This is Olive Grove International Foundation. It is also known as the "Voice of the Spirit" and I promise that the Lord will directly speak to your heart as you commit to visiting and interacting with us. Our Vision Statement: We envision emotionally lost and troubled souls restored to a meaningful life of hope in Christ. Our Mission Statement: We exist to teach and disseminate the undiluted Word of God through print and electronic media to emotionally lost and troubled souls to restore hope and meaning to life. What we do here is to give hope and encouragement to those who feel lost, alone and troubled and to demonstrate how you too can become an encouraging tool and a hope giver in the Lord. I believe in my heart that as you continue to follow us your vision and destiny will open up in Jesus name.
In October of 2001, I was in class at WORD OF FAITH BIBLE INSTITUTE (WOFBI), Lagos when the Spirit of God impressed on my heart to start a Newsletter. I did not know the next thing about writing and publishing and I told the Lord so. At break time I took a walk around the campus to stretch my legs before the next intensive classes. All the while I was preoccupied with this new assignment from the Lord and wondering how I was going to start on it. I got back to class after break time and found a newsletter of a church strangely stuck behind the back rest of my chair. This newsletter was not there before I left the class. I pulled it out and opened it. It was a four paged newsletter and as I kept going through the articles page by page, I heard the Lord say to me, "This is what I meant. This is what I want you to do for me" I realized then that He had sent someone to leave it for me as a pattern to follow. This is biblical. He had also shown Moses a pattern to follow in the building of the sanctuary in the wilderness "See that you make them according to the pattern shown you on the mountain" (Exodus 25:40) I had no formal training in writing nor publishing and I had never written any literary work in the past, but I started out in faith because the Master called.
When I started, I had no direction as to an audience or mode of distribution. I used to distribute the Newsletters free at bus stations, on street corners etc until one fateful day, in the place of prayer, the Lord instructed me to direct the distributions to the prisons. That was when my prison ministry started.
Today, Olive Grove is solely distributed to prison in-mates free of charge. I have been privileged to minister to thousands of prisoners through the years via the Olive Grove and physically visited several prisons to fellowship with them.
You can never truly understand how wide and deep the love of God is until you practically see men and women who have been hardened by crime give their lives to Christ and live like lambs. I have seen convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers etc receive Christ and turn away from their sinful ways.
The prison ministry is one that is greeted with skepticism, fear and distrust but I hold one view and that is if they are good enough for Christ they are good enough. The Apostle Paul said in 1Cor 2: 2 "For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (NKJV)
If you are related to a person in prison, please do not harden your heart against them, but pray for them and visit them. Yes, some have done unspeakable and "unforgivable" things, but we must forgive them if we want God to forgive our sins too. (Matt 18:21-35)
Great. God's grace as you carry out this enormous but deeply impactful task
ReplyDeleteAmen! Thank you Emeka.
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