Faith

Sister Faith Mathieu from Nigeria shares her experience with the Lord. She had a life-changing encounter in Uganda and felt inspired to join the ministry. She translated the foundation of His Correspondence into Nigerian languages and began preaching the Gospel. Despite the challenges of COVID, she reached out to prisoners and ministered to them. Many prisoners were touched by her message and shared their personal stories. One woman confessed to committing a crime to escape an abusive home situation. Hello, hello. Hi, everyone. This is Sister Faith Mathieu from Nigeria. How are you doing today? I'm doing fine. I hope you are doing very well. I am supposed to be in this program this year, but the Lord has better plans for me. You know, while we were getting ready for this program, I told the Lord, I said, let your will be done. And He is almighty. He has better plans. I am very grateful to God for the wonderful opportunity to be in service, in the service for the Lord, to work for the Lord in this capacity. It is a rare privilege and I am grateful to God. And I will tell you that this, my experience with the Lord, it started four years ago. Now I am a Christian. I am the pastor's daughter. Actually, the pastor's daughter, my dad, the pastor, my mom, and evangelist. I was born in this family of Christians. For the Lord wants each of us to have an experience with Him. And that experience I had when I met you, our director, Reverend Terry and her husband, Reverend Gordon. You know, in 2020, just before the COVID struck, my mom was supposed to go to Uganda. Usually I am the one handling her travel and everything, helping her arrange whenever it is time for her to travel to the U.S. or anywhere. She will tell me and then I and my husband will be arranging her. She will come to our house and we will plan everything and all that. This time around, I said, Lord, I want to join her. I was actually going to escort her. And I didn't know. I was not prepared for the encounter that I had in Uganda. But the Lord has plans. That is why I told you. When I was planning for this program, I said, the Lord, let your will be done. So the Lord has plans for me in 2020. And He took me. And that was my first time of traveling out of the country, so I was very excited. And I was also looking forward to meeting the director and my husband for the first time because I had spoken with them over the phone for a long time. When I got to Uganda, I had this encounter with the spiritual. First of all, I was listening and I was paying attention. Actually, I wanted to just hear. I wanted to hear and go because I was comfortable with the life I was living. I knew that I was a Christian. I knew that I had children and I am raising them in the grace of God. So I have most of them. I thought that was all. But knowing that the Lord had bigger, bigger plans for me. He wanted me in the ministry. He wanted me to be part of what He is doing at the same time. And then the Lord inspired me. I was listening to the people that came from the U.S. This young man, George, he is a Chinese. He came, he was speaking. He is younger than I was at that time. He is younger than I am rather. And he was speaking full of enthusiasm. I was asking myself, why is this young man talking like this? He is a kid. Where did he get this inspiration from? And that was where the Pentecostal Ed Ministry came to me. They said, yes, you are Christian. Yes, you are a compassionate. Well, you have a lot to do for me. And then at that program, at that particular time in Uganda, the Lord inspired us to translate the foundation of His Correspondence in Nigerian languages, Nigerian three major languages. Which is the Igbo, the Ausa, and the Yoruba. And immediately after that program, we started the translation process. And then we started moving about preaching the Gospel. We went to the priesthood. We went and received the foundation of His Correspondence in Yoruba. And there is one thing, one great thing about Yoruba is that the Yoruba culture is not free. All we need to do is to pay attention to it. All we need to do is to give ourselves to it. And then leave the other one, leave the other part for the Lord to do. We are conveyers of the good news. We carry the good news, we bring it to them, and then the remaining is for the Lord to do. And He has more field. He has, the Word of God has the capacity of doing that which it has said to do, which He has said to do. So, that's my experience in Nigerian prisons where I took the Word of God, where I took the foundation of faith, starting from COVID. I couldn't meet with the prisoners face-to-face because it was COVID. I had to reach for them from the point where I met the warden and they were listening. And from then, after the COVID, I had the opportunity of going to meet with them. So many of them that heard my voice then were able to see me face-to-face. So many of them, they were asking, oh people, now that I have heard your number, God, what's the next step? I had to minister to these people one after the other. Some of them had to come out, you know, confess so many things that they were doing. If I go away to the human prison, I met one of the ladies there that said that she actually committed the crime she committed because she needed to leave home. She was being abused at home and she needed an opportunity to leave home because she had tried to run away and they brought her back. But she didn't want to run away because she needed to do something.