Dear Friends in Christ,
Greetings to each of you from Germany! It is such a blessed privilege to be able to begin another year serving the Lord. In just a couple of months, I will have the joy of celebrating 40 years since the Lord saved me by His grace. My precious wife and I have been serving Christ together for almost twenty-two years and seventeen years ago today (February 2nd), God gave us a beautiful baby girl who is the joy of our lives. Since she was born, we have lost two children that we know we will see in Heaven one day. All of this reminds me of how good our Savior is. "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised!"
CHRISTMAS RETREAT '08
Ten years ago, my father and Rhein River Baptist church started an annual Christmas Banquet to help encourage missionaries in Europe. The first year, there were 60 people in attendance and this year we had right at 280 missionaries from fourteen different European countries. We have received so many letters and e-mails from them about what an encouragement the meeting was to them and their families. Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Sexton came from the states to be with us and the Lord used Dr. Sexton in a wonderful way.
RHEIN RIVER SINGLES MINISTRY
God has allowed Julie and me to work with the singles here at RRBC since coming to Germany and we have seen Him do some good things. We would love to see many more come, but we are grateful for the blessing that the Lord allows us to see. There have been a number trust Christ as their Savior in the past two years. Recently, we have seen two of our singles fall in love and get married. We have sent one young lady off to Bible college in the last month and also had another young lady surrender to full-time Christian service during our missions conference. One of our young men was facing a lengthy prison sentence for something he had been falsely accused of before he got his heart right with the Lord. We have tried to encourage him and counsel him through this long legal process. We came to the time of his trial with the peace of God so present. There were people praying all over the world. We saw God work in a wonderful way during the trial and he was found not guilty. This young man has surrendered his life to full-time Christian service.
HARVEST BAPTIST CHURCH BAMBERG, GERMANY
We are now going into our fifth month on this wonderful new work. It seems like yesterday that we started passing our our first fliers. God has worked in a great way. We have seen souls saved and a number of guests come through. A few weeks ago we chartered the new church and in spite of some things the devil was doing to fight, we had a wonderful service. We are beginning with nine charter members and other potential members coming. The Lord has given us some wonderful offerings and we have already voted to take on our first missionary which we will begin to support in March. We are continuing to meet in the hotel meeting room and this has taken care of our needs so far, but we are continuing to look for a building to establish a more permanent location. Satan has been fighting. We have had a base chaplain seeking to make things difficult for us on post but we are grateful that we have seen God's hand at work through all of this. Prayer certainly makes a difference!
|
