The Call for Muslim Evangelism

I openned our Bible study up to questions last night, and this was the first question, “Why does the Bible have four gospels instead of just one?”

It’s actually a pretty good question. I mean what’s the point of having four books which pretty much tell the exact same story?

If you’re wondering the same thing, here’s what I told him last night.

Pretend you’re a judge of an extremely important case in court. You want to be as unbiased about everything as you possibly can. The prosecution has their story, the defendent has his story, but nobody really knows who’s telling the truth or not. You, as the judge, weren’t there when the incident took place and neither was the jury.

In every single case, the most powerful source in determining what happened is an eye witness.

The only thing more convencing than an eye witness is four witnesses telling the exact same story. 

Was Jesus the Messiah? Was He crusified and did He rise again? Is He the Son of God?

Don’t ask my opinion, ask the eye witnesses who saw the whole thing.

When evidence is stacked up like that, you have to either accept it or choose to ignore it.

It’s as ridiculous as saying that I don’t believe George Washington really existed. It’s just something made up by patriotic Americans to sound like we had a great man lead us to independence. I never saw him and my professor says the story is made up. Only naive fanatics would believe in somebody like that.

Another interesting thing about having four gospels instead of one, is that we get the same story about the life of Jesus but from four different perspectives.

Matthew focuses on Jesus Christ the King of kings and His right to the throne of David.

Mark focuses on Jesus the servant.

Luke focuses on the humanity of Jesus Christ as the “Son of Man.”

John, who was the closest disciple to Jesus, goes extreme and focuses on Jesus as the “Son of God,” and God in the flesh.

This probably isn’t the only explanation for having four gospels, but it sure makes sense to somebody as simple as I am.

According to Muhammad,

“The most hated person in the sight of God is the most quarrelling person.”

(Saheeh Al-Bukhari volume 3, Book 43, Page Number 637).

Things that make you go, “hmmmm.” 

No that isn’t a new car model. It’s the condition of an entire country.

Chris Gardner headed back to the States yesterday to begin raising more support for the Peru Bible College.

The Bible college has made a huge impact in world missions, and it needs the finances to continue growing. 

While Chris is in the states, I’ll have more to do here in Arequipa than ever before. Luckily, I have skype and vonage to keep in touch with him and bug him with questions about the ministry.

Please be praying for the Gardner family (Chris, Andria, Jacob, Hanna, and Andrew) as they travel around the country and look for churches who will partner together with them here in Peru. 

Our team on the ground inide North Africa had their first official church service this past Sunday.

They had 11 people show up for it. 

Click here to read all about it. 

Praise the Lord for what He’s doing in North Africa!  

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.”

Proverbs 26:4 

Sometimes the best answer is no answer at all

I attended my first wedding vow renewal service tonight.

In fact,  I was in charge of it!

Never even seen one in person before. I just checked out Vision Baptist Church’s blog and saw all of their pictures. That’s about as close as I’ve gotten to a service like this.

In spite of running something I knew absolutely nothing about, everything seemed to go pretty well for the most part.

I was incredibly nervous, but with the help of Alonso Montenegro (who was really the one who made everything happen tonight) and Chris Gardner, it all turned out alright.

We had 26 couples publicly renew their vows, and after the service a lot of us went out to eat for a reception dinner.

It was a good experience, and I look forward to doing it again in the future. 

We had four first time visitors at our Bible study tonight.

All of them came from the English class again.

Praise the Lord! 

Be praying for Sunday’s services. 

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That’s what we discovered at 4:00 this morning.

There’s nothing quite like waking up at the most inconvenient hour of the night to the sound of a screeching alarm just outside your bedroom window. Especially, when you didn’t even know it was there. 

We’ve lived in this house for a year now and this is the first time I ever heard the stupid thing go off.

I had no clue how to turn it off!

For twenty minutes I stumbled around my house dazed and confused looking for some kind of switch or power breaker.

No luck.

Finally, I venture out our back door and just stared at the speaker causing my head to throb. That’s when I saw the little metal box connected to our electric fence. On the front of it there was a key hole with the words “on” and “off” written on opposite sides. 

Unfortunately, our landlady didn’t leave us this special little key to end all of our problems. So I thought as quickly as I could at 4:30 A.M. and grabbed a butter knife.

Let me remind you that I had only gone to bed about four hours earlier so my logic was weaker than normal.

I tried to pry the metal box open and quickly found out that metal against metal connected to a 220 Volt electric fence  was not a good combination.

Needless to say, I was very awake at this point.

I decided to go for help, and ran down our street in my wife-beater and palm tree pajama pants to the gate where our neighborhood guard sleeps… I mean is stationed.

He tried his best to help us and for the next hour and a half I stood in my back yard with my fancy PJ’s watching our guard cut wires, get shocked, and still get blown away by the obnoxious alarm just outside our bedroom window.

By the grace of God it finally stopped around 6:30 A.M. only to start up again around noon.

We finally found a way to yank the battery out of the box, but not without a little psychological damage.

Norah slept through the whole thing! Go figure.

Maybe tonight we’ll all get some sleep (all 50 of our neighbors included).