How the Kingdom of God Expands

"...and you shall reap 10-fold, 30-fold, 100-fold."

  I love how on occasion God will show us some of the things he has been doing behind the scenes where we cannot see it. During church today, we had a guest speaker, Tom Henderson. Tom is a motivation speaker who started a ministry called "Restoration Generations" a few years ago. His ministry focuses on restoring relationships both horizontally and vertically. This weekend he spoke at numerous schools, coordinated by our youth pastor. Our youth pastor knew Tom from Sioux Falls, South Dakota where they did ministry together. What did they do? Sioux Falls is home to the LifeLight Festival, which is a very well known music festival that has been going on for the last 15 years or so with many Christian bands and events taking place. Tom Henderson started out working as one of the speakers during the early years of the LifeLight Festival and during his time there he saw the troubles many of the youth are facing: broken relationships. With parents, with family, with siblings, with friends, and even with self-identity issues. And Tom Henderson used his window of opportunity with LifeLight to launch Restoration Generations. So without being a direct offshoot, God used LifeLight to start Restoration Generations.

  But how did LifeLight get started? The couple who started the LifeLight Festival were regulars with another mission organization: International Family Missions. International Family Missions, started in 1990, by being the only organization in the world that had a specific focus: teaching families how to do ministry as a family unit. IFM would take groups of 30-40 people for one week at a time to Juarez, Mexico. Juarez was chosen because it provide a 3rd-world culture, but was readily accessible to the US, being right on the border. The teams would stay overnight in El Paso and cross the border every day. The teams would do a "visit in Jesus' name". They would visit children's homes, rehab centers, elderly men's homes, colonia churches, etc. They would put on VBS Bible clubs, Bible studies, sport camps, carnivals, and simply spend time with them and visit with them. The couple that started LifeLight were frequent members of IFM outreaches. After a few years with IFM, the director of IFM told them they did not need IFM to direct them anymore. They said this couple could lead it on their own. So they did and after a few years of coming to Juarez on their own they started doing their own ministry in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. That is what launched LifeLight. LifeLight is not a direct launch of IFM, but it was a fruit of what IFM did.

  Now here is the kicker. My parents worked for IFM for 20 years. We know the couple that started LifeLight very well. And today, we got to see the fruit of IFM, which we were a part of, come full circle with our youth pastor and Tom Henderson at our church as a fruit of LifeLight. IFM also has another fruit: my fencing ministry and this blog. It was through IFM, that I got the opportunity to use the sport of fencing as a tool for ministry While I have not had as many opportunities to do my presentation in the last few years, it was IFM that gave me that first chance to try it out and it has been a smashing hit every time I do it.

  Many times we do not get to see the fruit of what we do. But God's Kingdom works exponentially. We rarely get to see how far God takes a work we do. And one reason of that is to keep us humble. We get the privilege of working with God by being available, but we must understand that it is God's work, not ours. When God gets all the glory, he can work far beyond what we can see. But every now and then, he gives us a small glimpse like I saw today of how he has worked beyond our reach. The principle of reaping and sowing is a concept every farmer knows. And when it comes time for reaping, we reap what we sow, we reap more than we sow, and we reap it later than when we sow it. IFM has sown many seeds in the 18-20 years they were most active in Juarez and today we got to see some of the harvest of that which was sown. And the harvest has been 30-fold, 100-fold or more. Keep doing what God tells you to do. You may not be directly winning souls for God's Kingdom. You might be. But as long as you are in the center of God's will, things will take place that you might not see that will have far-wider reaching effects than you can imagine.