back to indexBCC 2018 Retreat - Stories From the Field
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Why don't I pray for us, and then we'll get our session started. 00:00:11.000 |
Heavenly Father, we thank you for just giving us this opportunity to get away 00:00:16.000 |
and to focus on what you value, the things that you deem important. 00:00:23.000 |
Help us through this time and through this session just to get a better understanding 00:00:28.000 |
of the world that you created and this world's need for a Savior. 00:00:34.000 |
And I pray, Father, that you would help us really to reflect soberly on just the great 00:00:43.000 |
heart of mercy and compassion that you have and help us to resemble you through this time. 00:00:49.000 |
We thank you and we pray for your help to navigate through the next however many 00:01:02.000 |
My name's Peter, and just a brief introduction so you guys can kind of figure out how it 00:01:09.000 |
is that I ended up doing the job that I did the last six or nine years. 00:01:14.000 |
I was an education pastor here at Berean until 2009. 00:01:22.000 |
And in China for that first year, what I wrestled with was this one year is too short. 00:01:29.000 |
We can't do anything really in this one year. 00:01:32.000 |
And so I wrestled so much with, "Shall we stay longer? 00:01:38.000 |
And someone asked me, "Well, Peter, do you feel called to China?" 00:01:44.000 |
And it made me think, and I asked him, "Do you feel called to America?" 00:01:58.000 |
I should really make a confirmation of the call to ever make. 00:02:03.000 |
And so we stayed there for a year, extended it to three. 00:02:09.000 |
And in the next two years, I was really burdened with this thought. 00:02:15.000 |
Every time we set a date to leave, we're not going to give our hearts into this ministry, 00:02:25.000 |
But we just made a commitment, "Okay, we will be here for the rest of our lives until God moves us elsewhere." 00:02:31.000 |
And so that three years turned into a long-term vision. 00:02:34.000 |
But God put on my heart a desire to champion the cause of children. 00:02:39.000 |
And so I've been a Compassion International sponsor since 1997. 00:02:43.000 |
And I went on a trip to the Philippines with my wife. 00:02:46.000 |
Back then, it was a five-year anniversary kind of a trip, and I was blown away. 00:02:50.000 |
And Compassion Korea recruited me, so I ended up in Korea. 00:02:55.000 |
And what my job was, was a vision trip leader. 00:02:59.000 |
And my job was to take anybody and everybody--VIPs, national leaders, church leaders, celebrities, random people, student groups--anybody and everybody. 00:03:10.000 |
If they want to go somewhere, I'm the one who takes them. 00:03:14.000 |
And so wherever I went, it wasn't that--you know, we weren't staying at, like, the nice resorts and--well, our hotels were nice. 00:03:21.000 |
But we weren't, like, going to hang out at the beach. 00:03:23.000 |
What we were going to do was to visit the slums, visit the trenches, visit the garbage dumpsites. 00:03:29.000 |
And so a lot of the stories I've gained over the last six years are all pictures that I've taken. 00:03:34.000 |
And I just want to just share with some--review some of the stories that I've gained. 00:03:40.000 |
So in my time at Compassion, I totaled it up. 00:03:44.000 |
I was on 279 flights in the five years, four months. 00:03:51.000 |
And so I had--all the boarding has to have, like, this many. 00:03:58.000 |
And what I would love to do on an airplane, I usually get the window seat, and I like to watch as the plane goes up. 00:04:06.000 |
But wherever I went to for the first time, I like to watch for the last hour of the descent. 00:04:14.000 |
And I usually would--I didn't like to watch movies too much because I felt like it would be a waste of my time. 00:04:21.000 |
So I turned on the Sky Map, and I studied that map. 00:04:24.000 |
And that was one of my favorite things to do. 00:04:26.000 |
And I've discovered that this world is not small. 00:04:33.000 |
So during the course of my job, I visited many, many poor families. 00:04:39.000 |
I've eaten ostrich, crocodile, guinea pig, donkey, dog--don't judge me. 00:04:48.000 |
I've woken up to monkeys fighting outside my room. 00:04:58.000 |
If you don't know what an alpaca is, just look it up. 00:05:07.000 |
I've been bitten by mosquitoes in about 17 countries. 00:05:12.000 |
And I've visited 162 Compassion Partner Churches all over the world. 00:05:18.000 |
But we have about 6,800 churches that Compassion partners with. 00:05:24.000 |
So I've seen so much, but of all the churches that Compassion works with, I've seen 2%. 00:05:30.000 |
So I've seen a lot, and yet I've learned--or I've seen so little. 00:05:36.000 |
So I've learned a lot about poverty, and one of the greatest lessons I've ever learned 00:05:45.000 |
Sometimes when someone posts on Facebook, "Christianity is like this," 00:05:48.000 |
"Oh, the world is like this," and they've never left Orange County, 00:05:51.000 |
it's kind of--I just feel like, "How arrogant of a statement is that?" 00:05:55.000 |
You just blanketed it from your tiny little corner of the world. 00:06:02.000 |
So I'm going to show you how big the world is briefly. 00:06:06.000 |
Last week we were in Vancouver, Canada, from LAX to Vancouver. 00:06:18.000 |
So people I have often seen, "Oh, I hate being in Africa," or "Africa's not nice." 00:06:24.000 |
They're like, "You know, Africa is bigger than U.S., China, India, Great Britain, 00:06:29.000 |
"Eastern Europe, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, 00:06:37.000 |
It takes from one side to the other longer to get across Africa 00:06:49.000 |
And I've been to probably more countries than most of you have. 00:07:02.000 |
And Africa is not that big plot of land if you look at it from a much more global perspective. 00:07:13.000 |
Broad generalizations are dangerous in Christendom. 00:07:17.000 |
To say that all Christians have to be like this, 00:07:22.000 |
you have to be very careful once you make access outside of what we find in Scripture. 00:07:31.000 |
And so what I've discovered is that this world is big. 00:07:38.000 |
But one thing that I've also been heartbroken by is this fact. 00:07:42.000 |
40% of the world's inhabitants struggle to eat just one meal a day. 00:07:50.000 |
So it took me three hours on a plane to get from LAX to Vancouver, 00:07:57.000 |
But in this giant world, 40% struggle to eat how many? 00:08:04.000 |
I don't know when the last time I've eaten one slice. 00:08:10.000 |
But when we say one meal a day, it's usually no bigger than like this. 00:08:15.000 |
So for you, when you hear this number, when you see this number, 00:08:18.000 |
it might not be easy to wrap your mind around, but for me, 00:08:22.000 |
these are the types of people I've met all the time. 00:08:25.000 |
So I'm going to share with you some of their stories. 00:08:29.000 |
There are three things just in all of my traveling and my experiences. 00:08:36.000 |
And again, I share with you, there's so much more I don't know than I do know. 00:08:39.000 |
That's the thing that I feel like is one of the best lessons I've ever learned. 00:08:44.000 |
But there are three things that have been reaffirmed for me. 00:08:47.000 |
The first one, our big God created a big world. 00:08:56.000 |
So for you and for me, it's hard to fully grasp this. 00:09:03.000 |
But just know that right now where you're at, your God is too small. 00:09:09.000 |
And I'm going to share with you some stories of people that I've met whom God has created. 00:09:30.000 |
It's in a country that's part of Eastern Africa. 00:09:34.000 |
And -- yeah, I'll wait for everyone to -- let's see how this -- is everybody good? 00:09:52.000 |
And what the Maasai are famous for is two things -- or three things. 00:10:01.000 |
And because there's a shortage of water, they bathe in goat milk and they drink in goat milk. 00:10:08.000 |
But there's snow and there's flies everywhere because everything is, like, sticky and mucky. 00:10:14.000 |
But in any case, they have a lot of wives and a lot of children. 00:10:27.000 |
Richard grew up with 78 sisters and 48 brothers. 00:10:34.000 |
So I asked him, "Do you know how many nephews and nieces you have?" 00:10:41.000 |
He's like, "You cannot count that kind of stuff." 00:10:47.000 |
And he's looked down upon as a Christian because he has already one wife. 00:10:55.000 |
Here are some of the Maasai children who are part of the Compassion International Sponsorship Program. 00:11:00.000 |
This is a circumcision ritual that we happen to stumble upon. 00:11:04.000 |
And in the circumcision ritual, these boys who turn 13, they're put away for a month by themselves. 00:11:18.000 |
Can anyone tell me what country this is from? 00:11:26.000 |
Indonesia has 34 provinces, and this is the poorest. 00:11:37.000 |
And we went up on a mountain area where the Wamena people live. 00:11:43.000 |
And they have a strange tradition of loving pigs. 00:11:47.000 |
And so the Wamena people love pigs so much that when they put their kids to sleep at night, 00:11:54.000 |
the pigs come in and they sleep between the children. 00:11:58.000 |
And then they're sleeping, so they're cush pillows for the kids. 00:12:03.000 |
But a more interesting thing they do is for women who are nursing. 00:12:10.000 |
If they have milk left over, they give it to the pigs. 00:12:17.000 |
I'm going to do that real quick. It's a little inappropriate. 00:12:20.000 |
And we have churches that are ministering to the children, to the poor, there. 00:12:26.000 |
I've never eaten a pig. I don't know how that works. 00:12:33.000 |
And God created this world so big with so many cultures, so many people, tribes, languages, races. 00:12:50.000 |
And I've seen a lot of stuff that has broken my heart, that has caused me to weep. 00:12:55.000 |
And the second thing that has been reconfirmed for me is the world really needs Jesus Christ. 00:13:04.000 |
So last year around this time, I was in an area of Togo. 00:13:11.000 |
Togo is one of the poorest countries in all of Africa. 00:13:20.000 |
Their per capita income is around $400 per person per year. 00:13:32.000 |
And three months out of the year, there's harvest. 00:13:38.000 |
And the ground is not good, but there is some harvest. 00:13:48.000 |
For nine months, the people in Togo have very little to eat. 00:13:55.000 |
But because 90% of them are farmers, when the land has nothing, they have nothing. 00:14:01.000 |
And that's still okay until one of the kids steps on something or gets bitten by a dog. 00:14:13.000 |
They die because their immune systems are weaker. 00:14:22.000 |
So even if they could drive 11 hours to their closest hospital, they can't pay the hospital bill with a chicken. 00:14:34.000 |
And I've seen very emaciated adults, boys and women. 00:14:41.000 |
And these people, I've discovered, really need God to work and bless. 00:14:55.000 |
And this was taken in a very rural part of Ecuador. 00:15:02.000 |
But it's like maybe seven hours outside of Quito, which is the capital. 00:15:07.000 |
And this was a family that ate meat only once a month for protein. 00:15:25.000 |
So because they're so poor, Dad has to go to Quito to work for 10 months of the year. 00:15:40.000 |
But that causes a problem socially, functionally. 00:15:53.000 |
This girl who's 15 on the left, she's pregnant. 00:15:57.000 |
And basically the rest of her life is now devoted to having to take care of this kid. 00:16:15.000 |
But the poorest of the poor live in the remote, like the farthest rural areas. 00:16:21.000 |
That's why even if you guys go on like a mission trip somewhere, you're not getting to the poorest of the poor. 00:16:28.000 |
Because to see the poorest of the poor, you have to get on a plane and then travel 40 hours more on boats and in cars and in trucks and jeeps and bouncing like carriages. 00:16:40.000 |
But just keep in mind that most of this world is poor and most of the poor are in the rural areas. 00:16:46.000 |
But the thing is, urban areas actually feel more poor. 00:16:50.000 |
When you go to a big city and you smell the stench of people, it feels more poor. 00:16:56.000 |
But the rural areas, there's a lot more hopelessness, desperation, and poverty. 00:17:14.000 |
And I'm not sure if you guys know that 15 million people in the world live amongst garbage. 00:17:23.000 |
Because if you collect the recyclables, you can get some money out of it. 00:17:30.000 |
So 15 million people in the world live in these garbage dump sites. 00:17:41.000 |
So when I think of Bali, I don't think of a honeymoon destination. 00:17:44.000 |
I think of one of the world's biggest dump sites. 00:17:50.000 |
And one thing that you should be mindful of, this shouldn't ruin your vacations, but most of your vacation destinations, if you go to a third world country, let's say like places in Indonesia or even Thailand or just... 00:18:04.000 |
There are dump sites if you just drive a little bit, and there are many children living in these kinds of dump sites. 00:18:31.000 |
But when it rains on all this garbage, what happens? 00:18:38.000 |
And what happens to two three-year-old toddlers? 00:18:45.000 |
They drink the water, and guess what happens to those kids? 00:18:54.000 |
In non-educated communities, diarrhea is one of the biggest killers of babies. 00:19:00.000 |
Because the moms, because they're not educated, they don't think to give water to the child who's having diarrhea, because there's dirty water coming out of the baby, right? 00:19:10.000 |
But these kids not only just have a lot of diarrhea, they also suffer from a lot of lead poisoning, because they just put their mouth on all kinds of stuff. 00:19:21.000 |
But the biggest tragedy of these dumpsite villages is if the government wants to build, let's say, like a hotel, or a shopping mall, or an apartment complex, 00:19:33.000 |
and they're having a hard time getting the residents out of this area, they will set this place on fire. 00:19:45.000 |
But the problem is you're never going to read this on the news, because in the eyes of the government, people who live in these dumpsites, are they people? 00:19:54.000 |
So it's okay just to burn it, and let it rot. 00:19:58.000 |
So these are things that you and I need to be mindful of, and of how much the world needs Jesus Christ. 00:20:11.000 |
James, he's a good-looking kid. He's 15 years old. 00:20:15.000 |
He was 15 then, and now he's probably 17 or 18. 00:20:29.000 |
And mom and dad actually collect all these recyclables to send their kids to school. 00:20:35.000 |
But the little one right there doesn't like school. 00:20:41.000 |
Because, he says, "When I go to school, the kids tease me, saying that I smell." 00:20:49.000 |
See, poverty is not just about not having enough to eat. 00:20:54.000 |
There are so many different social issues and challenges that arise. 00:21:03.000 |
We were creating God's image, but a lot of my friends who are poor, 00:21:09.000 |
they don't see themselves with as much value as me. 00:21:17.000 |
They've spent most of their lives in a garbage dumpsite. 00:21:28.000 |
This was taken in Thailand, toward the north. 00:21:34.000 |
And did you guys notice anything about the map? 00:21:36.000 |
This is in the church, outside the Sunday school buildings. 00:21:47.000 |
This area is, at any time, war can break out. 00:21:51.000 |
So just a few miles across the border from Thailand, toward Myanmar, 00:22:05.000 |
But the soldiers actually gave us special permission to enter into the Shan State. 00:22:18.000 |
For most of their lives, all they knew was war. 00:22:22.000 |
And in this area, after we went in, we met a bunch of people without limbs. 00:22:28.000 |
At some point, what happened was they stepped on landmines, and they just exploded. 00:22:39.000 |
And in August 2015, I met a 20-year-old brother. 00:22:49.000 |
Five years prior to us meeting, his mom died of unknown causes. 00:22:55.000 |
And many of the four, they just died of unknown causes. 00:22:58.000 |
And their causes are not known because they're not dying in the hospital. 00:23:00.000 |
Because they don't have the money to go to a hospital. 00:23:04.000 |
And then five days after that, dad died of liver failure. 00:23:22.000 |
And she has a blood condition, which causes the blood vessels in her -- 00:23:33.000 |
And it causes these little bumps all over her body. 00:23:42.000 |
Because of compassion, she actually gets treated for this. 00:23:49.000 |
And when she crosses the border to go into Thailand to go to school, 00:24:00.000 |
You think kids are innocent and nice and sweet? 00:24:02.000 |
Kids all over the world, you know one thing that they're experts at? 00:24:09.000 |
I see again and again that this world really does need Jesus Christ to change thoroughly, 00:24:25.000 |
I've shown you guys -- some of you guys have seen this picture before. 00:24:32.000 |
And I shared with you on a Friday night that these kids are junior high school students. 00:24:38.000 |
And if you actually look up closely to their face, you'll see that they're pubescent kids. 00:24:48.000 |
And I shared with you the thing that broke my heart was hearing that all of these kids have seen a public execution. 00:24:58.000 |
And most people, when they hit 20 years old in North Korea at that point, have all seen a public execution. 00:25:13.000 |
And there's spiritual oppression that's rampant in this country. 00:25:22.000 |
And I mentioned the fact that they were abandoned and they basically grew up in this orphanage. 00:25:30.000 |
And in the orphanages, they do get some food, but they're all severely malnourished. 00:25:35.000 |
And when winter comes, a lot of them stay cold for three to four months over the course of the year. 00:25:51.000 |
And you might see this in the Philippines all over the place. 00:26:08.000 |
And I don't know if you guys noticed or not, but South Korea actually was the second poorest country in the whole world at that time. 00:26:14.000 |
Does anyone have a guess as to which was the poorest country in the world in 1952? 00:26:24.000 |
So South Korea was the second poorest country outside of Guinea about 60 years ago. 00:26:31.000 |
And so they were so poor, Koreans were so poor, that we had so many of the world's largest charity organizations all started in Korea. 00:26:41.000 |
But if you're a fan of Korean descent, you're here because the world ever is young. 00:26:52.000 |
And in the regular books of Compassionate International--ah, I wasn't there to take this picture because I wasn't born yet. 00:26:58.000 |
But back then, when they would get a shipment of apples, and each of the kids got two apples in this orphanage, 00:27:16.000 |
So with all this oppression and poverty and sin and hurt and pain, what is the answer? 00:27:30.000 |
That's the easy way. That's the instinctive response, right? 00:27:40.000 |
But South Korea has the highest suicide rate, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, 00:27:45.000 |
and the highest alcohol consumption rate in the world. 00:27:48.000 |
What does that tell you? Koreans are not happy. 00:27:53.000 |
And the churches--there's a lot of churches and missionaries in Korea, 00:27:58.000 |
but there's something that kind of went around in Korea. 00:28:06.000 |
And the thing that kind of dawned on me was, truly only Jesus can save. 00:28:16.000 |
But when you have the message of the cross and of Jesus Christ going into a people, 00:28:20.000 |
in addition with all these Western values, in addition with the promises of wealth, 00:28:25.000 |
and the health and wealth gospel is actually very effective in preaching to the poor. 00:28:32.000 |
But something happens there is where you damage those people. 00:28:37.000 |
And one thing that I discovered in the poor all over the world, 00:28:46.000 |
The poor are more compassionate than the rich. 00:28:56.000 |
This is a little girl. Her name is Naema. Her name is Grace. 00:29:05.000 |
This is actually James and Valerie Lee's compassionate child. 00:29:16.000 |
we were doing a photo shoot for the upcoming Christmas, 00:29:20.000 |
and we were traveling all over Tanzania to get just shots of the kids 00:29:29.000 |
And to get kindergarteners to smile for a camera, it's not easy. 00:29:34.000 |
So we had to bribe them. So we're like, "Ahh!" 00:29:36.000 |
Like, smile and all that stuff. And we gave them each a small pack of Haribo gummy bears. 00:29:41.000 |
You guys know what those are? In Costco, you still are looking at it, right? 00:29:45.000 |
So little Naema got this bag of Haribo gummy bears. 00:29:50.000 |
And we were just traveling around. I didn't give any thought to this little girl. 00:29:54.000 |
But we went to a home, and we visited with a mom. 00:29:59.000 |
And she had five kids. All five kids were of different fathers. 00:30:04.000 |
And the mom had eight. None of the kids had eight, fortunately, 00:30:10.000 |
And little did we know, like, 20 minutes later, 00:30:13.000 |
little Naema would actually walk in through the door. 00:30:17.000 |
And what broke my heart, what, like, shocked me was she still had the pack of gummy bears in her hand. 00:30:25.000 |
And she came into the gate. She opened up this pack of gummy bears, 00:30:33.000 |
gave one each to the two neighbor kids that were watching us white people, 00:30:38.000 |
and then she gave one to her mom, and then she ate one. 00:30:42.000 |
And she ate one of the kids that was five years old. 00:30:50.000 |
There's something about the beauty of people who are created in the image of God. 00:30:56.000 |
Even though they're in this poor place, they know how to display the attributes of God. 00:31:04.000 |
A lot of what you and I -- may I forgot some -- 00:31:07.000 |
so this five-year-old kid -- I mean, obviously, not all the kids did that, 00:31:14.000 |
And I actually requested that she be enrolled into the Compassionate Program. 00:31:17.000 |
I said, "I will find you a sponsor, and if the whole sponsor is not, I will sponsor this little girl." 00:31:23.000 |
We already had four, but he -- so I'll pray to God, hope I'm not getting in trouble. 00:31:27.000 |
And then James Vidal puts in the email, he goes, like, 00:31:30.000 |
"Would you recommend any Compassionate Children? I have a perfect one for Tanzania for you." 00:31:37.000 |
But this is such a common sight when you go to the communities of the poor. 00:31:44.000 |
Because they were created in the image of God. God created them. 00:31:49.000 |
So the first thing that I shared that was reconfirmed through all of my traveling was 00:31:53.000 |
that this world is so big, and God is so big. 00:32:06.000 |
And sin is everywhere, and everybody needs Jesus Christ. 00:32:13.000 |
Those who eat more than one pill a day, and those who eat only one pill a day. 00:32:19.000 |
Those who have, those who have not. Everybody needs restoration in Jesus Christ. 00:32:31.000 |
I've seen things in the world that show me how much God loves the poor. 00:32:46.000 |
And I want to share some stories of the things that God is doing around the world to transform lives. 00:32:58.000 |
This little girl in the middle, she's not little, she's 14 years old. 00:33:06.000 |
When she was 12 years old, her parents arranged for her to be married. 00:33:15.000 |
My assumption is that's where we get the coffee stuff. 00:33:21.000 |
So her parents, who are farmers, they arranged for Iyun to get married at the age of 12. 00:33:40.000 |
They sent her away, and then somehow she ended up in Bali, digging through the trash. 00:33:49.000 |
This church in Bali, which is actually, most of Indonesia is Muslim. 00:33:55.000 |
But Bali, the majority religion is actually Hinduism. 00:34:00.000 |
And so, but this church just adopted this girl. 00:34:08.000 |
And they fed her, they clothed her, they taught her about the goodness of God, 00:34:15.000 |
they taught her about the dignity of women, they taught her about the need for a savior, 00:34:21.000 |
And when we met her, she was telling us that she had accepted Christ, 00:34:32.000 |
and that she had been in contact with her parents to forgive them, 00:34:37.000 |
and to try to mend that relationship with her parents who had thrown her away. 00:34:44.000 |
And that's not something that any just moralistic person could do. 00:34:53.000 |
And in this small church in Bali, God was at work. 00:34:59.000 |
And I met her, I think a year and a half later, 00:35:08.000 |
But just a Korean, you might oppose that name. 00:35:14.000 |
Out of a class of maybe 800, from a girl who was just picking out trash, 00:35:20.000 |
Christ truly did change everything about her life. 00:35:25.000 |
I'm going to travel to a different place with you. 00:35:40.000 |
Micah Rose was just kind of quiet, shy, kind of a youth kid. 00:35:46.000 |
And she's been a compassionate kid ever since she was six years old. 00:35:50.000 |
But when she was in her last year of high school, 00:35:54.000 |
two boys and their friend, who's a girl, basically they drugged her. 00:36:02.000 |
And in her drugged kind of stupor, the two boys raped her. 00:36:10.000 |
And she said the whole time she couldn't move, she couldn't scream, 00:36:22.000 |
So she went into severe depression after about, 00:36:29.000 |
She didn't want to have anything to do with anybody. 00:36:34.000 |
And you know, this kind of story is extremely common. 00:36:40.000 |
like two billion people in the world actually have no protection under the law of any country. 00:36:48.000 |
So if a poor person gets raped, they go to the police station. 00:36:51.000 |
Sometimes the police will say, "Stop pushing us on this," 00:36:56.000 |
So actually police tell them to stop bothering us or you're going to get hurt. 00:37:03.000 |
But this is one of the reasons I love Compassion International. 00:37:07.000 |
Compassion International, if you sponsor a child, it goes all the way. 00:37:13.000 |
I keep saying we, because I'm so used to saying we, 00:37:15.000 |
but I'm not that compassionate when I'm on brain computers. 00:37:19.000 |
They hired lawyers from IGN who put both of those boys into jail. 00:37:25.000 |
But one of those boys is actually getting out in the next two months. 00:37:32.000 |
And the last time I talked to her, she said it's okay that those boys are getting out, 00:37:40.000 |
because maybe that will give me an opportunity to be shared with the rest of them. 00:37:46.000 |
Because what compassion did for this little girl was not just fight for her justice, 00:37:53.000 |
but for all four years of university they paid for it. 00:37:57.000 |
And they paid for all the counseling that she had to go through. 00:38:04.000 |
She was one of the best students in all of her class. 00:38:07.000 |
And she graduated last March, because March is when the school year ends in the Philippines. 00:38:13.000 |
And now she started her first year in law school. 00:38:16.000 |
She wants to become a lawyer to protect women who are abused, 00:38:23.000 |
and protect women who don't have compassion and compassion behind them, 00:38:29.000 |
And the thing that just jacked me up was this. 00:38:34.000 |
She said, "You know, I am thankful for compassion more than anything else, 00:38:39.000 |
because compassion taught me about Jesus Christ." 00:38:42.000 |
"Compassion could have clothed me, given me multivitamins, 00:38:47.000 |
given me vaccinations, checked my teeth, checked my eyes, 00:38:54.000 |
and your sponsorship actually does all this." 00:38:59.000 |
"Do a criminal prosecution on my behalf, compassion could have done all that." 00:39:04.000 |
"The one thing it would never be able to do is make me forget those boys laughing." 00:39:09.000 |
"And one thing it could never do is cause me to forget you." 00:39:18.000 |
That's why any kind of mission is endeavor without Christ. 00:39:22.000 |
You're just fixing the surface, and the heart will still pour. 00:39:27.000 |
My girl, what she said was, "Because Christ changed my heart, 00:39:34.000 |
and taught me to forgive, how can I not forgive that boy?" 00:39:40.000 |
She was wrestling with all the, "Am I ever going to get married? 00:39:56.000 |
Because when Jesus saves, He doesn't just save for like, 00:40:00.000 |
"Oh, okay, I raised my hand at a church, I have assurance of salvation." 00:40:05.000 |
He teaches people who have been extremely damaged to repay with love and forgiveness. 00:40:13.000 |
But this isn't just happening solely in the churches of the poor. 00:40:18.000 |
I want to share with you, this family is very happy, right? 00:40:27.000 |
The little girl with the red hat, her name is Lucy. 00:40:36.000 |
When mom was pregnant with baby number eight, dad ran away. 00:40:46.000 |
At first you're like, "Dude, those men, men in the world are everywhere. 00:40:49.000 |
They're the sick, those jerks, they'll leave the world." 00:40:52.000 |
Before you say that, this man actually stayed from one through seven. 00:40:58.000 |
He was working in the fields, just doing two, three jobs to take care of his kids. 00:41:05.000 |
But when number eight came along, I guess something snapped and he just went away. 00:41:10.000 |
So Lucy's mom was doing manual labor to try to figure out how to get food into their kids' bellies. 00:41:21.000 |
Because she was in such a desperate need, she was enrolled in the church, 00:41:32.000 |
But even still, what happened was, as mom was working, all of a sudden she had major pain. 00:41:45.000 |
But after the C-section, the next day she went back out to work because she said her kids needed to eat. 00:41:54.000 |
And two and a half years after that surgery, after Lucy was born, actually that's when we met her, 00:42:03.000 |
But that little lady holding the camera there was so broken by this story 00:42:11.000 |
that she kept bugging me, she was harassing me to like, "I want to do this, I want to do that for this family." 00:42:17.000 |
So she actually said, we got an estimate of, okay, for Lucy's mom to go back into school, 00:42:24.000 |
to get some kind of a training, how much would that cost? 00:42:28.000 |
And the estimate came out to about $3,200 for the year to feed all eight kids. 00:42:33.000 |
Well, the younger six, the older two, they were gone. 00:42:38.000 |
So the lady in this park, she set the $3,200. 00:42:45.000 |
Mom went to school for the full year with the accountability of the church. 00:42:53.000 |
And now she's working at a beauty salon, making 11 times more than she did before. 00:43:01.000 |
That was not possible just from the Pennsylvania church alone. 00:43:04.000 |
That was not something that compassion would have initiated because we have so many poor kids. 00:43:09.000 |
But someone from the Korean church saw the need, was broken, and was grieved, 00:43:18.000 |
shared what she had, and she basically allowed this mom to have dignity, 00:43:32.000 |
I can't find my husband, but I want to tell him about Jesus. 00:43:40.000 |
These are the kinds of things that are going on all over the world. 00:43:44.000 |
The poor, they're not going to get rich by us helping them. 00:43:50.000 |
But something happens when Jesus Christ enters into a person and does some major cleanup work, 00:43:57.000 |
does some major healing of scars and of wounds, a person is changed. 00:44:04.000 |
And that's something that's a little harder to see because there's poverty all over us as well. 00:44:16.000 |
Spiritual poverty is a little bit harder to gauge. 00:44:19.000 |
But we are not as broken over spiritual poverty as to the physical poverty, right? 00:44:27.000 |
But if we were broken over people's spiritual poverty around us, 00:44:31.000 |
and we were trying to figure out what's the best way to not bad-message a person by trying to help them, 00:44:37.000 |
what's the best way to lift them up in dignity, to follow the Lord, 00:44:45.000 |
And that's something that I want to share with you is the more I study scriptures, 00:45:01.000 |
And as you go farther and farther away from enough, whether it's this way or it's this way, 00:45:08.000 |
spiritual poverty just latches on and causes someone's tender heart to be weighed down by unnecessary things, 00:45:17.000 |
by the evils of the world, and causes someone who was created in the image of God with dignity to turn and be oppressed. 00:45:39.000 |
And I share a story in my sermon that I went to an area where the elephants just not found a building. 00:45:43.000 |
This is completely in the opposite direction, up in the north, up in the mountains. 00:46:03.000 |
And homemade alcohol is actually very potent. 00:46:10.000 |
But this family, basically, this child was enrolled into a compassion program. 00:46:20.000 |
And if you guys don't know anything about Compassion International, Compassion International only works with the local church. 00:46:25.000 |
And so, basically, that kid is taken in and gets his physical, emotional, like, cognitive, all of those needs are met. 00:46:35.000 |
So the parents obviously can't help but to be open to actually send a clinic to the church to receive the benefit. 00:46:47.000 |
And then the husband who used to beat her went the next week to the Bible study with her. 00:46:54.000 |
And the dad who used to spend all of his extra money on liquor, this is a year and a half in to build a new house. 00:47:04.000 |
If you look at the inside, it's nice and decorated. 00:47:08.000 |
Because the father, having met Christ, started taking responsibility of the home. 00:47:14.000 |
This is the kind of stuff that's happening all over the world. 00:47:18.000 |
And I think a lot of broken homes, when you have a weak dad, my assumption usually is that dad has not met Christ. 00:47:29.000 |
But when a man of the house actually stands firm in the Lord, the whole house atmosphere is changed. 00:47:49.000 |
We've been talking a lot about India from our church, right? 00:48:06.000 |
There's a lot of oppression, there's a lot of persecution. 00:48:09.000 |
There's a lot of illiteracy. I went to a village with 100% illiteracy. 00:48:13.000 |
And something about India, for me, that I will never forget, is that God loves this place. 00:48:21.000 |
And in one of the villages, I don't even know what some of the names of these places are, but I met a girl, her name was Manasa. 00:48:29.000 |
And at 13 years old, Manasa started to have a major headache. 00:48:36.000 |
And it just started hurting her so much, actually, the Compassion Programme. 00:48:42.000 |
So if you have a Compassion Sponsor, and your kid gets hurt or gets sick, 100% of the medical bills are covered. 00:48:52.000 |
So she traveled 400 kilometers away to Bangalore, India, where the best brain hospital is. 00:49:00.000 |
And x-rays showed that she had a 5/7 tumor in her brain. 00:49:04.000 |
And when Manasa's parents saw this, they were devout Hindus. 00:49:11.000 |
When they saw this, they were just broken. They were weeping. 00:49:15.000 |
They were like, "What did we do to have our daughter suffer like this?" 00:49:18.000 |
So they were very broken, and they wept in anger. 00:49:22.000 |
And they screamed, "If God, you are real," they screamed at him. 00:49:29.000 |
But again, Compassion, that kid gets the best possible treatment we can get them. 00:49:43.000 |
And so the decision was made to operate and take out the 5/7 tumor. 00:49:56.000 |
And even if the surgery is successful, she's for sure going to be mentally impaired. 00:50:04.000 |
So the parents obviously were distraught, and they were weeping, and they were like, "We will take care of her. 00:50:12.000 |
But just before the doctor initiated the surgery, the doctor felt like doing an angiography. 00:50:23.000 |
But from what I heard, it was just like, "Do you want to do another scan?" 00:50:32.000 |
But he's like, "You know what, let's just check it one more time to just reconfirm where everything is." 00:50:37.000 |
But that pretty new doctor was completely surprised to see through the angiography that the swelling had disappeared completely. 00:50:58.000 |
And we found out that that whole couple weeks, everybody was praying for Vanessa and her family. 00:51:07.000 |
Spontaneous closure of the bacilar trunk 9 years in. 00:51:15.000 |
So no one actually went to that she was done. 00:51:17.000 |
So all this money was collected, all the things were prepared, all the equipment was prepared. 00:51:24.000 |
But the funnier thing was, look what happens after. 00:51:27.000 |
When all the other patients in that ward of the hospital came to know what happened to Vanessa, 00:51:32.000 |
all the patients asked Vanessa to pray for them also. 00:51:34.000 |
So Vanessa prayed for every patient to share the gospel with them. 00:51:37.000 |
Vanessa was highly certain in her faith, and so on April 4, 2012, Vanessa was discharged, taken back home. 00:51:45.000 |
She went and testified among the progeny children about what the Lord had done in their lives. 00:51:50.000 |
All the children in tears prayed, "God, be close to the Lord." 00:51:54.000 |
Also Vanessa's neighbors came to know about the miracle's healing. 00:51:58.000 |
And Vanessa and her parents boldly shared with all of them about what Jesus had done in their lives to share the gospel to them. 00:52:02.000 |
This is happening all over the world in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. 00:52:10.000 |
When Jesus saves and heals, He saves and heals completely and thoroughly. 00:52:15.000 |
And there's a picture of her just sharing her testimony in front of the compassionate children. 00:52:22.000 |
There were 512 compassionate kids at this church. 00:52:25.000 |
And do you think those children believe in the power of prayer? 00:52:32.000 |
And you know those children, one of the first people that they pray for every day is their sponsors. 00:52:38.000 |
That's a shameless plug for sponsoring a compassionate child. 00:52:41.000 |
You can come to prayers and they get privileged. 00:52:50.000 |
I got to tell them personally that God answered their prayers and that He was pregnant, not just with one of the two kids. 00:53:07.000 |
One, not all of us had a choice to where he was born. 00:53:10.000 |
You're enjoying your life here because you were born in very suitable situations and very advantageous situations. 00:53:18.000 |
You are living in one of the most nicest places to live in all of the world. 00:53:31.000 |
The second thing that we all have in common is we all need Jesus. 00:53:38.000 |
That's why a lot of people tell me to stop talking. 00:53:43.000 |
And those are the things that we have in common. 00:53:51.000 |
And we all, and what God is desiring for is worshippers from every tribe, nation, language, tongue. 00:54:00.000 |
Every place God is raising up people who will worship Him as holy. 00:54:08.000 |
In one of the most hostile, drug and prostitution ridden areas in all of the, in Cebu, in the Philippines. 00:54:23.000 |
Sex trafficking, drug trafficking, so much of that. 00:54:29.000 |
And I want to show you how a church, in the love of Jesus, with the love of Jesus Christ, 00:57:48.000 |
And then the person who rescued her, her husband... 00:57:57.000 |
that she gave birth to a baby with a severe drug addiction. 00:58:07.000 |
Now, she's the one who discipled at least 40 moms with their babies. 00:58:19.000 |
Everything that they've gone through, she would know. 00:58:22.000 |
And I think God raises up people and allows for different points of hurt. 00:58:29.000 |
So we can empathize with people in this broken world that are hurting. 00:58:35.000 |
Then we would genuinely have compassion on people. 00:58:41.000 |
and when poverty and stuff remains at a number level... 00:58:48.000 |
But when poverty and admissions field start becoming people that you met... 00:59:05.000 |
And I believe with all my heart that God wants to use every person in this room... 00:59:10.000 |
to wholly bring the gospel of Jesus Christ... 00:59:26.000 |
Hopefully you had a very brief trip around the world. 00:59:31.000 |
And it was all scattered because, you know, it's stories. 00:59:34.000 |
But hopefully it gave you a little bit of a glimpse of the broken world that we live in. 00:59:42.000 |
And may the God of the nations stir your heart for the nations. 01:00:07.000 |
And help us not to be spoiled brats that just take in all the love... 01:00:12.000 |
and think that it's given just for us to enjoy. 01:00:16.000 |
But help us to be people who live with a passion... 01:00:23.000 |
To shine your light into the darkest premises of the world. 01:00:30.000 |
That any social justice and mission is endeavor does not... 01:00:35.000 |
substitute proper worship and proper reading of your word. 01:00:41.000 |
So we pray that as you raise up people who are biblically literate... 01:00:44.000 |
that you would raise up people who have a passion, God, to see the lost come to Christ. 01:00:56.000 |
We thank you Father for just accepting and praising you Jesus.