After lunch I had about 45 minutes before the afternoon class started, and I used that time to take more notes from the web site on the course God had instructed me to research for the next day's lesson. I did this until it was time for me to go teach in the afternoon session.
Something incredible happened across the street while God was busy sending the Holy Spirit into the service and filling the pastors with His Holy Spirit. We did not hear about it until a few days later, but it happened at that very instant .. about 1:30 PM, which is sort of the standard lunch time in that part of India. The folks who live on the property across the street from the bible college are a poor "washer" people. (People in the rural Indian villages are frequently identified by their profession, and these people did laundry for the village.) They are a large extended family who live together on the same property .. parents, and their grown/married children and their families with a few cousins and in-laws thrown in. I am not sure of the exact number of people in this family but it is a lot of people. They are very poor... only a very poor family would live on the property directly across the street from the Bible College and Church, because the church has multiple meetings daily and they use a loud speaker system, so the family members are forced to listen to all of the Church services and bible college classes.
Anyhow, this poor family bought some grain and sent it to the mill to be ground into flour. Then they cooked a special bread-like meal for the family from the grain. They were just sitting down to eat it, feeding the children first -- lots and lots of children. (Normally they feed the adult men first, then the women and children afterwards. But for some reason they were feeding the children first that day, and it was a special meal of this special bread-like substance they made from the grain.) Our meeting was a bit loud/disruptive and one of the adults was sort of agitated by it. In their agitation, they left the table and looked in the bag of ground flour and saw something alarming -- there was a dead poisonous lizard in it. The village had already had some deaths this year from people eating food poisoned by this type of lizard. And they had just served the food to all of their children. The person who discovered the remains of the poisonous lizard in the flour bag created a ruckus and was able to get all the poisoned food away from the children before any of them had a single bite of it. It was literally "just in the nick of time." If any of the children had eaten the poisoned food, they would have died because the lizard is extremely toxic.
There are two reasons that this story is so significant. First, there is a rule that if a family looses a relative, the neighbors have to respect their grief and give them three days of silence. This would have forced us to cancel all of the rest of our meetings in Razole, and God still had a lot of important things on His agenda to do there.
Second, and maybe more important, God got credited as being the one who saved that family from death by causing them to find the poisoned lizard in the nick of time. I am not sure I understand the reason the Hindu family credited this to the Christian God (even though we know it was God's hand at work.) I am not sure, but I think it might have had something to do with our meeting being loud/disruptive just as they were about to eat, which is what led the parent to leave the dinner table and find the poisonous lizard in the grain. They did not tell us this story until just before we left Razole to go to another city. Sharath was traveling with me but his wife, Shanti, stayed at home. She was invited over by the Washer family the next day to share the gospel with them. I heard a report by phone that they were receptive to the gospel and it is just a matter of time until every member of that family is saved and baptized.
God did this amazing thing at the same time that He released His power on the pastors and bible women in the church building/classroom. We were unaware of it, but God was busy glorifying His name and showing His love to the lost.
When the afternoon session began, God had me do some prophetic ministry. He had me prophecy to maybe 8 or 10 of the pastors and bible women. Of course, I did not understand the significance of the words to the people as they were given .. I rarely understand what God's word means to the person when I deliver it. I was told about several of their stories and how the words applied after the service, during the dinner break. I was truly amazed by the power of those prophecies in the people's situations. Let me share one of the stories with you as an example.
I called one young woman forward and asked her name and was told her name was Teresa (the same as mine). I teasingly told her that she had a great name -- totally unaware of the story behind her name. Then I began to prophecy to her that God had filled her with His boldness and that He had given her the ability to stand firm in the midst of great adversity. God told her to fear not, because He was with her and His hand of protection was over her in the midst of her present circumstances. God was also releasing the gift of prophecy over her, and He had me impart my prophetic mantle to her. There was more to the prophecy, but I don't remember it all.
After the service, Sharath's brother Sisir told me that this lady is a member of his church. She was a convert from a top cast Hindu family (Brahman priests). She is the only Christian in the family and her family was enraged when she was baptized (which technically moves her out of the upper cast to the lowest cast of all.. the "Christian cast"). She was named after a Hindu goddess, so when she was baptized she asked her pastor to select a new Christian name for her. He had prayed about it and God showed him my picture -- I had been to India twice before and had worked closely with him and was personally involved in several significant events in his life. Anyhow, God showed Sisir my picture and he felt prompted to name her after me because he believed God wanted to give her the same prophetic anointing He had given me. That is how she got the name Teresa. (I was utterly amazed and shocked that someone was named after me.) But God had me impart my prophetic mantel to her when I prophesied to her before I was aware of the story behind her name.
Then Sharath told me more of her story. Her family is a powerful and influential family. They have recently been pressuring her to renounce Christianity and "re-convert" to Hinduism. She has been refusing and standing bold and firm. They have been threatening to send her away and she expects to be sent away soon, but she refuses to relent or renounce her faith. In fact she is just completing training to be a bible woman, where she will be sharing her faith with Hindu women, leading them to the Lord and planting churches. If her family sends her away, she views this as an opportunity to spread the gospel in another area. So the prophecy about boldness and the ability to stand firm and to "fear not" were very relevant to her immediate situation.
After I did the personal prophetic ministry, I had them pair up and did an activation where I had them prophecy to each other. I was a bit amazed because they all gave rather lengthy (and powerful, according to the feedback I received) prophecies to each other. God used them to minister powerfully to each other. After the activation was over, God instructed me to anoint each of them with oil and release an impartation for faith to pray for the sick and see them get healed. There were so many people there that it took a really long time to do that, about an hour. The students and pastors and bible women were really excited about the way God had met them that day! He had done some really neat things in their lives. They will never be the same again!
But the day still was not over, and God had even more in store. Part of it was personal blessing and part of it was Him touching and meeting His people with great power and impartation.
I had already mentioned that God had me involved in several significant events in Sisar's life. (Sisir is Sharath's younger brother.) Back in 1996 on my first trip to India, I was a part of the marriage ceremony between Sisar and his bride Esther. I was asked to pronounce prophetic blessings over the bride and groom as a part of the ceremony. The blessing God had me release at that time was for God to bless them with beautiful, happy and healthy children. I did not understand Indian culture at that time, but that is a very important and significant blessing to Indian people, who value and treasure their children immensely. On my second trip to India in 2000, God had me speak at his tiny church plant in a Weaver community. At that time, the Weavers were very closed to the gospel and his church consisted of about 2 adult women and 20 children. But when I came to speak, the Weavers were curious to hear an American, and several of them came to the church meeting to hear me speak and to receive prayer and blessings from me. That opened some doors for his church to grow among the adult population. So I was involved in helping to plant his church.
This day, a Friday, was his third daughter's 1 year birthday. That is a very important family holiday in India and a cause of a big celebration. They decided to have the celebration at the beginning of the church service. Because of my relationship with the family, I was given the very great honor of holding/presenting her, of speaking a prophecy over her and then of helping her cut her birthday cake and feeding her a piece of it. (This is a big honor and it is usually reserved for a senior pastor or for a political dignitary, but I was blessed to fill that role in her birthday ceremony.) Then they cut the cake and passed it out to many at the church. Unfortunately there were far too many people crammed in that building to feed them all a piece of the cake -- even though they had baked three large cakes for the occasion.
Then it was time for the sermon. God had me speak on building intimacy with Him. He had me share the experiences He had reviewed with me in the wee hours of that morning. I presented it from the angle of "this is what intimacy with God looks like and God wants you to have the same type of experiences with Him." The people were captivated by the stories that He had me share. Then He had me start a 6-point teaching on how to build intimacy with God. However, I never got past point 4 because God took over the service again.
Step 4 was to enter into an agreement with God for Him to be Lord and boss of our life. At that point the Holy Spirit told me to explain the seriousness of a covenant with God and invite those who were willing to enter into a covenant with Him related to giving Him absolute Lordship in their life. (This was basically the same covenant God had me lead the pastors into earlier that morning.) I had carefully explained how serious this was and how they should not do this unless they were really willing to obey God all the rest of their life, no matter what He asked them to do. God had prepared their hearts and about 90 per cent of them made the commitment. Then He had me lead them in a covenant prayer of commitment to His Lordship. When we did the prayer of commitment, the Holy Spirit came in with great power and took over the meeting. This time He did not give it back to me and it was not possible to finish my teaching. So I let Him keep control.
God's presence was very strong in the room and we spent almost a whole hour just calling out to God, worshipping Him and receiving His Spirit. His power fell on people and He met them for close to an hour, then we closed in prayer. People did not want to go home, they loved experiencing God's presence like this. It was so much more powerful than I can find words to describe. You cannot imagine how powerful it was when He took over the meeting!
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