We were waiting on the second half of the Sight and Sound production Noah to begin. The lights flickered to signal the impending curtain rise. We checked our iPhones and turned them on silent. The house lights went down and the curtain began to rise.
Then the panoramic revelation of the producer’s idea about the inside of Noah’s Ark was before our eyes. We looked to our right, straight ahead to the stage and then to our left. The panoramic scene was filled with animal stalls and bird cages, mammals and reptiles. When the stage lights came up, it was as if the entire house simultaneously whispered, “Wow. Awesome. Incredible.” It was an ah-ha moment.
Two days later, we are in the center of a group of God’s people, namely the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC)Executive Board and the MBC state missionaries and their support staff. They were encircling us in a ring of prayer. The Executive Board had just voted to call me to serve as executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention.
There was a collective sense of wonder, respect and vision that captivated our hearts. Tears flowed down our faces. We recognized this ah-ha moment as the culmination of months of intercession and as an exercise of faith to trust the Lord with our lives for a new step in the journey.
Two days following, we encountered two marvelous experiences: One was that powerful ah-ha moment in the preaching of the Word of God when there is clarity of understanding and the sense that our Lord was speaking through His man straight into my heart. One of our faithful Missouri brothers was preaching the Word that Sunday. My wife and I were guests and so glad we were.
The preaching of the Word is a sacred task. When the man of God and the Word of God are in sync with the power and purpose of God’s spirit, incredible things begin to take place in and through the body of Christ. Disciples are equipped. People are born again. Relationships are restored. Dignity and honor are evident. Transformation is evidenced in the lives of people. We experienced our amazing God.
During the Sunday evening worship service, a second experience occurred. We participated in the Lord’s Supper and that is amazing in itself with the plethora of symbols demonstrating the tremendous price the Lord Jesus paid for my sin.
Then we heard the children’s leader for this particular local church explain about the church’s ministry to children and their families. The Gospel was clearly articulated. The culmination of the worship time consisted of 15 children obeying the Lord in Believer’s Baptism. Sharon and I stepped out to our truck, looked at each other and said, “Wow! The Lord is at work in this place.” An ah-ha moment!
In Mark 2, right after four friends of a paralyzed man installed a skylight in the meeting room, the Lord Jesus uses that teachable moment to demonstrate that He was sent to forgive the sins of men and women. On that day, there was a crescendo of God at work in the lives of people and “they were all amazed.” An ah-ha moment where our incredible God intersected the lives of real people. They left the house church that day glorifying God and saying, “We have never seen anything like this.”
You have studied the Scriptures. You know this was not some kind of spooky, mystical experience. The events in that passage are not something that can be conjured up or humanistically reproduced. However, God sovereignly chose that moment to make Himself known, to reveal His presence in the midst of His people, an ah-ha moment.
God is at work. He may be working in your world differently than He is in mine. However, He is moving in power among His people for such a time as this to reveal His glory to a culture that has abandoned His ways and to communicate the Gospel to those who have yet to hear the Good News.
As Henry Blackaby and Claude King wrote in the Experiencing God study, part of the walk of faith is the discovery of where God is working and join Him there. I am convinced the Lord is at work in Missouri Baptists and in our churches and in our cooperative ministries. Part of our quest is the discovery of what God is doing and who is He working through. Let’s take this journey together and be gloriously amazed at our mighty God.
John Yeats / Executive Director, Missouri Baptist Convention