Rising from the Dead

Last week, I was a part of a missions convention in Farmville, VA, as I've mentioned. The main speaker was representing Global Teen Challenge, a ministry to the drug and alcohol addicted. He preached a sermon on Jesus raising the widow's son in Nain (read: Luke 7:12,13), comparing an addict to the dead son in the story. He claimed that addicts are essentially dead men walking--their physical bodies are so damaged, it's just a matter of time. Their relationships with family and friends are usually dead. Their spirits are deadened. They are alive in body, but dead in all other respects. I found his message intriguing.

Fast forward to last night: I didn't have a service scheduled and I was four hours away for the service yesterday morning. I decided to pop into a church that was directly on the way home, even though I had never met or talked to the pastor. I figured I would have a chance to meet him, and who knows where it would lead. However, when I showed up, it was a baptism day: the pastor was baptizing 8 or 9 young men from a local Teen Challenge center. Each of the guys stood up and gave a testimony, nearly all of them about their struggles with alcohol, drugs, violence, jail time, etc. Several of them commented, "I should be dead right now many times over." For them, the symbolism of being immersed into water, dead to their old lives of sin, and being resurrected into new life in Christ was almost literal.

It really blessed me to see these young men making such a strong commitment to Christ. We sang James Huey's song, "When I think about the Lord . . . how He saved me, how He raised me, how He filled me with the Holy Ghost, how He healed me to the uttermost. When I think about the Lord, How He picked me up, turned me around, placed my feet on solid ground--It makes me what to shout, "Hallelujah, thank you Jesus. Lord, You're worthy of all the glory, all the honor, all the praise."

If you've never sung this song with folks who've been raised, healed, saved, filled and more by the Lord, you are really missing out. They were literally shouting Hallelujah as we sang it over and over again. I sang it for another three hours on the way home in the car.