I started ministry Monday morning with a prayer “God, please lead me to the people who really need to hear about You today.”
Now this isn’t an unusual prayer for me to begin ministry with, in fact I pray something similar every day, but this Monday it was particularly heart felt. It was the first day of our fourth week of ministry here in Ghana. Ministry was beginning to feel rather monotonous. We go out, we tell people about Jesus (who they probably already know), we pray for them, and we invite them to church (though they probably won’t show up, because they probably already have a Church). It’s rather tiring. Of course, through doing this, lives have been changed, people have given their hearts to Christ, and much needed encouragement has been given. Despite having seen these things, I’d begun to lose site of the fact that what we were doing was furthering the Kingdom of God. Then on Monday, God reminded me.
We were walking down the street, ready to find someone to talk to about Jesus, when a man came up to Charles, our translator, and started talking to him in Trw (the local language here). After a few minutes Charles told us we were going to this man’s house to talk to him. He was weighed down by something and really needed some encouragement, so we were to share whatever the Holy Spirit put on our hearts.
Thus we found ourselves sitting on this man’s front porch. We learned that his name was George, and he was a Catholic with a problem. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to go to heaven because he worked a government job. Every time he read his Bible he saw that Jesus called many men who worked for the government to leave their jobs in order to follow him. George didn’t see how he could leave his job, he needed his paycheck to live, but he didn’t see how he could be following Jesus if he kept his job. He just didn’t know what to do. Well, the Holy Spirit knew what to do!
My teammate Sarah Lou felt led to share the gospel with this man, even though he thought he knew it. She emphasized the fact that Jesus’s death on the cross covers everything! We don’t need to do anything special to get into heaven, Jesus already took care of it.
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in rightousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”
~Romans 10:9&10
That’s it. We just need to believe that Jesus is who He says He is. The Bible doesn’t say “If you believe and quit your job” or “If you believe and do everything perfectly every time”. No, the Bible just tell us to “believe and confess” and we are saved.
After Sara Lou had driven that point home, I felt prompted to speak. I remembered the story of Cornelius told in Acts 10 ans shared it with George. Cornelius worked for the Roman Government. He and his whole family became Christians, and no where in the Bible does it say that Cornelius then had to quit his job to be saved. Nope, he was saved the moment he believed in Jesus, and he still kept his job.
George seemed incredibly encouraged by what we had shared with him, and asked us to keep praying for him. So, we left him with the phone number of someone at our partnering Church who would be happy to keep talking to him, praying with him, and sharing truth from the Bible with him, and the promise to remember him in our prayers.
As we walked to the van I couldn’t stop thanking God for the morning, for bringing us to George when he really needed some reminders from the Bible. I didn’t think the day could get any better, but you can’t limit God.
Afternoon ministry time came around and once again I prayed that God would take us to the people who really needed to hear about him that day. And once again God answered.
We set out and quickly came across two women carrying a ton of grocery sacks. Apparently those were heavy sacks as the women had to set them down to rest every so often. Seeing this, my team approached and asked if we could help them. They agreed, let us each pick up a bag, and lead us to their home. Here we set down the groceries and they pulled out chairs for us to sit down so we could talk.
After seating us, one of the women explained that she was Muslim and it was prayer time. So, she needed to go inside and pray, but she would rejoin us in a bit.
Meanwhile, we started talking to the other woman. We explained we were missionaries from the U.S. and had traveled to Ghana to talk to people about Jesus. She then told us she was a Christian. She’d converted from Islam as a young woman when she’s heard a man preaching the gospel in the street. I loved getting to hear that testimony! She’d recently moved in with her Muslim family members, and could now only go to church on Sundays, not every day as she used to. Because of this she was very happy to get to talk to other believers and we were excited to encourage her in her faith.
As we were talking, the other woman came out of the house and sat down to talk with us as well. She reminded us again that she was a Muslim, so we asked her about some of the differences between Christianity and Islam. She explained to us that Muslims spend a month every year fasting, praying, and helping the poor in order to make up for any sins they’ve committed throughout the year.
My teammate, Katy, then shared her testimony with this woman. She explained how for years every time she did something wrong she worried that God wouldn’t love her. She felt had to make up for it by doing good things, but that’s not what God desires. He wants us to be free from the bondage sin has on our lives. So He sent his son, Jesus, down to Earth to die on the cross for us. Jesus is both the son of God and God himself, so he was perfect and his death paid the price for all of our sins. When we do good things it honors him, but it doesn’t free us from sin. Only Jesus can free us.
The woman listened intently to Katy’s story, and let us pray for her before we left. Now I’m praying that God will keep Jesus on her mind and she will turn to him. I know that God can answer that prayer, after all, he answered my prayer that morning. He brought the people to us that we needed to talk to, people who needed to be encouraged and hear about the love of God.
