“But if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin…If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:7, 9
We serve an awesome, gracious and forgiving God, one whose very being is defined as Love. While the Dinangat church has definitely been growing throughout the year, some issues have come to light in the past few weeks that have shaken things up in the village quite a bit. There was a large number of believers who had slipped back into dabbling in sorcery.
I won’t go into the details, but needless to say, our hearts have been heavy with concern as we wrestled with how to help them. We talked with many individuals over the last couple of weeks, and this morning at church Gary addressed the sin that has been going on, calling it by name and talking through different Scriptures that deal specifically with what we were seeing.
Remember that it took very little for the children of Israel to turn to idolatry when Moses was up on the mountain with the Lord. Our Dinangat friends are very young in the faith. It shouldn’t surprise us that generation upon generation of wrong teaching and worldview would creep back into their lives in moments of weakness.
After the message, one of the Bible teachers got up and addressed the group, and after summarizing the message and giving glory to God for making His Word clear, he then identified himself with the whole group, but telling them that he could not confess their sin, he could only confess his own.
He and his wife both stood up and apologized for not standing up more against this issue when they saw it taking place. They confessed before everyone in the church and the Lord for their part, and then opened the floor to anyone else who wanted to speak.
At first, the room was quiet, and everyone just looked around at each other. But after a few minutes, a very respected older man stood up. He said that he was a part of an event that took place a few weeks ago, and he understands that he was wrong, and before God and everyone there he apologized and thanked God for His forgiveness.
But he didn’t stop there. He went on to publicly confess other areas where he knew he was wrong. Immediately after him, another man stood up and said that he too, knew that he was wrong, and wanted to apologize to God and everyone there. And then another confession, with thanksgiving for what Jesus had done for him and the forgiveness that he could claim. And then another one.
This went on for about an hour, all in all over 30 believers humbling themselves and laying themselves bare before the Lord and the all of us. Oh the beauty of witnessing the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit!
How sweet and fitting it was to then partake together in a beautiful service of communion! Our dear friends in the bush have no bread or grape juice, but what they had, they brought. And as they passed around the bowls of cooked sweet potato and shared cups of water, we gave thanks together for the Lord’s broken body and spilled blood which was given so freely for us that we might know His cleansing power and forgiveness, and that we might know true fellowship with Him and with one another.
They know today in a new and very real way what His forgiveness feels like. Rejoice with us in His grace…for were it not for grace, how many of us could survive one day in this sinful flesh?
As if that weren’t enough to fill up a day (or a year!) there was another literacy graduation program and we clapped and rejoiced as 8 more Dinangats completed the 5 month reading course!
As a reminder, this course is now totally taught and run by the village, we missionaries have not taught literacy for quite a while as it has been completely turned over to them.