Stories of supernatural provision

Our generous God

After God told me to resign from my full-time job and I was literally living by faith, starting Living in Light (read the full article on page 6), I was completely reliant on God for finances. One day I was introduced to these two men that were literally hired by a gentleman to just bless people.

A friend of mine connected me with them and they ended up giving me £10,000 pounds. They told me: “This is not for your ministry. This is for you. This is to bless you. We love what you’re carrying – it’s precious.” I was astounded by God’s goodness.

This came in a season where, in a period of maybe about six years, I’d been blessed with about £22,000. People would just keep giving me money. It was insane! It taught me that the Lord is very, very, very generous.

Bobbi

 

Giving when it hurts

When my husband and I were newly married, we saved up and bought our first home. We were looking for ways to supplement our small income to make some alternations to the house. An investment we made started coming back with a return, which meant we could start doing what was needed to the house. 

At the same time our church started a building fund. We had pledged a monthly amount to give. Then one night my husband had a dream, where an elderly lady in our church was standing in front of a chalk board, with a large amount of money written on it, and she said: “This is what you should give to the building fund.” He woke up and told me about it, and laughed because we didn’t have that money.

Then I remembered it was the exact amount of the investment return we would be getting back in the next few months. I told him and he was horrified because we felt stretched financially at that point. But we prayed, and felt an assurance that if we built God’s house, he would look after our house. 

As a result, we couldn’t do the alterations to our house that we wanted to, but when we eventually sold it, it sold for double what we had bought it for. Fast forward, ten years later, we found ourselves in a new home, with five kids.

We had a mortgage in two places, one with a private loan, and the other with a bank. My husband lost his job a year into COVID, and in one week we ran out of all our savings. But God came through. The businessman who had given us the private loan called up out of the blue, even though we hadn’t spoken in a couple of years, and wrote off the loan! 

Our kids were at a school that we could no longer afford the fees for, so we told the school we were moving them, but did not say why. In that same week some people got hold of us and said they felt God had told them to pay for one of our children’s school fees. And the school then waived the rest of the fees. 

I look back to that first miracle of us stepping out and giving all our investment money to build God’s house and compare the amount of money to what we received in the loan being written off and the school fees being taken care of. What we received was pretty much tenfold what we gave in faith ten years before. God is faithful, and looked after us in what could have been a very scary, difficult time.

Julie, by email

 

Provision to help my daughter’s faith!

I am from the Netherlands, and my husband is from South Africa; we met on the Operation Mobilisation ship in 1994. Twelve years ago, when we lived in the Netherlands, the Lord called us back into full-time ministry after a terrible car accident, in which we should have been killed.

We came back to Cape Town in 2010 to work at Beth Uriel, which is a home for boys aged 16–24. Most of them come from the streets; they have grown up in children’s homes and foster homes. The biggest calling for my husband, Melvin, is to be a father to the fatherless, as the young men are so broken. My role is to be prayer support to my husband. 

We have four kids, but our children cannot inherit our faith, they have to find their own. Our eldest is 16 and is kicking against what we believe. She still prays in our morning devotions and goes to church with us, and we trust the Lord she will find the Way and make it her own personal faith.

She was born in the Netherlands, and is very close to her cousins there. Recently she kept asking to go back to visit them. Initially I told her I did not have peace to go, but when I prayed, I wondered if God would provide the money, which would then give me peace. H

e didn’t provide the money but he did give me peace about going. My daughter said: “You have peace, when are we going to book our tickets?” I said: “We need money for tickets, and we don’t have it at the moment.” We then said to her: “What about your savings?” She had enough to cover all our tickets.

We asked if she would lend it to us to buy the tickets, but she said no, because she didn’t know where we would get the money from to pay her back! We needed just over €4,000. 

A week later she changed her mind and said we could borrow the money. I said: “The Lord is going to honour your faith.” She just rolled her eyes and said: “Whatever.” We booked the tickets, and then, two hours later, the man who does the finances for the mission organisation we are part of in the Netherlands sent a message saying we had an extra gift of €2,500! We went to my daughter and said: “This is for your faith.” We then told her the Lord would provide all the money. She said: “Why would people just give you money? That’s crazy, that’s not going to happen!” 

The next night I got a WhatsApp message from one of our supporters. She said: “I just have it on my heart to give you an extra €200 euros – see it as a holiday gift.” We shouted from the bedroom: “The Lord has given another €200 euros! We are on €2,700!” My daughter just responded with a simple: “OK.”

I kept telling her the Lord would provide. On the last day of the month we got a message saying how much money had come in for us that month. We had been given an extra €2,500! In total we got more than what we needed. We never got extra gifts like that, but we needed it for the tickets and to encourage out daughter’s faith! 

The next day our twelve-year-old daughter asked: “Do you guys tell people you need money for air tickets, and then people give?” And we said: “No!” In twelve years of living by faith we have only once mentioned to people that they can support us if they want to.

After that we said: “God, we are not beggars; we trust you to support us.” And he has. It has not been easy, and sometimes we wished we could tell people we had run out of money for food. But we have seen miracle after miracle of provision, when there was nothing! 

Hendrika, by email