Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The Power of the Gospel in the Third World

My brother is back from his mission trip to Kenya. Thank you to those who thought to pray for him and the team he was with. He reports they had an awesome, fruitful, and enlightening time.

Here's a snippet from his back home blog post:
i could go on and on remembering funny or inspiring stories here and there, but i'll leave you with the clearest, loudest, and most convicting lesson i learned while away. as i shared the Gospel multiple times, always thinking of how simple to make it for the people and the interpreters, i was humbled and overjoyed to realize and remember how elemental our salvation is. a sinful man separated from a holy God. a holy God Who didn't have to provide a means of reconnecting to Him but did. no level of works can earn that fellowship. only our belief in God's Son ... that He paid with His life for our sins and rose again, conquering sin and death.

it was so easy to explain ... so painfully convictingly easy. i realized that as i had adjusted to this easy going, laid back, simple culture, the simple ingredients of the Gospel were universal. here at home our culture is cluttered, our lives are complicated, our "world" is complex, so we expect the cure to be equally involved. but it's not. the same ingredients for Salvation exist here as in Lemoru, Kenya: a sinful man and a holy God. it's a shame that our noisy society blurs our vision of the truth and it's a shame that i convinced myself that the truth was harder to deliver than it really is.

i now claim Romans 1:15-17 with a new conviction.

"So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, 'But the righteous man shall live by faith.'"

Yes, yes, yes!

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