← ArchiveSunday, May 5, 2019 — David and Claudia JohnsonDateMay 5, 2019Speaker—Text—Passages in this sermonLuke 150:27TranscriptMachine transcribed. Click any line to jump there.0:00what fun thank y'all so much for having us back and to come on a day to see a child dedication and i love that song telling an old old story all through the bible i heard y'all are starting the book of acts today that is just the story of god pursuing man and we are glad here to be here today to share a story with you you know in luke 15 jesus tells a parable and you're very familiar0:27with it he said suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost doesn't he go after that one and leave the 99 in the open field and when he finds it he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes back home there he calls his family and his neighbors and he says rejoice with me i have found the lost sheep and the same will be true in heaven there'll be more rejoicing0:57over the one sinner who repents than over the 99 who are righteous and don't need to repent you know we're familiar with that story and we've seen pictures of it maybe you even have a picture of that here in the church somewhere where that sheep is just stuck somewhere and crying out to the shepherd wanting someone to come back and help him and the shepherd comes and maybe has to fight off an enemy and dig1:27down in the dirt or wherever he has to go that shepherd wants to give everything he has to get his lost sheep back and then he rejoices and so many times we think about our journey of following after christ but we may forget about how god pursues each one of us we lived in bangkok thailand for 26 years i was the1:50administrator of the the mission office we had like 400 missionaries in the region and so i took care of all the nerd stuff and because it was downtown bangkok we'd often have people out of luck needing money coming for for money or something for food and one day it was a typical day uh an indian looking man2:15came in looked kind of disheveled and sad and had terrible english i could barely understand him but he needed money i really needed him out of the office so you know i gave him 10 bucks because he was starting to tell a sad story and i didn't have time sent him on his way because usually they never come back but abid came back and through the weeks that he came back i was hearing his story he has family here2:42he can't work he's there in hiding i didn't really understand much until he brought his little daughter or his little five-year-old daughter and he was saying yeah we live on a roof of a building and nobody helps us and it it was it was too much i said abid basically i'm not sure i believe you but let's go and we got in my car and we drove 45 minutes through bangkok traffic3:12to a old building in a terrible slummy part of town and he took me in the side door and we started climbing stairs four staircases to the roof like it was a ladder on the last staircase and it was like a a piece of metal covering covering the the tin and abid banged on the metal and a precious 11 year old boy3:40pulled the metal back we go up there and on top of this disgusting building with soot and filth all around this family lived there were three walls on one side and a great like a fence on another side they had been living there for a year the dirt and the heat coming through and there was a precious4:10family of with four kids and a mom and dad the the utensils for their kitchen would would fit in that little basket right there they had little mats to sleep on it was terrible this family introduced us to a way of life that we had no idea about we didn't know people were in bangkok in this situation4:37and they had just a few precious possessions that they brought out with them one of them was their their photo album when they started opening that photo album it seemed like they came alive talking about their friends and showing us pictures of family events and as we looked and saw their place we learned that they had had a business while they were there in pakistan and in that business they made these high5:06high count thread count sheets that they sold around the world to different hotels their house there it was like a small palace in pakistan just very nice and to see the family in this situation wow it became real to us we learned that abed was a hindu his wife shabnam was muslim and when she married she converted to hinduism5:31they showed us these posters that were put all over the city that they lived in huge posters that said this is the abed family there are four children if you see this family in the streets you do not ask any5:53questions you take the oldest child this is all on the poster and in front of the parents and the rest of the kids you cut that child's neck off head off then you cut the next child's head off the next child's head off to this smallest child and then you kill the wife in front of the husband and lastly you kill the6:17husband this will teach you that you don't change from the muslim religion couldn't believe it he said we were always in hiding we were very wealthy and one day they kidnapped this organization that you are all familiar with kidnapped our youngest son balal he6:43was eight at the time and they were going to hold him hostage and make him become a member of their army i gave every penny i had to ransom my son and whatever we had left we sold and bought tickets to come to bangkok because we heard we could be refugees and maybe get to another country where we'd be safe7:11so when they got to bangkok they came in on a tourist visa and they registered with the unhcr but here had been a year they hadn't heard anything of course they continually tried to call and find out more but when they got no answers they had kind of given up and so now they were in hiding because if they got caught without a visa they'll be caught taken to the detention center and it's just like a jail cell there i think7:40we told you the story about that last year so they had to remain in hiding and they had to beg for food we listen to this story is you know have you ever been a place that you just didn't know what to do that's what we i don't know what to do we listened to the story and right there we prayed oh god we don't know what to do but you do the only thing i think of can you let the un call them to interview them to be8:10a refugee that afternoon abed called and said we received a call from unhcr now we can see that your god answers prayer this was a surprise to us as well but we were very excited that god was pursuing them and the children they were precious i had realized that they had been in that room without education for8:36a year and of course as a teacher that bothered me so much so i started bringing books the next time we went we would have books with us and go up and try to teach them and shabnam would try to teach me how to make her food and i really wasn't good at it at all but her food was delicious but we could see when we opened the books the children were just hungry they were just so hungry to know and to learn something and we looked at the situation where they were it was really hot in that room with the tin over9:06the top and we just began to pray lord please open up some kind of a better room situation for this family abud would keep coming back to the office usually about once a month to get some money which i completely understood he needed uh he had come in a couple of days before and um a friend a pakistani christian friend came to my office he was living in north thailand but he just popped into the office9:35so upset i said prevez i need you to share christ in urdu with this man but he came two days ago he's not going to come again for another three weeks so prevez and i got on the floor lord send abed back within an hour abed comes into the office and he sits down i just wanted to come back and abed this is why you came back prevez said and we listen as prevez shared christ's love clearly10:02with abed abed abed listened and he said you know christians are the only ones that have shown kindness to us in bangkok i will listen to you we went back to the house not too long afterwards and we climbed up those stairs moved over the roof but no one was in there and we were like oh my goodness what has happened so we started calling out abed job nom where are you and they opened up the door and said hey we have a room10:30this one's been vacated for us and we went in they had a room with beds on the floor how wonderful and they had said we have decided to follow christ our family wants to follow christ and shabnam had been reading the bible or she said so yeah i'm pretty skeptical because you know they're getting money from me so yes it's convenient for her to say she's reading the bible but we started talking and10:59she started talking about the creation and abraham well you're you're a muslim so that makes sense and then she started talking about jacob and esau and joseph and his brothers and egypt and moses and aaron and miriam and the ten commandments and she had read in thoroughly about five chapters into our five books in two weeks and was full of questions and so excited11:28about the book and it's so exciting when someone is ready to follow christ and they still have so many questions they come with a new excitement that some of us forget after we've been following christ for a while we saw god doing all sorts of things in this family's life and yeah we're giving prayers and god's11:50answering one day we came to visit and abed looked at me he said i have one last request of you brother david uh what is that my grandfather died when he was 41 of heart disease my dad died when he was 40 of heart heart disease i'm 39 and i had gone to the doctor several months ago and they said there's very little12:15hope for any kind of cure for me and i am not expected to live long i want you to take my wife and my children and you care for them and you take them as your own family well y'all my prayers got better and better i said lord here we are again you know i can't do this one i can't do this one lord12:44you're gonna have to do something um it wasn't three weeks later when i've been called me and he said the the u.n has accepted as refugees and the united states has made us go and have a physical they did an mri on me a cat scan and there's no record of any kind of heart disease in me at all13:08he was excited but i was much more so excited and bill all said they want to know where we want to go they said we can go to new york we can go to la we can go to houston what should we tell them we said well um new york's good we know some people there but how about houston there's some big baptist churches there and surely we can find someone who can help you there and get you into a church but he called back he said oh they won't send us to13:37houston they're going to send us to some place called mobile alabama and i said that is the best news because we are in birmingham if you're in new york or houston we might not be able to go see you but we can go see you in mobile we're just a few hours away three days before they left bangkok to14:00come to mobile the family were baptized they moved to mobile and four days after they moved we came home on stateside assignment we can't even believe that this is true the way god answered prayer but we knew that god was seeking them out for a reason life in america for them was not very easy one of the first times we went to visit them there were some volunteers there from the mormon church they were trying to14:28teach them how to drive a car of course they had no car to drive and they would walk everywhere he had walked everywhere trying to get a job it was very difficult but you know he had this bad eye that he had gained from some kind of a problem in pakistan he really didn't speak much english he wasn't that employable we went and tried to talk to some people to get him some help and he finally found a job with a pakistani man14:53who had a gas station six miles away we got him a bicycle so he could ride along the road to get to work it was a hard life and he didn't feel he had time to take his family to church he worked like 90 hours a week and he was only paid for 40 hours a week and the the station owner said i know you can't get work otherwise anywhere else so you're gonna have to take it or leave it15:21abid was so sad he wasn't taking his family to church and before we came back to go to back to bangkok we came to visit this family here in america and i said abid god has been chasing you for years but you are here with people that are christians and the church is will help you as you help the church15:45you have got to commit to going to church for one month taking your family to church and i promise your life will change man that's a promise i shouldn't have made we went back to thailand and we didn't hear from them for quite a while but after about six months they did call they said yes we did go back to church16:12and yes people did help us now we're here in washington state and we have been put in charge of being a manager for the cleaning services for some five five of these days in our children have work after school the ones who are old enough and guess what if y'all come back we can employ you too god chased man he does it in thailand he does it all over the seas he does it here in birmingham alabama16:43last night i work as a chaplain on the weekends at uab and last night i was in a room with a man who had had a double lung transplant from leeds and he said you know two he was in his well into his 50s he said two years ago i was sitting in the hospital room and i felt something strange going on and the custodian came in the lady asked me how i was doing i said not well and she says i want to pray for you17:11and before she left 15 minutes later i became a christian and i have followed god and i know god has a purpose for me and i sat and listened god is chasing us and he's calling us not to work so hard but to go and to watch and be a part of that chase would you join me in prayer not to us oh lord not to us17:41but to your name give glory for the sake of your everlasting kindness and love and faithfulness amen
