Witch doctor sought to destroy Bible group, but God had other plans
By Mark Ellis —
One day Daladem was alarmed to hear about a Bible study group in his village and went to investigate their activities.
“My original intent was to cause confusion and finally destroy the Bible listening group in Tamerko,” he told Faith Comes by Hearing (FCBH), which produces audio Bibles.
But God had other plans for Daladem. “Things didn’t happen the way I planned,” he recounted. “One of my visits to the listening sessions left me with some serious thoughts. I heard clearly from God’s Word that unless someone accepts Christ, they are condemned to eternal damnation.”
The power of the Word and the conviction brought by the Holy Spirit began to soften his heart. “It dawned on me that the life I was leading was dark and evil, and I realized that if I did not repent and believe in Jesus Christ, I would suffer the consequences. My growing fear of hell deprived me of sleep that night.”
“The next morning, I hurriedly contacted the Bible listening group leader and told him I wanted to give my life to Christ.”
Daladem surrendered the control of his life to Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord and was born again!
In response to his new life in Christ he did something dramatic. “I gave up all my idols to be burned in a fire, then joined a church in Tamerko,” he told FCBH.
“Praise God for His power to save and transform! Deladem used to demand money, alcohol, animals, and food from his neighbors in payment for seeking favors for them from his old gods. Now he is the one seeking favor from the one true God,” according to the report by FCBH.
Pray that Deladem would be transformed like Paul in the New Testament and became an ardent defender of the faith; that he would preach the Gospel to his community daily by the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Pray that God would continue to provide for Deladem and his family, and that they would be an example of God’s goodness and trustworthiness.”
To know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
To learn more about Faith Comes by Hearing, go here
As of Fall 2018, every single nation on earth is represented at Arizona State University! Over 150 nations have someone on the ASU campus, while other nations are involved online – including North Korea and Antarctica! From this one place, Spirit-led believers have the potential to impact the entire family of nations, just as the apostles did on Pentecost!
In recent months, this huge university, the largest in the United States, has been in the grip of a bona fide spiritual awakening.
By our definition, formed over twenty years of monitoring transforming revival around the world, a true awakening means the work of God is comprehensive. This stands in contrast to a human campaign or initiative where results are typically confined to a single category or location within the community.
At ASU [Arizona State University], God’s sweep is as broad as it gets.
Not surprisingly, united prayer has proven to be a major factor behind these happy developments. After several tough years where campus ministries tended to go their own way, things took a pleasant turn in the fall of 2017. Instead of the usual two to three ministries coming together before God, prayer events at the local Campus Christian Center were rocking a three-fold increase in intercessory participants.
This past spring, fully a dozen ministries united behind a forty-day prayer focus where petitions were lifted day and night from a tent erected near the main campus square. The initiative was so fruitful, the ministries decided to continue the effort over the balance of the academic semester.
This fall, the tally of participating ministries and campus churches reached seventeen, as a fresh fifty-six-day campaign drew prodigals, atheists, Muslims, New Agers, and students suffering from depression. In addition to witnessing numerous conversions, healings, and deliverances, the intercessors also watched God begin to move among the University faculty and administration.
One of the more significant breakthroughs involved the school’s Interfaith Council of Religious Advisors. For years, the woman directing the council was motivated to establish ASU as a model of the global interfaith movement. Unfortunately, this highly syncretistic vision proved to be a major hindrance to the gospel. As time went by, her attitude toward Christians hardened, and ministries found their access to campus facilities severely limited.
Faced with this opposition, students and ministry leaders began to pray that God would either change this woman’s heart, or install someone more sympathetic.
It did not take God long to act. Within a period of weeks, this woman who had so vexed campus leaders disappeared from the Interfaith Council. None of the Christians on campus seemed to know where she had gone, or why. She was simply no longer there. Her replacement, a man even more hostile to the Christian cause, was similarly prayed out. Today, the council is headed by the son of a Baptist minister!
Even more dramatic has been the departure from the university of notorious atheist Lawrence Krauss. Virulently anti-Christian, the highly-paid professor routinely packed out Gammage Auditorium on campus by bringing in atheist luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Hawking.
A theoretical physicist, Krauss founded the Origins Project in 2009 with the aim of placing the university at the forefront of the New Atheist Movement. By promoting hostile, anti-religious rhetoric and policies (“teaching Creationism to youth is child abuse”), Krauss bullied Christian students and faculty into silence.
During the worst of Krauss’s campaign, God assured one late-night intercessor that the professor would be brought low, and that the backbone of the atheist movement on campus would be broken.
Given Krauss’s fame and tenure, this prospect was almost unimaginable.
And yet, on Oct. 21, 2018, Lawrence Krauss announced his resignation after being stripped of his role as an academic chair and as the Director of the Origins Project. This action came in the wake of an impending termination procedure urged by the dean of ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
According to ASU provost, Mark Searle, action was taken because the physicist “violated the school’s sexual harassment policy and code of ethics.” In a July 31 letter to Krauss, Searle told the professor his behavior was “unprofessional, reflects a failure of leadership, and is extremely disappointing.”
As for the Origins Project itself, the university newspaper notes that “sources point to a very different future for the project.” The initiative has already lost its name.
With Krauss out of the picture at ASU, Christian faculty in both the arts and sciences are again raising their flag.
A March 2019 conference on Science and Faith will allow students to engage faculty in six fields, an approach being lauded by the university president. As one professor’s official profile declares: “Through his work he intends to glorify God, from whom all good things come.”
Transforming winds have also been coursing through the university’s athletic department. Just last month, over 100 Christian student athletes attended an all-sport gathering in the men’s football facility that featured worship, prayer, and inspirational messages.
Many athletes were touched at this student-led event as the room was charged with the Spirit of God. One of them, star wide receiver N’Keal Harry — whom many analysts peg as a top-15 pick in the upcoming NFL draft — gave his heart to Christ and is devouring the Word. He is arguably the most popular personality on the ASU campus.
And Harry is but one of an estimated twenty to thirty football players who have turned their lives over to Jesus in recent months.The wrestling team has also been impacted through the open witness of Austyn Harris and All-American Josh Shields, and encouraging reports are coming in from athletes associated with hockey, lacrosse, gymnastics, track, swimming, and volleyball.
Dorm and Greek life are likewise feeling the impact of the Gospel. As one knowledgeable source told me, “Before this year, it was hard to find any Christians in the Honors dorms. Now, it seems like they are everywhere!”Better yet, they are uniting in prayer that God’s purposes will be realized in the lives of these elite students.
So much more could be said, but I’ll leave you with the observation one student athlete shared with me earlier this month: “The identity of ASU is being flipped.”
As of Fall 2018, every single nation on earth is represented at Arizona State University! Over 150 nations have someone on the ASU campus, while other nations are involved online – including North Korea and Antarctica! From this one place, Spirit-led believers have the potential to impact the entire family of nations, just as the apostles did on Pentecost!
Here is how you can be a part.
First, we need people who will partner with us to supply transformation video libraries to the dorms and athletic teams at ASU. There is great interest in these stories, and I believe they will inspire students to embrace even more of God.
Second, we believe God has called us to document this unfolding story on film so it can stir up faith on other campuses. We began this effort during a short visit to the ASU campus two weeks ago, but we want to return in late January to film a much larger set of interviews and events that are being arranged.
This story has already stirred audiences in several states. Just last week, I was able to share highlights with campus ministers from all the Ivy League schools plus Stanford University. This coming May, these leaders will join us on a revival exposure tour to see more of God’s handiwork in the Fiji Islands.
We need approximately $25,000 for these undertakings. If you can make a year-end gift to the ministry on Giving Tuesday (November 27), this will allow us to capture and transmit this glorious story to thousands.
Finally, please continue to pray for us as we complete other important research, training, and media projects. It is our heart’s desire to offer up some much-needed good news in this dark and uncivil hour.
These Study Guides are adapted from former Distance Education materials produced by Citipointe Ministry College, the School of Ministries of Christian Heritage College in Brisbane, Australia. Now they are adapted into these books for your benefit. The current courses use different and updated materials as part of internet resources for students.
For information about current courses, contact the Principal,
Welcome to this Study Guide on Holy Spirit Movements throughout History.
Topic 1 Introduction
Topic 2 Movements of the Spirit in the Old Testament
Topic 3 Movements of the Spirit and Renewal in the New Testament
Topic 4 The Ante-Nicene Church and early charismatic renewal; Monasticism and renewal in the Middle Ages
Topic 5 The Reformation, Pietism and the Moravian revival
Topic 6 The Great Awakening and eighteenth-century evangelical revivals
Topic 7 The Second Great Awakening in America and England
Topic 8 The Third Great Awakening – mid-Nineteenth Century
Topic 9 The Pentecostal Revivals and Healing Evangelism – early mid-Twentieth Century Revivals
Topic 10 Charismatic Renewal in the Churches
Topic 11 Late twentieth-century revival movements
Topic 12 Revival movements in Australia
Topic 13 Twenty-first century Spirit movements
The concept of renewal and restoration as the process whereby God renews the spiritual vitality of the church and restores neglected truths to a central place in its life is foundational to Evangelical and Charismatic perspectives on church life. An examination of the movements of the Spirit through history gives students a sense of the history of theological and renewal movements, and locates particular issues in relation to a larger conceptualization of the development of the church. This places a renewal theology of the Spirit in the context of the historical moment in which it arises.
Students preparing to minister today need to be aware of the historical movements of the Spirit which lead to renewal and reformation and how this applies to ministry practice and contemporary contexts.
This subject builds on the biblical principles addressed in The Holy Spirit in Ministry and further identifies historical contexts in which the Spirit operated within the church. These understandings provide the student with an opportunity to develop an awareness of the movements of the Spirit for contemporary ministry situations.
We all can learn more together about effective ministry. That learning is enhanced and expanded rapidly when we share our experiences and learning together. The ‘teacher’ usually shares from his or her experiences, but others can do also. So the more that our ministry education fosters mutuality, the more we can learn from one another.
We call this open education, or open ministry education. It is open to everyone and everyone can be involved. It is not just for leaders. Our leaders can help us, but their main job is to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12). We can do these things in classes, small groups, seminars, training courses and home or church groups.
I have read many similar stories, but this one exceeds them all.
I read the online edition and was blown away by the response of the Solomon Islanders to the power of the Holy Spirit. It was amazing, or should I say God-planned. Geoff has done well to not only be in so many places and seeing God at work, but also writing a book about it all. It’s as if it has all happened in a world apart, but the events in Brisbane show that it could happen in Australia also. ~ Barbara Vickridge (Perth, Australia)
Sydney, Australia, celebrated the beginning of 2000 by displaying on the Harbour Bridge the word Eternity in the iconic copperplate handwriting of Arthur Stace.
He started early, usually before dawn, and he wandered through all the streets of Sydney. Every morning he was somewhere else, Wynyard, Glebe, Paddington, Randwick, Central Station. As he said – where God directed him. Every night the message appeared in his head. He was a very little man, bent, grey-haired, only five feet three inches tall and just seven stone. He looked frail enough to blow away. Then with the formality of another generation he always wore a grey felt hat, tie and prim double-breasted navy blue suit. Sometimes in the dawn light he would be seen around Wynyard Station. He would nod to the drunks still left on the pavement and he would look at the debris of the affluent society stretched out on the park benches, trying to keep warm under newspapers. If he detected any movement there would be a pat on the head or a warm greeting. He had the air of a man who understood.
As he walked every so often he would stop, pull out a crayon, bend down and write on the pavement in large, elegant copperplate – Eternity. He would move on a hundred yards then write it again, Eternity, nothing more, just one simple word. For thirty-seven years he chalked this one-word sermon and he wrote it more than half a million times.
He did not like publicity. He regarded his unique style of Evangelism as a serious mission, something between Arthur Stace and his Maker, so for a decade these Eternity signs mystified Sydney. They were an enigma. Sydney columnists wrote about it, speculated on the author, and several people walked into newspaper offices and announced that they were the author. The real man kept quiet.
The mystery all came clear in 1956 and the man who cracked it was the Reverend Lisle M Thompson of the Burton Street Baptist Church. Arthur Stace was actually the church cleaner and one of their prayer leaders. One day Lisle Thompson saw Stace take out his crayon and write the famous Eternity on the pavement. He did it without realising that he had been spotted. Thompson said: “Are you Mr Eternity?” and Stace replied “Guilty Your Honour”. Lisle Thompson wrote a tract telling the little man’s extraordinary story and Tom Farrell, later had the first interview. He published it in the Sunday Telegragh on 21 June 1956.
Arthur Stace was born in a Balmain slum in 1884. His father and mother were both drunkards. Two sisters and two brothers also were drunks and they lived much of their time in jail. The sisters ran brothels and one of them was ordered out of New South Wales three times. Stace used to sleep on bags under the house and when his parents were drunk he had to look after himself. He used to steal milk from the doorsteps, pick scraps of food out of garbage and shoplift cakes and sweets.
His schooling was practically non-existent; so much so that this was noticed by Government officials. At the age of twelve he became a state ward. Not that this helped him greatly. When he was fourteen he had his first job – in a coal mine – and his first pay cheque he spent in a hotel. Already he had learned to drink at home so like the rest of the family he became a perambulating drunk, living in a fog of alcohol. He went to jail for the first time when he was fifteen, then it became a regular affair.
He was in his twenties when he moved to the seedy inner suburb of Surry Hills. There his job was to carry liquor from the pubs to the brothels, and particularly his sister’s brothel. Then there were other jobs such as cockatoo at a two-up school, that is the character who gives warning of the approach of the police. He was mixed up with various housebreaking gangs and because of his size he was splendidly useful as a look out man (1).
During the first world war he enlisted in the 19th Battalion, went to France and returned home gassed and half blind in one eye. Back in Surry Hills he took up his old habits, drink in particular. He slipped from beer, to whisky, to gin, to rum, to cheap wine until finally living on hand-outs. All he could afford was metholated spirits at sixpence a bottle. His alcoholism was so extreme his mind began to go and he was in danger of becoming a permanent inmate of Callan Park Mental Asylum (2).
He told Tom Farrell that in 1930 he was in Central Court for the umpteenth time. The magistrate said to him: “Don’t you know that I have the POWER to put you in Long Bay jail or the POWER to set you free.”
“Yes Sir,” he replied, but it was the word POWER that he remembered. What he needed was the power to give up drink. He signed the Pledge but he had done that many times before. He went to Regent Street Police Station and pleaded with the Sergeant to lock him up. “Sergeant, put me away. I am no good and I haven’t been sober for eight years. Give me a chance and put me away.” The Sergeant said: “You stink of metho, get out!”
This was the depression time and a metho drinker, dirty, wretchedly dressed, had to be the least likely of any to get a job. Outside the Court House there was a group walking up Broadway. The word had got around that a cup of tea and something to eat was available at the Church Hall. In the nineteen thirties one would endure almost anything for free food.
The date was August 6th and it was a meeting for men conducted by Archdeacon R.B.S. Hammond of St Barnabas’ Church on Broadway. There were about 300 men present, mostly down and outs, but they had to endure an hour and half of talking before they received their tea and rock cakes. Up front there were six people on a separate seat, all looking very clean, spruce and nicely turned out, a remarkable contrast to the 300 grubby-looking males in the audience. Stace said to the man sitting next to him, a well-known criminal: “Who are they?” “I’d reckon they’d be Christians,” he replied. Stace said: “Well look at them and look at us. I’m having a go at what they have got,” and he slipped down on his knees and prayed.
After that, he did find it possible to give up drink and he said: “As I got back my self respect, people were more decent to me.” So he won a job on the dole, working on the sandmills at Maroubra one week on, one week off at three pounds a week.
Some months later in the Burton Street Baptist Church at Darlinghurst he heard the evangelist, the Reverend John Ridley. Ridley was a Military Cross winner from the World War One and a noted “give-‘em-Hell” preacher. He shouted: “I wish I could shout ETERNITY through the streets of Sydney.” (3) Stace, recalling the day, said: “He repeated himself and kept shouting ‘ETERNITY, ETERNITY’ and his words were ringing through my brain as I left the church. Suddenly I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write Eternity. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket and I bent down there and wrote it. The funny thing is that before I wrote I could hardly have spelled my own name. I had no schooling and I couldn’t have spelt Eternity for hundred quid. But it came out smoothly in beautiful copperplate script. I couldn’t understand it and I still can’t.”
Stace claimed that normally his handwriting was appalling and his friends found it illegible. He demonstrated this to a Daily Telegraph reporter. He wrote Eternity which snaked across the pavement gracefully with rich curves and flourishes, but when he wrote his own name ‘Arthur’ it was almost unreadable. “I’ve tried and tried but Eternity is the only word that comes out in copperplate,” he said (4). After eight or nine years he did try something else “OBEY GOD”, and five years later, “GOD OR SIN” and “GOD 1st”, but finally he stuck with Eternity.
He had some problems. There was a fellow who followed him round and every time he wrote Eternity this other character changed it to Maternity. So he altered his style to give Eternity a large, eloquent capital E and maternity took a dive. The City Council had a rule against defacing the pavement and the police “very nearly arrested” him twenty-four times. “But I had permission from a higher source,” he said.
He lived with his wife Pearl in Bulwarra Road, Pyrmont and this was his routine. He rose at 4 am, prayed for an hour, had breakfast, then he set out. He claimed that God gave him his directions the night before, the name of the suburb came into his head and he arrived there before dawn. He took his message every 100 yards or so where it could be seen best then he was back home around 10am. First he wrote in yellow chalk, then he switched to marking crayon because it stayed on better in the wet. He did other things. On Saturday nights he led gospel meetings at the corner of Bathurst and George Streets. At first he did it from the gutter but in later years he had a fine van with electric lighting and an amplifier.
Aruther Stace died of a stroke in a nursing home on July 30, 1967 (5). He was 83. He left his body to Sydney University so that the proceeds could go to charity. The remains were finally buried at Botany Cemetery more than two years later (6).
There were suggestions that the city should put down a plaque to his memory. Leslie Jillet of Mosman said that there should be a statue in Railway Square depicting Stace kneeling chalk in hand (7).
In 1968 the Sydney City Council (8) decided to perpetuate Stace’s one-word sermon by putting down permanent plaques in “numerous” locations throughout the city. Sir David Griffin, a former Lord Mayor, tried to perpetuate what he called “a delicious piece of eccentricity”, but a team of City Commissioners killed the idea. They thought it was too trivial (9).
But finally Arthur Stace did get his plaque. It happened ten years after his death and was all due to Ridley Smith, architect of Sydney Square. He set the message Eternity in cast aluminium, set in aggregate, near the Sydney Square waterfall. The Sydney Morning Herald Column 8 said: “In letters almost 21cm (8in) high is the famous copperplate message Eternity. The one word sermon gleams in wrought aluminium. There’s no undue prominence. No garish presentation. Merely the simple Eternity on pebbles as Arthur Stace would have wanted it (10).
Ridley Smith did have an interest in Arthur Stace, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. As a boy he used to hear him preach on the corner of Bathurst Street. Even more interesting, Ridley Smith was named after the fire-breathing Reverend John Ridley, the very man who converted Arthur Stace back in 1930 (11).
References
(1) Sunday Telegraph, 21 June 1956.
(2) Reverend Lisle M. Thompson, The Crooked Made Straight.
(3) Daily Telegraph, 12 June 1965.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1967.
(6) Daily Telegraph, 8 October 1969.
(7) Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May 1968.
(8) Daily Telegraph, 30 April 1968.
(9) Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 1976.
(10) Ibid, 12 July 1977.
(11) Ibid, 13 July 1977.
Selected from ‘How I Learned to Pray for the Lost’, Back to the Bible pamphlet.
The author is anonymous.
The letter accompanying this testimony says in part: This is the result of my search for effective ways of praying for the unsaved. I have found it to produce amazing results in a very short time. After more than 20 years of fruitless praying, it seemed that there was no possible chance for my loved ones to ever return to the faith. But after only a few weeks of the type of praying that I have outlined here I have seen them studying the Bible by the hour and attending every church service possible. Also, their whole attitude toward Christianity has changed, and all resistance seems to be gone. I have taken my place of authority in Christ and am using it against the enemy. I have not looked at myself to see if I am fit or not; I have just taken my place and have prayed that the Holy Spirit may do His convicting work. If each and every member of the Body of Christ would do this, what a change would be made in this world.
Perhaps because the salvation of some seemed to me to be an impossibility, the first verse that was given to me was Mark 10:27: “With God all things are possible.”
The next Scripture verse had occupied my attention for some time, but it took on a new meaning: “(for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) casting down imaginations [speculations] and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4,5). This shows the mighty power of our spiritual weapons. We must pray that all of this will be accomplished in the ones for whom we are concerned; that is, that the works of the enemy will be torn down.
Finally I was given the solid foundations for my prayers – the basis of redemption. In reality, Christ’s redemption purchased all mankind, so that we may say that each one is actually God’s purchased possession, although still held by the enemy. We must, through the prayer of faith, claim and take for God in the name of the Lord Jesus that which is rightfully His. This is not meant to imply that, because all persons have been purchased by God through redemption, they are automatically saved. They must believe and accept the gospel for themselves; our intercession enables them to do this.
To pray in the name of the Lord Jesus is to ask for, or to claim, the things which the blood of Christ has secured. Therefore, each individual for whom prayer is made should be claimed by name as God’s purchased possession, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and on the basis of His shed blood.
We should claim the tearing down of all the works of Satan, such as false doctrine, unbelief, atheistic teaching and hatred, which the enemy may have built up in their thinking. We must pray that their very thoughts will be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
With the authority of the name of the Lord Jesus, we must claim their deliverance from the power and persuasion of the Evil One and from the love of the world and the lust of the flesh. We should also pray that their conscience maybe convicted, that God may bring them to the point of repentance and that they may listen and believe as they hear the Word of God. Our prayer must be that God’s will and purposes may be accomplished in and through them.
Intercession must be persistent – not to persuade God, for redemption is by God, but because of the enemy. Our prayer and resistance are against the enemy – the awful powers and rulers of darkness. It is our duty before God to fight for the souls for whom Christ died. Just as some must preach to them the good news of redemption, others must fight the powers of darkness on their behalf through prayer.
We will find that as we pray, the Holy Spirit will give new directions. Note that “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63) and that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Therefore we must constantly seek the motivation of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, in our faith, in our prayer and in our testimony.
It is most important also that we confess our own sins and have them forgiven. The enemy will use every possible means to silence our intercession and to block our attack against him. We must not only understand our enemy, our authority in Christ and how to use our spiritual weapons, but also how to wear the armour that God has provided for our protection. Thus equipped and protected, we need not have any fear. But let us always remember that we have no power and no authority other than that of Christ.
Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ (2 Cor. 2:14).
He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).
Truly the hand of the Lord is upon this land the Fijians like to call “God’s treasured possession.” Having spent nearly two decades documenting God’s transforming handiwork around the world, I am convinced that Melanesia, and Fiji in particular, is the epicenter of modern day revival.
Miracles upon the land are everywhere
Trees that never stop bearing fruit. Poisoned rivers that instantly turn pure. Bleached reefs that return to vibrant life and color. And SO much more!
But I want you to see it for yourself! This is the Kingdom of God on full exhibit. I am inviting you to join me this November for an eight-day visit to the Fiji Islands. This is not a vacation — it is much, much more!
Visit the Yasawa Island group where God has been doing wonders
Meet the Healing the Land team whose members are drawn from communities that have already seen spiritual awakening
Attend a two-day gathering where ambassadors from recently visited communities will testify of the Father’s mighty works
Potentially meet with members of the Olympic champion rugby team
Space is limited, but there is still time to reserve your place. I urge you to take advantage of this unique opportunity.
Who can forget the inspiring sight of Fiji’s Olympic rugby team, huddled in a circle at the end of their gold medal-winning match against Great Britain, and singing in glorious island harmony, “We have overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of the Lord.”
This spiritual acknowledgment — televised around the world — might well have been spoken of the nation as a whole.
Many countries, especially those as small as the Fiji Islands, carry on for hundreds of years without registering a single instance of transforming revival. But Fiji, from the early 2000s, has yielded these stories like a bumper crop of succulent fruit.
Thousands have been saved since the nation’s late president Josefa Iloilo commissioned a revival torch that has since been carried into every town and island group. Former cannibals have repented to the descendants of Wesleyan missionaries who lost their lives carrying the gospel into the interior. Former firewalkers have repented of their attachment to dark spirits. Idol worshippers have broken their hand-fashioned deities and burned them in communal bonfires.
10 Ways to Make Your Smart Phone a Spiritual Resource
Covenant people in covenant with our covenant God
We live in a technologically rich (and distracting) culture. Most of us have smartphones, tablets, laptops, and all the accessories to go along with them. We can check email, send a text, upload a photo, or update our status almost anywhere and anytime. This is a great resource, but it can also be very distracting and time-consuming. Despite all our modern conveniences many of us struggle to fit everything in that we’re required to do for our job and family much less spend quality time with God regularly.
You can share Good News in emails and on social media (eg Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest), eg., see my Facebook.
So here are ten ways you can use your smartphone or tablet to bring you closer to God and to pray more often.
1.Take five minutes to be inspired bya devotional/Bible reading app
Only got a few minutes? Download an app fordaily bible verses, quotes, and prayers. Ask the Holy Spirit to speak to you, open the app and see how today’s bite-size bits of inspiration relate to your life. Make the prayer your own and share your own thoughts with God after reading.
See BibleGateway.com – many translations. Try one verse and see 50 versions of it.
2.Capture God moments with your camera
God is on the move and speaking in so many ways we may not expect. Set yourself the challenge to be on the lookout for things, sounds, places and people that help you think about or talk to God today. Take a photo or video and keep a digital journalof what God is saying and how you’re connecting.
3.Don’t go it alone – Share your prayer requests
Got something you really need God to help with? Why not get your friends to pray with you. Find two people to whom you can send and receive private messages. When a need arises send a photo/textof what you need prayer for instantly through an app like Snapchat. Make sure you pray for God’s help as you press send and add your amen to their requests in return. (Don’t have Snapchat? There are other means of sending private messages too – you could DM on Twitter, message on Facebook or just text)
4.Playliststhat plug you in
Got a regular walk or commute? Create a playlist to plug you in to God. Download theworship tunes that stir you and connect you to Jesus and what he cares about. You could even create different playlists for chilled, meditative moods and wake-me-up-now worship journeys.
5.Usesocial mediato help you pray for others
Fancy shaking up whom you pray for? Why not open up a social media app or site and pray for the first person in your home feed. Ask Jesus to give you an encouraging comment to leave them after you’ve prayed.
6.Usea newsapplication to pray for the world
Ever find praying for the world daunting? Download a news app and choose one news story with your first tea/coffee/smoothie of the day. If you find it hard to start prayingimagine what the best possible outcome of the situation could be and ask Jesus to intervene. Keep it simple, specific and pray,“your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
7.Take the plunge –turn off your phone!
Silence can be scary but there’s nothing like silence and space to help you relax, clear your mind and connect with God. If you find it hard try finding a quiet place andturning off your phone as a sign that you’re switching off from the world and switching on to God for just two minutes a day. As those two minutes get easier (and start to feel quicker!) try increasing the amount of time you give your attention to God. You may even want to fast from those distracting apps on your phone for a time.
8. Use the alarm to remind you to pray
Your phone’s alarm doesn’t have to be exclusively used for waking you in the morning. Try setting it to go off at certain times of the day to remind you to take the time to pray. You may have different ways that you pray throughout the day. In the morning you might pray out of thanksgiving and adoration. In the evening it might be confession and repentance. It is always great to have a reminder to do what’s most important in the midst of the busyness of life.
9. Download an encouraging book
This idea may be best used on a tablet, but if your eyesight is still strong you can read an ebook on your smart phone. Download a Christian book that will challenge and encourage you. Read a chapter while riding the train into work or just before you go to bed at night.
10. Use your phone to call someone
I know this may be a novel idea, but your phone actually works quite well as a….well, phone. Stop texting, Facebooking, or Tweeting and actually TALK to someone. I know it is controversial, but not long ago that was our main means of communication! Take five minutes to call someone you know just to say “I love you and I’m thinking about you”. Ask them if there is anything that you can pray for them about and pray for them over the phone. Personal and direct human to human communication can be powerful.
Edited from Kenmore Baptist Church: KBC Life, June 2014
Chaplain Rondon (left) at July 29 Chapel service, when 200 soldiers gave their lives to Christ
Soldiers bow their knees in repentance, finding new life in Christ
