is a glorious calling. Instead of making people replicas of each other, mere copy-cats with no originality; we are forged as individuals with limitless creativity of expression and personality after the Creative God who spoke the cosmos into existence.    

Kingdom evangelism as such  refuses to allow our world to conceive of Christ , the glorious King,  as an empty philosophical position or an antiquated historical figure with no relevance for a post-modern world.  Instead it presents the King, full of power and might, a God fully able to handle the most difficult of situations, able to heal the most sordid of  sicknesses, to deliver from the heaviest of oppressions, and forgive the darkest of deeds.   This is Jesus alive- touching, healing, breathing, cleaning, cleansing, liberating, forgiving, and transforming in the 21st century.  Let the scoffer and mocker of this current age resist His claims and balk at His person, but let them never think Him impotent and irrelevant.  He is not a relic from some past iconic religious monument.  He is alive and active in an ever accelerating movement.  He longs to reveal Himself and transform  lives.  

 

This isn't a religious endeavor; its a relational one.  This is heaven's invisible Kingdom colliding with the human soul. The King becomes more than cultural expression: attached to a foul-mouthed four-letter swear-word.  This is Jesus up close and personal with the inevitable result of a  wonderful and glorious transformation.  This is Jesus enthroned in the darkest of places- the human heart where the heavy weight of a guilty conscience is forever cleansed. Sin's chains and vices banished, permanently.  

So, the question boils down to this for me: if Kingdom Evangelism is so vitally important and so intricately necessary  in seeing people personally encounter Jesus in a tangible fashion, then why is it that so few believers actually participate in this endeavor?  

There are probably more reasons that I can enumerate, but for now lets talk about motivation for Kingdom Evangelism.  What is our motivation?  Is it so that we can laud ourselves for being such important people?  Or check off a spiritual to do-list?  Never. For sake of brevity, let me elaborate on three.  

1- The Value of Christ's Sacrifice:  Kingdom evangelism centers around Jesus not man.  We often consider ourselves first and Him second.   A special outreach, a mission, a program, a strategy, but all such thinking originates in us.  Such thinking will never do.  Our starting point must be Him.  The beautiful Son of God sacrificed everything to die a criminal's death.  Innocence ignored.  Justice spurned.  Jesus, fully God, fully man, hangs between two criminals on a tree, the death that merited a curse according to the Old Testament.  Why? To pay the price of admission into the Kingdom.  The Bible refers to this salvific act as the perfect sacrifice.  Heaven's Lamb slain to pay for sin.   Blood had to be spilled to cover humanity's treason against God.  

What kind of response does such love deserve?  What  compensation or reward is equal to  such a  sacrifice?  Only one:  coined by the Moravians hundreds of years ago.  "May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His sacrifice."  Hundreds of young men and women literally abandoned everything  to take the Gospel to a world that had never heard.  Have we truly understood the sacrifice of the Lamb of Glory?  Do we understand His mission by death?  Or see the promised reward prophetically pronounced in the scriptures?  He will receive worshippers from every tribe, tongue, people, and language.  We must start with the sacrifice in full view. 

2- The Potential Kingdom Impact of a life:  Each life has significance. Each life a heavenly purpose, a God given direction.  Each person has  influence and opportunity to impact a sin-cursed earth with the order of the Kingdom.  I often think of my friend Sach.  Many know the story.  A raging drunkard and criminal of a man when I first met him. By his own admission, his life was spent and his destiny determined, hell.  Then one day the King grabbed his heart.  He met Jesus up close and personal  The Kingdom invaded his life and nothing has ever been the same.  

He now has a beautiful wife and two wonderful children.  The transformation is so astonishing that hundreds of others who knew him before have followed suit in making a decision to enter this invisible Kingdom and surrender to this glorious King.  Today, he is an agent of hope, a broker of peace and life in a turbulent Kenya fraught with terrorism.  What if he hadn't entered the Kingdom?  What if the King had never been introduced to Him? The eternal destinies of hundreds and thousands have hinged on this one life.   It is no different for anyone else.  Do we see this?  Do we understand the potential Kingdom impact of just one life? 

3-The Role of the Believer: Many people would never darken the door of a church- too many fears, hurts, and past pain.  They have no interest in Christian movies, videos, or Television.  Before we lose heart let's not forget that the King is actively pursuing them.  How then can they experience the Kingdom?  Only one way- you and me.  Our lives must contain authentic Kingdom witness.  St. Francis of Assis once said, "preach the gospel at all times and if necessary use words."  I  disagree with his statement for  a Gospel without words is no Gospel at all.  Obviously, there must the corresponding actions and transformation of life that Assis highlighted.  Let us never be so deceived as to think that people are going to blindly stumble their way to the feet of Jesus.  They need friends who have built relationship to point them to the cross.  Are you available?  Is your life vibrant with the Kingdom? 

Kingdom Evangelism Part 1

Bailey and I were talking together about evangelism as we returned from ministering at a large church here in Antanarivo.  

 

She asked me about a message I shared 7 years ago at Oral Roberts University, long before we knew each other.  A mutual friend that was there that day had told her about it.  

It was my first time to ever speak at Oral Roberts University in front of several hundred college students.  I remember being so nervous that I could hardly stand up.  Yet, I also knew that God had given me a message for my generation.  A message and a passion for seeing other people's lives changed.  

Much of this message on evangelism developed from my time as a student at ORU. The founder of the school, Oral Roberts, believed that God had given him a mandate for combining academics and misssional living. He articulated this idea  in the school's founding mission statement that is displayed in the chapel: 

"Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased." 

During my four years at ORU I often reflected on this statement as I studied  the Word of God and sought His face.  I found myself mesmerized by the idea of living a missional lifestyle where the end result would be to see other people's lives transformed by the power of God.  The more I studied the life of Jesus the more I discovered that His purpose for coming to earth was to see  this same spiritual transformation in people.  The Gospel message, embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, wasn't simply a nice philosophy, doctrine, dogma, or creed.  It contained power. It contained authority. It demanded radical surrender. It confronted sin.  It brought God's presence and rule to earth. 

This multi-faceted idea can best be encapsulated with one word,  "Kingdom."  Jesus referred to it continually throughout his life.  He was obsessed with making this reality simple enough to grasp.  Multiple parables start with the same phrase:  "The Kingdom of God is like...."  Jesus ministry centered on the idea that the Kingdom of God was breaking into the realm of humanity through His life, death, and resurrection. 

 This powerful Kingdom had come to earth in the person of Jesus, the King. A faith-filled response to the King would establish the Kingdom deep in the invisible realm of the human heart.  From here the Kingdom works its way outward transforming every aspect of our lives: spiritual liberation, physical healing, emotional restoration, relational reparation, financial insight, and wisdom for every other area of life.  

I saw a direct parallel between Oral's mission statement and Christ's teaching on the Kingdom: 

Oral articulated several clear components of the  the Kingdom  of God in his commissioning statement. I believe each has clear principles as well as implications for our lives as Christ-followers. 

1) The capacity to hear the voice of God: The Kingdom of God restores our relationship with Christ so that we can now hear His voice clearly in every matter of life, ministry, and calling.  it is a relational Kingdom where we have communion restored to God. 

2) A transmission of the Light of God: The Light of God exposes   the evil work of satan's darkness and confronts humanity's blindness. Nothing is hidden.  Yet, it goes one step further than mere exposure;  It provides a remedy for depravity by offering an invitation for restoration and freedom.  We walk in the Light of His presence. 

3) An experience with the healing power of God:  Jesus isn't just a nice teacher, philosopher, or religious figure. He claimed to be the Son of God.  As such, He has the power and authority to demonstrate the veracity of His claims through signs and wonders.  These signs point to Jesus as the Son of God and make people wonder that God would take such a direct and personal role in humanity's salvation.  Healing verifies the King's power. 

4) A commission to communicate it globally: The Kingdom was never meant to be kept to ourselves; hidden away in some secret chamber of our heart, never to be shared with others.  Instead, it is a global message. An international commission.  A charge to share it  openly and freely with the nations of the world.  God has a heart for the planet not just one  specific group of people. 

5) A partnership with Christ in announcing it: The Kingdom isn't humanity's idea; it is God's.  Jesus is actively working through the person of the Holy Spirit to convict humanity of the reality of Christ's rule and reign.  This work is advanced through partnership between us and Him.  He speaks, we obey.  His light pushes back darkness as we go to share it with others.  The message is confirmed through the messengers by demonstrations of God's power.  We communicate it globally so the nations- every people, tribe, and tongue can experience Jesus' transformation personally.  

This is Good News! In fact, evangelism comes from the Greek word Evangel which means just that, "good news" or "really good news".  

So when we touch on the idea of Evangelism, we are really talking about sharing Jesus' love in such a way that others can take the first step into the Kingdom.  Evangelism then becomes a means to an end rather than a goal in and of itself.  I think this is where so many people get tied up. 

 They are trying to make something happen through evangelism without realizing that something has been happening and continues to happen- all around us, everyday.  Evangelism isn't an invitation to join a church, denomination, or ministry.  Rather, we are inviting people to get in on what God has already started through Jesus the King.