A panoramic view of the End-Times Evangelism class.
Saturday, February 27, we had Alan Weston show us his method of sharing the gospel using the end-times prophecies. He says it's just one way of many to share about Jesus. 19 people came out to learn. I think that means there is a hunger in the church to be fruitful.
This last Saturday we went out on the pedestrian zone in Hounslow to do music and booktable outreach. The music part didn't happen. It was just too cold. It's been the coldest winter in 30 years here. Hopefully the next time we go out in April it will be warmer. Ten people from church came out, and we had a cold, happy time passing out tracts and talking with people. I had a chance to share Jesus with a young man from Nepal who left saying he wanted to check the church out. I pray he comes some Sunday.
Sunday was amazing for the amount of opposition we faced and for the results. I had a difficult time writing the message. I must have rewritten a part of it three times, trying to get the right approach to the Scripture. I want to be careful in what I preach. But at church I was very free in the teaching, feeling enabled to preach. At the end I asked those who wanted to pray to receive Jesus to look up at me in the eyes. To my amazement I found people looking at me. I asked them, "Do you want to pray?" One person on the side looked down again, but the girl next to him, his girlfriend, nodded her head. Two in front, a father and his son, who recently had left a cult, nodded their heads. They did it independently; neither knew until later that the other had looked up. A girl in the back, a Hungarian who comes only occasionally, also nodded her head. Five people in all responded to the invitation.
The fifth person was a girl I'd never seen before. After the service I learned she was the ex-girlfriend of a church member's son. The son had just broken up with her because he wanted to get his life together with the Lord. She had no background in Christianity. Her parents are spiritualists. The ex-girlfriend had woken up Sunday morning and was gripped with the thought: "I HAVE to get to church this morning." She came to Whitton School, walked up to the first person she saw and asked, "Is this the church? Am I in the right place?" She was talking to Joanie, who realized this was the ex-girlfriend. Joanie assumed the boy's mother must have arranged to meet the girl. But when the mother got there, she was as amazed as Joanie to find the ex-girlfriend at church. Before the meeting started, she led the girl to Jesus. At the end of the meeting, the girl prayed again to receive Jesus.
Meanwhile, the open discussion format at the Wednesday night Bible study is still going well. One longtime attender, a Dutch woman in her 70's, said to me, "This is really good. I'm understanding what you're getting at." Joanie thought last night had really kind of lost the context. I agree; we should have gone on to Hebrews 3. But I felt like we hadn't really studied a couple of verses in Hebrews 2. When we finished, the young man who had been in a cult told me that the study had described his own life. He'd been trapped in a meaningless life, so paranoid from smoking pot he had no confidence to go outside. But the Lord had set him free from that. He was praising the Lord.
It seems like the Lord is doing a work here. I am half excited and half numb. Is this really happening in my church? I have been praying for God to do a work. I will thank Him and praise Him and see what He does next.
