Beyond question – that hardest part about street preaching is the several minutes before you actually open your mouth. You wonder where God is, where your boldness is, where your love for sinners is. You wonder why you are there – what compelled you to go in the first place. You look out upon hundreds of people – realizing full well that what you are about to say will anger many if not all of them.
Hell is angry. The devil – self deceived as he is – still believes that he has a claim to the very piece of real estate on which you stand. Moreover, your prideful flesh is revolting and reminds you second by second that not only are you about to be made a fool of but that you are breaking fallen Adam’s first commandment: “Self-preservation is the only way to salvation.” Without doubt these are some of the loneliest and most confused moments a Christian can endure.
The cure for all of this is not more prayer or a frantic call home but rather to simply begin lifting up the name of Jesus – a thousand things get set right in just those first few seconds of proclaiming the King.
The fact that I was strengthened to preach for nearly 2 hours was a divine intervention in itself. I have been sick with a horrible bout of the flu. I thought for sure that my 12 hours sleep the night before would send it away for good but when I woke I felt like a truck had run me down. If it was not for my dear brother Todd going with me I most likely would have stayed home. The Lord continually revived me during that time and I consider it somewhat of a miracle.
Several wonderful things transpired today. First of all I realized that my preaching becomes strongest and boldest when I am being heckled and ridiculed. One young man walked over to me and said, "You are insane. Jesus is dead, he has been in the grave for 2000 thousand years." Oh what a boon this was to my preaching. Jesus – dead! Hah! For the next 15 minutes I preached almost nothing but His resurrection.
The Muslim man that confronted me a couple weeks ago was back. This again gave me special boldness to proclaim Jesus’ superiority over Muhammad. The founder of Islam never healed anyone, he never forgave his enemies, he never rose from the dead – Jesus did all these things and it is a privilege to declare this among the masses.
Like a couple weeks ago – many people stopped and pondered the message. Many people also stopped to video tape me – as a circus clown undoubtedly – but who knows where those video tapes will end up.
Todd was a great help to me – please pray that the Lord would raise up many men like him to help me in this ministry. Pray for those several thousand that heard the word today; that would come to our glorious Savior!!
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