Whew! What a day. I should’ve known right from the beginning that it was going to be a humdinger. The devil got up early and stayed up late, but he is such a punk that all he can do is trouble us; he can’t stop us.
We had trouble the first thing in the morning. The Bishop locked the keys in the car! But you have to hear this because this is really funny: he was in the car and decided to check the water before he came to get me. Now, the keys are on one of those key fobs that have the buttons to lock and unlock the car, but this one is very squirrelly. The alarm is unstable and will often go off all by itself. So the bishop gets out of the car, and – beep, beep – the car locks itself! Yeah, tell me that ain’t the devil!
Okay, so we bind together in prayer, and the Lord brings him to someone who is able to easily unlock it. Good. We are off to the meeting. Now remember, we still have to drive an hour, and these people have been waiting all morning having slept there overnight on the floor of the church. But when we get there we get the same rambunctious greeting on the dirt path that we got yesterday. You just got to love these people!
The message poured out of me again. I had no idea where I was going next, but I just kept going! I love it when God does that. It’s a little scary when you have no idea what you are going to preach about, and you have to just swallow real hard, stand up, open your mouth, and hope something comes out that makes sense. But once I got on the horse, it was like riding a wild stallion. I could feel the fallow ground being broken in their hearts. This is what I’ve been struggling up against for two days, but finally it broke. As I called them forth to the altar, you could have heard their cries a mile away.
Broken, crucified prayer breaks up the fallow ground so that the seeds of the Word of God can be planted in their hearts, but it is the tears of repentance that waters the seeds which causes the harvest to spring forth out of the ground. It was that kind of prayer, and yeah, it was that good. It can only get better from here.
But I should have known the battle wasn’t over. Right after we finished praying, a pastor told us that the car had a flat. Now remember, we are 50 km from the nearest gas station, so there is no place and no electricity to get it repaired. The tire was just fine until we started breaking through to the Throne of God. Satan must have been livid!
We managed to air up a spare (which was also flat) with a bicycle pump and we limped back to Soroti. I was so exhausted that I barely made it up the stairs to collapse on the bed. That’s when you know you’ve put in a good day in the Lord.
This is the last day for this group. Nothing has gone the way I expected, none of the messages have been what I usually bring, so I would imagine that the results will be anything but usual or expected.
And that is something to smile about!
[These articles were written during my trip to Uganda in 2011]
The Devil knows how much good you’re doing for the Kingdom. And he knows that he can’t stop you.
Yeah, he’s a punk. But we dismiss him at our peril. He is still the prince of the air.