Day 1 in England: The Power of Life and Death
It was amazing to be back and see how the church has grown over the years. Three years ago they were meeting at the top floor of a coffee house and renting out a school auditorium. By the next year they had outgrown the coffee house and continued meeting in the auditorium. This year they are in their own building. It's called Hope Centre. The place was filled with children and families today.
Hope Church is our second home. We love it here. What an honor it has been to see it develop and to see the members take ownership of it and become leaders. Years later we get to see the fruit of their faithfulness. We could even see the future of the church in the children and youth's servanthood and hunger for Jesus.
While at Hope Church, God brought my devos to mind. A few days ago I started reading about the plagues in Exodus. In order to show His hand in the Israelites' request to be set free, God sent Aaron and Moses to perform signs for Pharaoh: He turned Aaron's staff into a snake and brought on plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the firstborn (chapters 7-11). Pharaoh had summoned sorcerers and magicians to mimic the signs, but they only did the first three. I wondered specifically what it was about the plague of gnats that made it so that the magicians and sorcerers could not replicate it. It took me a while of reflecting on this question, but I believe God showed me the link.
The Bible says that the dust of the ground became gnats (Exodus 8:16-17). Dust is partially made up of dead skin. That fact stuck out to me as I was thinking and I felt God tell me that only He has the power to bring the dead to life. We see it happen in the Gospels when Jesus raises Lazarus (John 11:38-44), a ruler's daughter (Matthew 9:18-26), and a widow's son (Luke 7:11-17) from the dead and is himself raised from the grave after three days (Luke 24:36-49).
As I pondered what I read I felt God tell me that we can do acts that mirror God's work but only He has the power to bring to life what is dead. If we are working apart from the Spirit, then our work will not bring about true life (an eternal life with God in Heaven). It is only when God moves that we can see the dead live again.
I often plan out all these great ways that I want to serve God: writing books, preaching, etc. Sometimes I can fall into the trap of creating a hierarchy of my own acts of ministry, but that's not Biblical. God can bring life from death through a sermon and novels, but He can also do so in something as simple as a brief story, a touch, or an act of service. I could see it in the fruit of the leaders who've helped develop the body of Hope Church through their faithful service to the various ministries (children's, coffee house, greeting, etc).
God reaffirmed it in my own ministry today. I got to see a woman I love dearly at the church. I met her two years ago (the last time I was on a mission trip to England). She told me that her best friend was coming and was excited to meet me because she'd shared with her that after hearing me preach last year she believed she was loved by God. And now the woman was sharing that same message with her best friend. I was so in awe of how God used my sermon last year to bring this truth to life for her and continued to bear fruit by her sharing what she now understood. That is the legacy I was able to leave behind last time (though, by no means do I take full credit for this because I know God is the one that kept working it out in her heart and that others reaffirmed it).
I mentioned earlier that today I was able to share my testimony with the church. Well, afterward the woman's friend came up to me and told me how much my experience had resonated with her. Again, I saw the message God spoke to me in my devos come to life. I didn't have to preach a sermon. I was just faithful to the work God brought my way (this time it was in the form of a 5 minute testimony) and let the Spirit do His work through that.
My husband constantly reminds me that there is no work greater than another when it comes to ministry. God reminded me of that. As long as the Spirit is in what we are doing God can bring to life what is dead. Don't get so caught up in the act that you forget to invite God into what you are doing. Allow Him to show you how He wants to move. No matter what the size of what you do is, the magnitude of the Spirit's influence and power never changes.
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