I come to you, our readers, this week with a request for prayer. We at the mission have had three major outbursts of disturbance during the last four chapel services we’ve held. Last Tuesday someone entered the food pantry during chapel and began to curse our volunteers. Saturday a man began shouting Pastor Bill down as he was enumerating the lusts of the flesh as given in the Word. Today as I was opening a chapel message out of 1 Peter 1, a man began trying to domineer the service, causing concern to many of the attendees. The man left only when I called 911 after asking him to leave.

The preaching of the truth is bringing opposition. To those who are perishing, we are the savor of death unto death. And to those who are saved, we are the savor of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? We, as ministers, are finite, struggling, human individuals. We have limited strength. Our sanctification does not come from within ourselves. But we seek the Lord through His Word and prayer, and we pray that He would lead us and that His Holy Spirit would attend our endeavors to preach, explain, and live the truth as He has, in fact, called us to do. Like the Jews who sought to build Nehemiah’s wall, like the Waldensians, like the Puritans, Methodists, and Baptists, we stand in a long line of weak but redeemed people who are both hated and loved for the truth’s sake and for the fundamentals of the faith.

Pray for us, brothers and sisters in Christ. The battles rage—both internally in us as individuals and externally in our ministry as we’ve seen this past week. Pray that God would make us truer people through all this, that he would keep us in the love of the truth. Pray that we would be pleasing to Him in all things and live unto Him. We have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin, but we are experiencing opposition.

William Cary used to get dismayed when he was confronted with erroneous (and probably loud) argument, only to stutter and stumble in speech and not know what to say. When asked about the secret of his ministerial success, he replied, “I can plod.” Cary knew the secret of simply putting one foot in front of the other and trying to keep a generally happy spirit about it, in Christ.

Thank God for the day when sin and error, oppression and evil will finally be put away and we shall dwell in a new Heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.