“The furnace of affliction is a good place for you, Christian; it benefits you; it helps you to become more like Christ, and it is fitting you for heaven.” — C.H. Spurgeon
In the midst of this dark time I was driving one day to go preach and my then 20 year old daughter, Rebekah, was riding with me. She could see the devastation on my face. She turned to me and said, “Daddy, please don’t be so sad.” I said, “Sorry sweetie, I’m trying.” Then she said something so anointed by the Holy Spirit that it changed my life forever. She said, “Daddy, remember, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego didn’t see Jesus until they were in the furnace and Daddy, seeing Jesus is worth the fire.” It hit me like a brick! I knew she was right! We had experienced Jesus during this dark time like we never had before and Jesus is worth the fire! I was immediately healed of my discouragement. When I arrived at the place I was to preach I told them, “open your Bibles to Daniel chapter 3” and I preached a powerful message called Jesus Is Worth The Fire. I finished the sermon with the last verse of Daniel chapter 3 which is verse 30 “Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to even higher positions in the province of Babylon.” The furnace is for promotion! The only thing that burns is your bonds! You are thrown in tied up but after the Fourth Man appears your bonds are loosed and you walk out without the smell of smoke on you! This was perhaps the most prophetic sermon of my life and I have preached it all over the world. Our furnace was the launching pad for our greatest most miraculous season of ministry we have ever seen so far.
Rebekah moved to Inner City Los Angeles to work at the Dream Center for a year and quickly rose through the ranks to become a leader there. At 21 years of age she became the “Adopt A Block” leader for Nickerson Gardens, the largest government housing projects west of the Mississippi. God used her mightily there. You can read her blogs from that time HERE. I continued traveling regularly to Colombia, preaching and rescuing orphans. In January of 2012 I decided that I would take one whole day with a yellow legal pad and pen until I could come up with what I thought God wanted me to spend the rest of my life doing in one sentence. After praying and crying all day and writing, writing, writing I stepped outside to prayer walk around the apartment complex. At one moment while praying I stopped, looked into the night sky and said out loud, “Lord, I just want to know what Your mission critical is for me!” I froze. That’s it! That’s what the name of our ministry will be. I ran inside and searched to see if Mission Critical International had already been used as a ministry name and it looked clean! Later that night I identified my one sentence mission critical… “Passionately pursuing Jesus on His mission among the nations and mobilizing others to join us in this thrilling adventure!” That Spring I flew to L.A. to spend a week working in the streets with Rebekah. It was one of the most thrilling weeks of my life and we founded Mission Critical International that week. We worked one night trying to come up with a logo for the ministry with no success. I climbed into one of the bunkbeds in the Dream Center for a good nights sleep and I had a dream and saw our current logo on a billboard. The next morning I excitedly grabbed my Macbook and created what I had seen in my dream. It is precious to us. My son, Luke was so excited when I shared with Him what the Lord had showed me in L.A. He and I worked and worked to develop our website we have today.
2013 was a year of much sickness for me but God was preparing me. He was keeping me hungry for Him. I spent a third of the year in bed and finances were at an all time low but it was the beginning of the promotion for sure. In January Rebekah 24 at the time came to me and said, “Daddy, I know you love Colombia but God is calling me to Africa!” I said, “Great! That makes sense since He gave you an African sister. That has been on my mind.” She worked hard and God provided and she left for Zambia, Africa in February 2013 to live in the bush with no running water, no electricity, and help establish an orphanage! She fell in love with the people, the country, and the continent. She lived there two years. Read her miraculous stories HERE!
Our daughter Brooke, 17 at the time spent the summer in Colombia working in an orphanage. You can read about her experiences HERE.
I was planning in early October 2013 to travel to Bogota, Colombia on a mission trip with my oldest son Luke. My dear friend Bruce surprised me with an invitation to Newport Beach, California the first weekend of September to wed his two precious daughters in a dual ceremony atop a 300 foot long yacht in the harbor. The first of many miracles began when I stood at the altar of Celebration Church of the Woodlands and my pastor, Frankie Mazzapica prayed over me for healing and I never spent another day in bed after that. Then Lisa and I were at the airport getting ready to leave for Newport Beach. We knew God had to be our source because we only had $11.00 to our name, didn’t know how we would finance our stay in Newport Beach, where the money would come from to go to Colombia in 3 weeks, and more. While we were waiting in line to get on the plane I received a message from Colombia that there was violent rioting throughout the country and maybe we should’t come. We took a deep breath, asked the Lord to take over, and walked onto the plane. Everything miraculously worked out and we had a glorious trip to California and then Luke and I traveled to Colombia together and teamed up with a wonderful translator I had met on a previous trip named Oscar Useche. Read all about it HERE. We spent a week in the orphanages and then Oscar said, “I have pastors from 4 churches asking me to have you come and preach while you are here.” I said, “Great! Let’s do it. So Luke, Oscar, and I went to 4 churches in two days. I preached a sermon that God had blown my mind with a few weeks before as I was reading Mark chapter 2. The sermon was entitled The Recipe For A Miracle and God used it on this trip in miraculous ways that I had never before experienced. Whole crowds would flood to the altar at the end of the sermon weeping and crying out loud to God in desperation for Him. The anointing was so obvious that the pastors said, “Please, come back and do a trip that is just preaching crusades!” And so we started praying and planning for such a trip to be scheduled in the spring of 2014.
Spiritual and financial miracles were happening all around us and we begin to see that we were being “promoted to even higher positions in the province of Babylon.”
In the midst of this dark time I was driving one day to go preach and my then 20 year old daughter, Rebekah, was riding with me. She could see the devastation on my face. She turned to me and said, “Daddy, please don’t be so sad.” I said, “Sorry sweetie, I’m trying.” Then she said something so anointed by the Holy Spirit that it changed my life forever. She said, “Daddy, remember, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego didn’t see Jesus until they were in the furnace and Daddy, seeing Jesus is worth the fire.” It hit me like a brick! I knew she was right! We had experienced Jesus during this dark time like we never had before and Jesus is worth the fire! I was immediately healed of my discouragement. When I arrived at the place I was to preach I told them, “open your Bibles to Daniel chapter 3” and I preached a powerful message called Jesus Is Worth The Fire. I finished the sermon with the last verse of Daniel chapter 3 which is verse 30 “Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to even higher positions in the province of Babylon.” The furnace is for promotion! The only thing that burns is your bonds! You are thrown in tied up but after the Fourth Man appears your bonds are loosed and you walk out without the smell of smoke on you! This was perhaps the most prophetic sermon of my life and I have preached it all over the world. Our furnace was the launching pad for our greatest most miraculous season of ministry we have ever seen so far.
Rebekah moved to Inner City Los Angeles to work at the Dream Center for a year and quickly rose through the ranks to become a leader there. At 21 years of age she became the “Adopt A Block” leader for Nickerson Gardens, the largest government housing projects west of the Mississippi. God used her mightily there. You can read her blogs from that time HERE. I continued traveling regularly to Colombia, preaching and rescuing orphans. In January of 2012 I decided that I would take one whole day with a yellow legal pad and pen until I could come up with what I thought God wanted me to spend the rest of my life doing in one sentence. After praying and crying all day and writing, writing, writing I stepped outside to prayer walk around the apartment complex. At one moment while praying I stopped, looked into the night sky and said out loud, “Lord, I just want to know what Your mission critical is for me!” I froze. That’s it! That’s what the name of our ministry will be. I ran inside and searched to see if Mission Critical International had already been used as a ministry name and it looked clean! Later that night I identified my one sentence mission critical… “Passionately pursuing Jesus on His mission among the nations and mobilizing others to join us in this thrilling adventure!” That Spring I flew to L.A. to spend a week working in the streets with Rebekah. It was one of the most thrilling weeks of my life and we founded Mission Critical International that week. We worked one night trying to come up with a logo for the ministry with no success. I climbed into one of the bunkbeds in the Dream Center for a good nights sleep and I had a dream and saw our current logo on a billboard. The next morning I excitedly grabbed my Macbook and created what I had seen in my dream. It is precious to us. My son, Luke was so excited when I shared with Him what the Lord had showed me in L.A. He and I worked and worked to develop our website we have today.
2013 was a year of much sickness for me but God was preparing me. He was keeping me hungry for Him. I spent a third of the year in bed and finances were at an all time low but it was the beginning of the promotion for sure. In January Rebekah 24 at the time came to me and said, “Daddy, I know you love Colombia but God is calling me to Africa!” I said, “Great! That makes sense since He gave you an African sister. That has been on my mind.” She worked hard and God provided and she left for Zambia, Africa in February 2013 to live in the bush with no running water, no electricity, and help establish an orphanage! She fell in love with the people, the country, and the continent. She lived there two years. Read her miraculous stories HERE! 
I was planning in early October 2013 to travel to Bogota, Colombia on a mission trip with my oldest son Luke. My dear friend Bruce surprised me with an invitation to Newport Beach, California the first weekend of September to wed his two precious daughters in a dual ceremony atop a 300 foot long yacht in the harbor. The first of many miracles began when I stood at the altar of Celebration Church of the Woodlands and my pastor, Frankie Mazzapica prayed over me for healing and I never spent another day in bed after that. Then Lisa and I were at the airport getting ready to leave for Newport Beach. We knew God had to be our source because we only had $11.00 to our name, didn’t know how we would finance our stay in Newport Beach, where the money would come from to go to Colombia in 3 weeks, and more. While we were waiting in line to get on the plane I received a message from Colombia that there was violent rioting throughout the country and maybe we should’t come. We took a deep breath, asked the Lord to take over, and walked onto the plane. Everything miraculously worked out and we had a glorious trip to California and then Luke and I traveled to Colombia together and teamed up with a wonderful translator I had met on a previous trip named Oscar Useche. Read all about it HERE. We spent a week in the orphanages and then Oscar said, “I have pastors from 4 churches asking me to have you come and preach while you are here.” I said, “Great! Let’s do it. So Luke, Oscar, and I went to 4 churches in two days. I preached a sermon that God had blown my mind with a few weeks before as I was reading Mark chapter 2. The sermon was entitled The Recipe For A Miracle and God used it on this trip in miraculous ways that I had never before experienced. Whole crowds would flood to the altar at the end of the sermon weeping and crying out loud to God in desperation for Him. The anointing was so obvious that the pastors said, “Please, come back and do a trip that is just preaching crusades!” And so we started praying and planning for such a trip to be scheduled in the spring of 2014.