John - the most passionate NEW believer I have ever known

John, code name for privacy reasons, is the most passionate NEW believer I have ever seen. The changes that God has made in his life are just absolutely incredible. We spend a lot of time working with John, and God has done a lot in his life in the past few months. I just want to share several little stories about John with you.

He has been teaching in his religion classes the Life of Christ and in his other one the major stories from the Old Testament. He has been using all of the cool materials that people from the states help put together for him. One day he said he was using the posters of Creation and reading the story from the Bible of creation and the Holy Spirit just started to move in his class. He said that a girl stood up and told about how the boys had been harassing her in class. Then other girls started talking about the same thing. This came up because he was teaching about how a man should women using the example of Adam and Eve. John then talked to the boys that were harassing the girls, and then led the class in a time of group prayer. They formed a circle and prayed from their heart (huge thing here in this culture) for this situation that was happening with the harassment of these girls.

The next week John and I were walking back from one of our house churches and he casually said, four kids gave their life to Christ this past week in my religion class. Apparently he was sharing with the kids that they needed to give their lives to Christ, and a boy in his class stood up and prayed out loud in front of the whole class to give his life to Christ. Three other students did the same thing after him. John has already been to their neighborhood of these four kids to start a house church. One of these boy’s dad is totally against his son becoming a Christian because he is from a different religion. The son was tired of following all the rules from this other religion and that is why he decided to follow Jesus. John is working on starting a Bible study in the house of one of the other students. He will meet with them weekly, and they are going to invite their neighbors also.

On top of that John has started meeting with two different groups once a month on Saturdays and has a Bible study with kids in his class that want to study more. He completely set this up on his own with his students. They also did a service project together and went and cleaned all the classrooms in the school and hung up Bible verses and encouraging messages in all the classrooms in the school.

The other day, John walked into his classroom and four girls were all crying. He asked what the situation was and found out a girl was upset about a situation with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. John decided not to teach his lesson that day but to put everything aside and lift up this girl’s family and her in prayer. The whole class got together and prayed for this girl! John is serious about following the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit lays on his heart not to teach what he has prepared and just spend the class time in prayer or deal with a certain situation. He gives up his lesson and focuses on whatever God is leading him to do instead.

He also told me now that every class period he selects two people and prays for them and their family. He told me the students have loved it. He started out with just praying for one person, but the next class period everyone was asking him to pray for them, so he changed it to praying for two different students every class period.

Two weeks ago, it was his turn to pray for the school wide assembly. The normal custom in the school is to say the Lord’s Prayer and a recited prayer to Mary. He instead prayed just to Jesus from his heart, not a learned or recited prayer. This caused a reaction from a lot of different people. The other religion teacher came upset about his prayer, but another head faculty person commented on how much she liked his prayer. It turns out that she is a Christian, and they were able to talk about starting a bible study for the other professors.

One day in class, he asked his students for their ideas on how to evangelize in Peru in this day and time. They talked to him about making stickers that have the symbols that represent: Jesus came, he died, and he rose, went back to Heaven, and one day is coming back again and putting them on the local transportation buses. Not only would the students put the stickers on the bus, but they or one of us would explain with the drivers at the bus stop during their break time about the good news of Jesus. They had a ton of other ideas as well, but it was just so neat to hear about John asking his class about the ways they thought would be effective to evangelize in Peru.

One day a few months back, we were downstairs talking to our land lady about the recent death of her daughter. He directly told her, you need to give your life to Jesus. He is the only one that can help you. This shocked me because he used to give every other humanitarian response he could find to help people before he became a Christian and he even struggled with it after he became a Christian. He has really turned a corner; he tells everyone that Jesus is the only One that can help them. He does not try to give other solutions anymore; he just points them to Jesus. He reminds me a lot of John the Baptist.

The other day he found out about a situation with one of his students parents. They were in a very hard family situation because of sin, so he responded by telling the family the truth, that they needed to repent of the situation of sin they were in. He also met with the mom and had a prayer time with her. He has set up another time to meet with her again and just continue to pray for her and this family. The next time he meets with her Nancy and I will go with him as well. He told this mother there are no other solutions, we must pray.

It is so crazy for me to watch him from months ago, before he knew Christ, saying that people needed this material thing and this psychology session to improve their life to now just saying it is Jesus that they need. We both understand that people need things like food to eat, but our job is to tell others about Jesus and yes help them with their needs along the way, but primarily lead them to Jesus.

John has been working with us for now about 2 months in our house churches. He has really stepped out of his comfort zone and gone with us to ask people in the streets to come to Bible study. It has been a new experience and an uncomfortable one for him. He has been teaching a lot in house churches, and he is a phenomenal teacher. His gift is definitely teaching. Nancy and I are both ready to let him completely start teaching all of our house churches as soon as he is ready.

John and I have had some very serious discipleship discussions. I have had to talk about him what it means to be a Christian man of the household for his family, about the importance of marriage, about not letting fear of others get in the way of his witness, and about seeking God’s will. These discussions have not been easy to talk about, but God has been so faithful and brought up the exact right times and gave John the patience to listen. On the same token, yesterday he sat down with me and talked to me about a lot of things that I needed to do change in my ministry and in my life to be a better example of Christ and for our ministry to grow. God has definitely given me opportunities to disciple him, yet he is now using John to disciple me as well. I will write more about the things that he talked with me about in a later blog post.

The miracles I have seen God doing in John’s life continue to amaze me. I will try and write more about his life on a more consistent basis. John’s life is a constant encouragement to me and a reminder of the great things God can do in anyone’s life if they will just accept Jesus and then allow Him to work in their lives.