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Volume. XIX, No. 6 Letter From Preacher ZhangTo: Hope BP Church, Rev Okman Ki and brothers and sisters, we greet you in the name of the Lord We thank Hope BP Church for your tremendous support and your fervent prayers, which enables us to continue with the Mandarin Ministry in Cambodia, this gives us great encouragement, and we pray God will shower his blessings upon the good works of your church. Currently our ministry consists of: Future plans include starting a Bible Study Class in July, a 3 day Life Camp in mid August during the school holidays of the Cambodian School and Cambodian Chinese School and a Baptism Service in October, we pray that God will give us the wisdom to guide and carry out our service. As a witness to Gods grace, Cambodias monsoon season is from June to October, and our First Sunday School class started on the 13th of June and 930 am. It was raining heavily that day, and by 945, Tian Nan (Mr Lee) said that we might not have any students coming. Suddenly the phone rang and it was one of the teachers who makes a living by selling clothes, but on Saturday a thief broke into the teachers house in the middle of the night and more than half of her goods were stolen, with losses estimated to be more that 200 US dollars, and she was waiting for the police to make a statement and would not be able to attend Sunday School. Also there were 2 more who because of the rain, were not allowed by their mother to ride their scooters to come to teach the class. Out of the 4 teachers the only teacher left was late, as she had to bring her younger sister in due to the rain. I told her at this time that God was testing our faith, but we must thank God that we at least had 1 student. But her sister did not feel at ease and said she wanted to go home to ask her neighbour to come, and with our prayers, we thank God that she brought 2 more children along. We then started singing hymns with the 3 students and it was 10.15 by the time we started singing the first hymn. Suddenly, there were 3 Mandarin Language class students from Smach Deng who travelled for half an hour and they brought along 3 more of their little friends. We must give all glory to our Loving God. We have learnt a lesson from God from this incident, which is when you carry out your duties faithfully, other matters are in Gods hands and everything is according to the Lords will. When we see this Spiritual Battle, we feel that the work ahead of us is very dangerous and difficult, the devil Satans attack is very strong, and when we are doing Gods work, he is working there also, but he is working to hinder and destroy our work instead. Prayer is the source of our strength, the source of our strength is prayer we have not other weapons, our weapons besides the Word of God is prayer, which enables us to seek strength and wisdom from God to carry out our duties for him, and lets us depend on the strength of our Lord to seal any cracks, to battle the devils evil plans. Cambodians monsoon season is then thieves become daring, they usually commit their crimes in the middle of the night during a heavy shower, on the 8th of June, thieves made a hole in our neighbours door and stole 9 pairs on shoes from the shoe rack beside the door. The morning after we saw that there were several pairs of shoes and a stick in front their door, Tian Nan and I thought that our neighbour had thrown their unwanted shoes outside, never did we think that it they were left behind by the thieves. Thursday afternoon at 5 pm while it was raining, thieves took advantage of the fact that we were having classes and used a long pole from outside of the fence to steal our students shoes, thank goodness that one of our students saw and started shouting, the thief was male and he ran away without the shoes. On Sunday, one of our sisters house got broken into and several clothes were stolen. Tuesday morning we went to the market to one of our members stall to ask her to buy a good lock to lock up her house. Sadly, she told us that last night while there was a big shower, a thief broke into her house and stole 40 over ducks and chickens. A lot has happened in one week and we really need to pray that our Lord will protect our brothers and sisters and make sure that they guard their houses properly. Ever since weve moved to the new premises, life has become more busy, we really need to ask the Lord for wisdom and strength to shepherd our congregation, and also for sufficient strength to teach classes as well as to be able to have enough time for housekeeping matters. Tian Nan and I thank God for giving us a life of service for Him, God has given us strength, so that we can serve others. God has given us wisdom, so that we can lead people to believe in our Lord and expand Gods nation. All this is due to Gods special grace towards us, and we give thanks unto Him. Thank you to Hope BP Church for your monetary support as well as for remembering the Sihanoukville Mandarin Ministry in your prayers, we hope for Gods blessings upon you. We pray that the Spirit of God will motivate more people to be involved in the mission work in Cambodia, and we hope that person will be you. Thanksgiving & Prayer Requests
Servants of the Lord, Lee Tian Nan and Zhang Qiu Yue 16 June 04 |
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