REACH Romania
24h May 2005
Dear partners and friends,
Hope you are all doing well and enjoy God’s love and grace!
If you are like me - then these days we are so busy with so many things, so many important and urgent issues require our time that we ignore the important necessity of stopping and being thankful for the things that happen in our lives! In addition, there are so many good things that could encourage and strengthen us in our Kingdom service!
I want to tell about one of those things that happened recently - but as a result of stubborn perseverance!
It was almost 10 years ago when a brother friend of ours - Ilie Popa - started the evangelistic outreach, using "Jesus" film, in some of the many villages around Suceava that don’t have any evangelical church - some of them don’t have even an Orthodox church, which is unusual to Romanian villages. As most of the churches around here don’t believe in using such a worldly instrument as a movie, brother Ilie took some young people from our bible school. People were very much resistant to the Gospel - strong in their traditions and bound by many things - heavy drinking being a plague for the poor families. Also - family values were ignored, as people were not willing to pay the money needed to get married officially, so they were just living together. However, some people received us into their homes and we talked, prayed with them and encouraged them to make a decision for the Lord. This is one of the main reasons we decided not to have a Sunday evening service in our church, so that after the morning service, people could go to the villages and evangelize.
But there were not spectacular results - which is a discouragement most of the times. Brother Ilie moved to Bucharest meanwhile - being in charge of the educational program of Campus Crusade for Christ - Romanian branch, and recently appointed as the Pastor of one of the new Baptist churches there. Our people kept going anyway - planting the seed of the Word of God. One of the villages is Valea Bourei - almost 50 km. SE of Suceava. For the last few years our administration man - Dan Sorodoc - was the one in charge of the mission work in this village. Taking people almost every Sunday and sometimes just by himself, he kept going with perseverance - developing friendships with the people and showing them a new way of doing things. Sunday - May 15 - was an important day, as 5 people from that village came to Suceava to our church to be water baptized! Among them - one of the "families" I talked about earlier - after 10 years together and 4 children, they went to the mayor and told him they want to officially get married, because they are believers now and want to make things right before God and before authorities! I could not believe when they told me the mayor’s answer: "You still have a few days before we do it, maybe you’ll change your mind and come back to normal!" Anyway - they did the official part of it, and before we baptized them, we did the religious part of the wedding - asking the Lord to bless them with a new beginning! It was a great day of celebration for us all -and I’m sure it was the same in heaven!
Well - along with them an old friend of Brother Ilie was being baptized the same day - and he was invited to be part of the service, and he came all the way from Bucharest. Sunday morning we brought 2 vans full of people (about 20) from Valea Bourei to be part of the baptism service. You can imagine Brother Ilie’s joy when I told him who they were!!! With tears in his eyes, he was telling everyone how the Lord orchestrated things that day -so that he could enjoy the fruit of the work done in that village! And once again - the scripture from Isaiah 55:10,11 which says: "The rain and snow come down from the heavens and stay on the ground to water the earth. They cause the grain to grow, producing seed for the farmer and bread for the hungry. It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it" - proves true, and it encourages us to keep going!
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Thank the Lord for His grace and love for all the people -and thank you all for your prayers and support! TOGETHER WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE!!! Serving the King of Kings, Nicu & Suceava Team |
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