Going Beyond the Command of “GO!”

When it comes to reaching lost souls, many of us refer to the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20. We say that we seek to reach lost souls because God commanded us to do so. And while that is true, do we merely go just because of a command? Or is there a deeper purpose beyond that command that compels us to go. If there wasn't a command, would we still have the urgency to spread the good news of Christ's love to a dying world?

Of course, I could list a whole bunch of reasons why, but I merely want to list five.

1. The Crisis of a Christless Humanity
The Bible paints for us a very real dilemma facing the human race.

Act. 4:13—“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which they must be saved.”

John 14:6—“Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The Bible makes it clear that Jesus is the only means of salvation. Without Him, this Christless humanity is faced with a looming crisis--absolutely no hope of salvation. Without this hope of salvation, the only option they have is to be lost—not just a temporary, transitory loss, but an eternal lost. The loss of an infinite life—a life for which Christ sacrificed His own—is not just a trite loss. It is an immeasurably and inconceivably great or extensive loss.

Notice Paul's motivating factor for sharing Christ. 2 Cor. 5:10-11—“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men...” Paul knew that for the wicked who do not know Jesus, His coming would be a sheer terror. Paul said this fact was what drove him to share Jesus with others. He didn't want to see a Christless humanity that had no hope of salvation. And note the urgency by which he states this...he was persuaded to tell others. This is not a casual, nonchalant telling of the gospel. When people are seeking to persuade someone, they pull out every possible argument and reason to convince the other person. This is the urgency Paul felt. He did not want a Christless humanity to experience the crisis of an eternal loss.

We should have this same passion for lost souls.

2. We cannot assume that people will be saved.
In Zech. 13:6, we are given an account of individuals in heaven that will be perplexed about the nail prints in Jesus’ hands. They will inquire into the meaning behind them and it is then that Christ will be able to unfold to them the plan of salvation and how His death on the cross was the means of their salvation.

Some will use this passage to say that reaching lost souls for Christ is really not that necessary then since some will be saved never hearing the name of Jesus. Although it is possible for those who have not had direct instruction about Christ to listen to the wooing of the Holy Spirit through their quickened conscious, nature, or some other means, as followers of Christ, we must never take for granted that this is likely to occur. While we can hope that the world will hear about Jesus Christ, we must act and work as if they would not unless we directly told them.

Also, consider how we would feel if we were in their shoes. If we were them, wouldn't we wish that someone would tell us about the love of Jesus so that we would have the opportunity to be saved? This is a deeper application of the Golden Rule. We should do unto others as we would want them to do to us.

3. Reaching lost souls places us right in the center of God's work.
Have you ever wished you could have worked alongside Christ when He was on earth, to witness His teaching or experience His miracles? Just because we didn't live back then, doesn't mean we can't work alongside Him now. God's business is saving souls. Luke 19:10—“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” If we want to be in the direct center of God's will and His work, we will find ourselves reaching souls.

4. Reaching lost souls brings joy to the heart of God.
When you kneel to pray at night, have you ever thought about asking God how His day went? Can you imagine how He would answer? “My child, I witnessed over 100,000 deaths today. I wrapped my arms around a lot of hurting people. I shed tears with them as they hurt. I saw crime, violence, pain, and suffering. It was a rough day.” And then you ask Him, “But God, was there anything today that made you happy.” “Oh, yes,” He says, “I saw this couple give a Bible study to an individual and that person accepted Jesus Christ into their life. And let me tell you, all heaven started rejoicing over that one sinner that repented! That brought Me joy.’

Imagine that we can be instruments to help bring joy to the heart of God! That is an awesome thought!

5. Reaching lost souls brings us into harmony with Christ.
Notice this statement...“God could have reached His object in saving sinners without our aid, but in order for us to develop a character like Christ's, we must share in His work. In order to enter into His joy,—the joy of seeing souls redeemed by His sacrifice,—we must participate in His labors for their redemption.” (DA 142)

Reaching others does something in our own lives. It teaches selflessness, humility, love, compassion, sensitivity, and develops in us a character like Christ’s. And notice as well, that we can experience some of that same joy that Christ experiences by seeing souls won to Him.

So do we reach out to others merely because we are commanded to go? Oh, no! It goes way beyond the command. It should stem from a heart of love that realizes the crisis of those who don't have Christ. It should stem from a sense that we cannot assume a person will hear about Jesus and we must act as if they won't. It should come from a desire to be yoked with Christ in His work of reaching the lost. It should be driven by our desire to bring joy to the heart of God. And finally, it should be driven by our own longing to have a character more like Christ's and to experience His joy.

And that goes a whole lot deeper than a mere command to “Go”!

A little taste of our experiences here...

I feel like I have the best job here! While the other staff are busy with the logistics of buying food, renting cars, etc. I get to sit down with the students everyday and review their sermons and help them edit their talks. And then I get to go in the evening and listen to them preach and hear the powerful testimonies that are coming from their sites. I have been wanting to post some updates on what is happening here for several days, and have tried several times, but the internet is the worst thing ever! So I am not going to be able to put up any pictures here... But here are a few stories...

Story #1:

A few nights ago, I went to this mountain village to visit one of my students sites. This little village is so quaint! To get to it, you have to cross this extremely long suspension bridge that is the most rickety bridge ever! There are a lot of extension bridges around here, but this was by far the worst with a bunch of missing planks and pieces of plywood just laid in place.

The village itself is really cute. There are a total of 200-300 people in this village and the village has three different churches—an Adventist church, a mosque, and a Catholic Church.

There are a total of about 65-70 people coming and 19 of them are non-Adventist. There is a whole group of Catholic young people that are coming to the meetings. One of the Catholic girls is the youth leader at her church. But she has chosen to come to the Adventist church for Bible studies since they actually study the Bible and they don’t in her church. That's pretty cool!

Here it is very difficult to evangelize Muslims due to very strict government laws. It is illegal to evangelize Muslims. If you were to invite a Muslim to your church, you could face imprisonment. So in this little village, the mosque is directly across the large field from the Adventist church. The two houses right around the church are both Muslim families. But even though they can’t invite them to the meetings, I think the sound is loud enough coming out of the church that they are probably hearing the meetings anyway.

Even here, we see the great controversy playing out. At this site, there is a former Muslim lady who was demon possessed. The Muslims tried to get the demons out of her, but failed. The Adventist pastor prayed for her and they immediately left. She has since become an Adventist. But she is going through new battles now. At work, she desperately wants to tell her Muslim friends about Jesus but every time she goes to say something, she cannot speak. Also when she prays, she hears these voices in her head that distract her from praying. The great controversy is real and there is definitely a fight of who will conquer. But we all know that God is more powerful and will be the victor. Wonderful thought!

Story #2:

The population of Adventists at these sites is very high. In fact, some of the sites have had no visitors at all. Unfortunately, some of the churches say it isn't their culture to invite non-Adventists to their meetings. And perhaps some of it is the trouble they could get into for evangelizing. Some of my students were discouraged to have no visitors at their sites. So I told them to ask if they could go door knocking in their village and personally invite people to come to their meetings. Two students went to their site early one night and invited people to come.

They weren’t sure what kind of success they would have, but they were excited to see what would happen that evening. Just as the meeting was supposed to start, all the electricity went off in the church and it was pitch black. My students started to wonder if people would even still come with all the power off, but they looked across the little extension bridge and saw all the little flashlights coming across. They started to get really excited. By the time the lights came on a while later, the church had the most people it has had since the meetings started. And within the crowd were 4 Catholics and 3 Muslims that had come from the personal invitation. They were some pretty excited kids!

Story #3:

On the way to one of his sites, a student saw two people walking along the road and felt impressed to invite them to his meetings. When the turned around to find the people, they weren’t there, but the driver knew where they lived. But they weren’t home. The neighbor lady took them to a house where they had gone to visit. This family were Catholics. He found out the two people he was looking for were already going to the meetings, but he took the opportunity to invite the Catholic family to the meetings. He didn’t see them once the meeting started, but after the meeting, a church member told him that they had indeed shown up that night. He was very excited about that!

Story #4:

Two nights ago, a student prayed that at least 5 people that were non-members would come to his site. Last night, he prayed that he wanted at least 3 of those non-members to be Catholics. Tonight he had 4 Catholics and 2 additional non-members come to his site. And the night was on the Sabbath. He was so excited that God answered a very direct prayer he had prayed just the night before.

Story #5:

The other night, one student was preaching and indicated afterward that this was the absolute worst sermon he thought he had preached. His words were all scrambled, he couldn’t think of what to say, and it was all choppy. After the meeting, the translator told him that was the easiest sermon he had translated yet. He said it was smooth, he knew exactly when to cut in and out, the message was clear and convincing, etc. I think the Holy Spirit must have been doing some translating between speaker to translator!

Story #6:

At one site, attendance numbers were starting to decline, so the students at that site began praying that more people would come. Three nights ago, they had 87 people and 2 non-Adventists. Last night they had 97 people and 5 non-Adventists, and tonight they had 100 people and 10 non-Adventists. They were pretty excited!

Also at that site, the speaker had eaten something funny for supper and right before getting up to speak, she began feeling extremely nauseous. She was sitting on the front row getting ready to speak and was thinking at any minute she was going to throw up. She and her partner prayed that they devil would not prevent them from speaking on the important topic of the Sabbath. During the song service, she said all the songs seemed to apply to her… ones like “God will take care of you.” Her partner prayed that at least the nausea would go away just for the time she was speaking. Just as she got up to preach, all the nausea left and she preached the whole sermon with no problem.

That is only a few of the stories here. I am excited to see how God will continue to bless!

Two and a half weeks ago, our school began a three week long music filming tour of California and Utah. We are in the process of putting the book "Steps to Christ" to song. There will be three songs for every chapter interspersed with short speeches and testimonies from the students. God has richly been blessing our time. If you want to see what we have done on this trip, you can visit the school blog at http://blog.fountainviewacademy.ca.

We are currently in Utah and have been filming at several very beautiful locations in the area. There are so many cool things around here to see! On Friday, I went with some friends 4x4 off-roading and saw absolutely spectacular scenery through Canyonlands and the Needles District. We saw dinosaurs tracks and the fossilized bones of some very large creature. Each vertebrae was almost a foot long! They estimate the animal was about 30 feet long. We also saw fossilized clams, coral, and a sea urchin that would have had 1 foot long spines. It was pretty cool.

The past two days, we filmed at Arches Nat'l Park. Monday morning, we went out to the park at 5am in order to catch the sunrise. A camera was set on time lapse to catch the morning sunrise and just as it started to peak over the horizon, the camera panned onto the students who were sitting on the edge of a bluff singing the song "No More Night." It was really neat. But it was very cold as well! (In the 30s!)

On Sabbath, we went to the little church in town and I was absolutely shocked to see that one of my friends from Andrews University days was pastoring in this area. On Monday, I was able to catch up with him so while the students continued filming in Arches Nat'l Park, he took me to see some of the other famous arches in the park. They were incredible! Here are just a few photos.

Balanced Rock

South Window Arch

Turret Arch

Another view of Turret Arch

The La Salle Mountains in the distance. A monk was passing through Utah in the dead of summer and saw these mountains. He was sure there was no possibility of there being snow on any mountains in that type of heat, so he guessed the white on the mountains was really salt fields. Thus the name "La Salle"--the Salt Mountains.

The Double Arch.

Delicate Arch--one of the most famous in the park. I didn't hike up to it, so it is not the best picture.

The sunset that evening.

Yesterday, we went back to Double Arch and filmed several songs there. It was spectacular!

Honduras, part 2

I am writing this from the cool airconditioning of my room. I was out in the town this morning trying to buy supper to feed all the kids. The sun is so hot and it is easy to get burned here. Going to the market is quite the task since you have to haggle with the local market vendors to see who gives the best prices for produce. Thankfully one of the staff guys loves to barter so it makes things much easier. I need to take pictures of the market though. There are some pretty nasty things around there. Today, we saw these bloody chuncks of meat laying in the back of an absolutley bloody truck bed. I couldn't even identify what part of the animal it was. And it just lays out in the sun and rots. So gross!

Please continue to pray for our meetings here. Blessings are still coming out of the work here. You can go to the students blog and read some of them there. Last night at one of the sites, the non-Adventist translator was really touched by the sermon on the law of God and was very convicted. He said he is bringing a lot of friends tonight to hear the message. Pray esp. this weekend since the topic is on Sabbath vs. Sunday.

In addition to the meetings, we are tyring to get out and see some of the Honduran country side. We went on an exucursion yesterday to a national park called Punta Sal. The beaches are amazing and the water nice and warm. We took a walk through a jungle path which was really neat. And we saw lots of monkeys. Here are just a few photos of our time.

One of the boats we rode to the island.

This island is called "Cocolito" or "Little Coconut" (I don't know if I spelled that right.)

These birds are called "Friggets." They have an incredible large wingspan and a very long tail.

This was the hike through the jungle.

This monkey looks like he wants to throw something on me. The tour guide said the monkeys do like to throw things.

Another monkey.

A banana flower.

A very poisonous banana spider. They can't kill you, but they make you very sick.

The beach where we spent three hours snorkling, swimming, exploring, and eating a picnic lunch.

A picnic lunch on the beach.

Two students and I.

Yours truly trying to not get burnt. I actually did very well.

I am in Honduras!

Written Sabbath evening:
Well, we've been in Honduras now for four days and it has been a whirlwind! In just four days, I have seen the devil try to derail our work and discourage my students. But God always prevails. There are multiple areas around this part of Honduras that are holding campaigns, but this site seems to be one that has the least amount of ground work preparation. I cannot fault the pastors or leaders because each pastor here is responsible for many churches (13+) so they are running around trying to get everything worked out. There was aparently a lot of miscommunication with the pastors here about the students coming. Only about 4 of the 13 sites were able to be visited ahead of time. The rest of the sites, the students saw for the first time right before there meetings. Transporation was a huge issue since they didn't realize that most of the sites had two speakers. So last minute transportion had to be worked out. Some students didn't even get to their site until after they had already started Friday evening. And then there were so many issues with the translators... 13-15 year old kids who knew English well but didn't speak Spanish very well (odd problem, right?) and ones that didn't even know how to read Bible texts or translate words like 'Lord'. One site was so bad that the elder ended up preaching some random sermon because no one could understand the translator. Then at another site, there wasn't even a translator who showed up. So they just packed up and left. Then at another site, no one showed up so they canceled the crusade there. It was such a mess and students were all wondering what could be done. I kept encouraging them to have patience and flexiblilty. I just didn't want them to get discouraged since they have put there whole heart into preparing for these meetings. I have had to be in the middle of multiple meetings with the pastors, the union president, and our site coordinator for SHARE HIM just to try to make sense of what is happening here. The local people are swamped with 13 sites and didn't have the man power to run them. So we cut back from 13 to 7 sites and reorganized all the student teams and got new drivers and translators. It has been a lot of tedious details and has been a very exhausting past couple of days. But I do believe that God has big plans for these students and there must be miracles that are going to happen here considering the devil worked so hard at the onset. Tonight I got very good reports from most of the sites, so I think things are finally going to work out. Praise the Lord! So here are just a few pictures of some of the sites.

This last picture is of the site that was canceled Friday night because no one showed up. The pastor today in church pled with the people to bring friends to the meeting. This afternoon when they decided to cut sites, they again cut out this site. But the pastor had pled so hard with his congregation that morning and the church members went out to invite people, that they just couldn't cancel it. So one of my students agreed last minute to go preach at this site. There were quite a number of people there and God blessed my student so much as she preached the message. In the congregation is a Catholic gentlemen who goes to church on Sabbath because he is convinced the Catholic church changed the day of worship. My student commented that he is not going to be Catholic for long!

Please continue to pray for the meetings here. At one site we have a non-Adventist translator who is actually one of the drivers who was recruited to translate. He is actually doing quite well and the students are excited that he is hearing the messages as he is translating for them. They are praying that he will give his life to Christ as he helps them present the message each night.

Today was the first time I have had time to go to the beach. It was really nice. Here are just a few photos.

Some random funny things:

Some in our group are still getting used to the new fruit down here. They went shopping the other day and bought a "papaya". When I got it out for breakfast, I thought it looked kinda strange. But I cut it anyway. I laughed when we opened it. It turned out to be a squash instead. I think we need to teach some people in our group how to tell different foods apart!!

The first night we are in our hotel, my student was just getting ready to walk down the stairs from the second floor of the hotel and all of a sudden she screamed at the top of her lungs and began dancing around at the top of the stairs. All of us wondered if she saw a rat or snake or what. We laughed when this is what we saw. Up on the second floor is an area that has a lot of plants. This toad must live in the plants and eat the bugs there. He was a great big guy but so cute too!

If you want to keep up with the kids site, it is:
http://telagrams09.blogspot.com/

This and That...

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks that I don't even know what I should write about. School let out on the 10th of December, and then I joined the entire student body for a week long choir tour all throughout California. It was the first choir trip I have been able to go on since I always had to stay home before to get caught up on grading and lesson planning. It was great fun, but by the time we all arrived in San Jose on the 17th for GYC, we were all ready to stay in one location for longer than a day. We performed twice at GYC--once for an evening special music and then three selections during a Friday afternoon musical concert. It was fun. Here is a video of one of our performances.



This is a photo of all of us on stage at GYC. Photo credit by Alden Ho.

The students even made up a performance of their own. My kids never cease to amaze me in coming up with creative ways to entertain themselves when they are bored. I thought I would include a little clip of what they do when they need something to do. This year, yodeling has become a fun past time at school and one of our students has gotten quite a number of the guys to join along. Saturday night after the last GYC meeting, I walked into a room to find my students giving a yodeling concert. We were all laughing so hard since it was so amusing. There was a huge Christmas gathering in a park directly across from the convention center and there were a lot of passersby in the downtown area. One of our students suggested that they go out onto the street and see if they could get people to stop by and listen to them. They even decided to open the accordion case and see if people would throw money into the case. They actually did have people stop by and several stayed for quite a while. They even got a few donations for their cause. As you will notice in the clip, they had no qualms about asking for donations! To say the least, I thought it was a clever way to pass the time!



Now I am finally back at home and am enjoying a wonderful time with my family. It feels really good to just sit around! But in reality, I brought a lot of work with me and eventually I will get some stuff done. But in the meantime, I am enjoying just spending time with the best family ever!!

In the beauty of this season, I hope you will remember what matters most--family, friends, and most importantly a Savior who loved us enough to give us a reason for the season. May you appreciate His sacrificial gift all the more this Christmas.

so cute!

Canada is full of bears! Lots of bears! I have so wanted to get a picture of one to show everyone, but most of them have been out at night, but those don't make for good photos. (Besides the fact that I am not so fool-hardy as to run around at night trying to snap photos of bears!) Anyway, last month there was a little cub that decided Fountainview would make a great home. No one ever saw his mommy or daddy, but he loved making frequent stops on campus and grabbing a few bites to eat out of people's compost piles. And there was one tree on campus that was "his" tree. Here are just a few photos of him in his tree. I can't wait for Heaven where I can just cuddle with the little creature and give him a great big hug! That will be amazing!