On 1 August 2015 at City Harvest Church 5 p.m. service, Pastor Kong Hee mentioned the five reasons on why Christianity grew as cited by Mr Edward Gibbon, a distinguished secular historian and author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire":
1. Uncompromising Zeal
2. Future Rewards
3. Supernatural Miracles
4. Moral Purity
5. Church Unity
Later that evening, while at home, I continued with my re-reading of "Unleashing Your God-given Dreams" by Steve Munsey. The following story in Chapter 3 of the aforesaid book as recounted to Pastor Munsey by a Russian believer stirred me up to believe in miracles of the God-kind and I thought that my sharing it here would spur you to believe God for miracles in your life.
To digress, earlier at the service I felt some throat irritation and had to cough intermittently while singing worship songs. Then, when Pastor Kong led us in prayer, I prayed in tongues believing God for healing. Shortly after the prayers when we sang on, I realised that the throat irritation was gone. I was encouraged there and then to keep on believing God for miracles by faith in His Word (in what He has already said and considered as done before mortal men, constrained by the dimension of time, could catch-on.) All Glory be to God alone!
Back to the story when the KGB was so strong and communism was at its worst in Russia such that no one could preach the gospel:
"We were preaching the gospel one night, and the KGB came into our underground church in Russia. They arrested all of us, taking the leaders -- about four of us preachers -- in a helicopter, flying North. We arrived at the Arctic Circle area of our country, and they flew low, about one hundred feet off the ground. They shoved us, one at a time, miles apart, out the door of the helicopter to let us freeze to death. We never saw each other again.
My legs were broken when they hit the icy snow. I was freezing. This happened because of the Gospel. I awakened the next morning with the sun on my face. There was a polar bear, normally a man-eating animal, literally covering me like a blanket. When the sun got high enough that it could warm me, the polar bear looked right at me and walked away.
It came back that afternoon with a lunch sack in its mouth; the bear dropped it where I could reach it to get the food from the sack. Then it lay next to me to keep me warm through the night. This went on for three days and nights. On the fourth morning, the bear grabbed the back of my shirt and began to drag me through the snow into the woods. Then the polar bear ran off. I never saw it again.
I was discovered in the woods by some people who were only voices to me. I didn't know it, but they were Christians. They were a little afraid of me at first; they just didn't know who I was. They didn't believe my story about a polar bear keeping me warm. I told them, "He fed me for three days by bringing me a lunch sack." One of the men in the group said, "So that's where my lunch went!" He asked me to describe what was in the lunch sacks. I told him the contents that I ate on each day I was fed by the bear. It was what had been in the man's lunch sacks!'' They believe that I was a Christian after that testimony!"
Just as God provided food for Elijah supernaturally through ravens and for the Russian preacher through a polar bear, He will continue to work His miracles for us. Let's raise our hope in Christ -- our Hope of glory!
