Faith as a Child:
At this time I am preaching through Matthew chapter 18, and it is interesting to me how Jesus calls a child to Himself to give an illustration about childlike faith and how we must trust Him in that way. Then He goes on to talk about the importance of not being a stumbling block to these little children, and the grave consequences for those that do. All of this brings to mind the importance of reaching and working with children. They have a simple faith that is not yet affected by much of the contamination that we see in the world and even from false religions and philosophies. It is the prime time to reach them with the gospel and teach them principles that will affect the rest of their lives. It has been said that the mind of a child is like a sponge and that they absorb and retain most of what they see and hear. That is why, in our ministry, we have always tried to no loose this opportunity to reach and teach children. This past month we celebrated Children’s day here in Bolivia as a national holiday, so we had a special activity in the park near our church. The same as last year we had games like a fair or festival where they got tickets for each time they won and in turn could get prizes with their tickets. At the end we presented the gospel to them with the wordless book and several raised their hand for salvation. We praise the Lord for the opportunity to reach these children while they still have childlike faith.
Training to Help Others:
What a wonderful time we had recently in our pastor’s training classes. This is the third year that we have the classes and each year it has been a great blessing and help. This year’s theme was biblical counseling. This is a subject that applies directly to most pastors and ministry workers because one of their main responsibilities is to disciple, counsel and help the people they are working with to learn how to solve their problems biblically. We started out by looking at the condition of man and that it is a misconception that he, man, can solve his own problems from within himself. It is only through God and His word that man can find the answers to what he lacks. We also saw key aspects to counseling like understanding biblical communication and forgiveness and what true resolution looks like. At the end we were able to look at different case studies and how to handle them with the Bible. Counseling is something that I probably do more than anything else outside of preparing and preaching the Word, so these lessons were very helpful to me and the pastors that attended. Several of them came to me and said that they were facing similar situations in their churches and the instruction that they received was exactly what they needed. We had close to twenty pastors and workers from different churches with two men from the US and one pastor that came from Uruguay to help with the teaching. Bro. Bill Hill and his ministry of Equipping Nationals Worldwide is one of most biblically focused yet practical ministries that I know of and we are grateful that they come to help equip the pastors here in Bolivia. Please pray for these men as they lead their congregations and seek to reach many people with the gospel. We are praying that the Lord will continue to raise up many more men of God to serve Him in the ministry so that we can have a part in helping them do what God has called them to do.
Prayer Requests:
1. Pray for the pastors and leaders that we are training in our Bible College.
2. Pray for our children’s ministry and our community that we are working in.
3. Pray for our upcoming youth conference we will be having this coming month.
4. Pray for Bolivia and the elections that we will have later this year .