Recently, God led David Sha to return to Taiwan after studying, working and ministering for 10 years in Oklahoma. He is living in Kaohsiung and has been working with me in various projects. Last week, David invited me to join him in meeting with Kendy and GG, a young married couple and owners of a small beauty shop. As we talked with Kendy, he shared that he had recently had a dream where Jesus came to him and told him to follow Him. Since that dream, Kendy had been doing research about Jesus and discovered Catholicism and Protestantism. He was hung up on which group to join when we talked with him.
After sharing the Evangecube story and discussing his questions, I told him that his questions about which church family to join was only relevant after he became a child of God by faith in Christ. In response, Kendy and GG said they believed what the Bible said and wanted to trust in Christ. We prayed with them and welcomed them as a new brother and sister in God’s family.
Sunday, we were excited to see Kendy and GG come to New Life Bilingual Church. I asked them who was working at their beauty shop and he said, “No one, we decided to close it early to come to church.” Please pray for these new believers as they begin their walk with Christ. They are the first believers in their families.
Wow ! What a month. Praise God. We asked for intentional prayer for new believers and baptisms. Father poured out His love.
We were blessed to be at the Joyful Hope English Camp in the village of Taimali with American and Taiwanese brothers and sisters for one week. We saw over 70 people come to faith in Jesus, with over 16 baptisms. After my whole class prayed to believe in Jesus I was able to visit some of their families, share my testimony and the gospel. One whole family prayed to believe. Please pray for the students that believed, but were not allowed by their parents to be baptized. They face a difficult situation at home. I was told that many times they are beaten. Please pray that we can do follow up training there.
I had the opportunity to share my testimony and the gospel with new people visiting an English Bible Study called ORTV in Kaohsiung. I went there to help out because some of our team were away. Over 25 of the new people there prayed to believe in Jesus. Some of them even came to my Saturday T4T training the following week. Please pray for them to continue training with us or to join a local church.
We also had 3 new believers at our Saturday training in Nanzih. Please pray for them to continue to be obedient and be baptized
Our Tuesday T4T training in our home I had the privilege to baptize Ben. Then Ben baptized his wife Joan. Next week, Leticia and Penny want to be baptized. Please pray for this.
You prayed for intentional new believers and baptisms the past two months. Please continue because something wonderful is happening here. Please pray this month with specific intention for these new baptized believers to be new churches and to start new churches. Please ask Father to give them the boldness and the desire to do this themselves.
Those of you who know Peace and Lucy from our city in China (Lucy, a new baptized believer Brenda and I shared the gospel with and trained in T4T, and Peace a local TSPM pastor and hc leader who also trained in T4T) who both separately started many hc.s, were introduced to each other by Brenda, are now engaged to be married. Please pray for their protection from persecution.
As Brenda and I have learned from China when the harvest is great there is a cost. As soon as we were getting on the train from Taimali last week in great joy over the victories there, Brenda and I received an urgent email from our family back home. Please pray for our daughters. Satan knows the most effective ways to attack.
Li-Li, a Hokkien high school teacher, had attend 4 weeks of a Seeker Study. Each time she came she would begin with the same sentence, “I am Buddhist so I don’t believe in Christianity, sorry I am wasting your time.”
However, she kept coming back.
She also was reading the New Testament I gave her and said she was praying because it gave her such peace! On the 4th week, I came prepared to share about Jesus’ Death, Burial and Resurrection and give an opportunity to believe. Li-Li was the only one to show up that day. This disappointed me because it was such an important lesson and I wanted the other teachers to hear it too.
But God knew that Li-Li needed some one-on-one time. She came into class and immediately said reading the Bible had touched her. She said “I believe it.”
I was so excited! All this before I had even begun to teach the lesson! I could tell that the Holy Spirit was working.
I decided to read through the Gospel Bridge booklet with her. As we read through it I would ask her what she thought. She kept saying “I believe this.”
However, when it came to the part where she had to make a personal decision she said she could not do so. She then proceeded to share how angry her husband, her mother, and her mother-in-law would be if she became a Christian.
I shared with her how God can work in their lives, but she was adamant. “It is impossible” she kept saying.
I shared with her how important this decison was for her to make, but she just kept saying she could not.
Would you please join me in praying for her and her family? Pray that the Holy Spirit will continue to draw Li-Li to Himself and that Satan’s power-hold on the other family members will be shattered.
OH~~~ we have a very specially ＂Luckly Thing＂ and you can hang up it just like a necklace, AND it can protect you safe & well this year, moreover it’s smell fragrant.
I call that ＂fragrant package＂in English, because I don’t know how to say that word,HA~
This I learned from Tim:
Some say if we can stand the egg upright at noon on the day of Dragon Boat Festival, it would bring us good luck for the rest of the year.
No one ever said teachers knew it all. I learn so much from my students!!
On a more serious note though, do you see a pattern here? My students, my neighbors, my dear friends trust in “horses and chariots” (Psalm 20:7), they trust in auspicious items, and desire lucky things and lives.
Would you please join me in praying for them they too will place their trust in the name of the Lord our God? Please ask God to open their eyes to the truth that auspicious stuff has no power to make lucky things happen.
The Most High God is an all-powerful, all-loving God, and we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). May they one day soon know it too!!
One unique opportunity I had this weekend was to share the story of Easter with some Taiwanese young people that we had met through another one of our American friends, Ruth. So, I was talking to one of the girls who is an English teacher and has pretty good English and told her the story, then the girl next to her said, can you tell the story one more time, but in Chinese.
So, yeah, I got to stumble through the story with the few words that I know and was helped by another Taiwanese friend and our friend Ruth who is pretty good at making things work with the little Chinese she knows. So, anyhow, it made me really desire to learn Chinese and actually be able to share the whole story of Jesus and bring hope to these people who have never heard the story of Jesus and are willing to listen.
So, if you would be praying for me as I continue to study Chinese and seek God in the direction of my future study and even location after this year.
Nothing, makes my heart leap higher for joy than listening to people worship the King of kings and Lord of Lords in their own language!
Did you hear it: “gwa ay jew gwa bay ging by nee“?
It means: “My Lord, I come to praise you!”
This video is actually of the group of Taiwanese Believers from Taipei who came down south to share the Gospel in Kaohsiung County alongside Grace Family Church for three days.
Taiwanese sharing Good News with other Taiwanese in Taiwanese–How awesome is that!?!?
This coming weekend, Lord willing, a team of volunteers from a church in Taipei will be coming to work in Toa-Sia alongside an exisiting church in the area.
We will be sharing the Good News with friends of church members on Saturday and then worshipping in the park on Sunday. Please pray for God to be glorified this weekend and for Him to awaken dead hearts as they hear the Gospel.
Julie and I started our first seeker study with Eva, Mink and 3 of their classmates. We met Eva at the University English club event we attended a couple months ago (See: A day with University students).
Ever since then we have have enjoyed getting to know her and her friend Mink. We asked them if they would be interested in learning about the Bible more and they both said yes and also asked some of their classmates to join in. This last friday we met for the first time at their University NKFUST in Nanzih about 45 minutes away. We went through the story of creation. It was very encouraging to see their interest and to hear their questions and insight.
As we continue to meet with them please keep these girls in your prayers, that a relationship with their beautiful creator becomes simply irresistable.
Rachel (taken from a post on her shared blog Mission Taiwan)
Prayer is vital. It is our lifeline. It is our privialge and our responsibility.
We are ever so grateful for you–prayer warriors for the Hokkien People.
We are trying out a new medium to share with you, our precious prayer warriors, the praises and prayer requests of our team. Blogs are in their very nature very easy to update and organize.
As the moderator of our HH Prayer blog, I will try to post a prayer request at least once a week. Of course, anytime there is an urgent prayer need, it will be shared regardless of the “schedule.”
Using a RSS reader is a good way to keep track of when this prayer blog is updated. For example, Google Reader, bloglines, or newsgator. You can even add RSS feeds to your “my yahoo” or “personalized google” homepage.
Once again, thank you so much for your prayers for the Hokkien people and for us.
In the past couple months, I have been able to meet with some Taiwanese friends at their workplace. They are all involved with the court system in Taiwan. One person is a prosecutor, a bailiff, a serviceman, and lastly an assistant. Their jobs range from prestigious to ordinary.
We share lunch on Tuesdays to study the Bible. We started in the beginning with God’s creation and the condemnation of sin and learned about the promises of a savior and its fulfillment through Jesus. As we have been studying, my friends have realized the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus. Two men have recently started a new relationship with Jesus. We are currently learning how a Biblical relationship with Jesus is lived. They are really excited and have many questions about God.
Please keep praying that friends and new believers will continue to grow strong and become courageous “lights” of their faith while we are in Taiwan!
Eric
(taken from Eric’s post on a shared blog Mission Taiwan.)
This morning I was taking my dog, but before we headed home, I stopped to buy some breakfast. As I was talking with the storeowner, two women who had been buying fruit just down the street started running and yelling obviously very upset. They were chasing a moped that was weaving in and out of the crowded street traffic. Since they were shouting in Taiwanese (I speak Mandarin), I could only guess what they were shouting about.
I was close. I guessed someone had hopped onto their moped and driven away with it. Instead, as the breakfast storeowner told me, the two boys on the moped had driven past the ladies buying fruit and grabbed their bags; thus, stealing their purses and purchases.
Normally Taiwan is a very, very safe place. As a single woman, I actually feel much safer here than I do in the States. However, this is actually a problem for me. Since the Hokkien people are so nice, friendly, and inviting, it is very easy to get lulled into “they are a good people” mentality. This line of thinking of course is very wrong, and it leads to a lack of zeal for sharing the gospel because it causes me to fail to see the lostness of the people I live among.
The Bible says that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.”
I am not thankful that these two women lost some of their belongings today, but I am thankful for the reminder that the Hokkien people are hopelessly lost without Christ.
Please join me in praying for the Hokkien—worldwide less than 1% are Christian.
Several years ago, I was sitting with a group of college students at a coffee shop. The conversation was casual, nothing too serious. Then one of the students asked me first in Chinese and then in English, “who is your god?” Wow! The question caught me of guard. Never before in my whole life had someone actually asked me who my god was—as if there was more than one! I responded humbly in Chinese, “I am a Christian; Jesus is my God.”
About a year ago, another college student asked me, “Manda, who is the God? What is his name?” Again, I told this dear friend that I followed Christ Jesus.
Then, tonight, after telling another Taiwanese college student about how God had changed my life, the student said to me, “I would like to trust a god, but I don’t know which god I should trust. Which god do you worship?”
When was the last time someone wanted to know which god you were talking about? Although I live on “the island of a thousand gods” (title of a brochure I picked up at the airport), it’s not exactly a question I ever get used to being asked.
Please pray for:
–my former student and friend, KL, who is asking great questions about God, that he finds salvation in the one True God. –my other students, that they too will desire to know Jesus. –me, that I will have the wisdom to explain in my limited Chinese and/or simple English the inconceivable mysteries of our incredible God.
There are three teams planning to come to Taiwan in the next seven months.
October 28-November 6- Southview Baptist Church, Lincoln, Nebraska
January 20-29- Pioneer/Western Baptist Association, Southern Minnesota
April 10-23- Seneca Baptist Church, Seneca, South Carolina
Pray for the teams mentioned above as they recruit, pray and prepare for their ministry here. Pray that their leaders would have wisdom and that God would already begin preparing the hearts of those they will touch when they come. Pray for the teams mentioned above as they recruit, pray and prepare for their ministry here.
This coming Sunday several HH team members will be joining Grace Family church as they worship in a local public park.
Please pray for good weather, for lots of people to come and be attentive, and for hearts and lives to be changed forever by the Good News we will be sharing with them.
