Be Free
Last night at a hotel in Cardiff, Elim International Missions held a Charity Dinner to raise money for our ministry ‘Be Free’. I was so pleased that 170 guests came many not necessarily holding to the Christian faith but all sharing our humanitarian concern. We had a lot of fun and at the same time we all knew this was going to have a huge impact!
The whole event lasted 6 hours and in that time 820 people in our amazing world will have been taken!
What does it mean to be taken?
You are no longer a human being, you have become an object, a possession belonging to another person who has taken every option away from you so that you are forced to do things against your will.
There is no escape. This is your life now. All that you had and all that you were is now destroyed. It will become a distant memory.
Can you imagine being taken?
And every day 3287 are taken.
Already since you have been reading this blog 4 people have been taken.
43% of all victims of forced labour are trafficked for sexual exploitation.
Sex trafficking generates $7 billion each year, though Interpol says that it is nearer $19 billion.
10 million children are subjected to various forms of sexual exploitation in the commercial sex industry.
The largeness of these figures stand over us like mountains of doom.
How can we ever deal with this evil?
1. See the heart of God.
Let’s read a few verses today:
Deuteronomy 10:18
Psalm 68:6
Psalm 146:7
Isaiah 61:1
2. Make the heart of God your heart. The answer is not to lose sight of the one child, the one woman, the one man.
That 1 who right now is taken and is trapped.
We can change 1 person’s world.
That is the purpose of our Be Free ministry. Be Free from human exploitation.
When I was a child I played at war games, killing my friends who were the enemy, making a noise with my wooden stick imagining it being a Kalashnikov.
Today 300,000 children are forced to do that for real. For those who have escaped or have found themselves as post-war civilians, they are living haunted lives, robbed of education, their years of development, they are now barely adults with a social stigma for having committed horrendous crimes. They have no future.
But ‘Be Free’ says they do.
We cannot eradicate slavery completely, but we can delete exploitation from one more individual.
3. Give money.
We may never be able to rescue a person or see a person’s life restored. We may never be able to travel to rescue children from a life filled with terror. But we can give money so that these things do take place. We can give money for urgent medical care, for trauma counselling, for nicole generating businesses.
Money helps. We can give it.
It is for freedom that Christ set you free.
Missions Paul 