Heaven’s doors
The passing of time does wonders, even if at superficial level. The heart wrenching experiences we had gone through would soon recede in the rear-view mirror and become something of a faith distant memory. With that fading would go those doubts which had come to rock my ‘faith’. Satan has a clever way of healing those wounds he afflicts, obscuring the gentle hand of providence guiding our paths towards God. But for the longsuffering patience of God who is not willing that any should perish, we would be lost eternally; drowned in the deep mud of our own delusion. Error and deception has a vice like grip, creating an illusionary world which itself becomes a prison house for souls which would not embrace the truth and be saved. It is that tragic situation the Apostle Paul presents as a real danger to the Thessalonian Church in his second letter 2:9-12
The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness
It is scary to observe that when we insist on our own obstinate ways, rejecting the Truth and glorying in falsehood, that God Himself takes an active role in giving us over to our treacherous ways. God be praised who did not let me keep on that broad path for longer than his appointed hour.
Back to the treadmill
I would soon return to active preaching and to promoting the same errors which had time and again proved ineffective in my own life. I literally lived in that contradiction of terms, a situation which with hindsight I realized was made possible by a plethora of possible reasons why my faith hadn’t worked for all that time. Because I knew no better, there was nothing with which I could compare my knowledge of faith and its experiences to. It was all we had, and it had to work. Late In the year 2006 , I was sent out to pioneer a church in western Kenya, the sugar belt rural town called Mumias.
It is here I would later meet the saving Grace of God in the Gospel of His Son Jesus Christ. Pastor Barnabas, my then senior pastor had prayed and laid hands on us to go and plant a church. Strangely enough, I was going to rely on the power of miracles to help that new Church be established and grow. All prayer was directed towards beseeching God to bless us with miracle working power. This display of the supernatural power in healing and various manifestations would draw people to Christ and fill up the church fairly quickly.
I recall how a dear brother had gifted me with a preachers handbag as a parting gift. He wished me well and earnestly, even honestly prayed for my successes in the new church plant so far away from home. But before Vitalis gave me the handbag he said he had one very important piece of advice he wished to give me. With a rather pious, and what felt then to be a holy expectation for great things, he said “we are trusting God with you for one demonstrable miracle, which would be undeniable. This miracle will be the key to your ministry success”, and with those words he had offered a prayer to that effect. Well, the expected miracle did not happen, but our zeal and dedication to the new work was yielding fruit. Scores were joining us for worship services as we preached that Jesus loved them and had wonderful plans for their lives. We marketed and sold hope aggressively. Jesus was the key to all of life’s difficulties, sickness, poverty, bad relationships, and all manner of problems.
To this Jesus many came, not for forgiveness of sins or escape from the judgement to come. I cannot in all honesty say there were many cases of heartfelt repentance from sin and a turning to God for the right Biblical reasons. People came to find relief from their temporal situations, eternity, and the destinies of their never dying souls was hardly in view as we presented what we believed to the Gospel to them. But how could they genuinely repent when sin was hardly mentioned? And when it was mentioned, it was only raised as the little, small thing keeping them from their destinies. I shudder in fear and dread to think of how many I led down this false path They would be hundreds, perhaps thousands, who but for the Grace of God in Christ, their blood would be required in my hands. I find comfort in that text in Acts 17:31
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent
As God forgave and washed Saul of Tarsus from the heinous crimes of murder when he repented at the foot of the risen saviour, so also God washed me from the guilt of those souls I murdered with a false Gospel.
Grace arrived and the light shone in darkness
When God caught up with the zealously religious Saul on the road to Damascus, he had neither knowledge, nor plans of that divine appointment. The blinding light of the glory of God in the person of His dear Son wrestled the self-deceived zealot to the ground, laying to waste his many years of a false religion. This is what God would do for me in His appointed hour, an hour I would later learn was planned from all eternity (Romans 8:29-30), and fixed upon the heart of the Father (II Timothy 2:19). That even in my obstinate ways, hurtling headlong to self-destruction in the fiery pits of Hell, the loving father had given me as bride to His beloved Son. That the Son had pledged himself to the father to rescue me and make his own (John 6:39).
My new church plant was growing impressively, the man-made methods of church growth were working wonderfully. The deceived preacher, now pastor, was deceiving many as well. If God did not intervene in this tragic state of affairs, the Lord’s own words in Matthew 15:14 were playing out in spiritually chilling fashion;
Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.
A pastor friend of mine was hosting a preaching couple from Australia. I would later learn that this couple had been on a preaching circuit in Uganda and were to transit through Kenya back to their own country -Australia. God had directed Papa Billy and mama Tessa Sked to our little town to share the Gospel of God’s gratuitous Grace. So by God’s kind providence they would pass through our little town of Mumias (you can read more about their story by following this link). On their way to Australia, they were scheduled to preach for an hour in our little town. The church they were to preach in was not far from our own. So, my friend, with whom we had developed a very close friendship, being both charismatic preachers, asked me to come along and do translation for the Australian preacher. He would preach in English, and I would interpret in the local language-Swahili.
Billy Sked was preaching on the matter of justification by faith through the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. This had followed a laying out of the impossible claims of the moral law of God. He had insisted that given the impossible demands of the law of God upon our fallen, impotent human nature, no human being could be saved by keeping the law (Romans 3:20). That in fact by reason of our spiritual death, we not only are unable, but are unwilling to come to Jesus for our salvation. He said that if we would be saved truly, it would not be a result of our decision, but God’s initiative (John 15:16). That what would save us would be the twin realities of Christ’s substitutionary death as the sin bearer for those who would trust in Him. That Jesus took upon his own body that punishment, which was due for such vile law breakers, ungodly people like us (Isaiah 53:4-5, II Peter 2:24).
Even that fact of substitutionary death, notwithstanding that its full implications was coming home in a totally new way, was not the issue which turned my theology upside down. Billy Sked said even after such substitutionary atonement, at which we were saved from the wrath of God in eternal Hell, we still needed the righteousness which would make us acceptable to be in fellowship with Him (Matthew 5:20 & 48). Where would such a perfect record come from? How could a man born in sin achieve perfection in the sight of God? (Job 9:2). It is at this point I would have responded emphatically that I, as one who chose Jesus Christ and invited Him into my life, was responsible to keep myself perfect. That I had to work hard and achieve a righteousness which God wanted and keep it by all means possible. But this white man was saying that all I would achieve in my efforts would be in the language of Isaiah 64:6 “filthy rags” before God. It would come under the charge of St. Paul in Romans 3:20 “by the deeds of the law no flesh would be justified in His presence”. He painted a picture of many in the audience, including me resembling that which Paul spoke about ion Romans 10:1-4
Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes
The longest hour of my life
Having come from a background of believing man made choices to accept or reject God, and to keep himself in the state of Grace, and to work ever so diligently as to not miss out when the Lord returns, this was Gospel as I never heard it in my life. Billy Sked, by presenting text of scripture after another removed saving Grace from the control, or even partnership of man, to being the work of God alone. For a man who had all his life believed that he did some of the work and God blessed it by doing the rest, this was as diametrically opposed to all I believed as anything could be. Instinctively I judged this white man a false prophet sent by Satan to deceive our people. I would have walked away in protest, if not for anything else but not to be part of what I considered the damning of the souls of our people. But it is very un-African to be rude to a guest, especially one who had visited from another continent. So I was determined to endure this terrible ordeal of interpreting what I was vehemently opposed to.
My mind was in painful turmoil even as I translated for the elderly preacher. I knew I would have to confront him afterwards, that I would prove him wrong by the text of scripture, and afterwards I would come back and correct this false teaching among our people. Yet even as I struggled on that stage with these thoughts, I was aware that something else was going on in my heart. I could never put a definite finger to it, but certainly some of those darts were going through. In my mind I knew I had to fight this, yet my heart in some strange ways reckoned with the weight of what was being preached here. It felt as though some powerful force of truth was pushing the wall in my mind, and that struggle was very real. I could feel even in that providential hour, in real time, that my wall wasn’t holding up well. It is the type of feeling one has when you are hanging on a cliff, clutching on a stack of grass which was coming undone, and you know it is just a matter of time before you plunge down the cliff. But I felt if I had time to think and plan my attack, I would recover and would show this man how terribly wrong he was.
But that knowledge and solace did not minimize the intensity of the inner struggle. Later, having known how God’s wondrous Grace works through the Holy Spirit, in the making of new creatures, I would realize it was God at work in my heart, challenging and overcoming my own resistance to His saving Grace. He was chipping away at that wall, one truth at a time, having grabbed me, as it were, by the shirt collar, he would bring me to Himself despite myself. That hour felt like an eternity of torment, but it soon, to my relief, it came to an end.
Fighting a losing battle
I took the email address of this couple, with every intention of proving how wrong they had been in interpreting the scriptures. So for the next few weeks I looked at the texts I had hoped would make my case and refute theirs. But it seemed the same texts I had hoped would rescue my course rebuked it. I just could not understand how I had so terribly misapprehended the scriptures and with that misapprehension missed God’s way of genuine salvation. I saw scripture in a new light, the kind of light which made complete sense and was faithful to the word of scripture, the kind of light Billy Sked had been shining through his preaching.
I now know what happened was not that scripture changed, but that I had been given new eyes to see scripture in their real and intended meaning. The Spirit had been given to me to show me the paths of life in the scriptures. God was now leading me in green pastures, and besides quite waters. It is amazing how dramatic, yet subtle this divine transaction can be. From death to life, from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, God does this in such powerful ways, ways which one only sees clearly with the passage of time.
In the end I knew I had missed God’s way, that I had never been a genuine Christian to begin with. I now knew that I had just found the way of salvation. God had revealed it to me in that one hour, in such unexpected ways. I dropped my struggle and laid down my arms. I surrendered to the Gospel, and really trusted in Jesus for the salvation of my soul. When I next wrote to Papa Billy and mama Tessa, who had become my parents in the faith of the Gospel, it was to ask to be taught more adequately the ways of the Lord, to be fed with material which would help me grow in this new life, in this new faith. And God used them to confirm, build and to nourish my new faith.
I am eternally grateful that God sent this couple for me. I am thankful they obeyed God and came to Africa; I am thankful that God turned the perilous course of my life, and with it that of many more who continue to see the light of His saving Grace through the many ministry outreaches we have had since.
This story doesn’t end here, it continues in ever fascinating orchestrations of God to weave a Gospel ministry out of this story of His saving Grace. This salvation story became the rebirth of Gospel Missions Agency Church-Kenya, and the birth of Wisdom Training Centre-School of Ministry & Theology.
You can read of these ministries by following the links below
WISDOM TRAINING CENTRE-GODS OWN STORY