By Michael Ashcraft —

One of the hardest transitions for Wesley Pinnick from hunting terrorists in Iraq to civilian life in America was the loss of brotherhood he felt in the military.

“A lot of guys who go in the military have blood brothers, but they go in the military and they say, ‘You’re closer to me than a blood brother’ because you literally spend a year or years all of your time together,” Wesley says. “Those guys I went to combat with know everything about my life. You have nothing else to do but play dominoes and talk. It’s emotional bond that you have with these guys.”

Of course there was post traumatic stress disorder. Of course the shift from adrenaline jolts while dodging bullets to the drudgery of a day job was difficult. But it was the bond that was formed with those brothers — and then was broken when he returned to America — that hit him hard.

“When I got home, I realized, I’m never going to be as close with anybody ever again as I have with these guys — even to the point of when I get married, will I ever be this close to my wife?” he wondered.

Wesley is lucky. He found a church and fellowship with Christian brothers that, if not as close, was a decent approximation. He ran a discipleship house with new converts to help them break free from drugs, alcohol and other habitual sins as they learned to follow Jesus at the Door Church in Tucson.

As the U.S. war on terror extends itself with no end in sight, the U.S. is seeing increasing numbers of soldiers who struggle with traumas. Wesley’s story points the way to one great help for these soldiers — Jesus and the bond of brotherhood that can form in the church.

“The question is how do I live a life when I’ve already done potentially the greatest things I will ever do with my life, and I’m 21?” Wesley says. “What I really needed was people I could depend on and who could depend on me. I needed that camaraderie.”

Today, Wesley is a pastor in Long Beach, CA. But how he left his childhood church and enlisted to raise hell in Iraq is the story of a prodigal son.

Wesley knew nothing but church as a kid and teen. His dad was a minister in the Door Church, and he never had a friend outside the church. He felt burned out on the “unreasonable expectations” imposed on church kids.

“The reason I joined the military was to get away from church,” he says. “I backslid because I didn’t see any reason for me to stay saved. I didn’t want to mark out the next 30, 40 years in the church.”

So he bolted. Instead of fighting the devil, he fought terrorists. He and his buddies blasted open doors with C-4 plastic explosive and hauled off suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in 2004 at the start of the war in Mosul.

“It was a very traumatic experience in a lot of ways,” says Wesley, who fast-tracked to sergeant in two years. “I still don’t know how to talk about that.”

He was in the middle of the desert without God. Between the deaths of two buddies, he suddenly decided to re-start his relationship with Jesus by praying at night in bed.

“One day I just said, ‘God, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to have a relationship with You, but I want to have a relationship with You,’” he remembers. “‘I don’t have a church, a pastor or a Bible. I don’t know how this is going to work, but I’m willing to do it.’ But looking back, those six months were some of the most intense moments I had with God in my entire relationship with God over the course of my entire life.”

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the constant brushes with death that drove him to Jesus, he says. In fact, the exact opposite happens: soldiers who have escaped unscathed from conflict wrongly believe they are invulnerable.

“You think you have a power, that you are wielding something that has been tested,” he says. “You feel you’ve overcome it.”

One day over a cigarette, Wesley just had a simple thought: God had left him. His next thought was that he didn’t care.

Then it struck him as alarming that he didn’t care.

“That was the first pivoting moment when I started to go back and re-engage my relationship with Jesus,” he says.

Two years after enlisting, Wesley was released from the Army and returned to his hometown. He was diagnosed with mild to strong PTSD, for which doctors prescribed psych drugs.

“I did not go on medicine. I went to church,” he says. “It took me five years to feel like I had a hold of myself. But I still have flashbacks today. They’re not as a strong as they used to be. It’s a wound but more like a scar.”

The church and Veterans Administration courses helped him

Now 35, Wesley is married with three children. He has been pastoring the start-up church in Long Beach for two years. It’s been 15 years since his release from the Army, and he still struggles — though to a lesser degree — with putting the past fully behind him.

“I take the scripture of being a good soldier and apply it to what I’m doing today for the gospel,” he says. “I think I’m always going to be transitioning. I’m a continued work in progress.”

Michael Ashcraft pastors the Lightouse Church in Van Nuys.

God Reports, August 2, 2018

By Mark Ellis –

After a West African woman began to follow Jesus, her Muslim husband often beat her because of her newfound faith. Steadfastly, she maintained her quiet witness as she served him, all the while praying to God for his salvation.

She recounted the following remarkable testimony to Sudan Interior Mission.

It seems the woman wanted to attend a week-long church meeting away from home. She meekly asked her husband if she could attend. Predictably, the man exploded in anger. “Her husband was livid. A whole week? Who would cook his food? Clean his house?” she related to SIM.

He told her she should focus on Islam and forget the Christian church. He beat her harshly once again.

In spite of her husband’s violent response, she felt God’s leading to attend this meeting, which would nurture her growth and provide needed fellowship with other women.

The man was so upset after she left, he locked up the house and declared to the neighbors that his wife would never enter his home again. To add a dramatic emphasis to his point, he threw the house key into the river as he headed to his girlfriend’s house for the week.

The woman stopped by the local market on her way home from the conference. “She planned to have a hearty meal ready for her husband when he came home from Friday prayers. She had no idea that her husband had already locked her out of her home for good,” according to SIM.

After she got home, she thought it was strange that the house was locked up tightly. She wanted to start preparing the meal for her husband, so she borrowed a pot from her neighbor and began to clean the fish she had just bought.

“When she cut open the fish, a key fell out of its belly. Puzzled, she examined it and remarked to her neighbor that the key looked similar to her own house key. Her neighbor urged her to try it in the lock, and it worked! She opened up the house, cleaned it, and got her husband’s supper ready to wait for him,” according to SIM.

As her husband walked home from the mosque, he was shocked when he recognized his house had been opened and a fire was burning in the outdoor kitchen.

Now he was really angry, thinking perhaps a neighbor had helped his wife bust open the door or break the lock. But when he examined the door and the lock, nothing seemed amiss.

“When he demanded to know how she got back into their house, she told him the strange story of the key in the fish’s belly. Stunned, he didn’t say another word.”

The following night he told his wife he wanted to attend church with her the next morning.

After the Sunday morning church service, the man asked if he could speak with the pastor privately. He told him the amazing story about the house key and said, “I want to serve the God of the Christians. He is the One who knows and has power to do what no one else can.”

The man surrendered his life to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and was born again!

God faithfully answered the woman’s prayers for her husband to turn from his sins and follow Christ.

“In his gospel, Matthew tells of a fish caught with a coin in its mouth for taxes (Matthew 17:27). In West Africa in 2018, a house key in a fish’s belly became a key to the Kingdom for an abusive husband.”

“Our Lord is still a fisher of men.”

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

To learn more about the work of SIM, go here

Source: God Reports, July 6, 2018

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX 

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES) 

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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By David Roach —

Most Americans likely know of Francis Scott Key’s passion for the United States, expressed in his writing of the national anthem. Far fewer know he also was a passionate advocate of Sunday School whose leadership in the Sunday School movement helped evangelize the West.

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Key helped establish more than 61,000 Sunday Schools for some 2.7 million pupils over 50 years
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As the United States celebrates its 242nd birthday, Christian educators say Key’s two passions went hand in hand. Sunday School could once again, they say, be a catalyst for spiritual and moral renewal in America.

“America and Sunday School literally grew up together,” said David Francis, a retired director of Sunday School for LifeWay Christian Resources. “Nowhere else in the world has Sunday School been embraced like in America. Nowhere else in the world has the idea of a constitutional republic been sustained like in America. Two ideas. Both of God. At the same time. Spreading together across a continent. What a fortunate coincidence.”

Born in 1779, Key was a Maryland attorney, author and poet. In 1814, he wrote the poem “Defense of Fort M’Henry” after watching the all-night bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry from a British ship during the War of 1812. Key had gone aboard the ship as an American envoy to negotiate a prisoner release and was not allowed to disembark until after the attack.

In the morning, the sight of an American flag still waving over the fort inspired Key’s poem, which he soon had set to music. Under the title “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it became the national anthem more than a century later.

Lesser known is that Key was “an earnest Christian,” and “a teacher of a large Bible class,” according to Edwin Wilbur Rice’s 1917 book “The Sunday School Movement and the American Sunday-School Union” (ASSU). Key joined the ASSU board of managers in 1824, the year the union changed its name from the Sunday and Adult School Union.

The ASSU’s 1835 Annual listed Key as a “lifetime member” based on his contribution of at least $30 — the equivalent of $815 today.

Francis wrote in his book “Missionary Sunday School” that the ASSU’s aim was to start Sunday Schools across America where individuals from lower economic classes heard the Gospel and learned to read and write “using the Bible as a primary text.” Sunday Schools typically comprised children “who rarely or never attend[ed] church,” and adult classes often formed as a secondary ministry.

Key chaired an 1830 ASSU meeting in Washington, which instituted the “Mississippi Valley Enterprise,” a campaign that established west of the Appalachian Mountains more than 61,000 Sunday Schools for some 2.7 million pupils over the next 50 years, Francis wrote. Many of those Sunday Schools developed into churches, some Baptist, in areas previously without an evangelical witness while others became weekday schools before the era of American public education.

When Key died in 1843, the ASSU stated in its Annual, “By the decease of the Hon. Francis S. Key, of the District of Columbia, we lose one of our earliest and most steadfast advocates and patrons. His frequent and liberal contributions to our funds, and his readiness at all times to vindicate the principles and advance the usefulness of the Society, furnished unequivocal evidence of his interest in our cause.”

Francis told Baptist Press the Sunday School movement under Key and other early leaders “played no small role” during America’s first century in raising up a citizenry that was “both moral and literate.” — Baptist Press

David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service. 

Source: God Reports, July 4, 2018