On Time, Every Time

09 May On Time, Every Time

When Jesus was training His followers He told them to go ahead of Him to the cities beyond and take no extra clothing, no money and no food. Go and preach the kingdom of God and heal the sick, demonstrating God’s plan and God’s love (Luke 10:1-9 author’s paraphrase). In my own spiritual journey I have seen the Lord teach me that He is my supply, and test me in nations so my wife and I would know that Jesus will provide.

On my first overseas trip I found myself on the shores of France after several months of ministry in Spain. My plane was leaving from England and I had no Francs and no French language skills to cross the English Channel. I had acted in obedience to go to Spain, but now it looked like I would be a failure in the kingdom.

Would I become a beggar to survive? Scripture says, “Never have I seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread” (Psalm 37:25).  I was feeling hungry and didn’t know what to do. All I had on me was a collection of English tracts and a few Spanish coins. I had sown my last $50 into the Spanish mission before leaving.

Standing on the edge of the English Channel I felt like Moses, except instead of Pharaoh’s chariots I had an army of poverty and hunger on my tail. As I prayed the Lord spoke to me, “Why are you praying?” I thought, “What else can I do?” Then an idea popped into my heart: Go to the ferry port in Dieppe and preach. I had not even considered going to the ferry ports before so I took this as a word from heaven.

From 8:00 AM until 10:30 PM I preached the gospel to all the Irish and English leaving and arriving on the boats. It was wonderful to see open hearts and spiritual needs being met, but there was no change in my condition. With the last boat leaving at 11:00 PM it looked very bad, but my confidence was still in Christ.

At 10:30 pm two English tennis pros walked into the port and recognized me from the tennis tournaments we had played together in America.  They wanted to talk tennis, but I was not in the mood and excused myself to go outside and look for a possible truck that might need an extra driver. In a few minutes the pros followed me out to the parking lot, saying that a man inside had told them I was believing God for a trip to England. I didn’t want to get into an argument with a couple of wild tennis players so hadn’t mentioned my faith to them.

After a few seconds they turned to me and said, “We were just born again at a French tennis tournament this week. Will you teach us the Bible if we take you to England?” “You bet!” was my immediate answer.

This was the first of many displays of God’s supernatural supply as I reached out to the nations and went in His name, trusting Him for every provision I needed!