This week I want to tell you a story from my time in North Africa.

One of the elders in the church I visited was an extremely wealthy Muslim and with wealth comes esteem or respect within Islam. One day this man asked God if he were real to reveal himself to him and what happened next is out of this world!

The guy says that Jesus turned up in his living room and they had a conversation for an hour – after this his wife came home and the man said to her, ‘I just met Jesus and we are now Christian’ to which the wife replied, ‘no way, you have lost your mind’. You see, in a country like this to convert to Christianity not only results in you losing your status within the Islamic community, but it also more than likely results in your family disowning you and your neighbourhood discriminating and persecuting you. The man said to his wife, ‘no, Jesus is real, you ask him to come and He will come’. The next day the man came home from work to find a letter nailed to a tree in his front yard, on first look he thought it was a note from a local businessman but when he opened it he found out it was from his wife and read something along the following lines, ‘Dear Jesus, my husband says you are real and will come, if you are real please come’. A couple of days later the husband returned home to find his wife crying and he asked her what was wrong to which she replied, ‘Jesus was here in our living room and I had a conversation with Him, we are now Christian’.

These guys are now running a house Church in North Africa and despite the impact it has had financially and socially they are serving God with everything they have!

For me this is another example of the NEW CREATION CHALLENGE people who realise that the old self has gone and the new is here, and what’s more in this case the new self didn’t mean worldly acclaim in fact it meant the opposite on this occasion, it meant foregoing wealth and status in the pursuit of God, a fact that sadly I think a lot of us miss, you see, we like the smiling happy version of Jesus, the one that doesn’t really call us to be uncomfortable for Him but does mean our lives should go well for us because we are victorious in Christ and that means life should go well for us, right?  but is this really Biblical? Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all proclaiming that I have it all together, in fact I too like the idea of a smiling happy Jesus, but when I read the Bible I can’t seem to find that pretty hollywood love story with great outcomes for all, in fact I read Matthew 24 and think, ‘man-o-man the world will get a lot worse before it gets better’. Jesus has definitely won and death has been conquered, but in a worldly sense the notion of we get what we deserve and it should not involve tragedy, persecution, poverty or hard times is a total fallacy.

As Christians we serve the creator of the heavens and earth, a creator that if we don’t praise Him even the rocks will cry out! We are definitely victorious in Christ and we are without doubt made new in Him everyday - let’s commit to serving Him with everything we have knowing that for better or worse God is in control which honestly, means in the good times He is right there walking with us and in the bad times he’s right there next to us too!

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