The oxen from hell; that’s what my interpreter called him. I have to back up and explain to get the full story, but before I do I must relate something was shared from our group meeting this morning.
It seems that at one of our sights there was a major tragedy that occurred 2 nights ago. A young girl attending the meetings, about 10-12 yrs old, had come up for prayer afterward. On her walk home, she stepped on a cobra lying in the road. The cobra bit her 5 or more times on her legs. She was rushed to the hospital but she died last night. What a blow to the village and the workers. We all understand that this is a battle zone of good an evil. The enemy will not give up his ground easily. All of us were saddened and a sense of the reality and enormity of what we are doing and the potential dangers that surround us.
Cobra snake bites are common in India. If the snake bites you near your neck or spits its venom in your eyes, death is not only certain, but swift. You can be saved from death by quick action of applying milk to the eyes or a charcoal compress to the bite wound, but many in the villages don’t know these things and death is frequent.
Now back to my demon ox story. We arrived at the village a little early yesterday so my interpreter took me on a walk through the village. We stopped at several homes and went in and sat on plastic lawn chairs. They are the major furniture of the poor. Everywhere you go you see them being used. I sit there and smile while the villagers stare at me and wonder why I would come to their village let alone sit in their homes. They try to give me food or drink and are greatly disappointed when my interpreter tells them that it will make me sick. One woman tried to get me to come to her house and eat every day since I’ve been here. Yesterday, she gave me a prepackaged carton of crackers. These people will steal your heart.
While in one of the houses, the matriarch asked if I would go and cast a demon out of a piece of property that they wanted to build a house on for one of her kids. She claimed a man committed suicide by hanging himself there 20 years ago and the property is possessed. She knows this because several of her cows have died on the same piece of land over the years (think about that for a moment and realize she is demonstrating a common logical error). I agreed to pray for her and the land and we started to walk to the back of her house.
Here is where it gets even better. An ox, the one you see in the picture, is tied up along the path and he sees me. Now you need to put in context that cows and oxen are everywhere roaming free in India, even in the major cities. When I walk around the streets near the hotel after 10:00 p.m. there are more cows on the streets than people and they are roaming around eating in the trash heaps. They are docile and totally oblivious to traffic and people. You can walk right up to them from any direction and they will ignore you.
Not this ox! His eyes glared at me and he became agitated. They stopped me from going any farther and they had me go another route because this ox had a serious issue with me. I was then told by my interpreter that he was dedicated to the local Hindu temple and many people in the village felt he was possessed by a demon. I had to get passed a demon possessed cow to get to a demon possessed piece of property. I don’t know if I could make this stuff up. This is my new reality folks.
We visited several homes and I talked (or sat and smiled while my interpreter talked). We always prayed for the home when we left. Several homes we visited have people I had never seen at the meetings, but they were listening to the meetings via the large booming speakers we were using outside. Untold numbers in the village are hearing the preaching, yet fearing to come out to visibly take a stand. One such home, the woman wanted to be baptized and accept Christ yet she had never stepped into any of the meeting areas.
This demonstrates to me that God uses ways and means that we know nothing of. If I were to get disappointed due to the lack of attendance, I would be missing the bigger picture of what God is doing all around. I wonder how that relates to our work at the teen center. Could God be doing things that we don’t see with our meager offerings there?
We spent so much time with visiting and the people really didn’t want us to leave that we lost track of time. It was 7:00 p.m. and we realized we should be starting the meeting and I hadn’t set up any of my equipment. We showed up in the barnyard and everything was ready including the chairs and they were full to overflowing. When we showed up the kids were patiently waiting and they shouted out with approval. Now I know just how the Beatles felt when they landed in the U.S.
The interpreter started singing with the kids while I quickly stet up. As soon as possible I got the slide show running of the pictures of the people in the village. This is a real crowd pleaser. It doesn’t matter how many times they see their face up on the wall it gives them great pleasure. They’ve seen it enough to know when their picture is coming up next.
One note of interest that I must add before I get to the meat of this blog. You know that I’m basically preaching in a barnyard. Well, the animals aren’t in fenced areas or tied up so at any time you may have a visitor. Last night while I was preaching, a baby goat (kid) started to go around and through my legs foraging. No one in the audience was distracted by this or even noticed it except me! I guess I should be glad it wasn’t a snake. After this experience, it will take an earthquake to distract me when I’m preaching back home.
After I finished with the prepared sermon, I transitioned into a different topic. Hindu’s don’t pray like we understand prayer. They believe only holy men can pray to the deity and the regular people are unworthy for their prayers to be offered up by them. Part of the temple worship ritual is to serve as a mediation of prayers through the priest, idol or icon, but for a common person to talk directly to God is foreign to them. Unfortunately, many Christians don’t have a much better idea of what prayer is and how it works than a Hindu.
I want to share with you a condensed version of what I told them:
“I am honored and humbled when you come to me seeking prayers, but I have no power in myself. My God is all powerful and answers to prayer come from Him and not from anything I possess. I am no better or different from you. In God’s eyes I am equal to you as a child of God. You are my brothers and sisters. I may look different from you and my skin color is lighter, I speak a different language and have different customs. I live in a distant land but in the eyes of God I am no different than you (this was spoken to untouchables who are deemed the lowest of the low in Indian society).”
“I want to teach you tonight that you have the ability and authority to speak directly to God as a child would to their parents. He will listen to you and respond. You don’t have to go on pilgrimages, grovel on the ground or beat yourself. All you have to do is to ask Him. He may not always say yes, just as a good parent doesn’t always say yes to all the requests from their children. If your child asks you to give them a sharp knife to play with, most parents will say no because the parent knows that the knife will hurt the child. We don’t say no because we want to punish our children, we say no to protect them. God is no different with His earthly children.”
“Tonight I want to teach you the prayer that Jesus taught His followers to pray as a model.” (I then went through the Lord’s Prayer and explained it). “There is one prayer that God wants all people to pray and He will never say no to, that prayer is to ask Jesus to come into your lives and live in your heart. Will you pray that prayer with me tonight?”
How about you, readers of this blog? Are you praying for Jesus to come into your life today? If not, what is stopping you? There is nothing on this earth worth the cost of eternity. My evangelistic heart is burning for the harvest. We are going to see a harvest here because the Creator God of the Universe is doing everything within the legal boundaries of rightness to save His children. They only thing left is for us to accept such a great gift!
Pray for us and our protection here, pray for the family and village of the girl who died of the snake bite, pray that God will be glorified through the mighty work He is doing in India and around the world, pray for workers for the harvest is ripe. Pray that His kingdom will come.
Pastor Kevin
It seems that at one of our sights there was a major tragedy that occurred 2 nights ago. A young girl attending the meetings, about 10-12 yrs old, had come up for prayer afterward. On her walk home, she stepped on a cobra lying in the road. The cobra bit her 5 or more times on her legs. She was rushed to the hospital but she died last night. What a blow to the village and the workers. We all understand that this is a battle zone of good an evil. The enemy will not give up his ground easily. All of us were saddened and a sense of the reality and enormity of what we are doing and the potential dangers that surround us.
Cobra snake bites are common in India. If the snake bites you near your neck or spits its venom in your eyes, death is not only certain, but swift. You can be saved from death by quick action of applying milk to the eyes or a charcoal compress to the bite wound, but many in the villages don’t know these things and death is frequent.
Now back to my demon ox story. We arrived at the village a little early yesterday so my interpreter took me on a walk through the village. We stopped at several homes and went in and sat on plastic lawn chairs. They are the major furniture of the poor. Everywhere you go you see them being used. I sit there and smile while the villagers stare at me and wonder why I would come to their village let alone sit in their homes. They try to give me food or drink and are greatly disappointed when my interpreter tells them that it will make me sick. One woman tried to get me to come to her house and eat every day since I’ve been here. Yesterday, she gave me a prepackaged carton of crackers. These people will steal your heart.
While in one of the houses, the matriarch asked if I would go and cast a demon out of a piece of property that they wanted to build a house on for one of her kids. She claimed a man committed suicide by hanging himself there 20 years ago and the property is possessed. She knows this because several of her cows have died on the same piece of land over the years (think about that for a moment and realize she is demonstrating a common logical error). I agreed to pray for her and the land and we started to walk to the back of her house.
Here is where it gets even better. An ox, the one you see in the picture, is tied up along the path and he sees me. Now you need to put in context that cows and oxen are everywhere roaming free in India, even in the major cities. When I walk around the streets near the hotel after 10:00 p.m. there are more cows on the streets than people and they are roaming around eating in the trash heaps. They are docile and totally oblivious to traffic and people. You can walk right up to them from any direction and they will ignore you.
Not this ox! His eyes glared at me and he became agitated. They stopped me from going any farther and they had me go another route because this ox had a serious issue with me. I was then told by my interpreter that he was dedicated to the local Hindu temple and many people in the village felt he was possessed by a demon. I had to get passed a demon possessed cow to get to a demon possessed piece of property. I don’t know if I could make this stuff up. This is my new reality folks.
We visited several homes and I talked (or sat and smiled while my interpreter talked). We always prayed for the home when we left. Several homes we visited have people I had never seen at the meetings, but they were listening to the meetings via the large booming speakers we were using outside. Untold numbers in the village are hearing the preaching, yet fearing to come out to visibly take a stand. One such home, the woman wanted to be baptized and accept Christ yet she had never stepped into any of the meeting areas.
This demonstrates to me that God uses ways and means that we know nothing of. If I were to get disappointed due to the lack of attendance, I would be missing the bigger picture of what God is doing all around. I wonder how that relates to our work at the teen center. Could God be doing things that we don’t see with our meager offerings there?
We spent so much time with visiting and the people really didn’t want us to leave that we lost track of time. It was 7:00 p.m. and we realized we should be starting the meeting and I hadn’t set up any of my equipment. We showed up in the barnyard and everything was ready including the chairs and they were full to overflowing. When we showed up the kids were patiently waiting and they shouted out with approval. Now I know just how the Beatles felt when they landed in the U.S.
The interpreter started singing with the kids while I quickly stet up. As soon as possible I got the slide show running of the pictures of the people in the village. This is a real crowd pleaser. It doesn’t matter how many times they see their face up on the wall it gives them great pleasure. They’ve seen it enough to know when their picture is coming up next.
One note of interest that I must add before I get to the meat of this blog. You know that I’m basically preaching in a barnyard. Well, the animals aren’t in fenced areas or tied up so at any time you may have a visitor. Last night while I was preaching, a baby goat (kid) started to go around and through my legs foraging. No one in the audience was distracted by this or even noticed it except me! I guess I should be glad it wasn’t a snake. After this experience, it will take an earthquake to distract me when I’m preaching back home.
After I finished with the prepared sermon, I transitioned into a different topic. Hindu’s don’t pray like we understand prayer. They believe only holy men can pray to the deity and the regular people are unworthy for their prayers to be offered up by them. Part of the temple worship ritual is to serve as a mediation of prayers through the priest, idol or icon, but for a common person to talk directly to God is foreign to them. Unfortunately, many Christians don’t have a much better idea of what prayer is and how it works than a Hindu.
I want to share with you a condensed version of what I told them:
“I am honored and humbled when you come to me seeking prayers, but I have no power in myself. My God is all powerful and answers to prayer come from Him and not from anything I possess. I am no better or different from you. In God’s eyes I am equal to you as a child of God. You are my brothers and sisters. I may look different from you and my skin color is lighter, I speak a different language and have different customs. I live in a distant land but in the eyes of God I am no different than you (this was spoken to untouchables who are deemed the lowest of the low in Indian society).”
“I want to teach you tonight that you have the ability and authority to speak directly to God as a child would to their parents. He will listen to you and respond. You don’t have to go on pilgrimages, grovel on the ground or beat yourself. All you have to do is to ask Him. He may not always say yes, just as a good parent doesn’t always say yes to all the requests from their children. If your child asks you to give them a sharp knife to play with, most parents will say no because the parent knows that the knife will hurt the child. We don’t say no because we want to punish our children, we say no to protect them. God is no different with His earthly children.”
“Tonight I want to teach you the prayer that Jesus taught His followers to pray as a model.” (I then went through the Lord’s Prayer and explained it). “There is one prayer that God wants all people to pray and He will never say no to, that prayer is to ask Jesus to come into your lives and live in your heart. Will you pray that prayer with me tonight?”
How about you, readers of this blog? Are you praying for Jesus to come into your life today? If not, what is stopping you? There is nothing on this earth worth the cost of eternity. My evangelistic heart is burning for the harvest. We are going to see a harvest here because the Creator God of the Universe is doing everything within the legal boundaries of rightness to save His children. They only thing left is for us to accept such a great gift!
Pray for us and our protection here, pray for the family and village of the girl who died of the snake bite, pray that God will be glorified through the mighty work He is doing in India and around the world, pray for workers for the harvest is ripe. Pray that His kingdom will come.
Pastor Kevin
1 comment:
How about you, readers of this blog? Are you praying for Jesus to come into your life today? If not, what is stopping you? There is nothing on this earth worth the cost of eternity. My evangelistic heart is burning for the harvest. We are going to see a harvest here because the Creator God of the Universe is doing everything within the legal boundaries of rightness to save His children. They only thing left is for us to accept such a great gift!
( You said it all there Kevin)
Isaiah 25:1 O Lord, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things; thy counsels of old are faithfulness and truth.
Isaiah 25:4
4 For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.
Proverbs 1:33 But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.
George
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