So, the whole discipling the two new girls thing (see previous blog) didn’t quite go as I’d imagined… One good thing – Andrea is being discipled by another woman in the church, so that’s a GREAT thing! But Ilse has kind of dropped off the planet or something… She hasn’t been back to church since we decided to start the discipleship, and I just today found someone who gave me her phone number. Please pray for Ilse, she recently accepted Christ, and is unsure about this step because of the “rules” of being a Christian, which I unfortunately feel like we here at Horizonte have tried to impose.
I’ve always told people this: you don’t LOVE God until you KNOW Him (which we do through reading His Word), and we don’t have a desire to OBEY Him if we don’t LOVE Him. Example: If Jean Paul wakes up sick in the middle of the night, I’ll gladly get him some medicine, or do whatever needs to be done, even if it means going to the pharmacy at 3am. I do this because I LOVE him. If a friend calls me up at 3am with a problem, I’ll answer and try to have a good attitude about it and attend her (although this would most likely be with a BAD attitude) because she is my friend, and I love her, although not nearly as much as I do JP. If a stranger knocks on the door at 3am, we’ll probably look out the crack in the upstairs curtains to see who it is without them seeing us, then go back to bed (scared?) because we don’t know the person, don’t trust them, and don’t have any desire to attend to him at 3am.
I don’t want to impose rules on new believers, but allow them to get to KNOW God, to LOVE Him, and THEN to WANT TO OBEY HIM. And what can I do? Help and encourage them to KNOW God. This is discipling! So, I still hope to get in contact with Ilse and help her begin this processes of knowing God, and trust that the rest will come as she grows in her faith!
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