It was an absolute delight to be back with the Ards and the Braggs at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Missouri City, TX. The leaders and members of this church are always so sweet and such a blessing that we were thrilled at the outpouring of blessing that God gave during our meeting together.
The whole day leading up to the first rally night, my stomach was tied up in knots, I felt unusually anxious, and I dreaded the night. Furthermore, I was unusually fatigued despite two cups of Starbucks coffee I drank to wake up that morning. We prayed as a team, but to me things just seemed cloudy and dry. Even during the competitions, though we had almost an entire football team of huge guys present, I felt horrible and restless. To make matters worse, I could not even walk 6 feet away from the building because of strange radio interference in the wireless microphone. It wasn’t until the song right before the message when I heard teens snickering at the guys that the light broke through and the clouds parted in my heart. I preached that night with more liberty than I have felt for quite a while. During the preaching, God gave us a holy hush and every person in the room was arrested by the Holy Spirit. Then, God came down.
At the invitation time, when I called for those who were serious about the matter to stand to their feet and exit to the back of the room, everyone stood up and exited the room. When I handed the invitation over to John, the only people left in the room were the church kids and one or two other people. Everyone else had left. To get saved. All of them. It brought me back to what started me on the pursuit of evangelism when The War came to my church in 2003 and similar moving occurred. God isn’t done moving on crowds and drawing masses of people to Christ!
I entered the guys’ counseling room and it was jam-packed. We didn’t have enough chairs set up. We had very few counselors, so we had to have some people counsel five at a time. After I handed the young men over to counselors, I exited the room to wait and pray. A father was outside the room. I thought he was just waiting for his son, but when he struck up a conversation with me and thanked me for the message, I sensed God was working in his heart. I probed further. Sure enough, God was all over him. A few minutes later, he bowed his head and trusted Christ!
As the teens exited the counseling room and my wife and I followed up with them, one after another, teens confidently declared their exclusive dependence on Christ to save them. 24 teens had trusted Christ in one night! We were all in awe at the awesome power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. After things had settled down, it hit me why I had felt so “under it” the whole day leading up to the event. Satan knew that his kingdom was about to have a jailbreak and he wanted to stop it. Praise God that “greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world!” (1 John 4:4).
Even more thrilling than the souls saved was the fact that the next morning in Sunday School, we had 22 people in attendance including the church teens. There were at least 8 brand new visitors who had gotten saved the night previously. Seven of the big boys who had gotten saved the night before walked the aisle in the morning service and publicly professed that they had gotten saved the night before. Glory!
Before the week was over, we saw 29 salvation decisions. Everyone was completely encouraged in the Lord and in the power of the gospel. I can honestly say that it couldn’t have happened to a better church.
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