Displaying items by tag: Praise

Zabbai, son of a Jamaican pastor, used the name of God for his personal benefit. ‘I was a phony Christian, living in sin, knowing I could ask forgiveness.’ At seventeen he came to terms with the Jesus he avoided while he was smoking marijuana and chasing girls. ‘I realised that truth is not a thing but a person.’ He struggled with fitting in with his peers instead of standing out as a church goody-goody. ‘I found my identity within a love for playing the saxophone.’ One day while alone he closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, everyone was frozen. He felt a warmth from God, who said, ‘This is what my love feels like.’ ‘And with the snap of a finger, time began again. I had just encountered the Lord, and it scared me. With reckless abandon, I began pursuing the Lord.’

Newly-elected Conservative MP Stuart Anderson explained in his first Commons speech how going to church and finding faith helped him ‘see light out of the darkness’. He said he considered taking his own life after he was left ‘broken’ by his time serving as a rifleman for the Royal Green Jackets in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He finished his compassionate speech by saying, ‘When I was trying to do something right by my family, I found faith. For the first time in many years, I could see hope and a future.’ Danny Kruger, in his maiden speech, told listeners, ‘Look to Britain’s Christian past to address future problems. We are children of God, fallen but redeemed, capable of great wrong but also of great virtue.’ See

17 years ago Lisa had surgery for defective activity in her heart. But recently her condition returned and she needed surgery once again. Two good specialists saw that she had grown bad electrical pathways. Before going on a mission trip she asked for prayer and Paula Davis prayed for her. Paula, who had no knowledge of Lisa’s heart condition, started praying about the mission trip, then shifted her focus abruptly. ‘Do you have a problem with the electrical part of your heart?’ she asked. ‘I do, as a matter of fact’, Paula said, ‘I saw Jesus rewiring your whole heart’. When Lisa returned from mission she went for surgery. Afterwards, the surgeon in charge of the procedure said her heart was one of the healthiest he had ever seen and declared, ‘I didn’t have to do anything!’ Lisa asked, ‘Did Jesus heal me?’ ‘Yes’, he replied.

Human nature is more interested in bad news than good. Hence news media seemed to almost delight in Australia 'burning' with many phenomenal pictures, hysterical headlines and apocalyptic analyses. In recent days, though, there has been some welcome good news and yet, to a large extent, this is buried away in mid-page columns, if reported at all. I guess 'Australia being blessed by rain' is not as dramatic as 'Australia burning in hell'. Many fires are still ongoing, but there have been some remarkable stories and pictures of the effect of the much prayed for rain. Jeremiah 14:22 tells us that only the Lord brings rain. Gloucester in New South Wales ran out of water, after four years of drought; then in seven days, they had over 100mm of water. The effect is dramatic. What was dead and barren has sprung to life with what one farmer called 'rapid growth'.

Just as more Americans are becoming religiously unaffiliated, there is another shift happening on the religious spectrum. More people today say they are ‘born again’ than at any point in the past three decades. While significant portions of the country jettison religion, others are increasingly identifying with a more devout expression of the faith. Across segments of Christianity - not just evangelical Protestants - Americans are heeding the scriptural call that ‘you must be born again’ (John 3:7), even when the label has not historically been part of their faith traditions. 60% of black Protestants claimed to be born again in 1988, now it’s 80%. The increase for evangelicals was 68% to 78% during the same time period. Also, across all Christian traditions, including mainline denominations and Roman Catholics, the born-again identity is trending up.

Last year we prayed for Christian doctor Richard Scott to be vindicated after a concerted and targeted attack against him by a secularist campaign group was thrown out by the General Medical Council (GMC). In June the National Secular Society registered ‘concern’ with the GMC that the GP was ‘continuing to pray and promote Christianity during consultations in an attempt to convert patients’. However, the GMC has ruled that there was no evidence and that he had done nothing wrong.

Philip saw members of his isolated tribal community in Bangladesh dying from simple diseases (malaria, diarrhoea, childbirth complications) because there was no medical care. ‘I asked God to open a door for our community because I could do nothing. I never thought that God would open the door through me!’ With help from Open Doors, Philip trained as a rural doctor and returned to his village to serve as a pastor and a doctor, providing medical help and supporting Christian families who were mocked and insulted in a traditionally Buddhist tribal community. ‘But now they have started respecting the Christians. They buy medicine from me and say good things about my service. I am building good relationships with them and telling them about Jesus Christ.’

Brazilian soccer star Roberto Firmino scored the winning goal at the FIFA Club World Cup. Now millions of Christian fans are celebrating his latest move off the field - committing his life to Christ. Firmino professed his faith and was baptised in a swimming pool by his Liverpool FC teammate Alisson Becker and Brazilian musician Isaias Saad. Firmino shared a video of the baptism on his Instagram on 16 January. It was viewed over 3.2 million times in one day. ‘I give you my failures and I will give you my victories as well. My biggest title is your love, Jesus!’ Firmino wrote. 

In 1912, medical missionary Dr William Leslie went to live and minister to tribal people in a remote corner of the Congo. After 17 years he returned to the USA discouraged, believing he had failed to make an impact for Christ. He died nine years later. In 2010, a team from World Ministries made a shocking and sensational discovery. They found a network of reproducing churches hidden like glittering diamonds in the dense jungle across the Kwilu River from Vanga, where Dr Leslie had been stationed. Each village had its own gospel choir, although they wouldn’t call it that. They wrote their own songs and would have sing-offs from village to village. There were eight churches, scattered across 34 miles - even a 1,000-seat stone ‘cathedral’ in one village, which got so crowded that a church-planting movement began in the surrounding villages.

On 12 January Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, attended the Coptic Christmas service. Against a background of rising tensions in the Middle East, he held up the importance of tolerance and unity at a time when those tensions could spill over into conflict and violence - especially between religious groups. ‘If we love God, we must love each other,’ was his simple, powerful message. In 2019, at the opening of a new cathedral, he expressed his support for Christians, saying, ‘You are our family’. As Christians, we know that there is a model for this kind of love. For tense times and hard hearts, the Lord Jesus has already offered the perfect solution. Jesus’ greatest commands to us are to love God with all our heart and, out of this, to love our neighbour as ourselves. God, who is Love, wants us to love our neighbours who live alongside us - whether next door or across a distant border - with the same agape love He has for us.