Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 30, 2017 | Dr. Rob Congdon - Life And Medicine In Africa: Vulnerable Man, Unstoppable Gospel

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April 30, 2017 | Dr. Rob Congdon - Life And Medicine In Africa: Vulnerable Man, Unstoppable Gospel · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, Mulvaine Building, College Avenue Building, people all over the world.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: How are you this morning?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to see you.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, let me uh mention something.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Next Sunday night at 6 30, there'll be something really special happening here.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: A guy is uh I consider a friend, uh, one of the top ten music, gospel music song writers in the last 50 years named Donald Wertzen.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Don Wordson, actually related to the headstrums in our congregation.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Don teaches at Dallas Seminary at times, at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, has written, is constantly writing new songs, traveling the world, traveling America, performing.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a grand piano center stage next Sunday night at 6:30.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Don will be here to play the piano and talk to us about music.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I invite you to join me there.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm I'm really excited to ask my brother Ram up on stage.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Run up come on in.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Ron's a lot younger than me.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um there were several brothers in between me and him when I left for college.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: You were about two years old.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, he was actually about ten.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But um anyway, this is Rob, and um Robb has been um doctor in serving in Africa for, you know, years ago, when I was first here as a single guy in charge of youth and the singles group and so forth, Rob was a uh a college student.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: He came down and he he he was here at Wheaton for a while.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was coming from Wheaton and down here at the church.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we're both easy.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: See, this is easier for me than him, but actually the truth is this is not my comfort zone.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so I've told Jim, because he's forcing me to do this, when he comes to Africa, he's going to deliver a lot of babies.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stomp that dig him and stomp that nobody in Africa is clapping right now.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: No one.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I promise you that.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So Ram and I were checking out the girls here in Topeka together.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, no, that was and then he went to med school and then uh, you know, and and and man, served for served for years in Africa.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: But but um um but there's been a shift now uh just in the last year, last six months really, you had a tough decision to make because the mission talked to you seriously about sort of altering what you were doing.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we love uh medicine, love to care for people who are sick at the end of the world.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: My wife Nancy is somewhere over there in the darkness.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: There she is, four rows back.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas, Sarah, our children.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Stand up, you guys.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Thomas and Sarah are here.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Even Eleanor, you know.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, Eleanor.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, the Lord uh the mission asked us, and we believed the Lord asked us to think about uh making a bit of a transition, and it wasn't easy, but uh we prayed and thought and pushed on every other door, and the Lord opened this door again and again and again.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that is to spend about half our life in the States and about half our life overseas, back and forth, back and forth, to equip and encourage and launch the next generation of medical missionaries.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Medical missionaries.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Medical missionaries, and then establish them in different parts of the world.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, and then Nancy will be she's she's gifted in counseling and prayer, and so she'll be your partner there, and you guys will that's that's super.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's uh sort of an introduction to a little change that's going on.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm gonna I'm gonna leave him alone up here.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna start with a video, and then Rob's gonna share with you a message that you won't soon forget.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just let see that video.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: They were there when the rebel forces came in.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: They had six children, they jumped in one of four boats, but three of those four boats captized in the Nile River in the dark of the night.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: They had their six kids, the father grabbed the three older ones, his wife grabbed the three little ones and they swam.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: And when they got to shore, the father had his three, and his wife didn't have any.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: She was nine months pregnant.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: And he said uh his wife crawled up on the beach, went into labor, and delivered a healthy baby.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Really, how do you deal with that kind of pain?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, almost every family here has that kind of pain.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: God is using a tragedy to provide something of long-lasting benefit for the Maban people.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: We came up here, and what do you know?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: The Lord brought 120,000 people with at least 15 people groups that have never heard the gospel, completely unreached, living in places so isolated the gospel has never penetrated.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: They have come to live in uh a place where they are ready to hear the gospel.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: And um there's a lot to say about that, but the bottom line is it's an opportunity that God has given us out of this terrible adversity to uh share the gospel.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: And honestly, thousands of people are coming to Christ who would never.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great opportunity.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Good morning.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: How does Jim do this?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: Three services Sunday after Sunday, my voice is going.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Every time I see that video, it brings tears to my eyes and reminds me of the suffering of places like Sudan and Syria and around the world.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: But we have enough suffering of our own, don't we?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: You just read about the tragedy in Texas this morning.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Some of you might have seen that on the news.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: People died in a storm.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: Last Sunday, Nancy and I were up in Wheaton.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Our lastborn is a student there, and we were together, and we were with him.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: We were with Paul when he got the phone call.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Paul, your close friend, Ethan, missionary kid from Africa, your roommate next year, he's he's dead.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: How is that possible?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: He's dead.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Hit by a by a hammer at the track meet, and suddenly taken from here to glory.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: We spent the week just with our arms around each other and Paul and his four dear friends, and then the family, and then the whole school.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of hurt, isn't there?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what does the Lord have to say to us today about living in a world of pain and hurt?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: Colossians chapter 1.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to read a couple of verses that have been percolating in my mind and heart for the last few years.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a Bible, take a look at Colossians 1, 4, 5, 6.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: It starts in verse 3.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: We give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Christ is the center of Colossians, the supreme, the majestic risen Christ.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: And there it is, we give thanks to the Father of Jesus praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, look at that.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: It really does make a difference, doesn't it?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: I like the fact that Paul talks about faith, hope, and love.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: But in this passage he switches them.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Did you notice that?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Faith in God, love for one another at TBC.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: And where does it come from?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: It comes from a hope.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: A hope that is laid up, fixed, eternal in the heavens.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's a permanent thing, not passing.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's what is the hope.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Was the hope for Ethan, and is the hope for his friends.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: We have a hope laid up in heaven.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel, it says, which has come to you, just as in all the world also, it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard and understood the grace of God in truth.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's a mouthful, and Paul does that a lot, doesn't he?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I was tempted to say Jim should come up and now take over and exposite this passage for you, but let me do my best, okay?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I see a few things.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing I see is that it is the gospel.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: The gospel is central.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: You heard about this hope laid up for you in heaven in the word of truth, the gospel.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Nance and I have not been home that long, so we've heard a lot about uh hype on the news and false news and all kinds of stuff.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to find and hard to know what is true, isn't it?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: But there's truth here.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's the word of truth, the gospel.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's an anchor in the difficulty and the hurt and the pain and the storms of life.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Praise the Lord, for a word of truth.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And when I thought about this word of truth, immediately I thought of other descriptions, mostly from Paul, of the gospel.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: It is the word of God, it's the word of Christ, it's the word of truth, the word of help me out.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: What other word of can you think of?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a I'm not a pastor, so we can just talk.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's legal.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, word, can you think of any other phrases?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: I hear word of life, word of hope.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the word of life.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's the word of hope, that's the gospel.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Word of grace, excellent.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Mercy, love, word of truth, excellent.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: There it is again, but it is in other places as well.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the word of reconciliation, I think.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Some places we see the word of the cross.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Paul said, remember, he said it seems to the world the cross is foolishness, but it is a word of wisdom.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: Christ is at the center.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that passage in 1 Thessalonians where it says the cross, there is a word of power.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the Holy Spirit's power.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it is, it's not just trickling around out like this, but it is reverberating.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I just uh love that word.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the reality that the gospel is the word of truth and it's going somewhere, and then that that's the next phrase.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: See that it says the it is the word of truth and it comes to you.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: Think about that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: We live in a time when you can go to a seeker church, right?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And seek out the truth.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: But the the real deeper truth comes from Jesus Himself, Luke 19, 10.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: He's the hound of heaven and he's after us.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: He came after me when I was a small boy.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: And he takes us from darkness, it says in Colossians, and takes us into the kingdom of light.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: What a privilege to be children of a God who came to us constantly.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: This gospel is constantly bearing fruit and increasing.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: I thought about that for a while.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I thought I grew up in a home where, you know, we learned Psalm 1 when we were little kids.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's a big tree planted by streams of water.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: You want to be like that, bearing fruit in its season.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's what trees do, even in the Bible.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we had trees on our farm.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: We had fruit trees, and uh, you know, we had 12 kids.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Jim's told you all that.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: We we we got quite a bit of nutrition from those fruit trees.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, there was a time in the spring there might be some pie cherries and later on bing cherries, and there were plums that were purple and red, and then there were apples and there were pears.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: But we knew for sure there were not going to be any trips to the cherry tree in November, you know, or January or March, because those trees bear fruit in their season.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, what's Paul talking about?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Is he maybe he just didn't have any fruit trees or something?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's more than that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Paul knew that the gospel, this word of truth, it comes is supernatural.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing natural about it at all.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's constantly bearing fruit and increasing in all the world.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh certainly those disciples, when they climbed up into the upper room to wait, I don't believe they thought for a minute that the gospel would explode like that out of Jerusalem.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: But that's the supernatural truth about God's word, the word of truth.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it will do that in you also if you allow it, like the Colossians did.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Nancy and I are just here to bear witness that that's true, that the gospel is constantly bearing fruit in all the world, and uh even in us.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it does that despite our inadequacy.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a lesson we had to learn when we first got to Africa, and I'll be honest, I'll tell you just uh one story, but I could stand up here for an hour and tell you stories of our inadequacy.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: We got to Zambia and we were just struggling with the language, and we were going to a little village called Somatumbo.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: And in Somatumbo we were learning culture and language, but on Sundays they would sometimes ask me to preach.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a young guy that we'd pick up on the way, it was about nine kilometers through the bush, and we'd get there, and then I'd say a few halting words in Luchazzi, and then he would translate for me if I had to preach.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And one Sunday, to my chagrin, he was not there.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: He was sick, and I got to church, and yes, they wanted me to preach, and I thought, oh no.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: They sent a little kid up who had about as many words of English as I had Luchazzi.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I struggled.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: I said each sentence, you know, three times with simpler and smaller and shorter words, and I spoke louder, and it didn't help, you know.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: I could have wept up there in front, and I just finally, when we got finished, I don't know if I preached on the woman at the well, but I'm sure it came out as something like, you know, Jezebel falling out of the tower.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: But nevertheless, I sat down and I was uh horrified.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the old man Samatumbo stood up and he said some words and then he said, Does anybody have anything to say?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like, wow, that was bad.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: A girl, a girl stood up in the back, a junior high age kind of girl, and she said, Uh, I want to follow Jesus.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: I want to trust Jesus.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he talked to her, and then he prayed, and then she prayed, and then we went out to the car and drove home, and I had tears in my eyes, and I just thought, God, he can use us.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: No matter how inadequate we are, he just needs a willing rock or a stick or whatever.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: But we need to be willing.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: A few years later, we were busy there.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: The hospital was 110 beds, and I was the only doctor most of the time, and we had some great nurses, so we were a team, and we'd see, I'd I'd make rounds on the whole hospital about every second or third day.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: And an old man came from far distant through the bush walking, and he brought his grandson, and that was the chief of Litoya, and he was uh quite an old guy, obviously strong for a hike like that.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: And his son had a fractured femur, and we put up a traction, gallows traction, and told him, No problem, three weeks, he'll be better.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the weeks went by, and every few days I'd check and make sure he was all right.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And when we took the traction down, I remember.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: I remember the ward and the bed, and I remember standing there and taking off that bandage and seeing that the bone was healed, and then the top of his foot, there was an ulcer.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: The traction had pulled against his foot for some time.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: It hadn't been noticed.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: I felt so terrible.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: What a failure! You know, you came here to help people, not to hurt them.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we we always say first, do no harm in medicine.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I came around.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: I told the father, grandfather, okay, you can go home, but only when the wound heals and the weeks went by, and finally, after a month, the foot was healed, and that grandpa took his little grandson home.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, the last week or two he was there.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: Our friend John Chitumbo, the chaplain, was speaking to him day by day, and he gave his life to Christ.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: And he went home a believer.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And six, seven months later, John and I went to visit, and amazing.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: That guy and his uh family up and down the river had come to Christ, and they all wanted us to burn their fetishes and start their first church.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a church in Letoia today with men and women who are following Christ.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because of a little boy with a broken leg and a doctor who made a mistake, but God has purposes that go beyond our inadequacy and our mistakes.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: We need to trust him, and he will use us.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we were wondering how the Lord would use people like us in South Sudan when uh the mission asked us to think about going up there 10 years, 11 years ago.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um we we knew that's what the Lord wanted us to do, so we said, yes, we'll go.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: And as we look back, I see that there were some things our children taught us about team building and about life in Africa that were so important.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Our kids taught us that you need to have a good team, whether you're in a church or whether you're in a business or whatever, you you need a good team and you need a team that has some, especially in Sudan, some good security in place.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: And our kids were especially good at that.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I I won't tell you which one of our sons is here today, but he is in the middle of the picture.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he is the only one of our sons here today.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, he's pretty cute, so you know, they also we knew that we needed good food and we needed plenty of it, and our kids taught us that we needed to have some fun in the middle of all that difficulty.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I got home late so often from the hospital, and Nancy would tell the kids, wait, wait, wait, you're gonna be okay.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then finally she'd put the food on the plate.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: She'd actually throw it on the floor, and then she'd say, Tonight, dog dinner, no hands.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I love the way the one in the middle there, I don't think that's James.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's protecting his plate, you know.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Don't come here.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, if you meet our kids and they don't seem quite normal, you'll know you know who to blame for that.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, our kids taught us the teams need to be multicultural.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's no longer missions from the west to the east.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's from everywhere to everywhere.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: God has his people everywhere.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And our kids taught us you need to be ready for every difficulty.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, no matter what it is.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And you're they taught us that, well, maybe the Lord just taught us.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes there's nothing you can do in a place of difficulty.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And 15 years ago we stood here and told you the story about how we got stuck in the game park and how the Lord delivered us from a place that was sort of like being at the zoo with no cages, but by God's grace, we came through that.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: And they taught us to keep our heads together, be unified.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Don't let anything come between you.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they taught us that when things are dark or sad or difficult, like when Thomas and Robert were getting ready to go on a plane to boarding school the next day, I'll tell you, there was palpable sadness in our home.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: But we learned that in that situation, you need someone, always someone who'll keep smiling no matter what.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: And Paul was that kind of a guy.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we went to Sudan.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was a big country.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: SIM had come there many years before, and the Lord opened that door and told us to go.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: And very briefly, let me share with you how these years have developed.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: We looked back first, and we were just challenged by Bob and Claire Greave, a doctor who graduated from Oregon Medical School just like I did a few years before.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: And his wife, Claire, had gone to Wheaton and then Multnomah, where dad taught, and where Nancy went to school, and they got married, and their church, a lot like TBC, launched them off to Sudan, where there were three missionaries at Douro.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: So they had a team of five, and there they were in 1940 in February, and they they died in Doro suddenly when Italy flew over the little place there and bombed that place.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Six months.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: The pastor at their church at home said Tertullian wrote, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: Their labor is not in vain.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Against all odds, he was hanging on to hope.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: And the truth is, a year later, the first Mabon believers were baptized by one of those surviving in Doro who shared the good news.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the gospel is truly unstoppable.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: War came, terrible war, fifty years of ongoing conflict and genocide.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: You heard all about that.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was horrible.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: This picture is certainly not mine.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: This was taken by a photojournalist, became famous for this picture, he won a Pulitzer Prize, and he came from South Africa to Washington.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was given the prize, and somebody asked him, Kevin, what did you do for that child?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that was not really a fair question for a photojournalist, but he was tortured by the reality that he hadn't been so inadequate to do anything.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he went back to South Africa and he took his own life.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Terrible story, but I think about the fact that we're weren't none of us adequate, but it's the Lord who makes us adequate, isn't it?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: He makes us adequate to do something about the pain of the world.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the church in Sudan was so beleaguered.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: You can see the bullet holes in the wall.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, can you imagine that in that difficult time the church flourished and grew despite so much death and destruction and pain?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: And when we got there, there wasn't much left of the old hospital, and we stood around the gravestone with our leader, a short guide, just perfect for that time with a bunch of Arab uh military people who were also short, and they didn't want to see a tall guy like me, but they were quite happy to talk to Laiu.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And he loved the Lord, and he brought us around the gravesite of the Greaves, and we prayed together, Lord, in all of our frailty, make us adequate to do something for the sake of the gospel here in Sudan.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: And the Lord sent people to us who were such a great blessing.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Half of our team came from Ethiopia, and this couple is Abebe and Ababech.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the name means flower and flower.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: They uh are a couple that grew up in the communist times there.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: They suffered, they went to prison, but can you imagine they come from a church now of seven million people, the Kale Hewet Church in Ethiopia, because God is at work.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: The gospel is unstoppable.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so we worked together and we built and we got houses and a few vehicles and some solar power, and finally uh we even had running water.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Can you believe that?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: When Nancy would would uh would actually carry the water and we could get her to run, then we had running water.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Nan.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, she used to say that my head is slippery, you know, so I have to hold it up there, but I I can't say anything because I couldn't even lift that thing up onto my head.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we we had army in the hospital, the old building.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was the only standing building, so they used it for their arms, and that was the Northern Army.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we just went to serve the people in the bush.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: So we went village to village and we cared for the sick, and uh, of course, uh we learned a lot in those days about what sickness was there and how desperate the needs were.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we found so many children starving.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the first thing we did was to build a little place with some white tents, and we cared for the starving there.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thousand, the first thousand in the first couple years, and then after that, thousands of children and their parents.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: And all of them uh cared for in the name of Christ.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're a doctor, you'd love Sudan.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, love is the is too strong a word.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but Sudan is a place that has all 14 of the neglected diseases of the world endemic.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: So leprosy or leishmania or onclassarchiasis or whatever disease that you can't quite name, it's there.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: What a privilege to care for the sick in the name of Christ, and to bring people to physical health and also introduce them to the God who is the word of truth, the God of the cross, the God who came to them, the God who is unstoppable in reaching out to those who suffer.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: We trained health workers, great guys.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's you know it's terrible in Sudan right now, but some of these guys continue to see patients in the clinic that we built.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: We shared the gospel, we took care of the sick in any way we could.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh some it's not quite like Stormont Vale, but I mean we had a mud hut and we had us, we had a great ultrasound machine and a plastic chair.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: What more do you need, you know?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and we started delivering a lot of babies, and we realized that more children were were dying, and especially women in childbirth, more than in any other country in the world in history.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so we broke ground on uh a new maternity ward, and it took us a few years to build it, and we had a lot of people who came to help us, Jim and some guys from here as well, and by God's grace that building came up and continues to be a great testimony to God's love in a difficult place.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great picture, isn't it?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's Jim and uh Bob Keys and Marvin and my friend Nehemiah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: And if you I like the picture because Nehemiah looks so relaxed.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Jim and Bob and Marvin, you know, they're just hanging on for dear life.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, it's 110 degrees, uh, so we can't really blame those guys.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: But the other team that came had Stan on it and uh Jamie and Phil and Ron, and they had a lot of fun there.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think, yeah, they did accomplish a few things, but there were a there were there were plenty, there was plenty of laughter, and uh, no, actually, I'm joking.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: They they did so much, and by God's grace, the maternity ward was finished with much prayer and patience and with constant proclamation of the gospel in every place we could and in every way to share the love of Christ.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: But the Lord had something more to teach us.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: He taught us that our inadequacy didn't matter too much to him.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: Even our failures, he would use them for his purposes.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: But in the next few years, the Lord taught us something a bit surprising.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that lesson began when Dave Masters, a doctor, came to join our team.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: He'd been in Congo for 20 years, he went back to the UK, and then he said, My wife and I, Irene and I, want to come and we want to spend the rest of our life in Africa and let us serve with you.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so they came to South Sudan, and actually we were together for uh just uh weeks, and then I went back to Kenya for a bit, and I got a phone call one Sunday afternoon.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Rob, well it wasn't a phone call, it was a satellite phone, you know, one of those things.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: Rob, David has abdominal pain and he's in great pain suddenly, and then that night Dave is saying goodbye to us, and by morning, Dave was dead.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we struggled, Lord, what are you doing?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: That day, of course, in Sudan, you don't wait.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: They made a coffin and he was buried, and his wife laid him to rest.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: And we were helped by this word from a book by John Piper.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: He said, suffering was not just a consequence of the master's obedience and mission, it was the central strategy of his mission.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we didn't want to have that to be our central strategy.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: We could think of a lot of other strategies, but that was that was God's strategy in Jesus, and somehow he uses that strategy around the world.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Joseph San, a Romanian pastor, said just as Jesus suffered and brought salvation to us, our suffering proclaims the gospel to the world.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: What a great and challenging word.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: We stood around that cross at the gravesite a few days later, and it was difficult, difficult, I'll I'll tell you to understand the whole thing.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: And a few weeks later, when our plane crashed on the end of the runway, our Cessna caravan, uh we were in a bit of shock, no doubt about it.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: We had four nurses, and the pilot walked away from that accident.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: But what a tough and dark time.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Two years later, Jacob and Tabarak, a wonderful couple.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: They'd come out in their youth, at least Tabarak was a 20-year-old, beautiful young woman from Ethiopia, and they went through some great difficulty, and then they were up the river from us, 30 miles.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we got a call when Jim and the team were with us.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Jacob is sick with cerebral malaria.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: You've got the plane, you're leaving tomorrow.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: Can you fly, pick him up, and bring him out?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: And by the next morning when we got there, he was gone to glory.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we carried, uh, these guys will never forget, carrying the body of Jacob and a weeping Tabarak back to Nairobi.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: And from there, she went and she spoke to a crowd of thousands of Ethiopians and said, somehow she had her composure back.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: My husband gave his life for the gospel in Sudan.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Who will go and take its place?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: We came home with uh words from actually from Jim.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Pastor Jim was with us during that time, and he spoke, and the theme was God does some of his best work in the darkness.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we really needed that theme.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, in creation it was dark, but God was at work.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: And when Daniel went in the lion's den, it was dark down there, I'll bet you, but God was at work, and in in the Philippian jail, it was dark.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: God was at work in the darkness.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: On the cross, you remember it got dark.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: In the tomb, it must have been pitch black.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: But God does some of his greatest work in the darkness.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: How true, how true that is.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we discovered uh in many ways as the years went on.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: We came home, we were here in 2011, we were here in Topeka, independence came to South Sudan.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: Great rejoicing, as you remember, great hope.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: Can it be that the country is in such chaos today?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: Tragic, but true.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: But at that time, Sudan was divided in half.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: The little red star is where our clinic was.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: We were suddenly just 15 miles from the border and an outpost away from everywhere, and suddenly, during our time here in the States, the Northern government began to bomb their own people.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: They they wanted to get the Muslim people out of the borderlands because they thought oil was there.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: So if we bomb them, maybe they'll run.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: And they did.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: They came right across the border and they came right to places like Douro.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we had departed, there's an airstrip on the bottom.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: And uh actually, if you have good eyesight, you'll see a little tower right in the middle of the picture.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: That was our new cell tower, so we had you can get cell phones anywhere in the world.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's the town of Douro, not much there, just a market.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: Looking out the window the other direction, it was just wide open lands, and our clinic was down at the bottom of the picture.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: That was 2011.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: We were home for a year.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: When we went back and flew in for the first time, it looked like that.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: What a shock to see white, what looked like popcorn all over, as far as the eye could see from our clinic.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: And the UN was there.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: 40,000 people.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: And up the road in the next 10 miles, 80,000 in three camps, and then 90, and then 100,000.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, it was unbelievable.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: God, you really got a sense of humor bringing us to a place like this.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: We struggled with what to do, but SIM, you know, we decided together.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I'll I'll take part of the credit for that.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: We just said, Rob, you and a couple nurses probably shouldn't provide the health care for a quarter of a million people.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: Let's see what God has in mind.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so we just continued while the people scrambled for water and food and a place.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: We continued to care for the sick who would come to us and medicine without frontiers, and other people came and took their place and did their part.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we prayed every day, and our chaplains did their work.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Nance and I also prayed, Lord, what would you have us to do?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: We came to to build a hospital and we can't do that.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we said to ourselves, the gospel needs to go to people who are here maybe for one year or two years, or we don't know how long.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Lord, how can we do that?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we prayed, and the Lord gave us this idea of a Doro Evangelism team, and we spoke to many of you, some of you participated, and we invited uh a group of Ethiopian believers, eight of them came, and they joined us for two months and prepared themselves, and then they went out into that camp, two by two, every day, sharing the gospel.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we couldn't do that.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: We walked into the camp and people called us UN because we looked like UN workers.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: So we were UN.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: But these guys couldn't.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: One of the amazing things about that team was that the team included Tabarek and Gitacho.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Tabarek was the same Tabarak.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: We had carried in that plane weeping with the body of her husband.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: And she went and she finished Bible school and she was number two in the class, and a guy named Gitacho was number one, and he said, Whoa, will you marry me?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, Yeah, if if you'll go to Sudan with me, I'll marry you.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: And she he said yes, and they came.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: And God used them in such a wonderful way.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_02: These guys would go out, and I could uh spend the next hour telling you.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_02: I guess we don't have to go home, do we?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, I better not do that.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: But we I remember these guys came, one of the teams came back and told us we went to a group called the Zariba today, and they were all out, but there was a man and his seven sons.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the middle son is bright and he speaks uh and reads in English as well as their language.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, which was Zariba, but also Arabic.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, We shared the gospel from Genesis to the cross, and those all of them said we want to follow Christ.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: And they prayed and we worshiped together, and they invited us back tomorrow.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna talk to the whole group.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so they went back.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: The chief, the Imam, and the whole people were there, and they they told the story, and then they they came back and said, Here, there we were.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the chief stood up and he said, You are Christians, and we are Muslim.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: If this were my land, I would kill you.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: But this isn't my land.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: Go away and never come back.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: The remarkable truth is there's a church among the Zareba today because the gospel is unstoppable.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: God is at work in the world.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, our time is almost up.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Something amazing happened in that time.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: Atar is a Sudanese doctor, he came walking through the bush with 20 guys from his hospital.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: He had a hospital paid for by Samaritan's Purse up in the north.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: The government bombed it, of course.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: They like to get rid of hospitals.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so, with all these refugees, Dr.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: Atar came.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: And he came to us and he said, uh, do you have any place we can start a hospital?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, You better talk to UN because they got some money, maybe, and a place.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: And sure enough, five miles away from Douro, they were given land and some mash tents.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they started, and we started to help them.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then the Lord sent us a missionary.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, a young woman, a PA, and her husband.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: Two years before they went up to Khartoum to learn Arabic.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: But we didn't live in an Arabic-speaking place.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't coming to help us, but the Lord knew we had 120,000 Arab speakers.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: And he sent Kathy, and she took over our work.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: Nance and I went on loan to Samaritan's Purse for two years.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_02: We helped them build a hospital.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Your tax dollars are at work in a good way.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: That two Million dollar hospital is still functioning.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what a privilege we had to see that part of our deepest desire fulfilled.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: God is at work.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Trust him.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's amazing what he will do.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Gitacho and his wife Tabarek, you can see that God blessed them with a couple of children over the years.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: They came back and they stayed with us.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Gitacho day by day went to the refugee camps, not just to Doro, to build the church in those tribes, but also to the three camps, which were complicated.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: They had almost a hundred thousand Ngesona people.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the Ngessena tribe from the north in the hills had been so resistant for centuries to the gospel.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: And yet here they were.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: Osama bin Laden in his day had built a road for them up in his, you know, in their country.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: They were a fearsome kind of a people.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: But Gitacho would ride his bike there day after day or month, week after week, and he'd just sit in the market and drink coffee, and he would tell the story of the gospel, and he would hand out these little audio Bibles in Arabic.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: And as it took a year past, two years, but some young people came to see him one day.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: They said, Where is the man?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: We're looking for the man who tells about the Christian religion.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: If I'd been Gitacho, I might have hit in the tent.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: But Gitacho said, That's me.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: He said, We have a letter for you, and I keep a copy of that letter in my Bible, but there's no time to read it.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: It just says, We, the youth of Ingestina, 6,000 of us, we have decided, with the approval of our chiefs and our umdas, we want to follow the God of the Bible, the Christian God.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: And we want you to come and teach us what that means.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we want a church in each of the seven or eight areas of our people, so that when we go back to the north, we'll take that church with us.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we want to know music in our language.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so they started building.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: And okay, that's not uh TBC quite, but that is the first church.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was another and another, and there are more now, churches among the Ngessena, where people are studying the Bible and learning of Jesus, and they are being baptized.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: And praise God, when we stand around the throne in Revelation, the Lamb will be there.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that amazing?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: We will be worshiping with Ngessena people, Zareba people, people who love the Lord and sing worship songs in their own language.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because the gospel is unstoppable.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: And because it comes, it doesn't just sit here, it comes where we're least likely to find it.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it's constantly bearing fruit and increasing in all the world, in all the world as in you.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: Now that last little bit is a very personal thing because the gospel doesn't necessarily grow in us unless we put Christ first in our life, unless we step out in faith, unless we focus on him.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a lot of things to think about with our families and with our work and with uh Kansas basketball or whatever it is.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: If Kansas is just win sometime, no, I'm just kidding.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: But focus on him through all of those distractions, and he can use us in all of our inadequacy and failure.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: Nance and I went to Zambia many years ago, and the old doc who built the hospital was telling us uh a story one time.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: He said, I there were about 200 people outside, and the chaplains were speaking, and I was doing my OPD work, and the lady came in, and the rooms are, you know, only about that wide, and there was a table and a chair, and he said, I got ready to examine her, and she jumped up off the table.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: Her eyes were big and she ran out, and we coaxed her back in and laid her down, and same thing happened, and then she said, which is the word for snake.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: So he said, we were looking in the rafters up there, and I didn't see anything, but then uh the head of a snake peeked out.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Whoa! There was not just any snake, it was a black mamba, one of those big 10-foot-long snakes that goes like a horse.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's fast, you know, and aggressive.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so anyway, Dr.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: Bob came out of the room very quickly, I'm sure.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he went out and he said to the chaplains, now you need to get me some help because none of these people are going to be helped until the snake is out of the room.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: So the chaplains considered that and they said, okay, well, we will talk to the people.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: So Bob said he waited and then they came back.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: Juana, we've decided.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: You go, we'll pray.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: You go, we'll pray.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, isn't that the way it is?
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: Rob, you go, we'll pray.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, God wants us to pray.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: We must pray.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for praying for us.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's why we're here because we survived, and that's because you've prayed for us and for so many others.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: But I believe that some of you, God is asking you to go, maybe, or maybe to send your children, or maybe even to pray that your grandchildren will go.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's a tough one, isn't it?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: To go and follow the Lord, to take the gospel where it cannot fail.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_02: What a challenge.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: I want to close with just uh a few comments from a guy that I respect so much.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: His name is Tim uh Zemer.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've heard of him or not heard of him.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: Tim headed up the uh the President's Malaria Initiative for the past 10 years.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Bush appointed him.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: And he did such a good job with this billion-dollar a year program that uh malaria death rate has cut in half in these years.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: He just finished his work uh in January and he went to the Jewish university and he said a few words there that were so profound.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_02: His dad died as a martyr in Cambodia.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: His mom encouraged him so much when he was a kid, and then he went on to be a successful doctor.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_02: But he said the challenge, it's not new or radical.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's not my rank or position that's important, it's not my heritage, my experience, not my father's wisdom or my mother's faith and courage, but my own posture before God.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_02: We tend to worry about our circumstances or successes, but the Lord is interested in consecration.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_02: Pray that the Lord will do something in your life so that you will be empowered to do something in the lives of others.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: What a great word.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_02: What is our posture before God?
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's what he's asking us this morning.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: What is your posture before God?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Bow to his purposes in your life.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: And he will never fail us.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: In our inadequacy, in our own failure, we cannot fail.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should close in prayer.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they're not gonna come, so we'll be finished, but stand with me and let's pray together.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: Ask God to have his way in our lives.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are the living God, you're the God who sent your son, the Lord Jesus, the God who has taken us from darkness into the kingdom of your beloved Son.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: How we praise you for that, for the good things in our life, even for these tragic circumstances we find ourselves in.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: We see that you are in the process of using our inadequacy and our failure and our weakness for your purposes.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: Lord, we just pray that you would take us and use us.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: Help us to know how to say, Lord, send me and to be used by you.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_02: We thank you this morning in Jesus' name.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot the last picture.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: God's purposes are good.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: They are very good.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for your attention and for your love for us.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_02: God bless you.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: Go in peace.