Day 140, Mumbai

Today is our last day in Mumbai. We will go speak and do a drama at a concert tonight and this will sum up our ministry in this city. Tomorrow night we leave for Bangalore, which is in South India. We will spend 24 hours on the train. From what we have heard, this will be an interesting train ride.
My illness is fading. Thank you so much for your prayers. After almost three weeks of coughing and illness I am finally healing. I know many of you have been praying for me, and it is working!

This week we traveled to the largest temple in Mumbai, and the largest Muslim mosque. It was a powerful prayer walk. As we made our way to the temple we passed many people selling plates full of flowers and coconuts....everyone was selling them. As we climbed the stairs to the temple at the top I began to pray. The Indians were so blind....I couldn't believe it. They brought these plates of flowers and coconuts in and walked around the temple, expecting their gods to bless them, and then would take them back to their house so their house would be blessed by the flowers.

As I walked around I was almost overwhelmed. They were SOOO headstrong about their religion...they were SOOO blind to the real truth, their religion wasn't just a Sunday service religion, it was a complete way of life, the way they dress, speak, think, work, eat, pray....everything they did was under the guise of their religion. I began to think, "How is it possible to show these people the truth....it is too hard to change their life". I started to think about everything that would have to change in their life for them to follow Christ and started to realize how impossible it was. Then I felt the Holy Spirit quicken something to my mind. It was then that I realized that I had doubted the strength of our God. He is strong enough to break their religion's hold on them. HE IS STRONG ENOUGH. From that point on, that is what my prayer was focused on, declaring the strength of the Lord, declaring His power over their religion, over their way of life, and declaring that He has the power to change people's lives. I was not overwhelmed anymore.

I walked to the back of the temple where I found a staircase winding down to the sea. I walked down the stairs and sat there praying for the Lord to open their eyes to what they are doing. They get NOTHING from their gods, absolutely NOTHING, yet they continue to do their rituals in hopes that when they die they will be reincarnated into something better than a bug or dog (or worse, a cat). As I sat there I watched some people walk down with their platters of coconuts and flowers, and hand a girl their coconut. She walked across the rocks and down to the water where she threw the coconut in the water as an offering to their gods. I sat there in amazement. "How foolish you are! Open your eyes to what you are doing!" I thought to myself. They throw coconuts in the sea in order to please their gods. They carve statues and worship them....worship something that they themselves created! The last time it was counted they concluded that there are over 330,000,000 gods in India...That is 330 MILLION different gods that they worship....monkey gods, rat gods, cow gods, coconut gods....you name it, they worship it....they worship everything that is lower than them. How cunning the prince of this world is to get people to believe they will benefit in their "afterlife" by worshiping the rats and cats and cows and everything else on the planet that is of less value than they themselves.

I prayed that their eyes would be opened, that they would begin to think about their life, that they would begin to hear the truth.

We left there and went to the mosque afterwards. I spent a month in Egypt where I was constantly surrounded by the mosques and their eerie chants to prayer, where all the women completely covered themselves in black, with only a small slit for their eyes, where the men had huge bruises on their heads from smacking their foreheads on the ground in prayer 5 times a day. I was very familiar with Islam and had a pretty good picture of what to expect. A small rock walkway jutted a few hundred yards out into the sea where the mosque sat surrounded by water. As I entered the mosque I was shocked to see how different it was. It was mixed with Hinduism! The women didnt wear the black, the men had no bruises, the chant wasn't playing.....The Muslims here conform their religion however necessary in order to get people to follow their religion. Muslims don't worship idols, but these did. In a country where people are used to praying "to" something tangible, the muslims put things infront of them so they could worship them.

This was a shock to me, but it made sense at the same time. The enemy is so focused on separating people from Christ that he will use any means necessary, even if it contradicts his own made up religions, to get them to do it. In America, Islam is taking off like a wildfire. They are mainly doing this through the black population. They tell them that Jesus was white and preached that the Kingdom of Heaven was for white people, and that Mohammad was black and accepted blacks. By this, the muslims convert many blacks to Islam. When I spoke to one of the muslims here about this he was completely shocked that they did that. He said it was wrong and that Mohammad wasn't black. In the Qua'ran it says that it is okay to lie to people in order to get them to believe your religion. I didnt realize the extent of how true this was until I saw this mosque. Islam changes and shifts its beliefs and lies in order to get as many followers as possible.

I am so thankful for the stability of living a life with Christ, where you are anchored to something solid, the ROCK. Something that doesn't move and shift, but has always been and will always be the same.

Well, I dont know if I will be able to post until after I arrive in Bangalore where I will tell you all about the 24 hour train ride. Please pray that I will get some sleep and it wont be too bad.