Faith and Faithfulness

Our public appearance campaign was forged in the book of Habakkuk. There are a couple passages there, most notably Habakkuk chapter 2 and verse 4, that just shall live by faith. It's the final place where we really want our people, the ones that we talk to, to get to, to come to the point of where their life and their survival is by faith in the kind of world that we live. The book of Habakkuk speaks about a time when Habakkuk, who was a priest, prophet in the temple of God, came to God saying, God, this nation is sick. Do something with them. And God says, I will. Oh yeah, I'm going to do something that you won't believe and the whole world won't believe, but it's not what you think. And he shows that he will send the nation of Israel into captivity, which it did. The Babylonians invaded about a decade or so later, maybe a little bit more, and the nation was taken captive to Babylon. But then the nation was restored. And Habakkuk, in his final third chapter, which is this beautiful song, one time was sung, talks about restoration and talks about, from bad times, coming to good, as was spoken of in the earlier sermon today. But today I'd like to talk about the subject of faith, because by faith we will survive. The just shall live by faith. And that passage in the book of Habakkuk is quoted three times in the New Testament, by the Apostle Paul and by the Apostle Peter. My sermon today then is about faith and faithfulness, which is the practicing of faith. The word faith, though, is one of these words that has really been very much watered down as far as understanding is concerned. Not in meaning, but what do you mean by the word faith? Oftentimes it's synonymous with a religion, with an identity, with a denomination. What's your faith? Are you Baptist? Are you Protestant? Are you Catholic? Is that your faith? It's also been an identity. A person is a person of faith, as opposed to one who is secular. A person of faith. There are faith-based organizations, faith-based charities that work with churches more directly, or are churches themselves that do works, faith-based organization. Also, faith is a belief. Like, I believe in certain things. That is, I have faith about the Ten Commandments as being God's rules to live by. That's by faith. It's a way of life. Oftentimes it's confused with hope. People hope their faith. They have faith. I have faith that this thing will work. What they really mean, hope, means that they hope that whatever it is that they want will happen to them. That's hope, and not necessarily faith.

Well, how is it that one person has faith and another does not? Because there are people that exhibit great faith in how they speak, but more so in how they live. And there are people who are very skeptical, and people who really don't really believe or have confidence that things are going to be or happen or whatever it is that they want. Can faith be taught? Is there some way that we can give faith or say, here's the formula, do this, step one, two, three, and you will have faith? How is it that a person could have faith, and how can we have it?

Faith, as I said, is quoted three times in the New Testament. I said Peter, but all three references are by the Apostle Paul in Romans, in Galatians, and in Hebrews. He talks about how the just shall live by faith. Actually, he was paraphrasing because in the book of Habakkuk, in Habakkuk chapter 2 and verse 4, it is stated that just shall live by his faith. We already have a clue as to the faith being something superior to just what man can think of or work up. And so, Paul was definitely meaning that the just shall live by faith of something that God gives is already coming from a source outside the human existence and human experience. It is something that is given to a person, and then that is how a person lives. That is how a person conducts himself. That is actually the identity of the person because he is able to live a particular way, by particular means, because he has faith. I read a very interesting book. Maybe you've heard it. It's somewhat well known. It's called The Christian Atheist. It's written by Craig Groeschel, who is a Protestant minister, I believe. And the subtitle of the book is, When You Believe in God, but Believe as if He Doesn't Exist. How many people are Christian atheists? Well, they believe certain things. They have a certain knowledge of things. But then when they're tried and when they're put to the test, it all vanishes and all of the operates. There's no basis or foundation to what they're sticking with. But Craig Groeschel wrote about the fact that he was a pastor for 18 years. He finally came to the point and to a new level of awareness that, you know something? I don't really live. I don't really apply the things that I even teach. I talk about Jesus, I talk about generosity, I tell people to be generous. I really haven't shown that in my life. I talk to people about love and about how they ought to love one another and care for one another. Do I really do it in my day-to-day life? A real disconnect. And I just wonder how many of us, as we've gone through various trials in the church, I'm amazed as to how when we have certain beliefs as sunny-day Christians, when things are going well, we talk one thing. But then when a trial comes, and we've had them come, we've had the storms come to the church, we've had the fire, we had the blowtorch applied to us at times. There are people that have endured, and there are people who have not. There are people who have left, vanished, and their beliefs all of a sudden came to fore, which oftentimes was a bankrupt. Bankruptness of not really having what it takes to continue under duress. Jesus Christ said, he that endures to the end shall be saved.

He that endures to the end. And there are going to be times and periods where our faith will be tried. Hebrews 11 and verse 1. I'd like you to turn to Hebrews 11 and verse 1.

Hebrews 11 and verse 1. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.

Hebrews 11, the faith chapter. The conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.

Now, faith is the ability to perceive. It's like another sense. It's like vision, smell, taste. You have faith. It's a sense. Do you have it or do you not have it? It's a sense of things that really are not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God.

I believe that. I hope you do too. That there was a point in history, whether it was 20 billion years ago as last calculated or whenever it was, the universe was created by the Word of God. There was a God that created it all. So that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. This ought to be the starting place for cosmologists to understand what it is and what the universe is.

Faith first is a vision. It's a perception. It's being able to see things that are not visible to others. Do you see the kingdom of God? Do you see it before you? Do you see that that's where you're going? No matter what happens, as was pointed out earlier in the sermon, there are things that happen to us that are not always very pleasant. But do we really believe that we will get there no matter what happens? Do we really believe that greater days are ahead? Do we believe that the greatest events for all mankind and for you personally, eternal life, is there? Do you see yourself in the resurrection? That is faith. When you know that.

No, I was just so pleased. I was talking to the pastor's wife in Seattle a few days ago. This was just after the death of Charleston Williams. And she talked to me about CJ because he is in that congregation. CJ had called her and said, I talked to my dad the night before he died. We had a wonderful conversation. We talked about all kinds of things. We talked about the future, not knowing that the next day his father would be dead. And I'm asking you, I'm asking all of us, do we see ourselves for the number of years that we have left? Some will have one, two, five, ten, twenty more, but we'll have a limited time as to ending up where we need to be in the kingdom of God with eternal bodies that will never die. It was a wonderful conversation about CJ and his father and those last conversations that we had. And she talked to me also about the fact that CJ and his father had regular conversations. They discussed spiritual topics and spiritual ideas. They talked about sermonettes and sermons and the content of them, not only what was given, but what they were planning to give. It's a very beautiful testimonial to Charleston Williams.

Faith is not mercurial, something that's here today and vanishes away tomorrow. It is something which is solid and stable, no matter what happens. And also, faith comes from God. It's not some type of emotion. It's not some type of hope. It's just some type of belief that you muster up within ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves, but it's something which comes from God. Faith is both a fruit of the Spirit and a spiritual gift. One interesting statement about faith is that faith is not about the unknown. Faith is about what you do know and what you're convinced of. But let's get to the point of the fruit of the Spirit. Galatians 5, verse 22, where the fruits of the Holy Spirit are enumerated. This is what comes and grows out of our lives as a result of receiving the Holy Spirit, which comes at the time that we are baptized. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, we know these things. And then faithfulness. Faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Faithfulness is the practicing of faith. That is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. When you received it, when you were baptized and said, God, give me the Holy Spirit, give me your essence, put yourself inside of me, make your life live in me, you have faithfulness. You develop faithfulness, and along with these other fruits. Note, however, that hope is not one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. One of the gifts of God, but is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 12 and verse 8, one of the places where the gifts are mentioned, 1 Corinthians 12 and verse 8. For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another a word of knowledge through the same Spirit, but to another, faith. Faith is given as a gift, as a special aptitude and skill that comes in a supernatural way through the Holy Spirit. One is God's Holy Spirit being in us, and we practice it, and fruit is born as faith.

The other is God giving you a special aptitude of being a person who believes, and no matter what, he sees the future. He's strong in faith. There are some people who are very, very strong in faith naturally. Naturally, meaning by God giving them that gift. Like a person who can play the piano as a gift, a musician's gift, as Mitch Moss does. I could play and play and play, and I have to study hard, learn the notes and everything else, and I'm still kind of clunky with our play. Play okay, Mitch, because God has given him a very special gift.

But there are people who don't have it and need to improve. Mark chapter 9 and verse 24, when a man brought his child with a convulsion to Jesus Christ. Christ says, do you believe? Do you believe that I can heal? He says, yes, but I believe, but help my unbelief. I'm still shaky. And we're probably there at some level of a person who's been gifted with faith, and a person who needs more reassurance, and a person who needs to pray that God give me more faith. Let's take a look at some illustrations about faith.

I would like to demonstrate here as to the ability to see certain things.

One is what we had already had hinted to us in the book of Hebrews about the creation, that we believe that the Word of God is what formed it. Whether it was through the Big Bang, or whether it's through some other means, it's God who was the first force in creating the entire universe. All the galaxies, everything else, and in this place that we live, called the Milky Way, there's the Sun, and the Solar System, and this planet Earth, and this Goldilocks Zone that's able to produce life and conscious human beings made in the image of God. I see that. I believe that. Honestly, I do. I hope that we all know that. It's not something that we write down on a test, because our parents told us, but we really, truly believe that. The creation spoken about in Romans chapter 1 is one of the great aspects of God showing himself and making himself ultra clear to us. Birkin Russell, famous person who was a skeptic of God, philosopher, said this, if there is a God, why does he go through such great pains to hide himself?

I say, what more does it take to see the greatness of God? This is Richard Dawkins quotes him in the movie Expelled. Why is it that people like Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, who wrote some extremely wonderful books about astronomy, including The Pale Blue Dot, which is about the planet Earth, cannot come to terms that a universe is great and we are so tiny, but the greatness is God showing himself, and we are very special and unique, that we look to him to understand, that we look to this universe to understand divinity, to understand infinity, to understand the greatness of God in our special place.

I just read an article here recently about a cosmologist called Marcelo Gleiser a couple days ago. The scientists say that the more we know about the universe, the less important we become. And just like Carl Sagan, we're just basically nothing. Nothing here today and gone tomorrow. A very hopeless, a very sad statement. He died of cancer and I thought, I would hate to be dying and knowing that's it. And I'm so thankful that God has given me the ability to know where this has all come from, where I fit in, what the future will be. This is one thing we want to do in the public appearance campaign is to show people where we are, who we are, and what we need to be doing about where we're going.

David said, when I consider the heavens. David is a person who contemplated. He looked at all the stars. What is man that you are mindful of him? I see all the galaxies or I see all the stars of heaven. I see your great glory. No, David only was able to, at max, see about 5,000 stars.

Probably closer somewhere between two and a half thousand and five thousand.

Soldiers in the Turkish army had to count as many stars as they were able to see. That was part of their test in passing certain military codes. The most that a person could possibly see in one evening is 5,000 stars. Count 5,000 stars. Actually about 10,000 visible stars, but 5,000 of them are on the other side where it's, you know, right now we can't see stars. We can't see the stars that are up there right now, but we can see the ones at night. The Hubble in the telescope. It actually wasn't until about the early 1930s or late 1920s that we discovered that there was a universe beyond the Milky Way. But the very first optical instruments developed for magnification. David saw things only with his eye. There's no record of any kind of telescopes back in David's time. If anything, it would have been very rudimentary. It wasn't until about 1608 or 1609 in Holland that Hans Lippertchei patented the first telescope. He was an optician who put two pieces of two eyeglasses together and was able to magnify something three times. Great discovery! At the same time, Galileo had the same experiments, and they were able to have a three times magnification object device that was able to see craters on the Moon. I mean, that was just like discovering galaxies! This is only 400-some years ago that human beings were able to come to this point. Well, a lot more so than we could Well, a lot more stars were discovered with telescopes in the 19th century, when telescopes were developed in the 1700s and 1800s. In the 1900s, Mount Wilson Telescope, where a great discovery was made. We know about the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

But Hubble found a fuzzy spot that he thought was a nova, just something unknown. He found out that it was another galaxy exactly of the same genre as the Milky Way. And there it was!

And then there was another one, and another one. And then our universe expanded to being far bigger.

Well, here we have David, who could look at three, four thousand stars and says, oh, your awesomeness and greatness has seen this universe, the Moon, the stars, the Sun.

And now, in our times, we're discovering far more, more galaxies. And then, when the Hubble tells went up in the 1990s, oh, did it open the universe to far more? I think the three most interesting fields that it found was discovering what was called a deep field. They aimed the telescope, the Hubble, into a part of the sky where there were very few stars. In fact, time, using time on the Hubble telescope for scientists and astronomers is so valuable that they have to compete for being able to make a proposal to where I want so many hours of this telescope to be able to view this particular phenomenon. And one astronomer said, I'd like to do the deep field and see just how far we can reach out, how far we can go out the universe and see if there's anything really out there way beyond anything that we know. And so the Hubble was aimed at the deep field. It took 857 revolutions of this telescope to gather enough light to be able to see if there was anything out there. And other astronomers were mocking those that proposed this project. There's nothing out there. Just wasting valuable Hubble time. And what they saw was astounding. Those of you who have the book such as The Hand of God and others, they found five, six hundred septillion more stars that we didn't know about, if that makes any difference.

They found entire systems and universes and galaxies, some still in their formation, that were just huge, massive. Then they did another deep field experiment, which is called the ultra-deep field and then an extreme deep field, and found even more septillions of stars.

I believe sextillion. I'm sorry if I had to get it right, we'll have a little math session after here. But just a whole lot of stars. The universe is just awesome. Romans chapter 1 and verse 18. The Apostle Paul, in reasoning with people really who had zero faith. As we have in this world, people with zero faith. And you know something? I don't feel badly for them. I'm not even angry at them. I just am just like somebody who's blind and can't see things. I feel sorry for them that they can't see. Because I can see things that a person, even with a lot of knowledge, is not able to see. Hopefully, us, all of us, as simple Christians, can see. But God, verse 18, Romans 1, shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. One thing is that these are people who wanted a certain lifestyle. Down deep they knew it wasn't really natural or normal. They have a lot of it had to do with same-sex relationships, as is revealed in the first chapter of Romans. They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them.

People see awesome things. They don't understand them or know them, but they just don't want to acknowledge it. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky.

Through everything that God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities. Because you not only see things that are out there, you start having questions. How does it work? It's so intricate. It couldn't have just happened like that. How did it come to be what it is? It didn't just kind of be there. So they have for it no excuse for not knowing God. Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God and even give him thanks.

They began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. He writes this about intelligentsia, about the educational institutions in the Roman Empire, in the city of Rome itself. He talks about the state, the mental state, the intellectual state of people who had rejected God, when we do know him and do understand where it came from. Now, there are scientists. Actually, there are quite a number of scientists that do acknowledge God. And usually when they get past the point of where they have established tenure at a university where it's safe, again, to be able to say things that are not like this, some of them come up with statements that try to bring science and faith together. In National Geographic magazine, several months back, there was an advertisement from a person called Francis Collins, who is the head of the Genome Project. And he writes, why I'm a man of science and faith. It's interesting, the National Geographic, which is quite an evolutionary supporting magazine and society, even printed this. I'd like to read just a few things that he said. He's a physician and geneticist behind the Human Genome Project and is the director of the National Institutes of Health. He's also founder of the BioLogos Foundation and is a newsletter that they produced that I get at BioLogos.com. It's a group that fosters discussion about the intersection of Christianity and science. Actually, some very interesting things in it. He's going to ask, are science and religion compatible? He says, I am privileged to be somebody who tries to understand nature using the tools of science. But it's also true that there are some really important questions that science cannot really answer, such as, why is there something instead of nothing?

Okay, how is it? Why do we have anything anyway? Why are we here? That's a big question that we in the church ask the public. That's going to be asked tomorrow. Why were you born? In those domains, I have found that faith provides a better path to answers. I find it oddly anachronistic that in today's culture there seems to be widespread presumptions that scientific and spiritual views are incompatible. He was asked when people think of those views as incompatible, what is lost?

The science and faith can actually be mutually enriching and complementary once their proper domains are understood and respected. Extreme cartoons representing antagonistic perspectives on either end of the spectrum, such as the 6,000-year creationists to people that just say, kind of just all happened on its own, are often the ones who get attention. But most people live somewhere in the middle. And he's asked, you've said it was a blooming, that a blooming flower is not a miracle since we know that it happens. As a geneticist, you've studied human life at a fundamental level. Is there a miracle woven in there somehow? He said, oh, yes. At the most fundamental level, it's a miracle that there's a universe at all. It's a miracle that it has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of complexity and laws that follow precise mathematical formulas. Contemplating this, an open-minded observer is almost forced to conclude that there must be a mind behind all this, to me that qualifies as a miracle, a profound truth that lies outside scientific explanation. And one thing that science has not been able to find is any life beyond our galaxy. Even further, the next generation telescope that's being sent up is the James Webb telescope. This one will be out there one million miles out from the Earth, the size of a school bus. It's going to go, and its purpose, really, primarily is to try to discover life elsewhere in our universe. That's going to be one of its main goals. It's going to be out there four times the distance to the Moon, you know, just in some type of orbit, I guess, around the Earth, like in a Moon orbit, rotating around the Earth. It's going to try to find life out there. But you know something? Isn't it amazing that, of the vastness of the universe, that there's no other life anywhere, no matter how hard scientists have tried? There's very little hope of it, of having the exact Goldilocks type of environment to foster a life that we have on this planet, the way we are here. We are so unique and so tiny.

And you know, scientists have said, the atheistic ones, that we're so tiny we don't matter much at all. A scientist with faith says, we are so tiny, and we're the only one, that we are unique and very special. There must be something very, very special about the fact that we are so unique, that there's nobody else. How would anything even be known about what's out there, if there wasn't any consciousness and humanity to be able to even see it or understand it? You know, if there was no life anywhere, there was no consciousness anywhere, how would we know anything was out there?

Just like the statement, you know, if there was a tree falling in a forest, and there was nobody to hear it, would it have made a noise? You know, if there was nobody to hear it. I like that thing. The funniest one I heard was, if a man said something in a forest, and there was no woman to hear it, could he still be wrong? But we do have conscious, thinking people here on the earth who can perceive and have a self-analysis and have been told through Revelation that we have been made in the image of the very creator of that universe. The Apostle Paul, David, and also what Paul wrote, not only in Romans but in Hebrews, underscores that, and to me is a great builder. We understand that power, creativity, order, logic, beauty, everything about universe. Faith comes by perception and by seeing. But I'd like to tell you about another way that faith also comes. Faith comes by what is spoken of in the book of Luke.

Luke chapter 18, verse 1. We oftentimes apply this narrative to a lesson about faithlessness.

But there's actually a statement of quite a bit of faith in a particular individual, this persistent widow. Luke chapter 18 and verse 1.

Then he spoke a parable to them, Christ, that men always ought to pray and not to lose heart, not to quit, to continue enduring. And that's what the point of this parable is. But there's more, because he explains exactly its application. Saying, verse 2, there was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man.

Now there was a widow in that city, and she came to him saying, Get justice for me from my adversary. Here's an individual who is vulnerable. She has no strength. She's a widow, has no husband to support her. She just has her voice.

Get justice for me. And he would not for a while. But afterward he said within himself, Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me, I will avenge her. Lest by her continual coming she weary me. So she was coming to him over and over again, over and over again. I want justice. I want justice. You can do it. And he said, I will listen to her.

Verse 6, then the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge said, And shall God not avenge his own elect who cry out day and night to him?

O God, listen to those that ask him, that ask him in times of trial, ask him repeatedly, though he bears long with them, don't give up. Be one who endures.

I tell you that he will avenge them speedily, that God will give us the answer to our prayers according to his will. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he really find faith on the earth? The answer is not just no, it's yes and no. A lot of people have given up. A lot of people in the society are hopeless and faithless. And that's who we hope to reach tomorrow. We want those who come here to hear a message about where we're at, what's happening in this world, who you are and what you must do to give them the tools, to give them the direction, the roadmap to finding their way for a relationship with God. For salvation, the just shall live, survive by faith. That's what we want. That's the outcome that we desire from the public appearance campaigns. But will he find faith on the earth? Yes, he will, right here. With those who have given their lives to Jesus Christ, whose spirit lives in them, where their lives produce fruits of the Holy Spirit, fruits of the Holy Spirit of faith. And they say, God, give me faith. Help my unbelief. Help me with my faith. This type of persistence, I would like to tell you a story, because it's one that has really touched my wife and me about a group of people in northwest Zambia. We have traveled to Zambia, Malawi, several countries in South Africa, South of sub-Saharan countries that we work in. We have found a very interesting group of people who are like this persistent widow.

This is an amazing story about these people. I'll tell you what it started. It started in 1981, when a man by the name of Emmanuel Horasi Ciono, known as Horasi, in northwest Zambia, right there tucked underneath French-speaking Democratic Republic of the Congo and right nestled up against Angola, which is Portuguese-speaking. He had an accident. Had an accident where he lost his finger and was taken to the hospital and for some reason had to be kept overnight in the area of Mufumbu. Well, the person in the bed next to him had a magazine and various booklets at the Plain Truth magazine. He found those booklets to be very interesting, got the address, and when he came home, he sent for the literature to the United Kingdom and received the Plain Truth magazine, the booklets, and asked for a visit, which he finally got four years later and had to meet the minister 500 miles to the southeast in the city of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. The minister came from Zimbabwe.

And a short time afterwards, a year or two later, he was baptized in about 1986 or 1987. He passed his knowledge on in his little city in Mufumbu to other friends, most notably Joseph Capatula, who runs an orphanage, and three brothers, Samuel, Simon, and Christopher and Duggayonga.

They received literature, but there was not even a ghost of a chance of having a minister come on any kind of basis to visit where they were. They were very, very far away from civilization.

But they met every Sabbath. They held a service, which was basically reading the literature to one another. They would read through the magazine. They read through the literature. They believed it. They believed the truth. They were convicted by the truth, this group that was the three brothers, Joseph, their families, and Horasi, who was actually Portuguese speaking. Then in 1993, all literature stopped. These people were just cut off, probably some budget cuts somewhere. It's just not worth it to send this literature to them from where it was being sent, which is probably from the United Kingdom, or maybe even in Zambia at that time, by that time, and it completely stopped. Well, they didn't really know what to do. They wrote for it, but nobody would respond to them. Nobody would visit them. But, you know, they never stopped keeping the Sabbath and the Holy Days. They had the Holy Day calendar. They went as far as 2008, so they figured that at least they're good until 2008. Now, remember, there was no way to Google the Holy Days. There was no way to really communicate. They are really cut off. It's like another century. In 2003, they finally had somebody from the church at that time write to them. They sent them a magazine called The Scroll. They said, hey, they stopped. They said, well, we believed. This was what happened with the church that we had come from. They knew exactly that this stuff was ersatz. It was fake. It was not what they believed. This isn't the church. There's got to be somewhere. There got to be people that believe this somewhere.

When their calendar ran out, they figured that either the end of the world was coming, or they better really do something here to find the church.

Joseph Capitula, who had the name of one of the elders in that scroll magazine, said, I'm going to go down there and find out what is going on. He had a telephone number with $25, 500 miles away. He got somebody to give him a ride. Cost him $8. He bought the person a few drinks and got down to Lusaka. He tried to call Wilson and Coma over and over again.

No answer. Or maybe the phone was a different number, but he couldn't reach him. After he'd gotten down there, he tried to call. He thought, well, maybe when I get down there, I'll find him somehow. So he sat at the bus station in Lusaka.

He knew that he was going to find it somewhere, and he starts talking to a person who was sitting next to him. This person next to him, he said, would you excuse me? I need to use the restroom. Could you kind of watch my watch my bag here? And this person next to him kind of saw what he had a magazine. He had a some literature there, a booklet about salvation that looked very familiar, back very familiar from years ago. So when he came back to the bathroom, he says, you know, what is this?

This person started telling him, you know, I'm down here. I've lost contact with the church. I'm, there's got to be somewhere. He's talked about Wilson and Koma. The person he was talking to next to him is our deacon from the United Church of God, who was there sitting next to him, and he was 220 miles from home. He's going to be getting on another bus to go back home. Well, he tells him all about the church, told him about all the changes that had taken place, and told him that you come to services here in Lusaka.

Here is the address to the church. And so he gave that address to him. This was on Tuesday. Joseph found some Rwandan refugees that he knew from some time in the past, stayed with them until the end of the week, and went to services, which were held at an army barracks, because our deacon there, or now our pastor there now, was a major in the army and was able to get these facilities for services.

Well, Joseph comes on to the military base there, you know, and immediately arrested. This is his first day now, you know, for church. And the guard, you know, tells the guard, well, there's church services here. The guard says, you've got to be kidding. He says, what do you mean church services? He barely got out of there. Never made it to church. So he made it back to his Rwandan refugees, but Wilson had his telephone number. So that night, Wilson then called him, because our deacon called Wilson.

Wilson then called Joseph, and they arranged for a meeting on Sunday. And Joseph was so happy. And Wilson explained to him about all the things about the church. And so he then sent him back to his people back in the Northwest. Never got to church. He sent him back with money. He sent him back with a few dresses for his wife, books for his kids, you know, just all kinds of things. And when Joseph got back to Mufumbuhe, he says, I have found the church.

He said the reaction was just as though Zambia won the World Cup or the Africa Cup in soccer. The whole group was just cheering, and they were just jumping up and down with joy that they had found the church. They hadn't given up. Then they were invited to come to the Feast of Tabernacles in 2010. My wife and I were there at the Feast. That's where we first met them. My wife tells me, oh, I met these three guys here.

They have an amazing story. This is the very first time I had heard about this. You need to talk to them. So I talked to them, and they told us their story. And, you know, we were there just as visitors and guest speakers.

I wasn't in the know of what's happening with the church. And on the last great day of the Feast, I baptized a few ladies. And I was just, as a courtesy thing, was asked to do the baptisms and so forth. And we all left. These people were not baptized. I knew nothing about them.

Found out that the minister there, for some reason, some misunderstanding, said they needed to have more time. How much more time do you need to think about baptism? He said he wanted him to write their story up. Well, after that, then we had the schism of the church in January 2011, and that minister went the other way. And Wilson and Coma was with the United Church of God. And Bev and I were there for the Passover in 2011. And we baptized them. Baptized them at the pool, at the hotel we were staying with about another eight to nine people or so. My wife walked up to them and said, how long have you waited to be baptized? And they just, as a matter of fact, 25 years. 25 years. They kept the Sabbath. They kept the Holy Days. Never did they flinch. Never did they stop believing that the church was there. This is a story of tremendous, amazing, phenomenal faith. Three P's to faith. Perception, patience, and persistence. That's a part of the the aspects that make up this kind of faith. We are going to have to live by faith as we come to the end of this age. There's a couple things about our age that are going to be very, very trying. Things are very good right now. We have a nice potluck. We have a pack meeting. We have lots of wonderful things. But we live in a very, very ugly world with shifting movements of powers and apocalyptic things that will happen somehow, some way. Do you see your way through this?

What we're going to be talking to tomorrow are people who don't. The people coming tomorrow are people that somehow are beginning to see that something is really amiss, that there may be answers, and they're finding it in the Beyond Today magazine and Beyond Today television program. They're finding that answer. They see that there's something that's ringing true in what we're saying prophetically, matters of doctrine and Christian living. There's something to these people that have it together. We want to be able to reach these people and want them to be able to also have that gift of faith that you and I have. That you can see these things, that you can see the future. Certainly, we feel like the book of Habakkuk, which is again quoted three times by Peter.

Oh, pardon, by Peter. Why do I say Peter? Quoted by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. Quoted three times by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament is a book that shows the way through, the hints at the way through, and the Apostle Paul capitalized on that in speaking to the New Testament Christians about what they needed to have and talked about faith as being a fruit and as being a gift from God.