{"id":328,"date":"2012-11-05T06:13:01","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T10:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/?p=328"},"modified":"2012-11-08T17:08:41","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T21:08:41","slug":"not-just-another-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/2012\/11\/05\/not-just-another-sunday\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just another Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Communion<\/a>\u201cBut 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\u2026If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.\u201d\u00a0 1 John 1:7, 9<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>We serve an awesome, gracious and forgiving God, one whose very being is defined as Love.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There was a large number of believers who had slipped back into dabbling in sorcery.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t go into the details, but needless to say, our hearts have been heavy with concern as we wrestled with how to help them.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Our Dinangat friends are very young in the faith.\u00a0 It shouldn\u2019t surprise us that generation upon generation of wrong teaching and worldview would creep back into their lives in moments of weakness.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He and his wife both stood up\u00a0and apologized for not standing up more against this issue when they saw it taking place.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

At first, the room was quiet, and everyone just looked around at each other.\u00a0 But after a few minutes, a very respected older man stood up.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But he didn\u2019t stop there.\u00a0 He went on to publicly confess other areas where he knew he was wrong.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And then another confession, with thanksgiving for what Jesus had done for him and the forgiveness that he could claim.\u00a0 And then another one.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Oh the beauty of witnessing the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit!<\/p>\n

How sweet and fitting it was to then partake together in a beautiful service of communion!\u00a0 Our dear friends in the bush have no bread or grape juice, but what they had, they brought.\u00a0 And as they passed around the bowls of cooked sweet potato and shared cups of water, we gave thanks together for the Lord\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

They know today in a new and very real way what His forgiveness feels like.\u00a0 Rejoice with us in His grace\u2026for were it not for grace, how many of us could survive one day in this sinful flesh?<\/p>\n

\"Literacy<\/a>As if that weren\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

More Dinangat people group news<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBut 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\u2026If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.\u201d\u00a0 1 John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ministry","7":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jeremiah-markley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}