Swaziland, Africa, May 2004.

In a country that competes annually for number one AIDS infested country in the world, child abuse and neglect run rampant. Myths like “you can cure AIDS by sleeping with a virgin” lead to numerous rapes of little girls, sometimes three years old and younger.

We were leaving an orphanage, riding in a jeep, headed back to camp for the night. This is the night that would change how I view ministry for the rest of my life. The founder of the orphanage was telling us some of the children’s stories. One little boy’s mother had died of AIDS. Because his current step-father did not want to be bothered with raising a child, he threw his step-son into a sewage pit. He would throw food into the pit on occasion. By the time that the authorities found the young child, disease and waste was embedded into the little boy’s skin. Instead of shaming the step-father, the story in the newspaper was about the “Crocodile-skin kid.” I asked, “What did the authorities do about this?” The answer, “Nothing.” Other children had been raped by pastors. Church was not even a safe place. When I asked, “Are the majority of pastors immoral?” another shocking answer: “Yes.” Both of these one word answers broke my heart. I couldn’t eat. I fasted and prayed and cried and prayed and begged God to give me an answer. I got up at 4:30 the next morning and continued to pray. This time God answered – “You are.” It was at that moment that I realized that what I was doing, though seemingly small and insignificant was all a part of God’s magnificent plan of redemption.

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.” – African Proverb

The Lottie Moon offering is in full swing. The global economic situation has affected us all, but I would ask you to give sacrificially this year. All that you give to Lottie Moon goes directly to the work overseas. Last year’s giving set a new record. We want you to know that the money you gave last year funded the work which resulted in 565,967 new baptized believers and 26,970 new churches worldwide. Praise God! We hope this year sets another new record, but even with increased giving, the buying power of the U.S. Dollar has declined drastically. Investments in the US may be unpredictable, but investing in the Kingdom will never fail and the reward will be beyond anything this world can give. How are you a part of the answer?

~andi graig for the Missions Team

In the midst of the Civil War, on October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln called for Americans “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” So it has been for the last 145 years.

Ironically (at least it’s ironic now in light of our Thanksgiving celebrations), in March of the same year, Lincoln had declared a National Fast Day. I’d like for us to consider part of that much lesser-known speech:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

And we think times have changed! Friends, let’s not forget from whom our bountiful blessings have come; let’s not forget the gracious hand that has preserved us; let’s not, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, imagine that our own superior wisdom and virtue has attained for us anything of value.

Last week, our small group spent our monthly fellowship time praying for each other’s families, especially those who are without the Lord. May we continue this week to lift up not only our families but also our nation. Many of our family members, neighbors, and leaders have indeed become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace. In great humility, may we both bless the name of our gracious and merciful Lord, and may we also speak of the glory of His kingdom, to make known to the sons of men His mighty acts (Psalm 145).

Happy Thanksgiving and Praise Day!!!

~adam graig for the Mission’s Team

Have you ever discussed a case in your college ethics class where 5 people are tied to the railroad tracks with a runaway train fast approaching? You are in charge of the switch at a fork in the tracks that changes the tracks and thus the path of the train. If you don’t change the path, the people will die. If you do change them, there is one person tied to the second track who will die. It usually comes down to how you justify saving the 5 people on the first track by rerouting its path and thereby killing the one person on the second track.

Well, in a challenging chapter from Let the Nations Be Glad, John Piper uses an interesting ethical case of his own to show that the gospel turns worldly notions of love and greater good on their heads. The challenging part of the message is that many believers today operate with false notions of God’s love and are astonished to learn that his purposes to glorify himself in missions might not include saving the five for the one either.

Piper points to two sinking ocean liners with hundreds of people on there who cannot swim. You are the head of a rescue team that comes upon the first boat to find all of its passengers hopelessly scrambling to save their lives . You engage your rescue boat’s crew to save as many as possible. Then you are confronted with the fact that there is another ship some distance away and that the passengers there are in the same situation as these people except no one to rescue them. What do you do? What is the most loving thing to do? Piper argues that in the end it is very likely that you would keep the team where it was in order to maximize the time and energy you would lose in getting over there because in the end saved lives are saved lives. Therefore you would not save any from the second boat.

Piper argues that what we discover from Scripture is that God in fact does leave the first ship to save some from the second. This difficult truth reflects what is at the heart of God’s call upon the life of every missionary, to go to “all the nations.” A missionary is essentially sent out to leave the place of great harvest and easier labor (a reached people) to go and reap a harvest from a place with more difficult ground and with likely fewer results (an unreached people). God’s heart for his people to be ransomed from every tongue, tribe and nation (Rev 7:9) means that his priority is on the spread of his gospel to all the peoples (or people groups) of the world and not on the most individuals saved. I found this to be tough to understand at first but essential in our understanding of God and his call on our lives to go to “all nations” (Mat 28:19).

I want to finish this post by setting a challenge:

To those who are wrestling with the call to missions in their lives - will you consider that the Lord might be calling you to minister in another place around the world where faithful ministry means 50 converts in your lifetime versus the potentially greater impact that you would have as a minister here

OR

To those who are confident with the call to missions in their lives - will you consider that the Lord might be calling you to minister to a people who have never heard the gospel before and do not have the gospel or the Bible even in their heart language though you might have a greater harvest in a different place overseas?

This is a challenge indeed. ….all for the glory of God in the face of Christ to be displayed through the power of the Spirit among all the peoples of the earth!!! “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” Ps 96:3

-Nick Miersma for the Missions Team
(Excerpts taken from Let the Nations Be Glad, the chapter entitled, “Supremacy of God among ‘All the Nations’”)

A recent publication of The Commission magazine had this as its front page headliner. The area in question: South America. (You can view the article and a nice slideshow here.)

The Amazon Basin is home to more than 400 distinct people groups, and 270 of them have no missionaries living among them. One of our own couples, though, is working to shrink that number. The Gilpin family – Matthew, Tara, Lydia, Samuel, and one on the way! – are working among the Eastern Amazonian peoples as lay leadership trainers. As we have committed to send some peanut butter and taco sauce their way, may we commit all the more to pray for them. Friends, I can assure you that the Gilpin family can receive no greater Christmas gift from our class than the sustained prayer of faithful brothers and sisters. Let’s commit together to lift them up to our Father – there is no shipping fee or weight limit!

Colossians 4:2-3 “Devote yourselves to prayer…praying…that God will open up to [them] a door for the word, so that [they] may speak forth the mystery of Christ.”

Ephesians 6:19 pray that the Gilpin’s would “make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel.”

~adam graig for the Missions Team

Elections are coming very soon. One of the abiding issues on the table is the war and its effects on the country and people of Iraq and on our troops and our country.

The ironic thing about it is that the cares and concerns, even the priorities and pursuits, which shape my daily routine (and I think, the routine of many of the people throughout the US) resemble more and more the mentality of a time of peace and prosperity rather than a mindset in the midst of war. In fact, I think that unless you have a family member or a close connection with someone in the war, the prospects of the election have roused more people to attention than the actual war has.

I do not wish to overstate my point. And the point that I make is this: There is an uncanny parallel between our nation’s mentality about war and the mentality of missions held by numerous Christians today. Unless we know someone who is a missionary or have been to the frontlines ourselves (though some of the short-term trips could hardly be called such), we are almost completely oblivious to the work of our brothers and sisters in places all over the world to spread the news of the gospel against the wishes of those who are presently enemies of Christ.

Knowing that I speak as one who himself does not often think from a wartime perspective, I still want to persuade us to think about and evaluate the kinds of cares, concerns, priorities and pursuits we have now and how they would be affected by a more constant awareness of the continuous battle that rages for the gospel all over the world.

I suggest as a first step shifting our focus in prayer. Now, I speak as one who struggles greatly to do anything consistently, let alone pray, so do not consider brushing off the proposal. Therefore, it is my prayer that we as believers would grow not only into greater conformity with our Savior Jesus Christ, who alone is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, but also to grow in our desire to see the work of reconciliation and rescue, to which Christ has called us, be furthered all over the world by lifting up in intercession the cares, concerns, priorities, and pursuits of our Triune God and his ambassadors, as they battle what is not of flesh and blood to proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

To this end, we hope, as the missions team, to begin putting in front of you all lists of prayers and requests from those we know who are serving as missionaries to better enable us to pray for the work and unassailable plans of our Almighty God.

In the meantime, pray:

that God would be glorified among the nations,

that it would proceed through the faithful proclamation of the gospel,

and that the proclamation would go forth in power that stems from the earnest prayers of his children!

Inspiration and some thoughts taken from Let The Nations Be Glad and its chapter on prayer and missions.

~Nick for the Missions Team

Below are excerpts taken from Chapter 1 of Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions by John Piper.

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exist because doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.

Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal in missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. The goal of missions is the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God. ‘The Lord reigns; let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!’ (Psalm 97:1). ‘Let the peoples praise thee, O God; let all the peoples praise thee! Let the nations be glad and sing for joy!’ (Psalm 67:3-4).

But worship is also the fuel of missions. Passion for God in worship precedes the offer of God in preaching. You can’t commend what you don’t cherish. Missionaries will never call out, ‘Let the nations be glad!’, who can not say from the heart, ‘I rejoice in the Lord…I will be glad and exult in thee, I will sing praise to thy name, O Most High’ (Psalm 104:34; 9:2). Missions begins and ends in worship.” -pg. 11

Piper goes on to address specifics:

“The zeal of the church for the glory of her King will not rise until pastors and mission leaders and seminary teachers make much more of the King. When the glory of God himself saturates our preaching and teaching and conversation and writings, and when he predominates above our talk of methods and strategies and psychological buzz words and cultural trends, then the people might begin the feel that he is the central reality of their lives and that the spread of his glory is more important than all their possessions and all their plans.” -pg. 38

Here is part of Piper’s summary of chapter one:

“God is calling us above all else to be the kind of people whose theme and passion is the supremacy of God in all of life. No one will be able to rise to the magnificence of the missionary cause who does not feel the magnificence of Christ. There will be no big world vision without a big God. There will be no passion to draw others in to our worship where there is no passion for worship.

‘Great and wonderful are your deeds,
O Lord God the Almighty!
Just and true are your ways,
O King of the ages!
Who shall not fear and glorify your name, O Lord?
For you alone are holy.
All nations shall come and worship you,
for you judgments have been revealed.’ (Revelation 15:3-4)” -pg. 40

Do we share the gospel often and does the frequency of our witnessing reflect for better or worse the intensity of our passion for God and his glory in our own lives?

I pray that the Spirit would help us to examine ourselves in light of these points with the end result being a greater love for and worship of God in our lives and a heightened effort to see him worshiped and glorified among all the peoples of the earth!!

~Nick Miersma for the Missions Team

CNN reports today: “Gunmen killed a Christian businessman and wounded his nephew in a drive-by shooting in Mosul, police said Monday…At least 900 Christian families have fled in recent days, reportedly frightened by a series of killings and threats by Muslim extremists ordering them to convert to Islam or face possible death, Iraqi officials said.”

As I sit here in my Seminary apartment writing this, with a glass of sweet tea and some pistachios at my side and the NLCS on the TV, I think of the Psalm I read this morning and what a drastically different perspective it takes on tonight as I think of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East: “I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever” (Psalm 145:1-2a). And, then I read v. 4 and think of what this Christian businessman’s nephew might tell his kids one day: “One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.”

Friends, let’s be faithful to pray for our family in Iraq - that they will, even now, bless the Lord’s name, that their faithful witness in the face of this persecution would win many a Muslim to Christ, and that these trials may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

With our sweet tea and pistachios and you fill-in-the-blank, let’s not allow the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches to choke away our consistent devotion.

~Adam Graig for the Missions Team

Well, friends, Ramadan has come to an end, and as we continue to lift up the Muslim world, let us now turn our immediate attention to the large Jewish community that is here in Louisville. Last week, several students at Louisville Collegiate School were allowed an excused absence from school to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This Wednesday, Jewish students will also be excused from classes, and teachers are not allowed to assign homework, as the Jewish community celebrates Yom Kippur, or the “Day of Atonement.”

Yom Kippur is comparable on some levels to the Christian celebration of Christmas. It is the most solemn and important of the Jewish holy days. Most secular Jews, who may not strictly observe other Jewish holy days, will fast and attend synagogue on Yom Kippur, where the number of worshippers attending is typically double or triple the normal attendance.

The biblical rites for the Day of Atonement are given in Leviticus 16. The themes of substitutionary atonement and repentance are among the central themes in the text.

So, Wellum’s Couples, as many of our neighbors gather this week to observe this holy day, may we – partakers of the blood of the new covenant – remember those whose eyes have not yet been opened to the One who has atoned for all sin and called every man to repentance.

~The Graigs for the Missions Team

Click here for today’s focus on Suriname.

The following information was taken from the 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World website.

The last ten days of Ramadan are considered highly blessed. They are marked by a heightened spiritual intensity.

One night in particular (this past Saturday to be exact), called the Night of Power or Night of Destiny, Muslims prayed for blessings and forgiveness all night long. In fact, one translation of the Hadith (Qur’an commentary), has the Prophet Muhammad declaring that “whoever prays during the Night of Power with faith and hoping for its reward will have all his previous sins forgiven.” Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad had his destiny fulfilled by receiving the first revelation of the Qur’an on that night.

And so it was on this special night and in weeks to follow, that significant numbers prayed and will continue praying in desperation genuinely seeking help from God concerning their destinies. Many will even experience supernatural encounters with God for the supernatural is very much an accepted part of Muslim life.

Because they are open to dreams and visions, Ramadan is a strategic time for Christians to believe that God would in His sovereignty reveal Himself to those who do not yet know Him. There are many stories throughout the Bible where God spoke through a dream or vision (Genesis 41, Genesis 46:2 & 3, Daniel 4, Judges 7:10-15, Ezekiel 11:24, Matthew 2:12, 19, Acts 10:3-20, Revelation 1:1). In many of these cases the end result was for the purpose of salvation or physical safety.

Here are a few contended yet surprising statistics to consider about dreams and visions:

-80% of new Christians in South Asia come to Christ as a direct result of supernatural encounters.

-More than half of new believers in Iran have had a dream or vision of Jesus.

-At least 35% of all recent Turkish conversions were in response to a dream and/or vision.

Furthermore, as Ramadan draws to a close, Muslims from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar will end their 30 days of fasting with a celebration feast called Eid al-Fitr. In many places this can last up to three days and include a special congregational Eid prayer and recitation that is normally performed at mosques or open areas like fields or squares. Apparently, Muslims are so open right now that conversation about faith could be easily initiated. Although Ramadan is over, the necessity for prayer and action towards Muslims continues.

So, let us fervently pray that:

-God would continue to draw people to himself through faith in his Son to the praise of his glory!

-as Muslims seek their God for favor and assurance of prosperity and fortune, the Lord would be gracious toward them and address their deepest need, their unbelieving hearts, by sending his Holy Spirit to convict them of sin and to bring about despair in their hope of Allah.

-believers around them would grow in boldness during this time of spiritual awareness to proclaim the light of Christ into their world of darkness.

-dreams or visions of Jesus might lead those who have heard the message of Jesus or even read parts of the Bible to put their complete trust in Him for their salvation!

~Jennifer Miersma for the Missions Team

This will be a short post so as to not reiterate much of what has already been said concerning Ramadan. If you’re just now joining us on this 30 day focus of loving Muslims through prayer, please feel free to check out the last two Missions Monday posts:

30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World/What is Ramadan?
Continued Prayer for the Muslim World

Click here to read about today’s focus on Nagpur, India.

May God help us remain faithful in prayer for Muslims these last 9 days. For as they seek Allah’s approval through arduous praying and fasting, yet they will not be heard by the LORD because their faithless hearts are far from Him!

“The LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” (Proverbs 15:29)

Thanks be to Christ, through whom our prayers are heard!

~Jennifer Miersma for the Missions Team