Dear Operation Gideon Participant,
Many of you shared about how God worked in great ways during the summer.
Their were stories of Salvation - God preparing people for the right time at the right place - Non believers translating the Gospel - Of how Prayer worked and many other great things.
But we want to hear from you. Leave a note in the comment section below to share a story from the summer or how God used OG to change your life
# Share a Story |
A Story from Crete
When I first arrived in Greece I could immediately feel the spiritual dryness of the land. It was as if I had just come out of streams of refreshing and victory, into a barren land. I had decided to come to Greece early to help setup and get organised for the Olympic outreach that I was going to be involved in. The outreach was call Operation Gideon, and was organised by Hellenic Ministries.
The strategy of Operation Gideon was to surround the mainland of Greece on all the different island. And to proclaim Jesus at the same time on all the islands. This entailed 5 days of preparation for all the more than 25 international teams in on central location on the mainland. Once on the islands we had 3 days of prayer and fasting, followed by 3 days proclamation evangelism and 3 days of literature distribution. We then went back to Athens and ended off with a 24 hour worship event.
It turned out that we had about 37 different teams coming for Operation Gideon. I was blessed to be a part of the South African team. We went to the island of Crete as I had been there before and have been praying for this island ever since I first visited there 3 years ago. I believe that this played the biggest role in our outreach there, because we have been able to cover this island in prayer for such a long time beforehand. It was awesome how God was able to release His supernatural power on the island. In the short time we spent on the island we were able to witness many miraculous things.
Our team consisted of 12 people who had come from different parts of South Africa. This was amazing how God put us all together, such different people with different backgrounds and personalities. This came as quite a challenge at times, but I believe God hand picked each individual and when it came down to doing the evangelism we all worked well together.
We faced many difficulties and problems on our mission. Almost every day something would go wrong or we would hear of some bad news from back home, but this didn't stop us. In fact it gave us more reason to rejoice that the enemy was trying his best to stop us. This also gave us the confidence that we were going to be doing something big in the heavenly realms (Eph 6:12)
Before we left to go to the islands almost all the plans that we had for doing the evangelism was stopped by Satan. I had brought my dad's laptop with me and had been editing some video footage to use to attract a crowd to share the gospel with. Also on the computer was all the work and other videos that I had been making of the rest of my mission. I don't know how else to explain it apart from been an attack of the enemy. But the computer stopped working, I tried everything I could to get it to work, and had other computer experts to look at it no one could find the problem. The hard drive had crashed (a brand new hard drive less than 2 months old) and there was no way of recovering any of the data, we took it into the Toshiba dealers, not even they could help us. Then all our other plans for music with a sound system and projector also fell through and we were unable to organise a permit.
But looking back God gets all the glory, because now it wasn't us going to do an amazing program that brought the people in. It was only us surrendered to His will in our weakness that He was able to move in a powerful way.
We spent the first three days on the island in prayer and fasting for the outreach and the people that we would come into contact with. On the first night of proclamation, we arrived in the town square where we had planned to do the evangelism and found that the place was packed with people watching a traditional Greek dance with music and sound system. We didn't waste this opportunity as soon as they were finished we took the opportunity to start sharing the gospel with the people.
At the end of the short message that Johnny (one of the guys in our team) shared we started to hand out some of the Bibles and tracts that we had with us. As we did this we found ourselves all getting caught up in conversations with the people we could share more of the good news on a personal level. We all had many of these opportunities to share Christ with the people. As soon as the conversations and stopped we would come together pray and sing a song with dance (Jabulani), then one of us would share testimony and a short gospel message. This became our strategy for the evenings. We found that we had an amazing response from the people, as God had obviously been preparing their hearts. And in a short time of about 4 days we had seen 26 people making full commitments and praying to accept Christ and there may be many others that made commitments in the privacy of their own homes.
For the purpose of this note, I will just highlight one or two testimonies.
The first was an Albanian guy who almost came running up to hear what we were talking about. He told us that just a few days before he had been up to a monastery to talk with the monks, he had not found his answer there; when we had finished sharing the gospel with him and prayed with him you could just see this bright glow radiating from his face with a big smile. He was so excited his said, "This is the best news I have ever heard, and I believe it with all my heart."
He also had a friend with him who after seeing what happen to his friend also accepted Christ and we prayed with him too. The next night we were doing evangelism in the same town but in a different area and he found us and brought another friend to us with whom we also shared the gospel and he too, accepted Christ. That next Sunday this man came with us to church as well.
The last few days on the island were spent handing out the literature packs with beautiful hard cover Bibles in them. We must have handed out about 3,900 of them. This too was a great blessing to do even though it was very hot outside and we were running up and down many stairs and hills. But we need to continue praying that these literature packs will be powerful seeds of truth that bring people to Jesus.
We then headed back to Athens to finish off with a powerful worship festival.
Outrage on Hios
Seems some people noticed that we were visiting them this summer.
Heres a translation from a Greek Article.
ATTENTION TO GODLY GIFTS
Many people have discovered small plastic bags at their front door of their homes with the words “A gift for you – God loves you” It has a lot of tracts inside, endorsed by Hellenic Missionary Union. This literature does not have any Orthodox character and we include the following announcement from the Church leadership:
Dear Christians,
A few days ago an organisation which is foreign to our Orthodox Christian belief called Hellenic Ministries came to Xios and distributed packages to homes around Xios and probably to other islands as well. The material they are distributing are Protestant in nature and totally against our Orthodox Christian belief. For example they deny the sacraments of the church and they don’t give honour to our saints and they try to mislead you with offers of New Testament books and messages. We would like to warn you as orthodox Christians not to have any relationship with these heretics.and don’t give any attention to the gifts they are offering.
