This morning I attended a Hispanic Pastors Conference hosted by Bethel University. I was invited to attend with Reverend and Evangelist Sammy Wanyonyi, founder of Shine in the World Ministries. Sammy is the person who invited me to go with his team to Kigali, Rwanda, last August on my very first mission trip. He was invited to speak to the group of Hispanic Pastors today for a few minutes about a new initiative, a movement that God has put in his heart called Merge Twin Cities. The purpose of Merge is to unite the Twin Cities by bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the almost one million immigrants that live here. Of those, 90% are unchurched.
There are over $220 thousand Hispanics in the Twin Cities and I was invited because I now serve on the Board of Shine as well as Chair of the Merge movement to represent the Hispanic population. I feel very inadequate serving in this position but Sammy asked me and I said yes in faith. All of us Board members are believing together that God will move right here in our own Twin Cities and will bring churches together for the same purpose—to bring the message of Christ to the immigrants. So my next mission trip may be right in my back yard!
This morning we were only able to attend the first class that was part of the conference. Dr. Juan, who taught the class, is an excellent teacher of the Word. I learned today so much about the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). I learned that each Gospel was written with a purpose and that God instructed the writers of each Gospel to use facts, stories, history, parables, teachings, theology, and deep explanations of certain parts of the Gospels so we (all of us today) could learn—learn everything we could from the Scriptures without making the Scriptures (the Bible in itself) an idol.
Each Gospel is different and even though Matthew, Mark, and Luke cover some of the same stories, they are each unique in the way they are written and in the order of which some stories are told. Also, some books have more chapters than others (Matthew has 28 versus Mark that has only 16) but it’s for a reason. Matthew and Luke, for example, include Jesus’ genealogy and talk about His family while the others don’t. The Gospel of John, for example, is the only one who describes Jesus as the “Lamb of God” right away in Chapter 1. Everything I learned today sparked the learner in me and now I want to start studying the Bible in a more serious way, not just read a passage here and there as I usually do.
I encourage you today to dig deeper into the Scriptures and learn, learn—learn all you can about the life of Jesus. Get to know Him as a person. It’s a never ending journey of learning and the deeper you get, the more you find out how much there is to learn about the things of God. The more you learn about the person of God, the more you will fall in love with Him and the more you will feel His amazing, abundant love for you!