Watch Chan’s entire sermon presented during the Moody Bible Institute’s Founders Week Conference
During a recent sermon given at a Moody Bible Institute conference, missionary and author Francis Chan told the audience that he and a team of other Christians had witnessed the miraculously healing of several people in a rural village located in Myanmar, including two deaf children.
The video of Chan’s entire sermon was posted online by the Moody Bible Institute.
Chan, the former teaching pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, California, was preaching at the conference earlier this month when he told a story about visiting a village that had no believers.
“At one point, we were in this village that had no believers, like zero. Not a single one,” he recalled. “And this lady had built a relationship with the head monk and the village leader and somehow was able to work out that we could go into the village.”
“My translator told me he had been in that area before and was chased out with knives and stones thrown at him, so he was terrified,” Chan continued. “But the entire village showed up, and I had the honor of sharing the Gospel through a translator, to be the first one to lay out the Gospel and explain that they had a Creator and explain that He had a son and explain what He did on the cross and the resurrection.”
“There’s no way I can communicate to you how much peace I felt,” the pastor stressed. “I am sharing the Good News with a village of people who have never heard of this before. I can’t tell you how right it felt.”
The Crazy Love author told the audience that he asked God to help him heal the villagers who were suffering.
“I’m going, ‘God, please, please hear,'” he recalled. “People started coming forward for healing.”
“Every person I touched was healed,” Chan said as the conference crowd applauded.
“You guys, OK, this is craziness to me,” he added. “I have never experienced this in 52 years. I’m talking like a little boy and a little girl who were deaf. We laid hands, she starts crying and smiling. These are not Christians who have even heard about Jesus, and she’s freaking out. We lay hands on her little brother, we lay hands on him, and he starts hearing for the first time.”
Chan also admitted that the experience was out of his “comfort zone,” but “Man, it happened. It happened.”
“I thought I had faith, but my faith was at another level,” he noted. “And I think there are some things that contributed — some of it was just faith in His Word, that when Jesus says, ‘I am in you and you are in Me,’ to take that literally.”
Chan explained that although he disagreed theologically with some of his team members, he believes God was “honored by this fight for unity, and I believe God was honored by this pursuit of the unreached, and obeying the Great Commission and we saw power.”
“And I don’t know that that means it will happen every time,” he continued. “My theology says I don’t think it will happen everywhere … but best I understand Scripture, He wants me to believe in my unity with Him, this power that I have because He and I are one. He wants to believe that you and I can become perfectly one.”
Chan also announced that in a few weeks, he and his family will be relocating to Hong Kong. The reality of persecution, he said, has caused him to “evaluate” his beliefs.
The missionary said there’s “nothing like” preaching to people who have never heard Jesus’s name.
As CBN News reported last November, Chan announced he and his family were moving to Asia in February of 2020 to become international missionaries.
The former pastor caused quite a stir in 2010 when he announced to the congregation at Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley he was resigning his post as lead pastor of the church he and his wife founded the same year they were married.
They then founded the house church movement called We Are Church, which is based in Northern California, where Chan moved his family in 2013. There are more than a dozen churches today with anywhere from 10 to 20 congregants and about 30 pastors (two per home), all of whom serve bi-vocationally, meaning they aren’t financially compensated for their ministry work.
Since making the rapid decision to move his family overseas, Chan admitted he is beginning to feel a bit nostalgic about the United States. But in moments of doubt, he said, the words written by the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:4 have “convicted” him.
The passage reads, “We reject all shameful deeds and underhanded methods. We don’t try to trick anyone or distort the word of God. We tell the truth before God, and all who are honest know this.”
Source: CBNNEWS.COM