Devotional Thoughts from Mike Scheffel
$150 billion dollars!
That’s right, $150 BILLION!! If I told you that was the annual revenue produced, one might think of a major league sports team such as the NFL! Well you would be wrong! According to the International Justice Mission (IJM) and Five14 Revolution, this staggering amount of money is actually the annual revenue of human trafficking! This is way more than the NFL, actually more than the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL combined!!! Two-thirds of that $150 billion are coming from commercial sexual exploitation! It’s unbelievable to hear those statistics. Not to mention, there are an estimated 50 million people held in slavery today! Millions of men, women, and children are trapped in modern-day slavery around the world.
My older sister and her family live as missionaries in Myanmar. Traffickers in Myanmar, known for their labor trafficking, prey on the poor who are looking for work. They lure the poor with false advertisements offering job opportunities, and then sell them to China or remote places in Myanmar as slaves. Imagine showing up for your first day on the job excited to provide for your family, to discover you would not only be unable to provide but would likely never see your family again!
We actually can’t even begin to imagine. Everyday across the world human beings…children, women, and men are forced into slavery and a life of abuse. We may very well feel a lack of proximity to this global problem, but then come to find out, it’s happening just around the corner. Five14Revolution is a local ministry that exists to respond to human trafficking and sexual exploitation by bringing God’s hope, healing, and freedom in places of vulnerability. Over 70 new women walked through their Wilmington doors in 2022, each one of them suffering from trauma associated with their sanctity of life being violated. One of which, called from a local hotel room right on Market Street with her trafficker in the other room. They were able to successfully obtain a security escort to pick her up and bring her to safety.
When considering the sacredness of human life, the topic of abortion and the fight to preserve the lives of unborn children is understandably a primary focus. However, these brief examples and the heartbreaking statistics of those enslaved and oppressed are a reminder that there are vulnerable people in need everywhere…from Wilmington to Myanmar.
In Luke 4:18, Jesus quotes Isaiah 61:1 when He says
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”
Sin brings about great damage! Sin oppresses its victims, but Jesus brings liberty to the oppressed. Jesus came not only to preach this message of deliverance, but to be the deliverance for us! We were once slaves ourselves, but for those in Christ we have been redeemed and set free. Praise be to God! And it should be our desire to continue in the path that Jesus set out for us! A desire to shine Jesus into the darkest places of our world and community through the gospel message and through “gospel people” like you and I who are filled with His Word and His Spirit and who, compelled by Jesus’ example, live noticeably different in the way we care for the vulnerable, oppressed, and enslaved people of our world.
As we are commanded in Romans 12:12, let us:
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer”.
Join us today and pray through these specific items:
PRAY FOR Five14 Revolution:
That the cycles of trauma and addiction be broken this year
That Five14 can locate a property to house these women for a place of rest while they are healing from trauma
That they can identify and hire 2 part-time house mothers for the Restoration House — They are currently looking for a rental property ($2,500/month) and the two part-time house mothers ($30,000 per house mother)
PRAY FOR International Justice Mission (IJM) and other organizations like IJM that are actively fighting for and rescuing those enslaved and mistreated around the world.
Pray that they would rely on our all-powerful God to do what is only possible with and through Him.
As we pray, may the Lord remind us the gospel message of Jesus Christ is not only for the oppressed but for the oppressors. The story in Sunday’s sermon about the radical transformation of Dr. Robinson and Dr. Johnson (40 days for life), reminds us that God brings life out of places where death used to flourish! Pray that God would continue to radically change, restore, and heal both the oppressed and the oppressors!
