The Gospel is a beautiful thing. It changes lives, giving hope to the hopeless; bringing the prodigal home. It is the loving cure for the sickened soul; the unshakable peace for the worry-prone heart. It’s the one miracle that outdoes any other miracle — that God would choose to love the unlovable, bringing them to love as well.
Through this hope that Jesus offers to our broken world, we get another blessing on top of our salvation: the blessing of seeing God’s divine power work through the lives of others. This helps us to appreciate not only the great gift, but also the Giver who gives it to us.
When God works through the Gospel, from the Gospel, and for the Gospel, what we see as a result are miracles in our modern day.
Real-life miracles.
When we look at how the Gospel changes, transforms, and renews a once hellish being into a heavenly one, what we get to witness is a supernatural phenomenon on the divine scale. Tales of creatures reborn and made new. Legends of the once-dead, yet now resurrected, walking among us, and living with us.
TLDR -> This is what I wanted to share with y’all today: Stories! Hope you’re encouraged 🙂
(Took these from Chapter 9 of Crazy Love by Francis Chan)
Rachel Saint
Rachel was born in 1914 in Pennsylvania, the only daughter among eight children. Her father was a stained-glass artist and their family often had very little food growing up.
When Rachel was eighteen, a kind, wealthy, elderly woman took Rachel on a trip to Europe and offered to make Rachel her heiress if she would be her companion for the rest of her life. While Rachel contemplated it, she knew she couldn’t accept the offer of a comfortable life spent sipping tea and conversing.
After twelve years working at a halfway house for alcoholics, Rachel enrolled in linguistics school and became a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators in South America. She spent several years working with the Shapra Indians of Peru, but ultimately knew she was called to work with the Waorani Indians of Ecuador, who were notorious for spearing to death any outsiders immediately upon contact.
Eventually, Rachel was introduced to a Waorani woman, Dayuma, who agreed to teach Rachel the language of her people. For years Rachel studied the language and witnessed to Dayuma about Jesus Christ as she waited patiently for an opportunity to go to the Waorani without being killed. Rachel’s own brother, Nate, a pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship, had been killed by the Waorani people when they attacked him and four other missionaries. This only sharpened Rachel’s desire to tell these people about the love of Christ.
After many years, Rachel finally went to meet and live with the Waorani people. She lived with them for twenty years. Over time, their culture of revenge and murder was transformed by hearing what they called “God’s carvings” (the words of the Bible). The Waorani people became her family. They gave Rachel the Waorani name Nimu, which means “star.”
Rachel eventually translated the New Testament into their language, and today she is buried with her people in Ecuador. At her funeral, a Waorani friend said, “She called us her brothers. She told us how to believe. Now she is in heaven…. God is building a house for all of us, and that’s where we’ll see Nimu again.”
Brother Yun
Yun was born in 1958 in the southern part of the Henan Province in China. When he was sixteen years old, with his father dying from stomach and lung cancer and his family nearly starving, Yun met Jesus Christ.
Over the years Yun grew and began to preach the gospel all over the country. The police were constantly tracking him and arrested him more than thirty times. Usually he was able to escape or elude long-term prison stays, but not always. Yun was imprisoned for three lengthy terms, including a four-year term during which he fasted from water and food for a period of seventy-four days. Although it is considered medically impossible for someone to survive that long without water, God sustained him. During those four years he underwent intense torture, including repeated beatings with a whip and multiple shocks from an electric baton.
Later on, Yun was held in a maximum-security prison in Zhengzhou. To ensure that he would never escape their prison, the guards beat Yun’s legs until he was crippled. Despite this, Brother Yun walked out of the prison six weeks later. Gates and barriers that were always closed and barred were miraculously opened. No guard tried to stop him; it was as though he were invisible to them. It wasn’t until he was outside and safe that Brother Yun realized he was walking on his “broken” legs!
Brother Yun and his family came to Germany in September 2001 after escaping China, where Yun is still wanted by the police. They now encourage believers around the world by sharing what God has done and is doing in China and many other places.
Jamie Lang
When Jamie was twenty-three years old, she flew from the United States to Tanzania with $2,000 from her savings account. She planned to stay until she ran out of money, at which point she would come home.
Jamie was overwhelmed by all of the need that she encountered, so she started praying that God would allow her to make a radical difference in one person’s life. After about six months, she met an eight-year-old girl at church who was carrying a baby on her back. Jamie learned that the baby’s mother was dying from AIDS and that she was too weak to care for him. Jamie began to buy formula for the little boy, Junio, to provide him with the nutrition he desperately needed. At the time, he was half the size of a healthy baby.
Jamie fell in love with baby Junio. She wondered if she was being foolish- a barely twenty-four-year-old, single, white American entertaining thoughts of adopting a baby. Besides, she didn’t even know if Tanzania allowed international adoptions. Eventually, she discovered that the country didn’t allow international adoptions; however, because she had lived there for over six months, she could establish residency. Before Junio’s mom died from AIDS, she came to Jamie and said, “I have heard how you are taking care of my son, and I have never known such a love. I want to be saved.” Just before she died, she said, “I know that my son is taken care of, and I will see him in heaven someday.”
Jamie spent six months going through the adoption process and then five more months working with the American embassy to get Junio a visa. When she finally came home, she had been gone for a year and a half.
Junio is now five years old, totally healthy, and HIV negative. When Junio’s mom was pregnant with him, she took a “morning-after pill late in her pregnancy in order to abort him. But instead it induced premature labor, and because Junio was so small, no bleeding occurred during his birth. Thus, he did not contract HIV from his mother. What was intended to end his life, God used to save it. Since adopting Junio, Jamie has gotten married, had a little girl, and is moving back to Tanzania with her family to work with Wycliffe to translate the Bible for a group that has never heard it before.
After reading these stories, you might be tempted to think of these people as “super Christians” or their stories as “anomalies” among the faithful — but should we really? Should we dismiss these stories as fairy tales from our own personal stories and reality? Did these folks have some sort of special access to a “miracle membership” that we don’t? I don’t think so.
We have the same access to the same hope, power, love, and life that they did as they lived out their radical lives, don't we? We have the same God who does miraculous and extraordinary things within us, right? So here’s the question then. Why do our lives seem so different?
