# 1 > Achyamma's eyes stung with salty tears. But they were not from the cooking fire or the hot spices that wafted up from the pan. She realized time was short. Her six sons were growing beyond her influence. Yet not one showed signs of going into the Gospel ministry.
Except for the youngest__little "Yohannachan" as I was known__every one of her children seemed destined for secular work. My brothers seemed content to live and work around our native village of Niranam in Kerala, South India.
# 2 > "O God," she prayed in despair, "let just one of my boys preach!" Like Hannah and so many other saintly mothers in the Bible, my mother had dedicated her children to the Lord. That morning, while preparing breakfast, she vowed to fast secretly until God called one of her sons into His service. Every Friday for the next three and a half years, she fasted. Her prayer was always the same.
# 3 > But nothing happened. Finally, only I, scrawny and little__the baby of the family__was left. There seemed little chance I would preach. Although I had stood up in an evangelistic meeting at age eight , I was shy and timid and kept my faith mostly of myself. I showed no leadship skills and avoided sports and school functions. I was comfortable on the edge of village and family life, a shadowy figure who moved in and out of the scene almost unnoticed.
# 4 > Then, when I was 16, my mother's prayers were answered. A visiting Gospel team from Operation Mobilization came to our church to present the challenge of faraway North India. My 90-pound frame strained to catch every word as the team spoke and showed slides of the North. They told of stonings and beatings they received while preaching Christ in the non-Christian villages of Rajasthan and Bihar on the hot, arid plains of North India.
# 5 > Sheltered from contact with the rest of India by high peaks of the Western Ghats, the lush jungles of Kerala on the Malabar Coast had long nourished India,s oldest Christian community, begun when the flourishing sea trade with the Persian Gulf made it possible for St. Thomas to introduce Jesus Christ at nearby Cranagore in A.D. 52. Other Jews already were there, having arrived 200 years earlier. The rest of India seemed an ocean away to the Malayalam-speaking people of the southwest coast, and I was no exception.
# 6 > As the Gospel team portrayed the desperately lost condition of the rest of the country__5000,000 villages without a Gospel witness__I felt a strange sorrow for the lost. That day I vowed to help bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to those strange and mysterious states to the North. At the challenge to "forsake all and follow Christ," I somewhat rashly took the leap, agreeing to join the student group for a short summer crusade in unreached parts of North India.
# 7 > My decision to go into the ministry largely resulted from my mother's faithful prayers. Although I still had not received what I later understood to be my real call from the Lord, my mother encouraged me to follow my heart in the matter. When I announced my decision, she wordlessly handed over 25 rupees__enough for my train ticket. I set off to apply to the mission's headquarters in Trivandrum.
# 8 > There I got my first rebuff. Because I was underage, the mission's directors at first refused to let me join the teams going north. But I was permitted to attend the annual training conference to be held in Bangalore, Karnataka. At the conference I first heard missionary statesman George Verwer, who challenged me as never before to commit myself to a life of breathtaing, radical discipleship. I was impressed with how Verwer put the will of God for the lost world before career, family and self.
# 9 > Alone that night in my bed, I argued with both God and my own conscience. By two o'clock in the morning my pillow wet with sweat and tears, I shook with fear. What if God asked me to preach in the streets? How would I ever be able to stand up in plublic and speak? What if I were stoned and beaten? I knew myself only too well. I could hardly bear to look a friend in the eye during a conversation, let alone speak publicly to hostile crowds on behalf of God.
# 10 > As I spoke the words, I realized that I was behaving as Moses did when he was called. Suddenly, I felt that I was not alone in the room. A great sense of love and of my being loved filled the place. I felt the presence of God and fell on my knees beside the bed. "Lord God," I gasped in surrender to His presence and will, "I'll give myself to speak for You__but help me to know that You're with me." In the morning, I awoke to a world and people suddenly different. As I walked outside, the Indian street scenes looked the same as before: Children ran between the legs of people and cows, pigs and chickens wandered about, vendors carried baskets of bright fruit and flowers on their heads.
# 11 > I loved them all with a supernatural, unconditional love I'd never felt before. It was as if God had removed my eyes and replaced them with His so I could see people as the heavenly Father sees them__lost and needy but with potential to glorify and reflect Him. I walked to the bus station. My eyes filled with tears of love. I knew that these people were all going to hell__and I knew God did not want them to go there. Suddenly I had such a burden for these masses that I had to stop and lean against a wall just to keep my balance. This was it: I knew I was feeling the burden of love God feels for the lost multitudes of India. His loving heart was pounding within mine, and I could hardly breathe. The tension was great. I paced back and forth restlessly to keep my knees from knocking in fright. "Lord!" I cried. "If you want me to do something, say it, and give me courage."
# 12 > Looking up from my prayer, I saw a huge stone. I knew immediately I had to climb that stone and preach to the crowds in the bus station. Scrambling up, I felt a force like 10,000 volts of electricity shooting through my body. I began by singing a simple children's chorus. It was all I knew. By the time I finished, a crowd stood at the foot of the rock. I had not prepared myself to speak, but all at once God took over and filled my mouth with words of His love. I preached the Gospel to the poor as Jesus commended His disciples to do. As the authority and power of God flowed through me, I had superhuman boldness. Words came out I never knew I had__and with a power clearly from above.
# 13 > Others from the Gospel teams stopped to listen. The question of my age and calling never came up again. That was 1966, and I continued moving with mobile evangelistic teams for the next seven years. We traveled all over North India, never staying very long in any one village. Everywhere we went I preached in the streets while others distributed books and tracts. Occasionally, in smaller villages, we witnessed from house to house. My urgent, overpowering love for the village people of India and the poor masses grew with the years. People even began to nickname me "Gandhi Man" after the father of modern India, Mahatma Gandhi. Like him, I realized without being told that if the village people of India were to ever know the love of Jesus, it would have to be brought by brown-skinned natives who loved them.
# 14 > As I studied the Gospel, it became clear to me that Jesus understood well the principle of reaching the poor. He avoided the major cities, the rich, the famous and the powerful, concentrating His ministry on the poor laboring class. If we reach the poor, we have touched the masses of Asia. The battle against hunger and poverty is really a spiritual battle, not a physical or social one as seclarists would have us believe. The only weapon that will ever effectively win the war against disease, hunger, injustice and poverty in Asia is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
# 15 > To look into the sad eyes of a hungry child or see the wasted life of a drug addict is to see only the evidence of Satan's hold on this world. All bad things, whether in Asia or America, are his handiwork. He is the ultimate enemy of mankind, and he will do everything within his considerable power to kill and destroy human beings. Fighting this powerful enemy with physical weapons is like fighting an armored tank with stones.
# 16 > I can never forget one of the more dramatic encounters we had with these demonic powers. It was a hot and unusually humid day in 1970. We were preaching in the northwestern state of Rajasthan__the "desert of kings." As was our practice before a street meeting, my seven co-workers and I stood in a circle to sing and clap hands to the rhythm of Christian folk songs. A sizeable crowd gather, and I began to speak in Hindi, the local language. Many heard the Gospel for the first time and eagerly took our Gospels and tracts to read.
# 17 > One young man came up to me and asked for a book to read. As I talked to him, I sensed in my spirit that he was hungry to know God. When we got ready to climb aboard our Gospel van, he asked to join us. As the van lurched forward, he cried and wailed. "I am a terribe sinner," he shrieked. "How can I sit among You?" With that he started to jump from the moving van. We held on to him and forced him to the floor to prevent injury. That night he stayed at our base and the next morning joined us for the prayer meeting. While we were praising and interceding, we heard a sudden scream. The young man was lying on the ground, tongue lolling out of his mouth, his eyes rolled back.
# 18 > as Christians in a pagan land, we knew immediately he was demon-possessed. We gather around him and began taking authority over the forces of hell as they spoke through his mouth. "We are 74 of us. . . . For the past seven years we have made him walk barefoot all over India. He is ours. . . . "They spoke on, blaspheming and cursing, challenging us and our authority. But as three of us prayed, the demons could not keep their hold on the young man. They came out when we commanded them to leave in the name of Jesus. Sunder John was delivered, gave his life to Jesus and was baptized. Later he went to Bible college, and since then the Lord has enable him to teach and preach to thousands of people about Christ.
# 19 > Several native Indian churches have started as a result of his remarkable ministry__all from a man many people would have locked up in an insane asylum. And there are literally millions of people like him in Asia__deceived by demons and enslaved to their horrible passions and lusts. This kind of miracle kept me going from village to village for those seven years of itinerant preaching. Our lives read like pages from the book of Acts. Most nights we slept between villages in roadside ditches, where we were relatively safe. Sleeping in non-Christian villages would expose us to many dangers. Our team always created a stir, and at times we even faced stonings and beatings.
# 20 > The mobile Gospel teams I worked with__and often led__were just like family to me. I began to enjoy the gypsy lifestyle we lived and the total abandonment to the cause of Christ that is demanded of an itinerant evangelist. We were persecuted, hated and despised. Yet we kept going, knowing that we were blazing a trail for the Gospel in districts that had never before experienced an encounter with Christ. One such village was Bhundi in Rajasthan. This was the first place I was beaten and stoned for preaching the Gospel.
# 21 > Often literature was destroyed. It seemed that mobs always were on the watch for us, and six times our street meetings were broken up. Our team leaders began to work elsewhere, avoiding Bhundi as much as possible. Three years later, a new team of native missionaries moved into the area under different leadership and preached again at this busy crossroads town. Almost as soon as they arrived, one man began tearing up literture and grabbed a 19-year-old missionary, Samuel, by the throat. Although beaten severely, Samuel knelt in the street and prayed for the salvation of souls in that hateful city. "Lord," he prayed, "I want to come back here and serve You in Bhundi. I'm willing to die here, but I went to come back and serve You in this place." Many older christian leaders advised him against his decision, but being determined, Samuel went back and rented a small room. Shipments of literature arrived, and he preached in the face of many difficulties. Today more than 100 people meet in a small church there. Those who presecuted us at one time now worship the Lord Jesus, as was the case with the apostle Paul. This is the kind of commitment and faith it takes to reach the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ.
# 22 > One time we arrived in a town at daybreak to preach. But word already had gone ahead fro the nearby village where we had preached the day before. As we had morning tea in a roadside stall, the local militant leader approached me politely. In a low voice that betrayed little emotion, he spoke: "Get on your truck and get out of town in five minutes, or we'll burn it and you with it." I knew he was serious. He was backed by a menacing crowd. Although we did " shake the dust from our feet" that day, today a church meets in that same village. In order to plant the Gospel, we must take risks. For months at a time I traveled the dusty roads in the heat of the day and shivered through cold nights__suffering just as thousands of national missionaries are suffering today to bring the Gospel to the lost. In future years I would look back on those seven years of village evangelism as one of the greatest learning experiences of my life. We walked in Jesus steps, incarnating and representing Him to masses of people who had never before heard the Gospel. I was living a frenetic, busy life__too busy and thrilled with the work of the Gospel to think much about the future. There was always another campaign just ahead. But I was about to reach a turning point.
