After breakfast, I started to have a case of Montezuma's revenge. I could not figure out where it was coming from, as I was eating food prepared in the kitchen, was staying away from yogurts, fruit, uncooked leafy vegetables, etc., plus I drank filtered water. My cold was terrible, it seemed to have gotten worse overnight. I was sneezing and coughing and my voice was very hoarse. I spent a full 45 minutes on the toilet before morning service and hoped I had gotten all of my breakfast out of my system.
The church building was only a five-minute drive from the compound. Worship had been going on for some time when I arrived. It was a fairly large church, with well over 200 people there. Most were sitting on mats on the floor and the place was totally filled. They had to sort of slide over to make a path for me to get to the front of the room. There were a row of plastic chairs across the front for Sharath, myself, James, his father, and a few others. The worship team was also standing up front, leading worship.
I must say that I really liked their worship. I recognized the melody as one of the songs I knew/loved in English. So while they worshipped in Telegu, I sang along with them in English. That song ended. Then another song started -- it was the same melody again. I was later told that they write several of their own songs, and I got the impression they borrow melody from American songs and put their own words to it. That particular morning all the remaining songs used the same melody. They were different worship and praise and intimacy songs to the people in the congregation. But at the time, I thought they were singing the same song over and over again.
God had me preach another of those sermons of faith, where I acted out various stories from Abraham's life as well as a few other bible stories. Each time I preach this, it comes out a bit different, because God is customizing it for the local group. Since I was feeling so under the weather, I was not sure if I was doing as good of a job as usual. It was presented in a story-teller fashion, but with some challenging personal applications thrown in. Some of the people seemed to really like the sermon and were listening intently. But others were looking around the room and talking with their neighbor as I preached, etc. I wanted to cover one more point, but I started really needing to go to the bathroom again. So I cut the sermon a bit short.
When I finished preaching, they did some more worship and were preparing communion. I leaned over to Jessie, who was sitting near me and asked him if he could please take me to a toilet. He said that we needed to go back to the compound to use the bathroom. I am not sure if he thought I needed a Western style toilet of if there was not an Indian style toilet at the church. We slipped out of service. The car we had arrived in was buried behind several other vehicles, so he borrowed someone's motor-scooter to take me back to the compound. I rushed up to my room hoping to be really quick. But my intestines would not cooperate, and I took well over ten minutes. But I felt very relieved when I came back downstairs. We returned to the meeting. Communion was over, but they were still worshipping.
When service was over, they asked me to pray for people. However, only about half of the people there came up for prayer. That was the first that I'd preached and some of the people did not want prayer. I figured I must not have done a very good job because of the various sicknesses my body was battling. I felt apologetic about that, but decided not to say anything to them about it. To borrow a phrase I'd learned from Rolland Baker, that was God's problem, not mine.
When we got back to the compound for lunch, both Paul and James told me how much they liked the sermon. I told them I'd gotten the impression that the people did not seem to like it very much. They thought I was mistaken.
After lunch, I got to spend a little time getting to know James and his wife Sarah and their three children. They had arrived in the wee hours of the morning and had barely gotten up in time for church, so I had not been able to get to know them before Church.
Then it was time to go to the afternoon meeting with the leaders and staff of the ministry. Most of these men oversaw regions and had multiple pastors and churches under them. There were about 30 men there, and there were also about twenty women. These ladies were intercessors and church planters. They were known as "Diamond's Daughters" -- James' mother's name translates (in English) to "Diamond". She has trained and raised up these ladies, and that is why they were called Diamond's daughters. Many of them were still quite young -- college age. But they were very active in church planting and intercession.
We had worship at the start of the meeting. During worship, I mentioned to God that it would be really nice if He would let me know what He wanted me to say. All He would tell me was, "Don't worry Teresa. When the time comes, I will put My words in your mouth. You don't take any forethought before you prophecy, and that is what I am going to do here -- I will put My words in your mouth to speak to the leaders here."
That was a bit of a challenge to me, but God was faithful. During the course of the meeting, I did personal prophecy for about ten of the leaders. But I prophesied over the whole group for most of the meeting. God had me speak a lot about spiritual warfare. He told them that He had given them assignments to advance the kingdom. But when they advanced His kingdom, they tore down the devil's kingdom. And the devil was getting really mad a them about this, so he was fighting back by attacking them. Recently, battle has been very intense, and it will continue to be intense because of the nature of the work God has given them to do. So God wanted them to understand the nature of the battle. He spent a lot of time developing some of the enemy's strategies against them and what His strategies were to overcome them.
The meeting went on for quite some time. My voice was very hoarse, but Sharath was able to make out what I was saying and translate for me. His voice was fine, so the meeting worked despite my own physical limitations. God seemed to show up at the meeting as well, which was the most important thing. Occasionally I would run out of things to say and stop speaking for a while and ask everyone to worship for a bit. While we were worshipping, God would speak to me and give me more to say. I can't remember for sure, but I think the meeting went for about 3 hours.
At the end of the meeting, James got up and spoke in Telegu for a bit. I don't think they wanted me to know what they were doing, but God told me that they were taking an offering for me. That was very unusual. Most of the time, Indian Christians look to Westerners as a source of income, so it is really a role reversal for them to take an offering for a Westerner. I later learned that they were really impressed by the anointing God had put over me, so they wanted to sow into my ministry so that maybe they could reap some of this anointing in their own lives. (One man put his wrist-watch in the offering. It will probably take him a year to save up enough money to buy a new one. I was so touched that I cried when they gave it to me the next day.)
After the meeting was over, James told me how appropriate that topic had been for the senior leadership of his ministry. He shared some of the specifics of warfare that had been going on recently. There had been a lot of physical sickness amongst the leadership, as well as unusual adversity. Just two months before I came, there was one really bad day. On this day, James' two year old daughter pulled a pot of boiling water off of a shelf and was seriously burned -- with second degree burns over more than half of her little body. She spent a month in the hospital, and had only been out a short while. She is not allowed in the sunlight, and needs to go to the Shriner's Hospital in the United States for burn care, to see if they can minimize long term scarring and disfiguration. Fortunately her face was spared and does not have any burns or scars.
That same day, another pastor's daughter fell into a well and it was difficult to rescue her. She was seriously hurt but fortunately did not die. Also on that same day two of their pastors were injured in separate car accidents. They had not understood what was going on, why all of this was being allowed to happen to them. Now they saw it in the context of spiritual warfare and they were ready to fight back.
The battle is very real in that part of India because God is taking ground away from the demons that empower the Hindu idols there. The devil does not want to loose his stronghold in India. James' ministry is a real threat to him because they are so actively advancing God's kingdom. So that is why they have been seeing so much spiritual warfare lately. And that is why God wanted to talk to them about that subject.
Since I was coming to expose the devil's strategies, the enemy also unleashed warfare against me. I saw more warfare during my two-day stay in Ongole than in all of the rest of my time in India combined. En route to Ongole, I was almost in a fatal car accident where I suffered bumps and bruises and a sore neck. Then my cold got worse, to the point where my voice was so hoarse I could barely speak. On top of that, I got a serious case of Montezuma's revenge. I was so sick after the Sunday afternoon meeting that I could not eat dinner. The devil definitely did not like what God sent me to do in Ongole.
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