A second century Church father was quoted as saying this: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” From the time that Stephen, the first official Christian martyr, was stoned to death in AD 36, Christians have been laying down their lives for the One who gave His life for them. I believe God has a special […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 3/11/2016
After receiving the tragic news of the death of brother Omar and his wife a few days ago, I decided that I would write an update this week around them and what their lives have meant to the Kingdom of God as they worked as missionaries through House of Blessing. As regular readers will know, our contact with House of […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 2/13/2016
In the last few days, I’ve received several calls from Pastor R from his location near Damascus. As always, there is good news as well as news of tragic events that have transpired. There is now not a day that goes by in the Middle East without a multitude of events unfolding. We are the generation Jesus spoke of that […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 2/3/2016
As I received a phone call this morning from Pastor R in Syria and wrote down some notes from his special report, I thought of a familiar verse found in Joel: Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision. The sun and moon grow dark, and the stars […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 1/29/2016
Every time I check my regular news sources, it becomes clearer by the day that our troubled world is hurtling toward cataclysmic events, the likes of which will leave all other troubled eras in our world’s history pale in comparison. For those in the West, so far, at least for the most part, we just read or hear about these […]
MIDEAST UPDATE: 1/19/2016
Watching the news further confirming a call from Syria in the wee hours of the morning, it is obvious that circumstances continue to deteriorate in the Middle East. Many of you may have heard of the horrors happening in the Syrian city of “Deior-ez-Zor” (one of several spellings). It is located in the northeastern portion of Syria and was brutally […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 1/16/2016
The beginning of the Church Age was tumultuous. Once the Day of Pentecost came and the apostles began to preach and teach with power, the forces of the enemy began to persecute. The enemy here is not the Jewish Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, or even the Roman government at the time, but rather the forces of hell that were unleashed to […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 1/9/2016
After receiving a phone update this week from Pastor R, and thinking about all the things that God is doing through the House of Blessing missionaries in the Middle East, I am reminded of a number of Scriptures. One of these is Ephesians 4. And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 1/5/2016
We live in a world where people are looking for heroes and even the supernatural. Many of the movies that are produced today play into the desires that people have. As humans, we find ourselves wishing we had access to the supernatural…usually for the wrong reasons. We wish we were capable of seeing things that the natural human eye cannot […]
MIDEAST UPDATE, 12/24/2015
I am now coming to realize more and more as time passes, that not only is the intensity of world events increasing, but so is the intensity increasing with the work in God’s harvest of souls. For those of us who have direct contact with overseas missions, it is probably easier to recognize; it certainly is for me through my […]