THE AUTHORITY OF HIS CHRIST

Revelation 12:10,11. “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

They warned us not to come to their village. They wanted no preaching in their village. They warned us to stay away. If we insisted on coming into their village somebody was going to get hurt. The Indian brothers told us they were going to go anyway. We Americans didn’t have to go. It could be dangerous. There would be many other opportunities to preach in safer circumstances.

I told them I was going with them. No, I didn’t want to get hurt. No, I didn’t want to be a martyr. But I had always preached that God could just as well take care of you in a dangerous missions situation as he could in your living room. And if it was God’s plan for you to die you would die just as easily in bed as in an Indian village in Andhra Pradesh. And I didn’t want to stay behind just to be back at the compound hearing bad news the next morning.

It was dark when we got there. The spiritual atmosphere was physically oppressive. The Indian brothers played instruments and sang for about half an hour. My partner got up to preach first. He struggled. I could sense it. He was much more experienced than I. What was I going to do? If he had a hard time in this village, what would I do? I had little choice. I prayed. When it came time for me to preach my legs felt weak. I stood at the podium and prayed aloud. When I looked up I could sense the Holy Spirit filling me. I noticed that all the people in the audience were women. All the men of the village stood around the outside in the dark. I could just barely see them. The Holy Spirit told me to challenge the men, so I did. I called them out of the darkness and into the light. I asked them what they were afraid of and pointed out that their women weren’t afraid. “Come out of the shadows, so I can see you,” I called. One of my friends was standing in the back with a questioning look on his face making the throat slashing sign at me. He wanted me to stop it but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t stop. The Lord was filling my mind with thoughts and my mouth with words almost faster than I could think. My prepared message lay folded in the back of my Bible. Darkness and light became my theme. God had a message for those people in that village in South India that night. We saw God at work. But that was just the beginning…