Awarding Diplomas

Today we had a special service at the public school where we meet for church. As you may know, we also teach moral/religion lessons during school hours on a weekly basis. As of now, we teach the Gospel in the public school on a weekly basis during schools hours to about 350 students. Of those students, we had the awards ceremony today for the elementary school students (grades 1-4) who studied the course “Wrong way Jonah” with us throughout this school year. The kids did very well even though this was the first time that many of them had ever opened a Bible in their short lives. Very few of them even have Bibles at home and they are hard to acquire in Moldova. You can buy the Koran in bookstores but you cannot buy the Bible, even though Moldova is considered a “Christian” nation. The great part about these Bible study materials is that the text is printed out in the manual so even though the kids do not have a Bible they can study with us.

Are you totally committed to following Jesus?

This is the article for the next lesson at our youth meeting this Friday night. We are looking at lesson 4 of “Counting the cost of discipleship”. Here is a quick review of what we have learned.

• Lesson 1 – The call to follow Jesus
• Lesson 2 – The cost of following Jesus
• Lesson 3 – Difference between a genuine follower of Christ and a false “follower”

Be a Real Christian (Matthew 7:13-29)

I am preparing to teach lesson 3 from “Counting the real cost of discipleship” this Friday night at our church youth group. This is a great study and I would like to share it with you here.

LI – The Call to follow Jesus

LII – The Cost of following Jesus

These are the two lessons that precede the one that I am teaching this Friday night. This lesson teaches what a true disciple looks like and how he compares to a false disciple. The lesson begins with a provocative question:

Is it possible to be deceived, calling yourself a Christian, yet not really be one?

Let’s look at the words of Jesus Christ.

 

Biblical Engagement

I am officiating my first “engagement” today. In order to brush up on the process and think through the Biblical steps, I would like to write a post on what the Bible says about the act of “engagement”. The word is found in the Old Testament in the book of Deuteronomy.

Christ’s Resurrection

For the sake of space, I will add a link to I Corinthians 15, the resurrection chapter, written by the Apostle Paul, explaining to the Corinthian believers the importance of the resurrection of Christ in the Christian faith. Without the resurrection of Christ, we are still under the penalty of our sins and remain slaves to sin and its lusts.

Why is this important for us? I would like to pull out some truths and share them here, as well as looking at some cross references in the epistle to the Romans, also written by Saint Paul.

Judges Lesson 1

I had the privilege of teaching the first lesson from the study on Judges to our EFNL teachers yesterday. In fact, we made a lesson plan together based on the first lesson. I would like to share what we learned here with you. The context of the book of Judges is a period of ups and downs as a nation struggled with the cycle of sin. For a period of 450 years (about) the people were unstable, going through periods of obedience and disobedience. There was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Their times are very similar to our times today. Relativism was popular then as it is now. My truth is mine and yours is yours. I just want to point out what was happening then and see if we can draw any conclusions for today.

Church Planting Session

You may have noticed that I have not been very active on my blog over the past 2 weeks. If you have been following then I want to apologize. Over the past 2 weeks I lead the 2nd Session of the Precept Ministries Eurasia”s Inductive Bible study Institute. The theme was “Church Planting”. We studied “Lord I want to know You” about the Biblical Names of God, written by Kay Arthur.