Day 1 – in Shreveport
(Follow the mission trip using the Indonesia tag.)
Well – the day has arrived. This is the first day of a two week mission trip to Indonesia to preach the Gospel. There are 19 of us, and we will be serving a total of 15 or so churches. 8 of them will be focused on in the first week, with multiple opportunities to preach the Gospel to not only church folks, but their family and friends.
There are several emotions that are in the air:
- excitement – It’s not every day that one has the opportunity to go around the world for the cause of Christ; to have great delight in His Word because of its sufficiency to save. The fact that HE goes before and prepares the hearts of men is a comforting and exciting thing.
- nervousness - Plane travel can be a nerve-wracking thing. Did I get everything? Have I got my passport? Copies of my passport? Gifts to bring the pastors? Have I left phone numbers / contact info?
- humility - There is an over-arching feeling of inadequecy to the task given. I CANNOT preach Christ as He deserves to be preached. At best, my feeble efforts are a drop in the bucket of what He deserves.
I was reading in several places this morning – two of which I will mention here: Acts 19:13-16, and John 15:7-8
Acts 19:13 Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” 14 Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. 15 But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” 16 And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.
In this text, we see those “pretenders” of the faith. This really was convicting to me today, in light of the endeavor that we will be attempting. It calls me to examine myself, to “see if I am in the faith”. By what power do I go? Whose authority? My own? Christ’s? The enemy knows good and well that Jesus has authority over all things – but will the servants of the most high prove to be genuine? There is great rest in this next text in John 15:
7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. 9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.
This is comforting meditation – the fruit of God by way of the vine and branches only occurs in the abiding in the vine. He says a wonderful thing here in this text: “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.“ Powerful. The context in this verse is one of eternal fruit bearing. We are attempting to do something grand – to preach a Gospel from dying men to dying men. It is of eternal significance. What then do I wish (vs. 7)?
- The Word will run free course among all those who hear.
- The Word will have great power to be received as the voice of the Lord.
- We will recognize divine appointments to share the Gospel.
- We will handle the Gospel VERY carefully, not in a trite, trivial manner.
- We promote the greatness of our God and the depravity of man.
- That the eyes of our faith will behold Christ as more precious than we’ve ever seen before.
There are many other things to pray for that are great things to pray for – but these are things that I see that are directly related to fruit bearing in light of this trip.
Will we go in the power of Christ? I pray that we do. And when we preach in this manner (produce fruit in this manner), we prove to be His disciples. AMEN!
I ask that you pray that this team does go in the power of Christ. I will attempt to update this blog regularly to keep those interested informed of our progress.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Devotional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
