Telling the Truth

Guest (Male): God has a word for you each day, and He wants to prepare you to minister to others. Today on Telling the Truth, Jill Briscoe inspires you to start every day off by communing with God. That is coming up, but first, building a consistent prayer life can be a challenge. That is why we want to let you know about a special opportunity to soak in Stuart and Jill's wisdom on prayer through a newly curated collection of their messages called Powerful and Effective Prayer.

This resource is our thanks for your gift today to help others experience life in Christ through the global ministry of Telling the Truth. But the offer ends today and you do not want to miss it. So call now to request your copy of this special collection: 1-800-889-5388. That is 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now, here is Jill with more from her message, Used by God.

Jill Briscoe: The thing we have to do, of course, is listen to God first. We are Jesus' servants here, sending us as God sent Him. We have to get up and listen to God. I have put in my Bible, "Get up and listen to me so you can go out and listen to them." That is the verse that struck me years ago: if I get up and listen to Him, then I can go out and listen to the person who is weary and match their need with the scripture that is going to help them that I have been learning for myself.

The picture is of a scholar awakening his pupils early. "In the morning, first of all, Savior, let me hear Thy call. Make me ready to obey Thy commands throughout the day." I have said that prayer every day since I was converted, a little chorus I learned at the beginning of my Christian life, and I have never forgotten it.

I have this idea of the scholar, the godly, divine scholar, waking me early. If I do not let Him wake me morning by morning, wake my ear to listen like a disciple—like one being taught—I might miss the word that is going to sustain the weary one that He will match me up with wherever I am in my sphere of influence that day. What a sad thing that would be. You cannot just bring out the same little canned things, thinking it worked for the last one, because God wants to give you the fresh word that is going to be absolutely the thing that is right.

The first thing you have to do is listen to God for yourself before you can take this stuff to other people. I love Patsy Clairmont. I was with her not too long ago when she said, "What we want to do is say to God, 'Fix me while I'm sleeping so I can rise up righteous in the morning.'" God does not fix us when we are sleeping. It would be easy to wake up and go straight out into the day and start to minister, but He wants us to cooperate.

So He wakes us up. We get up. We get on our face before Him. We do our devotions or however we want to do them, but we meet with God. We meet with Him for ourselves first, and He speaks to us and we listen to God. As we do that, then we will go out into the day to have a ministry of listening. Quite quickly, I want to talk about three things that every single one of us can do.

First of all, we can have a ministry of presence as we listen to people. In my book, It Had to Be a Monday, I do not really deal thoroughly with this, but I touch on Job's friends and the things that they did right. At the end of chapter two, when Job's three friends heard about this terrible Monday he had in his life and his whole world had collapsed, they got up and they traveled a considerable distance to go and be with him.

When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him, and they began to weep aloud. They tore their robes and they sprinkled dust on their heads in their fashion. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, and no one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was. In those few verses, you and I can learn how to listen or how to have a ministry that is very easy to have.

The first thing is a ministry of presence. All of us can do this. When I took some women over to Croatia and Bosnia, I took them to have a ministry of presence. I remember getting there with these ten women in Zagreb. We were undergoing a whole day of orientation by people that had lived there, people that were Croatian, people that knew what was going on.

They were trying to tell us where we were going, down to the war border, down to where the refugees were coming over at a thousand a day at that point. Then they would tell me that I would be speaking in this church and I would be speaking to the refugees here. Then we would go to the boxcars and we would have some personal talk to the refugees that had been there for a whole year and nobody had done anything about them, just sitting in these boxcars.

At the end of this orientation, I looked around this group of very mature women from all walks of Christendom. There was the head of the Lutheran social service that I had with me, and a young pediatrician who had had extensive experience with refugee work in the medical field. We looked at each other and the women started to say, "What are we going to do?" That is so American. We have to go and do something. We have to fix this.

I said, "I don't think we're going to do too much." They asked, "Then why are we here?" Another one asked, "What are we going to say?" I told them, "I don't think we're going to say much. We're going to have a ministry, first of all, of presence. What we're going to do is go and say one thing. If we say anything, we'll just say, 'We just had to come.' Say it after me." And we all said it: "We just had to come."

In fear and trembling, we went down. One of them said to me, "Well, what do you think they'll say?" I said, "I have no idea. But that's something you can say." God is going to give you the know-how, but that is what we are going to do. We are just going to go, and that is the reason we went. We just had to go. Women were in desperate need in another country. Women needed the sort of help we could match them with, the resources we could match them with in America. We knew that we could help if we could just go. We just had to come.

I remember the pediatrician who went with me was in this conference at FCA and I told this story. She just sat there and cried because she remembered, like I did, at the end of a refugee meeting down on the border. We had bombs going off and they blew up the church behind us while we were having this refugee meeting and trying to do things. At the end of the meeting, we went out and I looked around the courtyard in the seminary where we had had this refugee meeting to find the women I had taken.

I could not find them. Then I began to see them. They were so buried under groups of Croatian refugees. They were all women because refugees are women, while their men are dead or fighting or prisoners. Their arms were around those women. They grabbed them, they grabbed their necks, they put their heads down. I said to my interpreter, "What are they saying?"

The interpreter said, "They're saying, 'Thank you for coming.'" So I started walking around in that crowd and I heard my women saying, in a language they did not know if the folks could understand, "We just had to come. We just had to come." "Thank you for coming." "We just had to come." "Thank you for coming." We were the first women's delegation in the whole of that war. Only men had gone down there.

Men cannot get hold of women like women can get hold of women. Men cannot have a ministry of presence like women can with other women. It is like the woman in the hospital that helped me, who was my cleaner. There is something that we know that nobody else knows. There is a feeling that we know when something happens to our child that a man cannot link into. We just had to come. Can you do that? Of course you can. How many people do not go when they know something has happened because they do not know what to say? You can say, "I just had to come."

Guest (Male): You are listening to Jill Briscoe on Telling the Truth. She is coming right back with more on the ways God readies you to minister. But before she gets back, let's be honest: prayer can sometimes feel like a bit of a mystery. Some people feel so confused by how prayer works that they will just forget it all together.

But scripture paints an exciting picture of what a life of prayer can be and how you can experience it yourself. That is why we want to send you a newly curated collection of messages from Stuart and Jill called Powerful and Effective Prayer. These five eye-opening messages will help you push past today's common platitudes on prayer and develop the rich and vibrant prayer life you are longing for.

We are excited to send you this one-of-a-kind resource as thanks for your gift today to help keep sharing the life-changing truth of God's love with people around the world through Telling the Truth. Remember that today is your last chance to request this special resource. So call now to request Powerful and Effective Prayer when you give: 1-800-889-5388. That is 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org.

For many, our smartphones have become our social connection. But we want to help you make a spiritual connection with the Telling the Truth mobile app. You can listen to daily programs, engage in Bible reading plans, journal, and share your thoughts and prayers on the community wall. Get the Telling the Truth app through your app store or log on to tellingthetruth.org/mobile-app. Now, let's return to Jill with more from today's message, Used by God.

Jill Briscoe: Secondly, you can have a ministry of silence. Everybody can do that. I remember watching the moving van come up next door when I lived down in Brookfield years ago. The neighbors knew what was happening and we knew there was trouble in the house next to me. I did not know this woman. I had only talked to her over the garden fence a couple of times. She had been very private in that house.

Suddenly, here is the moving van. Suddenly, here is the husband and he is directing the furniture out of the house and into the van, so we all know what is happening here. Off the furniture van goes, and I sat in my kitchen window looking at that empty street and wondering what was happening in that house next to me. I did not want to go next door. That was the last thing I wanted to do.

I began going through this whole thing: what do I say? What can I do? I thought I supposed I could just go. So I just went. With my heart pounding, because it is not the sort of thing that comes easily to me—I am a very private person, I am English, I do not want to intrude on people's privacy—I knocked on the door. The lady in question opened the door and I said something like, "I just had to come. I saw the van, I just had to come."

She put out her hand and grabbed me, pulled me inside the house, and shut the door. She sat me down and said, "Please let me make you a cup of tea." That is a wonderful thing to let people make you a cup of tea because that is the thing you do in times of crisis. She made me a cup of tea and we sat down. For the next two hours, I never said a thing. I had a ministry of silence. I left that day without her having said anything.

I actually had two ministries. I had a ministry of silence and I had a ministry of tears. That is the other thing you can do. A ministry of tears—can you do that? I can do that. I am good at crying. I think women are great with tears. That is one of our things. Some of us are more wet than others, but I can cry. Can't you cry? I remember coming home from a doctor's appointment and being given some rather frightening news. The doctor had said, "I want you in the operating theater in two days."

I came home and told my family. We did not quite know, but it did not look very nice or very good. When the world falls out from you like that under your feet, you are trying to regroup. It was not on your agenda that something like this might happen. You get very panicked and you are in denial for a bit, then you think, "Goodness, this is real. This is it, maybe."

As I got undressed that night, I looked at my husband who was lying in bed with his book open in front of him, and he was crying. Here is my husband, who is very eloquent. Here is my husband, who is a Bible teacher. Here is my husband, who could have turned anywhere in the Bible and given me a little lecture. He didn't. He had a ministry of tears. It was what I needed, all I needed. There is power in weeping with those that weep. Can you do that? I can.

So there are all sorts of things we can do to be a servant of the Lord. When and if the time comes to say something, then your life words will come from your accumulated wisdom as a person. Your wounds that God has allowed in your life can become life words. You can become a wounded healer. Henri Nouwen is a name that you might know or might not. He was a Roman Catholic priest. He wrote a book called The Wounded Healer. I suggest that you read that, specifically the last chapter.

His whole premise is that the wounds that we received can be a healing for other people if we share the comfort that God has given us as He has mended our wounds. He himself was a professor at Harvard and Yale, a very prominent Roman Catholic theologian. He had a marvelous ministry, and then God began to deal with him very definitely in his life.

He gave up that incredible worldwide ministry that he had at the top of the hierarchy of the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He went to live in Canada in community with a community of people who were incredibly handicapped. The bulk of his life he lived in community with these people. He still went out of that community to preach and to teach and to make movies and films, which are absolutely wonderful. He finished one as he had a heart attack and died as he was making that movie in Russia.

He would go back to his community and he would always take one of the people from his community with him. Some of the stories he tells are funny, they will make you laugh, they will make you cry. But he always took a brother or a sister from his community to be a wounded healer themselves. He tells stories of how these handicapped people who did not have all their faculties with them, but God had healed them.

I remember Corrie ten Boom's book. she had a little book called Common Sense Not Needed because spiritual insight has nothing to do with intellectual prowess or intelligence or IQ. The wounded healer of these people that God had allowed to be so physically or mentally, psychologically wounded, and had made them as whole as they would be in this world, turned out to speak to groups of people that Henri Nouwen was speaking to, of the world's top people, and would have words of comfort and consolation to say.

It is incredible how our wounds can be used to bless other people, and then to link the scripture with them. That is a wonderful thing. So when it is time to speak, the skill to counsel, matching the words with the worries or whatever—the consolation must be rooted in scripture principles. I do not mean just rubbing a verse of scripture on somebody's wound, but the principles of scripture must be applied.

For this, of course, we will need to have the ear of a disciple. We must be an obedient disciple. Do you see that it says here that the servant of the Lord was obedient? He did not draw back. "I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back." For Jesus, it meant pain and wounds Himself. He offers His back to those who beat Him, His cheeks to those who pulled out His beard. He did not hide His face from mocking and from spitting.

Because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced. Therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know I will not be put to shame. He who vindicates me is near. He will hold my hand. What we find is that the ultimate leader, who is the ultimate servant, will have the tongue of a teacher and the skill of a counselor, but he will have to be an obedient disciple because He will send you places that perhaps you did not want to go and He will ask you to say things you did not want to say. Tell you what to say, you want to say it. To be spiritually eloquent with clumsy lips or whatever it takes, and do it anyway.

Guest (Male): Jill Briscoe is coming right back with more on the ways God readies you to minister. But before she wraps things up today, you probably hear people talk about prayer all the time. But aside from knowing that you ought to do it, how much do you truly know about prayer? For example, how does God want to use prayer in our lives? Is He listening to every single request? And can prayer really make a difference?

We would love to help shine some much-needed light on the subject of prayer by sending you Stuart and Jill's new five-message collection, Powerful and Effective Prayer. This specially curated set of messages, available through the end of today only, is our thanks for your gift to share the life-changing truth of God's word around the world through Telling the Truth. It is only thanks to the support of generous friends like you that broadcasts like this one can keep going out, reaching others with God's love so they can experience life in Christ.

So if you have not given before, please consider a gift today and remember, this offer ends today. Request Powerful and Effective Prayer when you call and give: 1-800-889-5388. That is 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Now, here is Jill with a few last thoughts.

Jill Briscoe: An obedient disciple and that persistence will have the sense that somebody is leading you. There will be that, "Yes!" This verse, of course, reminds me of my friend Elizabeth Elliot. This is her life's verse: "I set my face like a flint. I have not turned back." She received that verse from God from this passage of scripture when she had to decide what to do when her husband lay face down in a river with an arrow out of his back, dead, gone to heaven.

Here she was with a six-year-old child. She had to decide what to do. God had called her to the Indians. God had called them to the Auca Indians. Now they had murdered her husband. What was she going to do? Was she going to come home to the United States and find another ministry? Was she going to stay where she was in a safe little town and just do translation? Or was she going to walk back into the jungle and find those men and finish the work that her husband had not been allowed to finish?

Of course we know the story. She did go back into the jungle. The reason she went was this verse: "I have set my face like a flint, I have not turned back." Whether I offer my back to those who might beat me, my cheeks to those who pull out my beard, in her context, she said, "Because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced; therefore have I set my face like a flint."

What motivated her? Simply, she was an obedient disciple and that is what she believed God was telling her to do. As it turned out, it was right. Now the men that murdered those men are the leaders of the church in that tribe, which is totally Christian. That is the story of the Auca Indian martyrdoms.

Just as I finish this, I want to read to you Jim Elliot's diary, the last entry in his diary before he was martyred. He goes out to spend time with God on a hill overlooking the little airport where they are getting that plane and off they go, not knowing what is ahead.

This is what he said: "I walked out to the hill just now. It's exalting, delicious to stand embraced by the shadows of a friendly tree, with the wind tugging at your coat tail and the heavens hailing your heart. To gaze in glory and give oneself—what more could a man ask? Oh the fullness, pleasure, sheer excitement of knowing God on earth. I care not if I never raise my voice again for Him, if only I may love Him, please Him, mayhap in mercy He shall give me a host of children that I may lead them through the vast star fields to explore His delicacies, whose finger ends set them to burning."

This man is a poet. I love that. "Maybe He'll give me a host of children"—he is talking about the Indians he is hoping to bring into the kingdom of God—"that I may lead them through the vast star fields to explore His delicacies, whose finger ends set them to burning. But if not, if only I may see Him, touch His garments, smile into His eyes, ah then not stars nor children shall matter, only Himself. Oh Jesus Master and Center and End of all, how long before Thy glory is Thine, which has so long waited Thee? Now there is no thought of Thee among men; then there shall be thought for nothing else. Now other men are praised; then none shall care for any others' merits. Hasten, hasten, glory of heaven, take Thy crown, subdue Thy kingdom, enthrall Thy creatures."

Jim Elliot set his face like a flint and went to heaven in a fiery chariot the next day. Elizabeth Elliot took the baton and she and her daughter finished the job. Why? Because we are ultimate leaders, which means we are ultimate servants. He has given us the tongue of a teacher and the skill of a counselor, but it is not going to work unless we are an obedient disciple.

I found a verse the other day that said, "I will go where you tell me to go," and I underlined that. As I sat even among wonderful opportunities where, as far as I know, I am not in any danger looking at them for the next three years ahead of myself, and as I looked at that verse, "I will go where you tell me to go," I asked myself: am I still on target? Am I still focused? That has been a principle of my life.

I want you to know I am. I am going to go where He tells me to go. I am going to do what He tells me to do because someone is leading me, someone is helping me, and somebody is praying for me. I cannot fail. It is a win-win situation. So if you came in here thinking, "I'm not a leader, and I'm not a teacher, and I'm not a counselor," I do not want you to go out there if you are unconvinced. This is a huge challenge, folks, and at least you can start by having a ministry of presence, and a ministry of silence, and a ministry of tears. See if that opens up to you the opportunity to match with a word from the Lord one who is weary in the season of their life.

Guest (Male): Thanks, Jill. Before you go, here is a final reminder for you that through the end of the day today, you can request Stuart and Jill's newly curated five-message collection, Powerful and Effective Prayer, when you give to continue sharing God's word through Telling the Truth broadcasts and resources.

So please, request yours when you call and give: 1-800-889-5388. That is 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. You have been listening to Telling the Truth. What a pleasure it's been to spend this time with you today. Join us again next week as we share more biblical teaching from Stuart and Jill Briscoe to help you dive deep into God's word. Listen in and experience life next time on Telling the Truth.