Saturday, October 30, 2010

The West Yellowstone Mexican

I was so excited.  I was in West Yellowstone for work and was walking to the place we were to eat dinner and I saw a school bus that was converted to a Mexican take out place.  I just got finished memorizing how to share the gospel in Spanish so I went in looking for some Spanish speakers.  I found them.  The girl taking orders hardly knew any English so I spoke to her in Spanish and took her through the law and gospel.  It was cool.  Even though my Spanish was bad, she understood everything I said and actually got convicted.  She spoke to me in Spanish and told me she grew up Catholic but now is not anything.  She then said something about when she was a girl she never sinned but now she does and then she asked where Jesus is now.  All I could say in Spanish that He is "en el Cielo" , He is in heaven.  I gave her a Spanish gospel tract and left the seed to grow.

At work on Thursday, the fire extinguisher man came to inspect our extinguishers so I road along with him and it turned out that he was from Butte also.  We talked about Butte and the people we know and then I swung to the spiritual and took him through the Law and shared the Gospel.  He was wide open to talk and had a lot of questions that he had been struggling with for years.  We talked for 2 hours.  He thanked me a lot and said at first he thought, "I hope this guy isn't going to preach at me all day" but then he said he was very glad I brought up the topic.  He said that he shared things with me that he had never told anyone before and he said it felt good to talk about things.  We covered many topics and I shared my testimony.  He was interested in seeking God but had never read the Bible in his whole life.  I gave him my the first Bible that I ever owned.  It was the Bible I devoured when God saved me.  It had so many notes and highlights it was crazy but he said he didn't care.  I can't take it to Peru anyway so I would rather give it to someone who will read it.  You never know, God might use it to save him in the same way He used it to save me.  Gloria a Dios por su gracia.

Friday, October 22, 2010

To Every Tribe Missionary Conference - Day 1

We are in Oklahoma right now at the To Every Tribe Missions conference.  The first session of Friday night was given  by Josef Tson from the Romanian Missionary Society.  He is a Romanian and was persecuted for the faith. 

He brought out some interesting points from Hebrews 2:15 which says that all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.  Everyone that is scared to die is a slave for life. 

Josef said when he was in prison for the gospel and the communists put a gun to his head and said they would kill him, he told them, "Your weapon is killing but my weapon is dying."  He told them that by his death, God would spread the gospel throughout the country, which is what the communists were fighting, so they never killed him and let him go.

Another powerful thing he said was, "A man who has no fear of death is the most dangerous man in the world."

Why do we love our life more than Jesus?  Jesus gave up His life and suffered for us, why don't we do the same?

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The Drug deal

I wonder if the cops don't know or just don't care. We share the gospel a lot at Hill park in Helena. This is where many of the street kids hang out as well as where most of the drug trafficking takes place in Helena. It was very obvious what was going on in the open. A beat up car from Billings filled with 4 rough looking men were sitting in the car were smoking nervously and waiting for someone. I gave them some gospel tracts, which 3 of the 4 took but one guy wouldn't look at me. After a while another car load of men pulled up. Out jumped a few big men that look like they make their living as the enforcers of those who don't pay. They went to the car of the 4 drug dealers and made a transaction. Many other kids were milling around at the time, probably waiting to get hooked up with what they wanted. It saddened me when I saw the drug dealers in their 50's talking from a distance with one of the teenage girls sitting in the park. It was obvious they had a relationship of some sort and not a good one. What a lost and depraved world.

Before we got to the drug deal we met up with Peters, Brent and Yoshi at their church. I had a man with me named Ravi, who is an evangelist from South Africa. We started at Carrol College because the Rocky Mountain Elk foundation was having their annual meeting. I brought a whole bunch of my elk gospel tracts and we stood by the door and gave them out to all the people who went in. God blessed this and no one from the Elk Foundation told us to leave. We gave out over one hundred tracts in a short time.

We moved up to the drug dealer park and I shared the gospel with a couple guys at a table. We went through they law and gospel. They knew they were condemned and thanked us for talking with them but there was not much conviction.

The drug deal happened next when we were in the park. Yoshi and Brent were busy witnessing to different groups of people so Ravi, Peters and I went up to talk with another group in the park. I tried to do a magic trick but an angry man, who knew what we were all about, immediately started railing at us and told us to leave. I asked if he wanted me to finish the trick and he got made and started to jump up and said he wasn't going to tell us twice. We graciously left, praising God we were not still lost and wretched because that man would have been hurting. We were all the same as this angry man when we were in sin and without Christ so the way he was acting was understandable. He is a pagan, acting like pagans do.

Yoshi tried to give a biker who was sitting in the parking lot a gospel tract and the biker said if he touched his bike with the tract he was going to break his hands. Loving guy.

In the walking mall, a group of girls went off on Brent because they hated Jesus.  They railed at him non stop.  I tried to talk some logic into the girl but she was so illogical that she believed that her beliefs determined what reality was.  We left and they openly mocked us and clapped their hands at us.
Brent talked with angry kids who also reviled him most of the time. This is the way that sinners that hate Jesus Christ act and we are used to it and take comfort in Jesus who said:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
(Matthew 5:11-12)

I had a good conversation with a 26 year old man who ruined his life and was now an alcoholic.  We talked for a long time about the Bible, law, and gospel.  He was suicidal and had no hope and wanted to be dead.  I shared the hope in Christ and told him to seek God and confirm what I was saying by reading the gospel of John.
 
Praise God for the great night!