The Struggle Against Powers of Darkness- In God's Service Without Authority
special, but because He has gone to the Father.
I can't recount all the promises that had become especially precious to me in those days. I shall only mention one more of the many. In John 16:24 the Lord Jesus says, "Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." It is not necessary for us to obtain joy from the things of this world. We can receive complete joy by asking for it in Jesus' name.
Regarding my calling to the ministry I often prayed, "Lord Jesus, if I am to preach the gospel, then I want to preach like you." The Lord Jesus didn't just preach in the synagogues, so I saw myself not only preaching indoors but out in the open as well.
After I had completed my training, the Lord Jesus did something completely unexpected. He showed me that I should not only preach to the whites, but also to the black people, to the Zulus. This was most extraordinary to me because, before my conversion, I was of the opinion that blacks weren't equal to us whites. Until then, I couldn't imagine that blacks had the same feelings and thoughts as whites. Today, I am ashamed of the attitude I used to have. Most of my time since then has been spent with blacks, I have lived among them, and that which I had previously so rejected I came to accept when Jesus came into my life.
Initially I couldn't speak Zulu, much less preach in Zulu, because I had never wasted time with this language and wasn't even interested in these black people, whom I despised. But because of my love for Jesus I overcame my dislike and was prepared to go.
Chapter 2
The Struggle Against Powers of DarknessIn God's Service Without Authority
I was a missionary for twelve years before the revival broke out. I preached straight from the heart, although I knew pastors who didn't. Some of them stated that you needed to be careful what you preached, because, if you preached the truth, people might possibly walk out of the church. But I said to the Zulus, "Repent and change your lives. If you don't, you're on your way to hell."
Then the Zulus would respond, "We hear what you say, but you've got to understand:- Christianity is the white man's religion. We Zulus have our own religion. You are a Christian because your forefathers were Christians. If you had been born into a Zulu family, you would be like us."
"Christianity is good, and we've profited considerably from Western civilisation. You've built churches and schools for us, but Christianity is just not enough. We also wish to hold on to our traditions, we want to retain our ancestral worship. Even if we are Christians we must take our sick children to the witch doctor to find out why the child is ill and who has cast a spell to make it sick."
"When someone has died, we must celebrate a feast for the departed in order to bring back and worship his spirit, because the spirit of a deceased person inhabits a snake's body. It is our custom to take a 'mancishane' (small beer jug) and a piece of meat during the feast and set them before the spirits of the dead." (This is usually done in a special place at the back wall of a Zulu hut).
I strove to make clear to them that ancestral worship was demonic and that we didn't need any such things if we had Jesus, but they explained to me in their own way that, for them, Christianity was like water that one pours on a fire: it kills the flame, but the glowing embers remain. That is why they wished to keep their old traditions, which, in their opinion, penetrated to the root of the matter. My attempts to demonstrate to them that it suffices if you have Jesus were all in vain.
One day I prayed earnestly, "O Lord, please be with me today when I hold the service. Grant me wisdom and the power of your Holy Spirit. Give me your word and the authority to convince these Zulus that you are not just the white man's God, but the Son of God who died for all mankind, who rose again and ascended into heaven."
I worked out my sermon very carefully, beginning in the Old Testament with what the prophets had foretold regarding the coming of Jesus Christ. Isaiah, (who lived six hundred years before the Messiah was born), prophesied the virgin birth. I told the Zulus how all these promises had come to fulfilment, and how the Lord Jesus had eventually died on the cross for our sins and rose again so that we should have life.
I said to them, "We don't need to worship Mohammed. We can go to his grave where his bones still lie. We don't need Buddha. He died and that was the end. Those are dead gods. But Jesus is a living God. His grave is
empty because He rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and all power in heaven and on earth is given unto Him. There is no other name given among men by which we can be saved other than the name of Jesus. For all men, independent of the colour of their skin, there is only one way: Jesus Christ. He is the way, the truth and the life. He does not change, He is the same today as He was two thousand years ago. Just as people came to Him then, we can come to Him today as well."
I had hardly finished my sermon, when an old woman came up to me and asked, "Mfundisi (Pastor), is it true what you told us?" "Yes," I replied." Is Jesus, the white man's God, really alive, just as you said?" "Yes!" "Can you speak with Him?" "Of course. You can speak to Him too. That's what we call prayer. Everybody can pray." "Oh," she said, "I am so glad that I have found one person who serves the living God. I have a grown-up daughter who is completely mad. Could you please ask your God to heal her?"
I didn't know what to say. What a fool I had been! I thought I had been cornering these people, but instead, I had cornered myself without even leaving a loophole. How should I get myself out of this awkward situation? I couldn't just ask God to heal the girl. What should be done now, what could I do? I had here a simple-minded heathen woman before me. If she had at least been an intelligent person, I could have asked her: "Are you sure that it is God's will that your daughter should be healed?" or "Might this not be the cross you have to bear?" or "Is it God's time that He should heal her now?" The Bible addresses such problems as the cross that we must bear, submitting to God's will, and appointed times which the Lord lays down. But if I wanted to explain all that to this simple-minded heathen woman she would only become confused. So I was at a loss, and didn't know what to do. I remained quite calm outwardly, not betraying my perplexity, and finally asked the woman, "Where is your daughter? Is she here?"
"No, she is at home."
That was a bit of a relief. I thought that if I could only gain some time, I would most certainly think of something. "Where do you live?"
"Not so far away, about one kilometre."
"Can we get there by car?"
"Halfway, and then we must walk."
"All right, just give me some time. I'll finish here, and then I'll come with you."
On the way there, she told me that she was a widow and that her husband had passed away four years previously. She had only this one daughter, and a married son who was working in Durban. When we arrived at her home, I looked into the hut and cried out in dismay, "But you didn't tell me half of what I see here!"
In the middle of the hut I saw a girl sitting on the floor, her arms bound to the centre pole with wire. The wire had cut deeply into her flesh, so that blood was flowing down, and she was covered with scars and wounds. Some of these had healed, but others were still fresh. She pulled at the wire with such vehemence that it cut deeply into her arms. She spoke incessantly in foreign languages, and at times it was not possible to determine which language it was.
"How long has she been bound like this?" I asked her mother.
"For the past three weeks she has been talking non-stop, day and night. She does not eat anything and she does not sleep. We bring her food, but she takes the plate and throws it against the wall."
"But why don't you use something softer to tie her up? It's cruel, to bind her with that wire."
"We've already tried everything else. She breaks the strongest ropes, then she runs around and we can't catch her. She gets into the neighbour's fields and gardens and pulls out the cabbage, the maize and the other vegetables. She destroys everything. The people are afraid of her and the men take their sticks, beat her and set their dogs on her. Often she runs into the mountains and doesn't come back." The woman looked at me, and with tears in her eyes she asked me, "Can you imagine what it means to a mother's heart, to have such a child?"
She continued with her story: "The girl tears her clothing to shreds and runs around naked. She is very
dangerous. There is a man here who has a big scar where he was bitten by her. When she bites someone she won't let go until somebody else comes to the person's rescue. Once she ran into the school and the children all jumped out the windows and fled from her in fear. The school committee has informed me that something must be done to prevent these incidents. Look at my cattle pen. I don't have any cows, sheep or goats left. Every animal I owned I sacrificed to the spirits. The cows I didn't kill I had to sell to pay the witch doctor. I haven't got any more money. I'm at the end of my strength."
Weeping, she finished her story with the words, "You know, I have often wanted to take a knife and cut my daughter's throat. At other times I've wanted to bring my own life to an end. But something always held me back. What would become of my daughter? Nobody would look after her. Now I am so glad that I have found a person who serves the living God! Perhaps there is still hope."
When the woman said that, I felt as if my heart had stopped beating. In my innermost soul I cried out to God, "O Lord, you are still the same God as of old. Can't you do something?"
I went to some of my colleagues and shared my experience with them. I asked them to pray with me for this girl. Next I drove to my parents' farm and asked them for a room where the girl could stay while we prayed for her. My parents readily agreed and prepared a room. Together with a few other men I fetched the girl and brought her to my parents' house. Everybody in the whole area, the entire tribe, knew what was going on.
I said to my colleagues, "Look, for years we've been praying for revival, but up to now it has failed to come. Maybe this is the match that we must strike to make the fire burn. If this girl is healed, then the revival might finally break out, because the whole tribe knows her: the chief, the children, all the people, young and old. What a mighty victory it would be for our Lord Jesus if the girl were healed. Then the Zulus would realise that Jesus is the only true God."
But we had hardly brought the girl into her nicely furnished room, when she turned the table upside down and began destroying the chairs. We were eventually forced to remove all the furniture, leaving only the bed. But then she attempted to pull out the springs in the mattress, so that we had to take the bed out of the room as well, leaving her only with an 'icansi' (a grass mat) and a blanket. The next thing that our protégé did was to break the panes and frames of the windows. Within a few hours that room looked like a pigsty, in which not just one but many pigs were living.
We prayed day and night for three weeks, but the girl wasn't healed. Instead, I was at the end of my strength and close to a nervous breakdown. The girl sang her satanic hymns incessantly. Someone advised me to plead the blood of Jesus, which the devil would fear and flee, but to no avail. On the contrary, the girl began to blaspheme the blood. Again and again those horrible, sacrilegious songs resounded through the room, renouncing the blood and death of the Lord Jesus as only the devil could do it. All this time the girl would sit half or fully naked in her excrements, blaspheming. She would stamp on the concrete floor with her bare feet, like somebody attempting to demolish it with a sledge hammer. She carried on like that for hours on end, and the noise and blasphemous songs could be heard from far away.
I couldn't understand it. We had done what the Bible taught us, but it didn't work. Our experience belied the theory. I felt like the evolutionists, wise people of this world, who claim that there is no creator and no God. Millions and billions of years ago we were supposedly all fish, and these fish developed legs. Not only did they then evolve into frogs, but also into monkeys, which somehow lost their tails and thereby initiated the human race. The advocates of this theory can explain all the details most precisely, even down to the number of years required for this development. But, strangely, there were always missing links. Many years ago it was announced that a certain Prof. Smith had caught a Coelacanth (a fish long believed to be extinct). They believed that this fish constituted a missing link, but to their great disappointment, this could not be verified. And that is exactly how I felt in my position: The theory was correct, but in practice it didn't work.
What was I to do? Go back to the girl's mother and tell her that her daughter had not been healed? Everybody in the area knew that we Christians were praying for this girl. They had heard me preach, "Don't go to the witch doctors, don't sacrifice oxen and goats to the spirits. Jesus is the answer to every problem, come to Him." They were all waiting to see what would happen, and now we Christians had failed. We prayed with all our strength, "O God, it's not our name which is at stake here. People won't say that we have failed, they will say: 'It is their Jesus who has failed.'" But heaven seemed barred and we received no answer to our prayers. In the end we all gave up and were compelled to take the girl back.
Then I beseeched the Lord, "O God, I beg you to send me somewhere else. I can no longer stand before these people and preach to them. I've got to be honest with them. I just can't support something that doesn't work! I have to be honest with myself as well, because I, too, have a heart and a conscience." After all, I couldn't go to
these people and say that there is no God, that the white man's religion is worthless. The best thing would be to go somewhere else. But I said to myself that I would never again preach so foolishly as to evoke a situation as difficult as the one I had landed in now.
From then on I could no longer believe that the Bible was God's Word and that everything in it was true. I deemed it possible that parts of Scripture were true and other parts weren't. Anything that couldn't be reconciled to my experience and my own train of thought, I rejected. I was like a fool sitting on a throne and passing judgement on what is true and what is not. I would say, "This is legitimate nowadays, but that is not. This might have been valid two thousand years ago, but not today. Things have changed. We can't expect everything in the Bible to be true."
During all those years I had preached the gospel and sometimes hundreds of people had come forward in one meeting to accept the Lord Jesus Christ. Then I would usually pray the sinners' prayer with them before they went home. I knew these young people and the kinds of books they read at home. I knew that some of them even possessed pornographic magazines. I was acquainted with young men who couldn't pass a book shop without looking at the pictures of naked women hanging there. Some of them would even buy them, and then hide them from their parents - and all of these young people had accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord!
The Lord Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst" (John 4:13-14). No, I said to myself, it's not true. Are there people in this world who are thirstier than the Christians? Some Christians even crave abominable sins, and if they can't sin openly, they'll do it secretly. At some point in time they came to Jesus and they drank, but they're still thirsty. Some crave cigarettes, some crave alcohol, some crave sex and other worldly things. Children ask their parents why they aren't permitted to dance or go to the cinema and enjoy their lives like other people. The parents have a hard time raising their children correctly, but they are all Christians!
Perhaps Jesus made a mistake, or at least the authors of the New Testament did. Probably John didn't write down exactly what Jesus said. What I experienced was different to what was written. These young people came to me, I prayed with them, and they accepted the Lord Jesus. But they remained dirty. They dressed just like the people of this world. Yet the Bible teaches us, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world" (1 John 2:15). If you see a Christian and a non-Christian walking down the street, you often can't tell the difference. Yet the Bible says, "Be not conformed to this world!" (Romans 12:2). I doubted the truth of many such verses in the Bible, because I couldn't believe what was written there. I believed in what I had experienced, in what I saw and what I heard.
I continued preaching for another six years, and after twelve years of ministry altogether I arrived at Mapumulo. I thought about it over and over again, and I began to recall the time when God had first called me to preach the gospel. Hadn't I declared, "Lord, if I'm to preach the gospel, I don't want to play church." But when I asked myself, "Erlo, what have you been doing for the past twelve years?" I had to admit I had been playing the whole time. I had preached the gospel for twelve years and there weren't even twelve true Christians, in conformance with biblical standards, to show for it. I remembered the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 3:1,5: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof: from such turn away." I thought, "Where are the people that have this power of which the Bible speaks? I haven't got it myself. I can't carry on like this. I see other people who are apparently enjoying their lives. They're making money, and here I am, a poor missionary, preaching something that doesn't work."
I assembled my Zulu congregation and said to them, "I'm finished. I just can't go on like this any longer." Maybe my problem was also due to the fact that I used theological ideas to try to explain things away. I used to say that, possibly, these people didn't live the lives they should because they were too primitive, too uneducated. If they were more educated, they would be better able to grasp the truth. But there was one verse in the Bible which I could not forget. The Lord Jesus took a little child one day, put it in their midst and said, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein" (Luke 18:17). Every Christian and every pastor should take that to heart. Jesus says in Matthew 18:3: "Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Now when Jesus says we need to become "as little children," he doesn't mean we should become childish, but that we should become childlike in our faith. There's a distinct difference.
This word out of the mouth of Jesus was the decisive factor in my decision to abandon all my so-called wisdom and to read the Bible in childlike faith. I then asked the Zulus whether they would be prepared to come to two Bible studies a day: at seven in the morning and at five o'clock in the evening. I said, "We will take our Bibles and we won't explain anything away. We won't justify ourselves, either, but accept things as they are written. If