The following is a story from Roy Knight, who serves as a missionary to his own people in India:
I grew up in a church family – my dad is a church preacher and my mom serves the women for the Lord. But the diversion in my life was that I was living in the midst of Hindu friends. They believe in 300,000,000 idols of god.
Shortly after I accepted Christ at age 15, I felt as though He were calling me to something. I started reading the Bible a lot, and one of the scriptures really touched me – Isaiah 60:1-3: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and His glory will be seen upon you.”
I told my dad I felt called to preach, and even at that early age, my dad encouraged me. My dad is so strong. He believes Christ so much, and he told me the important thing was not my age or qualification, but that Christ lives in me.
A year later, God led me to a village about 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) away and I started preaching in the village. “You men and women – you are beautiful flowers, but you die in the evening. But Jesus wants you to be beautiful flowers everlasting in His presence.” People were coming – men, women, children came – and they started to sit in front of me, at first as if I were an entertainer.
Every day, I felt a strong motivation to return there, sing songs with them and share the Gospel of Jesus. After two years, there was a man who spoke up from the crowd and said, “I hear the sound, I believe in Jesus.” Not a strong voice – it was very weak – and he was just sitting away from us because he was a leper. I went to him and touched him. As I did, I saw the people started going to their houses. Then I confirmed his confession, baptized him and gave him the new name of Moses.
Two years of preaching hadn’t gone in vain – it was inside the people’s hearts. I thought they forgot it, but I saw that Jesus was not forgotten in their hearts. He was talking with them. And around 70% of the people quit going to the temple.
The temple guru became upset with me for starting a church and taking people away from the temple. So the guru invited me over for chai…
“God, I’m going to be a friend of this guru,” I thought.
“Don’t believe that man,” Moses said. “He may spoil you. He has some kind of evil power – he can spell the people to tell lies and he has made a lot of evil things happen.”
“Brother, God is more than the evil. He can overcome it, He has done it. Let’s go.”
“I will not come, because I have leprosy.”
So I went inside by myself, and the guru gave me chai. I drank it, and as soon as I did, he told me, “Get out of the room immediately.”
I went home thinking something had happened to me. My mom and dad were really upset and were taking care of me. But the next day, I was fine. The next day, I went back to the village.
That day in the village, the Hindu guru was crazy and crying. He grabbed my shirt and said, “What did you do to my wife and my children?”
“I have not done anything,” I told him.
“I made a witchcraft chai for you to not speak about Jesus,” the guru confessed. “The spell happened to my wife and kids.”
I saw what happened to his wife and I was shivering. I had no words for a while, but I started to share the gospel of Jesus with him and left him with a Bible.
When next Sunday came, he had shaved his face and cut his hair. He and his wife, with a beautiful smile, and his children came to place where we were worshiping. God had cleansed them. And he sat with us – with the leprosy man! The guru had no kind of neglect for Moses because, as he said, “I personally have come to know Jesus in my life, so I believe Him. He has changed this leprosy man – how much He loves him with the same love I have received.”
He hugged Moses, then he took his key to the temple and threw it out into the middle of the street saying, “I’m not going to worship any more in the temple as a priest.” And he and his wife were baptized.
After three or four years of time since the first visit, the whole village came to Christ. And can you believe that the temple was broken? Tree roots came inside and broke the temple.
After that first experience of sharing the gospel with the village, God gave me the Hindu guru – whom we now call Daniel – as a co-worker to share the Gospel. We went and preached and evangelized and over time established the Gospel in 62 villages.
When Isaiah 60 says, “Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples,” I see that. That is what I see most in India – darkness, idol worship, sin and persecution. But the Word says that “the glory of the Lord will rise upon you.” That’s what I felt every time I came under the persecutions, troubles, pain, sufferings and the people fighting against us. We would think, “There is no way.” And then we would see the glory of God rising upon us. God is changing the people and making miracles among them. They come to Christ. The people who were fighting, they came to appease. And the glory of the Lord’s rising is happening.
Ghost written by Daniel Casella.
The Lion Is Alive 