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| 인도네시아...
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글쓴이:홍철호 날짜:2009-07-22 조회:726 |
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Dear friends,
Peace and grace to you in the name of our savior Lord Jesus Christ!
Past four weeks have been filled with several meetings and training as our Company implemented structural and leadership changes globally starting on July 1, 2009. As result, we have been traveling quite a bit. On July 16th, my family and I traveled to Jakarta to attend a West Java team leaders meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to strategize our work for the next year and a half so that our strategy will produce on-going church planting movements. As we were preparing for the start of the meeting in the early hours of July 17th, the news reached us that there were suicide bombings at Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta. Although we were 15 minutes away from the site of bombings at the time, we were shaken by this senseless act of killing. Indonesia has been making steady forward progress in peace for the past four years, but there are small groups of Muslim extremists who resort to violence and set Indonesia back. What was interesting to us was that Indonesian government and media described the incident as an act of "terrorists" even though it is clear that the act was planned and carried out by Muslim fanatics belong to Islamic groups.
I have been talking to Indonesians about the incident. Muslims are adamant that such killing is not part of their Islam beliefs and that these "terrorists" have wrong understanding of Islam. How ironic that Muslims have wrong understand of salvation! Muslims hopes to enter the heaven by doing good things. They hope to earn salvation through good religious acts. But when asked further, they don't have any assurance of salvation. Their only answer to salvation is "If God wills." Another issue closely related to salvation is the problem of sin. In Islam there is no forgiveness of sins. Muslims hopes that their good deeds will outweigh their sins on the balance in the end. Such thinking stems from shallow understanding of sin. Even then who would know how much of good deeds they have to do in order to cancel out their sins?
Part of our training included strategies to witness and win Muslims who possess such belief. Assurance of forgiveness of sins and salvation are what Christ Jesus gives, not because I am good but because Jesus paid for my sins through His death. Only Jesus knows the path to heaven because He came from heaven, He returned to heaven and He is in heaven now. There are four million people in our area who need to hear this Good News. In order to accomplish this, our strategy includes discipling and sending out national partners. Through current economic difficulties we realized that we, the missionaries, can not do everything and can not accomplish the task by ourselves. We must and need to equip and empower the nationals to become missionaries to their own people. That is our goal and prayer. Would you pray with us that as we witness to Indonesians we will find those national partners who will boldly take gospel to their people?
On our personal front, our children will begin their home school for the new school year on August 3, 2009. They are currently working with mom to create their home school schedules. Within next couple weeks, we must renew our visa. We are told that people are experiencing delays in renewing their visas because Indonesian government is verifying all registered NGOs and their work. We don't expect any difficulties but please do pray for us and for our visa.
Missionary H. serving in SE Asia.. |
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