TODAY’S PROPHETIC WORD
It doesn’t matter where you are in life, or how many things have gone wrong, or how many things you have screwed up. All it takes is one moment, or one word from the King, for Him to change your life. He will trade your ashes for the beauty of an abundant life. Jesus came to liberate us from any and all oppression. Mark 10:27 tells us that with man, this is impossible, but not with God, all things are possible with God.
A MILE IN HIS SHOES — PART 2
Ready for the rest of Alexander’s story? It is a true testament to how good overcomes evil when we listen to the Holy Spirit’s prompting to love the unlovable and help the hopeless…
A slave to the Mexican cartels, Alexander worked the trash dumps of Matamoros. Paralyzed in a shootout, he was confined to a wheelchair. His “elephant feet,” bare and infected, drug on the ground through the toxic filth until the Holy Spirit told me to put my own gigantic shoes on his feet.
Alexander got saved that day, but his story didn’t end there.
Seven years later, I was in Brownsville, Texas, just across the border from Matamoros. I had spent an hour preaching on the goodness of God, and I told the story of Alexander’s shoes. After the service, I saw a man in a very dirty suit waiting to talk to me. He held a Bible in a ziplock bag.
“I am sorry I am so dirty,” he said in Spanish. “I really wanted to look nice. I saw you on TV yesterday in Matamoros and I spent all night and all day getting across the border to be here tonight.”
I instantly knew the mud was from the river. He had risked his life to cross it illegally.
“I’m sorry it was so difficult to get to me. What can I do for you?” I asked.
He was Alexander’s brother, coming to tell me the rest of the story.
Alexander really had a life-transforming encounter with Jesus on that hot summer day in the trash dump. Not long after that, some people took him into their home where he got cleaned up and his feet healed. Because I had prophetically given him my shoes, he knew it was OK for him to prophesy. It had been a part of my walk, and since he had my shoes, it was now part of his.
His brother told me Alexander would have dreams and they would come true. The Lord would tell him about a problem and how to council the person needing help. That person would later show up. One day, Alexander dreamed his brother was coming to see him and the Lord gave him a word.
“You are not supposed to leave your wife. You need to go back and get her and give your life to Christ. When you find her, you will find out she is now saved and is praying for you.”
The brother had no idea Alexander knew the Lord, or that he knew he had left his wife. When he found her, it was just as Alexander had said.
“In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while slumbering upon their beds; Then he opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction.”
-Job 33:15-16
“Many times,” his brother, now a pastor, told me, “Alexander would have a dream and write out all of the things God told him to tell people before they even came to our house. One day he told me, ‘God showed me a man with a badge is coming today and when he does, hand them this letter I wrote from the Lord to him.’ Two hours later, a federal police officer knocked on the door. I told him, ‘God told us you were coming and this note is for you.’”
It read something like this:
“Manuel, I am real and I love you. Turn to me now and live with me. I have life for you. Turn from idols and salvation is coming to your house today. Jesus. No other name.”
Wow! Story after story, Alexander’s brother went on and on. Finally, like a little kid, I asked, “Can I come to your house? I’d like to see him.”
But that was never to happen. He had died a week earlier surrounded by his loved ones.
“He would want you to have this. I had to bring it to you,” the brother said, handing me the baggie with Alexander’s Bible in it.
I took it out, opened it up, smelled it and held it close.
A life transformed. Hundreds of people saved. Through a simple pair of shoes, the goodness of God had overcome the worst evil Satan had thrown at Alexander.
TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO ASK HOW GOD CAN USE YOU TO ENSURE THAT GOOD OVERCOMES EVIL. WRITE DOWN HIS RESPONSES AND ACT ON THEM!
From my book: GOOD OVERCOMES EVIL
