“Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them.”
(Psalm 139:16)
God is so amazing! He is surely God!
This morning I was thinking how many things He foretold about my life before it happened and was SO amazed. I don’t say this boastfully because it was His grace to me even when I was so undeserving of Him. And I don’t say this to emphasize that I am superior to others in anyway. No, I believe the Lord is doing such wonderful things for all people, but we are just oblivious to it unless He shows it to us.
At age 13, I had a sense that God would either send me to China or Africa or both. I did not want to go to China at the time. By no means did I want to! I even backed away from God at the time because of this fear. However, after I surrendered my life to the Lord (thanks to His grace and Holy Spirit), He sent me to China. However, it was not as I imagined. I loved it so much I did not want to come back.
At age 16, I opened the Bible to the Book of Jeremiah and I read his calling, I felt God was telling me that was my calling to. He wanted me to speak to my believers about their worldly ways and turn them to whole-hearted devotion to the Lord. What’s more, if our nation did not turn back to God, a terrible catastrophe would befall our nation. Once, again, I feared to follow such a calling. I thought I will lose even the few friends I have if I do this. So, once again, I backed off from the Lord.
However, since we have been back from China and I have adjusted to ministry in America, God has brought Jeremiah back to me as an example of the kind of courageous man of God I need to be if I really want to do what’s best for my people. I have been reading books on Jeremiah. I am reading a book now by Dr, Philip Graham Ryken on Jeremiah and Lamentations, and finding it very beneficial to my ministry. I have written over a 100 pages of notes from my research and from my reflections on this amazing book. I have often thought that perhaps God was calling me to write a contemporary version of Jeremiah that would place this man of God in 21st Century America and have him speak now as he did then, and try to imagine the reactions and the results of such a ministry. That book project is in God’s hands, if it is meant to be, but in the mean time, I do believe, God is now fulfilling the next stage of what He gave me an indication of when I was 16. God is making me an iron pillar and a bronze wall to speak what He tells me to this nation (Jeremiah 1:18). People will kick against this kind of preaching, but not be able to stifle it because it is what is needed and God is behind it.
At age 18, I began writing a book that I planned to publish. It was at one of the lowest points of my life that God gave me the gift of writing to put my thoughts down in writing. I filled 128 pages of notebook paper with words. I thought to publish, God thought to reveal. How I wish I had that manuscript now! Not to publish it, but to verify the many ways in which God was telling me His plan for my life even before I was born again. Once, when I came home from college, I purged anything from my previous life, that I thought was secular and not squarely based on my new born-again experience. I believe I purged it too because it has not been found.
However, even now, July 18, 2012, I am experiencing the realization of things I wrote then as science-fiction/Christian novel coming to pass as reality. Here are some brief testimonies of what has come to pass. The Lord has been revealing these amazing things to me just in the last few years. About 30 years after the writing!
In my book, “Darkness will Fall on the City”:
The hero wears a modern edition of a knight’s suit of armor. The Lord revealed to me at a Salvation Army Camp today (July 18, 2012). The armor was symbolic of the armor of God which I didn’t know about when I was 18. I didn’t know the Bible back then. Our camp theme this week has been the armor of God.
The hero has two Christian ladies come into his life. One is blonde and the other brunette. He is attracted the blonde at first, but later realizes the brunette is the one for him because she and he can talk about Jesus and the Bible together. Before I met my wife, Sherry, there was a blonde lady, who was a good friend. She was the type that could of have been a Hollywood beauty, but she definitely was not as spiritual as Sherry is. I was close to the blonde (Kathy) for about a year and a half, but then that relationship faded away when I met Sherry. Sherry and I hit it off spiritually. We prayed together, studied the Bible together and witnessed to the foreign students together. Just like in the book, I ended up choosing the brunette because she brought out the Christ in me more than the other. God just revealed that to me this morning on July 18, 2012.
One day, I was in China, and by accident, I had got off the bus too early and ended up walking to my destination. On the way to my destination, I saw a boarded up church. I stopped and stared. Then, I realized my book was about a futuristic crusader whose mission was to open up an old boarded up church, so that people could worship God once again. That was what I was doing in China. I had opened up a worship meeting for people to come to know Jesus who didn’t have a church to go to. In China, many churches had been closed and boarded up by the communists. God placed me there to reopen places of worship.
So what does all this mean? It means that God is written our life in His book even before we were formed in the womb. He knew our days even when as yet none of them existed. How exciting is that? I urge you to ask God to reveal the purposes and plans He has for you. They are good plans. Even if at first, His plans scare you to death and like Jonah, you want to run from them, I urge you to stay open minded. Your imagination may run wild when He tells His plans for you, but just hang in there with God. He will bring His plans for you about in the right season and when it is the right season, it will feel right, and you will feel ready to go forward with Him. If God be for you, who can be against you? When the One who created the whole universe and sustains the whole universe is working through your life, what do you have to be afraid of?
Praise the Lord!
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