On Our Knees

Every day, hundreds of refugees are flooding into Greece and countries like it around the Mediterranean Rim, seeking refuge from conflict and crisis. You have probably heard news headlines about the modern day refugee crisis, but I wonder how many people are hearing about what this means in the spiritual realms for the kingdom of God. 

For God is so good at taking crisis and creating victory, transforming tribulation into triumph. 

Just like what we read in the book of Acts when God used the persecution of the early church to send the gospel across the world, God is similarly using the modern day refugee crisis to get his gospel to unreached places through displaced people. 

I sat in the Glyfada church of Christ in Athens, Greece, one Sunday night and worshiped in both English and Farsi with a full room of predominantly middle easterners. It is extremely difficult to get the gospel into places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, but people are being brought out of these dark places as refugees and landing in countries like Greece, where they hear the gospel, believe, and become passionate disciples who are then sent out into the world and even back to their own countries as ambassadors for the Lord Jesus Christ. 

The gospel may not be easily sent into Pakistan, but God is making disciples out of displaced Pakistanis, who are then able to share the gospel with their own people. In this way, God is miraculously using one of the greatest crises of our day to advance the kingdom of Christ in some of the world’s hardest to reach places. 

And our response to this as believers half a world away must be to get on our knees for this part of the world, which is a territory of intense spiritual warfare, but also a region of special loving attention from our Father, who is the God of all nations and people groups. 

I met with a group of believers last night in Arkansas, and we rallied together to pray for this part of the world, believing together that we don’t just pray for the work, but that prayer is the work. We’ve got to stop acting like prayer is the least we can do and instead treat it like it’s the most important thing we can do. 

“I’ve never been on many mission trips,” one woman said to me after praying together, “but I’ve been to the nations on my knees.” 

Let’s go to the nations, starting on our knees.