This is day 12, the final day of the Prodigal Prayer Mission by Kathie Saari.

The Plan of Salvation

Meditate on John 3:16

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

READ AND PREPARE

How to Lead a Person to Christ by Dr. Richard J. Krejcir including

Billy Graham/Bill Bright Four-Step Process (Campus Crusade):

1. God’s purpose: peace and love. God wants you to experience peace and life abundantly and eternally (Romans 5:1, John 3:16, 10:10).
2. Our problem: Separation, God created us in His own image to have abundant life. He did not make us robots to automatically love and obey Him but gave us the gift of free choice. Hence, we chose to disobey God on our own will, which resulted in our separation (Romans 3:23, 6:23). Our attempts through the ages have failed to bridge the gap (Isaiah 59:2, Proverbs 14:12).
3. God’s remedy: The cross. Jesus Christ is the only answer to this problem. He died on the cross, rose from the grave and paid our penalty (1 Timothy 2:5, 1 Peter 3:18, Romans 5:8).
4. Our response: To receive Christ, we must trust in Him by personal invitation (Revelation 3:20, John 1:12, Romans 10:9). Then pray with the person and make sure they receive discipling. And focus on the basics, which include prayer, Scripture, devotional life, accountability and discipleship.

The Roman Road

The Roman Road is a group of Bible verses from the book of Romans that are used to help people to better understand salvation and to lead people to Christ:

1. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)
2. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
3. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)
4. If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. (Romans 10:9-10)
5. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. (Romans 10:13)

The first thing you have to realize is that YOU ARE a sinner. Secondly, God loves YOU. Thirdly, without God, you are doomed. Fourthly, come clean, confess your sins to God; and lastly, you are not excluded from salvation no matter what you’ve done.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Sights and Sounds of Enabling
  by Diane Viere and Elaine Altman-Eller
• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Work
• Day Eleven of the 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Ten of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Nine of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission

This is day 11 of the Prodigal Prayer Mission by Kathie Saari.

Testimonies That Build Faith

Meditate on Matthew 17:20

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Testimony 1

Steve Friskup: A Drinking Man’s Salvation

by Christine McWhorter of The 700 Club

CBN.com – Working as a horse auctioneer isn’t just a job for Steve Friskup; it’s a passion. He also loves calf roiping and spending time with his wife, Robin. But years ago, Steve’s favorite activities were overshadowed by his love for alcohol. “I never was a guy who could just have one drink,” Steve tells The 700 Club. “If I had one, I had two. If I had two, I had 12. If I had 12, then some time in the night I was going to become rich, handsome and bulletproof, all at the same time.”

Steve had his first drink at just 9 years old. His parents were Christians, but alcohol was a big part of their lifestyle and always available in his home. Later, as an adult, Steve discovered alcohol gave him something he had always longed for:

It made me liked. It made me popular. It made me fit in. I may not rope as good as anybody. I may not have as much money as anybody else, but if we’re at the bar, you’re going to like me. That’s just how it is. That need for that attention or something.

But the alcohol didn’t just make Steve popular. It turned him into a man he barely knew. He says, “Anything that alters the way a man thinks and alters his morality — it can’t be good. Alcohol somehow demoralized me. I could see it getting worse and wors. It just dumbed me down to a guy that I didn’t want to be. Every time I sobered up I didn’t want to be that guy. That’s now who I wanted to be and I knew it.”

“Money was a big one. I could spend money on the dumbest stuff. I could buy drinks for everybody. I could gamble, just do dumb stuff with money you didn’t have. You go home and you’re trying to keep the lights on for your wife and your little kids and you just spent the stupid money. I was just making really bad decisions.” Steve’s drinking affected his family the most.

“I used language that a man should be crucified for in front of my children. [It] wasn’t abusive; I was just vulgar. Stuff like that. It’s no good. It was no good. I’ll tell you the worst one. I’ve got two daughters and one of them’s never had a drink that I know of. Pretty sure not. The oldest one can’t say that, because her daddy gave her a drink. Little girls [sic] should have never been given her only taste of alcohol in her live [sic] from her dad. That’s what alcohol did for me.”

After partying one night with a friend, Steve woke up with a hangover and a revelation. He was finally tired of his drunken lifestyle: “I got up that morning, and I was sick with a capital S. It was bad. It was like you hit me right in the forehad with a choppin’ ax. I didn’t have any money left and I just laid there in that bed and I thought, “Now, I’ve got to put my game face on and go auctioneer this horse sale and pretend like I’m fine.” I told that friend I said, “I’m not drinking no more.” My friend kidded me and told everybody, he picked on me all weekend.

But Steve was serious about his new commitment. He just didn’t know how to keep it. On the ride home after the horse auction, he decided to talk to God:

That night I called on Jesus for some odd reason. Nobody’s told me how to pray this prayer. I just called on Jesus and I met Him. You know the first thing that the Lord spoke to me: ‘What do you want?’ I said ‘I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good dad. I don’t want to do another thing away from home that I’m ashamed to tell my family when I get back. Alcohol’s turning me loose to be an idiot and I don’t want it anymore. I want rid of it right now! He said, ‘If you’ll give me all of it, I’ll get rid of that.’ I said, ‘I’m all yours.’

It moves me every time of how awesome it is for a guy like me in a cab of a pickup to have your sins forgiven. Heaven is part of the deal, but I don’t think people realize unless you’ve been an old sinner what it means to be sitting in the cab of a truck and have God tell you that your sins are forgiven.

He drove home that night and began a new life. He began r3ading his Bible and going to church with his family. “It was pretty amazing when you pull in your house and you tell your family,” Steve continued, “Get up. We’re going to church. I just got saved.” You don’t even know what that means. They think I must have snorted something up my nose or something and went crazy.” Steve says he hasn’t had a drop of alcohol since then.

“The fear of the Lord will make a man hate evil. As I’ve grown, I’ve got to where I just despise evil. I’ve gotten that way about the alcohol, because it was so dangerous in my life and i didn’t know it.”

Now, the Friskup home is peaceful, and Steve makes strong decisions for his family. He and Robin are pastors of Muleshoe Cowboy Church in Texas. He says, “It’s just what God’ll do. We run horse sales with grown men walking around telling each other they love each other. That’s just crazy. That ain’t how that goes. But that’s what God’ll do.’

Testimony 2

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but it seems to me that a lot of people have come to know the Lord at the age of around 20. Maybe it’s just the ones I’ve met? But that is when it happened to me. I was just approaching my twentieth birthday, twenty years ago nw, when someone came right up to my friends and unashamedly told them that he had given his life to Jesus. My friends at that time knew this particular young man and made the most of ribbing him and giving him a hard time. I just listened quietly in the background and when they had finished their taunts I asked him some questions of my own: “What about starving millions? Why doesn’t God do something about it?” and I can’t remember what else. I don’t think his answers impressed me, nor anything particularly of the whole event, but all I know is that at that moment in great simplicity I said within myself, “OK, I believe you, there is a God.”

I had not thought much about it before and I had special intention of ‘going away to think about it’ at that time. However, the next I knew was, wherever I went, whatever I was doing, all that kept going through my mind was, “There really is a God’, ‘there really is someone called Jesus, there really is a heaven and there really is a hell.”

My knowledge of the Bible was pretty much limited to what the cover looked like of a little Gideon’s Testament I had among my possessions (somehow!). My only previous use for this was to press a four-leaved clover inside of it and occasionally tuck it under my pillow at night, in some vain attempt at procuring some comfort from a state of paranoia about my health and death.

My concern for my state of health and fear of death did have some basis in reality. I had severely traumatized y own body by a lifestyle of drug-taking and had on two previous occasions overdose on amphetamine and once at an evey younger age tried to completely asphyxiate myself with my head in a bag of solvent.

Mine is the case of the typical broken-home scenario. I’ll spare the details of the early years, suffice to say that by the time I was 13 I was headlong into crime, girls, self-abuse and the care system, complete with D.C. (detention centre) — the short, sharp, shock treatment. By the time I was 19 I wasn’t looking as though I was going to improve much.

So we come back to my little encounter above. A lone off conversation with nothing especially much to impress, but during the 2 weeks that followed that brief encounter something was still progressing inside of me. In the course of that time that “voice” (not audible but none-the-less very real) did not let up at any moment. It was saying every day : There really is a God, there really is someone called Jesus, there really is a heaven, there really is a hell.”I somehow knew as if by instinct (or the young man told me, I can’t remember) I must repent of all my sins, ask Jesus to forgive me and live a completely different life.

The idea of “giving up” all my vices in life was almost too much to contemplate, but there was something much more powerful growing inside of me that I knew I couldn’t escape — the fear of Hell. I am not saying that the whole purpose of my Christian life now is simply to escape Hell, I am not saying that such a thought is a wonderful motive for giving your life to Christ; but the bottom line for me and my particular thought processes at that time was this: It doesn’t matter how bland, boring, dull and difficult life will be, it will only be temporal — but after that comes the eternal! By comparison there was only one thing a self-seeking sinner could do — turn my life over to Jesus and be saved. Such was my reasoning and such was God’s method of reaching into the depths of me and making me repent of my sing.

The time had come; I knew what I must do, so, alone in my flat one night I decided that I was going to do it. One final thought struck me. It was late in the evening and I had a habit of making resolutions last thing at night about changing my lifestyle. Not for any moral reason, but simply for the sake of my health, which as I said I was somewhat paranoid about. I would make my plans to live a cleaner, healthier lifestyle at bedtime and in the morning would go my way in pursuit of besetting sins. So that evening I said to myelf, “If I really mean this, then I’ll mean it just as much in the morning. ” So I did nothing that night and went to bed.

That was the beginning for me. Needless to say, many are the lessons along the way. Jesus said that He is “The Door”, but He also said that He is “The Way”. One of the most valuable lessons I had to learn as a young Christian was that it doesn’t matter how radical and striking your conversion experience is, unless you continue to walk with God day by day then you are still powerless to live righteously before God. I was greatly helped by reading a book by the title of Abide in Christ. Of course, ultimately it is God Himself who sees to it that you and I will hear the right thing, read the right book, meet the right people at just the right time in order to teach us the things we need to know, as we are able to receive them. Jesus also said that He is “The Shepherd”. The Holy Spirit is our Teacher. God Himself has promised to guide us into all Truth. May He guide you along the paths that to everlasting life, too.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Sights and Sounds of Enabling
  by Diane Viere and Elaine Altman-Eller
• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Work
• Day Twelve of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Ten of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Nine of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission

I was raised Southern Baptist, okay?! I’m not sure why I felt obligated to say that up front or why this topic makes me so tense. I’m a worshiper,  in fact, it was listening to “worship” music that I remembered from more than 20 years prior that was partially responsible for the end of my lengthy prodigal run. God intervened directly in my life — that was unmistakable — but I was left with this question: Which God intervened directly in my life? Bad experiences in Christian church buildings had contributed to my disenchantment with God so I was prejudiced against this God being that God, the Christian God.

I made a CD of some old Christian songs that I remembered, mostly simple choruses and hymns, and noticed that ;my heart would soar listening to them. Now I knew that it was that God after all. I would listen to this music when I was driving alone and often raised my available right hand. This was noteworthy because I was not a hand raiser in my youth.

When I finally worked up the nerve to walk into a church building again, I walked into a building full of hand raisers. I did not want to conform at any level because I still held some bitterness toward Christian congregations, I, of course would not raise my hands. I assumed that anyone who did desperately needed attention and I despised them.

I had a dilemma, I found that raising my hands was a spontaneous expression of worship for me but I did not want to appear to be “one of those”, whatever “those” are. I sought seats at the rear of the congregation so I could raise my hands at will and yet make it clear to everyone else that I did not need attention. This felt disingenuous — I use that word because it sounds much better than “fraud-like” or its dreaded twin “hypocritical”. I’m not sure why I was surprised that holding strong resentment toward Christians in general and hand raisers in particular impeded my worship. It took me months to unravel this truth while I repeatedly tried to reconcile the difference between the spontaneous, unfettered Richard and the uptight, contemptuous one.

Now I raise my hands when I feel it and don’t when I don’t. I most often raise just my right hand, bending it at the elbow over and over in celebratory praise. Of course, if you are new to our local congregation, this appears a great deal like a really big guy angrily shaking his fist at God. I’ll call this “cognitive dissonance” because it sounds more Christian than “frightening the children”.

I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. \o/

Psalm 63:4

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Sights and Sounds of Enabling
  by Diane Viere and Elaine Altman-Eller
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• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Religion
• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Worship
• Day Twelve of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission

I was concerned about some things that are happening with myself, with friends and with online friends. I told my wife last night that if we took a snapshot right now and scored the events, it looks like there’s a lot of spiritual movement and the bad guys are winning hands down. So I lay down on my back on my bed and closed my eyes.

My mind wandered from the task at hand so I opened my eyes and looked down toward my feet. I see something blurry nearer a dresser past my feet against that wall. Then the blur becomes a scene as if someone was focusing a camera. Once focused it was hi-def clear — it was a familiar tree from our backyard with a familiar number of stars against a black sky. I see one star just above the top of the tree become a shooting star, scratching a perfect bright white line straight up and then burning out.

I blink and the scene is gone, I think “Yeah, right.” I then start to open and close my eyes, squint, change angles, all in an attempt to reproduce the picture but nothing. I am overwhelmed with the feeling that something important is happening either right at that moment or today. That feeling stays with me and I begin contacting people about it. I think this must be a positive sign. We’re to “shine like stars in the universe as we hold out the word of life” (Php 2).

I pray that God if this is a sign that something very important and positive is going to happen to me that He not do it. I asked God to let the cup pass me in favor of my friends in greater need.

Several things happened today that I will report back on with comments to this post. Is one of those things THE thing. Are all of them? Did something big happen today in the lives of the people I asked God to help?

UPDATE …

There are three major wins in this group, one medical, one job and one financial gain. There’s more to do but “wow”, thank you Jesus. The number went from two to three this morning when one of the people I prayed for (above) received great financial news in the form of a job for her dad. She’s thanking Jesus and so am I.

UPDATE (7/25/11)

I had a strong sense when reading Joseph from Chuck Swindoll’s Great Lives series that the blessing I passed on for my friends would be restored but I would have to wait two years like Joseph waited two years to get out of prison after he interpreted the ruler’s dream. I was excited to know that the blessing would be restored but when I heard it would be two years I shouted “No!, No!” at God. If you’re thinking this was not the correct response, just know that I’m aware of that. I’m adding this update now because it’s now been almost two years since the vision and only a few months shy of two years since God shared this with me. There has been no blessing yet, but there has been a major increase in spiritual activity. My mom was injured when she fell and hit her driveway face first, then the same thing happened to me a week after. We both look like we were in a really bad fight and lost. Last night my wife and I interrupted a man in our backyard who apparently was attempting to steal our car or tools from our shed.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Work
• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Religion
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