{"id":11,"date":"2007-11-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-04T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-11-04T19:13:30","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T00:13:30","slug":"right-to-teach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/2007\/11\/04\/right-to-teach\/","title":{"rendered":"Right to Teach"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Teaching<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, I just have to put down in writing what the Lord did yesterday so that I never forget. One of the things that we needed to do was to hold a meeting with the leaders in the community here to discuss with them the Bible teaching. This is extremely culturally appropriate and a wise thing to do as it gets the leaders and the community on board with what we would be doing. But it would prove to be a very intimidating meeting and would have to be done all in the local language. Since I am going to be the main teacher on our team I got elected to lead the meeting.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Well, I was very nervous. I laid myself before the Lord and asked for His intervention. I did this over and over and tried to not feel nervous, but I couldn’t just make it go away. I also wrote out word for word what I was planning on saying and asked the team before hand everything we wanted to communicate just to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything in my nervousness. So I did all that. But my source of confidence and strength was the Lord. I knew that I could not do this unless he interceded. And what I want to record is that He did!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

What He did was amazing. Not only did he bring the leaders from our small community of 200 people but He brought half the village! So when I talked about the history of our work and what we were planning on doing and how we would be teaching them chronologically through the Scriptures they all heard it. We showed them some of the pictures we would be using and some of the Bible lessons that I have already written. God used that meeting to prepare the hearts of the people. Excitement slowly spread through the crowd. Everyone wants to come to hear God’s story clearly in their own language. One of the leaders said, “Everyone from the youngest child to the oldest man must come to hear this teaching.” We were elated to hear this. They are catching it!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It was an awesome time with them because God worked. For one of the first times ever we felt a strong connection with the people. Their suspicions were laid to rest and they are excited about this. The elected member from the community here said to everyone, “These men have lived with us for a long time. They know the burdens we carry. They are familiar with our lifestyle because they have worked alongside us in our gardens and slept in our houses. They know our seasons. They are thinking of us when they make these plans. So whatever times they choose to show us God’s talk is best for us. Let’s stand with them.” WOW! What a huge testimony. And all those months and years of learning their language and culture has come to fruition. Everything that we’ve been doing with them was to communicate exactly what that man said. That we are thinking of them! We have earned their trust! This is no small matter. We’ve done all we could’ve done, but ultimately this was a work of God! He is going before us and preparing the way.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

God is faithful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See what God has been doing to prepare the hearts of the people to
\nreceive His message to them and that the date to start teaching is set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/gary-smith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}