Friday Night Notes

another one in the books...

We interrupt the "Answering Objections To Calvinism" series for the my usual summary of our street preaching endeavour.

My pastor and I were out for 3 hours of street preaching and Gospel literature distribution, and this is a quick breakdown of how things went:

The Good:

-A young lady spoke with my pastor for some time about attending one of our services. She was impressed with our evangelistic effort. After their conversation ended, she stepped away a few feet and started interceding the Lord on our behalf (I could see, from across the street, that her eyes were closed and her lips moved, indicating she was praying). She did this for a whole 30 minutes! When my turn came up to preach, she offered to fetch us something to drink. From my pastor's conversation with her, this woman wasn't a strong believer by any stretch of the imagination, but the Lord revealed the importance of what we were doing to her, and she showed great kindness. The Lord bless her.

-I had a chat with a kind Muslim (LOL). I'm not kidding, the man was down right charming. He told me he was from Iraq where Christians and Muslims get along with each other. He said, in Iraq, Muslims fight Muslims, and Christians fight Christians, but Christians and Muslims pretty much don't have anything to do with each other. He went on to explain how most Muslims viewed Christ as a prophet of God. I went on to challenge that position by quoting the verse where Jesus refers to Himself as "I am". He acknowledged that there were problems with what the Bible says about Jesus and the Muslim belief of who He "was". It was really interesting talking to him. It was clear through our conversation that the garden variety Muslim has no idea what "Allah" requires of them; what he will forgive, and what he will condemn. We concluded our chat with me reinforcing the concept that without Jesus, the Bible makes it clear, there is NO salvation. He took one of our Bible tracts and said "farewell".

-A man heading for a bar looked at me and said: "when you were a boy, could you have imagined this would be your destiny?" To which I answered: "no way! but praise God it was!" He just smiled and gave me a thumbs up sign.

-The police were out in full force tonight. They do that in the first few weeks of summer. They call it "blitzing", it's making their presence known to set the tone for the whole summer season, when things get busy in the marketplace. Anyway, a police officer came by to where I was preaching and asked me where my pastor was. I pointed to where my pastor was and one of the police officers took off towards him. Turns out the police officer is a good friend of my pastors; a long time protector if you will. It's good to know that you have someone with authority out there that has your six.


The Bad:

-Ah! pride. My chief sin. Shame on me. A staple when street preaching is being called an idiot, a brainwashed fool, a dumb-dumb. You have no idea how it irks me! Whenever someone treats me to a "get a job" or a "get a life", I just want to go on the offensive. Show them just how much smarter and better I am than they could ever with to be. P-R-I-D-E! Anyway, I didn't say a word to anyone, but it was in my heart, let me tell ya!

-A couple of drunken fools guilt-tripped me into wasting a whole lot of time dealing with them, you know, the old "well, if you were a good Christian, you'd talk to me." They weren't interested in hearing the Gospel, they just wanted to show me the merits of their own foolish philosophy. A real aggravating waste of time.


And that's about how it went. I'm going to bed now, I have a big day of work tomorrow (we're helping friends repair their house roof).

Take care and good night, dear readers,


Rand