Northwest News!

Here is a helpful article for Christians as we face Halloween coming up.  Halloween is a massive event here in the city with people coming from all over Europe to celebrate this day here.  We plan to go out and do some witnessing on the street tomorrow night.  Please pray for us.

God has really been blessing our missions conference in some amazing ways. 

On Wednesday night, our missionary speaker spoke on how to overcome “The Fear of Losing Control”.  The women of our church sang two songs and did an amazing job.  There were 28 people in attendance including the visiting missionaries and mission team from America.

On Thursday night, we had an international banquet with international food.  Ronnie Smith and his family sang for us, and Martin and Carrie Wickens were down.  Carrie played her flute for us while she was here and was a blessing to us.  The message was on “The Fear of People” and how to overcome that.  We had 36 in attendance including the missionaries, pastors and 3 folks from America.

Tonight, we had a great time as we looked at our vision for 2008, watched a video of Ronald Tubillas’s ministry in Georgia, had some special music from the visiting mission team, and heard a great message about overcoming “The Fear of Failure”.  There were 31 in attendance including the visitors.

I want to thank you for your prayers for the work here.  I am so grateful for our missionary speaker from North Africa.  He has been a great help to me and to the church here, and we look forward to continuing to work with him and his ministry in North Africa.  We have three more services left and are looking forward God continuing to work and move in a powerful way.

What are we going to do about the young people who are “out of control“?

I don’t have all the answers but I want to suggest a couple of things:

• Prayer - this should be our first resource not our last.
• Modelling - parents and leaders are quick to criticise and condemn but very slow to model and lead by example.
• Discipleship & Mentoring - one of the greatest needs for young people is a good role model.  They have many bad role models but few good ones who will mentor and disciple them.
• Challenge - we need to put the challenge of serving and loving God before them.  Being a Christians is not for the wimps and the weaklings; it is for the courageous.
• Parents - the most important person in a young person’s life is their parents.  We can blame young people all day but most of the problems can be traced back to a negligent, careless, indifferent, abusive, angry parent.

Do you have any other suggestions to add to the list?

It was a very tiring but fun day today.  The harvest service went well this morning as we started our “Wanted” series and looked at “Courageous Men” from the life of Joshua.  We had 35 in the morning service with 4 first time visitors.  After the service, we had a great time eating, fellowshipping, and playing games together at St. Columb’s Park House.

Everyone was real tired from the days activities, but we had a good service tonight looking at “Preparing for Revival” with 21 folks in attendance and 4 first time visitors out.  We are looking forward to God doing great things in our mission conference with starts this Wednesday.   You won’t want to miss any of it.

I have had an amazing journey through the Book of Isaiah in my devotions.  I wanted to share some of the gleanings that I received along the way:

• 3:12 Leaders must be careful to not lead those who follow astray.
• 5:14 Hell hath enlarged herself, and we must do all we can to warn the lost!
• 6:8 We need thousands of laborers to surrender and say, “Here am I, send me.”
• 7:4 We need to not fear but be quiet and trust the Lord.
• 8:13 Too often we fear things and people far more than we fear God.
• 11:9 Our prayer should be that the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord.
• 19:20 Jesus is our Saviour to deliver us from the penalty, power, and presence of sin.
• 24:19 God is so powerful that He could make the earth reel to and fro like a drunkard.
• 26:3 Perfect peace comes from having our minds stayed upon God.
• 28:10 Teaching is the art of repetition and small steps.
• 32:17 The result of being made righteous through faith in Christ is peace.
• 40:31 To renew our strength, we must wait upon the Lord.
• 41:17 God hears the poor and needy and so should we.
• 43:7 We are created for God’s glory.
• 43:25 God has the ability to not remember my sins!  What a Saviour!
• 48:10 God chooses us in the furnace of affliction to mold us and make us.
• 50:7 Once we know God’s will, we should set our face like a flint and nothing keep us from obeying His will for our lives.
• 55:11 God’s Word is powerful.  It will not return void.
• 58:4 God is more concerned with our motivation than our actions.  Why are we doing what we are doing?
• 61:1 God is in the business of giving good tidings to hurting people.
• 63:3 The wrath of God is a fearful thing.  Here God is likened to a man trampling out grapes but blood instead of grape juice is being splattered on his garment.
• 65:5 Lord, forgive us of our “holier than thou” attitude.
• 66:2 Many times our worship, our words, and our actions disgust God because we do not have a broken and contrite heart and we will not tremble at His Word.
• 66:18-20 We need God’s heart for the world that all nations, the distant isles, the Gentiles, the people of all tongues would have God’s glory declared to them.

I really think that our World Missions Conference is going to be one of the most exciting meetings of the year.  We have alot of great things planned and we are asking God to move in big ways in all of our hearts leading us to a new level of commitment in our lives.  We have a tremendous missionary from North Africa who will be speaking to us during the services.  We will hear video testimonies from missionaries around the world, and we will have special singing every night.

There will also be three people here from Georgia on a mission trip to help us out with evangelism, the conference, and the ministry of the church.  You won’t want to miss a service of the conference.  To get more details about the conference, go here.

We are excited about our Christmas Play coming up on December 16.  The children will be putting on a great play for us on that Sunday at 11.30 AM.  You won’t want to miss it!  Begin to invite your friends now.

If you would like your children to be involved, please let us know.  You can find out more here.

Here is the flyer from our new message series coming up over the next three weeks: 

We are really rejoicing with the Lord’s blessings on yesterday.  God blessed the message on “Recovery from Broken Relationships”.  I am continually amazed at how powerful the Word of God is.  The Lord gave us 34 folks in attendance in the Sunday morning service with 2 first time visitors.

God is continuing to bless the work in spite of our failings, and we praise Him for it and give Him all the glory.  Please continue to pray for Jonathon who is here helping us.  He had been a tremendous blessing with the music, the youth, outreach, and so many other things.  Today is his birthday, so comment here to wish him a happy birthday and I will forward it on to him.

We just got our youth ministry website up and running.  I hope you will go and check it out and encourage any young people you know to come to the youth meetings and youth activities, as well as get involved in our church.  Young people are most valuable resource, and we need to do all we can to pray for them, encourage them, train them, and help them to serve God with their lives.