Greetings friends!
Recently, I finished preaching through the gospel of John. Now I’m going to preach through the letters to the Corinthians. Sergey (another elder of the church) is finishing up preaching on Romans. Since we had started Bible school over again, and plus I have to teach counseling, we agreed to take turns and preach every other Sunday.
Now we are thinking about sending a lady in our church to Samara in order for her to further her biblical studies. She successfully finished theology in bible school, reads a lot and spends time with the sisters here. She has grown spiritually in the past few years, and we feel that she will be able to have a key role in teaching women more in the future. We strive to develop and discover the abilities and gifts of every member of our church to the maximum, in order to effectively build up our local church and influence the world.
We had a meeting with the pastor of a nearby church that has some errors in their teaching – specifically in regards to the teaching on salvation. Sergey and I asked the pastor a few crucial questions:
- How are people saved?
- Is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ sufficient?
- How many ways of salvation are there?
- Is the scripture the only source of Gods truth?
- Some of their answers were good, some were not. If God wills, we hope to help them gradually. We did not push them away but asked for another meeting, to open the scripture and study together. And they agreed!
I hope we will get to meet with them more than once and hopefully it will help us to explain certain principles of hermeneutics. And hopefully they will start looking at the scripture from the right standpoint.
There have been other opporunities this month for us to communicate truth to another church as well as the many lost souls in our city. It seems that God is starting to use us to influence not only unbelievers, but other churches as well.
- Please pray for my wife Oksana, her spine hurts, tips of her fingers and toes get numb, also her head. Pray that the doctors may diagnose her correctly and that it is nothing serious.
- Pray for our influence on other churches.
- Pray for the spreading of the gospel in our town.
