Good thoughts

Yesterday, I had a reader who was studying the temptation of Jesus with me. We read through the text and went over any English words that he didn't understand. (He learned English by listening to American music and watching American movies. I was really impressed by his ability to speak only by those means.) Then I had him read and answer the questions written in his workbook. He didn't have much trouble there except for some verbs in the past tense. (In music and movies, most of our speech is in the present tense so this can be a problem.)
After the workbook questions, I always ask additional questions that help them answer for themselves what is really going on in the text. We talked about how the devil was tempting Jesus and I asked him, "What do you think about what the devil is doing here to Jesus?" and he replied, "The devil knew the scriptures really, REALLY well!"
I was really hit by the truth to his statement. It wasn't the first time I had heard someone say that, but it is so true! Then my reader said, "I really need to know the scriptures, too!" then I said, "ME, TOO!" If quoting scripture is Jesus' defense against the devil, it sure had better be mine. I need to be in the Bible daily and so often it gets a low priority. Maybe if I spend more time in the Word, I wouldn't fail to temptation so easily sometimes. If I claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ, I need to spend time in the Word.
I included some details of how this lesson went so that you could see the format that we use in our reading sessions. I hope you can see that not only do we show our readers Jesus, but they show us some great insight into scripture as well.

Now that's a good question!

Today I had two reading sessions that were very interesting. I'll call my first reader Timothy. Timothy is a very intelligent 18 year-old who has a good grasp of English as well as general knowledge of the Bible. Timothy rarely has problems understanding the message of each lesson so recently I decided to challenge him with harder questions. Because he learns so easily, I thought he would enjoy studying the deeper questions that we usually don't ask our students. Today, we were talking about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and His ultimate choice to be our sacrifice. We also talked about how His disciples reacted to His arrest. What were they thinking? Then I asked him how he would have reacted, if he were one of the disciples.

Timothy said that he would have wondered why Jesus gave Himself over to the Jewish leaders. That lead us to talk about why God wanted Jesus to die. "Why did Jesus have to be the sacrifice?" Now that is a good question. When that question arose, I realized that this discussion would take longer than the time we had and so I said that I wanted him to think about this all week and that we would talk about it next Wednesday. I can't wait until our reading session next week.

Reader #2, I'll call Gideon. Gideon is a 33-year-old family man. He believes in Jesus and struggles with the understanding of what being a Christian looks like in the real world. In an e-mail, he flat out asked me if it was a sin for a cop to kill a man (inside the law) Uhhhh, I don't hear that question everyday. Then today, we were talking about how Jesus would not drink of the cup again until God's kingdom comes. Then he asked, "When will God's kingdom come?" Now that's a good question!

I'm sure you are curious to hear my answers to these questions, but I've found that the best answers come from the Bible and I can only give a simple man's opinion. And what is that compared to the unfathomable wisdom of God's Word.

Parties and Beaches

By my title it may seem like I'm really living it up, but the party I mention was an LST costume party. We invited all of our readers to come to the church in a costume. We asked them not to dress as anything evil and be creative. We had a great turnout! A few of my readers came and we had fun and games. We taught them about the "Trick or Treat" process and showed them how to go to a door and beg for candy by yelling these familiar words. They had a really good time and learned some American culture at the same time. Cyndi went as the woman at the well and I went as a Roman Emporer.
We were really beat after the party and the next day, on our day off, we went to the beach. We relaxed and enjoyed the waves. I've only been to the beach a couple of times so far and really enjoy the beauty of the ocean. I'm so amazed at the power of these relatively calm waves. It was a nice way to rest after the party.
I've loaded more pictures on our Picasa site. Click here to see them. Remember, we don't have daylight savings time, so we will be three hours ahead of Central time and 2 hours ahead of Eastern time starting this Sunday.