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Stories of Faith for Inspiration and Proof that God can be Trusted Completely

Three months earlier we had moved to the island of Penang just off the Malaysian coast and south of Thailand.  I was finally settling into my two-year contract teaching high school science at the Dalat International School, and my wife and I decided to visit the the much-acclaimed Butterfly Farm.  They had 120 different species of butterflies flitting about sporting an incredible rainbow of colors.  There were thousands of them flying all around us in their enclosed world of tropical flowers and nectar.

After completing our visit there, we decided to continue on around the road that loops the island and find the Tropical Fruit Farm.  It will help to understand what traffic is like in Penang.  Cars go every which direction, and at the same time, there are hundreds of motorbikes also going every which direction. Like a relative of ours who’s lived here for a number of years said, “In Penang, road lines and traffic lights are merely suggestions.”  Traveling is a life-and-death endeavor; I was recently told that so many folks are killed on motorbikes that the police no longer keep track of the statistics.  Even the Malays that live here admit that traffic is bad!

So, we were very surprised when our GPS routed us up to a very nice four-lane highway that was nearly empty!  Following the road up into the mountain, we only saw a couple of motorbikes and couple of cars go by.  Traveling further up into the mountain, we decided our GPS was giving us false directions with the mountain coming between our GPS and the satellite signal.  Turning back started to seem like a wise idea.  We found a flat rocky area to turn around and headed back down the mountain in our very small Malaysian car.

Minutes later the car started bumping along, and my wife who was driving said, “Is the road rougher than it appears or do we have a flat?”  That was about the time I smelled the rubber.  She pulled over, I got out, and our front left tire was flat as a pancake!  While I was looking at the tire, three teenagers pulled up on their motorbikes and wanted to know if we needed help.  I assured them we were good, and it would only take me a few minutes to change the tire.  Besides, I didn’t know if they were there to hustle us, rob us, or whatever.  I kept trying to get them to  move on, but they just stayed … kinda laughing while they spoke to each other in Bahasa, the Malay language, and very broken English.   Still, I persisted in politely trying to get them to l-e-a-v-e!  Still smiling, they wouldn’t budge.

Then I started thinking, “Lord, is there some reason these guys need to be here?”  As soon as the prayer left my head, I discovered we didn’t have a jack or lug wrench! When we were buying the car a month before, I checked the spare, jack, and lug wrench–all were good.  Apparently, before we brought the car home, someone removed the jack and lug wrench!!  We had no AAA membership here and mechanic shops are tucked away among hundreds of other little shops.  But the one big teen kept repeating to us in broken English, “You rtree no gd, I cld mhs frnnd, h  ees say gud muh ka n tik!!”  Smiling we said, “What was that you said?”  Straining to understand after a couple more smiles and repeats, we got it–”Your tire is no good. I called my friend; he’s a good mechanic!”

Soon after, down the mountain below us we heard a revving motor and then saw a small sedan flying around the corner, swing past us at full speed, hit its brakes, slide sideways, peeling rubber with gray smoke billowing everywhere. The sedan makes the turn, aims at us, and then slams on its brakes right beside us, and out steps our smiling mechanic.   He pulled off the tire, and the inside sidewall had a hole the size of my fist.  I paid him, and gave the three teenage boys some money for their help, and all was said and done in less than thirty minutes!!  Talk about speedy roadside service!

On the way back down the mountain, I prayed, “Lord! Thank you for helping us once again!  Even when I didn’t think we needed help, You knew we did and had those boys stay.  And thank you that we didn’t have a wreck when the front tire blew a hole the size of my fist.  Thank you, Lord, our trust and confidence is in You, and You alone.  Amen from Penang.”

… I have had God’s help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike …        Acts 26:22

Copyright (c) 2011 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

Greetings!

I’ve taken a two-year teaching job at an international school in Malaysia and will be leaving on July 16.   The blog will have to go on hold for the next four weeks as my wife and I transition into our new life.

God has done so much in our past—I still have many faith stories to share with you.  We would appreciate your prayers during this time and thank you for being a faith story reader!

Regards,
Nick

PS:  The region we are moving to has six-foot long lizards, cobras, an ocean, a jungle, huge spiders, poisonous frogs, monkeys all over, three major people groups, and God’s hand in it all!  I call this fertile ground for future faith stories!  God bless you, and remember . . . We walk by faith—not by sight!

The following is a true accounting of three acts of faith.

The young man voiced his fear about persecution; he wasn’t sure if he could remain faithful to God through such an ordeal.  In older theology, the question would have been voiced, “Is God’s grace sufficient for persecution?”  This same thought went through my mind one night on a back street in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

While attending college north of the City, every Friday and Saturday night, a group of us would drive into Greenwich Village to work in a coffeehouse called the “Wayward.”  This was our opportunity to witness and share the love of Jesus with the street people and anybody else that wanted to come.  One evening around 11 PM we ran out of coffee.  I volunteered to go buy some more and took a friend and his sister with me.  As we were cutting down a back street we heard someone yelling and screaming behind us.  I turned and saw a man running straight at us holding a metal thing over his head like a dagger.

Being a new believer, my first reaction was to fight.  So I stepped forward as he ran in and grabbed the guy’s jacket and used his momentum to throw him off to the side.  I heard the metal thing hit the ground in the dark.  Then I turned to fight because he was now running straight at me.  In that moment, time slowed and I began to think about the fact that I had given my life to Christ and I was no longer my own.  So I decided not to fight, but to trust God and so I just stood there.

This guy comes screaming back, grabs me by the front of my jacket and slams me against a brick wall.  He is screaming and cursing and has his fist cocked at my face and I’m thinking here it comes.  When suddenly, I felt this peace settle over me and surround me like a warm piece of plastic and all I felt for this guy was love.  The same love that Jesus had for him and I started smiling at him.  Apparently that really freaked him out and he dropped me down from the wall and ran off screaming.  But I wondered, do the persecuted believers or martyrs experience the warm plastic feeling of peace and love?

While attending a college in Canada I had the privilege of meeting a retired missionary who had spent some time in China before Mao took over the country.  We were sitting at the breakfast table eating and he began to tell me about his brother who had also been a missionary in China at that time.  In the late 1940s Mao’s Communist fighters had taken over most of the country.  Almost all the foreign missionaries had been evacuated.  A few missionaries stayed, one of them being his brother.

One night the Communist Chinese came to his brother’s home.  They pushed his brother aside and marched into his home confiscating all his Bibles, commentaries and other Christian books.   He had a considerable library.  They took the books out into his front yard, piled them up and poured gasoline over them and set them on fire.  His brother was heartbroken.  In the morning, filled with fear and grief, he walked out into his front yard to look at the smoldering ashes.

Everything was burned; his whole library was nothing but ashes.  Then he noticed among the ashes a small piece of a page charred around the edges from one of his bibles.  He picked it up, read it, and wept.  It read, “Upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” On hearing this story I couldn’t take another bite of breakfast and I too wept.

The question, “Is God’s grace sufficient for persecution?” is best illustrated in an eyewitness account by a Mr. Coggeshall in the year 1555.

“For believing the Gospel of Christ and the truth of the Scriptures, Thomas Hauker was condemned to be burned to the death.  As he was being led to his place of burning, many of the faithful in the crowd that followed asked him to somehow give them a sign if the grace of God was sufficient in the fire.  His persecutors tied him to the stake, piled faggots around him, and set them on fire.  For a while Hauker prayed aloud, but the violence of the flames soon took away his voice, and he stood silent in the flames, unmoving, even as his flesh turned black and his fingers burst into fire.  He stood that way for so long that most thought he was dead.  Then suddenly and unexpectedly, this blessed servant of God stretched his arms over his head toward the living God, his hands flaming like torches, and, with an act of rejoicing that all could sense, struck his hands together three times–as if for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Then his hands fell to his sides and he slumped forward into the flames.”

Now my young friend, “Is God’s grace sufficient for persecution?”  Let us repeat together in our hearts the words of Saint Paul, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”   So my friend, God’s grace IS sufficient for persecution.

Matthew 16:18
The New Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe.  Rewritten and updated by Harold J. Chadwick, Quoted from page “XX” of the Forward.  Copyright © 1997 by Bridge-Logos Publishers
Romans 8:38,39

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols