It’s always great to serve at a MotelChurch service. The leaders are excellent, the volunteers selfless, the guests gracious and grateful. Besides, I like getting the opportunity to lead a discussion on God’s word, especially the Book of John that we’re going through currently.
So, last weekend I got up early, Faye put the casserole we had made and refrigerated into the oven to heat; we gathered everything else needed, and off we went. It’s a bit further for us to travel to some of the motels than for our volunteers, but an hour later we’re pulling into the parking lot and looking to see if any volunteers were as early as we were.
There was one “early bird” and we had a delightful time getting to know her before the others showed up.
In many ways, it was just another typical MotelChurch service that morning. We sang a few songs, ate breakfast, and started looking at the verses in John for this weekend. We were looking at John 9:13-34, where the Pharisees are investigating the healing of a blind man by Jesus.
As with every study every weekend, the topic swung around from this miracle of Jesus that is being investigated by religious leaders to the life and mission of Jesus. I shared the basic story using the RAV (Ron’s Abbreviated Version) and as happens every time, the real miracle of Jesus, his sacrificial death, atonement, and resurrection, just came alive in front of me. I love this story of why God sent His son, what His son did, and how his resurrection proved that He was God as the final linchpin in the story.
The end of the story is always a prayer together, with leading our guests in a simple, but silent prayer to accept Jesus.
After we finished, one of the great volunteers brought an 11-year-old boy up to me with the news that he had accepted Jesus during the prayer. Wow! That just always gets me excited because God did another miracle right in our midst. But, that wasn’t all. Later when I was going through the prayer cards at home there was another person that wrote that they also accepted Jesus in their heart during the prayer.
I love evangelism because we’re commanded by Jesus to do it, but actually, the truth is, I do it out of gratitude. The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus was mirrored in me as I went through a tough time in my life. God was there as I was dying and he saved me.
We have an unbelievable gift to share with everybody. It’s the gift of eternal life. The cure for eternal separation from God, our creator. And we don’t have to be eloquent or have the gift of preaching or have all the right verses memorized. All we have to do is use the words of the blind man as he told the Pharisees what had happened to him. “I was blind, but now I can see.”