As believers, we are Christ’s ambassadors in the world. The places we go each day are full of people who need to hear the truth of the Gospel and the full counsel of God contained in his Scriptures. Some of those people would even be extremely interested to hear it.
Do we, as those Gospel ambassadors, think about those seekers around us? Do we appreciate the opportunity?
Danny Allen certainly appreciates this reality. His life has been powerfully transformed because of someone who was in the right place at the right time, someone who was faithful to reach out to him five years ago.
Danny Allen grew up in Seattle, attending a church that his parents had joined and attended for three decades. As Danny got older, he started to wonder why his youth pastor was more interested in introducing him to “rap music from Compton” than showing him truths from Scripture.
“I didn’t really know what it was like to be discipled,” Danny reminisces. “My perspective of what discipleship was was very skewed.” While there were some people at his church who loved the Lord, there was not a lot of depth. Danny says that he never really read his Bible until his senior year of high school.
Because of this, Danny did not really understand God’s law. On the other hand, he did understand that sin could be enjoyable. He partied a lot in high school, and it eventually led to a trip to the hospital. It was there that God started to get his attention: “The Lord showed me the reality of what death is. Death is real, and there is a punishment for sin. From there on—that was my senior year—I took my faith seriously.” He confessed Christ as his only hope and slowly started to learn what it meant to walk with Him.
“Lord, show me what is true from your Scriptures. Lord, I just want to know the truth of your word.“
Danny moved to Spokane to attend Gonzaga in 2016, and while he knew he was saved with faith in everything that Christ had done for him, his young knowledge in the Scripture was tested a few months into his time at Gonzaga. He started being proselytized from missionaries of a cult called the World Mission Society Church of God. “These two guys come on to campus, and they’re talking to me,” Danny remembers. “They say, ‘Have you ever heard of the mother God because you know that there is a father God?’”
The missionaries went on to explain that the words in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image,” point to a father and a mother God. Danny felt that the idea was strange and contrary to what he had been taught. However, Danny felt that he didn’t have an explanation why this was the case. God’s word had not really been taught to him while he was growing up. “I didn’t really know a whole lot about Scripture. Looking back at that now, I know it was the Lord showing me the importance of knowing the Scriptures,” Danny says.
He met with these missionaries a few more times. They told him that he needed to be baptized on the Passover to receive the Holy Spirit. They also said that they didn’t meet on Sundays because they needed to honor the Sabbath by meeting on Saturdays. However, the strangest thing that he remembers them saying to him took place at a meeting at the old Starbucks on Hamilton Street.
Danny recalls the conversation: “They said, ‘Jesus has already come back. He’s already returned, and he’s a Korean guy named Ahn Sahng-hong.’ I said, ‘That’s a pretty big deal if Jesus has already come back, I should know about that.’”
Danny remembers feeling anxious and visibly distressed about this claim, not knowing if what they were saying was true or not. The missionaries then said to him, “Can we pray for you in the name of Ahn Sahng-hong?” Danny said that they could but that he was going to pray to Jesus because he knew that Jesus was Lord.
As the missionaries prayed to Ahn Sahng-hong, Danny remembers praying the following words to Jesus quietly in desperation: “Lord, show me what is true from your Scriptures. Lord, I just want to know the truth of your word.“
The way that the Lord answered his prayer was astounding. Danny took a bathroom break, and as he returned to the disciples of Ahn Sahng-hong, someone else stopped him on the way back to their table. Kayla Lewis, a former member of the College Ministry at Faith Bible Church, came up to Danny, and he recalls her saying, “I’ve been listening to what these guys have been saying to you, and none of it is true.”
“You are a direct answer to prayer! I literally just asked the Lord to show me what is true.”
Danny says that he told her right then, “You are a direct answer to prayer! I literally just asked the Lord to show me what is true.”
She also invited him to come to College Ministry at the church the next night. Danny gratefully agreed. His life has never been the same since.
“From that point on, it has been faithful men and women teaching me the word of God,” Danny states as he joyfully remembers the years following that answered prayer. “You can tell that the elders pray, ‘We want to be a loving community making disciples of Jesus Christ.’ I am more than thankful to see faithful examples of disciples of Jesus at Faith.”
Danny now follows the example he saw in Kayla, and the many faithful disciples at Faith Bible Church. Danny seeks to be a witness to his co-workers. After reading in a book that sixty percent of people who have never read the Bible would be willing to read it with someone who knew it, Danny asked a co-worker if he would be willing to read the Gospel of John with him during lunch breaks. They made it through the entire book, and Danny got to pray in front of this man every day.
He and his wife, Emma, also serve on Wednesday nights at Discovery, faithfully teaching God’s word to the elementary-aged kids.
The Lord is faithful to draw disciples to Himself. In His sovereignty, he uses people who are willing to barge in to conversations that they overhear. He uses people who are willing to tell others that what they are hearing is untrue, people who are willing to tell them where to find the truth.
Josh serves as Resident College Pastor for Faith's college ministry, Doxa. He and his wife, Pam, have three children.
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