Today our team, Team Thriven, set out on an adventure to find a temple that was on a nearby mountain top that we had seen. We first went out to lunch at one of our favorite fried rice places and then headed out towards the mountain. Along the way we met a young man named Robert and he was very intrigued with us and what we were doing, so he decided he wanted to tag along with us. Robert ended up leading our team through the city and eventually all the way up the mountain to a Buddhist temple. All along the way through the town and the entire way up the mountain we were praying for the people’s houses we were passing and that they would come to know the one true God and how much He loves them and how crazy He is for them! It took us a little while, but finally we twisted and turned our way up to the top of this mountain to a temple and there was one little lady inside, and thankfully since we had Robert with us, we were able to go inside this temple complex. We spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes wandering around this complex and just covering it with prayer. I kind of expected to see monks or something, but then realized that it was simply a temple and not a monastery. I thought it was quite a ways to go all the way up the mountain to go to your temple, and so I prayed.
I prayed similar prayers that I did over the houses on the way up to the temple, and then also that the undeniable, and often untapped power of God and the name of Jesus Christ would be manifested there and that people that were coming to this temple would have an encounter with the one true God that loved them and wanted more for them than the temple worshipping life that they were currently living. We are going to meet up with Robert again to go with him to another temple on the other side of the mountain and pray over it. We could see the other temple from the temple that we were at, but we had to go down the mountain and then back up another way in order to get to it.
The power of the name of Christ is being spread into temples even in northeastern China!! We are merely planting seeds thus far, we have not been a part of any reaping or conversions, but we are praying for people daily to see the truth of Jesus. Robert is a Muslim, so we are definitely going to be praying for him as he comes on our adventures with us that he would see something different about us and wonder! I think we are going to teach him some more English as well, he speaks English, but he doesn’t know it all that well and he could definitely learn more, so that could be a way for us to reach out to him as well.
