Roy Crowne, Director of Hope Together UK, speaks to Coventry Jesus Centre volunteers

I want to encourage you all who work and volunteer here at the Jesus Centre! You are at the heart of God’s heart; it’s your day of opportunity!

When you touch the broken, you touch God. When you connect with the poor and broken, you connect with Jesus.

William Booth said that the only thing that really transforms people is the Gospel. We need to constantly bring the gospel to the people we work with; some of these broken people need to keep coming to hear it!

We can take heart from and learn from the Christians in this country who came before us:

The tide of lawlessness of the eighteenth century was stemmed by preachers John Wesley and George Whitfield. At Bristol Wesley had eggs thrown at him. Did he think better of going back there? No! He thanked God for the eggs thrown at him and was back the next week – such was his passion for spreading the Gospel.  His mother, Susanna Wesley, had eighteen children and still had time to pray for an hour a day!

As a young man, Wesley had been over to America. 'I went to America, to convert the Indians; but oh! Who shall convert me?” he said. While travelling home, Wesley shared his passage with some Moravian missionaries.  When the ship was caught up in a storm, the Moravians began praising God! Wesley realised they had faith he didn’t have and said, “Don’t you care that we die?” Their reply was, “Whether we live or die, our lives are hid in Christ!”

Later, in London, at Fetters Lane, he describes how his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ as he heard the Gospel and found assurance of salvation.

It was Wesley’s passion for the poor that gave him his ministry. It was also passion for the poor that gave William Booth and Catharine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, their ministry. The early Salvationists had such success as they spread the Gospel that pub landlords attempted to drive them out of town. They knew their businesses would be ruined when people turned to Jesus!

The core of what these people were was their passion for the Gospel; this is what they laboured for and prayed into.

As we labour for the Gospel we can get caught up in the system and miss the ‘Jesus moment’ we were meant to embrace. We miss the jewel that is there!

In the Old Testament, we read the story of a man called Saul who lived in Israel. He had a problem! His donkeys had gone missing so he and his servant went off the find them. After three days he still hadn’t found them. (1 Samuel 9:1- 1 Samuel 10:16)

Meanwhile, God spoke to Samuel, the prophet who lived in that area. The people of Israel had clamoured for a king and God told him, ‘Tomorrow you will meet and anoint the future king of Israel’. Saul was chasing his donkeys and had no idea an anointing was going to happen. He decided to seek out Samuel to ask him if he could tell him where his donkeys were. Samuel told Saul his donkeys were safe and, if he could just wait another day, he’d got something to tell him. The next day Samuel anointed Saul. Saul became an amazing man of God – although he ended badly. He was small in his own eyes, coming from the weakest and most insignificant tribe but God used him.

We can spend our lives chasing donkeys but God has another story.

You may think you’re chasing donkeys. Someone will come into your life and bring an anointing otherwise not possible. Often the greatest influence is through ‘insignificant’ people as they impact our lives.

Amazing things happen as we are ‘searching for donkeys.’ I recently read a story in the Readers Digest of Marcella Steinberger, a business man who took a day off work to visit a sick friend and jumped on a train to Woodside in the USA. On the train He got talking to a Jewish man who was searching for his lost wife of many years. She had been taken away by the Nazis while living in Hungary and he had never seen her again. Amazingly, Marcella, looking at a photo the man showed of her, realised he had seen the woman a few weeks before at a business event and had taken her number. Marcella rang her and found it was indeed the same woman and paid for a taxi for them to meet each other. Sceptical people attribute this to chance. But was it chance? The God we serve does things like that! He is awesome!

We can expect miracles as we are ‘searching for donkeys!’ Don’t miss the ‘Jesus moment’, the jewel that is there!