And we saw that in the other scripture, in 1 Corinthians 3, where the works are tested; and if they're burnt up, the person is saved yet by fire. They come into Heaven, they come into eternity with the Lord; but all that God had prepared them for, they haven't qualified for. This is so distressing. What an amazing thing, to have an abundant entrance; and I don't think it's just in eternity, and in the millennial. It actually starts to happen now. You start to access God. You start to see His presence in your life. You start to begin to feel Him around your life. You have divine connections take place. You start to see blessings happening in your business, in your personal life. Around your life, God begins to start to make His presence manifest. The kingdom is coming near to you, and you know that one day, an abundant entrance will be given for you, into that place.
So your life is set. I will give myself passionately for works of serving God. I'm zealous that Jesus name be honoured, so I will let my light shine before all men, that they see what I do, and know there's no way it could be anything except: God is working in that person. Now does that mean it's all about supernatural things? No. I tell you something: when you see an unselfish act of kindness, even an unsaved person's got to say: I never seen anything like that. God is in that. Think of Mother Theresa, whatever you think of her, unsaved people said: God - we saw God in those acts of kindness.
I'll just finish with this quick story. We were in a very difficult season in our life, and we faced many pressures at work, and many pressures at home, many pressures in the ministry as well. Just there were lots of pressures, and we were really quite tired, and it was early days of serving a ministry, and financially we had no money. I'd taken a pay cut from about - that day it was about $24,000; and I went down to $6,000 to serve the Lord. It was quite stressful for us, with a family of four; and so we had to lean and depend on the Lord constantly for our provision. We were at a place we were quite emotionally and spiritually drained, and tired, and we needed a break. Someone offered us a place up in another city, up in the north, where we could be looked after as a family for three weeks, and have a break, which was wonderful. It wouldn't cost us anything. All we had to do was get there, and I checked out the money we had. I had enough money to get there, and not enough money to get back, so I said: well this is very good - so Lord, I'm leaving in this car to go there. If you want me back you'll have to provide [Laughter], and I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm not going to tell anyone. No one will know my need, except you.
And so we went on that, and we were there, and had quite a nice time of break; and one evening, one of our friends said: we'd like to invite you out for a meal. I said that'd be wonderful. We'd love to go out for a meal; and so they invited us for a meal. When we got there they said: no, actually it's not with us. It's a special surprise, and they said we've got a map for you. We want you go to this address, and the surprise is there, which was quite unusual. So we drove around the streets, and there's a house there with the lights on, and the door is open. There's a big sign up: Welcome Mike and Joy, and so we went inside and there's no one in the house. The house has got beautiful candles. It's lit up. The lounge is lit up with candlelight and they've got candles around the room and candles on the table and the table is set for a course, about a five course meal and all the meal was laid out there before us. There's beautiful Christian music playing; and anyway, there was a note to us, that said: our ministry is to express the love of Christ to people, and we will come and serve you coffee at the end of this meal. So we sat down, and they had a scripture for us.
I can remember the love of God to this day, that I felt when two people I didn't even know showed the love of God. I can still feel what I felt then, the gratitude to God, for the kindness shown in such a practical way, to people who really needed it. They later came round and gave us coffee, and they said: this was our ministry. We ask only one thing: that you never tell anyone who we are. To this day, I've never told anyone who the people are, and they've continued. They said: we've had all these people come through our house, and we've had marriages restored. We've had lives restored, just through the simple act of making a home available, to show kindness to people.