P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

“I COULD SING OF YOUR LOVE FOREVER”

The Christian bestseller Living Faith describes a simple Cuban-American preacher named Eloy Cruz, who may be in God’s all-time Hall of Witnessing Fame. He and his Anglo ministry partner traveled from Georgia to Massachusetts to share their faith with families that had emigrated from Puerto Rico. They got fleabag rooms at the local YMCA and spent a week just going from one high-rise tenement building to the next, talking about Jesus Christ with the families crowded into the tiny apartments.

And the author writes how this Pastor Cruz was just an amazing witness for the Christian faith. He spoke fluent Spanish, of course – the writer of the story just a little – and Cruz would sit in someone’s living room and begin to tell how wonderful Jesus was. One family had six kids, and they all sat and listened. The father, over in the corner, tried to push a beer bottle out of sight as Cruz shared the story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. He told how Jesus wept, and soon the family was crying. Then he told how Lazarus came bounding out of the tomb, and they all broke into cheers. Immediately the entire family knelt down and prayed a prayer of repentance.

And this writer goes on to describe how Eloy Cruz seemed to establish intimacy with everyone he met. He loved Jesus, and he loved people . . . and those two loves worked spiritual magic everywhere he went.

Oh, by the way, the “second banana” in that summer witnessing team was a young Baptist named Jimmy. As in Carter, later America’s 39th President. That’s right. And Carter once asked Pastor Cruz what the secret was for his powerful Christian witnessing. The man looked embarrassed at first, and then confessed: “Pues, Nuestro Señor no puede hacer mucho con un hombre que es duro.” Meaning: “Our Savior cannot do much with a man who is hard.” He observed that Jesus was gentle with people, patient with their faults and confusions, “especially with those who were poor or weak.” And President Carter concludes by telling us Eloy’s one simple rule for evangelism:

“You only have to have two loves in your life – for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.”

Yesterday we suggested that a person needs to KNOW God, to be acquainted with Him, to have new realities and experiences regarding God entering his mind and heart at all times . . . otherwise he or she won’t have much to share. As they say in Christian circles, “You can’t come back from where you haven’t been.” But today let’s take it a step further. Would you agree that a LOVE for God is really the first prerequisite if we want to share with others? If we don’t love Jesus Christ, what motivation is there to tell others about Him? A recent Bible study curriculum in my own denomination put it very succinctly:
“We witness because we are in love with Him.”

In the book, Prisoners of Hope, missionaries Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer describe their imprisonment in Afghanistan right before and after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Why did these two American girls risk life itself to invade Taliban territory and quietly talk behind curtains and locked front doors about Jesus Christ to friends they made over there? The answer is very simple. We find in the early chapters that Jesus had invaded THEIR lives, and rescued them from experiences of heartache and misery. One of the girls had fallen into promiscuity, had had an abortion. Her boyfriend got her into experimenting with drugs. She would go out with her friends, using a fake ID, order mai tais and light up cigarettes, and then confess right there at dinner: “I know God is real. I know there is something more.”

But then she went to Baylor University; she began to attend Antioch Community Church. And there she really fell in love with Jesus; He became everything to her. And it was that love which drove her to sign up with SNI – Shelter Now International. By the way, you talk about “loving Jesus and the person in front of you” – this book is filled with wonderful anecdotes about the people they fell in love with over in Kabul. That miraculous mix of vertical love / horizontal love made them effective witnesses for Christ.

In the gospel of Mark, chapter five, we find a desperate story of a man invaded by a satanic spirit. I don’t know how capable a possessed person is of sensing their own desperate pain and need, but this wild-eyed man did run to Jesus and fall on his knees; something in him cried out for release. And with a simple command of power, Jesus drove the demons out of him.

We probably can’t imagine how instantly this man must have loved Jesus! Think about the freedom of having your mind back, of feeling clean after years of diabolical confusion and rage. And in verse 18 we’re told that this man begged Jesus: “Let me stay with You. I don’t want to be anywhere else! I love You! Let me be Your 13th disciple.” And then Jesus gave this powerful witnessing command:

“Go home to your family and tell THEM how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.”

Way back in the beginning years of our denomination, a little book called Steps to Christ had this observation:

“No sooner has one come to Christ than there is born in his heart a desire to make known to others what a precious friend he has found in Jesus . . . If we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good we SHALL have something to tell.”

What does this mean? If we have truly encountered Jesus, if we are in love, then we’re going to have a natural desire to talk about it. You know, being a Southern California-based ministry as we are, we sometimes bemoan the fact that you have to go clear back to 1988 in order to be able to talk about Dodger successes in the postseason. I wasn’t with the Voice of Prophecy back then, but I’m sure there had to be some lunch gatherings where the sports fans just couldn’t stop talking. How ‘bout that Gibson homer against Eckersly and the A’s? How about that Hershiser winning Game Two and Game Five? How about the way they shut down the Mets in that great final NL championship game, with born-again Hershiser kneeling down on the pitcher’s mound to pray at the end? Those who cared about Dodger Blue weren’t able to keep still. Here in 2003, I notice that parents whose kids are graduating have something to say. Someone who gets a new grandbaby brings pictures around and we lose many, many collective hours of Voice of Prophecy salary time ooh-ing and ahh-ing. As well we should. Because somebody loves that baby, and we all love that somebody. But are we equally in love with Jesus, and ready to “show His picture” to someone we have decaf coffee with at the office, or the guys in our bowling league on Thursday nights? Or our cousin who has wandered away from their earlier faith?

You may say right here: “Well and good, Melashenko, but frankly, I don’t FEEL any love for God or for His kingdom. I drag myself to church but I don’t hear any violins playing or get any lovey-dovey perfume scent out of it; know what I mean?” Yes, I do, and it’s not real to think that we will feel the same way about Jesus as we do about our high school romantic flames.

Ironically, there’s a great sentence or two in C. S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity, where he’s writing about spousal “love” . . . but what he says works here just as well, if not better. “Love” is not the same, he points out, as “being in love.” Being in love is a feeling, which might come and which might go, and which would never be steadily gushing along like Niagara Falls anyway.

“But love,” he continues, “is a deep unity, maintained by the WILL and deliberately strengthened by habit.”

I find that the people who have most effectively witnessed to me, and the people I most admire when I go with an evangelism entourage to Caracas, or to Columbia, South Carolina, or to the dusty roads of Zambia, are those who just steadily, and faithfully, and relentlessly abide in a relationship with Jesus. It may not be flashy; they aren’t generally real charismatic folks. But every day they read God’s Word. Their Bibles are well underlined, with substantial parts memorized. Every week they’re in His house of worship. Every weekend they give Jesus a full 24 hours of Sabbath fellowship. And no, most of them don’t write love poems about Jesus and read them to me over breakfast, but they certainly live lives that exhibit a love relationship, and they do seem to graciously work many conversations around to that favorite of all their topics: Isn’t Jesus good? He’s my best Friend; I want Him to be yours too.

You know, President Jimmy Carter still teaches a Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church. You can just show up in Plains, Georgia, and ask him a question. He tells how visitors sometimes ask him: “Mr. President” – or maybe there it’s just “Jimmy” – “what does it mean to be a Christian?”

“Being born again,” he writes, “is a new life, not of perfection but of striving, stretching, and searching – a life of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit.”

That’s a good working definition of love. AND good witnessing.