Jehovah-Jireh
And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh. As it is said to this day, In the mount of Jehovah it shall be provided. (Genesis 22:14)
During the year 2014, the Lord spoke to Rev. Rachel and Pastor Ling-Ling through a series of incidents, dreams, and biblical insights, telling The Promised Land Ministries International (TPL) to move toward establishing a church in addition to being an organization. Since then, TPL leadership had been praying and seeking God for guidance on how to proceed. In the process, the Lord has been revealing His strategies and principles step by step. In mid-November of 2015, after Rachel and Ling-Ling received the final confirmation during their visit to Israel, TPL announced the date to start Sunday services on January 3rd, 2016. Since then, TPL began looking to rent a location to hold the service.
Rachel and Ling-Ling started with checking into the possibilities of renting a church facility, a community center, a hotel conference room, or a school meeting hall as many other starting churches had done. In the meanwhile, they felt led by God to ask group members from the Eagle’s Gathering, a leadership development group that they have been leading, to seek God’s guidance. One of the members, Christine, saw in her mind a picture of a pitched roof building without a cross on top while praying. TPL prayed but did not know what that meant. A week later, another member, Charlene, also saw in her prayer a pitched roof building with white walls, but without a cross on top as well. When the TPL leaders asked the Lord on this, it dawned on Ling-Ling that the buildings in the new town center of her city, Santa Clara, look like that. As TPL sought God further, Ling-Ling felt that He was directing TPL to look into business buildings. Since this is ministry related, Rachel and Ling-Ling thought it would be best if one of TPL members knew the business owner from whom they would rent.
While Rachel was sharing the thought to the Eagle’s Gathering group, one of TPL board members, Lee-Ling, felt nudged by the Lord to check into Dr. Wu’s clinic. Even though both she and Dr. Wu’s wife, Jane, are in the same exercise class, they have not seen each other for a while. After Lee-Ling prayed for God’s confirmation, she met Jane the very next day. Although they had known each other for more than twenty years, neither of them knew that the other was also a Christian until that day. It turned out that the clinic has a large conference room in their basement for rent. When Rachel and Ling-Ling went to check out the facility, Jane saw and recognized Ling-Ling (they used to attend the same church from a few years back). Ling-Ling impressed her as someone who constantly serves others in the background.
After touring the facility, Rachel and Ling-Ling prayed and felt that this was the location that God wanted TPL to rent. In fact, the building of Dr. Wu’s clinic has a pitched roof with white walls which are not very common for business buildings in that area. However, Rachel and Ling-Ling continued to pray for additional confirmation from Dr. Wu and his wife. Instead of asking for the place to be leased at a favorable price to TPL, they prayed that the owners would be moved to rent their space for the Lord’s sake. Sure enough, when TPL leaders met with Jane the following week, she mentioned that Dr. Wu is a fourth-generation Christian from his side of family. After some discussion between Jane and her husband, they decided to lease the basement to TPL at a very low rent as an offering to the Lord. Glory to God - the Faithful One! Not only that, after a six-month lease was signed on the December 19th of 2015 to use the facility on Sundays, the Lord also reminded Ling-Ling of her previous prayer that the place would allow TPL to leave the church settings there most of the time without setting up and taking down after each use of the facility.
After the search for a facility was complete, another member of the Eagle’s Gathering, Justine, shared her amazement of the entire process. During her trip to Israel with Rachel and Ling-Ling from November 3rd to the 16th, she started to pray for the location search and continued to do so after returning to the States. Every time she prayed for this, the Heavenly Father always told her to “wait and see!” Back when Justine was a board member of another church in the San Francisco Bay Area for a few years, she had been involved in looking for places to rent for church meetings. The process was always long and weary, leading to results that were barely satisfactory. Hence, she couldn’t help but get worried about TPL’s search for she knew how hard it was in this area. On top of that, with the starting date of Sunday services approaching quickly, there were still no potential places in sight by early December. To make things even more unbelievable for her, Rachel and Ling-Ling began to spend a lot of time and effort on helping the homeless people upon God’s prompting instead of focusing on the search. However, when the Lord’s timing came, everything fell into place and settled without much effort.
This incidence strongly provoked Justine to reflect on how the search process was carried out. From her previous experiences, other church leaders worked very hard in securing a place and then prayed for God’s help. But TPL’s strategy was the complete opposite. They prayed for the Lord’s guidance step by step and then followed with complete obedience, which included switching focus to help the homeless as He directed. When this happened, TPL claimed God’s promise on Luke 6:38, “Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.” This process turned out to be exactly as the Scripture says! TPL invested time, effort and money into the homeless project, and the Lord allotted them a wonderful meeting place with much less effort, time and money!
May all the glory, honor, thanksgiving and praises be unto the Lord – Jehovah-jireh!
January 2016