Fight the silence!
Learning from the
Father’s in faith really encourages young missionaries like me. I was a
Christian who’s just content in playing instruments in church, leading young
people and pastoring a church but not committed in mission’s work. I don’t have
a heart for mission. Through Nehemiah Teams, God used the short biographies of
mission heroes to open my blind eyes. The life and the challenge to Hudson
Taylor really moved me.
Hudson Taylor is
an English missionary born in 1832 and died 1905. He was a missionary in Inland
China. One day while he was preaching there, a man was listening. After he
preached this man approached him and said, “I have long searched for the truth,
as my father had before me. I have traveled far, but I haven’t traveled far,
but I haven’t found it. I have found no rest in Confucianism, Buddhism, or
Daoism, but I do find rest in what I heard tonight. For now I believe in
Jesus.” He later asked Taylor, “How long has the
Gospel been known in England?” To which Taylor replied, “Several hundred years.” And the guy said, “ What! And you have now
only come to preach the Gospel to us? My father sought after the truth more
than 20 years and died without finding it. Why didn’t you come sooner?”
How about for you
and me? How long have we known the
Gospel? How long have we had the truth? Yet we’re keeping it to ourselves.
We have kept it from those who have been searching for it for a long time.
Some, for all their lives! How much
longer will they wait? How many more
will die without hearing it?
I am just as guilty and my eyes were just opened
to the truth. It is true, as the Scriptures says, “For everyone who calls on
the name of the Lord will be saved.” But it is also written, “How then can they
call on the one they have not believed in, How can they believe in the one of
whom they have not heard, and how can they hear without someone preaching to
them?”
Get up! Stand up! Fight the silence!
-
- - Gladwin, 21
Bicol
* Pray with Gladwin as he goes and help with Nehemiah Teams Training in Palawan and participate in a team. He may stay there a little while after the summer to help set up for the next summer and reach out to his friends in mainland Palawan where he grew up.
