BEIJING (BP)–Two months’ time between hearing the Word and receiving the Son: that was all it took for an entire ethnic-minority village in southern China to believe in Jesus as the way to salvation.
The story began when a team of Christian workers visited the previously unevangelized rural village to get acquainted with the inhabitants and share the gospel. After watching the “Jesus” film, the villagers told the guests they would like to have two months to think things over. The team of visitors graciously consented to return later. As they departed, they left some additional evangelistic materials behind.
When the Christians returned to the village this winter, they were warmly greeted. As they sat around a pit of fire in the home of their host that night, they realized that God had been working in significant ways to bring the village to himself. The villagers had been faithfully listening to the taped version of the Jesus film and discussing it among themselves.
God also had worked by impacting one of the young village men who had traveled outside the village during the two-month interim. The young man had spent just enough time in the “outside” world to realize there was something better to be found in life than what they had always known. He had returned to tell the village that it was time to move forward in their thinking.
So it was that on the night of the visitors’ return to the village that they had visited two months earlier that the entire village of 50 people prayed to receive Christ as their Savior, and to begin new lives filled with his presence and guidance.
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(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at http://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: NOT TOO REMOTE.
