help – Gospel Minutes for Everyday Missionaries

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“May the Lord show mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, because he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains. On the contrary, when he was in Rome, he searched hard for me until he found me. May the Lord grant that he will find mercy from the Lord on that day! You know very well in how many ways he helped me in Ephesus.” (2 Timothy 1:16-18)

Last week Brian Waple spoke of how important prayerful dependence on the Lord is when things don’t go quite as we hope and expect. This was a timely word for Darlene and me, as we were traveling 2,500 miles east in our RV and had just experienced some serious technical challenges.

First came some troubling computer errors. We were zipping down the highway doing 80 in that big rig (the speed limit in South Dakota), passing a Mack truck doing 75 or so, when we hit a major wind gust. The engine suddenly cut out and all sorts of audio and visual alarms began to ring and flash. With traffic zipping angrily around us, we were finally able to pull to the shoulder. To make a long story short, one tire was quickly losing air, and both front tires were wearing unevenly. We replaced them in Indianapolis and got back on the road.

We were almost into Pennsylvania when the next big challenge arrived. Our RV is diesel, and all throughout the nation I’d been looking for those green-handled diesel pumps when I filled up. I pulled into a BP which said it had diesel for $2.25/gallon. I found a green-handled pump with that price on it and began filling up.

Suddenly I realized the pump I was pumping out of wasn’t diesel—it was regular fuel! I stopped immediately, but not until four gallons of regular fuel had been placed into my diesel tank.

Chagrined and embarrassed, Darlene and I discussed and prayed about what we should do. It was a weekend and finding a diesel mechanic in that small town would be next to impossible.

“Why don’t you call Brian Holthe?” she said.

Great idea! Brian used to attend Elim, and I have grown to trust him implicitly. Brian’s shop, Genesis Automotive, had been providing good service to our RV for several years. But the shop was closed, and I did not have Brian’s cell phone number.

My wife is always full of good ideas in challenges such as this. “Try Martin,” she said. “He will know how to get a hold of Brian.”

I called Martin, praying he would pick up—and he did. He provided Brian’s number and encouraged me NOT to start the engine. (He said he had once been in the reverse situation—accidentally putting diesel into his regular-fuel motorcycle engine—and Brian had been invaluable. I was encouraged, and I also didn’t feel as dumb as I had a few minutes earlier!)

Brian answered his mobile, and Martin was right, he was very helpful and gave me great advice. He provided the name of a diesel additive that would help, and suggested I fill the tank with as much diesel as possible to minimize the ratio of regular to diesel fuel in the tank. With luck, watching my engine temperature and listening carefully for any problems, he thought I’d probably be okay. (He said he would normally advise the tank be emptied on the spot, but that wasn’t possible in our situation.)

His advice was spot on. I hiked a mile to an auto parts shop that sold me the additive, then I added it and topped the tank with diesel. We then drove carefully the three hours to our daughter’s home in Pennsylvania, with no further problems.

Prayer is very important under such difficult circumstances. But we also found great help in fellow brothers in Christ who were willing to drop what they were doing to help us through a tight spot. I’m not sure what I would have done without them.

It strikes me that even the Apostle Paul leaned heavily on his brothers and sisters in Christ as he conducted his difficult ministry. In stressful times like these, it is more important than ever before to have brothers and sisters in Christ we trust to help us when we are in trouble.

And it’s also critically important that we ourselves be available to help others who need us!

Are you seeking to connect with and depend on other brothers and sisters in Christ, here at Elim and elsewhere, to be there when you need them to? As Brian suggested last week, take your challenges first to the Lord, but then listen carefully as He directs you toward people who can help you run the race with confidence and strength.

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By Kendrick & Janna Gilli

“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.” Proverbs 14:34 (NIV)

Pastor Steve was right when he said that Americans hate the word sin. We are fiercely independent and do not like being told what to do or what we are, and so when it comes to being called sinful, Americans bristle at it. Americans also like to believe that people are basically good—maybe a few bad mistakes in life, maybe a few bad apples in the bunch. This, of course, starts as a baby and a toddler, because they are so cute and angelic.

And we wonder why so many people feel hurt by Christians! We tell people that they are sinful from birth. Often the familiar response is, “What! My cute little angelic baby is sinful?” We tell people that only the Holy Spirit can help us realize our sin and work on it and we get, “I don’t need no stinkin’ help; you can’t tell me what to do!” We tell people that only Jesus can wash away our sin so that we can be with Him in heaven. The response is often, “What do you mean? What are talking about? I am a good person and those anger issues are because it is overcast here so much. It is not really my fault.”Job said it best: “I have concealed my sin as people do, by hiding my guilt in my heart” (Job 31:33).

People equate the idea of sin as gigantic and associated with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. No, that baby is not Hitler. No, just because you get mad doesn’t mean that you are Stalin. Why can’t people realize that we don’t have to be Stalin to be sinful? People tell others all the time that they do not have to be perfect. If this is true, then they must recognize on some level that everybody has faults (i.e., sins).

A favorite story in my family goes back to when I was a few months old and my sister was one year older. She liked to pick up a doll and hit me with it. What was in her heart that made her want to hit her baby brother? What about when my daughter would throw temper tantrums when she was two to four years old? Sin is in our hearts even as children, and we need help from our parents to recognize it and deal with it. Even the world agrees that parents need to teach their children right from wrong. However, the world also believes that once we have grown up, we magically stop doing things wrong. In fact, the “wrong things” as an adult are just considered “choices,” that we are just being whom we choose to be. Sin has become a bad word or politically incorrect.

It is also interesting how, as Americans, we persist in thinking we do not need any help. We love to help others but are too proud to ask for any help ourselves. What would you do if your car broke down in the middle of the intersection and four guys came to help you push it out of the way? Would you refuse? Of course not! Then why do we refuse help with correcting mistakes we make? Why are we not willing to accept help from God? He just wants to help us be better and when we do things wrong, He wants to forgive us. Yet, we believe that we can solve our problems ourselves or we are too proud to ask God to help us change.

As a nation, we seem to have gone to the extreme with our pride and denial. In fact, Satan is doing a darn good job pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. So as Christians, how do we deal with this? The first part of this answer is recognizing the truth and asking God to convict us and to show us our sin; then, we must be willing to ask Him to change us from the inside out. The second part of this answer is LOVE. Being Christ to the world and living with love will open up doorways to conversations about sin and God’s solution for it. And finally, the last part of the answer is prayer; we need to be prayer warriors and to ask God for grace and opportunities to share the gospel with unbelievers. We need to fight against the lies that Satan is spreading, lies that make us complacent and okay with our sin. An unseen war is raging all around us, and we need to put on our armor daily and pray that God opens our eyes to it.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:10–12)

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