Well, we had quite a crew for our Friday night evangelism, tonight. Five of us! That's up two from the usual, which is great. I think I am going to miss it when I go home for a month.

Tonight was slow, and hot. There weren't too many people out, and the humidity was brutal, I was sweating for two hours in the middle of the night!

I've been reading through the biography of James Hudson Taylor, and a story therein really jumped out at me tonight:

'How long have you had the Glad Tidings in England?' he asked all unsuspectingly.

The young missionary was ashamed to tell him, and vaguely replied that it was several hundreds of years.

'What,' exclaimed Nyi in astonishment, 'several hundreds of years! Is it possible that you have known about Jesus so long, and only now you have come to tell us?
'My father south the truth for more than twnty years,' he continued sadly, and died without finding it. Oh, why did you not come sooner?'

John Wesley Preaching

Despite the different struggles I have with guidance, not knowing wher eto go from here, there are common themes that have always stayed with me, in whatever I'm doing... such as music. Study of Scripture is close on my heart, and prayer.

Another thing that has been growing on my heart (as some may have noticed) is evangelism. Some of the reading material I have been absorbing lately (such as biographical works on John G. Lake and James Hudson Taylor) have been really inspiring.

More than that, though, as I have been spending time in more concentrated prayer over the last six or seven months, the blazing glory that surrounds the gospel of Christ has been (somewhat) revealed to me. The more I think on it, the more I read about it, the more I listen to it and people speak on it, the more it captivates my heart.

This is the third installment in my three-part mini-series on the social justice movement and the preaching of the gospel within the Church today.

In the first part , I noted primarily that there is a tendancy within some organisations to put things like the fight against human trafficking and medical missions on the front line, and to bump the preaching of the gospel back. I am not condemning these organisations for anything, but I do believe it's our responsibility to put the gospel first, regardless of our station in life.

In the second part , I posted some short responses to a few objections that I normally get when I speak on or write about this subject of social justice and the gospel.

Here, in the final installment, I want to address the gospel itself.

The first 15 minutes or so are getting everything working, jump forward to about 16 minutes for the update.

In the last article I made a few comments on how parts of the Church have gone astray from preaching a pure Gospel of Jesus Christ and been sucked into the "safe" trap that beckons under the guise of the modern social justice movement, namely actively promoting social justice as a higher work than the propagation of the Gospel. This worries me, and God has put it heavily on my heart for over nine months now to pray over, and I know that the movement plays a major part in His plan for the Church as we are nearing the end of the age.

I shall, in this second part, respond to a few objections or comments that I anticipate receiving: whenever I write an article such as the one previous to this one, I almost always receive some sort of feedback along these lines of thought: "God calls different people to do different things", "the Gospel is a social justice movement", "Maybe it's wiser that organisations don't advertise they are Christian so they have a wider influence".

Most of us, I think, are aware of the great emphasis on justice (or fighting injustice) that is growing today in our societies... there is an abundance of movements out there promoting justice and the fight against injustice on many levels, and a lot of good things are coming out of it. The Church has been addressing many of these injustices for centuries, if not since it's inception two thousand years ago: truly, the very core of how Jesus taught us to live makes it undeniably necessary that we, as Christians, find the lost, help the needy, support the broken, to show love to the world's enemies... even and especially those who hate us.

Well, here it is, January again!

January 4, 2008 was the day that I arrived here at Reef To Outback, two days after I first arrivedin Australia for the second time. So I have been in Australia for over two years now, minus the three weeks that I spend in Thailand on my outreach. Two years since I left Canada! It's been pretty good, though, I've had some great experiences.

I've been reading John Piper's book "Don't Waste Your Life" lately, and a DVD accompanies it, on which is this sermon: which someone graciously uploaded on Youtube. If you have the time, please listen to this sermon, it's quite good. If you get a chance, do check out the book, too.

Well, any of you who have been following my blogs will be quite familiar, by now, with my struggles in life, particularly regarding my role... here in YWAM, in Christianity in general, and in the world. I've written a few times about how I feel like I'm being pulled in a few different directions, each one having equal influence in it's grasp, or so it seems.