Numbers That Preach: Understanding God's Mathematical Lingo
FEEDING THE HUNGRY
Troy gave his life to the Lord at age 19 in 1986. He joined a rock band and when he wasn’t touring, Troy worked as a phone counselor for CBN in Dallas. “That’s how I learned how to partner with the Holy Spirit and give prophetic words,” he says. In 1992, Troy started OpenDoor Church and remembers preaching one day near the Texas border, and sharing food with underprivileged and homeless people. He met a man in a wheelchair at a trash dump who had no shoes on, so Troy took off his boots and gave them to him. That night Troy preached with no shoes. A few days later, Operation Blessing called and said they had a full tractor trailer truck and asked Troy if he wanted the contents. When the truck backed up to their food bank warehouse, Troy saw it was filled with thousands of pairs of shoes. “I laughed and marveled at the goodness of God.” Ever since, Troy has joined forces with Operation Blessing as a coalition partner. “We were one of the first ministries to have stood with OB,” he says. In the past year, TBM has fed over 120,000 people, and over the course of their ministry, they’ve given away over seven million pounds of food. “We have so many miracle stories of answering evil with the goodness of God,” Troy says. “We must overcome evil with good and it doesn’t take a lot of goodness to overtake evil.”
RESCUING THE ENSLAVED
Troy’s decision to rescue slaves of sex trafficking was made in 2004 in Costa Rica. He was giving out food and clothing at a trash dump, when an old woman approached him with two skinny, little girls. Troy didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know what the old woman wanted. An interpreter told Troy the old woman was a madam asking if Troy wanted to hire those young girls for sex. He paid $90 for the two starving girls and took them to a Christian children’s home so no one would hurt them again.
On another outreach in Matamoros, Mexico, Troy was giving away food and met a woman named Maria. She had been a sex slave to the drug cartels because her parents were behind on the rent of their small house, owned by the cartel. It began when Maria was 19 and in order for her parents to “pay their debt,” she was forced into a brothel for seven years. When she was too old and diseased, they threw her in the trash dump. Troy asked Maria, then 26, how much her parents owed. The debt was $600, so Troy and everyone on his team gathered all the money in their pockets and came up with the money. “It’s our cause to demonstrate the goodness of God all over the world,” says Troy. “We need to answer the call to end poverty. We need to take a stand and represent the heart of Jesus. We have liberated over 1750 girls who were sex slaves.” After they are rescued, they are given a name and a family in safe houses all over the various countries they are working in including Uganda, India, Asia, Mexico, Central America, Belize, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. For more information, please visit www.TroyBrewer.com or call 877-413-0888.
BY THE NUMBERS
Troy has loved studying the meaning of certain numbers in the Bible for more than 20 years. “It makes some foggy things in the Bible clear, and it’s fun,” he says. Troy is clear that his study of numbers is not to be confused with numerology, which is associated with the paranormal, and is, in Troy’s words, “witchcraft.” He explains that there is no power in numbers, only in God Himself, but the numbers in Scripture have meaning and show God has purpose in all things. Examples from his book: The number one refers to unity, superiority, and beginnings; the number two, to being a faithful witness and being set apart, the number three, to fullness and completion. Troy notes that when Jesus asked the disciples to cast their net into the sea in the gospels, they drew up 153 fish, and that the number of people who followed Christ in each gospel is also 153. His bestselling book Numbers That Preach: Understanding God’s Mathematical Lingo is required reading at some seminaries.
