There are times when the incense of heaven fills your heart.
Jesus called the school on Thursday afternoon. “Hello,” He said. “I am Jesus, and I will be coming to church this Sabbath to share a message with the church.”
The school secretary panicked and called the elder in charge. The pastor, you see, was away for the weekend. The elder called the pastor, told him about the call, and asked what to do.
“Be kind to Him,” Pastor Dale said.
Instead, they panicked, called the conference office, and then the local police. Sabbath morning they were ready—eager, even—for Jesus to come.
Receiving Jesus
Jesus, partly paralyzed and dependent on an aluminum walker, arrived in a taxi and clumped his way through the front doors of the church.
“Yes, I am Jesus,” he declared. “And I have a message.”
The church threw him out.
They told Pastor Dale what had happened. “I imagine it was a bit like being thrown out of Nazareth,” Pastor Dale cringed.
Tuesday, when he returned home, Pastor Dale found out where Jesus lived, asked a church elder to join him, and dropped by for a visit.
Jesus was a little man, living in a small house, his heart filled with kindness and hope.
“I wanted to tell the church that God wants them to care for the people who are hurting and hungry,” Jesus said. “That’s all.”
“How about coming to church with me this Sabbath?” Pastor Dale invited. “You’ll be my guest.”
“Wow,” Jesus said. “It’s been 40 years since I was baptized there. Thirty since the last time I was inside the doors. I’d love to come with you.”
So it was arranged, and Pastor Dale began planning for Sabbath. “God told me that the sermon was to be about blind Bartimaeus shouting at Jesus beside the Jericho gate, especially the part where people told the loud blind beggar to ‘be quiet!’ God also told me there was to be an anointing during the service.”
The anointing was for Angela. She and her husband, Gil, are both 100 percent First Nation Navajo.
Angela had recently accepted Jesus, but was going through some terrible health challenges. “So I asked Jeff, one of our church leaders, to anoint her,” explains Pastor Dale. “It was his first time doing anything like that, but he agreed, and I brought my special frankincense oil.”
Pastor Dale told blind Bart’s story while his special guest, Jesus, sat quietly in the second pew, his walker waiting in the aisle. When Pastor Dale asked Jesus to join Angela and Jeff up front with him, Jesus pushed his walker forward, praying quietly during Angela’s anointing.
“There’s another anointing we also need to do today,” Pastor Dale spoke to the entire congregation. “This man here is a new friend of mine. His name is Dennis, though some of you may know him as Jesus. Angela, would you be willing to anoint Dennis and pray for him today?”
Angela took the oil and dabbed a couple drops on Dennis.
“Wow, that smells better than my aftershave!” Dennis said loudly. “Can I have some more?”
“Give him all he wants,” Pastor Dale told Angela. She dumped half the bottle into Dennis’ hands, and he quickly patted it all over his face and rubbed it into his hair.
Dennis, his voice full of tears, shouted. “Wow! This is so good!” And the congregation joined the celebration.
Scripture Come Alive
After the potluck meal, Dennis told Pastor Dale and Angela about coming to church the Sabbath before.
“As I was getting ready to leave home, God told me to put all my cash in my wallet. I didn’t know why until I was in the taxi and the driver started telling me about all the trials he was going through. His family is in a financial bind, and his kids are having trouble making it through other problems. His life is really tough!”
Dennis was so overwhelmed by the taxi driver’s story that he opened his wallet and gave the driver all the cash God had told him to bring. “For you,” he said. “From Jesus.”
As Dennis told the money story, Pastor Dale’s mind went to the day Jesus saw a widow woman slipping her last two mites into the temple treasury. “It was like Scripture coming to life right here in our small town!”
Sabbath night Angela brought her husband, Gil, to “Underground Oasis,” an evening meeting Pastor Dale leads in an old warehouse downtown. Gil had not accepted Jesus and was battling demons that were making life hell on earth. The demons attacked in the middle of the meeting, and Pastor Dale’s wife, Simona, walked over to Gil and commanded the demons to “come out of him right now!”
The demons obeyed.
And Gil, empty and eager to be filled, prayed for Jesus to come into his life, and asked to be baptized!
Everyone rejoiced. “It was just like when the demons were cast out of the Gadarene wild man!”
After the celebration calmed down a little bit, but while the meeting was still going on, one of the visitors, a very large man, asked Pastor Dale if he could talk to him. The two moved over to the side of the room.
“My name is Eric,” the man said. “I’m a 100 percent native Eskimo from Alaska, but right now I’m driving a taxi here in town. I’m recovering from a bunch of stuff, and life has been really tough. Some people aren’t comfortable with a big Alaskan like me. Then, a couple weeks ago, a man named Dennis hired me to take him to the Seventh-day Adventist church on Saturday morning. He was a nice old guy who needed one of those fold-up metal walkers to lean on. A very kind man. Well, in the taxi he asked about my family, and though I usually don’t tell anyone about my family, something made me tell Dennis everything. I told him about my kids, our financial troubles, my wife’s illness, and how we were living on the edge.”
Pastor Dale listened with wide eyes, in awe at how God was fitting so many stories together.
“While we were in the taxi,” Eric continued, “Dennis took out his wallet and handed me a large wad of paper money. Said it was for me, from Jesus. I accepted it, but was really uncomfortable. It was a lot of money: $1,700, to be exact! In fact, I was so uncomfortable that I haven’t spent any of it on myself or my family. Dennis has called me several times and asked if I would be willing to go to the market and buy some groceries, and to the hardware store and buy some other things he needed. He always offered me more money, but I refused, and instead used the money he had given me. I’ve spent several hundred dollars of Dennis’s gift money to buy things for him.”
Pastor Dale started to ask a question, but stopped when Eric pushed a small paper bag toward him.
“Pastor, this is the money Dennis gave me. I have spent hundreds of dollars of it, but the full $1,700 is still here in the paper bag! How is this possible? I’ve decided that it’s God’s money and that I need to give it back to Dennis. Do you think that would be OK?”
Pastor Dale smiled, thinking of a widow and her son in the small town of Zarephath.
