A Chronicle of Renewal and Revival

Archive for July, 2018

Christian wife locked out, finds key in a fish

Man locks Christian wife out of house, she finds key in fish’s belly

July 6, 2018

By Mark Ellis –

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After a West African woman began to follow Jesus, her Muslim husband often beat her because of her newfound faith. Steadfastly, she maintained her quiet witness as she served him, all the while praying to God for his salvation.

She recounted the following remarkable testimony to Sudan Interior Mission.

It seems the woman wanted to attend a week-long church meeting away from home. She meekly asked her husband if she could attend. Predictably, the man exploded in anger. “Her husband was livid. A whole week? Who would cook his food? Clean his house?” she related to SIM.

He told her she should focus on Islam and forget the Christian church. He beat her harshly once again.

In spite of her husband’s violent response, she felt God’s leading to attend this meeting, which would nurture her growth and provide needed fellowship with other women.

The man was so upset after she left, he locked up the house and declared to the neighbors that his wife would never enter his home again. To add a dramatic emphasis to his point, he threw the house key into the river as he headed to his girlfriend’s house for the week.

The woman stopped by the local market on her way home from the conference. “She planned to have a hearty meal ready for her husband when he came home from Friday prayers. She had no idea that her husband had already locked her out of her home for good,” according to SIM.

*Women selling fish on the beach (photo credit: Steve Bloom)*

After she got home, she thought it was strange that the house was locked up tightly. She wanted to start preparing the meal for her husband, so she borrowed a pot from her neighbor and began to clean the fish she had just bought.

“When she cut open the fish, a key fell out of its belly. Puzzled, she examined it and remarked to her neighbor that the key looked similar to her own house key. Her neighbor urged her to try it in the lock, and it worked! She opened up the house, cleaned it, and got her husband’s supper ready to wait for him,” according to SIM.

As her husband walked home from the mosque, he was shocked when he recognized his house had been opened and a fire was burning in the outdoor kitchen.

Now he was really angry, thinking perhaps a neighbor had helped his wife bust open the door or break the lock. But when he examined the door and the lock, nothing seemed amiss.

“When he demanded to know how she got back into their house, she told him the strange story of the key in the fish’s belly. Stunned, he didn’t say another word.”

The following night he told his wife he wanted to attend church with her the next morning.

After the Sunday morning church service, the man asked if he could speak with the pastor privately. He told him the amazing story about the house key and said, “I want to serve the God of the Christians. He is the One who knows and has power to do what no one else can.”

The man surrendered his life to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and was born again!

God faithfully answered the woman’s prayers for her husband to turn from his sins and follow Christ.

“In his gospel, Matthew tells of a fish caught with a coin in its mouth for taxes (Matthew 17:27). In West Africa in 2018, a house key in a fish’s belly became a key to the Kingdom for an abusive husband.”

“Our Lord is still a fisher of men.”

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

To learn more about the work of SIM, go here

Source: God Reports, July 6, 2018

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‘Star Spangled Banner’ author evangelized through Sunday Schools

The writer of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ helped evangelize the West through the Sunday School movement

July 4, 2018

By David Roach —

Francis Scott Key wrote the words and music for the Star Spangled Banner
Each stanza of the anthem concludes:
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Most Americans likely know of Francis Scott Key’s passion for the United States, expressed in his writing of the national anthem. Far fewer know he also was a passionate advocate of Sunday School whose leadership in the Sunday School movement helped evangelize the West.

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Key helped establish more than 61,000 Sunday Schools for some 2.7 million pupils over 50 years
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As the United States celebrates its 242nd birthday, Christian educators say Key’s two passions went hand in hand. Sunday School could once again, they say, be a catalyst for spiritual and moral renewal in America.

“America and Sunday School literally grew up together,” said David Francis, a retired director of Sunday School for LifeWay Christian Resources. “Nowhere else in the world has Sunday School been embraced like in America. Nowhere else in the world has the idea of a constitutional republic been sustained like in America. Two ideas. Both of God. At the same time. Spreading together across a continent. What a fortunate coincidence.”

Born in 1779, Key was a Maryland attorney, author and poet. In 1814, he wrote the poem “Defense of Fort M’Henry” after watching the all-night bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry from a British ship during the War of 1812. Key had gone aboard the ship as an American envoy to negotiate a prisoner release and was not allowed to disembark until after the attack.

In the morning, the sight of an American flag still waving over the fort inspired Key’s poem, which he soon had set to music. Under the title “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it became the national anthem more than a century later.

Lesser known is that Key was “an earnest Christian,” and “a teacher of a large Bible class,” according to Edwin Wilbur Rice’s 1917 book “The Sunday School Movement and the American Sunday-School Union” (ASSU). Key joined the ASSU board of managers in 1824, the year the union changed its name from the Sunday and Adult School Union.

The ASSU’s 1835 Annual listed Key as a “lifetime member” based on his contribution of at least $30 — the equivalent of $815 today.

Francis wrote in his book “Missionary Sunday School” that the ASSU’s aim was to start Sunday Schools across America where individuals from lower economic classes heard the Gospel and learned to read and write “using the Bible as a primary text.” Sunday Schools typically comprised children “who rarely or never attend[ed] church,” and adult classes often formed as a secondary ministry.

Key chaired an 1830 ASSU meeting in Washington, which instituted the “Mississippi Valley Enterprise,” a campaign that established west of the Appalachian Mountains more than 61,000 Sunday Schools for some 2.7 million pupils over the next 50 years, Francis wrote. Many of those Sunday Schools developed into churches, some Baptist, in areas previously without an evangelical witness while others became weekday schools before the era of American public education.

When Key died in 1843, the ASSU stated in its Annual, “By the decease of the Hon. Francis S. Key, of the District of Columbia, we lose one of our earliest and most steadfast advocates and patrons. His frequent and liberal contributions to our funds, and his readiness at all times to vindicate the principles and advance the usefulness of the Society, furnished unequivocal evidence of his interest in our cause.”

Francis told Baptist Press the Sunday School movement under Key and other early leaders “played no small role” during America’s first century in raising up a citizenry that was “both moral and literate.” — Baptist Press

David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service.

Source: God Reports, July 4, 2018