Saturday, February 11, 2012 was one of the greatest days of my life. The inaugural Orphan Hope Marathon Trail Run was a huge success! See photos HERE See videos of the start below.

It all started in February of 2011 with an email from a friend and fellow soldier in orphan ministry, Jenn Burton,

Hey matt,

I was out walking today and thinking and wanted to run something by you. I am not sure if you knew but I have a non-profit fitness ministry. We do bootcamps at different churches and just have a heart to help women get healthy in all aspects of their lives. So I also now have a heart for these orphans so as I was thinking about the 2, I think it would be really amazing if masterpiece fitness (my ministry) put on a walk-thon with the goal of raising enough money to give to orphan hope to build another safe home. We currently have about 200 girls in the ministry and that seems to be growing by the day. We could put on the walk (a big one) and then follow it up with a mission trip to Colombia for the women and their families that want to go. What do you think?

Jenn

Matt and Jenn Burton on Saturday

I have learned that God uses our passions to lead us into ways that we can expand His kingdom with incredible enjoyment and I recognized this as one of those opportunities and so I told Jenn, “Absolutely, let’s do it.” Neither of us knew the huge effort and blessing that was ahead.

L to R Mel, Ken, Jenn, Dawn

The rest of Jenn’s fitness team, Dawn Rodgers, and Melanie Gonzales immediately jumped on board and we were off and running. It wasn’t long before God sent what the girls describe as “an angel” in Ken Johnson. Ken is a retired Lt. Colonel in the Army who has run marathons for decades and even written and published on the subject. He lives in Huntsville where we held the race and very early on he joined the planning team. These three girls and their team and families worked endless hours to make this race happen. It was a full year of donations, planning, scheduling, studying marathons, purchases, and so on and it culminated in a smashing success on Saturday with 416 runners and $40,000.00 raised for the Bogota Safe House that we will open this year. The goal was $60,000.00 so will still have a way to go. We are still taking donations at www.OrphanHopeMarathon.com for the Safe House.

We had a wonderful  pre-race sit down dinner on Thursday night with live music, wonderful food, and testimonies about the importance of the cause. The Attaway family came together and organized the entire thing. They are amazing!

Over 150 volunteers worked Friday and Saturday. The after race meal consisted of over 500 barbecue sandwiches prepared by Dawn Rodgers father and family (28 briskets!). There were so many miracles that happened along the way that it made it really fun to see God’s fingerprints on the whole thing. People came together, worked, donated, and with such wonderful attitudes it was a delight to work together with each and every one of them. Jenn and some of her team spent most of the day Friday marking every inch of the 13.1 mile trail through the woods of Huntsville State Park while the rest of us set up tents and stretched flagging and lots of other items.

My sweet wife, Lisa, along with our girls were in charge of setting up and manning the Orphan Hope International booth and they did a beautiful job of representing our ministry at the race.

We all got about 3 hours of sleep Friday night and then hit the ground running at 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning. I couldn’t have been more proud of the way Beverly, Brooke, and Jana jumped in and helped both on Saturday and Sunday. They were a huge blessing.

It was so exciting to see the hundreds of people come flooding into the park from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. And then it was time to start. I led the group in prayer, the music started, the horn sounded and then they were off! I felt the tears well up in my eyes as everyone cheered and the runners raced off into the trees.

A tremendous personal blessing for me was that my beautiful African daughter, Mercy, was one of the runners. The former orphan running to raise money for orphans… profound and precious.

A few weeks ago I noticed that she was thinning down some and because she has had so many health problems in her past it worried me a little bit and so I asked, “Hey Baby, are you losing weight? Are you ok?” She smiled at me, “Dad! I’m training for the Orphan Hope Marathon!” I was stunned. I had no idea she was excited about and planning to run. She was a little worried because she had never run more than 4 miles but she was determined to at least run a relay leg of 8 miles. She ended up running the 1/2 marathon (13.1 miles) in 2 hours and 30 minutes. A time good enough to win second place in her age group. We were elated!

When you consider that 4 1/2 years ago she was lying in a bed in Monrovia, Liberia dying and weighed only 48 pounds, to see her cross that finish line (see video below) was one of the defining moments of my life. We interviewed her on camera later and she said, “Dad, just when I was ready to quit about 3/4 of the way through I saw one of your signs that you posted along the trail (there were 30 of them with a girls face on each one) and the sign I saw had Heidy’s picture on it and I knew that I had to go on for Heidy.” Wow! God is so good to us to allow us to follow Him on this amazing journey.

 

As a young Christian I was constantly thinking about and worrying about “What is the will of God for my life?” It seemed that I constantly wrestled with such questions as “What city does He want me in?” “What ministry does He want me to do?” I wanted to serve Him so desperately. I wanted to be used by Him terribly. I wanted to make a difference in the world. And it seemed to me that knowing the will of God was a mysterious, mirky, uncertain business. Today, I know better and it is a great delight to my life that I have figured out how to consistently discern the will of God for my life. God doesn’t play shell games with us. He doesn’t have a mission for our life and then spend the rest of our life trying to hide that mission from us. He has a mission for our life and He wants us to know what it is and to accomplish it more than we could possibly imagine. As Mark Batterson says, “God wants you to get where God wants you to go more than you want to get where God wants you to go.” Matthew Barnett says, “God wants you to know your cause. He does not play games. Because He loves you more than you can understand, He is not going to make the discovery of your cause a tug-of-war in which He simply messes with your head. He designed that cause specifically for you because He knows it will deliver tremendous joy and fulfillment.”

Of course, sometimes God speaks directly to us in dreams, visions, or other ways but I have generally observed that He more often speaks in that still small voice. So quickly, here are the steps God has taught me for discerning His will in my life. I learned these by experience and then God has confirmed them through others over and over again and I will quote some of them. I specifically want to focus on the last one, Invitations. This is not a formula but the steps that I know God uses in my life to get me where He wants me to go.

1. Pursuing God. God’s will is not something He wants you to run off and do without Him. The first part of God’s will for every Christian is to know Him deeply and love Him deeply and stay in His presence. It’s only when I am pursuing God Himself that I can have any chance of knowing what He wants me to do.

2. Absolute Surrender. God’s will is GOD’S will not my will. The Lord’s prayer is hallowed be THY name not hallowed be MY name, THY kingdom come not MY kingdom come, THY will be done on earth as it is in heaven not MY will be done. If I want to be used of God I must be completely surrendered. I must lay my self on the altar and say, “Lord, use me how you want. You decide how my life can best bring You glory.” If it is suffering, sickness, prison, death, or advancement and prosperity, I submit to You Sovereign Lord. When God knows that I will do whatever He tells me without hesitation then He will clearly show me what He wants me to do. Matthew Barnett says, “So how do you find out what your cause is? From experience – mine and others’ – I’d argue that the first step is to surrender your will to God.”

3. Passion. God begins to lead us into the specific areas of service that He wants us in by desire. This was a wonderful revelation to me. When I realized that God put this unquenchable passion in me to know, love, and serve Him, I remember leaping for joy. I was studying 1 Timothy 3 regarding the qualifications for pastors and it hit me that the first qualification was desire! It says, “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a pastor, he desireth a good work.” When I realized that the call of God starts with desire/passion my whole life changed.  Matthew Barnett says it so well, “In my life, God speaks through passion and circumstances. In other words, He instills a sense of desire and urgency within me. I have a passion to accomplish certain dreams. Because those dreams are not the normal human impulses, especially in today’s self-indulgent culture, I believe those are God-inspired passions.” For example, I have seen God take the passion He put in me as a little boy to be a good father when I grew up and to be the leader of a family that would love God and impact the world for generations to come and expand that original passion beyond just my blood descendants to encompass the orphans of the world. Amazing.

4. Invitations/Circumstances. The final way I, and others, have found that God directs us to His mission for our lives is through invitations to become involved in what He is already doing in the world. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life that as I am pursuing God and loving Him and that relationship begins to spill and splash on to others around me that invitations begin to come in from people to “come over and help us” (Acts 16:9) Most of the greatest blessings in my life have come from an invitation that I said yes to. Our involvement in evangelism, youth ministry, church planting, conference speaking, authoring a book, Tres Dias, adopting our precious daughter Mercy, our ministry in Colombia, our wonderful church that we now attend, and many other blessings all started with an invitation that lined up with a passion God had already stirred in our hearts. Matthew Barnett again says it so well, “If you’re serious about knowing God’s chosen cause for you, think carefully before you turn down invitations to help somebody you know engage in some type of service activity, no matter how big or small it might be. That invitation might be the beginning of the adventure that identifies the means to filling the hole in your heart.” Wow! I love that and have proven it in my own life.

So, all that being said, as I begin to think about the year ahead and what God wants for my life in 2012 I realize that God is drawing me to Himself and His presence more powerfully than ever before, I am less afraid to lay it all down on the altar for Him than I have ever been, there is a terrible burning passion in me and in my family to be involved in what God is doing in the nations, and I currently have invitations from people that I love and admire to come and preach/minister with them next year in Colombia, Mexico, Zambia, Liberia, Rwanda, Nepal, & India. I am humbled and amazed at the way God is moving in my life and I can’t wait to see where He leads.

“Because the church has lost Holy Ghost fire, men go to hell-fire!” – Leonard Ravenhill

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

We were very sad to leave our teenagers in Roswell, NM but we were also excited about what God had for us. My sister, Melanie, who had moved to Roswell to live with Lisa and I when she was 15 went off to Bible college and we moved back home. I had always felt that God was calling me to be an evangelist/revivalist and so I believed that this might be the time when God would bring that to pass. So in the spring of 1987 we moved back to Albuquerque, rented a broken down little house with my younger brother, Mark, who was preparing to go to Bible college, in a neighborhood known as “the war zone” because of the crime, drugs, and gangs that lived and operated there. Five people were murdered within a block of us the year we lived there but it was what we could afford. Our neighbors were pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and immigrants.There was some kind of war going on around us every day.

 

In our youth ministry in Roswell I had become extremely close to one young man, Rusty, who didn’t have a family. Rusty was my right hand man. He led the Bible study at Goddard high school and generally spent every minute he could at our house. It killed him and us to have to leave him there. Shortly after we moved back to Albuquerque he was able to come and live with us and became like a son. We joined a church in the city and I began to work and pray to establish an evangelistic ministry. I got a few opportunities to preach here and there but things were slow and we literally lived meal to meal but Rusty, Mark, Lisa and I grew ever closer to the Lord and we were enjoying our baby, Luke and it wasn’t long before our second son, Levi was born. We were so blessed to have a family!

 

I was reading everything I could get my hands on about revival and I concluded that I needed to go have a prayer retreat so Rusty and I hiked up to the top of a mountain near my parents home. We built a lean to with tree limbs and we camped out and spent many hours with the Lord. From one side of the peak I could see Interstate 40 snaking its way east to Texas and beyond and I prayed many a prayer during the days we were up on the mountain that God would give me invitations to travel that road to preach across America. I named our ministry Save America Ministries and printed business cards and a brochure with lots of quotes from the great evangelists of the past. I even got to meet with my hero, Jerry Johnston, and share with him about what I intended to do. It wasn’t long before we were packing our car and heading east on I-40 to points unknown preaching through the midwest at youth camps, Christian school graduations, church revivals or wherever God opened a door but always returning to our little house in the war zone. I was so excited and scared and excited.

 


 

Many sweet little providences continued to reveal to me that God’s hand was upon our lives and he was moving us to His rhythm. Many souls trusted Christ or had a spiritual awakening in their life. Some thought we were crazy and there were plenty of people telling me that I was not being responsible and getting and education and getting a good job and settling down now that I had a baby and one on the way but I just couldn’t see any fruit in their lives that would make me want to listen to them. Soon our second little boy was born and we were so thrilled.

 

Every time I came back home to the war zone I would get convicted that my own neighborhood and city needed Christ and I began to pray and to witness to people in our neighborhood. Ever since I had come to Christ I had made a habit of sometimes praying late at night on a mountain, in the woods, or in a city park. One night I went to pray at Trumbull Park in the war zone. Trumbull Park was where everything bad happened in the war zone. Drug deals, gang wars, etc. In fact we called it Rumble Park when I was a teenager. So I am walking and praying in the park at about 2 a.m. and this huge guy comes up to me with a huge knife and tells me he is going to gut me. I looked him straight in the eye and I said, “If God wants you to do that you can, but if He doesn’t want you to, I am invincible until God is through with me.” I was as serious as sin and he could tell. His eyes got big and he said, “You mean you are not afraid of me?” He waved that big blade in my face and slashed like he was going to cut me. I said, “No, I know that I’m invincible until God is through with me and if He is through with me on this earth and He allows you to kill me then you are just going to send me straight into the arms of my Lord and to my reward. What is there to be afraid of?” He just stared at me for a minute and then he put that big knife away and he said, “You’ve got to come to my house and talk to my mom about this.” I said, “Are you sure?” “It’s 2 a.m.” “I wouldn’t want to wake her up.” He shook his head, “No, she will want to be awakened to hear this. She loves this kind of stuff. She is always trying to push God on me and telling me to clean up my life.” So off to his house we went and woke up his mom and it turned out she was a Jehovah’s Witness but she was so impressed that her son had listened to me and brought me home they both asked me to tell them about Jesus and we had a revival meeting in their living room until the sun came up. God began to break my heart for the war zone. I fell in love with the place and the people.

 

One Sunday my pastor came to me at church and said that a church in Tucumcari, New Mexico was without a pastor and they needed an interim pastor until a permanent one could be found. I was thrilled. The next Sunday we loaded up our little car and headed to east on I-40 to Tucumcari 3 hours away to preach. It was the sweetest little church and amazingly enough the man, who had given us the $20 dollars a few years before when we ran out of gas in Tucumcari, went to church there. I ended up preaching there every Sunday for several months. It was a blessed time. One Sunday on the way home our car broke down in the middle of the desert an hour and a half from any size town. We were heart sick. We had a baby with us and it was blazing hot outside and this was before the days of cell phones. We were really in trouble. We said a quick and desperate prayer and I stepped out of the car to see what I could do but I knew the engine was blown. I no more than stepped out and closed the door and a big silver cadillac pulled up with a white haired couple in it and asked us if we were ok and needed any help. I explained our situation and they said they were going right by our house in Albuquerque and they would be glad to take us. Lisa and I looked at each other in amazement and climbed into their air conditioned car with leather seats. We took off and we began to tell them about ourselves. “Turns out” that they were very familiar with the college that Lisa and I had met at and even knew many of our friends there. The grandmotherly woman held our baby and we talked about the Lord all the way home. The hour and a half seemed like 10 minutes and when they dropped us off at our house and we said goodbye Lisa and I turned and looked at each other and at the same time we both said, “Angels, uh huh.” out loud. We shook our heads and said it again, “Angels, uh huh.” Then we went in the house praising God.

 

I was still preaching wherever God opened the door and souls were coming to Christ everywhere we went. We were still living meal to meal but we never went hungry. My brother went to Bible college and Rusty followed him not long after and for a little while it was just our little family. Rusty and Mark are still in the ministry today.

 

About this time the youth pastor at the church we were attending took a pastorate in another city and the pastor asked me if I would take over the youth group. We prayed about it and felt that this was an invitation from God. The next Sunday we met our 19 young people that we were to shepherd. We began to put our heart and soul into these young people and God began to move. We named the youth group, yes you guessed it, Teens Unlimited and I had some business cards printed with these words across the bottom “Albuquerque’s Fastest Growing Youth Outreach”. And the ministry began to grow like crazy. Lisa and I and our babies would be out all week winning young people to Christ on the streets and then bringing them in on Sunday. My burden for the war zone continued to grow and I was constantly praying.

 

 

One evening Lisa and I were driving down the street to our house and I saw a group of punk rockers on the corner. I had never seen anything like these teenagers before. They were all dressed in black leather with punk rock band patches all over them. One of the boys had a mohawk that stood at least 9″ straight up from his head and the rest of his head was shaved. One of the other boys had his haired glued in spikes like the statue of Liberty and the rest of his head was shaved.  The girls all had heavy black eyeliner and black lipstick. I looked at them and laughed out loud and made a comment like, “look at those freaks” as I drove on by. Immediately I was devastatingly convicted in my spirit and I felt the Lord say to me, “Don’t laugh at them. I love them. You have been praying to me for the war zone, well, they are the war zone. They only look like that because they are lost and they are trying to find what only I can give them.” Rarely in my life have I felt such a clear impression from the Holy Spirit. I drove around the block and came back around to where they were standing. I pulled up and rolled down my window and asked them if they would come to Teens Unlimited with us on Friday night (We had a Friday night youth revival service  and fun activity every week). To my utter amazement they said, “Sure, that sounds cool.” I found out that the two boys names were Count and Adam. I gave them all one of my cards and we agreed to pick them up on that same spot on Friday night. As we drove away I was humbled, scared, and elated all at the same time. I doubted they would be there on Friday night but I was glad that I had obeyed the still small voice of the Spirit. To my utter amazement when I pulled up there on Friday night there they stood with 6 more of their friends all dressed the same way they were. We packed them into our car and headed off to the church. Miraculously, no one else showed up that night. (which was highly unusual because we normally had 30-40 youths back then on a Friday night).

 

I’ll never forget one of the punk girls named Janice.  She was Count’s girlfriend and had a spider web painted across one side of her face with eyeliner. She had spiked jet black hair and a black miniskirt and she was scary. Janice was perhaps the hardest hearted 15 year old girl I had ever met. She was venomous in her hatred of God and His men. She told me so in language that would make a sailor blush. She stared a hole through me as I preached the gospel that night until it made me very uncomfortable. She was not happy about being there that night but the rest of the teens listened intently and when I urged them to trust Christ, one of the girls had tears in her eyes. We had a great evening and on the way home I invited them to come with me on Sunday and they all said, “Cool.” Sure enough the next Sunday they were there waiting and ready to go and you can only imagine the looks that I got from the church when I walked in with those 7 or 8 teens in tow. Oh my. But I was as happy as I could be because I knew that God was doing it and not me. On the way home that day I learned that Count and Adam’s father was in prison and their mom worked two jobs and so they were on their own. I also found out that they hadn’t eaten in a couple of days (no wonder they were so skinny and deathly white) and that they were planning to go dumpster diving (which I had never heard of) behind the McDonald’s on the corner after church. I invited them to come home and have lunch with us and they hungrily accepted. My sweet wife cooked everything that we had in the house (that was supposed to last us the next week) and they ate every bit of it. I had never seen a truly hungry person eat and it was eye opening. We realized that day that we could talk about Jesus all we wanted if we loved them and fed them because they were absolutely starving for both and so we did. It was amazing how they would show up at our house every night around dinner time with some theological question for me to answer 🙂 and of course we always invited them to eat with us. They had some pretty crazy theological questions for me too. Like one day Adam is at our house and he says, “Brother Matt (that’s what everyone called me back then) I want you to tell me if you think this is a sin. You see the guys and I go up to the gay bar on the corner and all the guys hide around behind the bar and they send me in cause I’m the best looking and I get friendly with some old gay guy and pretend like he can take me home and then when we walk out to the parking lot the guys and I roll him for his wallet and run off. Now that’s not a sin right Brother Matt because God hates gays too, right? Wow, talk about discipleship. These boys and girls stretched me to the limit sometimes.

 

I was out praying on my porch one night and I saw Adam walking down the street picking up cigarette butts, lighting them, taking a few puffs, and lighting the next one because they had no money for cigarettes. I was appalled. Nothing in my experience to that point had prepared me to fathom that kind of desperation so I went to the store and bought a pack of cigarettes and I gave them to Adam. I just knew I was going to hell for contributing to his demise but it hurt me to see him smoking those nasty butts off the street. He was so excited about that pack of cigarettes. He would smoke three or four puffs from one and then put it out and put it back in the pack to save it for later and make them last as long as he could. He asked me to hang on to them because everyone else would steal them. So every night he would come down and have a smoke on my porch and I would talk to him about Jesus and that’s how I won him to Christ. Eventually he got saved, his little sister, Laura, got saved and started winning her friends to Christ.

 

Those church teens got excited too and started winning their friends to Christ and bringing them and before long we had gone from 19 teens to 200.

 

About this time Count came to me and told me that his girlfriend, Janice, the scary 15 year old hard hearted girl was pregnant and that her parents had kicked her out on the street and could she stay with us. Lisa and I said of course but inside we were scared. We had a “hide a couch” with a bed in our tiny living room and we made it up for Janice. I’ll never forget as long as I live the fact that she stayed with us for over a week and she never spoke a word to us. Not one. The first night I asked her if it would be ok if we went ahead and had our normal family worship and would she sit in. She never looked at me just moved to the side of the bed and sat through our family worship. We were begging God to save Janice. One night I couldn’t take it anymore and Lisa and I sat up half the night literally preaching the gospel to Janice and pleading with her to come to Christ. She sat there the whole time looking at the floor and never said a word. The next day she was gone. She and Count had stolen a car and ran away to California. We never saw Count again. I was heart broken and I remember complaining to the Lord that I really really wanted to save Janice and I wasn’t happy that I had failed. Three years later Lisa and I had been through some major disappointments with churches and ministry. We were walking out of Walmart and this beautiful young woman with long brown hair in a nice dress came running up shouting, “Brother Matt, Brother Matt and threw her arms around me.” I was stunned. I didn’t know who she was. I was looking at Lisa with a shrug like, “I don’t know what’s going on here.” After a huge hug she pulled away and said, “Don’t you remember me?” “It’s Janice.” “I stayed on your couch and you told me about Jesus.” Lisa and I were shocked. We both grabbed her and hugged her and then she began to tell us that she had given her life to Christ and that she was living back at home and had reconciled with her parents and she was soon to be married to a young man in her church. We were overjoyed! She had started a craft business and was in front of Walmart selling her wares. She ran over and picked up a clock that she had made that looked like a woman’s summer straw hat. She brought it back and handed it to us and said some of the sweetest words that I will probably ever hear in this life. She said, “I hope that every time you look at this clock you will be reminded that what you are doing is making a difference in people’s lives. You may not think they are listening but they are. You may not think that your love is touching them but it is. Please never quit.” We hugged again and walked away with tears streaming down our faces. Janice is still serving the Lord today.

 

One day I was walking down our street and I recognized two captains from the gang “South Side Locos”, Anthony and John. My brother had witnessed to Anthony years before and Anthony had even stayed with Mark for awhile. I could tell that they had been on the street for awhile. I stopped and invited them to come home with me and have something to eat and clean up. They happily agreed and they moved in and became part of our family. Eventually other gang members came to live with us too. So we traded a house full of punk rockers for a house full of Latin gang members. My dear sweet wife always welcomed in every soul that I brought home and somehow we never went hungry. We did add water to the milk sometimes and the lights and gas got shut off pretty regularly but we always found a way to get them turned back on. God was teaching us so much and we were just walking through the doors that He opened in front of us. Anthony eventually became my right hand man at Teens Unlimited and stayed with us for a couple of years.

 

Yes, another Teens Unlimited 🙂

 

Soon I was asked by the pastor to go on staff full time as youth pastor along with my brother Mark as co-youth pastor. We set out to build the city’s biggest youth ministry and change the world. But very shortly Mark and his wife returned to Illinois to plant a church. Lisa and I had a baby daughter named Rebekah (which means enchanting beauty) and no man was ever more excited to be the daddy of a daughter than I. Her first night home from the hospital she slept through the night on my chest and she has owned my heart ever since. The ministry continued to grow dramatically. We started Bible clubs in several high schools. We revived the red satin jackets, went street preaching, had youth rallies, went on inner city mission ventures, I got physically carried off by Bon Jovi’s bodyguards because I was preaching and handing out tracts with some of my young preacher boys in front of one of their concerts. Hundreds of teens gave their life to Christ. I would baptize 5 to 10 young people ever Friday night at our youth revival service. Many of them are some form of ministry today.

 

The stories are endless but I will share three of my favorites. First, I still had the bug to do old fashioned itinerant revival ministry and so I loaded up our little family, Luke was 3, Levi was, 2 and Bekah was 6 months and several of our teens in a church bus and we spent two weeks going throughout Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma preaching in churches and singing and challenging the young and the old alike to live for God. It was the most wonderful trip ever. The second story was when an inner-city ministry that had a youth camp in the mountains invited us to bring all of our inner-city teens free for a week long summer camp with lots of activities and preaching every night. Lisa and I and our team put the word out on the street in the war zone and all over town about this free camp. On the day we were to leave we drove through the war zone with our big old church bus and I was so delighted to see our teens and lots of faces I had never seen stream out of those shacks and projects with a few clothes and maybe a blanket to go to summer camp. It was surreal seeing these gangsters and hoods excited about going to camp. It was a wild week as they rode horses, played capture the flag, ate and ate, and listened to a fiery evangelist each night preach the gospel. One of those young men is a pastor today. Praise God.

 

My third story is one of the highlights of my life. I wanted to have a real live city-wide youth evangelistic meeting like Jerry Johnston had in Albuquerque back when I was in high school but I wanted to preach at this one. So we planned it all out. We got a loan at the bank to buy the hundreds of free pizzas for the event. We printed tickets and flyers and bumper stickers. We got free TV and radio spots and we got a really good deal on billboards all over town. We contracted with Dominoes Pizza to make as many large pizzas that night as we needed and have them arrive right after the altar call. But most importantly we prayed. For weeks leading up to the event I would walk to the park and pray for hours, sometimes all night begging God to touch my city like I had been asking Him since I was 16 years old. A few days before the event the pastor of the church asked me how many people I thought might be coming. I said that our goal was 500. He informed me that the largest attendance ever at the church was 600 and that was for a nationally known preacher so not to set my hopes too high. After he walked away my dear wife turned to me and she said, “Matthew, the Lord has shown me this week that we are going to have 1000 teens here.” Like any good husband, I smiled, patted her, and said, “That’s great honey but after what the preacher said we should probably plan for 400.” She meekly said, “Do you mind if I go ahead and have the team set up for 1000 just in case?” I said, “Sure. That can’t hurt.”

 

The night of the event, October 21, 1989, I couldn’t bear to look until the last minute so I stayed upstairs in the youth room with the lights out praying until they came and got me that it was time to start. I had told everyone that I didn’t want to know how it was going until I walked out on the platform to preach because I wanted to stay focused on my message. When they came to get me the people that were walking me to the auditorium were white as ghosts and uncharacteristically quiet and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be bad.” I’ll never forget stepping through the door and onto the platform and seeing 1200 teenagers crammed into that auditorium. As I am typing this my heart is in my throat, I can feel the butterflies, and tears are filling my eyes. I stepped to the podium and told my story of how lost and alone I was and how Jesus pursued me and how he changed my life 7 years before and how wonderful it was to serve Him. (Original audio below)

 

 

It didn’t feel like I was doing well but it was all I had to give. I invited those who wanted to give their life to Christ to come forward and the aisles flooded with hundreds of young people. Teenagers were all over the altar and up onto the platform at my feet praying to receive Christ. I had to back up to the choir loft. Hundreds confessed Christ that night and we baptized scores of them the next Sunday morning. After the service the teens went out into our gymnasium and consumed over 300 large pizzas. Lisa had called the 4 pizza places earlier that day that we had contracted with to shut down their stores that night to make pizza just for our event and told them to have enough pizza for 1000 teenagers and we did. I went back upstairs to that dark youth room and danced for hours and threw my shoes up in the air and praised God for answered prayer. It was one of the greatest days of my life. At our Friday night youth revival the next week I baptized kids from the pizza blast until my arms ached.

 

But there is always a spiritual battle going on behind the scenes in any successful ministry and shortly after the Pizza Blast I was called in by the senior pastor and told that my vision didn’t match his vision. He told me that he didn’t want to be Punk Rock Baptist Church. That my vision for the street kids was more fitting for a para-church ministry or something. He told me that his vision was to have 50 cream of the crop teens and that he felt that “the Holy Spirit was leading me elsewhere” and I was fired and I was not to share with anyone why I was leaving and especially I wasn’t to tell the parents and teenagers. I was to leave quietly. I felt like all the blood had drained out of my body as I walked out of his office. I was 24 years old and I was devastated. The next Sunday when I tried to go to the youth room and tell the teens goodbye I found the pastor had stationed men there with instructions not to allow me to speak to the teens. When they realized that I was ready to throw down if they didn’t let me pass they stepped aside and I was able to say goodbye to my teenagers and try to explain a little but it was pretty ugly. The saddest thing was that we had a separate service on Sunday afternoons for our inner-city teens from the war zone that ran about 80 teens per week and that afternoon my phone started ringing and the teens from the war zone were telling me that the service has been cancelled permanently and that the church had left the 80 teens standing on the street corner with their Bibles and they were told to go home.

 

My wife and I had never felt pain like that before. We were shell shocked. Our life stopped. Our income stopped. And our hearts nearly stopped. My brother had started a church in Pekin, Illinois and we put our stuff in storage and headed out for Illinois to try and help them with their church but we were dead inside. We were living in my sister in law’s grandmothers basement and my brother and his wife were living upstairs with Grandma. We were working three jobs. Lisa and I would work at the church all day (we were remodeling an old building my brother’s church had purchased) then we would catch a few hours sleep then leave our sleeping children in the basement (my sister in law would check on them periodically) and go load up our van with newspapers at 1 a.m. and deliver them to the paperboys in all the little towns around Peoria, Illinois until 6 a.m. Then we would drive 75 miles to Bloomington, Illinois where we had a job cleaning a Pharmore Store (similar to a Walmart) just trying to make ends meet. We would finish that by 9 a.m. then drive 75 miles back and work on the church. It only took a few weeks of that and our broken hearts for us to completely melt down. One night we came in and my brother had left a letter on our bed informing us that he thought we should go back home and get some financial integrity and that we were no longer welcome to stay in the basement. I tore the letter up in little pieces, we packed up our 3 children and I drove straight from Peoria, Illinois to Albuquerque, New Mexico 32 hours without stopping except for gas. We lived on my mother’s living room floor in her apartment for 3 months until we could get an apartment. I went to work laying railroad ties for $5.00 per hour during the day and vacuumed offices at night for $3.80 an hour and I felt like Samson grinding in the mill but I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. I knew God didn’t fail me, and I knew my brother was a good man, and I had loved and looked up to my pastor so it must have been something wrong with me. It was about this time that we found out we were expecting our fourth, Beverly. I was so happy. I started to think about all the pastors (including the one who had just fired me) and missionaries I knew whose children were living for the Devil and I decided that God had given me a wife and 4 little children to disciple and to provide for and I was going to pour myself into being a provider, a godly husband, and a great dad and I was going to tuck all those dreams of saving the world away and hope that one of my kids would fulfill that in my place someday. I decided I was going to build a godly family… Aflame For God 12 – Warriors For Christ

I have been so busy with our first ever TVHP that I haven’t blogged in a while. It was a wonderful program and the hand of God was evident upon it at every turn. We had multiple events and lots of fun with our 19 Colombian guest while they were here.

There are too many sweet moments to tell about them all but suffice it to say that we were all moved, touched and changed by these sweet children and by the knowledge of their aloneness in the world.

The happiest part is that we know that several, if not all, of them have found a forever family!

There are not enough words to share how wonderful the entire team was that put this program together from OHI, Grace Fellowship UMC, Katy, the host families, the translators, the Grace Fellowship small groups, the Colombian chaperones and our alliance partner Tayakai and on and on. It was a wonderful thing to see so many people working together so smoothly and harmoniously. What a monument to the grace of God upon this whole program.

It was a bitter/sweet tearful goodbye at the airport as we said goodbye to our little friends but definitely not for the last time 🙂

Below are some fun pics from different events.

After 4-1/2 months of paperwork, a special trip to Bogota, hundreds of emails and phone calls, trainings and orientations, and many prayers, our 16 little Colombian orphans arrived this morning at IAH at 6:00 a.m. There was an expectant and excited group of host families and ministry partners there to greet them with signs and balloons and all kinds of neat things. The local television news media was there to film all of the hoopla and interview several families and ministry personnel. When the children finally came through the doors a great shout arose. There were many hugs and kisses and gigantic smiles. I was so glad to see some of my little friends from Amparo De Ninas in Bogota. Yuly, Nicoll, Luisa, Paola, and others that I have grown very fond of on previous trips came running up to hug me. It always delights my heart to be in the presence of The Good Shepherd’s little lambs. If you are interested in meeting them while they are here go to www.OrphanHopeIntl.org/events to see what is happening and how to get involved. Below is the Houston Channel 11 news video. My daughter Beverly is holding the Orphan Hope sign.

After many photos, much conversation, and some more interviews we headed out to the local International House of Pancakes for breakfast. We had called ahead earlier in the week but they were still a little overwhelmed when 65 of us walked in. But we all jumped in to help and breakfast went wonderfully. As I looked around the room of smiling faces and saw conversations, laughter, translators at work, and so on, I turned to Bill and Shoby and said, “At this moment, the endless hours of work and the $45,000.00 price tag seem like nothing compared to the reward.” They heartily agreed. The impact on the lives of these children and families in the future and on into eternity and the national and global ramifications of that impact is incalculable. As C.H. Spurgeon once said,

“Ah! dear friend, you little know the possibilities which are in you. You may but speak a word to a child, and in that child there may be slumbering a noble heart which shall stir the Christian church in years to come.”

After breakfast we went our separate ways and I was blessed to catch a nap in my lounge chair before heading over to one of the host homes for an interview with the Houston Chronicle. The photographer was there when I arrived and he was catching some wonderful shots of the family and their 3 children and their 3 host children finishing up their lunch. Soon the reporter arrived and I was interviewed and then my daughter, Rebekah, who was with me and I went to play with the kids while the mom and dad were interviewed. Rebekah went to play with Marian, one of the Colombian girls and I got to play with Omar, her brother. Omar is 6 and he had a nerf dart gun in each hand and an ample supply of nerf darts. It wasn’t long before I was playing the monster and he was shooting the fire out of me with nerf darts. We had a wonderful time. It took me back 20 years to playing “army” with my two boys. I’m glad I wear glasses now though because Omar knows that the best way to kill the monster is to shoot him in the eye! We had a blast. Meanwhile Rebekah and the mom and Marian were playing Jenga and they built up a big tower of blocks. I was once again amazed at how beautiful and how sweet these children are. It amazes me that no one wants them. I wish I could take them all but I am satisfied for now to get to be around as God continues to work through us here at Orphan Hope International to “Transform the lives of orphans and those ministering to them through Christ centered… Vacation Host Programs.

“Permit the little children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” – Jesus (my hero)

I recently wrote about the joyous reunion we had with our African daughter Mercy after a year of trials and lessons. On July 4th we had another tremendous blessing to get to spend the day together. She has grown up so much and the Lord has given her a beautiful and radiant spirit since we first met her. I can honestly say that she is the single greatest miracle I have ever personally witnessed and I am humbled that God would allow me to be her daddy. We had a wonderful day playing cards (she was my partner and was so patient with me because I am terrible at it). We told stories and remembered old times. It was a generally awesome day. I couldn’t be more proud of her.

There were many sweet things that she said during the day that tremendously warmed my heart. Each time we would complement her on something she would say, “You guys made me everything that I am.” We know that it was God through us but it sure was nice to hear it. She told about how all of the scripture that mommy had taught her to memorize came back to her when she was without her Bible for awhile and so she got a notebook and wrote down all the scriptures she had memorized and carried that for her Bible. Her friends were shocked at how much Bible she knew by heart. We shared many, many “I love you’s” and many “I missed you.” She always knew that we loved her and we always knew that she loved us but we all realized on this day that God had taken us all to a new level of love for each other. I think maybe for the first time she felt like our little girl for real and it was incredibly sweet.

Later in the day we got to go hang out with some of our dearest friends and she got to meet Tanya for the first time and reunite with the Davis family. It was so sweet sitting on their couch with Mercy tucked under my arm with her head on my chest just like old times.

As Brooke and I took her home that night she delighted me with this question, “Daddy, do you remember how you used to tell me that I should write a book about my story someday, about how I survived being an orphan, running from the rebels, survived malaria, survived a cobra, survived being kidnapped and tortured, survived drinking lye, came to America nearly dead, had surgery and ended up in the Bullen family?” “Yes Mercy, I remember.” Then she said, “Daddy, do you know what a ghost writer is?” “Sure I do.” “Daddy, will you be my ghost writer and help me write my story and get it published like we used to talk about?” “Sure I will Mercy, I would be honored and delighted.” She said, “I’m ready to tell it all now. I’m ready to tell about how God had a plan for everything and how I would do it all again to get to America and be in your family and have you for a dad and mom for a mom and my brothers and sisters.” “And daddy, as soon as I turn 18 I want to go to Colombia and love on the kids with you.” “And daddy, don’t ever think that what you are doing doesn’t matter because it is bigger to those kids and to me than you can imagine” “And daddy, someday can we go and minister to the orphans in my orphanage in Liberia and love on them because I remember how lonely it was and how desperate we were for a kind word or a touch?” “And daddy, I’ll be the translator!” “Yes, baby.” I said through tears, “God will allow us to do all of that and much more, I am sure.”

Yep. Greatest personal miracle of my life. I love you Mercy Kandakai Bullen. You are a gift from God. You are a kiss on the head from my Father.

“The church of our times needs the apostolic spirit. She needs so deep a baptism with those fires of Holy Ghost that she can go out and set the world on fire by her zeal for the souls of men. Till then the generations of our race must go on, thronging the broad way to hell because no man cares for their souls.” – Charles G. Finney

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

 

Teens Unlimited, Roswell, New Mexico

 

In March of 1986 we packed up and moved to Roswell 200 miles southeast of home and moved into a little old parsonage. My first day on the job as the new youth pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, the former youth pastor, who sadly was leaving the ministry and his wife for another woman, was directed by the pastor to take Lisa and I around and show us the city. I’ll never forget how he took us by both high schools and when we mentioned how we had Bible clubs at our respective high schools and how we had started them at Teens Unlimited in Springfield, Missouri he said, “Oh we’ve tried all of that here. You won’t be able to do that in Roswell.” Lisa and I just looked at each other and smiled. We had seen what God could and would do when His children meet the kingdom prerequisites of heart hunger, sacrifice, bold faith, and radical obedience to His word. He spent several hours driving us around telling us what we couldn’t and wouldn’t do. He told us how the youth ministry consisted of 30 spoiled, rebellious church kids who wouldn’t listen to us especially since we were only 19 and 20 years of age. Thankfully we had been living in the daily presence of God long enough to know that the roaring enemy had consumed this man and we felt only compassion for him but determined that we would not let God’s name and power be so defamed among this little church and this little youth ministry if we had anything to say about it.

 

We launched into this new Teens Unlimited ministry with all the passion and fervor and faith that we had and in just a few weeks God began to open doors and began to turn the hearts of the teens and their parents and the church to us. We were loving on the church families and praying and witnessing on the streets to teens and cleaning the church and anything else that was asked of us. We quickly began to learn about the awful truth of church politics and how churches are ran (often by people who don’t resemble Jesus in the least). That was very painful but we kept our eyes on the young people and God began to bless our efforts. We fell in love with those kids and they fell in love with us. One of the first things that I felt needed to happen was that we needed to make following Jesus as attractive as it truly is. Christianity is the greatest high, trip, hit of all time. It is not a duty or a drudgery to hang out with and work for the God who keeps planets spinning and births and kills stars and who is the most amazing Person in existence. Jesus is better than anything! His way is the path to true joy and excitement and adventure. Those who think different don’t really know Him. We showed those teens that everything they were looking for was ONLY to be found in Jesus Christ. Teenager after teenager began to turn their life over to Christ and start reading their Bible and witnessing to their friends. Their parents by and large immediately became concerned and started putting pressure on the pastor to make sure that I knew that I was there to keep their kids from getting pregnant, on drugs, and cursing too much. They made it clear that I was not there to turn their kids into radical followers of Jesus. Thankfully, I was just too young to listen.

 

I was preaching every week in that youth ministry like it was a city-wide evangelistic campaign and young people and adults were coming and getting saved and committing to be followers of Jesus. I had recently read David Wilkerson’s book The Cross And The Switchblade which touched me more deeply than I can express and I remembered how the members of the Mau Mau gang in the book wore red satin jackets with white lettering to identify themselves with the gang. I got the idea that we could do the same to identify with Christ and with Teens Unlimited. We taught a Bible study on reaching the world for Christ and then presented each teen and adult that completed the class a red satin jacket with the Teens Unlimited logo emblazoned on the back. I wrote and printed a gospel tract directed at teenagers with our logo and contact information on it and the young people started wearing their jackets to high school and handing out the tracts. Within a few months of our arrival the whole church was buzzing about Teens Unlimited.

 

I did some research and found out that the largest attendance that youth ministry had ever seen in the church’s 100 year existence was 60 teens. I thought it would encourage and excite the class to break that record and so I promoted to the young people that if they would bring their lost friends and have over 60 young people on a certain Sunday that I would allow them to honey and feather me in my suit that Sunday after the service. It worked only too well and on the given Sunday we had 63 teenagers and since honey moves too slow the kids brought two gallons of restaurant pancake syrup and two feather pillows. The whole church gathered out in the parking lot as I was doused in syrup and then covered with the feathers. It was all fun and games until the bees from the clover field next door to the church got a whiff of that syrup! Within a few moments I was a howling swirling mass of bees. Fortunately our little parsonage was right across the street from the church and so I made a beeline (pun intended) for the water hose in our front yard and doused myself with water as I stripped off my suit and shirt and then tore into the house leaving the bees swirling over my clothes on the front porch. It was hilarious to say the least.

 

Another wonderful thing was that I regularly filled in preaching when the pastor was away. One of my favorite sermons that I preached there was Fire In The Church (audio of the actual sermon below) on the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Preaching on the Holy Spirit in a baptist church? Wow, did I get in trouble for that one.

 

 

Another of my favorite sermons from that period was Impact the World for Christ (audio of the actual sermon below).

 

 

We had many adventures as God began to change the young people of the church and impact the youth of the city. It wasn’t long before we had established Bible clubs in both high schools and teens were being saved and getting on fire for Christ. We were interviewed by radio and television and the young people and most of their parents were excited to be a part. About this time a young newly married couple named Scott and Jaime Gurule asked us if they could join our team. The pastor warned me not to allow them because they had a shady past and he didn’t care for them but I really liked them and they were passionate about Jesus and about teens so Lisa and I said, “We would love to have you!” in spite of the pastor’s ire. We became fast friends after that and today Scott and Jaime are internationally known pastors of Covenant Generations Church in Tucson, Arizona and have been greatly used of God. Also about this time we found out that a Baptist church across the street from the largest high school in town was shutting its doors and their 200 seat auditorium was for sale. We began to pray that we could start a youth center there and within a month or two it was ours and Lisa and I would go there every night after working at the church and paint and remodel.

 

We painted red, blue, and yellow racing stripes along the walls of the auditorium (It was just this year that I realized that those are the colors and almost the configuration of the Colombian flag). They terminated at the front with a big flame and the words where there is no vision the people perish. We turned the previously unfinished Sunday school area of the church into a 50’s diner and game-room and we would hold a mini-revival there every Friday night much like the Monday night Youth On Fire meetings that my brother and I held when we were in high school.

 

As my 7 months pregnant wife was setting up for one of these Friday night revivals and I was out in the church van picking up teenagers her water broke and we had to take her to the hospital. The doctor’s said that our baby was coming 2 months premature and the hospital in Roswell couldn’t handle a baby that small so they were going to fly us to Albuquerque to the hospital there. Here we were. 19 and 20 with a baby coming this early and neither of us had ever flown on a plane before. Yet I remember so clearly that we were at perfect peace. We knew that our lives were a miracle, that we were called of God, and that He would take care of us. We got on that little medical plane and took off and our little 4 lb. 8 oz boy, Luke, was born the next day. Today he is a fine man of God with his own family. Praise the Lord!

 

The next spring, to celebrate our first anniversary with the ministry, we decided to have a city-wide youth evangelistic campaign with a pizza blast like we had done in Springfield. Scott set up TV spots and billboards and radio spots and we put up posters and flyers all over town. We packed out the church gymnasium and I preached my heart out. Many teens from all over the city and of varied race and societal status were saved that night.

 

Shortly after the pastor called me in and told me that he and the deacons were concerned about the “type” of young people that I was bringing in. He let me know that they didn’t want “those people” in the church and that those kids parents were never going to come and were never going to tithe anyway. He wanted me to “bring in the football players and the cheerleaders.” I was stunned and sickened. I had received quite a bit of resistance all along from the established hierarchy of the church but because the teens and parents loved us so the politicos were careful about confronting me but now I had gone too far. I was being forced out. We were heartbroken but rejoicing in the year we had shared with this church and the lives that had been changed. We moved back home to Albuquerque wondering what God had for us there.

 

Aflame For God 11 – Punk Rock Baptist Church

 

“May God so fill us today with the heart of Christ that we may glow with the divine fire of holy desire.” – A.B. Simpson

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

Lisa and I started out married life in a Baptist Bible College married dorm. It was so cute. It was a tiny one room efficiency apartment with a Murphy bed that folded down out of the wall. Shortly after we moved in my mother shipped us a big box of wedding presents that the dear folks at my church in Albuquerque had collected for us. We set up our little home very nicely. Shortly thereafter we were out soulwinning and ran across a homeless hispanic family living in their van with two little kids. With the help of our prayer team we set them up in a little apartment and my new bride gave them all of her wedding presents to help establish them in their new home. They came to Christ and were baptized and we stayed in touch with them until we moved away. This was to define our family forever. From that moment on our house was always going to be a home for anyone the Lord sent and our possessions were always going to be “on loan from God” until we ran across someone who needed them more than we did.

 

We were still working in Teens Unlimited, praying, preaching, soulwinning, and studying like mad people. I was still pursuing my study of the anointing of the Holy Spirit and during our first 6 months of marriage I read every single book in our bible college’s two story library on the Holy Spirit, gifts of the Spirit, revival, and evangelism. I was a man obsessed with having what Jesus had in…

 
[quote]Luke 4:14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding district.
 
Acts 10:38 “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good…[/quote]
 

and the apostles had in…

 
[quote]Acts 4:33 And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all.[/quote]
 

and Paul had in…

 
[quote]Rom. 15:19 …in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.
 
1Cor. 2:4 and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,  5 so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.
 
1Th. 1:5 for our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction;[/quote]
 

I could honestly say with Paul…

 
[quote]Act. 20:24 my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News of the wonderful grace of God.[/quote]
 

I read the stories and biographies of men and women throughout church history whom God used mightily and the more I read the more my heart burned to know God and expand His kingdom like those men and women had. I read about D. L. Moody, R. A. Torrey, Wilbur Smith, Charles G. Finney, Billy Sunday, George Mueller, William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Christmas Evans, Peter Cartright, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Mordecai Ham, The Moravians, David Brainerd, Robert Murray McCheyne, Jonathan Edwards, C.H. Spurgeon, William and Catherine Booth, Hudson Taylor, George Fox, Andrew Murray, Oswald J. Smith, and many others. I wanted so desperately to see God vindicated in the world and to see Him show His power and I wanted so bad for people to know Him and not be lost anymore.

 

All along the way since I gave my life to Christ at Singing Hills Camp I had faced resistance by my family, friends, and even spiritual leaders. The fact was I was just too radical for most of them. As I delved deeper and deeper into my studies of the history of great awakenings and reformations and revivals (which is what my soul longed for so desperately) I began to experience more and more resistance and even persecution from those in the Bible college and the church that my life caused to be uncomfortable. I became weary of the opposition and it wasn’t long before I began to feel strongly that I should leave school (ah youth!) and pursue a ministry of evangelism full time. We packed up what little we had, said our tearful goodbye’s and headed for New Mexico. I felt that I would have more opportunities back home where my life and ministry were known.

 

Shortly after arriving back in Albuquerque we discovered that we were expecting our first child. We were ecstatic! Our families were not amused. Here we were 19 and 20 years old with nothing to our name out to save America! We moved into a little apartment in The War Zone (a section of Albuquerque riddled with drugs, gangs, poverty, and crime). I put a handmade sign on the door of the apartment that read, “Matthew Bullen Ministries Revival Center” and we began to pray for God to open the doors for us to serve Him.

 

Within a month I was offered a full time position as a youth pastor at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Roswell, New Mexico. Lisa and I felt that it was a good place to start and so we accepted, trusting God for great things. Aflame For God 10 – Fire In The Church

 

“Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything rather than a feeble flame;” – E.M. Bounds

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

God had abundantly answered my prayers to be back in the action of winning and discipling young people while attending Bible college by allowing me to be a part of Teens Unlimited Youth Ministry at Baptist Temple, Springfield, Missouri. Lisa and I were quickly assigned a bus for Sundays to pick up teens and we started hitting the streets on Saturdays visiting and witnessing to young people. God blessed our efforts and soon teens started getting saved and coming to Teens Unlimited on Sunday. We would go all over Springfield and just stop teens on the street and start telling them about Jesus. During the week our prayer groups would be praying for the teens and workers by name. We began to see God really move in hearts and change lives. It was so exciting. It wasn’t long before I was asked to preach to the teens on a Sunday morning. I was ecstatic. I had been studying and praying for power to preach and here was my chance. Lisa and I made a pact to fast and pray as much as we possibly could the week prior to the Sunday I was supposed to preach. By Sunday we were so weak and so tired that I was wondering what in the world I had been thinking. Lisa sat in the back and prayed and I gave my sermon but I felt like it was a total flop. I preached my heart out for 45 minutes and then went and sat down on the front row and put my face in my hands and started to weep. I was complaining to God that I had fasted and prayed and preached my heart out and I didn’t feel anything supernatural. Just about then I heard a great rustling and I peaked up to see dozens and dozens of young people at the front weeping and repenting and giving their lives to Christ. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I put my face back in my hands and started praising God with everything I had. The invitation lasted as long as the sermon and at the end of the 2 hour service almost all of the teens in that ministry had either been saved or rededicated their life to Christ that morning. Praise God! That night the baptism service was amazing as young person after young person was baptized. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

 

We continued working the streets and winning souls and building Teens Unlimited and more and more invitations started coming for me to preach around Springfield and around the country. Our team of prayer warriors and I made a trip to Indianapolis Indiana and held a youth rally and souls were saved and lives changed. We got to go to Kansas City and hang out at Jerry Johnston’s ministry headquarters and other amazing things. I was preaching so much that I couldn’t work a job and most of my preaching engagements didn’t pay anything so we would “pray down” the money to go. I’ll never forget whining to God one night that I had prayed and prayed and believed Him for some money and nothing had come in. I got up off my knees and went to my mailbox on campus and there was a check inside for $500.00. Boy did I do some apologizing for my unbelief to the Lord that night.

 

Then we heard that Jerry Johnston was coming to hold a week long conference on evangelism at our school and he needed volunteers to hand out brochures and put up posters and promote the meetings. We jumped in and helped and then sat enthralled each night as different speakers from around the country preached about evangelism and winning the lost. It was exciting to get to spend some time with him and tell him about what I was doing at Teens Unlimited. One night a young pastor preached on Power From On High and he told about how Jesus, our example, was anointed of the Holy Spirit to do powerful ministry and so must we be. He preached from Is. 61:1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; and Acts 10:38 “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. I was tore down. I remember going to the front during the invitation and praying so hard that I didn’t realize the meeting was over and I was the only one left at the front until one of my buddies came and got me and we left. God was continually reminding me of where the source of power was from to reach souls.

 

Lisa and I were steadily growing in our love and admiration of each other though we were still not considering ourselves romantically attached. We were just “working in ministry together” but we were inseparable and had been for 6 months. March 1, 1985 would change all of that. This night was supposed to be a youth ministry night but for some reason that I can’t remember it got cancelled and we ended up going to the mall with a young evangelist and his wife to hang out. This young man had worked for Jerry Johnston Ministries and now had his own ministry and he was also helping out at Teens Unlimited. We hit it off that night and had a wonderful time. I’ll never forget at one point he turned to me and said, “what is the deal with you and Lisa?” I said, “well we really like each other but we aren’t dating or anything.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “well frankly she is so perfect that I’m afraid if I date her I will want to marry her.” He said, “And what is wrong with that?” and I said, “I don’t know if she is God’s will, or how to even know how to know if she is the right one and I don’t want to make a mistake.” He laughed and said incredulously, “So you are telling me that you love her, she loves you, she’s perfect, she thinks you are perfect, but you are not sure if she is God’s will for you???” Then he held up his arms like Elijah and said in his best Jerry Johnston imitation “Matt Bullen, how long halt ye between two opinions?” “Marry this girl!” It was the mentor approval that I needed. I asked her out that night and she looked at me like, “I was wondering when you were ever going to ask?” and we had our first date the next Saturday night, March 7, 1985.

 

Shortly after I received an invitation from Lisa’s pastor in Michigan to come and preach at his church. I was excited to meet him and Lisa’s family and friends. I had been asking the Lord what He wanted me to preach and one day as I was walking around a high school campus praying for the teens there it struck me that the reason most Christians weren’t reaching people for Christ was that they didn’t fully grasp the gravity of three things. I felt that if people had a clear vision of the horrors of hell, a clear vision of the glories of a transformed life in Christ, and a clear vision of standing before the judgement seat of Christ and giving an account of how they had used that transformed life, their lives would be different than most of the Christianity I saw around me. I was excited about preaching this message for the first time at Lisa’s church. I was also excited because most of Lisa’s family didn’t know Christ and she and I were praying that they would come to hear Lisa’s “beau” preach and God might do something mighty on their behalf. We caught a ride with some other college students and headed for the Detroit area. We had a wonderful time with Lisa’s church and got to meet her family. I preached my heart out that night. The sermon was entitled Get A Vision (the audio is below) and God blessed it and many came to Christ that night, some in Lisa’s family. It was glorious. I’ll never forget what Lisa’s pastor said to me after the invitation ended and all of the people went back to their seats. He looked at me in amazement and said, “son, just never get to where you think it was you that did this.” I said, “yes sir”, and I have kept that promise. Glory to God alone for His mighty works. The original audio of that message is below.

 

 

God continued to bless our ministry at Teens Unlimited. Many days and nights I would walk to the different high schools in our part of town and walk around the campuses asking God to give me the souls on those campuses. One day to my utter amazement the Sr. youth pastor told me that God had burdened his heart for all of the high school kids in Springfield and he asked me if I would hold a city-wide youth evangelism meeting for Teens Unlimited. He said that he would get the pizza and everything just like Jerry Johnston was doing around the country and we could invite all of the teens in the city to come and I could preach to them. He said that we could have an all night prayer meeting the night before and just see what God would do. I was delirious with excitement. I ran back to our little group of prayer warriors and told them about the plans. We began to plan, promote, and pray. We prayed all night the night before and then worked all day the next day to get ready. The night finally came and there in the stands were all kinds of kids from all over Springfield. I was so weak and tired I was really worried but I stood up and preached my heart out all the time begging God in my spirit to do something amazing for these young people and to lift up the name of Jesus. To my great delight, when I gave the invitation teens started streaming to the front to be saved. I remember praying with one young man from the local football team and when we finished praying he jumped up and beat his chest and said, “I got it! I got it! I’m going to heaven now!” It was a miracle night. Cheerleaders, and jocks, and druggies, and just kids of all kinds got saved that night. Our faith was growing and we knew that God’s word was true. The original audio of the message is below.

 

 

Shortly after the Pizza Blast as we called it, the Sr. youth pastor announced that we were going to be taking a mission trip to the inner city of New York in the next few months. We sent off to all of the gospel tract societies in America I think and asked for free tracts. In the end we collected just at 1,000,000 tracts to take on this trip. We did car washes and fundraisers to raise the money to go.

 

Before we left in July however, I wanted to take Lisa home and meet my folks and friends in New Mexico. We had borrowed a car and gathered up all the money that we had for gas. We did the calculations and knew that it wasn’t enough to get us the 850 miles to my house but we really felt that God was in this trip so we set out by faith, trusting that He would provide along the way or stretch our gas mileage. We headed out and made it all the way to eastern New Mexico before we ran out of money and gas. We pulled into a little gas station in Tucumcari and decided to go into the Denny’s and use the restroom before we decided what to do. We bowed our heads and asked the Lord to provide. I went into the men’s room and when I came out there were four men talking to Lisa and she looked a little pale. I walked over and introduced myself and realized that they were asking about the Teens Unlimited logo on our shirts. Lisa and I explained about our ministry and that we were going home to see my folks and then returning to go on the mission trip to New York City. I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach when one of the men reached in his pocket pulled out his wallet and said, “here, I want to give you a little something to help out with your ministry” and handed me a $20.00 bill (just enough to get us home). My head was swimming and I wanted to run out the door and put gas in that car right then before that $20.00 disappeared or something. Then the man said, “hey can I buy you something to eat?” Lisa and I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days because we were saving all of our money for gas to get home but I was so excited about getting out there and putting gas in that car and getting on down the road that I told him no thank you. Lisa kicked me under the table and gave me a look like, “what are you saying? I’m starving” 🙂 but I was ready to go. She never has let me live that down. We said thank you and slipped out of the Denny’s and headed home praising God! The most amazing thing about this story is that some years later I would be interim pastor for a time at the Temple Baptist Church in Tucumcari, New Mexico and the man who gave us the $20.00 was a member of that church and he sat under my preaching for a time and I got to tell him what a miracle that money was for us.

 

We enjoyed 2 weeks at home and then back to Springfield and then off to New York City. It was a marvelous trip. We got to sing and preach on the streets and we handed out all of our 1,000,000 tracts in just a few days. It was astonishing. I remember a busy intersection in the Bronx. We would have 4 people on each corner with an armful of tracts handing them out to people as fast as they could for hours and hours. Sometimes a line would build up as the people were waiting to get whatever the young person was handing out. Many times they would stop and read it right there and we were able to engage them in discussion and lead some of them to Christ. There was a little church plant in the Bronx called Lighthouse Baptist Church and I got to sing there one Sunday night. I also got to preach at a church in Saddlebrook, New Jersey just outside of the city. It was a blessed time. We also did some sightseeing and Lisa and I stood on top of the World Trade Center and dreamed of the day we would hold city wide evangelistic campaigns in major cities all over the country. Our minds, hearts, and dreams were expanded.

 

We came home to Springfield, and with the approval of our Sr. pastor, Dr. W.E. Powell, who was also chancellor of our college we decided that we should get married before the next semester started. We set the date as August 3, 1985 (Lisa’s step dad’s birthday) which was just a few weeks away. The teenagers from Teens Unlimited and our Bible college friends rallied around us and we had a wonderful wedding. Many of the people who stood up with us, sang for us, decorated, and more were teens that we had won to Christ that year. The young evangelist who had asked me at the mall “How long halt ye between two opinions?” and his wife were our best man and matron of honor and the Sr. youth pastor walked Lisa down the aisle. The teenagers had taken up a collection and rented us the honeymoon suite at the nicest hotel in town. No two kids were ever more happy to be wed. She was 18 and I was 19 and we were ready to win the world for Christ… together! Aflame For God 9 – A Man Obsessed

 

“Saturate me with the oil of Thy Spirit, that I may be aflame. Make me Thy fuel O flame of God.” – Jim Elliot

 

So I kept seeing this redhead in the choir but I was sure that I was imagining that she was smiling at me. As I learned later the redhead’s name was Lisa and she actually was smiling at me and had been watching me for some time. She says that of all the young men in that auditorium, I was the most serious and passionate about the singing and preaching and this intrigued her. Each day when she came back to her dorm her roommates would ask her if she met a guy yet and once again she would explain that she was not there to meet guys but to get prepared for ministry. Finally they wore her down and one day she told them, “well there is this one guy I would like to meet but I don’t know his name.” They squealed with delight and made her promise to point this young man out the next time she saw him. So later that day I come walking into the cafeteria and Lisa pokes her roommate and says, “there he is…” her roommate Karen looks up and says quite loudly, “Matt Bullen!!!??? That’s the guy you want to meet, Hey Matt!! Come over here! So now Lisa is bright red and crawling under the table. It turns out that her roommate is my dear friend Karen from my church. I came up with Karen through Sunday school since we were 4 years old. She is like a sister to me. Lisa is petrified and of course I have no idea what is going on and at the moment. I don’t even recognize Lisa as the girl from the choir. Karen just introduces me to all of the girls at the table and I move on never giving it another thought. But for a week or so after Karen keeps telling me that her roommate likes me and she wants me to meet her. I keep telling Karen that I can only imagine what kind of girl she is trying to match me up with and I want no part of it.

 

Finally one day we are having a big lunch on the grass in the middle of campus and Karen comes and starts dragging me by the hand to meet her roommate. I reluctantly give in and she walks me up to Lisa and my eyes bug out because its the redhead from the choir! I feel like telling Karen, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the pretty redhead?” 🙂 Anyway, we talk a little but this girl Lisa is painfully shy and so I’m not sure if she is really enjoying this or if Karen coerced her as well. The next day however we got a chance to talk for a long time and tell each other our conversion and following ministry stories. She had been saved out of a horrible situation at the age of 13 had moved in with her pastor and his wife and kids and had lived with her youth pastor’s family some as well and been thoroughly discipled by them. She had been a radical witness in her high school too and had won and discipled many teenagers in her school. We had a very similar passion, vision, and mission in life and I left that visit that night knowing she was the one.

 

I had a little problem though. I had a girlfriend back home that my whole church thought I was going to marry. I had been chasing this girl on and off since I was in the 7th grade and everyone knew we were going to get married after she graduated high school. (Of course because we were strict Fundamental Baptists, so chasing her meant trying to sit by her in church). Now I had met the girl of my dreams and I was in a pickle. I explained my situation to Lisa and we reluctantly agreed that we should just be friends but neither one of us were very happy about it. We started meeting with some other friends every day to pray and seek God for His power to win souls. I was sharing with Lisa all of the things I was reading about the Holy Spirit and revival and she was getting more and more fired up. She and the girls in her dorm started having all night prayer meetings asking God to revive our college and to give us souls. The more time we spent together the more I knew we were both falling hard for each other and I kept trying to figure out how to get out of the fix I was in. It seems comical now but at the time it was a serious dilemma. When I went back home for Christmas, my girl back home informed me that she had met another guy and that she thought we ought to “date around” while I was away at college. No young man was ever more happy to be dumped!!

 

During this time another dilemma had been rising up in me. I had loved and soaked up all of the study and the prayer and the seeking God my first semester at Bible college but one thing was eating at me. I had just spent two years in high school winning souls every day, teaching every day, preaching every week, and various other ministry adventures and though I had needed the time with God and the season of searching for His power I was now ready to get involved in some sort of ministry and get back in the action. I had noticed a sign at Baptist Temple where I attended that read Teens Unlimited Youth Ministry. I felt drawn to that sign and I started praying that God would let me get back to winning the lost somehow and that he would let me be a part of that ministry. To my amazement, within a couple of weeks I was invited to be an assistant youth pastor in that ministry and they were also looking for a young woman from the college to work under the youth pastor’s wife and minister to the teen girls. I immediately told them about this awesome young woman named Lisa that I knew who would love to have that position. So shortly thereafter Lisa and I were off and running working in Teens Unlimited and going to Bible college and more miracles were about to begin… Aflame For God – Teens Unlimited

“When the Spirit was outpoured the disciples were all filled with power from on high, the most unlettered tongue could silence gainsayers, and with its new fire burn its way through obstacles as flames fanned by mighty winds sweep through forests.”- Arthur T. Pierson

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

I arrived at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri in August of 1984. I was beyond excited and a little scared about being away from home for the first time in my life. The first day I signed up for classes and then I found out that Baptist Temple, one of the churches in the city, was having a two night conference to welcome the students for the new year and Dr. Jack Hyles was preaching! I couldn’t believe it! I was so excited. I went to the meeting that night and my world was wrecked. Dr. Hyles preached on Meet The Holy Spirit and he made the sweet third person of the Trinity seem so wonderful that I wanted to know Him more than anything in the world. I remember walking around the campus until curfew crying out to the Lord to let me know Him like that. The next night Dr. Hyles devastated me with a sermon called The Fullness of the Holy Spirit. He preached about how the power of Luke 24:47 and Acts 1:8 was for today and was for me. He told stories about men like Wesley, Spurgeon, Whitefield, Evans, Finney, Moody, and others who had counted on and depended on an anointing of the Holy Spirit to do their work and of the miraculous results they had experienced as a result. My heart burned as I listened and hot tears rolled down my face. I felt that I would die if I couldn’t have that power from on high to win souls for Christ. I bought both tapes of the messages before I left that night and over the next several weeks I listened to them scores of times until I literally memorized every word. I got a job at night about 5 miles from the school and I would walk to work and listen to those sermons over and over again and cry and pray and beg God to let me know His power like that. I eventually wore them out to where they wouldn’t play in my walkman cassette player anymore.

 

I began getting up every morning at 5:00 am and I would run to Doling Park and spend a couple of hours in prayer before going to class. I would walk the campus at night and pray until curfew. Then I would sneak out of my bed and steal down to the laundry room after curfew and pray sometimes all night begging God to use me, to make me a preacher, to let me in on a mighty work, to give me souls for His kingdom. I began to fast for days at a time. I lost a lot of weight (and I didn’t have any to lose back then). I was doing well in school and loving what I was studying but I couldn’t get those stories of Holy Spirit anointing on the preachers of old out of my head. I wanted to be used of God or die. It was a sweet time as I got to know the Lord in a deeper way. I had stumbled across Psalm 63 and it became and remains to this day the prayer of my heart.

 
[quote]Psa. 63:1 O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water. 2 Thus I have seen You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory. 3 Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, My lips will praise You. 4 So I will bless You as long as I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. 5 My soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness, And my mouth offers praises with joyful lips. 6 When I remember You on my bed, I meditate on You in the night watches, 7 For You have been my help, And in the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy. 8 My soul follows hard after You; Your right hand upholds me.[/quote]
 

I have prayed that prayer or a portion of it nearly every day of my life since. It truly expresses the cry of my soul.

 

I began going to the college bookstore and looking for books that would tell me more about power from on high and being used of God in mighty ways. The first two I found wrecked my world worse than I could have imagined. They were both written by Oswald J. Smith, world renowned pastor and missionary statesman, and they were entitled A Passion For Souls and The Man God Uses. Oh my soul! My eyes are welling up with tears as I try to type the titles. Here is an excerpt from the book A Passion For Souls to give you a taste of what God was searing into my soul,

 
[quote]”But oh, to realize and know that souls, precious, never dying souls are perishing all around us, going out into the blackness of darkness and despair, eternally lost, and yet to feel no anguish, shed no tears, know no travail! How cold our hearts are! How little we know of the compassion of Jesus! And yet God can give us this, and the fault is ours if we do not have it. Who is really travailing in prayer? How many, even of our most spiritual Christian leaders are content to spend a few minutes a day on their knees, and then pride themselves on the time they have given to God! We expect extraordinary results, and extraordinary results are quite possible; signs and wonders will follow, but only through extraordinary efforts in the spiritual realm. Hence, nothing short of continuous, agonizing pleading for souls, hours upon hours, days and nights of prayer, will ever avail.”[/quote]
 

I can’t describe to you how my heart burned to have the anointing of the Spirit and see His power and His glory. I went back and re-read Leonard Ravenhill’s Why Revival Tarries and I saw that the first chapter was With All Thy Getting, Get Unction, unction being another biblical word for Holy Spirit power. How my heart burned as I read,

 
[quote]”Unction cannot be learned, only earned by prayer. Unction is God’s knighthood for the soldier-preacher who has wrestled in prayer and gained the victory. Victory is not won in the pulpit by firing intellectual bullets or wisecracks, but in the prayer closet; it is won or lost before the preacher’s foot enters the pulpit. Unction is like dynamite.”[/quote]
 

I was so desperate to be used of God. I started a journal to track my progress and keep me accountable to my times with God. I also recorded my impressions from God and many, many specific answers to prayer. Going back and reading those journals today I ache for the young man who wrote those words and at the same time my heart is stirred to regain some of that youthful passion and pursuit of God’s power for His glory.

 

I had been at Bible college for about 3 months and I was very homesick and so was my roommate whose girlfriend was from my church back home so we devised a plan to leave right after classes on Friday and drive the 850 miles home, see our families, go to church on Sunday morning, leave after church and drive back in time to go to classes on Monday morning and this we did. It was a crazy trip but the life changing thing for me was that while I was home for those 30 hours or so someone handed me a cassette of a sermon by Dr. Jack Hyles entitled Fresh Oil and it was about the anointing of the Holy Spirit for power in ministry. It was like pouring gas on a bonfire. I once again wore this tape out over the next few months.

 

I have always been grateful that God wouldn’t let me go about this. I am grateful that He created a hunger in me for Him that, though at times of discouragement has sometimes waned, has never never left me. He created a fire in my heart and a radical passion to see His power and glory that has never been quenched.

 

It wasn’t all reading, fasting, and praying though. I had developed a group of friends who were passionate about Christ and we enjoyed many activities together all centered around church of course. Springfield, Missouri is the world headquarters of my denomination at the time, Baptist Bible Fellowship International, and the world headquarters of The Assemblies of God denomination and there were 4 Christian colleges in this relatively small town so needless to say, there was some kind of Christian concert, revival, Bible conference, Christian film series, etc. going on every week and we enjoyed many of them. Every day we had chapel and the college would bring in a different preacher from around the country and the huge college choir would boom out hymns and it was amazing. I’ll never forget them singing The Solid Rock like every day. It quickly became my favorite hymn. I would sing out at the top of my voice,

 
[quote]”My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus name. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”[/quote]
 

After battling Satan and his hordes at Manzano High School for 2 years this seemed like heaven. We were seated for chapel alphabetically by last name and with my last name being Bullen I was seated on the second row of the large auditorium. Every day I would glance up into the choir loft at this pretty redhead that was singing in the alto section. She always caught my eye, not only because she was pretty and a redhead but because I could swear that every time I looked up there she was smiling at me. It was a huge auditorium and even from the second row I couldn’t see her well enough to know for sure. I figured it was probably just my imagination but as it turns out… but that is a story for another post. Aflame for God 7 – The Pretty Redhead

 

“Destitute of the Fire of God, nothing else counts; possessing Fire, nothing else matters.”- Samuel Chadwick  

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

Shortly after school started in 1983 it was announced that Jerry Johnston was coming to our church to hold a week long city wide crusade. We were beside ourselves with excitement. Usually when Jerry went to a city he would hold LIFE school assemblies in every high school in town to talk about suicide and share his hope in Jesus Christ. We were enthralled that he would be speaking at Manzano High! But as Albuquerque, New Mexico is not in the Bible belt and not used to such things, Jerry was denied entrance into all of the schools in Albuquerque. So Jerry sat down with my brother and me and said very intently, “If I can’t go into the schools, I want you two and your Bible club to bring the schools to me!” We said, “Tell us what to do!” He gave us boxes and boxes of tickets, brochures, and posters and on them were printed Jerry Johnston Ministries presents PIZZA BLAST. Come here about LIFE and get all of the free pizza you can eat. And it gave the date, time, and location. He looked us in the eyes and said, “I want all of these tickets and posters and brochures scattered all over Albuquerque and I want you guys to have 1000 teens here on Friday night!” (This was on the preceding Sunday). We told Jerry, “Don’t worry sir, we will have them here; you can count on us!” We left that meeting excited and scared to death! What had we just said?! We went to school the next morning and sat our Bible club down and said very intently, “If the schools won’t let Jerry come then we need to…” well you get the picture. We started praying, fasting, and talking to everyone about the PIZZA BLAST on Friday night. We gave everyone of the 4000 students in our school at least one ticket that week and we went to other high schools and mingled with the crowds as if we belonged there and handed out tickets. We attended the crusade each night that week and heard Jerry preach which further inflamed us for Christ. We gave Jerry updates of how it was going. It was so exciting. One night after the service we took the posters to several high schools and put them up all over the place. We had prayer meetings late at night. By now you see our parents, friends, teachers, etc. were scared to even question what craziness we were up to. They knew that God was driving us because they could see the fruit and the transformations taking place.

 

Friday night finally came. We ran the vans to pick people up. When we got to the 2 thousand seat auditorium it was packed out with teens and adults. I could see classmates everywhere and I knew that God had answered ours and Jerry’s prayers. The place was so packed that I had to sit in the aisle at the back which was great because I could see everyone in front of me. When Jerry started to preach I felt a wave of the the Holy Spirit sweep across the room and I knew God was going to do something big for our city and for our school. I also felt a deep burning, churning, warfare type urge to pray. I started praying like I had never prayed before. I started begging God to give us souls for our labors. I prayed so hard that I got physically ill and had to step out for a moment and get some air. My youth pastor came to see if I was ok and I remember saying, “I just want to die if God doesn’t give me souls.” We went back in and I continued to pray. When Jerry gave the invitation, hundreds of people flooded to the altars to receive Christ. It was the greatest thing I had ever seen. I saw some of the worst kids in our school getting saved that night. I was awed by the power of God and His goodness. I can’t remember how many young people from Manzano trusted Christ that night but it was over 100. We were given the decision cards (which had a space for which high school you attended) from all of the students at Manzano that came forward that night and we began to follow up and work at discipleship. We rejoiced with Jerry, our church, and our Bible club that God had done beyond what we had hoped.

 

We quickly realized that we needed more than Bible club each day and youth group on Sunday to disciple these kids and the rest that were still being saved in the Bible club each day so we started a Monday night teen church and called it Youth On Fire. We met in the gymnasium of our church which was providential because the gym, called the Dennis Elliott Memorial Youth Center, was built in memory of my uncle who was killed by a drunk teenager in 1970. My uncle who was 18 lived across the street from me. He was a sold out Christian young man and my hero. He’s the first person I ever remember telling me about Jesus. He died when I was 5. There were over 1000 people at his funeral and the church built the gym in the hopes that it would help get young people off the street and that is exactly what Youth On Fire was about. We would meet every Monday night from 7:00 – 9:00 pm. The first hour we would play games and have sports and then the second hour we would have worship and preaching. It was an awesome ministry. My brother and I would trade off preaching each week and later when we had some preachers boys rise up out of our group of converts that we were discipling they would alternate preaching with us. We had people saved (adults and teens), we counseled, fed homeless people, had all night prayer meetings, and so on. We were going going going and God was blessing our youthful fire and devotion with growth and great results.

 

As the school year came to a close I began to think about my future and I began to pray that God would allow me to attend Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. Many of my uncles and cousins had attended there and I wanted to go there so bad. I had a little money from working with my dad in construction but I needed more finances and a way to get there. My brother and I shared a car but I needed to leave it behind so that he could continue Manzano Bible Club and Youth On Fire while I was at college. Not long after I started praying my pastor called me in and told me that some one had decided to anonymously support me $100 a month while I was at BBC. Praise God! I also found out that two teens from our church and a street girl that had been saved there wanted to go also and I could ride to college with them! I’ll never forget how excited I was getting ready to go and what a surreal feeling it was when I hugged and kissed my family goodbye and headed east for Bible College. I didn’t know what the future held but I sensed that it was going to be amazing and I was not mistaken… Aflame For God 6 – God’s Knighthood For The Soldier-Preacher

“Set a fire down in my soul that I can’t contain and I can’t control… I want more of you God.” – Will Reagan and The United Pursuit Band

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

Our Bible club was underway and within a couple of months we were filling up the youth ministry at our church with teens who were being saved daily in the halls, classrooms, and library of our high school. Our youth pastor eventually convinced the church to designate two 15-passenger vans with drivers and every Sunday morning we would make the rounds and pick up “our kids” from the Manzano Bible Club. The most we ever brought on one Sunday was 42. It was exhilarating being on God’s team and seeing Him respond in big ways as a result of the simple childlike obedience of a few teens to speak about Jesus to someone everyday… and pray like crazy ☺

 

It wasn’t long before we were getting invitations to go speak at other churches and ministries about what was happening at Manzano. The first one I remember was especially exciting because it meant traveling with our youth pastor to another city about 200 miles away. We were to share our story at a church called Tabernacle Baptist Church in Roswell, New Mexico. (The amazing providence is that less than 3 years later I would be the youth pastor of this very church and God would launch an amazing ministry there… but that is for another post) On the way there our youth pastor asked us if we knew how to prepare a sermon. I answered, “Sure! You just pick a subject; find every verse in the Bible that relates to that subject, and preach about it.” Brother Rick very patiently agreed that was one way to do it but would we like to learn about using an introduction, 3 point outline, illustrations, and conclusion. We said, “great!” so the rest of the trip he mentored us in sermon preparation and delivery. It was such a blessing! We poured our hearts out and came home rejoicing. We were now itinerant evangelists just like Jerry Johnston! ☺

 

Not long after this, Dr. Jack Hyles (now in heaven) was preaching a conference at our church and so we took off from school to go. On the way to the conference I stopped and bought my first necktie. (In the picture below) My youth pastor taught me how to tie a single Windsor knot and I was ready for the conference. It was a blast and I remember sitting there with tears running down my face amazed that I was having this much fun at a preaching conference. Wow! Things had sure changed in my heart. There was this longing that can’t be described by words to preach and be used by God to transform the hearts of people the way my heart had been transformed. Dr. Hyles from that moment on would have a dramatic impact on my life and thinking.

 

Another thing that happened at this conference was I noticed that my brother and I were the only ones at the conference who weren’t wearing suits. Consequently, the next week we had our mom take us to Western Warehouse (we were still cowboys after all) and we each purchased a three-piece western cut suit. We polished up our cowboy boots and we were ready to join the preaching circuit. ☺ I have rarely felt as exhilarated as I was the first Sunday I walked into church with that new suit on. I can still smell the wool.
 

Not long after, my pastor, Dr. Curtis Goldman (now in heaven) asked me to preach for him on New Years Eve 1982. I couldn’t believe it! Our church of 1000 people was huge to me and I was so excited and scared at the same time. I prayed and fasted and studied for days and felt the Lord leading me to challenge the congregation with the fact that Jesus had said, “If the world hated me it will hate you.” As I looked at the church and the Christians around me and as I read and studied the Bible, the largest dichotomy that I had observed was that the Christians I knew, for the most part, were not turning the world upside down and were not being persecuted for it. The Sunday came and I stepped into the pulpit and experienced something for the first time that I have enjoyed many times since and came later to understand as the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I preached my heart out on The Persecution of the Righteous (actually audio HERE) and explained to the people that a direct indicator of whether they were following Jesus or not was the amount of or lack of persecution taking place in there lives. I shared passages such as

 
[quote]Luke 6:22 – 26 22 “Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. 23 “Be glad in that day and leap [for joy], for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. 24 “But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. 25 “Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe [to you] who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. 26 “Woe [to you] when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”[/quote]

I challenged them to look at their lives and ask themselves the question, “Does the world hate me?”
 
[quote]John 15:19 “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”[/quote]

I was surprised at how many people came to me after the message and said that they were really challenged to look at their lives. Praise God! I was equally surprised at the number of people, whom I looked up to, who came to me and warned me to be careful of taking my newfound faith too seriously. I was satisfied in my spirit that I had spoken the truth in love and I trusted God to give the increase.

 

I spent the rest of that school year building the Manzano Bible Club, preaching where and when I could, and reading and studying and listening to sermons like a madman. Some of the books that touched me deeply early on were Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, Why Revival Tarries, Sodom Had No Bible, both by Leonard Ravenhill, God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew, Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray, and biographies of George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, and William Carey. These books painted for me a radical Christianity that I didn’t see around me and I longed for it. As David said in Psalm 63 I thirsted for it as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. As I tried to live what I read in the scripture and these books the persecution at home, school, and church was intense at times. I continually discovered though that the overwhelming joy of following what the Bible said over what man said and the joy of seeing God’s fingerprints all over our ministry as a result overcame all discouragement. The school year ended and I spent the summer working in construction with my dad.

 

That summer, July of 1983, I also returned to Singing Hills Youth Camp and once again Jerry Johnston was there but this time he was aware of our ministry and we were able to spend some awesome time with him and at the end of the camp he invited us to come on stage with him and share our testimony of what God had done the previous year! It was heady stuff getting to speak on stage with the man whom God had used to lead us to Him. He was also going to be speaking the next week at the camp and he invited us to come back and share our testimony then also. As it so happened, our uncle’s church from Dodge City Kansas was going to be there and our cousin was the youth pastor. Their hearing our testimony lit a fire in their teenagers to go back to Kansas and turn their world upside down for God. Little did I know that less than 4 years later I would be a youth evangelist and would be holding a week long revival in that Dodge City church. But that is a story for another post. We went back to Manzano that next year even more on fire than before and I will share about that in Aflame For God 5 – Youth on Fire.

 

“Aggressive Christianity is the world’s greatest need.” – A.B. Simpson

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

One of the things that Jerry Johnston had done as a young preacher starting out at age 14 was to start a Bible club in his school in Kansas City, Kansas. He began winning his classmates to Christ and learned to preach as he discipled them. We had heard him tell about it at camp that week and so we were determined to start where he had started. School started on Monday, August 23, 1982 but it wasn’t until Thursday, August 26, 1982 that we were able to shift our classes around and start our Bible club. That Thursday we gathered some of our friends that would come and met in the library at lunch. I didn’t know what to do once we had them all seated around the table but I had heard somewhere that as a new believer you should start reading the Bible in the book of John so I figured the best place to start with these unbelievers was the book of John so I opened up my new leather bound Bible to John 1 and I started reading. I read John 1, 2, and 3 and when I got to the part in John 3 where Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless he is born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven, I noticed that my brother was talking to our friend Ted Chavez and Ted had tears coming down his face. It wasn’t too long before my brother and Ted bowed their heads and Ted prayed to receive Christ as Savior. It was unbelievable! We left that library like we were walking on clouds. It felt like the book of Acts all over again. We praised and thanked the Lord for His Spirit moving.

 

When we got home we told our mom all about it and she made a wonderful suggestion. She said that we should start a notebook and write in it the names of the souls that God gave us each day. So we went in my dad’s office there in our home and got a brand new red spiral notebook. Here is the entry from the first day…

 

The Holy Spirit Bible Study

Started August 26, 1982

Ted Chavez accepted the Lord 8-26-82

 

That night we praised the Lord and prayed and rejoiced. The next day, Friday, August 27, 1982 we came to school with a boldness that God was going to turn our school upside down for Him. We started talking to everyone about Jesus and to our amazement some of them were so ready to hear it and so ready to place their faith in Jesus. Others were aggressive and had many questions that I couldn’t answer and I knew I would have to do much more studying. That Sunday we came to our youth group so excited to tell our youth pastor about what God was doing at Manzano High. He was shocked and thrilled and allowed us to give our testimony. After the service two girls, Cheri and Debbie, walked up and said they went to Manzano and they wanted to be a part of our club. We were elated to have some fellow soldiers from our church to help us.

 

The entry in our red spiral notebook the next week looked like this…

 

Charter Members: Matthew Bullen, Mark Bullen, Mike Meyers, Mark Malles, Glen Jorden, John Owens, Ted Chavez, Cheri Pendley, Debbie Greenwood.

 

Friday 8-27-82 saved

David Watkins (won him to Christ during Spanish class)

Paul Langley

 

Monday 8-30-82 saved

Micheal Granjean

 

Wednesday 9-1-82 saved

Jennifer Fox

 

Friday 9-2-82 saved

Jerry Hicks

Jennifer Taylor

 

Tuesday 9-7-82 saved

Morris Sanchez

 

We were off and running! I would write the names of the kids who came to Christ in the fly leaves of my Bible and then transfer them to the notebook each night. But in a very short time I ran out of space in my Bible. Over the next 2 years we would write the names of over 300 teens in that red notebook as having professed faith in Christ! We were living the book of Acts!

 

I started reading every Christian book I could get my hands on. I told my parents, grandparents, and friends that all I wanted for birthdays and Christmas were Christian books and they complied. We were witnessing every day and running into Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Satanists, Agnostics, Atheists, you name it. I remember one time I was witnessing to a Satanist and he started foaming at the mouth and cursing and blaspheming and tried to bite me before his friends tackled him and dragged him away. In a short period of time we became known throughout the school as the Jesus Freaks and we started getting hauled into the principals office on a regular basis and threatened for witnessing. Part of the fun was running back to the rest of the club and telling everyone about the miracle that just happened to us. One day my brother came running up very excited and told us that he had just won the leader of the Cholos (our old rival gang) to the Lord and that He had prayed with Mark right in front of his whole gang. Our Bible club was kicked out of room after room on campus but God always provided and that club met every day for the next 3 years. Teens were being saved, lives were being changed, we were discipling our flock and they were devouring the Word and witnessing and winning souls too. One day we got the idea to stand up in the hallway between classes as everyone was at their lockers and preach a 5 minute gospel sermon. That got us hauled into the office. We would bring gospel tracks to school and pass them out. One day we were hauled into the office and as we were sitting outside the principals office waiting to be seen we gave out our last tract to a teen waiting there as well. When we were called in they asked us if we were handing out tracts and we said yes. They asked to see one and we truthfully told them we didn’t have any more 🙂

 

Our school had atrium hallways where the lockers were that were open to the sky. We got the idea to come in at night over the roof and drop down into the hallways and put a gospel tract through the vent in the door in every locker in the school. Remember in my previous post I said stark raving mad passion…? Yeah. We sent off to different tract societies and had them send us the 4,000 tracts that it would require then one night we dressed all in black and delivered our package. The next morning it was pandemonium as 4,000 students walked through the halls reading a gospel tract and then, something we hadn’t anticipated, promptly threw them on the floor. We were hauled into the office for that one! Many young people came to Christ through those tracts and we were walking on clouds. We pulled our cat burglar stunt with the tracts several more nights over the next three years. One of the neatest evangelistic ideas we had that year was to get everyone in our Bible club a white T-shirt with big red letters on the front that read “DO YOU KNOW?” We would strategically wear them all on the same day and when anyone asked us, “do you know what?” we would say, “do you know if you died today if you would go to heaven or hell?” Many, many young people came to Christ as a result of those simple T-shirts. In just a couple of months the news of our Bible club began to spread all over the city, state, and eventually the country and we began to get invitations to tell our story at churches and youth rallies. But that is for another post.

 

There is no way to tell all of the miracles that happened everyday for those 3 years of Bible club. Many of those teens are walking with the Lord and in ministry around the country today. To God be the glory! But that was just the beginning… Aflame For God 4 – 17-Year-Old Evangelist

 

“The Gospel is not an old, old story, freshly told. It is a fire in the Spirit, fed by the flame of Immortal Love; and woe unto us, if, through our negligence to stir up the Gift of God which is within us, that fire burns low.” ― Leonard Ravenhill

 

Read the beginning of the series HERE

 

My brother and I left that camp in the summer of 1982 “On Fire For God.” We went home talking about how the world was going to hell and God had Personally called us to do something about it. Well, frankly, we scared our parents, friends, neighbors, pastor, and youth pastor half to death… in the best possible sense. A tremendous spiritual battle had been raging at home with our parents the whole time we were at camp (imagine that) and we were hit with it the minute we walked in the door but the Holy Spirit was so near and at night when I would steal away into my room and stretch out on the floor before Him, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would come again in such sweet fellowship and power and with such a clarity of vision and passion that I couldn’t doubt that I was on the right path. The one overwhelming message to me at that time was “this life is a wisp of vapor, a puff of smoke, a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes into thin air… live for eternity!”

 

We started spending hours in prayer and in the word reading and memorizing. We talked to anyone who would listen about Jesus. It was a heavenly feeling to know your cause for which you were born and to be about that cause for the glory of God and for the thrill of being in the Lord’s army. I knew I had scared my mother when I came out of my room with a big box of all my worldly music and clothes (which I had purchased with my own money) and explained that these weren’t glorifying to God and so I was throwing them away.

 

I also asked her to take me to the Christian book store so I could get a “real” Bible. She did and I bought a leather bound King James Schofield Reference Bible. I was so excited I nearly burst. The first thing I did when I got home was to take a red pen and underline every verse in the New Testament about salvation and began to memorize them so that I could lead people to Christ. The word came alive to me and I saw so many wonderful things there. In a relatively short period of time I had read through the entire Bible. I remember sitting on the couch at my grandparents house on a Sunday afternoon underlining verses in red. Every once in a while I would exuberantly shout out, “Oh wow! Listen to this verse I found” and I would read it out loud to them. My grandfather would just look at me as if I had lost my mind. The other thing that changed that really shook some people up was that in our rather large church all of the teens sat in the back right corner of the sanctuary and mostly goofed off and passed notes during the service on Sundays but on my first Sunday back at church after camp I sat up on the front row with my new Bible and a notebook and feverishly took notes of the pastor’s sermon. Two weeks before I had been on the back row flirting with the girls and joking with the guys. How my heart and affections had altered. For the first time in my life I had been introduced to something… someOne Who was worth my full attention and devotion, Who was worth my whole life.

 

The summer was rapidly coming to a close and I began to anticipate going back to school and putting my Capture America plan into motion. The Holy Spirit was so heavy on me. Even though we were already beginning to experience some persecution from our family and friends, I could feel the Hound of Heaven pursuing me and pulling me into His kingdom work. I knew that there were about 4,000 students in my high school and in my first two years there I hadn’t ran into one who really knew the Lord. This was going to be my first mission field. God and Mark and I were going to turn this school upside down for God! The week before school started I called all of my bullriding buddies and told them that I had met the Lord and that I was a new man and we weren’t going to be having any more gang fights with the Cholos (a local hispanic gang), no more drinking parties, and no more skipping school (the semester before I met the Lord, I had skipped 2/3 of my classes to go get into fights and steal and drink). I told them that I was starting a Bible Study at lunch every day in the library and I wanted them to come. After long periods of silence, and a few questions like, “are you messing with me man?” some agreed to come. Mark and I were prayed up, fasted up, studied up and ready for school to start. In my next post I will begin to tell the story of the Manzano High School Bible Club. Aflame For God 3 – Cat Burglars For Jesus

 

“I have come to set the world on fire.” – Jesus (Luke 12:49)

 

I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Nearly everyday in 5th and 6th grade I had to take a different route walking home from elementary school because invariably some gang members would be waiting to beat me up. I hated elementary school those years but it paled in comparison to how rough middle school was and in 7th and 8th grade the violence intensified. I was in or fleeing a fight nearly every day. One day in 7th grade it climaxed for me. A high school young man waylaid me with with a chain when I had my arms full of books. I ended up with two black eyes, broken nose, broken teeth, cuts and chain link shaped bruises all over my face and torso. But the damage to the outside wasn’t the real tragedy. It was the damage to my soul. A murderous hate began to well up within my that day. I began to study martial arts, carry weapons, and over the next three years became the one picking fights. I never got beat up again. Eventually I became the leader of a gang in my high school called Stomps. One day in 10th grade a member of another gang, Leroy, picked a fight with my little brother (a year and a half younger than me) and I told him, “Meet me in the Safeway grocery store parking lot at 2:00pm and we will settle this!” Then I cavalierly shouted, “and bring some friends so I don’t get lonely!” My gang of 10 Stomps and I came around the back of the Safeway at 2:00pm armed with clubs, chains, and brass knuckles and got the surprise of our lives. In the parking lot stood 40 rival gang members holding machetes, knives, and pistols! We froze in our tracks. Fortunately they were looking for us to come around the other side of the building and so hadn’t seen us. We quickly ducked back behind the Safeway, agreed that we had to run to live, and took off for a large, nearby apartment complex where we could split up and loose any followers. Sure enough we were seen and hot pursuit followed but just as we hit the apartment complex 3 police cars pulled up and started arresting the rival gang members and we were able to slip away unseen. Leroy and his cousin Rodney became my arch enemies and many conflicts began.

 

My mother got scared. She told me, “You will end up in prison or in the grave.” In the summer of 1982 she went to my dad and told him that there was a Christian summer camp coming up in July and she felt like my brother and I really needed go there. She later said that she felt like it was a last-ditch effort to save her boys before the world completely assimilated us.

 

 

So we packed up and went to Singing Hills Youth Camp in the mountains of New Mexico for the week of July 19 – 23, 1982. I figured that I would play some sports, meet some pretty girls, and all would be well. In my wildest dreams I didn’t foresee the cataclysmic shift that was about to take place in my life.

 

God’s secret weapon, that I didn’t count on, who was speaking that week was a fiery 22-year-old evangelist by the name of Jerry Johnston (now pastoring in Kansas City, KS). Jerry had been preaching since his radical conversion at the age of 14. He enjoyed an anointing of the Holy Spirit unlike anything I had ever encountered in my life up to that point. He preached, and I mean PREACHED, every morning and every evening of that week. He made living for Jesus seem so awesome and the power of God so real that a hunger and thirst for God began to grown in me. I wanted to know God like Jerry did. I ached to have the power that Jerry had with God. The Holy Spirit’s conviction was so strong on me as he preached… I resisted Monday morning, Monday night, Tuesday morning, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, BUT GOD!! on Wednesday night, July 21, 1982 oh what a night. As Jerry preached the room seemed to sparkle with electricity. It was as if heaven came down and touched me and the dam broke in my heart and a torrent of God’s glorious grace raged down over me. I felt that if I didn’t get out of my seat and go to the front when the invitation was given, I was going to explode right in the pew. I bolted to the front to join the dozens of other teens coming to kneel there and I prayed a very simple prayer that I meant with all of my heart, “Lord, if you want me, if you want my life, I’m Yours.”

 

I can’t explain the peace, power, joy, and stark raving mad passion that came over me at that moment but deep inside I knew that He had pursued me, He had called me, I was special to Him, and He wanted to use me for something great. The only way I could explain it was just to say that He had “set me on fire” for Him! As I was still kneeling there, I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned to see my brother, Mark (now pastoring in Missouri), with tears streaming down his face and he said, “I gave it all tonight brother.” I remember it as if it happened 5 minutes ago. I was later to realize that God had put that stark raving mad passion in my brother too. The Bullen family would never be the same again. I went to my youth pastor, Rick Cochran (now pastoring in Indianapolis, IN), the next morning and said, “Brother Rick, you are not going to believe me, but I think God is calling me to preach and I don’t mean someday, but now. I’m burning up inside but I’m just a 16-year-old kid. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Please tell me if this is my imagination. Tell me how to know if it is from God.” Rick wisely opened his Bible to 1 Corinthians 1 and read starting with verse 20:

 
[quote]20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 26 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; 27 but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, 28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no man may boast before God. 30 But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, 31 so that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.”[/quote]
 

I was so happy! God has chosen the foolish, the weak, WHOO HOO!! I qualify! Rick prayed with me right there at my bunk and I accepted the mantle that God had placed on me. I was going to be a preacher!

 

The rest of the camp I soaked up every word that Jerry Johnston had to say. Two things he said that exploded in my heart were, first, he told the story of D.L. Moody, the great 19th century evangelist who shook two continents for Christ, and how as a young believer Moody had heard a man, a Mr. Varney, say, “The world has yet to see what God will do with one man who is wholly committed to Him.” and how Moody had walked out of that meeting saying, “Oh God let me be that man.” Oh! How my young heart burned when I heard those words! I too wanted to test God in this and see what He would do with little old Matt Bullen. Second, Jerry said to us, “most young people go to summer camp and they cry and they make all kinds of commitments to God but then they go back home and nothing changes…” Then he shouted, “I’m praying that one of you (and I could have sworn that he looked right at me) goes home and turns his family, his high-school, and his city upside down for God!” Oh! I wanted to jump up and run out to the highway that snaked its way past the camp and through the mountains down to my home-town of Albuquerque, New Mexico and start hitchhiking home so that I could get started turning my world upside down for God.

 

I felt the power of God’s Spirit on me so strong that I thought I was floating. I felt light and tingled all over and my heart was bursting with joy. It was the most wonderful experience to know that God had placed me there to hear those words, that He was real, and powerful, and He wanted me on His team. I learned that Jerry Johnston’s ministry theme was Capture America for Christ and that at the young age of 22 (only 6 years older than me at the time) he already had a nationwide ministry that was reaching thousands for Christ. Capture America… what a vision! I started to formulate a plan in my heart of how I was going to help him do it… but more on that in Aflame for God 2 – A Puff of Smoke.

 

Every year for the last 12 years I have written a New Year’s letter to friends and family and every year I have started the letter with “this year was our busiest, most exciting, or most stretching year yet.” Well 2010 so exceeded any previous year in every category that I will not even try to compare it to any other year to date. It was a year of miracles, battles, loss, great advances, and most of all, it was a year of drawing ever closer to our sweet Savior and drinking deeply of His sufficiency in everything. The year started off with a bang in January as we reached out to a devastated young woman named Jana who was in a courtship with our son Levi who was in Chicago in the Navy. We took Jana in on January 15 and the next day Rebekah, Beverly, Brooke, and I left for Bogota, Colombia for a week. We had a marvelous time of blessings and ministry in Colombia but all during that week the story of what Jana had been through was unfolding and by the time we returned home we were in an all out battle with her adopted parents, the church I was pastoring, and the hordes of hell.

Over the next three months we learned what it means to fast and pray and sing and speak His name as we wrestled many days and nights with principalities and powers. In February I was laid off for the 3rd time in 2 years, had a car accident, had some major Lupus flare ups, was in court several times battling evil, and spoke at both the men’s and women’s Tres Dias weekends. God was so near to me and His power was so evident that I felt like I was in a dream. Rebekah was able to attend the women’s Tres Dias and God used that weekend to take her up about 3 notches on the radical for Jesus scale. I was so blessed to be there and to speak on the waterfall of Grace. One young woman who was there named Tanya really related with my messages on our Heavenly Father’s delight in us through Christ and how earthly fathers are supposed to reflect that with their children. She later asked me if I could be her “stand in” Daddy because she had never experienced that kind of love before :-). She is now a part of the family and like a big sister to the girls, especially Rebekah.

Through all of this Beverly was leading the charge to complete the adoption paperwork to bring our beloved Colombian girls home. In April Lisa and I traveled to Bogota to spend 5 lovely days with our girls there. It was Lisa’s first time in the country and first time to meet the girls. We had a dream week together. It was beautiful. We came home very excited and completed the last leg of the adoption paperwork. Unfortunately there were more battles to fight. The pressure of the prospect of having two Colombian girls to share us with proved to be too great for our 15 year old African daughter, Mercy. In the week after we returned home from Bogota she ran away 3 times and eventually CPS kept her and determined that we were not qualified to give her the psychological help that she needed and eventually terminated our parental rights. We were broken hearted to lose Mercy and equally devastated to learn that this incident had also disqualified us from adopting our Colombian girls as well. Once again though, God was nearer and more real than ever before.

In May, due to me standing up against serious sin in the church and holding the people involved accountable, defending Jana against her abusers, and our troubles with Mercy, our little church that I was pastoring dwindled to nothing and we closed our doors saddened but constantly assured in multiple and sometimes miraculous ways that we were on the right path and that God was preparing us for a greater vision. Even in all of this, Lisa and I still were able to counsel and encourage 2 to 4 couples a week throughout the spring.

Also during the spring a wonderful blessing from God was taking shape. Jana, who is a gifted musician and songwriter, began to write song after amazing song and Rebekah, Beverly, and Brooke began to help her to develop different harmonies Some of us got inspired by Jana’s writing and wrote a few songs ourselves to which Jana composed and added the music. Before long the girls had several songs with absolutely beautiful harmonies that they were singing around our piano every day. The anointing was so heavy that over the summer God brought scores of people through our home to hear them sing and there was never a dry eye in the house. It was like a kiss on the head from our Heavenly Father. The girls began to call themselves Purchased and started blogging about their songwriting at http://1cor619-20purchased.blogspot.com/. They are in the process now of recording their first CD.

In June we took 27 people to Bogota, Colombia to minster to about 400 orphans. God opened many doors and blessed in many ways. When we returned home, we determined that God was leading us to form a non-profit ministry to work on behalf of orphans everywhere. We named the ministry Orphan Hope International. It was a very exciting time. We began immediately to lay out a mission and vision for the ministry. Our mission statement reads “Transforming the lives of orphans and those ministering to them through Christ centered Mercy Missions, Padrino Programs, Adoption Awareness, and Haven Homes.” Our initial focus is on Colombia, then Latin America, and then the world. The ministry has literally exploded and we are running full blast just to try and keep up with all of the opportunities God is bringing us. God has put together a wonderful team of people who are like family to me. I am so honored to stand shield to shield with them and defend the fatherless. Our web address is www.OrphanHopeIntl.org. I have also blogged about the journey at www.mattbullen.blogspot.com

August was another miracle laden month for the Bullen family. God is so good! On Sunday, August 1st the parents of our precious daughter in law, Misti, celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, on Monday, August 2nd our beautiful daughter Brooke turned 17, on Tuesday, August 3rd Lisa and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, on Wednesday, August 4 Luke and Misti gave birth to our first grandchild, a beautiful little girl named Joy, on Thursday, August 5th our son Levi came home from the Navy to join in the week of celebrations!

The rest of the summer was packed with orphan ministry endeavors. In September our board of directors made a trip to Bogota to meet with the Colombian government and establish official relations regarding our work there. The trip was successful beyond our wildest dreams and when we returned we began planning for a Christmas vacation program where we could bring our Goddaughters home to the U.S. for Christmas and our first annual fundraising dinner entitled Share The Hope.

October and November were grueling as we worked through mountains of paperwork and planning to be able to pull off these two events and spoke at two Tres Dias weekends. God walked right with us though and held our hand through every part of it. It was exhilarating to see Him knock down road block after road block to make this all come together. God sent another little miracle to us in November when Jana brought home a mentally ill homeless girl named Jessica that she found hungry and freezing outside of the Walmart where Jana worked. I’ll never forget the way the text started that Jana sent me to ask if it was ok, “Papi, please don’t say no right away…” Jana went on to remind me that this girl was Jesus in Matthew 25 and that she needed to be clothed and fed and so could she please stay with us. Of course I was overjoyed that God was raising up my girls to have this kind of heart and compassion and I assured her that she could indeed bring Jessica home with her. She stayed with us for a month and reminded us that people like Jessica are truly Jesus in a distressing disguise.

God blessed mightily, our work paid off, and on December 10 eight precious orphan girls stepped off of the plane to spend 3 wonderful weeks with us. It was a joyous and magical time and we were able to share all of the Christmas season with them. The Share The Hope fundraiser was wildly successful with over 300 people attending. My girls sang and I and other board members spoke. The orphan girls shared beautifully and tearfully about their hopes and dreams and asked for our help. It was an anointed evening to say the least. Levi and Jana were engaged in November and began planning a wedding for April of this year but the Navy changed their plans on them and so when we found out that Levi was going to be able to come home for Christmas we quickly scrambled and got the paperwork together and they were married on December 18. They still hope to have a reception with all of their Texas friends sometime this coming spring. God brought our whole family together and a few more for Christmas. I still shake my head and chuckle at my Heavenly Daddy when I think that 3 continents were represented at my dinner table on Christmas day. I have blogged in more detail about all of these events so I hope that you will check them out at www.mattbullen.blogspot.com.

Finally, this month we took 30 people to Colombia for a week and God rained down on us with blessings and opened doors. All of my girls went with me and sang and ministered in the orphanages. The ministry is poised to help tens of thousands of children in the years to come and I am so humbled and honored to be a part. We gave up our house this week and moved into an apartment as we try to prepare ourselves to be ready to minister in whatever part of the world that God needs us in that particular month. (We have many pleas for help from around the world). I can’t even imagine anymore not living daily in His hand, depending totally on Him for everything. I believe I can speak for my family when I say that we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. He is all we need. He is sufficient! We can lay back completely in His arms knowing that He will carry us through.

Our little family has grown up. Luke, Misti, and little Joy live in Willis, TX. They are planning on going with me to Bogota in June to minister to the orphans. Levi finishes his training command in Virginia this spring and he and Jana will find out then where they will be stationed long term. Rebekah will start classes at the All Nations School Of Missions in Houston this spring. She plans to be a missionary somewhere in Latin America. Beverly will attend Beauty College this spring. She plans to get her degree and then possibly teach cosmetology to the girls in the orphanages since there is a great demand for that trade in Colombia. Brooke plans to finish high school this spring and then move to Colombia to teach English in the orphanages there. All of our children love God and love others extravagantly and they are a continual blessing and inspiration to Lisa and me. Two other girls who have become like daughters to me are also headed to work with orphans. Rachel Humphrey who played the violin for the Bullen girls band Purchased is leaving this week to go to Mexico for a year and Hannah Loomis whom I pastored for years and whom I love dearly is leaving this week for a year in Uganda, living in the orphanage there and ministering to the children. I stand in awe of what God has done and how He has blessed me to be around some of His choice saints this year. All I can say is He is sufficient. He is all I need. We love you all and pray for the nearness of Christ to you and your families in 2011.

The Bullen Family

Christmas Day 2010 was a day of miracles for the Bullen family. First of all, everyone of the original 7 Bullens were there (an increasing miracle as the years go by). Luke with his precious wife Misti and their beautiful baby Joy, Levi home from the Navy, Rebekah, Beverly, Brooke and of course Lisa and I. However, added to the mix were some very special people. Jana, Levi’s fiancee and a precious addition to our family, Tanya, a blessing that we have claimed as our own, Heidy and Ginary, our delightful Goddaughters from an orphanage in Colombia, Adrianna, an official of the Colombian government staying with us for the month of December, and Anoop, an Indian man with whom I have the privilege of working! 15 total! What a day it was. 3 continents were represented at our humble Christmas dinner. Amazing! Thank you Lord for making our home place where you dwell and where you draw your “other sheep” to yourself. Each one had a Christmas stocking with their name on it (thanks Brooke) filled with goodies and gifts. I would say it was magical but I think supernatural would be more appropriate. To God be the glory.

On December 10, 2010 one of the biggest miracles of my life transpired. I was standing in the international arrivals terminal at George Bush Intercontinental Airport with my wife and four girls when out walked my two Goddaughters from Colombia who had come to visit us for 3 weeks over Christmas. The story of how this moment came to be is strewn throughout this blog and some of it is hidden deep in my heart never to be shared this side of heaven. It would be impossible to list the number of prayers, tears, hours, phone calls, emails, meetings, pieces of paper, plane flights and heart-stopping setbacks that preceded this moment but suffice it to say it was significant. There were many times that we were told it was not going to happen and yet we continued to believe that “the setting for a miracle is difficulty and the setting for a great miracle is impossibility.” As I am writing now the girls are back in the orphanage in Bogota and our vacation with them is over but the list of little Christmas miracles that we have experienced over the last 3 weeks are still shining in our minds and in our hearts. Here are a few of them… Hearing Heidy in the morning say from the top of the stairs in English, “Good morning Daddy, I love you.” then she would run down the stairs and jump into my arms… Taking the girls shopping and Ginary walking up with two blouses and asking me which one I like the best and then smiling and putting the one I chose in the basket… Seeing them enjoy horseback riding, ice skating in the Galleria, making cookies and peanut brittle and fudge, picking out a Christmas tree, wrapping gifts, singing Christmas carols, shopping in Old Town Spring especially the old fashioned candy store and toy store, riding the rides at the Family Fun Center, playing video games with the girls and laughing their heads off, watching Spanish cartoons on Mom’s computer all night long (oops) and many many more. Christmas day was amazing. Seeing them enjoy our new grand baby Joy on her first Christmas. Watching them open their gifts was incredible. My favorite part however was Christmas Eve as we gathered around the fire with our hot chocolate and egg nog and listened as Heidy read to us the Christmas story out loud from the Spanish New Testament and then read Max Lucado’s John 3:16 gospel tract out loud in Spanish as we remembered why Jesus came. What a miracle moment it was.

December 2010 will live in my memory as the month of Christmas miracles. God showed Himself mighty in so many ways this month. It started with two officials of the Colombian government flying into Houston on December 3rd to meet and learn more about Orphan Hope International. We enjoyed 3 days of meetings and learned much about each other and how we can cooperate together to help the children of Colombia. The Holy Spirit was strongly felt in all of the meetings but it was the third day that will stand out in stark relief in my mind. We had been discussing many processes, programs and plans for our future work with orphans in Colombia when both of these officials with tears in their eyes looked at us and said, “The greatest thing that Colombia needs from Orphan Hope is the spiritual element. Luis (our Director of Operations) has been telling us how his life was changed through Tres Dias and we want you to bring that to all of our institutions in Colombia (about 30,000 children).” I felt the blood drain from my head and the hair stand up on my neck as I looked at the other board members in the room to make sure I had just hear what I had heard. Their wide tear filled eyes assured me that I had indeed heard correctly. We went on to talk about how Orphan Hope brings something that other organizations don’t bring and that is spiritual transformation through Jesus Christ. We talked about how reaching the children of Colombia with this message could ultimately impact the future of a nation and the world. It was a miracle moment and the beginning of a string of Christmas miracles that we were to enjoy as 2010 came to a close. To God be the glory!

Hospitality has always been a passion of the Bullen family. The Bible says some have entertained angels unaware by being hospitable. Mother Teresa called those in need of hospitality “Jesus in disguise.”

In the last three years and especially the last few months, God has taken it up a notch for us. On July 3, 2008 a tortured, frail, and frightened African girl was dropped on our doorstep (Jesus in a beautiful but tortured disguise). Jan. 15, 2010 an abused, distraught, oppressed young woman was dropped on our doorstep… (Jesus in a beautiful but painful disguise). Until last week we had a homeless mentally ill young woman living with us that Jana brought home… (Jesus in a distressing disguise). Now we have three Colombians, two of them orphans, staying with us for the Holidays …(Jesus in a beautiful, love starved disguise)… We have a Sikh young man from India coming to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with us this year too… (Jesus in a lonely disguise)…

Then yesterday I get a text from a sweet young woman named Hannah in New York who is like a daughter to me saying that her friend from Bible College is flying from NY home to Mexico for Christmas but that she has an all night layover in Houston and Hannah knew we would help her out. She flies in tonight at midnight and leaves tomorrow midday (same time “coincidentally” as I will be at the airport picking up my son Levi coming home for Christmas from the Navy)… (Jesus in a stranger disguise)… I responded that of course we would love to have her (because we don’t have enough Latinas in the house as it is LOL)…

Then I was reminded of page 86 of the book Radical… “Bullen how are you going to impact the world?” “I am going to disciple the nations” Then I realized that if He wants to God can bring the nations to my door one or three or four at a time if He wants to… I looked from the text message from Hannah, laughed out loud at God and then looked to some of my family standing around and told them of our guest coming the next night. We all laughed and shook our heads at (or should I say with) God and then we said laughing, “Well this year we are the Inn at Bethlehem but we will make room for Jesus” We all stopped stunned and looked at each other. “Wow” we said, “That’s powerful. May there always be room at the Bullen Inn for Jesus.”

God is moving mightily among us here at OHI. On December 11, 2010 at 6:00 pm we will host Share the Hope, a gala dinner and auction to promote the ministry in Colombia. Please mark your calendars for this important event! More details to follow…

Almost minutes after our fifth trip to Bogota in June we began planning the launch of an organized ministry to take the lead in organizing and promoting what God was leading us to do in Colombia. Two weeks after we arrived back in the states we had a meeting and chose the name Orphan Hope International. We formed a board of directors which included David Richardson as president, Chris Dinkler as vice president, Bill Byrd as treasurer, Shoby John as secretary, and me as spiritual director. We elected two officers, Sandra Patricia Forero as vice president of Colombian affairs, and Alexandra Venegas as assistant secretary and translator. Many nights were spent at Bill and Sandy Byrd’s house hashing out all of the details of organizational structure of the ministry. Sandy always fed us like kings and we always had fun fellowshipping with one another so that made the chore very enjoyable. We also added and continue to add advisory council members including Luis Escobar, Curt and Tonya Currie, Dave and Gail Beach, Nep and Dona Reyes. God continues to send us wonderful people with varied talents and gifts to assist us in blessing the children of Colombia. We have established a website at www.orphanhopeintl.org and we have a presence on Facebook as well. Our vision statement reads, “Positively transforming the lives of orphans and those who minister to them through Christ-centered Mery Missions, Padrino Program, Adoption Awareness, and Haven Homes. You can read all about it on our website. We have also helped to establish an alliance partner organization in Colombia called Fundacion Tayakai. Tayakai means Me in a native dialect of Colombia. It brings attention to the fact that these children are people. Through these two entities we hope to greatly impact the nation of Colombia for Christ in the years to come and rescue many sweet little children and bring them to the savior. To God be the glory!

Here are some of the reasons we are so passionate about this…

Facts and Statistics

It is estimated there are between 143 million and 210 million orphans worldwide (recent UNICEF report.) The UNICEF orphan numbers DON’T include abandonment (millions of children) as well as sold and/or trafficked children. The current population of the United States is just a little over 300 million… to give you an idea of the enormity of the numbers…

According to data released in 2003 as many as eight million boys and girls around the world live in institutional care. Some studies have found that violence in residential institutions is six times higher than violence in foster care, and that children in group care are almost four times more likely to experience sexual abuse than children in family based care.

Every day 5,760 more children become orphans

Approximately 250,000 children are adopted annually, but…

Each year 14, 505, 000 children grow up as orphans and age out of the system by age sixteen

Each day 38,493 orphans age out

Every 2.2 seconds another orphan ages out with no family to belong to and no place to call home

Studies have shown that 10% – 15% of these children commit suicide before they reach age eighteen

These studies also show that 60% of the girls become prostitutes and 70% of the boys become hardened criminals

Another study reported that of the 15,000 orphans aging out of state-run institutions every year, 10% committed suicide, 5,000 were unemployed, 6,000 were homeless and 3,000 were in prison within three years…

An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked every year; (THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2005)

2 million children, the majority of them girls, are sexually exploited in the multibillion-dollar commercial sex industry. (THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2005)

WHY COLOMBIA?

There are many reasons and ways that God has clearly led us to minister in Colombia. Here are just a few:

In 2010 Colombia had 577,000 orphans. (Children on the Brink) Note: For a little perspective, Orphan Hope International makes approx. 4 organized trips to Colombia per year. We minister to approx. 500 orphans per trip. At that rate it would take us 289 years to just see every orphan once. Colombia, is just one country in Latin America. Latin America is just one of three regions of the world, along with Asia and Africa, where the orphan problem is rampant. Asia and Africa have a vastly larger orphan problem than Latin America.

Colombia has been under the scourge of a 40-year civil war. This, along with the drug trade, has caused violence and consequently a rise in orphans in this country.

Girls, especially orphans, are abducted into child soldiery and sexual slavery and are sometimes forced into armed service by their parents as a form of ‘tax payment’, as happens in Colombia. (THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2005)

In Colombia, for example, girls as young as 12 are reported to have submitted sexually to armed groups in order to ensure their families’ safety. (THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2005)

Interpol estimates there are 35,000 women and girls trafficked out of Colombia every year for the sex trade, with estimated profits of $500 million, making Colombia second only to the Dominican Republic in the West. It is beyond comprehension the horror that these women and girls face as they service on average 40 clients per day. (Interpol)

1.2 million children are trafficked every year world wide; this is in addition to the millions already held captive by trafficking.

The average age of a trafficked victim is 14 years old.

One can only imagine what will happen to the sweet, pretty girls that we meet in the orphanages when they are turned out into the street at 18 years of age. This is why we have made safe houses one of our four main priorities is so that these girls are not on the street and vulnerable.

Here is what God says about orphans…

God Loves Orphans…

Deuteronomy 10:18 “He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing.”

Psalm 10:14 The unfortunate commits himself to You; You have been the helper of the orphan.

Psalm 68:5-6 A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, Is God in His holy habitation. God makes a home for the lonely;

Jeremiah 49:11 “Leave your orphans behind, I will keep them alive; And let your widows trust in Me.”

Hosea 14:3 “For in You the orphan finds mercy.”

God Defends Orphans…

Deuteronomy 24:17 “You shall not pervert the justice due an alien or an orphan, nor take a widow’s garment in pledge.

Psalm 10:17-18 O LORD, You have heard the desire of the humble; You will strengthen their heart, You will incline Your ear. To vindicate the orphan and the oppressed, So that man who is of the earth will no longer cause terror.

Psalm 146:9 The LORD protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow, But He thwarts the way of the wicked.

Proverbs 23:10 Do not move the ancient boundary Or go into the fields of the fatherless, 11 For their Redeemer is strong; He will plead their case against you.

God Commands Care For Orphans…

Deuteronomy 14:29 “The Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance among you, and the alien, the orphan and the widow who are in your town, shall come and eat and be satisfied, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hand which you do.

Deuteronomy 16:11, 14 and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite who is in your town, and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your midst, in the place where the LORD your God chooses to establish His name. 14 And you shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.

Deuteronomy 24:19-21 “When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. “When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. “When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow.

Deuteronomy 26:13 “You shall say before the LORD your God, ‘I have removed the sacred portion from my house, and also have given it to the Levite and the alien, the orphan and the widow, according to all Your commandments which You have commanded me; I have not transgressed or forgotten any of Your commandments.

Job 22:9 “You have sent widows away empty, And the strength of the orphans has been crushed.

Psalm 82:3 Vindicate the weak and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and destitute.

Isaiah 1:17 Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow.

Jeremiah 7:5-7 “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly practice justice between a man and his neighbor, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor walk after other gods to your own ruin, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever.

James 1:27 Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

God Opposes Harm Of Orphans…

Exodus 22:22-24 “You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. “If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to Me, I will surely hear his cry; and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

Deuteronomy 27:19 ‘Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan, and widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’

Job 6:27 “You would even cast lots for the orphans and barter over your friend.

Job 24:3, 9 “They drive away the donkeys of the orphans; They take the widow’s ox for a pledge. 9 “Others snatch the orphan from the breast, And against the poor they take a pledge.

Psalm 94:6 They slay the widow and the stranger and murder the orphans.

Isaiah 1:23 Your rulers are rebels And companions of thieves; Everyone loves a bribe And chases after rewards. They do not defend the orphan, Nor does the widow’s plea come before them.

Isaiah 10:2 So as to deprive the needy of justice And rob the poor of My people of their rights, So that widows may be their spoil And that they may plunder the orphans.

Jeremiah 5:28 ‘They are fat, they are sleek, They also excel in deeds of wickedness; They do not plead the cause, The cause of the orphan, that they may prosper; And they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Jeremiah 22:3 ‘Thus says the LORD, “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. Also do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan, or the widow; and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

Ezekiel 22:7 “They have treated father and mother lightly within you. The alien they have oppressed in your midst; the fatherless and the widow they have wronged in you.

Zechariah 7:10 and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.’

Malachi 3:5 “Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,” says the LORD of hosts.

Will you help us?

In the midst of the battle and heartache, our brothers and sisters with whom our hearts have been woven together in the trips to Colombia were a constant source of encouragement through their many cards, emails, and phone calls. Their unwavering love and understanding was incredible.
Also, God was moving in the heart of our friends Bill and Sandy Byrd to go with us in June. Bill would call me every few days with a question or just wanting to talk about the trip. It was a joy to see their excitement. Bill also blessed Lisa and I with an unexpected but very badly needed blessing when he and Sandy paid our way to go on the upcoming trip. It meant the world to us. Bill is the president of South East Texas Tres Dias and is now on the board of directors of Orphan Hope International and is our treasurer. Another dear friend whom some of our team was working on during this time was Shoby John. He is another brother we originally met through Tres Dias.

Shoby and his daughter Hannah committed during this time to come on the trip. Shoby is now on the board of directors for Orphan Hope International and is our secretary. Even in our pain we could see that God was causing all things to work together for our good and the good of the sweet children of Colombia.

Well, there is no Easter Sunday without a Good Friday. We arrived home on Monday, April 19, 2010 tired but full of joy and hope that our sweet Colombian girls were coming home soon. Our beloved African daughter, Mercy, unbeknownst to us was very fearful of the Colombian girls coming and had been working for weeks behind our back to try and sabotage our adoption of them. When Lisa came home so excited about finally getting to meet and spend time with Heidy and Ginary, it was more than Mercy’s fears and insecurities could take. She could not imagine competing with two more girls for our love even though we tried desperately to assure her that God had made a parents heart to always expand proportionately with the number of children He gives them so that they never have to share the love their parents have for them. She panicked and four days later ran away from home. Child Protective Services and the police became involved and brought her home. Over the next five days she ran away two more times and was eventually placed by CPS in a group home. Court dates and much legal wrangling ensued and we ultimately had to let her go forever. The heart breaking phone call came shortly thereafter from our adoption agency informing us that our adoption of Heidy and Ginary had been cancelled and that due to this incident with Mercy we would not ever be candidates for adoption again. We, of course, were devastated. We had spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to save these two precious girls and Mercy but God is the keeper of the accounts and he knows! We are at His disposal and we receive from His hand good things and bad things with the same joy. The one resounding message that continued to ring through my heart as I received this dreadful news was, “My son, I don’t want you to just help two or three girls, I want you to help them all.” Through the pain and tears I bowed my heart before the Lord and replied, “Yes, Lord. I believe, help my unbelief.” Already, unbeknownst to me, God was beginning to move the hearts of key people to go with us to Colombia in June 2010.

If I have learned anything in the last few years it has been that “there is no victory without a fight, there is no sunrise without a night, there is no purchase without a cost, and there is no crown without a cross.” We came home from out third trip in January to all out war at home, which frankly, always excites me because you only get shot at if you are in the heat of the battle. This war had been building for some time. It actually started back when we took in our African daughter, Mercy. So let me rewind a little back to July 2008. Three weeks after Mercy came to live with us my two sons and I were all laid off from work on the same day. I was unexpectedly laid off from a six figure income job that day and was consequently out of work for almost a year and financially we have never recovered. But the three of us getting laid off was not to be the height of the spiritual warfare for that day. We came home, gave the bad news to the girls and mom, and decided to go to dinner and forget our fears and worries. On the way home from dinner an old man who was off his medication tried to run my wife off the road in our little, safe, gated community where we live. She pulled over and the boys and I got out to see what was going on and he accelerated to about 30 miles an hour and just missed me and hit my oldest son Luke sending him smashing head first into the man’s windshield and then he flew over the car and landed on the pavement as the man sped away. My heart sank to my feet as I watched all of this just a few feet from me. But God! Even though the man’s bumper, fender, mirror and windshield were dented and shattered Luke jumped up off the ground with no broken bones and only a small scratch on his head. The first responders who arrived shortly after and saw the damage to the car could not believe that he had even survived much less was unharmed. That day we knew we were in a war. Over the next several months our entire family’s lives were wrapped up in ministering to Mercy. Here was a girl who had been beaten, had horrible scars all over her body from being tortured, was passed around and rejected over and over again, had been on the run from the guerillas in Liberia, had ingested caustic soda and destroyed her esophagus. Had lain in a hospital bed in Africa for two years begging to die and when we met her was 13 years old and only 48 pounds. Now she was healed physically but spiritually and emotionally she was desperately sick. We poured our lives into her and then 11 months later God sends me to Colombia for the first time. Fast forward now to February 2010 and the war we came home to. Within a week of our third trip to Colombia another abused and broken orphan girl was dropped on our doorstep and a legal battle with her abusers ensued. Because the people had formerly been a significant part of the church I was pastoring, the legal and spiritual battle overflowed into my church and split it to pieces. At the same time the abused girl was an emotional, spiritual, and physical wreck and for the first 3 months she was with us my entire family spent nearly every night praying, singing, and reading scripture over her as she fought with her attackers in horrible nightmares all night long. Of course, during the same time my health was severely attacked and our finances continued to take hits from every side. But with every fiery dart God would also send a little miracle to assure us that, like the 3 Hebrew children, He was with us in the fiery furnace and in the end when we could come out our clothes wouldn’t even smell like smoke! We would pray for money to come in for the orphans and then the phone would ring and someone would donate the exact amount that we were praying for. God continued to send us people to help as well. It was a surreal time in the Bullen family. One day in February, in the midst of all of this, I was down to my last $20.00 without taking something to the pawnshop. I put the $20.00 in my gas tank and said, “ok Lord, I’m in your hands.” That afternoon I was offered a job starting the next day. I was so excited and thankful. The next morning I left to go to my new job and was in a car accident half-way there. It was kind of a freak accident where my car just started sliding and I couldn’t stop it. I had to call my brand new boss and tell him and then be towed to the mechanic. As I was sitting at the mechanic waiting to find out how bad the damage was I received a call that my oldest son Luke (the one who was ran over by the car) had had a car accident that morning at the exact same time as me and that his car had slid off the road and spun end for end into a field “barely” missing several trees and power poles and had landed in the only spot that it could have landed without destroying his car. Later that afternoon I learned that my father had had a very similar car accident that same morning at the exact same time as Luke and my accident. All of us were unharmed and only my vehicle had any major damage. Thankfully my Christian boss understood and I am still working for him today. These are only a few of the things that happened between my third and fourth trip to Colombia and all it did for me was solidify that I was in the right place, God was at work, and the devil was really mad about it. All, wonderful things to know. We survived February and March. The sun began to shine again and in April we went back to Bogota for a fourth trip. But that story is for another post. Here are some quotes from Christians whom God used to change the world that really encouraged me during this time.

“A radical willingness to risk, sacrifice, and suffer is the attitude of authentic ministry.” – John Piper

“Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis

‎”Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus – a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” — Mother Teresa

‎”God had one son on earth without sin but never one without suffering.” – Augustine

So I am in the midst of a whirlwind of orphan ministry activity at this time. We have been back from our September ’09 Padrino trip less than a month, I have spoken to two Tres Dias ministries and shared about Colombia, we are in the middle of adoption paperwork, and someone mentions 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 multi-racial children there 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. Several people spoke, including our daughter, Mercy, from Africa. We took several videos that day and you can access them at http://www.youtube.com/user/heritagefamily

After the testimonies I preached from Job 29. Here is a very brief summary of the sermon.

Job is one of my heroes. Job was a godly man. Just listen to God’s description of him in chapter 1 verse 8, The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil.” Wow! What an amazing accolade from the Almighty! There are many things that we can learn from Job but one of my favorites is this; Job was a man who was passionate about orphan ministry.

In Job 29:2-11 He tells us some things about His relationship with God that ought to make us sit up and take notice. He says…

God watched over me… His lamp shone over my head… by His light I walked through darkness… the friendship of God was over my tent… the Almighty was yet with me…

Then Job goes on in verses 12-17 to tell us why he was so blessed…

Because I delivered the poor who cried for help, and the orphan who had no helper. The blessing of the one ready to perish came upon me, and I made the widow’s heart sing for joy. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; My justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I investigated the case which I did not know. I broke the jaws of the wicked and snatched the prey from his teeth.

There we have it! Job’s wonderful relationship with God was because he was faithful to diligently minister to the poor, needy, widow, orphan, lame, and blind. He defended those who were being mistreated and punished the predators.

We get another glimpse of Job’s passion for the orphan in Job 31:16-22 where he says very passionately… “If I have kept the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my food alone, and the orphan has not shared it (yet from his youth the orphan grew up with me as with a father, and from infancy I guided her), If I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or that the needy had no covering, if his stomach has not thanked me, and if he has not been warmed with the fleece of my sheep, if I have lifted up my hand against the orphan, because I saw I had support in the community, let my shoulder fall from the socket, and my arm be broken off at the elbow.”

Job was very serious about caring for the poor and needy, the orphan and the widow. Yes, we can learn a lot from Job.

There were some people in attendance at our Orphan Sunday that deserve mention because God has continued to knit our hearts together to launch Orphan Hope International. Shoby and Dolly John were there. We had originally met at Tres Dias, then Orphan Sunday, and now Shoby is on the board of directors of Orphan Hope. Praise God. Luis and Marcela Escobar. I told you about meeting Luis at Tres Dias, then I had lunch with him, then I had lunch at his house and met his family, then they came to Orphan Sunday, and now Luis has been to Bogota with me 3 times and is a valued member and advisor to Orphan Hope International. David Richardson was there. He originally invited me to Colombia and is now the President of the board of directors for Orphan Hope and a dear friend. Allen and Cindy Pate were there. Allen opened my eyes to orphan ministry originally through his talk at Tres Dias that led to my “safe prayer.” He is now a valued member and advisor to Orphan Hope. Doug and Leann Platt were there. He has been a true friend and mentor for a long time. He is Allen Pate’s brother in law and has also adopted from Colombia. There were others there that blessed me richly. Last but not least, I should mention my beautiful wife and daughters who have worked tirelessly to assist me both here in the states and multiple trips to Colombia as well. The future is bright and exciting as we look to what God is doing and allowing us to tag along.

No doubt about it. Orphan Sunday, November 8, 2009 was a life altering day for me.

After Tres Dias, Lisa and I became Godparents to another girl that I have mentioned before. Her name is Ginary and she is a precious, precious girl. Ginary grew up with her large family in the city dump scavenging for scraps. When she was ten years old she got a job as a maid. When she didn’t please the lady of the house she was severely beaten and so she ran away when she was twelve and ended up in the orphanage where she lives now. Our family is so honored and blessed to be able to love and be loved by this sweet girl. We also started in earnest the process to adopt both Heidy and Ginary and make them our own. My daughters, especially Beverly, worked long and hard over the next three months on orphan ministry, adoption, and in the church. They did the lion’s share of the paperwork and maneuvering the menagerie that is international adoption. We exchanged many sweet letters and emails with our Goddaughters and continued to work on developing a long term orphan ministry to the over one million orphans of Colombia. I was blessed to speak several times and in several places about the need and to share my excitement about God’s calling upon us to do something about it. We also continued to experience many amazing divine appointments as God again and again revealed to us that we were being led to work in Colombia. For example, in twenty five years of ministry I had never just “ran into” someone from Colombia and yet in the last year I can hardly go a week without “running into someone.” It is very exciting when God puts it together. During this time we also experienced some resistance from those who don’t understand or are simply just intimidated by the idea that we are somehow responsible for the plight of children in another country. But God in His gracious lovingkindness continued always to confirm again and again that this is what He wanted the Bullen family to be about. To Him be the glory.

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.” So many miracles were happening all around me in regards to this orphan ministry that I quietly bowed my heart to my God and thanked Him for allowing me to be a part of His work. Luis has now been to Bogota on missions with me three times and he is a blessing to me, my family, and the ministry. There were many evidences of God’s hand over the next two weeks to make me stand in awe realizing that he was moving in a way larger than I had imagined.