Our executive pastor in Detroit once had somebody break into his house at 3:00 a.m. while his family was out of town, thank God. He heard a window being broken. Some guy was breaking into his house looking for drug money. Our pastor was coming downstairs when the burglar grabbed the largest kitchen knife he could find and met our pastor on the stairs. He stabbed him in the stomach several times, then in his back near the spinal cord another 12 times, then up at the chin another six times to try to kill him.
Then the man left our pastor on the floor in his own blood and went upstairs to see what he could take. While our pastor was lying there on the floor, he was praying, “God, before I die, please don't let my children be bitter with the ministry or think that you're not with us. And God, let my wife know that I love her.”
Then he said he heard a voice that said, "They still need you."
All of a sudden, he said he held his intestines in place and somehow, by the strength of God, got up, walked out the door to his neighbors, who happened to be up at 3:30 in the morning. The doctors said they'd never seen anything like this before. He’d been stabbed 37 times, and not one of those had hit a vital organ. Meanwhile, the police entered his house looking for the would-be murderer and saw the giant puddle where he had been lying. They wrote in the police report, “We see the blood, but we don't know how he got to the neighbor's house. There are no footprints.”
So many times, we forget how much God is protecting us from, and there are so many things that we will never know about that God is already doing on our behalf. We're so ready to praise him for what we know that we have forgotten to praise him for the things we rarely see and don’t understand.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:11-13, ESV).
After pastoring an inner-city congregation in Detroit for thirty years, Pastor Tim served at Brooklyn Tabernacle in NYC for five years and pastored in Lafayette, Louisiana, for five years. He became Senior Pastor of Times Square Church in May of 2020.