theamenministry

Many of us were blessed to have grown up in churches where we heard God’s Word from the earliest days of our childhood.  However, for those of us who were so blessed, there is a great danger.  Have we heard the story of Jesus so often, His love for us, His death on the cross in our place, that it no longer moves us as it once did?

As our mission team shared the Gospel with people who were hearing it for the first time, I was greatly moved and blessed to witness their response.  We told them of the One True God.  We talked to them about what sin is and how our sin separates us from God.  We told them that we could never save ourselves or atone for our sins or work our way into Heaven.  It was when we told them of God’s Son, Jesus, and how He loved us so much that He came to earth and took our place and paid the penalty for our sins by dying on a cross; that is when I was so moved by their response.  You see, for these people, death is not a video game.  For them, death is not something they watch hundreds of times on television shows and therefore become desensitized to it.  For the people we were talking with, death is something they see up close and far too often.  The daily threat of death lurks in and around the Amazon.  They could relate to someone being in danger of dying and then someone else dying in their place so that they could be saved.

When they heard the story of God’s love and salvation through Jesus, they wept, they were humbled, they were amazed.  Does the cross still move you?  Are we as affected by the story of Jesus as we should be?  Oh, that God would do a fresh work in our hearts that shakes us and moves us when we hear the Good News.  May the old, old story stay fresh on our hearts now and always.

In Christ’s service,

Allen