Monthly Archives: September 2017

At the Green Line in Beirut

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Yesterday I had lunch next to the Green Line in Beirut, Lebanon. The Green Line was the boundary that divided Beirut during the civil war here from 1975 to 1990 between Muslim, Christian and other factions. A large street was next to the outdoor restaurant and my friends said the French ambassador had been killed in the intersection in front of us during the civil war. There were still some pock marks in places on the buildings nearby from the street fighting that was so normal back then.

But I’m not here as a tourist. I won’t go into specifics of what I’m doing, some of you reading this already know but primarily it has to do with the Christian service that’s been a part of my life for decades. In the few days I am here I’ll be meeting old friends and making new ones in an effort to bring the love of God and the power and truth of God to this part of the world. Mostly I’m just listening, getting a clearer understanding of how things really are, what can be done, what the needs are as well as realistic possibilities. And in the months to come, Lord willing I’ll be sharing more about what has been going on while I am here and things that have been able to get started on this visit.

The last verse in the book of Mark says, “And they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word with signs following.” (Mark 16:20) That might be a good explanation of something I’ve really notice since being in Beirut. I’ve very strongly noticed that phenomenon here of “the Lord working with them.” Things that I came here to do, which I had very few leads or ideas about, actually worked out really well and got taken care of in barely 24 hours. The answers and results were almost like falling on me. And I heard other people here use that phrase also, like the Lord was just dropping things on them.

I guess this whole part of the world here is just a very serious place. The Lord is really doing big-time miracles here, lives are being drastically altered, abject prayers are being answered and also people are suffering terribly and dying for their faith. Someone told me about a Muslim military commander in the war in Syria. Somehow he found a Christian tract in his language on the ground. He picked it up, read it and saw an address on it where he could order a Bible in his language. He did that and ended up having a strong salvation experience that empowered him to be a witness to those he was leading. Ultimately he paid with his life for his newfound faith. But then death by one means or the other is often known to be not far from so many in the Levant.

And there are many who come here to try to help in whatever way they can. Volunteers work in refugee camps in the region, some with over 100,000 people in them, doing shows for children, providing physical needs and at times just providing the education that school age children would be having if there was any normalcy in their lives. Groups from abroad channel finances to some individuals here who are deeply connected to the vast numbers of refugees and sufferers. These funds help to provide the barest of basic necessities for the essentials of life so that families don’t exist on the streets and so they can eat.

Others here and in the region are called to a different path and are actively straightforward in sharing their faith in God and the answers they’ve experienced from the Bible. I won’t go into details but things I’ve heard of people like this are very similar indeed to what you can read in the book of Acts. Some have survived repeated attempts on their lives here as they win people to the Lord and feed His sheep. Others who’ve come from abroad have actually died for their faith. But mostly this isn’t what happens as the Lord so closely and strongly leads His few bold soul winners in ways that they can reach effectively the people of this country and others in the region.

Well, this is just a little update, a few things I’ve seen or heard and a bit of news from this series of visits I’ve been making to places over the last 2 months. Once I’m back to my base, following up on the things that have gotten started on this trip will be the main thing I’ll be doing for the next months. There have been a lot of beginnings during the last two months which I’ll be telling you more about before long.

God bless you, your friend, Mark

Does God use organizations? Or individuals?

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Ever wondered how God works best, with a group of organized individuals? Or with individuals alone? It does kind of mater. Should we endeavor to find a group of like-minded folks who share the same vision, goals and understanding of the Lord as we have? Or should we concentrate on our personal relationship with the Lord and just follow as best we can the Word and the directing of God’s Spirit?

Of course the best way to find the answer to this is to look to God’s Word. But the answer that comes back may not be conclusively for one side or the other. If you were to say that God blesses and usually wants us to work within some larger organized structure, you could use the example of Israel of old and how He raised them up and blessed them as a nation for centuries. It was their unity, their cohesion and their subjection to His laws and prophets that made them what they were. Or in some cases what they were not. “Believe in the Lord your God, so shall you established; believe His prophets, so shall you prosper.” (II Chronicles 20:20)

But there were times when this wasn’t the way the Lord blessed or delivered His people. The Lord raised up the shepherd boy David, virtually a child, to deliver Israel from Goliath and the Philistines in his day. Before that, Saul’s son Jonathan famously said, “God is not limited by many or by few” (I Samuel 14:6) and then he and his armor bearer routed the Philistines and turned the tide of battle when the larger army and forces of Israel were bottled up and tied down.

“Mark, you’re wrong. God prefers organizations and the safety of the flock.”

Yeah, sometimes He does work that way. But equally, some have traded their insecure liberty in following God individually for safety and security but ultimately bondage in Christian organizations that stopped truly follow God generations ago.

It looks like you can’t make a really solid case that God only works one of these ways or the other. But what about in Christian times? Was the Early Church a highly organized, structured, top-down outfit, demanding subjugation and dominion over all the multitudes who came to Christ in the first century?

Well, back at the time of the Early Church, they did have some organization and they did try to shepherd and feed the tremendous wave of people who kept coming to the Lord from all over the known world of that time. But it was centuries before there was the kind of stultifying, soul-quenching “organization” that the Catholic Church, as well as the various Orthodox churches, came to be by the time of the so-called Dark Ages.

Maybe it’s just because there are so many kinds of people. Some, perhaps the majority, are more followers than they are pioneers and spirit-led disciples who can really forge ahead on their own. Admittedly, not everyone is going to turn out like the Apostle Paul or some of the famous missionaries and pioneers of history who just couldn’t be tied down in some daily routine that was supposed to be the fulfillment of their obligations to the Lord’s call to discipleship.

But maybe we should note that the Lord did call individuals to personal discipleship and to even leave behind their present life to be “fishers of men”. (Matthew 4:19) He said we should pray to the Father that He would “send forth laborers into the harvest” (Matthew 9:38). Is that best done on a huge scale with much leadership attention to detail, where the laborers need to constantly be checking back with headquarters far away to make sure every move they make is ok with the council of the elders? Or is it best portrayed by Spirit-filled and called individuals who go out, even “not knowing whether they went”? (Hebrews 11:8) I suggest, and I’ve experienced, that this second mode seems to work better, even though it’s rarer and some folks just think it’s almost dangerous.

“How can we just let these individuals out there to roam around, saying whatever they will and with no accountability to anyone?!”

But if you look at the record of God’s Word, as well as Jewish and Christian history, some of the greatest things God ever did, some of the greatest works He ever started were where there was no controlling head but God , no organization but that supplied by the Holy Spirit, no directors or direction except His Word and the leading voice and presence of the Lord.

Sometimes, alone and outnumbered, people of God have had to utterly depend on Him for support, direction, inspiration and just the whole caboodle. But the Lord came through wonderfully time and again. Isn’t that what happened with Noah? With Abraham? With the Apostle Paul and the pioneers of the Early Church? In some situations that might seem weak and unorganized by man, God had some of His mightiest works done through His frail but yielded individuals. I might add that ones like Saint Patrick and many of the highly effective early Celtic Christian apostles were like this. Could we add ones like Dr. Livingstone and Florence Nightingale to this list?

And is there a reason I’m even writing this? Perhaps because in my own life I’ve come to feel that at times when I had no one but God to lean on and direct me, that at those times some of the most amazing things happen. So if you’re feeling quenched and subdued in some kind of Christian organization that is supplying your need for fellowship but is slowly sapping your faith, fire and initiative, perhaps you might find greater blessings in simply doing and living the truth you know in your heart that you realize your religious organization is just not following. Perhaps you need to follow God into greater fruitfulness, greater faith and a closer relationship to Him as you follow and obey the Lord, where so often modern Christian organizations just won’t be taking or directing you.

In Indonesia, after 10 years

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I’ve been in Jakarta for over a week now, where I lived between 2003 and 2008. Those 5 years and this country had a huge impact on my life. Now I’m again with my friends from those times as I do recordings in Indonesian of the prophecies of Daniel video series which actually was started in Jakarta back in 2006.

From time to time I’ve mentioned in blog posts about when I was living here. But there’s something about talking about the past and reminiscing about the past which I’m not so into. Because I feel there’s a danger that any of us can so easily slip into living in the past and the highlights of those times so that we lose sight of all that’s still before us in God’s vision and future for us, if we’re willing to keep going forward for Him. There’s so much ahead of us in peaks we have yet to climb, if we keep the vision.

And so truly it has been said, “Without a vision the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18) If we let our looking back to the past replace our following the vision that’s before us, it’s a great error. But it can be thrilling to look back, with some caution, to see the peaks and valleys we’ve already crossed, the victories that have already been won and all that the Lord has already done in our lives till now.

With that thought in mind, I’ll take the liberty to share a few links to blog articles I did several years ago when I first started doing these. As a few of you know, I was doing what I called “Fields” newsletter for a number of years before I had these web sites. In fact, one of the first blog articles I did was mostly taken from the first “Fields” newsletters I did. It briefly traces an outline of my life, going back a number of years and then explains why I was about to go abroad in Christian service again in 2003, to Indonesia. Here’s a link to that article.

During the time I was in Indonesia, I was often involved in projects with friends to help start schools, doing character building programs in schools and also in direct disaster relief. Perhaps the most intense few weeks of my adult life was spent in the Indonesian province of Aceh in the direct aftermath of the horrific tsunami that hit the region on December 26 of 2004. I went there immediately as an aid worker with a few friends but I also brought along my small video camera. Here’s a video on YouTube which I made while I was there.

My five years here was an interesting time with a lot of variety. At times I would be having Bible classes with young people who were from missionary families in Indonesia. But at other times I was able to do presentations in some local schools that we helped start of principles that are shared between Christianity and Islam. In the picture you can see me with a flash card I am holding of a picture of an angel and the title is something like “Angels watching over us”. One of the local students is translating my explanation of it all to the other students there. A blog post that I wrote about this experience with these young students is “East Meets West”.

This particular school was a start-up of a young Islamic man in one of the very poorest parts of Jakarta. First he had to persuade the parents to let the kids go to school since the kids could make $5 a day each from begging, far more than their parents could make at a job here. But it finally worked out and an extremely basic school got started on stilts over standing stagnate water, very close to an oil refiner on the coast of the city. A blog article about this little slum school is called “Far Country Photos from Jakarta”.

Student-in-Jakarta

And it was a thrill that some of my Christian friends back in the States contributed to this project at a particularly needy time which made it possible for us to hire 3 teachers to continue there when it was touch-and-go back then as to whether the school would continue. The amazing good news is that from those seemingly feeble, tenuous beginnings, the school (with help from my friends here) was able to build larger and better facilities.It  now has over 300 students who are being educated when, almost certainly, many of them would still be begging on the streets.

It’s been a good time to be back here again, to meet friends I worked with during that time and with whom I am still working with on things presently and happened soon. Some of this is like what they say about “happiness that money can’t buy”. There’s a deep gratitude in my heart to the Lord that He’s led my life in the way He has , to be able to not only be a child of the Lord but to serve Him and be a positive contribution to mankind and the world we live in. Thank the Lord!

Coming together

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It’s been heartening to read about the outpouring of help from so many to the flooding disaster in Texas. Right now I’m in Indonesia, 12 time zones away from my base in Texas but I’ve very much kept up with events there. There’s just something Godly about genuine outgoing concern for others that’s expressed in sacrificial giving and breaking out of your routine in order to rescue others from the peril they’re in.

If there’s anything that Jesus is remembered for, even by unbelievers and those of other faiths, it’s that He was a caring, loving, sympathetic man. He took action. He went out of His way. Jesus got up from dinner with His friends to go help someone who’d come there to plead for His help. And when we do this, as individuals or in mass, we are “touched with the feeling of their infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15), like He was. And, doubtless, this is what God wants.

So I’ve been gladdened to read about the activities of so many now to try to do what they can to help make things better in south-east Texas after such “unprecedented”, almost Biblical floods. I’ve read that there’s been virtually no looting, so different from a similar hurricane disaster just to the east of Houston, Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005.

We aren’t supposed to be proud, there’s not a place in the Bible that promotes or condones pride in any way. But it is nice every so often to feel good about the people and place you come from. I wrote something about this a few years ago in “Texas People”. I’ve always known that, contrary to many popular stereotypes, there are some very kind, humble and godly people in Texas. So it’s been encouraging to see this being manifest right now in the aftermath of this tragedy.

And that’s the funny thing about tragedies, isn’t it? King David of long ago once said, “And in my prosperity I said, ‘I shall never be moved’; Lord, by Your favor you have made my mountain to stand strong. You did hide Your face and I was troubled.” (Psalm 30: 6 & 7) It’s natural and human to like and want prosperity and certainly there’s quite a lot of prosperity in Texas, especially around the Houston area. And although it’s nominally a very Christian city and state, very many people have a real problem with materialism. Jesus once said, “Beware of covetousness for a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.” (Luke 12:15)

So as terrible and destructive as this disaster has been, there likely has been an almost unwanted silver lining for many. They’ve escaped with their lives. They’ve hopefully seen “the deceitfulness of riches” (Matthew 13:22). And in their dire straits and extreme dangers they’ve just been through, the real things of life have hopefully become clearer to them than they were when everything was just coasting along and they were “rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing”. (Revelation 3:17)

Chastening, judgment, loss, these are things that virtually no one wants to go through. But for those of us who know the Lord, we know from the Word that these things happen and that they can be for our good, often for our very good. And equally it puts the onus on those who have not been so affected, to see what kind of response it will illicit in them. Will they be like the Good Samaritan, stopping to help the stranger and truly loving their neighbor? Or will they be like the religious hypocrites, the Pharisees from Jerusalem who “passed by on the other side” (Luke 10: 31 & 32) when they saw someone in need.

So it’s a time when God is really working in the lives of many millions. And from what I’ve read and heard, a lot of good has come of this disaster, as strange as it may seem. “All things work together for good to them that love the Lord.” (Romans 8:28) I’ve even noticed that there seems to be (temporarily at least) much less hate-filled squawking from the extreme left and extreme right in the States. It’s hard to talk about “fake news” and “them” when the desperate realities of your fellow man are staring you right in the face and you have to make a decision what you’re going to do, even though that person in need might not be of your race or political party.

So, personally, I’m thanking God that I can see at least a little bit of real coming together. Of people forgetting their differences long enough to help those who may die without the immediate help of their neighbors, friends and countrymen. Love in action is what it’s really all about and the love of God moving in the hearts of people to love others and to manifest that love sacrificially is a wonderful, heartening sight. Praise God!