May 2008

Pack Your Purse with OBEDIENCE

Feature: "Night of Chocolate"
Invite the women to bring items that can be used in chocolate fondue (such as fruits, pound cake, angel food cake, pretzels, etc). You provide the chocolate, which can be kept hot in a crock-pot (or better yet, perhaps you can find a "chocolate fountain" to use!). Serve the chocolate in small Styrofoam cups along with stick skewers for dunking the treats. Play a "blind taste test" game, where you offer everyone small pieces of 3 or 4 different kinds of specialty chocolates, and then take a vote and declare a favorite. Decorate the tables with sayings about chocolate such as "Nobody knows the truffles I've seen", "Stressed spelled backwards is desserts", "Chocolate is cheaper than therapy and I don't need an appointment", etc! For devotions, use Ps. 199:103: "How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" What does it mean that the Lord's words are "sweet" to us? How does that affect our response to His words? If we say that His word is sweet to the taste, then we are affirming our desire to be obedient to that word.

Outreach Idea:
Hand out miniature chocolate bars to all the women in your church. Have an invitation attached to the candy telling what the theme for this month is. Encourage the women to take an extra invitation to give to a friend who doesn't usually attend your women's ministry events.

Prayer Tip:
Pray that Jesus will be lifted up. He has promised that if He is lifted up - men will be drawn to Him. Tools and programs are great, but it is Jesus who changes lives. Pray that we will use programs and tools to lift up Jesus. He is the only Savior. Pray for people to repent and receive Jesus as their own personal Savior.

Discipleship Thought:
Do you want to be the greatest in the kingdom of God like John and James? Jesus made it clear to us that the way to greatness is through humility. In Matthew 18:3-4, He says, "I tell you the truth...whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven".

Good to Go in Mongolia

By Renee Anderson
I'm good to go. What does that mean? What do we need to do to be good to go? The first thing that came to my mind is this: the Christian who is good to go has counted the cost and deliberated his strategy.

"For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?'" Luke 14:28-31 ESV

This is the place where Tomor and Chimgey got tripped up. These two single leaders from the Seed of Faith student church in UB were eager to prove that they were faithful by finding employment. This is not an easy endeavor, as unemployment rates in Mongolia are high. They approached C&MA missionaries, Jacob and Juhny Kim, with the idea of opening their own small grocery store. The sound advice they received was to wait, obtain the capital they needed and proceed carefully.

However, that isn't the Mongolian way. They approached friends and family and borrowed money and opened their store. Now, they barely bring in enough income to keep their shelves stocked and are considering borrowing more money. They probably thought they were good to go. They weren't.

This is only a picture of the reality of the church here in Mongolia. The young people are up against tremendous odds: Buddhist backgrounds blended with Shamanism, poverty, an enormous rate of alcoholism, and the leftover baggage of Communism. That is just one side of the coin. On the other side is a lack of resources that the Western world enjoys. Face it, there's no real reason for any professing Christian in the U.S. to not be "good to go." Christian books and audio are not just in the multitude of Christian bookstores, they are even in Walmart! If you don't want to get dressed and go out, you can just turn on your computer.

That is not the case here. If the Mongolian young people are to be good to go, they must be trained. There is a real need for training facilities and trainers; for student camps and staff to run them; for scholarships to send them to other countries, such as the Philippines, for in-depth training not yet available here.

I asked the question, "What does it mean to be good to go?" Just as important a question, is to determine what it does not mean. God is able to make all grace abound…in all things and at all times. We are only good to go when we know that is the only way we will abound in every good work.

I don't know a lot about Mongolia. I'm only in the first year of language study. I do know that I will not make it on my own strength and my own abilities. Before the apostle Paul gave the Corinthians that incredible promise in chapter 9, verse 8, he told them, "Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God" (2 Cor. 3:5). Here, the odds are definitely stacked against us. None of us here are "good to go" in and of ourselves. Not the missionaries, not Mongolian Christians. We need your prayer and support.

Let me support my point with the story of Bat. He was as well-trained as a Mongolian believer can be. He had been to Bible school. He is a gifted teacher. The translation I received of one of his messages was one of the most encouraging ones I have heard. Two weeks later, he was with some friends and they had too much to drink. The drunken young men broke into the church and stole money. Now he is living in the countryside trying to earn enough money to make restitution.

Was he good to go? Maybe, maybe not. But even the "good to go" must be totally dependent on God, aware of their own potential for falling and supported by their brothers and sisters in Christ because we need to be good to go...Together.