Surfs Up in Anaheim, CA

Our SWAT team is back from our mission with the Harvest Crusade in Anaheim 2018.  The mission was fruitful, productive, exciting, encouraging, physically/mentally/emotionally draining, spiritually invigorating.  There was spiritual warfare, laughter, tears, joy, intense prayer, unity, and a laser focus on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to share the love and hope of Jesus Christ.  Hopefully, some of these words will enable you to picture the AWESOME work God did in Anaheim this week August 16-19.

Where to start…which story to tell you about… they were all diverse, unique, and divinely appointed.  Let me start by telling you that God allowed our team to bring 63 people to a commitment or re-commitment to Christ.  Additionally, keep in mind that the majority of the time our team was successful in sharing the gospel and leaving people with something to consider.  It reminded me of a passage I read recently in my devo, 1 Corinthians 3:6-9, where some plant, some water, but only God is the one who makes things grow.  Something else that stood out to my wife and I during our trip was that the majority of the people we engaged said that they had been recently thinking about our main question, “Where would you go if you died today”?  They would tell us, “How did you know I was just thinking about that!”  Deep down inside they were already pondering the question, but no one dared to ask them.  The verse that resonated to my wife and I during this whole trip was 1 Corinthians 2:9.  We were speaking a message of Gods wisdom, “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – the things God has prepared for those who love him”.  Interesting, how awesome!! All we had to do was ask and it opened up the flood gates to many fruitful conversations.     

One encounter I had while walking down the sidewalk in Huntington Beach was with three college aged young men.  I approached them while they were drying off from swimming at the beach, and began to engage them.  I invited them to the crusade and they were very respectful and said that they would consider going.  I then proceeded to my main question “Where would you go if you died today”?  The question caught them off guard but they were very intrigued.  One of them said, we just come back to life again as someone else, the other didn’t know, and the last one said he was agnostic but open to hear what would happen… Wow!! Three totally unique answers.  This opened the door for me to share the gospel, the love of God.  This really brought down the walls and the young men began to share their experience growing up and what they believed in.  The first one was still stuck on the fact that he would be coming back as another person.  The second one finally said he was a Christian but never really had a relationship with Christ.  The third person “Elijah” said that he was studying philosophy in college and was studying many religions and was confused.  With all that information I moved to the evidence part of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  I gave him factual evidence and Elijah began to agree and start to see the facts and truth of what the bible had to say about Jesus.  How he was a real man, how he lived a perfect life, how he claimed to be the God, how he paid for our sins by dying on a cross, and by rising from the dead to give us eternal life.  And all we had to do was Believe.  I wasn’t sure if the conversation had reached a turning point but they began to get up and they said that they had to get going because their parking meter was going to expire.  I thought this would be it, but wait…they then asked us if we wanted to follow them to their car and keep talking.  Whaaaatttttt, hello… Absolutely!! So we proceeded to walk down Main street toward their car.  I proceeded to talk with Elijah who was the agnostic.  Kept telling him promises in scripture and then we get to a stop in a corner of a busy street.  We had to part ways, I however, needed to ask him one last question.  So I said to Elijah, I don’t want to leave without asking you one last question “Would you like to get your life right with God and receive Jesus Christ into your heart”?  I then proceeded with Revelation 3:20, “I stand at the door of your heart and if you hear my voice and let me in, I will come in” This really impacted Elijah, he proceeded to tell me that his uncle had been wanting him to go to church, and how he had been trying to tell him scripture, but Elijah always told him that he was too busy and not right now.  This really opened his eyes and more importantly his heart.  He made the decision to stop running and gave me his answer… He wanted to receive Jesus into his heart and stop running from God.  Wow!! This teared me up a little listening to him, watching his facial expression, he was telling me how ignorant he was, his uncle all along had been trying to share about God and probably praying for him.  But all this was about to change.  I lead him in the sinner’s prayer, in a busy street corner and we rejoiced after the prayer! He was going to call his uncle as soon as he got to his car and tell him about what had just happened and was definitely going to go to church that Sunday. 

There were other impactful stories I could share, but this one touched me the most.  I saw God’s power transform a life right before my eyes.  So back to what I was telling you at the very beginning, some water, some plant, but God is the one who makes things grow.  I had the privilege of watering and watching God sprout this new life.  I encourage you to water, to plant because you never know when God is going to sprout a miracle to show you that God is alive and working in your life.