Adaptability in Soul Winning

Missionary Saint Jomhong soul winning here last September

Last Thursday night I was out soul winning with my partner Say Nay Moo. While out soul winning we knocked on a door and had a Thai man answer the door who was named Sakda. Sadka is the first actual Thai man I have ever met in this city in the almost 14 years I have been here. We have many Burmese refugees here who use to live in refugee camps in Thailand, but before now not any actual Thai people. This man Sadka did not speak much English and my partner who speaks many languages, only spoke a little Thai. The man had acknowledge that he did not know he was going to heaven, but I was at a loss at how we could get him the Gospel...

Then it occurred to me that Missionary to Thailand; Saint Jomhong is still living in the United States. I had Saint's cell phone number and called him up. I told him what I was doing and that I had a man right in front of me from Thailand that was lost. I handed my phone to Sadka and Saint who speaks Thai fluently went right to work presenting the Gospel. After about ten minutes the man bowed his head and trusted Christ as his Saviour. Praise God!

Sometimes while out soul winning we have to adapt. I am glad Saint was available by phone and I am glad that I was able to think fast at the door. In this case our adaptability worked! Praise God for another soul going to Heaven!

GREAT CHRISTMAS PARTY

You had to get the ball through the wreath!

Some of our Ladies enjoying the party!

 We had a great Christmas party this past Friday night. We typically spend a lot of time soul winning and we preach and teach the Book pretty intensely, so it is nice to just relax and have fun sometimes.
  This year we had one of the best parties we have ever had. Great crowd for the party and a great spirit among the people that attended. I love having fellowship with people that love each other and people that truly love the Lord instead of themselves.
  We actually had a lot of new faces at the party this year and they all really enjoyed themselves! We served up some great food and played some really fun games. Adults love to play games! I am excited about finishing our year off strong and having the best year of soul winning and growth that we have ever had in 2016!

They had to hook the candy cane!

They had to sort through the boxes to see how bells are in each one!

What's Wrong with a Culturally Diverse Church?

Mrs. Painter with her visitors on Sunday morning. Ma Jee and her children.

Mrs. Painter hosted an activity to the Burmese refugee girls at our house.

Lincoln Baptist Church is culturally diverse. Our services are in English, however, we have people attend every week from all over world. We have a core of Americans, but a great outreach for refugees. For example this past Sunday morning we had two visiting couples that were from Congo and a Karen lady that came with her children. All first timers! We also had a Burmese couple and a Sudanese family return from the previous week. Praise God!

More activities from the Saturday get together.

However, it has been brought to my attention that some don't like the fact that our church is so culturally diverse. Might I say that God loves the souls of all men! In Matthew 28:19 He said, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the   Holy Ghost:" I think He meant all nations!!!

Folks, our church is not run like some conglomeration of multiple churches from different countries. We run our church like an independent, fundamental, KJB preaching and believing Baptist Church! What I cannot understand is why someone would want to support missionaries to go across the world to reach these same kind of people, but not want to go to church with them themselves! I will always oppose this Pharisee attitude that self righteous Christians carry with them while they sit on their blessed assurance and do nothing to reach a dying world!!!

The Bible tells us in Revelation 7:9,  "After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;" I'll bet that will be tough for some people! Image this, Christ loves everybody! Christ also wants every nation, kindred, people, and tongue reached in any given area. Christ had much love patience and tolerance for many different kinds of people. However, He had very little patience for self-righteous Pharisees. Those were the ones that we can see in the Scriptures that He criticized. God has been good to us so we are going to keep reaching everybody! Somebody say Amen!
 

Great Thanksgiving Week

It was a fantastic week and weekend, despite battling a lot of bad weather. I will let the pictures speak for themselves with their captions.

A new Burmese couple were my visitors on Sunday morning. We had several other visitors as well.

The Karen girls with my daughters and their Karen dresses.

Men's outing on Tuesday night. We had eleven men out. Perhaps we can turn the world upside down.

Bro. Jonathan leading a Karen man to Christ using a translator.

Had some men from our church over for Thanksgiving who have no family on this side of the world. They have never played darts before. My wife and I found them to be quite good at it.

What a Blessing!

Matthew 5:10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

During our morning service time our assistant pastor noticed these signs placed around our building, so he started picking them up and toting them off to the dumpster in the back. Then he was confronted by a man who came seemingly from nowhere and told him that he he was stealing his property. The man told him that he was exercising his right to picket our church because of what we believe! After arguing for several minutes the man decided to leave for now. Here is the reason behind the title...

I sent this picture to a pastor friend of mine and he texted me back and said, "what a blessing." I thought about it for a second and decide he was right. It is a blessing to be persecuted for righteousness' sake! By the way, let me make clear that we do not hate Sodomites, nor does God. However, God hates the act of Sodomy and we preach that fact here. Apparently it isn't well liked by everyone that we do preach against it, especially in our neighborhood. We have a church five blocks away from us that has a rainbow flag painted on their sign!

The Week After

Bro. Painter and Hieu Nguyen

This was the week after our seven week campaign, which usually the week after a campaign is pretty flat. However, not the case for us, overall we had several visitors and one baptized. It really was a pretty good week following the the excitement of our Big Day. I was excited to see our assistant pastor bring a convert from Saturday named Hieu, who also followed the Lord in believers baptism. We even had some visitors come from Virginia. They were in Omaha for a wedding the previous day and decided to drive one hour to Lincoln so they could attend our church. They had seen our website and decided they liked the look of our church. I was delighted to hear that they actually drove an hour out of their way to attend a soul winning church! Praise God for others who want the soul winning atmosphere too!!!

A Diverse Church

The crowd after Sunday morning service

We had our final week of "Christ is Our Mission" and had Missionary Nathan Owens with us for the weekend. One of the comments made by the visiting missionary and his wife was how diverse our church is and what a sweet spirit there is among such a diverse crowd. Then one of our men took this picture and sent it to me on Sunday afternoon. I got to looking at the picture and figuring up where everybody is from and realized something... Wow, eleven different nations are represented in this auditorium! I also realized that there is a sweet spirit in our church these days!!! Somebody say, Amen!!!

I preached on "Christ is a Master Soul Winner" on Sunday morning. At the invitation time we had 4 Nigerians come to know Christ as their personal Saviour. We had a total of 5 public professions made and 129 in Sunday school. (Which I thought was very good considering our bus numbers were a lot lower than normal.)

Sunday night we had a presentation about South Africa from Brother Owens and then we had him preach. He preach a fantastic message on repairing the altar of the heart. He and his wife also did a fantastic job on Saturday out soul winning. They followed up on several Cameroonians in our area. This was helpful especially since the Owens have planted several churches in Cameroon and can speak the language. Pleased pray for the Owens while they work at raising the rest of their support so they can get to South Africa and start churches there.

Missionary Owens and his wife