Dear Family and Friends,
Today was a travel day for me so there is not much to report. I left Bujumbura, Burundi and came back to Nairobi before heading the Madagascar tomorrow, Wednesday. So, I thought I’d give you a quick summary of one of the presentations I made in Nairobi last weekend. I’ve uploaded pictures of some of the slides that I show when telling God’s Story.
Understanding God’s story helps us prepare to answer questions people ask us about Christianity. It’s my conviction that every question comes out of one of the four chapters of God’s Story.
SLIDE 1, CHAPTER 1: CREATION
Gen 1-2 is the creation event and at the end, God said it was “very good!” Paradise on earth.
SLIDE 2, CHAPTER 4: NEW CREATION
I then skip ahead to the last chapter, chapter 4, New Creation. NEW creation? I thought it was very good. What happened to mess it up?
SLIDES 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; CHAPTER 2: THE FALL
These four slides explain what happened. When Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, everything changed. Humans were cursed with deceitful hearts and a sin nature. The ground was also cursed. And the two, when combined, broke the world. The result was every kind of evil, from disease, to war, to corruption. And in nature, every disaster imaginable became possible. At this point I explain that every person becomes a victim of one or more in the list. Some of it might be self-imposed. Sometimes we are just an “innocent bystander” who gets sideswiped but the sin that is in the world.
Questions like: Why won’t God stop the war in “my” country? Why is there so much suffering? Why does God allow genocide? Why did God allow “that” person to die so young with a heart attack? Etc.
The question that needs an answer is “how do we fix the broken world?”
The answer is not new leaders, new laws, a different government, more education.
SLIDE 8, CHAPTER 3, REDEMPTION: The answer is, “we need a redeemer” who will give people a new heart and a new nature. That is what Jesus’ death and resurrection is all about. The gospel is the answer to fixing a broken world and Jesus has been changing hearts one at a time since the day He was raised from the dead. Nature (disease and natural disasters) will continue it their broken condition until Jesus returns to make ALL things new by destroying the old and creating a new heaven and earth.
This is a quick overview of the second talk I gave in each location in Nairobi last weekend. I hope you found it helpful. Understanding the broad effect Adam’s sin had on human and nature helps explain why things are the way they are, which leads to the answer: Jesus.
Here is the link to see the slides in the album.
Pray for an on time, safe flight to Madagascar and for the reorganization of our Madagascar after the untimely death of our coordinator, Julien Mvemba, a few months ago.
By His grace,
Steve