Stories of Faith - Episode 9

Culled from Workplace Grace: Becoming a Spiritual Influence at Work

“Dave and I hit it off during a business negotiation. Over time, Barb (my wife) and I became close friends with Dave and his wife, Ann. We spent time together carpooling kids and watching soccer games. Barb and Ann led our daughters’ scout troop.

Dave and Ann were not believers, and they had encountered more than a few aggressive, hypocritical Christians, which made Dave wary. But the more we got to know each other, the more my faith seemed to intrigue him.

After a year, over lunch I told Dave how I came to believe in Christ. He listened with interest and asked questions. Eventually, he and Ann accepted an invitation to attend a Bible study at our home. Ann told Barb that she was interested in a personal relationship with Jesus, but she didn’t want to take this step without Dave.

For months, I communicated the gospel to Dave in every way I knew. Yet in spite of all my efforts, Dave’s heart seemed impenetrable, and I became discouraged.

I met with my spiritual mentor and recounted my frustration. In response, he asked me two tough questions.

“Wait, do you really care about these people, or are they just a project?”

Embarrassed, I had to admit that persuading them to make a decision to trust Jesus had become more important than being a friend.

“How often do you and Barb pray for Dave and Ann?”

I hung my head. “I really don’t pray for them very much at all.”

He reminded me that Dave and Ann faced the toughest, most important decision of their lives – and that praying for them would do more than all our efforts. So Barb and I began to pray every day for Dave and Ann as we continued to cultivate, plant, and love them.

Almost seven years after our friendship began, God answered our prayers. Dave and Ann both decided to become followers of Jesus.” – Walt Larimore

Stories of Faith - Episode 8

An excerpt from Messenger: Sydney Elton and the making of Pentecostalism in Nigeria

After serving as a missionary for 16 years in Ilesa with The Apostolic Church mission to Nigeria, Pa S.G Elton was led by God to leave. In his words, “I left them because God said, ‘I have got a bigger ministry for you.’ The prophetic word as I left was: ‘Don’t you deter or delay my servant Elton; I have got a bigger job for him and it will cover the whole country and beyond.”

The decision to leave the Apostolic Church mission while remaining in Nigeria was a major step of faith for the Eltons. Telling the story many years later, no doubt with some nostalgia, Elton did not in any way attempt to downplay the precariousness of the situation - God had to come through for them or they were going to become the laughingstock of many who thought they had made a foolish decision by leaving the mission: “I remember the day, more than thirty years ago, when my wife and I submitted our resignation from any salaried job,” he began. “We told our leaders who were visiting us from England that we would now no longer require any salary. We had finished. We had no income in this country. We had no farm. We had no food in our stock room. But we knew God was leading us.”

In a very rare display of emotion, which further reveals how deeply he felt about the situation, he talked about how two leaders from England (Rosser and Wellings) “who had just left me, who had accepted my resignation and walked away, drove away after being my guests and eating my food in my house; they drove away, leaving me, knowing that I had no source of income, and they hoped that I would soon after pack up and leave Nigeria.” “For months no money came in,” recalled Elton, “We came down to our last five pounds. I had no farm, I had no business. My wife prayed, ‘Lord if we have done the right thing, today in the post there will be a letter from someone in England who is sending us money who has never sent us money before.’ One can therefore imagine their excitement when they went to the post office “and in the post box was a letter from a person we had never heard of before.” Enclosed in the letter was a cheque and a part of the letter read, “We feel that you are possibly facing a crisis and are in need, so we are enclosing a cheque which we hope will meet your need whatever it is.” Elton remarked, “Now, they didn’t know what I was facing, and they didn’t know what I was going to go through.” The money was substantial enough to buy him “a car for transport as an independent person.” As he a later said, “I moved out in faith, believing God would provide and He did so.” And indeed, leaving the Apostolic Church released Elton into his most fruitful years of ministry in Nigeria.

Stories of Faith - Episode 7

Source: www.opendoorsusa.org

Brother Andrew started with bold beginnings by smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe in 1955, started Open Doors to serve the persecuted church and wrote God's Smuggler, one of the best-selling Christian books of all time.

God led Andrew into a lifetime of adventures, like the one he describes below.

During the height of the Cold War, Communist countries were keeping a tight control on their borders, but God had called Brother Andrew to help the Christians behind that Iron Curtain. “When I pulled up to the checkpoint on the other side of the Danube, I said to myself, “Well, I’m in luck. Only half a dozen cars. This Romanian border crossing should go swiftly.”

“But when it took forty minutes to inspect the first car, I began to worry…literally everything that family was carrying had to be taken out and spread on the ground.

“Every car in line was put through the same routine. The fourth inspection lasted well over an hour. The guards took the driver inside and kept him there while they removed hub caps, took his engine apart, removed seats.

“Dear Lord,” I said, as at last there was just one car ahead of me, “what am I going to do? Any serious inspection will show up these Romanian Bibles right away.

“Lord,” I went on, “I know that no amount of cleverness on my part can get me through this border search. Dare I ask for a miracle? Let me take some of the Bibles out and leave them in the open where they will be seen. Then, Lord I cannot possibly be depending on my own stratagems, can I? I will be depending utterly upon You.”

“While the last car was going through its chilling inspection, I managed to take several Bibles from their hiding places and pile them on the seat beside me.

“It was my turn. I put the little VW in low gear, inched up to the officer standing at the left side of the road, handed him my papers, and started to get out. But his knee was against the door, holding it closed. He looked at my photograph in the passport, scribbled something down, shoved the papers back under my nose, and abruptly waved me on.

“Surely thirty seconds had not passed. I started the engine and inched forward. Was I supposed to pull over, out of the way where the car could be taken apart? Was I … surely I wasn’t…I coasted forward, my foot poised above the brake. Nothing happened. I looked out the rear mirror. The guard was waving the next car to a stop, indicating to the driver that he had to get out. On I drove a few more yards. The guard was having the driver behind me open the hood of his car. And then I was too far away to doubt that indeed I had made it through that incredible checkpoint in the space of thirty seconds.

“My heart was racing. Not with the excitement of the crossing, but with the excitement of having caught such a spectacular glimpse of God at work!”

Stories of Faith - Episode 6

Culled from The God Chasers by Tommy Tenney

A man named Edward Miller wrote a book entitled, Cry for Me Argentina, in which he describes one of the origins of the great revival in Argentina that was destined to impact South America and ultimately the entire world. Dr. Miller is now in his eighties, but more than four decades earlier he was one of but a few Pentecostal or Full Gospel missionaries working in Argentina. He tells the story of how 50 students in his Argentine Bible Institute began to pray and had an angelic visitation. They had to suspend classes because of the heavy prayer burden they had for the nation of Argentina. Day after day for 49 days in a row, these students prayed and interceded for Argentina in this Bible school. Argentina was a spiritual wasteland at the time, as far as Dr. Miller knew. He said he only knew of 600 Spirit-filled believers in the entire nation during those years under the government of Juan Peron in the 1950’s.

Dr. Miller told me that he had never seen people weep so hard and so long in prayer. It had to be supernatural in origin and purpose. We don’t know much about interceding today. Much of us think it consists of screaming against evil spirits, but that’s not what needs to happen. We simply need for “Father” to show up.

Dr. Miller told me that those students wept and cried day after day. He mentioned that one young man leaned his head against a concrete brick wall and wept until, after four hours, a trail of tears had run down the porous wall. After six hours had passed, he was standing in a puddle of his own tears! These young intercessors wept day after day, and he said it could only be described as unearthly weeping. These students weren’t simply repenting for something they had done. They had been moved by the Spirit into something called “vicarious repentance,” in which they began to repent for what happened through others in their city, their region, and in the country of Argentina.

Dr. Miller said that on the fiftieth day of continuous intercession and weeping before the Lord, a prophetic word came forth that declared, “Weep no more, for the Lion of the tribe of Judah hath prevailed over the prince of Argentina.” Eighteen months later, Argentines were flocking to evangelistic healing services in soccer stadiums that seated 180,000 people, and even the largest stadiums in the nation weren’t big enough to contain the crowds.

Stories of Faith - Episode 5

An extract from The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson

I think God saw to it, during those first long months of our work at the center, that we never found a cook. We tried every system under the sun to keep ourselves feed, but the one that never worked out was to have a full-time cook usurp the pantry. A kitchen is always the heart of the home anyhow, and a real cook has a way of chasing you out so that she can get her work done. Thus you are chased from the heart of the home. 

Not so with the center, because we could never come up with a cook. The result was a wonderful chaotic, happy mess. And to understand it you must first understand where the food itself comes from. Like everything else at the center, we get our food by praying for it. This is one of the projects in which our living-in gang members take a most active role. Each day we pray for food, and the way it comes in is a vivid lesson to boys just learning about faith. People send in a ham, potato chips, fruit, vegetables. Or they send in money not earmarked for a special purpose. 

One day, however, the kids awoke and washed and went down to breakfast and there wasn’t anything on the table. By the time I arrived in the office from home, the center was buzzing with problem of no food. “Your prayers didn’t work I guess this time, did they, Dave?” said one of the gang boys. “Lord,” I said to myself, “teach us a lesson in faith that will live with us forever.” And aloud, I said, “Let’s make an experiment. Here we are without food for the day, right?” the boy nodded his head. “And the bible says, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ right?” “If you say so.”

I laughed and glanced at Reverend Culver, who shrugged and nodded his head as if to say he’d teach the boy the Lord’s Prayer. “So why don’t we all go into the chapel right now and pray that we either get the food for this day or money to buy the food.” “Before lunch, Dave?” said the boy. “I am getting hungry.” “Before launch. How many people do we have here?” I glanced around. The number in the Center was constantly shifting. On that day we could count twenty-five people who would need to be fed. I figured it would cost between thirty and thirty-five dollars to feed that number of people dinner and supper. Others agreed. So we went into the chapel, closed the door, and we all began to pray. 

“While you are it, Lord,” said the little gang boy, “would You please see to it that we don’t go hungry for the rest of the summer?” I looked over, mildly annoyed. It seemed to me that this was stretching things a bit. But I had to admit that it would leave us freer to work at other kind of prayer if didn’t have to pay so much attention to such basic needs as food. 

One of the things about our prayer at the center is that it needs to be a bit loud. We do pray aloud often, and there is a wonderful freedom in the Spirit that sometimes frightens people who hear if for the first time. They may think it is uncouth, without realizing that we are just expressing our true feelings before God. If we feel concerned, we say so not only with our lips but with the tone of our prayer. And this morning we were quite concerned. While we were saying so in tones that left no doubt how we felt, a stranger walked in. we didn’t even hear when she knocked on the door of the chapel. When finally she opened the door and saw all the twenty-five of us on our knees, thanking God for the food He has given us in the past and thanking Him too for the food He would be giving us, somehow, in this emergency, I’m sure she was sorry she had come. 

“Excuse me,” she said, softly. “Excuse me! She said, louder. I was near her and Immediately got up. The rest of the workers and gang members kept right on with their prayer. This lady was a little hesitant about coming to the point of her visit. She kept asking questions, but I noticed that the more she found out about what we were doing, the more enthusiastic she became. Finally, she asked about the prayer session. I told her about walking in that morning to discover that we had no food in the house and about the purpose of the prayer. “When did you begin this prayer?” the lady asked. I figured up. “About an hour ago.” “Well,” she said, “that is truly extraordinary. I knew very little about your work. But an hour ago I received a sudden impulse to do something that is completely out of character for me. I felt that I was supposed to empty my piggy bank and bring the contents to you. Now I know the reason.” She reached into her purse. 

She placed a white envelope on my desk and with an expression of hope that it would be of some help, she thanked me for showing her our Center, and left. The envelope contained just over thirty-two dollars, exactly the amount we needed to feed ourselves for the rest of the day. 

And do you know, that teen-ager’s prayer was answered too! For the rest of the summer, we never again wanted for food.

Stories of Faith - Episode 4

Narrated by D.E. Winget, a University of Texas Astronomer. Originally published on www.cru.org

I was raised in the church. On Sundays, we went to church in the morning and evening. We went to Wednesday night prayer meetings, too.

By the time I went to high school I began to resent going to church so often. Reluctantly, my loving and devout parents stopped insisting that I go. I began to drift away from the church. I only continued to drift further and further away from my “Christian” upbringing.

When I was 16, I started at the University of Illinois. As a very young child I knew I wanted to be a scientist, and specifically an astronomer. So when I began attending college, I chose to pursue science academically and I looked here for the answers to the mysteries of life.

When I studied Anthropology at the university I began to get a broader perspective on world religions. I began to feel the only reason I was a “Christian” was because of an accident of my birth. If I had been born in Japan or China or anywhere else – I thought – whatever my family there would have believed would have been I would believed, too.

I began questioning my understanding of “Christianity” and looked at all the religions of the world. They all claimed to be correct and I thought, “Christianity can’t be the only truth. Or maybe it’s not true at all... All these different ‘truths’ that people hold are contradictory to each other, so this can’t be the one truth.” 

Over time, I eventually landed at atheism.

I started out arguing and then debating. I studied the Bible quite a bit as a child. I knew Scripture, and that made me dangerous in debates. I had a list of 50 examples where I thought the Bible was contradictory that I would use. I would often bring these up and considered myself a “fire-breathing atheist.”

I needed a moral compass

My wife and I had 5 kids. She was a cultural Christian and when I challenged her faith, she became an atheist.

But sometime later, it became obvious to us that our two oldest boys didn’t have any real spiritual or moral compass. My wife and I spent a great deal of time talking and worrying about this.

Neither of us gained a spiritual or moral compass at school – that happened by going to church in our childhood. Because of this, we decided that we needed to find some religion of the world and use that to guide our kids and get involved. We didn’t want to just dump them and drive off. We realized, though, that we would have to find some place to get connected.

In our minds, this religion had to at least be plausible. So once again, my wife and I both started investigating different world religions. With my background in anthropology, what we were looking for was a religion that wasn’t archeologically falsifiable.

In the midst of this search, we began looking for places for our youngest son to go to daycare. The only one we found that would take him was a Christian church. When we ran into the pastor, we realized that this is someone we could talk to about Christianity.

He began to meet us for coffee, and each time we met he encouraged us to go a step further. He recommended a few books to read: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. What was interesting to me in Lee Strobel’s book was that he dealt with archeological and extra biblical evidence for Christ.

One by one, all the objections I raised debating as an atheist for many years fell away.

“Are you a Christian?”

We went to Nashville over spring break to visit one of my former graduate students and discuss our scientific collaboration. I was caught off-guard when he noticed books by C. S. Lewis and Philip Yancey in my car and suddenly asked me in an uncharacteristically aggressive tone, “Are you a Christian?”

I steeled myself for an intellectual attack, the kind I had dealt out so many times myself, but I found myself compelled by the example of Peter to say, “Yes, I am a Christian.” He was shocked I was a Christian, but the attack never came. He, too, was a Christian.

I was more shocked than him, however, because I had reached a decision. I knew that I believed in Christ as my Savior.

In that instant, I discovered that it took more faith to disbelieve than to believe.

If I were to deny Christ, I might as well argue that gravity didn’t exist, or that he Earth was flat. But Jesus did exist – and He still does. To place my faith in Him used to seem like the dumbest thing I could do, but now I know the truth – I would be a fool not to.

Stories of Faith - Episode 3

Adapted from 'Tommie Titcombe and the Nigerian Witchdoctors' originally published on chrisfieldblog.com

Tommie Titcombe was small in stature physically, but spiritually he was a giant. He was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1881. It was at the age of 21 that he and some friends took shelter from a rainstorm by entering a Salvation Army hall. A meeting was in progress. Conviction of sin entered … and a few days later Tommie “was saved for time and eternity,” to use his own words.

Four years later – and now living in Canada – Tommie heard an S.I.M. missionary recently returned from Nigeria. He soon felt called of God to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who had never heard the good news of salvation. Twice he applied to the Sudan Interior Mission, and twice he was refused. He told the director, Rowland Bingham, that he was going to Africa anyway. Upon being asked what board he was going under, Tommie replied, “I don’t know, Mr. Bingham. It may be some old woman’s wash board, but I’m going to Africa!” Seeing Tommie’s determination, Mr. Bingham soon afterwards relented and accepted him into SIM. By 1908 he was in the ‘dark continent’, ‘the white man’s grave’ as it was then known, ready to preach the gospel. In those days most SIM missionaries either died early or returned as invalids from the field.

He became a pioneer missionary to the Yagba people of Nigeria, West Africa.… and the obstacles and blessings that came his way are recounted in Tread Upon the Lion, by S. de la Haye. Another volume, A Flame of Fire, by J. Hunter, tells of the birth of S.I.M. and the early men and women of God who ventured forth …

The story is told of Tommie Titcombe surrounded by “witch doctors gesticulating, posturing and gyrating, and the mob shrieking and roaring.” In his words, “I pushed my way to the centre of the ring,” wrote Tommie, “and saw to my utter astonishment a woman rigid in the air. Her feet were some two feet off the earth and as she came toward me gravitation had no power over her …All I said was: ‘Lord, Thou hast said in Thy Name we shall cast out demons. Lord, deliver this girl’. Immediately she dropped to the ground. I picked her up and carried her into the first hut …”

The witch doctors and sorcerers of the Yagba people threatened physical harm and death to Tommie Titcombe if he entered their villages. The villagers of Ponyan strung a rope of fresh human heads across the path to scare him away from their area. Tommie fasted and prayed and entered that village and many others.

One of his earliest converts and the first man to be baptised (in 1914), Malachi, son of a witchdoctor, lived to over 100 years and did much to build on the foundation which Tommy established.

Before his death he had the joy of seeing thousands of Yagba people in Nigeria turn to Christ.

Raymond J. Davis, S.I.M. General Director, tells of visiting Tommie just prior to his death. “He grasped my hand. ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘I’ve told you many times that long ago God gave me Psalm 91 as my special portion of Scripture. There are 33 promises in that Psalm and God has fulfilled every one of them for me, most of them many times’. He lay back on his pillow … opened his eyes a bit and said, ‘I’ll see you up there …’.”

Tommie Titcombe died in Toronto, Canada, on 29 May, 1968.

His story is a blood-stirring pioneer thriller. More than that, it is the record of how God used a very ordinary man to break into an animistic society and start a movement that produced a large and healthy church. Tommie Titcombe’s spiritual insights and personal courage have made his name a legend among the many Christians of Yagbaland. His story also provides us with an extremely relevant case history of sound missionary principles at work.