Aflame For God 19 – Recruiting Jesus Addicts

“Fire is the chosen symbol of heaven for moral passion. It is emotion aflame. God is love. God is fire… It is by a holy passion kindled in the soul that we live the life of God.” – Samuel Chadwick

Read the beginning of the series HERE

Rebekah and I arrived back in Houston that Sunday and our feet were hardly touching the ground. We had spent five amazing days in the presence of Jesus and loving on His lambs and we were full up to the brim. Three days later, as the Lord would have it, I was to speak at a three day men’s retreat called Tres Dias. Ironically, this is the same ministry where I first heard my friend Allen talk about orphan ministry and God got ahold of my heart. I was so excited that I was going into this set of weekends, (the men’s weekend followed by speaking at the women’s the very next weekend.) so full of the Holy Spirit. I felt as if I was floating on a cloud as I arrived at the camp that Thursday. I was oozing joy and excitement and everyone around me could feel it. I was to speak twice that weekend, once on The Means of Grace, and once on The Life in Grace. What better subjects to talk about after just spending a week under the waterfall of Grace in Colombia. I preached my heart out both times and showed a video of the pictures from our trip with a song playing in the background by Steven Curtis Chapman called “What Now” The first line of the song says, “I saw the face of Jesus in a little orphan girl.” The presence of the Lord was powerfully present and I knew lives were being changed. After I showed the video it was time for lunch. As I walked into the lunchroom a man walked up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “My name is Luis Escobar. I am from Bogota, Colombia. I speak both languages fluently. I know the city, the government, the culture. I have experienced the grace of God today, I know God spoke to me today, and I am at your service.” I couldn’t believe it and yet I could. I hugged him and said, “I have been praying for you for six months.” We began then to plan the next trip and we set out to pray about whom the Lord would have come with us. Luis did end up going on that trip and became a huge blessing to me over the years.

We also immediately started working on adoption paperwork for Heidy and Ginary to become our daughters. During this time, someone mentioned to me, “Hey have you heard about National Orphan Sunday, November 8, 2009?” So I started checking into it and found that Chrisitan Alliance for Orphans and Steven Curtis Chapman’s ministry and others had organized a national day to recognize the plight of the orphan and were encouraging churches across the country to have a special emphasis that day. We quickly began to plan and promote Orphan Sunday at Heritage Church where I was pastoring at the time. When the day came the church was filled with people and there were dozens of former orphans from all over the world who had been adopted. Someone commented that it looked like a miniature United Nations that day. It was one of the best days of my life.

There were many other amazing providences that led up to this trip as well. One that especially sticks out in my mind was a prayer meeting that David Richardson, Allen Pate and myself had in my study. We had all been feeling the pressure and the spiritual warfare leading up to this trip and we agreed to meet at my place and get on our faces before God and seek His help and power. Before we began to pray, David mentioned some men that the Lord had laid on his heart regarding orphan ministry. We wrote down three names and prayed for them and for God’s leading. One of the men’s names was Chris Dinkler, a brother that we had met at Tres Dias. It was a powerful prayer meeting and afterward we dried our eyes and hugged each other goodbye. About twenty minutes later, my phone rang and it was David and his voice was shaking and he told me that just after he and Allen left my house, his phone rang and it was Chris Dinkler calling to say that for “some reason” he and his wife couldn’t quit thinking about Colombia and the orphans and that he wanted to get more information about going with us. Chris did go with us on the January trip and I’ll never forget as long as I live the words he said as we were leaving the last orphanage on the last night headed to the airport. We were standing outside the gate of the orphanage on a dirt road in this inner-city slum and with tears rolling down his face Chris said, “The next time someone tells me they want to see Jesus I’m going to tell them, ‘I can give you the street address where He lives’.”

This time my daughter Brooke as well as Rebekah and Beverly made sure I knew they wanted to go. It was a total stretching of our faith because at this time I had been out of work for about 18 months and money was really tight. For just me to go in January would require a huge miracle. We set about to pray for people and pray for money and God answered big. My co-pastor and best friend, Chuck Carpenter, also expressed interest in going but he too had no idea where the money would come from. I began to walk the streets of my neighborhood every night crying out to God to pay our bills and somehow get us all to Colombia in January. One morning my phone rang and a dear friend from a previous church I had pastored said, “I hear you want to take 5 or 6 people with you to Colombia and I want to pay for them! Wow! So all of us including Chuck, Luis, Chris, and several others were going to Colombia!

We had a wonderful trip and I have written about it HERE.

Things were going really well and miracles abounded but something happened just before we left that would prove to be a catalyst for the most difficult period of spiritual warfare we have ever experienced.

Aflame For God 20 – All Out War