Jericho Hour by Dick Eastman

Author:Dick Eastman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: spiritual warfare, Protestant, Missions, Christian Ministry, Christian Life, Evangelistic Work, Christianity, Religion, General, Evangelism, Pentecostal & Charismatic
ISBN: 9780884193630
Publisher: Creation House
Published: 1994-01-25T22:00:00+00:00

NINE

CONTENDING FOR THE LOST

Establishing Siege Strategies for Our Loved Ones, Cities and Nations

WILLIAM CAREY is often referred to as the father of modern missions. A brilliant youth with a promising future, Carey was moved by God in his early years with a passion for the lost that changed the course of mission's history.

Working as a shoe cobbler's assistant in eighteenth century England, young Carey is said to have saved discarded scraps of shoe leather from which he fashioned a makeshift globe. Hours spent in a local library with the best maps of the then known world gave Carey enough insight to sketch in ink the outlines of the continents and countries on his crude leather globe.

Decades later, it was said that Carey's tears of intercession during those early years literally blurred the outlines of the nations on his handmade globe. They ultimately gave rise to his calling to become a pioneer missionary to distant India.

Did Carey's tears make a difference? Some might question the missionary's evangelism effectiveness—seven years transpired before he saw his first convert. But I believe his greatest contribution to the evangelization of India was those tearful prayers poured over the nations of the world, including his primary love—India. In fact, I firmly believe Carey's prayers for India are still being answered.

Every Home for Christ, the ministry I have the joy of directing, systematically takes a printed salvation message, each with a decision card, to every home in a nation. In recent years we launched our final phase of taking the gospel—for the third time— to all 600,000 villages in India. (EHC has had similar campaigns in 147 nations.) The first full coverage of India required ten years of intensive commitment involving as many as ten thousand volunteer distributors at any given time along with hundreds of full-time workers.

But the harvest was amazing. In the first coverage more than one million people responded to our invitation to accept Christ or enroll in a Bible correspondence course by sending in decision cards to our nine regional Indian offices during a ten-year period. Since then, an additional 3.9 million response cards have been received from subsequent coverages, and as many as seventeen new village churches are being planted daily. Truly, Carey's tears for India that began with his crude globe may be reaping a harvest far beyond anything the pioneer missionary had ever imagined.

Laying Siege in Prayer

Praying over a map or a globe, as was the case with William Carey, is not new in biblical terms. Centuries ago, God commissioned Ezekiel to lay siege to the geographic region of Jerusalem using a man-made map. God told the prophet:

Now, son of man, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it (Ezek. 4:1-2, NIV).

What does it mean to "lay siege" in prayer? Siege means "the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.

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