8th Church Anniversary Arise & Shine -River Of Life Church

8th Church Anniversary Arise & Shine -River Of Life Church

By Rick Gillespie- Mobley

Isaiah 60:1-3

Summary: This sermon is for a church's eighth anniversary. The congregation is a West African Church from Liberia and focuses in on the pastor and his struggles.

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Eighth Anniversary Banquet 10/26/24 Isaiah 60:1-3

Arise and Shine for your light has come. Arise and Shine are words of victory, joy and celebration. However those words are usually given to a people who have been downtrodden and living in a world of darkness.

For seventy years the people of God have been living under the cruel oppression of the Babylonians, Medes and Persians. Darkness has been hovering over their lives. They had been taken captive from their homeland, their temple destroyed and their city set on fire after the destruction of their walled gates.

To hear the word given by the prophet Isaiah, arise and shine for your light has come, injected into them a new sense of hope and purpose. Their God had not forgotten about them. They remembered their homeland and they wanted to return. They wanted to be used by God to rebuild what they had lost and to be a light to those who were still living in darkness.

Today we celebrate the eighth anniversary of The River of Life Church International. We are here also because of its vision to reach out to the homeland of some of its members from Liberia. The call to a small group of believers there is to arise and shine, because God is going to equip them with a building so that they can be a light in their community in such a way that others will glorify God.

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The scriptures tell us in Ephesians 2:20 that God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. In other words, God thinks, God plans, and God carries out things on a level way beyond us.

When God tells us to arise, we never know just how high the Lord is going to take us. When God tells us to shine, we never know how brightly we will burn, or how far our light will extend.

We are tempted to forget, that the God we pray to here, is the same God that’s listening to the prayers of others on the other side of the world. It is a privilege and an honor, when we can be the answer to somebody else’s prayers because of the place God has placed us in.

The seed for the River of Life Church International, was planted out of pain and struggle. I want you to go back in time with me for a moment.

Imagine what it was like, to have your country being torn apart by a civil war. You can hear gunfire, and you know the rebels are closing in. You’re terrified as you see people running for their lives.

Because you, worked for the government, the rebels are after you. They catch up with you, and you are arrested. You are from the same village as the vice-president, and they insist you tell them where the vice-president is hiding. You have no idea where the vice president is. You’re just a lowly government worker.

That’s the situation Joseph Samuel Banaci found himself in, in his home country of Liberia in 1990. He’s praying to God for help.

But the rebels demand they tell him something he does not know. They start beating him without mercy or remorse.

There’s a severe blow to his kneecap. His body is wracked with pain. They keep asking him the same question. Blow after blow hits him. They beat him until he passes out, and they leave him for dead. He’s out for hours before others can help him. The recovery is a slow process. Yet God is telling him to arise and shine for his light has come.

His desire to know the will of God for his life is increasing as he continues to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Preaching in Liberia and other surrounding African nations. He goes to the country of Guinee to learn more about the bible at the Abundant Word Bible College.

Dr. Pangio is at the College teaching and preaching as he, travels from the US to go over the world doing conferences and helping to establish bible schools and colleges.

There in the African nation of Guinea, Rev. Banaci meets Dr. Pangio. Because Rev. Banaci speaks French and English he becomes Dr. Pangio’s guide and security guard. At the end of the conference, Dr. Pangio attempts to give Rev. Banaci money in payment for his services.

Rev. Banaci declines the offer of money and says, “what I want from you is to be my spiritual father. I need someone over me in my ministry.”