Faith: God’s Gift to the Human Heart is a refreshing look at faith. This book contains insights gained during fifty mission trips in Asia and Europe, and forty years of local church leadership in Australia. It will encourage you to do the works that Jesus did during his earthly ministry, and does to this day, through Christians who move forward in faith.
A fine American missionary who founded a bible college in Central Luzon once took me to a Filipino village (barangay) which had been blacked out by a power failure. Although not far from a highway, it was another world. Motorcycles roared around in the night and dim shapes flitted through the darkness beyond our vehicle’s headlights. Our venue was the rather grandly named “Oasis Club” that turned out no more than a rough concrete stage with unfinished rooms out back. I went to take a quick look inside the rooms, but backed away when warned there could be cobras.
A hastily-arranged power connection soon got the meeting started. The response was good, despite the
meeting being interrupted by an occult leader who raised his staff of authority and chanted, “Inkon is the true God!” (I thought that he was saying, King Kong, until told that he was speaking of an ancestral spirit.) After preaching I ministered to the sick and then climbed into the back of a heavy truck to pray for a man on a stretcher suffering from elephantiasis: a disease that swells the leg and…you really don’t want to know. On the way home the missionary offered me some salted peanuts, but the thought of eating them from my hand, remembering that it had…well, you get the picture.
A year or so later, when I was about to teach at that missionary’s bible college, a petit Filipina student
approached me, her face beaming. She asked, “Do you know me?” “Sorry” I replied, “but I can’t say that I do.” She then asked: “Do you remember that night at [she named the village] when the lights were out and two girls played guitar?” I responded that yes, I did remember, and would never forget that night. Well, she said, the name of one of the girls who played guitar in the meeting that night was Jina.
“I am Jina!” she exclaimed. “I was one of the two who played guitar that night!” The excited young student then told me that after reading one of my books on faith she had decided to return to the village with a friend, and there preach the Gospel. They believed that the Lord would use them to heal the sick, just as He had used me. “We played a few choruses and then told the people about Jesus, like you did. Then, as we prayed, the names of different sicknesses and diseases came into our minds.
“When we called out the names of those diseases, people who were suffering from them came forward. We laid our hands on them, and when we did the Lord healed them!” Jina added that after that wonderful experience she asked the Lord if He wanted her to go to Bible College. He did, and there she was – bubbling with joy and excitement! That young lady’s testimony of her unforgettable experience is what this book is all about.
I am confident that many who read Faith: God’s Gift to the Human Heart will put what they learn to good use – just as Jina did. I hope that you will be one of them.
