Costel And Christina

Costel Ghioanca continues to pastor the Adonai Church in Bucharest, Romania. He maintains multiple ministries, including itinerant speaking, translating and maintaining a radio program. This month he provides a brief window into his present gospel labors:

I greet you all again in the Name of our Lord. Summer is already gone and we are preparing for what we call a new`Spiritual year`, beginning in September, till the end of June, next year. For now, let me share with you some insights from what we did in August 2020.

Wedding

We are very happy to let you know that on August 8th we celebrated the marriage of a young couple in our church. One of them came to Christ while attending our church, was baptized a few years ago and now she was married to a faithful young man. The wedding took place in another city, Suceava, far from Bucharest. Stefan and I, plus a few other members, went there to attend their wedding. It was a wonderful and blessed time. We had been a little concerned about going to Suceava because the city was a Coronavirus hot zone, just a few months ago. More than that, people who came to the wedding did not respect the social distancing rules. We prayed that God would protect us in this situation and the good news is that no one got sick. Praise God!

Evangelism – Vasile

I had a great opportunity to talk again to Vasile, my neighbor. We have spent almost a half a day in the park, talking about many things from the Bible. We spoke extensively about salvation and he now understands exactly that Jesus died for our sins and that He is the only way to Heaven. However, he believes that Jesus is just a perfect Man, a kind of second Adam. As the first Adam was able to bring sin into all of us, so Jesus who lived a perfect life, can bring us eternal life (the condition that Adam and Eve had before sinning) if we believe in Him. But he believed that Jesus is not God, He is just a Man. This helped me to see that I need to talk to him more about the deity of Christ. I explained several things to him but we still need to have other discussions on the matter. I want to give him the book ”More than a Carpenter” by Josh McDowell and he told me that he will read it gladly. Please pray for Vasile and his family that God will open his heart to the Gospel and he will come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

Preparing sermons for our church retreat

By God’s grace I prepared the special sermons for our church retreat based on the book of Nehemiah. One of the sermons is about the difficulties that we face when we want to get involved in a spiritual project. Also, I emphasized the solutions that we have through the grace of God. Of course, besides preparing the sermons there were many other administrative things that had to be done for our annual church retreat.