Two years ago, The War came to Smyrna, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, for the first time ever. Pastor Johnston and Pastor Huggins were encouraged by the responsiveness of the teens in the community and God’s blessing on the meeting. This time, we all were anticipating God doing a work—and He did, but not without quite a battle.
Our challenges began not much later than we arrived. Spiritual oppression plagued me personally and weighed heavily upon me. One of the team captains became physically ill, which hindered his recruiting. We ended recruiting with much fewer contacts than we would have liked to have had.
There were a number of discouraging factors during the first night. The attendance was quite a bit lower than what we had seen two years previous. On top of that, one of the young people we had hoped would trust Christ (named Lawrence) walked out upset early on in the message. Several men and one of the team captains spent some time talking to him out in the parking lot. He insisted he was saved but kept changing his answers every time. The men were convinced, but the team captain had a hunch that he hadn’t gotten it. He came back later to apologize to me for leaving during the preaching, but we couldn’t get anywhere in our conversation to get clarity on the state of his soul. Though several were saved, we ended the night dissatisfied.
As we met together for prayer the next morning, we were burdened to find deliverance on our knees. We spent much time in quiet personal reflection and earnest dependence upon the Lord. What we didn’t know was that God’s whole purpose in the battles of the night before was to get us on our knees like this. God was preparing a breakthrough!
That night, however, did not seem to be shaping up that way at all—in fact, at the outset it was shaping up to be one of the worst nights of the tour. Setup on the off-site field during the pouring rain left us drenched, a saucy policewoman with a chip on her shoulder nearly threw us off the field for no reason, teens took their time getting to the field and getting set up, my bluetooth receiver for the music was malfunctioning, the competitions went longer than they were supposed to go, and on top of all that the pouring rain didn’t let up for the entire duration of the competitions.
When we got back to the church, I felt very rushed because of the time factor. I rushed through the inside portion of the night and got to the preaching still feeling pressured and rushed. I tried to streamline my opening illustration, but only ended up lengthening it accidentally. I charged in to my points quickly, speaking swiftly and intensely. I was honestly just hoping God would do something. About three-quarters through the message, however, I noticed a change in the room—God was working!
At the invitation, several responded including Lawrence. During my briefing, as I was doing my visual illustration of trusting Christ alone, Lawrence blurted out, “That there just answered all of my questions!” I gave him to the gentleman who had taken him home the previous night. I overheard bits and pieces of their conversations, but I gathered enough to know that he was being thorough in giving him Scripture. Afterwards, he came up to me and was glowing. He told me that he was happy. His answers were rock solid.
After all of that, He told me that a while ago he had become a witch. He said that he had been afraid of talking to me the night before—then he corrected himself, “I wasn’t afraid of you, they were afraid of you—the demons.” But now, he was excited that they were gone and that Jesus lived inside of him.
Overall, we had a total of 110 teens attend and a high night of 84. There were 19 decisions recorded to trust Christ alone to save them. Praise the Lord for breakthroughs!
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