Traffic on Highway 101 and 350,000 decisions in Africa: two pictures from one sermon

On Sunday 11 October 2026, Pastor Liu Tong of River of Life Christian Church in Silicon Valley preached “Lift Up Your Eyes, Respond Courageously” from John 4:35: “Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”

Four things to see

• The mission is already entrusted to us — the Great Commission is not only for pastors and mission agencies; it is given to every believer.
• The kingdom is advancing worldwide — wheat and weeds grow together; the mustard seed is small, yet becomes the largest of garden plants.
• The harvest season is short — we can no longer say “four months more”; the fields are already white.
• See the present moment — the more troubled the age, the more it is God’s hour to work; Isaiah answered, “Here am I, send me.”

The first point carried the most weight: the early church grew fast not because the apostles were unusually capable, but because after persecution scattered the believers, “those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (Acts 8:4). The commission was given to everyone.

The second point used two sets of numbers: in sub-Saharan Africa the Christian population was about 9% in 1910 and had reached 63% by 2015; of Africa’s 56 countries, all but Muslim North Africa have grown in these forty years “faster than you can imagine”. Preaching village by village in Africa, he said, feels like a beach landing — whoever arrives first wins the village.

The African testimony (around the fifth minute)

About four and a half minutes in, the pastor named the evangelist who was called home a few years ago and whose ministry left a deep mark on Africa: Reinhard Bonnke (1940–2019). Bonnke testified that in 1986 he held a large crusade in Blantyre, Malawi, and that across the week-long meetings 350,000 people registered decisions for Christ. The pastor repeated it from the platform: “I did not misspeak, and you did not mishear — 350,000.”

That night, after the meetings ended, he sat alone in his tent and read the journal of David Livingstone (1813–1873). A hundred years earlier, Livingstone had begun preaching the gospel on the very ground where the crusade had just been held.

The pastor relayed the gist of the journal: Livingstone wrote that this was a dark period for the gospel, that however he preached he saw little fruit — yet he believed that a hundred years later a servant of God would come to that place and see a great harvest.

Reading that, the evangelist wept — because he was standing exactly where Livingstone had preached. He heard the Lord say to him: you are walking in the blood and tears of the missionaries who went before you.

Bonnke tied that response to Livingstone’s earlier missionary work: the harvest he saw in Blantyre stood on seed sown by an earlier generation. The sower did not see the harvest; the harvester did not forget the sower.

Mission is not the work of one generation. The seed you sow may be harvested by someone else; the harvest you reap was sown a century ago.

The line the sermon left for Silicon Valley

Later in the sermon, Pastor Liu recalled that Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), would take his hand whenever he visited the church and say: “God did not put you in Silicon Valley by accident. He wants you to use the most advanced technology to preach the gospel and extend the kingdom of God.”

Then he said it plainly: do not dream only the engineer's dream here, do not dream only the entrepreneur's dream — dream the dream of the kingdom of God. And he added that in the last days God will use two kinds of people: ordinary believers, and the Chinese.

The two pictures it left with me

The first picture is the traffic on Highway 101. The pastor said his office has a large window looking onto the highway. Once, watching the cars, the Lord asked him: what do you see? His first answer was “a bad traffic jam”. But in that moment the Lord opened his eyes: every car, one person — how many lonely souls inside a busy Silicon Valley. He knelt and prayed for that generation.

The second picture is those 350,000 in Africa — and Livingstone, a hundred years earlier, seeing “no fruit” on the same ground. The tears that night, the pastor said, were not shed for the 350,000 but for a prayer that had waited a hundred years.

Put together, these two pictures speak to what I am doing. Our AI Agent course is not about replacing people with tools; it is about helping the lonely, the ones who cannot write or dare not speak, to put what is in their hearts into words and carry it into new media.

It is also why I insist on keeping the words and the videos on the website. A record today is my testimony while I am alive; in ten years it may be read by my children; later still, by a stranger searching some question at midnight who has never heard my name. That kind of influence is no longer limited to the years I am alive — it can carry on, and be handed on.

Livingstone sowed without seeing the harvest. Perhaps what we can do is simply record what should be recorded, carry what should be carried, and leave it to time — and to the Lord who makes the seed grow.