Battle Log

Thursday, 26 April, 2018

Posted 2 May 2018, 6:19 PM by Ryan Hemelaar. Permalink

At Sunnybank yesterday, God raised up a team of 8 of us for the outreach, which meant we were able to reach both sides of the road very well, handing out gospel tracts and starting conversations.

Two standout conversations - one person who was quite hard hearted and the other person who was very receptive.

The hard hearted man was a man in his 50s or so who said he is a Mormon all the way from when he was young. He was very familiar with all the teachings of the Mormon church, saying that God the Father has multiple wives and lives near the planet Colob. He said that Jesus and Satan are brothers, and that humans were never created but have always existed.

There were so many false beliefs to deal with, so we decided to focus on a main topic - salvation. He said that God would judge everyone one day on their works, and so therefore he interpreted from that that God will weigh a person's good deeds verses their bad deeds. We made the point that the Bible says even all liars will have their place in the lake of fire (Rev 21:8), that means even one lie is enough condemn us forever. And it would not be the just thing for a judge to let a criminal go free based on doing more good actions than crimes, neither can the good God of the universe do that.

We then brought up Ephesians 2:8-9 which describes how we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus and not by works, and he said that belief is from the devil. He then jumped topics on to the trinity saying that there can't be one God who exists in three persons, instead there must be multiple gods. What this man was saying really shows how different Mormonism is to Christianity and the Bible. And he wasn't misrepresenting Mormonism at all, this is what they actually believe.

He didn't want to believe what the Bible said about all these subjects and instead wanted to rely on the modern prophets of his church. So the conversation ended some time after that.

But not too long later, we had a good chat with a Chinese man named Roy who hasn't even heard of the name Jesus before or what He has done. We got to talk about how we have all sinned, deserve God's judgement, but that Jesus died to pay the penalty for our sin if we would come to believe. The evidence that we believe is that we will then start living a different way.

He asked a bunch of clarifying questions, even asking, "Why would Jesus do that for me?" We also gave him a gospel of John to start reading.

To God be all the glory!