Also On Audio Tape # 4 and 5
Mark 10:21 Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.
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Today,
I would like to share with you part of our family testimony as how to God
called us from Miami Florida, to Pena Blanca New Mexico. By
putting our testimony alongside a teaching on apostles, in no way am I claiming
my wife or I to be apostles. However our
calling has been apostolic by nature, and I believe that it has within it,
godly wisdom to impart. The process
that I am going to describe to you has taken place over a four-year period of
time.
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As
we have discussed in our previous teaching, the apostle is one whom is
commissioned and sent forth to represent the wishes and the interests of
another.
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Because
there is always a specific commissioning by the sender, which in this case is
the Lord Jesus, the apostle acts as the Lord’s ambassador. As with an
ambassador who represents any nation, that country’s interest far outweigh the
personal interests of the ambassador.
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An
ambassador who represents a nation on foreign soils puts forth the wishes and
interests of his or her nation before the country in which he or she
resides. The ambassador is able to
accomplish this because he or she enjoys the full backing, the power and
authority, and the credentials of the sending nation. Diplomatic intercourse with a Philippine ambassador is diplomatic
intercourse with the Philippines itself. This is the oneness of the ambassador
or apostle with the one who sent him or
her. Please observe the three
scriptures below;
Mat
10:40 He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that
receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.
Luke 10:16 He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.
John 14:9 Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?
My wife Mary, our four precious children, and I,
lived in Miami Florida for twenty years.
Mary comes from a well to do family, which allowed us to purchase a
three-bedroom, two-bathroom condominium with cash. To add to that we also decorated the whole place in authentic
cherry wood furniture. I also had good
career job loaded with benefits with the second largest Hispanic television
network in the world. We had no financial debt to speak of, two paid off cars,
many Christian friends and so forth and so on.
Yet Mary and
I were absolutely miserable! For many
years we had been stuck on the merry go round of what I call the “American
church ghetto.” Sundays was the most
highly pressured day of the week. We would get up early, and huff and puff our
way through jungles of tense arguments and busy bathrooms to finally get our
family off to church. Once we got
there, it was discouraging, in that it seemed as if same messages that we had
heard for years were still being preached.
We never stopped going to church, but I questioned the Lord seriously
for a number years, if indeed it was worth our effort to give up one of our two
precious free days for something that was so uneventful. The rest of our Christian experience
consisted of equally uneventful cell groups, and an occasional fairly
ritualistic outreach to the homeless.
Mary an I thought that we were going “lose it”, stuck
in this crazy “spinning wheel’ that we called church. Weeping, we would ask the Lord; “Is this it?” “Is this what
Christianity is all about?” “Where is the Book of Acts, Lord?” One day God in
His sometimes incredible blatant, but usually brief response said to us, “ If
you want the supernatural life, you must live supernaturally.”
I had grown up in the Virgin
Islands for thirteen years, and thought that as an answer to our desperate
prayers, the Lord Jesus was going to call us back to live and minister in the
West Indies.
I knew that the costs of island real
estate and normal living expenses were exorbitant in comparison to that of the
mainland. We knew therefore, that
selling our condominium would only at the very best cover one half of the price
of a modest home in St. Croix. We would
be forced to take out a mortgage, whereas in Miami we had none. It did not seem logical that the Lord would
take us out from a mortgage free situation to one that would incur debt again,
in His commission for us. In our
minds, the only way for us move and minister in the West Indies was to continue
to maintain ourselves debt free. The words of the Lord rang loud and clear in
our ears. “If you want the supernatural life, you must do something
supernatural.”
Luke
6:38 Give, and it shall be given unto
you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall
men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it
shall be measured to you again.
Mark 10:21 Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said
unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the
cross, and follow me
Mat 19:29 And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.
At the same
time the Lord began to challenge us with scriptures like the three above. One Sunday morning during a church service,
God spoke to my heart and told me, “Give the condominium away!” Only God could
say something like that! Mind you, the
Lord did not tell me to sell the condominium, but to give it away! After the service, in the church’s parking
lot, I began to recount to Mary what the Lord had told me. She abruptly interrupted me in mid sentence,
and pulled my words as if by magic, out of my mouth. The Lord had spoken this
same thing to her several months earlier, but she had not told me anything
awaiting the same confirmation in me.
According to scriptures then, if we were to believe God for the
supernatural miracle of giving us a bigger and more expensive paid off home in
the West Indies, we would have to give our smaller cheaper one away. The process of actually giving away the
condominium, the furniture, and one car to Christian friends of ours, took
another one and a half year. During that time span the Lord also told me to
leave my job. Our pastor confirmed all
of our decisions.
The Lord did not let us go to the Virgin Islands
after all. For reasons that you shall
see later, He kept our eyes blinded to the fact as to why. As the time drew
closer for us to vacate and for our friends to move in, the Lord spoke again to
me and told me that the Virgin Islands had been a training ground. He told us that on the day that we would
vacate to get into our van, and just as Abraham did without knowing where he
was going, we were to travel and share our testimony.
Luke 6:38 Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.
Mary and I were confident that God would fulfill Luke
six and thirty eight before we would have to vacate from the condominium. We had just given away $100,000.00 and
thought it right and proper that God would give back to us. The fateful day of
April 17, 1997 came however, and no money had come to us. We were forced to use the very credit cards
that we had meticulously kept at a $00.00 balance all those years.
Our church sent us out in the midst of
a tremendously powerful anointing. As
Abraham went, so did we, with no idea of what God had for us. We had put our personal belongings into
storage. We packed our van with our
four children and nine duffle bags and proceeded north on Florida’s turnpike.
In a Tuscaloosa Alabama motel, during
my prayer time, the Lord spoke to me two words; “New Mexico.” In the
spirit I felt that this was the Lord’s final destination. I need to jump in and say right here, that
in the majority of our 2,200-mile trip, which many a time was so lonely and
scary, the Lord full of mercy gave us our personal star of Bethlehem to lead us
and comfort us. Comet Hale Bopp was
virtually in front of our car every one of those seventeen nights in the northwestern sky. As we headed westward towards a state that
we knew nothing about, we stopped and lodged in the town of Longview, on
Texas’s easternmost boundary. There,
during another time of prayer, the Lord spoke one word; “pueblo”. My wife and I were
deeply puzzled. I was born on the
island of Cuba, and my wife had been a missionary in South America with
YWAM. Both of us therefore know Spanish
fluently. A ‘pueblo’ to us is a little
town. Perplexed, we opened up our road atlas to the map of New Mexico and were
absolutely stunned to find nearly twenty locations that had the name “pueblo”
stuck somewhere within their names. As we stared at the map, the Lord pointed
us to Santo Domingo Pueblo, smack between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and told us
to drive there. Only God could direct a
family to head towards a town of 8,000 people that is yet over one thousand
miles away!
We got to Albuquerque on a Saturday night in early
May of 1997. We proceeded to get a
motel room and then headed towards Santo Domingo Pueblo the next day, fifty
miles north of Albuquerque. When we drove into this adobe structured village we
found out that it was a Native American reservation! We were to discover that Santo Domingo is one of the nineteen
Pueblo Indian Nations of New Mexico!
Hence all the names containing “pueblo” within them!
Upon our meeting the people of Santo Domingo Pueblo,
it was love at first sight. The Lord in
one instance zapped our hearts, and opened our eyes, with a mighty flood of
divine love for Native Americans.
Until that very moment we had known nothing about Native Americans and had
never felt a godly burden for them.
Now, in one instance, we had been called as “white people” to love and
serve the Native American population with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We found out from our new friends at the pueblo, that
white people are prohibited from living within the Pueblo Nations. One precious
lady directed us to the nearby town of Pena Blanca eight miles north where
non-Native people like us live.
For one week after this, we traveled back and forth
between Albuquerque and Pena Blanca attempting to find residence there. Our daily search proved fruitless. We had
been lodging in an Albuquerque motel, which we had booked for one week. Our
credit cards were dwindling down quickly from the expenses incurred on our
2,200-mile journey.
On the next
to the last night of our stay however, an apartment suddenly opened up to us in
Pena Blanca. We packed up our van the next morning, left Albuquerque, and drove
to Pena Blanca to meet with the landlady and investigate for ourselves if this
place of residence was the Lord’s calling for us. The Lord had commanded us to
stop using the credit cards. I had $ 10.00 in my pocket and balked at the idea
of going to rent this place with such a paltry sum of money. I argued on that fifty-mile stretch up I- 25
with the Lord, who told me to be quiet and proceed forward.
The apartment was a cute, unfurnished, one-bedroom
efficiency, which was part of a duplex. Knowing that this was the place that
the Lord probably wanted us to take, Mary and I stuttered and fumbled with our
words and ten dollars in our pockets. The nice landlady waited for our
response, as we huddled together not knowing what to do. She then suddenly interrupted our eternal
hesitancy to tell us that we could move in and pay her the following week. What
a miracle! Hallelujah!
The first night in our little efficiency was
difficult, surreal, and scary, but it was also laced with the anticipation and
excitement of the Holy Spirit. Our only
furniture was one shade less lamp with a very bright and blinding bulb, and one
torn up couch. I took the couch, while
Mary and our four precious little ones slept huddled on the carpet amidst
Wal-Mart blankets and our own pillows.
New Mexico because of it mountainous elevation of 6,000 feet at Pena Blanca,
has a relatively cold winter and spring. The efficiency had no heat.
As I fell asleep I tried to absorb and justify all
the comforts and security of the life that we had left behind, to now to come
to this. For the next two years or so,
our family would all sleep together in one room. Easy it was not, but those two years of having our family
together became very special years of intimacy and bonding for us.
The next day, being a Sunday, we attended a church in
Santa Fe whose congregation and pastor we had met the previous Sunday after our
initial visit to Pueblo Santo Domingo. After sitting down, the pastor
recognized us in the crowd of parishioners and asked to come forward and share
our testimony as to how the Lord brought us out to New Mexico. Mary and I have
a personal conviction of not making our financial needs known except to the
Lord. We shared the testimony and sat
down. The pastor then got up and
announced to his congregation that the Lord had spoken to him about taking up
an offering for us. Over seven hundred
dollars came in and we were able to pay our first month and security deposit!
During the week of apartment seeking in Pena Blanca,
we had met most of the Christians that lived within the community of five
hundred. After a week of living in the
efficiency, these people appeared one day and totally furnished our home
including kitchenware and bathroom ware. My littlest daughter Sarah, four in
age, asked the Lord for a TV set to watch Barney on. That same afternoon a small black and white TV set was brought
over to our home.
I was not allowed by the Lord to get a
job for seven months after arriving in New Mexico. I believe that the Lord’s greatest reason was to continue to
build our level of faith to the point that He wanted it to be.
During this time many miracles
occurred, and continue to do so today.
I would like to share five with you that depict the grandeur and
faithfulness of our God. The first miracle
transpired when we had absolutely no food except for flour and water. Mary woke up that morning having a strong
sense that the Lord was going to provide us with food. After having fed us with the unsavory
pancakes that she had made, she stepped out of the efficiency to feed our
adopted dogs. To her utter astonishment, the dogs had brought unopened cans of
food, including a bag of beans, a huge can of peanut butter and other items.
Their saliva was still slobbered on all of these food items. It was an Elijah
raven miracle, except that God had used dogs to do it. Hallelujah!
The second miracle was just as
powerful. I had four dollars in my
pocket, and our son Timmy being little, was still in diapers. He had one diaper left and I had four
dollars. Mary left the efficiency to
buy us a loaf of bread, a can of peanut butter, and a jar of jelly. I remember
kneeling in my tiny office, which was the storage and heater room for the
efficiency and calmly looking up to heaven and saying to the God, “Lord, you
know that we have one diaper left for Timmy, and no money to buy him anymore.” As I was still praying, Mary barged in
through the front door, gleefully screaming.
Sadly to say, one of her aunts had suddenly and unexpectedly died in
Florida. But the joy of the Lord was
that Mary had gone to the post office after purchasing the bread, peanut
butter, and jelly, and had found a check for $10,000.00! Hallelujah!
Mary’s aunt had chosen her nephews and nieces as heirs, and this were a
tax-exempt gift sent immediately to them after her passing away. We immediately paid off our credit cards and
gave the landlady two months in advance of rent. Praise the Lord!
We had no washing machine in our
efficiency. Mary would always go to the
laundry mat located at Cochiti Pueblo.
In those two years in which Lord kept Mary at the laundry mat she was
able to develop numerous and lasting relationships with our precious Indian
friends. One of them is the current
governor of Santo Domingo Pueblo. We had run out of money and were unable to do
laundry for almost a month. Believe it
or not, the bags of dirty laundry had piled up to seventeen loads! A couple, and good friends of ours from one
of the pueblos, would on many occasions drop off their small girls to play with
our kids. Miraculously, at the time
that our laundry had piled up, they absolutely insisted on giving us twenty
dollars for baby-sitting their children. They had never done that, and we had
never insisted. We took the money, our seventeen loads of laundry, headed up to
church to then proceed to a laundry mat in Santa Fe. While the service was still going on, I felt prompted to leave
early and go on to do our laundry since the task was so massive. As our family darted out the front door of
the lobby, a man that I had only seen on several occasions but had never
personally met, motioned to my oldest daughter Alexandria with his finger and
said, “Little girl, come here.” As any
father would do, I froze on my tracks ready to attack this man if he would but
just put one finger on her. Alexandria
went up to him. He kindly stretched out
his hand and gave her twenty dollars. The laundry with detergent cost us
$37.00. Our Indian friend’s twenty
dollars would have never made it! The
Lord knew exactly what we needed!
When the Lord finally allowed me to go
back to work, it began with the “small beginnings” of a part time job in a
convenience store in Pena Blanca making $ 5.00/ hour. I remember on one occasion, paying our rent in bits and pieces
over a one-month period of time. As I
paid the last fragment, the new month was just beginning, and I had to trust
the Lord to start paying up again. We
had been virtually eating non-meat foods due to our lack of financial
resources. I was working at the store on a Wednesday morning. Every second Wednesday, a deliveryman would
stock up the store with what pertained to the new month. On that day, my mouth dropped in utter
amazement as I gazed at a big pile of cold cuts and cheeses forming on the
floor of the store. Anything that was
outdated by even one day, this man was dumping out. I could not believe it! I
immediately talked the owner who prepared for us a large bag full of cold cuts
and cheeses. Hallelujah!
But the most amazing miracle is the
next one. Our families, not being Christians, to this day consider us as being
absolutely insane for what the Lord had us do.
Mary’s father came up on an inheritance towards the end of 1998. He does not trust us with his finances any
more. However, as the good father that
he is, he has always treated his three children equally. He gave Mary’s siblings a large cold lump
sum of money. For Mary he set up a
trust fund with a trustee so that we could not personally touch the money. Through the trustee however, we obtained the
distribution that we needed and purchased a brand new five bedrooms, three-bathroom
mobile home, almost 2400 square feet in size, and then fully furnished it. The condominium that we gave away in Miami
was less than 1300 square foot in size.
This new home is virtually double in size. We also purchased over one acre in land of which we had none in
Miami. The trust fund likewise pays on
the property taxes, the property insurance, and all repairs forevermore. Praise the living God!
Today, I am working in a television
station in Santa Fe where I make half of what I made in Miami. Mary and I have no health insurance.
Financially, we do not make it. The Lord however makes it for us. I have been there for three and a half
years, and for those three and a half years the Lord has commanded me remain
put and not leave. It has not been my
wish to remain there. Yet I have had to obey the Lord. I cannot begin to tell
you of the number of continuous miracles that our faithful God executes. We have all of our bills paid; we have no
debt, and no mortgage. Our income is
considered poverty level in this country. God told me that He would take care
of us. He has asked me to remain there,
to teach me faith and to teach me to walk strictly in His ways. Our van has a transmission that should have
given out months ago. The Lord told me, not only to believe Him for the healing
of the transmission, but that He would send us to minister in different
locations in this very van; and so it has been happening.
On another occasion after paying off all of our bills
we had thirty dollars left for food to cover six people and two weeks. As I
told you, our policy is to never ask. At that time we had commenced a telethon
to raise money for the TV station. I
was asked to take substantial quantities of food that was left over for my
family, inclusive of large quantities of ice cream with all the fixings to make
sundaes! During those two weeks, we got
invited out to parties and barbecues and so forth, and ate glamorously. On
thirty dollars a family of six ate for two weeks and lacked nothing!
Finally on
one other occasion, we had virtually run out of food and had no money in
sight. That same afternoon we received
a phone call from a friend of ours in Albuquerque, who wanted to bring over a
friend of hers for ministry. At the same time the Lord put it on her heart to
bring us numerous bags of unused Y2K food. Hallelujah! I could go and on.
In conclusion, the Lord has many
reasons for having us done what we did.
I would like to state the ones that pertain in our service to Native
Americans. One of the greatest ministry
lessons that must be learned by all of us is that we must identify with those
to whom the Lord has called us to minister to.
It is impossible to minister effectively to someone in whose shoes we
have not walked, at least to a certain degree.
Native Americans, for over six hundred years have
lost absolutely everything.
Furthermore, in the Pueblo Nations of New Mexico, anyone who becomes a
“born again” Christian is excommunicated from the pueblo, and all of his or her
possessions within the pueblo, including home, is confiscated from them. Christianity in the pueblos is strictly an
underground faith. Unknowingly to us, when we obeyed God in Miami Florida four
years ago, and gave away everything that we owned, the Lord had us identify with,
and comprehend to a small fraction, what Native Americans have been through,
and what the Pueblo people still go through when they profess faith in Jesus
Christ. Many Navajo people live in one bedroom circular homes called “hogans.” In God’s wonderful wisdom, He had us for
those two years live in a one-bedroom efficiency to identify with the Navajo
peoples.
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Part
of our ministry to Native Americans is that of repentance and reconciliation,
as to what pertains to the wrongs done to them by the white man and the
church. One very touching incident
occurred when we had been asked to minister in a church in Ganado Arizona,
within the heart of the great Navajo Nation. Our Navajo friend, speaking in
Navajo, wept as he recounted to the congregation how God had called us to give
up everything and come out west. These precious people realized the love of God
for them, in that He called white people to forsake all, for their sake. When I got up to speak, the Lord had me ask
these Navajo people for forgiveness in the name of the white man and the
ancestors of the white man. The church
service abruptly stopped. Nearly two
hundred people came forward to embrace us, many of them weeping. We wept as well. Navajo hand- made bolo ties were place around our necks.
God Bless You,
Jose
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