I successfully negotiated the exams in November at Moore College and received the good news that I passed all the exams...though I did have to wait an extra 4 days because of an unpaid $4 library fine...such a rebel!
I am now into my 4th week of working at Interserve and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
www.interserve.org.au
At home, we received some exciting news at the end of November that Kate, our eldest daughter is getting married! Wow, I am way too young to have a married daughter and I'm a bit scared as we go into a new faze of life but that's life! Kate is marrying Andrew Dryburgh in May next year. He is a really nice Christian guy which is fantastic!
Now, last week, I had the privilege to be in Canberra for the National Training Event (NTE) run by AFES (Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students). What a great time to see nearly 1400 students there to praise God, the learn how to study the bible and to hang out with kids their own age from all across Australia.
I was down there as one of the mission organisations in my new role at Interserve.
There is some great work being done on University campuses. There were many testimonies given in the main meeting time, however I did meet a young man from China. I will call him 'D'.
I got to meet D at the Interserve stand I was manning. D came to Australia to from China to study at University in Melbourne.
He was an only child. While he was in Melbourne studying some young people asked him if he wanted to talk about Jesus. He had never heard of Jesus so he said ‘ok’.
After some weeks there was some confusion because he had grown up be believing there was no God. Now he was being challenged about the claims of Jesus. He said that he knew God didn’t exist but what these people were saying about Jesus had to be investigated. He said to me, 'I thought Jesus must be very important, but not God because he didn't exist.' The more he investigated the more he found the accounts of Jesus not only to be true, but that he was in fact God.
For D, this came together in a very logical way. He investigated and logically through reading the bible came to put his trust in Jesus.
I asked him when he was going back to China and if he had told his parents about his conversion. He was going back at the end of 2010 and he hadn’t yet told his parents. He was aware of their complete unbelief in God. He knew of their expectations of him. They were members of the Communist Party.
He was worried that he quite didn’t have the right way to tell them. That his words would come out wrong. That even though he logically came to the conclusion about Jesus, he wasn’t able to explain it clearly to the people he wanted most to understand it.
I was able to explain to D, that when he came to the Lord, it was actually the Lord who came to him. That even though he logically mapped the whole God thing out, it was actually the Holy Spirit that showed himself to D. It was the Spirit that caused his mind to come to that conclusion, something that was completely foreign to him months before.
I said that he should pray that the Spirit would do the same thing in his parents lives as He did in his. That the Spirit would take his words and open up their hearts and their minds to Jesus. No matter how well he speaks, no matter how logically he explains it, unless the Spirit was there to take away the blinkers and the hardness of heart, they will not believe.
He looked at me. He put his head on the side, puzzled, as he tried to work all this through. I could see him trying to take this all in. He then said to me, ‘you have taken a great burden from me, I thought it was all up to me, now I know that it is the work of the Holy Spirit to change my parents.’
What a relief for us in our ministries that the work that we do is not dependent on our brilliance (or lack of it), rather the working of the Holy Spirit to prepare the words spoken and to prepare the waiting hearts and minds.
What a great ministry is happening in our universities and schools, with minds who are willing to discuss and debate the claims of Jesus. It is on these claims that Christianity stands or falls. Please keep in your prayers those who work in these institutions as they help raise up the next generation of believers.
