Holy Spit
Mike MacNeil · Tidal Church Moncton · May 29, 2022 · Supernatural series
Mike MacNeil explores Mark 8:22-25, where Jesus heals a blind man in stages, showing that He meets desperate people in surprising ways. With stories from Honduras and prison ministry, he invites us to humble, persistent faith and expect God to move.
More from Mike MacNeil · The Supernatural series
Topics: Faith, Prayer, Holy Spirit
Transcript
[0:00] Today we are starting a brand new series called Supernatural. That there's more to this world than just what the eyes can see, and to start the series today, we have a special friend of Moncton Wesleyan who is joining us, and a long-term relationship that I can speak to is when I was in university many, many, many years ago. Now, we're talking about 30 years ago that I think I sat in this guy's class, and it really is miraculous because when you see him, you're gonna see that he is so much older than me and yet looks so much younger and better than me.
[0:46] And so when you see Mike, you will know that there is a testimony that God still does miracles in the world today. We want to welcome today our good friend from Kingswood University. Professor Mike MacNeil, would you make him feel welcome? Thank you. Well, that was quite an introduction. I don't know. I'm not sure how to follow that up, but it's great to be with you this morning and to share and to be able to open up this series called Supernatural. I don't know if I've ever, this might be the first time a church has invited me to open a series. I don't know if I've ever kind of experienced that before, and you may assume, because I'm a Bible college professor, you might think that I come from like five generations of pastors or, you know, something like that, but actually I grew up totally outside of the church. My dad was raised in a strict religious home that shoved religion down his throat. So he rebelled, and he raised our family to not go to church, to not be interested in anything spiritual at all. And so I grew up just like the stereotypical Canadian pagan boy that, you know, tried drinking and partying and drugs and just like all the stuff that you do.
[2:20] And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was really looking for God, but on the outside I appeared very, very skeptical and very, very anti-God, and it was, I was 24 years old, and it was a Friday night, and I kind of got tricked into going to church. I don't know if that's ever happened to you. But I somehow found myself at King's Church when it was, you know, maybe 30 or Be people meeting in a school, and it was a Friday night, and I walked in there with the worst attitude in the world. Not thinking that, you know, anything about it was real.
[3:05] And I had that classic Billy Graham experience of, like, the preacher. It was almost like the room faded away. He was talking right to me. I was like, how is this guy describing my life? How does he know all of these things that are going on inside of me? And at the end he gave one of those, like, good old school, like, altar calls where he said, if God has spoken to you in any way, like, come down front. And I was like, you were doing good until then, buddy, but nobody is going to come down front. Who's gonna get up in front of all of these people and embarrass himself and go down front? And as I was thinking this, I was standing up. I don't know how that works out theologically, but my brain was going, only an idiot would stand up and go down front, and I was standing up.
[3:58] And I walked down to the front. And I was like, God, I don't even know if You're real. But if You are, like, I want You. And the only way I can describe what happened to me, I mean, it was supernatural. It's like God before that moment. I just I didn't really, I wasn't sure, so I didn't even want to do. I was the only one who came forward. And I came forward, and I was like, well, it's a church, so I probably should kneel, so I knelt down, and the best way I can describe it is the God who was just this idea out there somewhere, all of a sudden, this isn't very theological, but it was kind of like all of a sudden there was this presence there.
[4:47] It was a tangible thing. It was invisible. I could not, you know, Jesus didn't appear to me physically, but I felt the presence of Jesus, and that night I went home. And I had the only divine dream I've ever had in my whole life. In the dream, God showed up to me as a bright, white that, like, lit up, and it just kind of obscured everything else. And I woke up. At that point where God appeared in the dream was like, I woke up. And to be honest, I have never recovered. I have never recovered from my conversion.
[5:34] And it was, it was, and so, so I was a person that was really skeptical, and, you know, what I needed to do, I needed to experience God in some way. I needed something tangible, something real. And so God gave me that experience. So my whole Christian walk has kind of been marked by the supernatural, by things that are kind of unexplainable, and I believe that it's hard. You know, Paul said that the Christ has not been raised from the dead, that everything else is in vain. Like we, Christianity is by its very nature a supernatural, a supernatural religion.
[6:25] And so I want to take us to a story in the Bible today. The title of my message, Holy Spit, and you will see why in a minute. We're going to go to that story where Jesus has an encounter with a blind man, and He spits in his eye, and so I want to talk about when Jesus uses unconventional ways to display His unconditional love. When Jesus uses unconventional ways to display His unconditional love. I just I just have another book out. That's this is a little kind of commercial before we get into the Scripture. But so these are available out, these will be available after the service. It's a book of stories of Jesus kind of working in supernatural ways, like in the present day, in the present time, and so some of what I'm gonna share today, some of the stories are in the book, and the books are like 10 bucks each, and so I'm obviously not getting rich off of this. This is a way for me to, like, extend my speaking, to put the stories of what Jesus is doing today into people's hands. And so if you'd be interested in getting one of those, they'll be available later, but I want to take us into the Scripture in Mark 8:22-25.
[7:57] I love the Gospel stories, the simple stories of Jesus encountering people and meeting, in meeting their need, and often. It is very faith-stretching kind of stuff for us. I don't know if any of you follow The Chosen. But my favorite scene in The Chosen is Jesus. Jesus heals a man and Thomas is standing watching this. And Thomas just, Thomas sees this healing. And he just says, "I don't understand. I don't understand." And in The Chosen, Jesus looks at him and says, "Get used to it. You're going to see a lot of that," which I thought was accurate and hilarious at the same time. And so in Mark 8:22-25, it says, "They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him.
[9:01] He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When He had spit on the man's eyes and put His hands on him, Jesus asked, 'Do you see anything?' He looked up and said, 'I see people. They look like trees walking around.' Once more, Jesus put His hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly." And so this is our basic story today, and I'm gonna use the Scripture, and I'm also wanting to report on some things that I have seen God do lately. I was on a mission trip in March, you know, finally as COVID was kind of coming to an end, was able to get a team out and go down to Honduras, and honestly, folks, I don't know why. I can't explain exactly why this happened. I've been on a lot of mission trips, but in those eight days in Honduras, we saw more miraculous events. We saw more supernatural kind of encounters, faith encounters, than I probably have seen in the whole rest of my Christian life.
[10:24] It was pretty incredible, and it just stretched my faith. It challenged me. And when I came home, I was in my heart, I was feeling like, this is what we need to see in Canada. We need to see God move in tangible ways in Canada. It's been so, it's been too long. It's been too long since we've experienced revival. And Bethsaida actually means "mercy." And so in our Bible story here, Jesus and the disciples, they meet this man at a place called Mercy. And what happens, like what Jesus does for us, is totally by grace. It's by His mercy.
[11:16] It's not because we're great people or we deserve it. It's a mercy kind of thing. And noticing the story, that other people bring the man to Jesus. Sometimes we need others to bring us to Jesus in faith. And sometimes we need to bring others to Jesus in faith, sometimes because of the circumstances of life. We can just get overwhelmed. We get overwhelmed by the negative things that are going on around us. And we don't have the faith for ourselves, and sometimes it's somebody else. I've seen this several times in my life where it's somebody else who kind of stands in and has the faith that we don't have, that kind of brings us to Jesus in prayer, because we're feeling overwhelmed, and at that moment they kind of have more faith than we do, and they step in and they play their part. And so this man is brought to Jesus, and Bethsaida also means "desert place."
[12:31] It means a place, a barren, a barren kind of place, not the place that you would go to on vacation, you know, an out of the way kind of place. And so as they bring this man to Jesus, it's interesting that Jesus takes the man, and Jesus kind of removes him, removes him from the crowd and takes him to an out of the way place where the crowd is not watching. And when God moves supernaturally, when there are healings and miracles and things that happen, one of the things that I've noticed is that often happens in out of the way places.
[13:19] It doesn't often happen in the spotlight. Jesus takes the man where the pressure of the crowd is not on the situation, where it's just him and the man, and He can deal with the man's, what the man's issue is. And Jesus, what I found about Jesus is He will not be our entertainment. And He will not be our novelty act. You know, sometimes people are just looking for kind of the next thing, the next exciting thing that can titillate their senses or their emotions. And Jesus, one of the things I've noticed is I have seen God move in supernatural ways. It tends to happen in places that are unexpected, places where you wouldn't necessarily assume that something spiritual was going to happen.
[14:17] So in Honduras, we were taking food out to the poorest of the poor who work on the dump outside of the city of Tegucigalpa. And basically the dump is like a big mountain of garbage, and if you can picture just like a dry, dusty place, the workers there make a couple of dollars a day just pulling metal out of the garbage and then selling it. They've got masks on their face to keep the dust out. There are buzzards flying everywhere. It's not the kind of a place that you would look at and go, "Like, God is here, you know, something spiritual is gonna happen."
[15:04] But as we were there, we did a little service off the back of a truck, you know, we got some guitars out, you know, sang some worship songs in Spanish and invited people for prayer, and then we were going to feed them. And there was this one man named Valerio. I noticed that he seemed very comfortable comfortable with us. He was hanging by the truck, and there was a language barrier, and so the translators were all busy, and I couldn't really, I was like, I really thought, like, this impulse from God to talk to him. But I didn't speak his language. And so I was kind of torn in what to do. And then I saw one of the translators become free from a conversation, and I waved him over, and I found out that this man.
[15:55] I said, "Can we pray for you?" And he said, "Yes, I want to tell you what's going on in my life. I've been experiencing chest pains for four days, and my breathing is like my breathing is shallow, and having a hard time breathing. And I don't have any, there's no doctors here. And even if there were, I don't have money to go to the doctor, and And I said, is it okay if we pray for you and and he said, "Yes, I'm a Christian. Please pray for me." And we stood there beside the truck in the dump. You know, with the poorest of the poor. And I was feeling like out of my element. I was feeling like, God, like, this is this is beyond me. Like, there's nothing that I can do here that can really help this man. It has to be You.
[16:50] And so I just prayed a simple prayer. That God would, that what God would meet his need. And then afterward, through the translator of the translator said to him, "How do you feel now?" And he, and this is what he told me, he said he said, "When you prayed, I felt heat go through my body from the top of my head down to my toes." He said, "And my chest pain stopped. And now I can breathe. Now I can breathe normally." And you know, and we were like amazed at what Jesus had just done. Jesus had literally touched this man. Because he was desperate, in a desperate situation, and he had no other option, and it was in an out of the way place. And what I find is, when the devil is at his worst, Jesus is at His best.
[17:50] Like Jesus, when there's nobody else that you can turn to, Jesus. Jesus, well, He will reach out and He will touch us. And you can go on my Facebook. I got a, I was like, "Valerio, can I get a picture with you?" Because this is a special moment for me as well. And I want to get a picture so that I can pray for you. And you know, you can find, you can dig around in my Facebook and it's there. Jesus often uses methods in the Scripture. Jesus spits on the man and then touches him with His hands.
[18:39] Let's just be honest. This is really weird. Okay. This is, sometimes we read the Bible and there's stuff in it. We just kind of read over it like it's normal, and it's like, if this happened today, we'd be like, does God work that way? Like, this is really weird. This was not a normal thing to do, to spit in somebody's, and somebody's eye, and And Jesus often uses methods that are surprising at best for us. And sometimes they're downright shocking. Sometimes they're downright, like, offensive to us. Like, what, would God really work in that way?
[19:27] And so I don't know about you, but I, like, I want everything that Jesus has for me. And that means that sometimes I just need to get over myself. You know what I mean? Like, sometimes I just need to get over the expectations that I have. What I've found is that God doesn't play by my rules. And He doesn't bend to my agenda or my expectations about things, about the way things are supposed to happen. And so I think we need to get, we need to get desperate enough. I've asked myself many times, why did I see what I saw in Honduras?
[20:15] Why did I see that there, and why don't I see that here? I've wrestled with that, and I think it might just be that, because Honduras is a very poor country. You know, where there's 60% unemployment, and gangs rule neighborhoods. And the government is somewhat corrupt, and because of all those things there's kind of a desperation there when people come to God with their needs. There is an intensity and a desperation that sometimes we don't have here. People are too desperate to be proud, and there's no other option. And so I asked the translator, how, well, who is working with us, I asked him about that. I said, "Why do you think you are? You see more miracles in your ministry here?" And he said, this is what he said to me, and I think there's wisdom in this for us from a brother in the third world. He said, "You have too many of your, this is what he said to me, you have too many of your own resources.
[21:27] And so sometimes you don't go to God until it's a last resort." And I haven't forgotten that. I've been rolling that over in my mind, and I've been kind of wrestling with that. We live in a culture that is soaked in doubt. We are so skeptical. We live in a culture where we don't believe in our institutions anymore. We don't believe in our government. We don't, we are skeptical about everything. And that doubt, I think it's all it's like the air we breathe, and it kind of seeps in, even for us as Christians. It kind of seeps into the church, and it kind of gets, it kind of gets in the way.
[22:18] In the garden, the first thing when Satan wants to tempt us, the first thing that he says is what he said to Adam and Eve in the garden: "Did God really say that?" He plants doubt. And then he gives us a lie after that, an alternative truth than what the Bible says. And so I know you've just finished a kind of an apologetic series. And, which I hear was very good. And one of the things that I've that, one of the conclusions I've come to is that we don't we don't doubt the Bible because it's full of contradictions. In our culture, we doubt the Bible because it contradicts us.
[23:05] We kind of have a religion of the sacred self, don't we? Where it's like, I am the judge of, I am going to be the judge of everything. And then it's we smack up against a supernatural faith where God, where God says, "No, you're not God. I am God." And and so sometimes it's it's the doubt is kind of rooted. It's kind of rooted in something, and something different than just having honest questions about the Bible. We can be soaked in doubt, and I think in our culture we're, we seem to be obsessed with our own dignity. We were obsessed with where, we're such a, we're such a proud people. We have ground rules for God. "God, this is what I will let you do in my life.
[23:54] And this is what I won't let You do, God. This is how I want You to work, and, you know, God, that I don't want You to work this way. And what I have found in my own life is, like, God does not obey me. At all. Like, He wants to be God. He wants to be Lord, and I am not. And so if I really want to experience what Jesus has for me, I have to be desperate enough. I have to be desperate enough to kind of get to kind of get over myself, to get over those things. One of the things I love about the Bible is how brutally honest and authentic it is. Like, I love this scripture here where Jesus interviews the man, and He says, you know, do you see anything?
[24:45] And the man says, the man says, well, I see people, but they kind of look like trees walking around. Okay, so it's kind of like invasion of the tree people, right? And it's like you can't make this. Yeah, if you were just making up a God and making up a holy book, you would not put stuff like that in it. That is like, that is so authentic to the way that we express ourselves. Isn't like the guy's, like, the guy's blind, and then afterwards he's like, well, I could see a little bit. It kind of looks like just a bunch of trees walking around. And I just, I kind of love the brutal honesty that's there. When I was in Honduras, one day we were going, we're going from house to house with a pastor, just kind of visiting these little adobe houses that are very, very humble, you know, just kind of one or two rooms, and we were taking turns praying on our team through the interpreter. And there was a man that was kind of doing some cement work in the house. And as we visited, his wife, you know, told him to stop and called them over, and she, like, in the story, she's, the man did not seem to have a lot of faith. She spoke up for the man. She said he's been in a motorcycle accident, and ever since he has headaches, and his shoulders are sore and in pain a lot of the time.
[26:24] And the man just kind of shook his head, and through the interpreter he said, yes, I hardly slept at all last night, and I just experiencing all this tightness, like in my shoulders. I'm in pain constantly. And so it was my turn to pray. And I prayed a nice, dignified prayer. And, you know, and when I was done praying, it was really obvious to me that nothing had changed, that nothing had happened. So I looked to, Howell, our translator, who was also a pastor. I kind of desperately looked to him like, do you have anything to add here? And Howell prayed in a very interesting way. Howell did not ask God to do anything. Howell talked directly to the infirmity on behalf of God, which was kind of a stretch for my faith, right? He was saying, God, will you do this?
[27:20] He spoke directly to what was going on in the man's life. And he said, you know, he's very, he's Spanish, so he's very passionate. And so he's like, in Jesus' name, you know, he's speaking to this. He's speaking to the headache, and he's speaking to the soreness that the man has. And so he prays the second time, and the man just kind of has a surprise look on his face, and the man starts going like this. And he's like, my headache's gone. And I can move. And I was honestly, inside I was like, on the outside I was like, inside I was like, what? Like, I was surprised, right? Because we're not, we're not as used to that kind of, like, how well looked like it's just another Monday, right? Just another Monday, serving Jesus.
[28:16] And And so it's okay. Notice that Jesus goes back, and He has to, He prays for the man a second time. It's okay if healing is a gradual process, not an instantaneous moment. We have all these stereotypes in our mind from, like, Christian TV and stuff where it's, like, where people are throwing jackets, and they're very showy, and everything happens in a certain way, and I've often, I don't know why this is, but I've often found that sometimes it's on the third or the second, third, or fourth prayer. Sometimes people will say, well, I feel a little better.
[29:02] And then we pray again, and then we pray, like, a third time, and then something happens, and I'm not exactly sure why that is. Maybe it may be something to do with building our faith, or, like, perseverance in prayer, something like that. But often, we have to pray more than once to see God work. And we live in an instantaneous society where, like, if we're not, like, if we're not getting, like, a Wi-Fi signal in the first three seconds, like, where we're like, what's going on here? Like, we're, so we're, we want everything, and we want it right now. And sometimes we have to persevere in prayer. One of the things I noticed about church in Honduras is, like, nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry.
[29:55] When does church start? About 20 minutes after it's supposed to. When does church end? When it does, like, when we feel like God is done, right? And so we would have services, and at the end of the service, like, nobody was. It's like, we will stay here and we will pray as long as it takes to see something happen. Like, we're not rushing off to our next thing, and we will, we will pray all night if we have to. The goal of all healings and miracles, as we see, as we see in the story, as we see the man is restored.
[30:41] The goal of all healings and miracles is to restore something that has been lost. They are practical demonstrations of God's concern. And so Jesus is always practical. It's always to see something that the devil has stolen from us restored, and kind of brought back. The Bible says in 1 John 3:8, it says, "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil." Jesus came to restore, to bring back everything that the devil has taken from us. I was, I have, I'm very right-brained and creative, and so sometimes things will mix together. So I'm reading the Bible and I'm watching TV one night. And so I've got, like, the scripture going on, kind of on this side, but over here I'm watching a show about airplane repo.
[31:43] Right, which is just like one of those weird guy shows where it's like, we're like, you know, it's one thing to repossess a car. It's another thing to repossess an airplane. You know, they have to sneak in, start up the plane and take off before somebody stops them. So there's this crazy show about, like, about repossessing airplanes of people aren't up on their payments. And so mixing the Bible with the repo show. Suddenly I get inspired. And I do a lot of prison ministry. So suddenly I get inspired and I end up writing this poem called Repo Man. From prison church to drug rehab, redemption is no smash and grab, an inside job, a well-planned heist. The Mastermind, the One called Christ, reaches deep in darkened cells and shines a light on private hell. He's taking back what Satan stole and filling in the God-shaped hole with Kingdom keys and nail-pierced hands. Jesus is God's Repo Man.
[32:49] And that's what God. That's what Jesus is up to in all of our lives, and the bigger purpose of the miraculous. You know, the man finally saw clearly. He saw reality as it actually was. And that is the purpose of the miraculous, is that we might see things clearly, that we might see the world like God sees the world, that we might see ourselves like God sees ourselves, that we might see others like God sees others. The man's sight was restored.
[33:37] And we live in crazy times, don't we? We live in times where you want to talk about having faith. We live in a time where people are like, you know, I can't believe in the virgin birth. But I can believe that men can physically bear children, right? Like, really? Which is harder to believe, you know, that a supernatural God of the universe could impregnate a virgin, or that, you know, that a man can have a baby? We live in these crazy times where people are believing all kinds of distorted and things that it says in Judges 21:25. It says that when there is no king, everybody just does what's right in their own eyes.
[34:31] That's the chaos we see all around us these days when there's no king. If there's not King Jesus, then you're king, and you just do whatever you feel like, and eventually that kind of turns, that kind of turns into chaos. And so we need to see King Jesus very clearly in these days. I have never ever been like a revelation, end times, figure-everything- out kind of guy, but over these last two years it's kind of like I feel like I'm watching stuff play out in real time here. Like, and if there was ever a time when, as Christians and as the church, we need to see things clearly and have God's perspective on things. It's definitely right now.
[35:26] We live in a very distorted kind of culture, and since COVID there has been some kind of a shift in the world. We don't know exactly how to describe it. But I think all of us can feel it. Doesn't it feel like what was solid ground is now kind of shifting? Doesn't it feel like, I don't know what's going to happen next? Doesn't it? Doesn't it feel like something has happened in an accelerated way that we weren't quite expecting? And it seems like the world is kind of indifferent to a church that doesn't have power and doesn't have passion.
[36:15] And so I think we need less sit and more spit. In our lives, myself included, and in the life of the church. If there was ever a time we needed more and more clarity, it's right now. If it was ever a time, we need restoration and revival, it's right now. I was at a church with a young pastor in Nova Scotia a couple weeks ago, and this was kind of late, like on a Saturday night. He just kind of looked at me across the table, dead serious, very, very concerned about what he saw going on around him in his community and then the country. And he just looked at me and he said, like, what is it going to take?
[37:05] What is it going to take to turn things around? And he was really intense about this. And I thought for a moment and I said, you know, I don't honestly, I don't see any other option but revival. There's no other option for us. But revival. We need God to move. We need God to move in our lives and the lives of our communities. There's a, we need more messy moments. Right? When Jesus shows up and He does things in kind of ways that make us a little uncomfortable. They're kind of messy moments. But it may be a little unusual, but we know that God is in it.
[37:55] And that's kind of where my heart is at right now. I'm just kind of like, God, we need You. We need You. We are, we need some tangible grace for some terrible times, God. We really do. I want to close with a story to encourage you. And then after we do a song, we are going to have a time, a prayer time, for anybody that's just kind of feeling like, I need, you know, I need a miracle in my life. I need God to do something, and it's like I'm in a desperate state and I really, I just really, really need some people of faith to pray for me about this. We're gonna have some ministry time here, kind of here at the end. But I want to tell you the story of the most changed, I think, the biggest miracle is not necessarily physical healing. It's not necessarily something that is tangibly unusual. The biggest miracle is always a changed life.
[39:01] It's always a changed life. A couple years ago, I've been doing prison ministry for, like, 30 years, and up until COVID, once a month on Tuesday night, I would take a team. When we go into prison. One time when my daughter Emily was little. My wife. It was a Tuesday night, my wife heard Emily on the phone in the other room, like, "My dad." "No, he's not here. He's in prison, you know," 'cause she decided everybody went to prison on Tuesday night, right? And we have no idea who that was. We never did find out. But a couple years ago, we were, the band was kind of practicing before the prison chapel service started. And in this guy poked his head and he'd obviously never been to chapel before.
[39:52] He had a shaved head, a lot of tattoos. He's pretty scary looking. He had a couple of teardrop tattoos, which I think means he killed a couple people. He pokes his head in to see what's going on. One of my students kind of looks up and sees him in the doorway and starts praying like, "God, don't let that guy come and sit next to me. I'll go to Africa. I'll do anything. Please, just don't." So, of course, he comes right over and sits beside that student. And he starts coming out to the chapel when we're there. He doesn't go any other time, just when Kingswood is there. And so on Tuesday night, we show up a few months later. And he's like, "Hey, I just became a Christian yesterday.
[40:37] Calm asquery from Moncton was here and he prayed with me and I became a Christian. Can I tell the other prisoners about it?" And I was like, "Yeah, that'd be great. Before we start, I'll just hand you the mic and you say whatever you want." He dropped the F-bomb ten times in five minutes in his testimony. He was so rough around the edges. He didn't even realize this wasn't appropriate, right? "God is bleeping awesome," and he's like, he and so this started this relationship where every, you know, when we go once a month, we would get the latest installment. I can't give you his real name. I'll just call him Joe. We get the latest installment of what was happening with Joe. Joe was very feared. And so Joe decided he was going to start some Bible studies. So he just walked up to people and go, "Bible study, Monday, 1 p.m." "Okay, Joe." Right? So like, Bible studies were breaking out, these like Bible studies that you couldn't say no to were breaking out all around the prison.
[41:42] And, but what he started, like, he brought these Hilroy notebooks. He was like sitting in his, he was sitting in his cell and he was like writing it when he read the Bible. He was writing out his own commentary in these Hilroy notebooks and it would bring them to me and kind of read them to me, and I would look forward to the next installment, what was gonna happen. He started to reinterpret all his tattoos. He had FTW tattooed on his chin, which used to mean, like, "F the world." Now he says, "You know what this means?" I was like, "No, Joe." And he goes, "Faith the word." Okay. He has ACMD tattooed on his knuckles, both knuckles, which used to mean "All cops must die." Now it means "All Christians must disciple."
[42:27] Okay, Joe. Right? So he's, every month we go. He's telling me and got like, God is chase, he's going from, there's a young guy. It's his first time in prison. He has that disease, where that's that sickness where, you know, part of your hair all turns white, even though you're very young. People are making fun of them. Joe has a glass eye. Joe takes his glass eye out, walks around with his other young prisoner and says, "If you're gonna make fun of him, make fun of me." Everybody backs off. He's gone from being somebody that everybody fears to being a protector in prison. And some, he told me that he used to be with a motorcycle gang. If I said the name you would know what it is. Up in Montreal, some guys get transferred down to the prison.
[43:18] And they confront him in the prison yard. They're like, "Joe, we know this Christian stuff is all fake. And we know you got a shank in your boot, because you never go anywhere without a knife." Joe pulls out his New Testament. And he says, "This is the only shank I carry now. And you can't take me out, because I'm not going anywhere until Jesus says it's okay." And they just get so weirded out that they leave him alone, right? So when COVID hits, like, I have not been in prison in two years. The first thing to shut down. And I'm like, how are all of these guys doing in prison? All the guys that we led to Jesus and are Christians there.
[44:04] It's kind of in the middle of COVID, and I get this. I get this letter sent through the prison chaplain. And it's from Joe, and he's like, "I want to thank you guys for what you did for me. And I also want you to know there's a small group of us in here. We're still Christians and we're staying strong. And we're having Bible studies." And and I was like, isn't it? Why, like, God knew. God knew that all of us were going to get locked out of the prison. And God raised up Joe to be kind of a chaplain in there. A very scary tattooed looking chaplain when the other chaplains couldn't come in.
[44:55] And just about a month ago, I got an email from the chaplain at the prison. And in it he had, like, connected a file to the email and said, like, Joe's Joe and three other prisoners decided that they want to be pastors, and so they've started classes at Kingswood. And so Joe Joe did his first class. His first Bible class, and he got an A in the course. And he sent me, he, through the chaplain, he sent me, you know, some of the things were blocked out, but he wanted to show me that he got an A in his first Bible course, right?
[45:50] And that just, like, that just moved me. That just warmed my heart. And if God can meet Joe where he's at, God can meet any of us, right? God can meet our need. And so I don't know, as we do this last song, like, I don't know what the needs are today. I just know that we serve a supernatural God. And that Jesus is real. And that we can experience Him. And He meets us with tangible grace wherever we're at. And so be encouraged today. Be encouraged to keep on keeping on in your faith.
[46:37] And if there's something you need to pray about today, if there's something where you decide I just feel compelled in my heart to bring this to Jesus. This might be the very day that God does a miracle in this place.