 So in Acts 14, verse 27, says, and now when they had come and gathered the church together, they reported all that God had done with them and that he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. So they stayed there a long time with the disciples. Here in the context is the apostle Paul and Barnabas after the first missionary journey, coming back to the churches that have sent them out in particularly in Antioch of Syria and going on to the churches in Jerusalem to beginning to give a report of all the missionary work that had been done and accomplished so and with the direction and with the focus to give glory to God for those good things. So today is just the point is to catch you up on what's been going on in Guatemala and to be able to explain some of that work and to give glory to God together for the good things that he's done. So first off, then I would wanna tell you the outline that I would gonna follow is just a great commission outline. I'm gonna tell you about the vandalistic work there. I'm gonna tell you about the discipleship work there and then about the church planting work there. Tonight is gonna be more Q and A. So I know you'll have questions from that but tonight we'll have a fellowship time, five o'clock. If that's still, is that still the time, five o'clock? And at five o'clock we'll talk about any kind of questions that you would have about the ministry. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Mark Mudge or Marcos Mudge, depending on where I am. So I'm a missionary to Guatemala and I've been sent there to plant a church from our church here, Cornerstone Baptist Church in the city of Guatemala. So I wanna just introduce Guatemala to you and a little bit of who's there. So the country of Guatemala is right under Mexico, Central America, it's about the size geographically but the size of Tennessee has about 14 million people in it and about four million of those people are in the capital city. We're in the capital city, Guatemala city, easy to remember and the city and the country is one that the demographics of it, what it's like is that religiously is about 50% Catholic and about 46% evangelical. Now the way that the people, how they think is they've been overcome by the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is the dominating lie of the city. Thanks brother, that's very kind of you. The Pew Research Center is a reputable research center. 2014 they did extensive studies for religion in Latin America and they surveyed about the prosperity gospel and the way they define that is by asking the question that do you believe that if you have faith you will receive health and wealth in this life. Pretty simple, right? Well nine out of 10 Protestants in Guatemala city believe that. 89%, 89% of Catholics believe that. So that was surprising to me. So if you get 90% of evangelicals and 89% of Catholics and if you're adding the math Dr. Dodge, you get about 96% either Catholic or Protestant. Basically nine out of 10 people you meet believe in the prosperity gospel. That's grieving, surprising. So if you consider Latin America, right? Guatemala has the highest percentage of evangelicals in Latin America. So many consider when they look at missions they consider Guatemala as a place not to send missionaries because of how reached it is. They can understand because of the prosperity gospel and Catholicism it is a completely unreached country. It's an unreached country and that in the same way you would talk with a Mormon and they would define faith different or you talk with a Mormon and they define repentance different or almost any term you use, the Bible, apostles, priests, they have a different definition. In the same way somebody who believes a prosperity gospel has many different definitions. You can use the same word but have define them differently. So if I stand up and talk about faith, they have a different understanding about what faith it means than what you would have as a performed Christian. So the country is given over to these lies of Catholicism and prosperity thinking. It's very prevalent and very strong. The Catholicism is stronger than it is here as well. It's more people believe it. More people, they'll often during holiday times, they'll have the processions of idols where they come with incense in the street, they carry idols of Mary, of a black Jesus, they have being like a statue crucified and they have many people carrying these. They'll have maybe sometimes they'll have all nuns carrying this statue of Mary and during Christmas time we saw a lot of that and they have people who follow behind the processions of idols. They have people with drums and trumpets so that nobody can preach. You can't hear anything as the idols pass through. They've got it planned out. So I'm giving that as an illustration to say how strong the Catholicism is that this is a regular practice and something that the country takes pride in that around holidays they parade the idols to the streets and they give veneration or worship to these idols. So there's a great need in Guatemala for the gospel. There's a great need in Guatemala for the gospel. Guatemala has had a history of great violence, and atrocities from the 1970s and the 1990s. There were 200,000 people who were killed in the countryside because of a civil wars between communist guerrillas on the countryside and then a military run CIA backed government that was, the presentation is, understanding the history and in the 20th century of Guatemala helps you understand how evangelicalism rose in Guatemala. It rose in the 19, particularly in the 1980s when Pentecostal president got elected, Rios Mont, and he is now, that guy is now in jail, okay? He's now in jail for war crimes, but at the time he was a president in the 1980s, he was considered a pastor and president of the country. Every Sunday night he'd preach a sermon to the country and he helped Pentecostalism rise in Guatemala going from a very small percentage, like 3% of the people to then escalating to what it is now. And it's still on the rise, it's still on the rise. If you compare it from the 2014 Pew Research numbers, they would have around 41% of the country evangelical and then you would get a more recent update from the newspaper, they haven't risen to 46%. So in a matter of three years, evangelical numbers have gone up 5% in the country. So I'm just trying to give you numbers to give you an idea of what is it like there? What is it like to talk to people about the gospel? What do people think about when it comes to God, the Bible, almost everybody you meet, they'll say, oh, I'm a Christian. 19 out of 20 people you meet, say, oh yeah, I'm a Christian, but nobody knows the gospel. Nobody knows the gospel. There is a great dependence in works righteousness. If you talk to somebody, you ask them, do you believe you're a good person? In Guatemala, a lot of people will say, no, I'm not a good person. And then you ask, what's your hope? How will you have your sins forgiven? And then they give a good person solution. They say, oh, I'll try harder. I'll try harder. They say, they know the right thing to say and think is, well, I'm not a good person because they're very religious. But then when you say, what's the solution? They have a good person solution. They don't really believe themselves to be as bad as the Bible describes that we are. And so the, so we're in this country, right? Country that's given over to Catholicism and prosperity gospel, these false gospels. And so then how do we fit in there? So the Rusi family and the Mudge family are living in an apartment in the central part of the city. We're downtown in a fifth story apartment, sharing that together. And it is a great blessing to be able to live with them. Lee is currently looking for work and going through the immigration process in order to be able to get his papers in order to be able to work there. He's had an interview recently but it was for a very small amount and be able to pay the rent kind of job. So he's hoping for his paperwork to come through in the next few months so that he can pursue that. He has been a great help and a great blessing in the ministry. We've done everything together. I couldn't be more thankful for the partnership. Gabby is running the home school. She's doing a good job raising Judah and Ezra. It's exciting to see them being to get friends that are in the neighborhood so that they're speaking more Spanish. And it's surprising how much they know and then they don't say it in the house until they get a friend in the neighborhood who doesn't know any English and then how much they see them be able to grow with their Spanish. They know more than they let on. And the Benjamin is growing fast and he is a little Spanglish machine. He does understand the difference between Spanish and English so he just mixes them all together. And Ashley's man is here and they've been of course a great blessing to be able to serve with and a great help with all the ladies. So that's a little bit of introduction. The country, who we are, what we're doing and then now I'll get into the outline. Some stories about evangelism, some stories about discipleship and then about church planning. So first off with evangelism. In evangelism we're trying to make use of various means. So we'll try and do street evangelism. We'll try and do open air preaching. We'll try and do what is a newer evangelism for me, what I would call synagogue evangelism. So in some of the street evangelism there, we don't typically go door to door because there's so many people in the streets that it doesn't make much sense. So there's so many people walking by to knock on a door where you don't see somebody and I can't like, because there in Guatemala the houses are all like a little fortress. If you've been outside the US in many places in Eastern Europe and Latin America and Africa, many of the islands where you go, the houses are like a little fortress. You know, you gotta knock on a metal door and they got razor wire so you can't jump the fence and that's just how everybody lives. And so in order to get into the fortress, it doesn't make much sense when I got people, I got more people that can evangelize walking in the street. It's very easy. It's very easy just to, and people are more open to conversation culturally there than they are here. So it's not the same where you leave your work and then you get in the highway and then you drive until you hit your little garage door button and it opens and you pull your car in and it closes behind you and you don't actually know or talk to any of your neighbors. That's not the way it is in Latin America. So a great number of the people don't even have a car so then they walk to the bus station, they're interacting in all these community levels, right? So it's very easy to start a conversation on the street, just walk out the back door and walk into the street and there's people walking around and so you pick up a neighbor very easily. So in our central part of the city, we'll be at zone five in the city, we've had numerous conversations where the ladies really have focused in on that area during Saturday afternoon or sometime. And so some of the stories there is we have a next door neighbor named Angel Gabriel or the Angel Gabriel in English. It sounds different in Spanish, but he was somebody who's, because I can look out my back window and see him working on a car, he's a mechanic and we're hanging out on the street corner and he's a short indigenous guy, like very short, like people there are very short and he Lee went up to him and was talking to him about the gospel and so he gave him a track and it went like a regular conversation. He read the track and he was very convicted from the track. He was expecting a track to say about how God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and so then when he was reading it about sin and judgment, he was very convicted and so then he contacted us and talking about how, what a difference this track is. So he said he wanted to follow Christ. In the conversations with Lee, he'd already explained his background in gangs and his background and then that his, one of his children had been killed by the gangs in the city and so then he in turn went and killed some of the gang members. And so he was just describing this to Lee in a conversation. And so then we were kind of left in a pickle or in a decision point of, okay, do we invite this guy, which he's openly admitted that he's killed people, do we invite him to church, which happens to be in the house of somebody that's part of the assembly, a part of our church in Guatemala. So we decided that we're gonna move slow with him, we'll continue to meet with him on a weekly basis, go through hard to believe with him and see how it goes. So we happened to be going through the book of Mark and the story with Matthew, the tax collector and all of his violent friends and how they come to hear the gospel. So by God's sovereignty, we're going to this text and so we invited him forward for fellowship instead of putting the church member at risk, we decided to invite him over to our place because he does where we live anyway if we're across the street. So we invited him in and he was saying, I want you to know I'm a true Christian, I'm a true Christian and he used some prosperity kind of, if you know prosperity lingo, he's like, I declare, I declare today that I am a true Christian. And so I was watching Lee, this is at our kitchen table, dining table with a church fellowship, everybody from the church comes to church fellowship because we're such a small church, right? And so I'm watching Lee and what happened is within a short time, he went back to the same lifestyle of sin within just a few a matter of weeks. And what happened is in his family, his girlfriend, a long time living girlfriend that they have a baby with, she ain't got in a fight with us with the mother and fist fight and then from that trial, he decided to go back to his sinful lifestyle. And so what I'm describing is some of the, an example of evangelism that didn't end like you would want it to end, but it's just what the Bible talks about. It's just like what the Bible talks about when trials come and what happens when you preach the gospel. So the same things that happen here happen there. The same things that happen, so the same things we do here, we do there. It's not any different. What they did in Israel with the disciples, planting churches in Samaria, in Judea, to the ends of the earth, what we do here, we do there. It's not really any more glamorous or any different. It's the same, the same work just in a different country, different culture, different language, but it's the same work. So another example of evangelism is when Lee and Gabby would go out and we have a supermarket that's across the street. It's kind of like their version of a public's, right? It's a relatively nice place in it. And so the ladies will go there in the parking lot and it's, the city of Guatemala is full of evangelistic opportunity. They're not so restrictive as here, you know. You go into certain developments and they say, oh, you can't preach gospel in this development. You go to certain apartment complexes. Oh, you can't preach the gospel in apartment complexes. Or you go into malls. Oh, you can't preach the gospel in malls. Or you go to Waterford Lakes. Oh, you can't go in the strip mall. You can't go preach the gospel. Or you stand up in the bus station down in the link station. Or there's just so many places here where they say, oh, you can't do that. In Guatemala, it's not like that. It's very easy to get an opportunity to be able to preach the gospel. It's rare. You have to go to very rich areas in order to get kicked out. There's many, many, many opportunities to preach the gospel there. So one of them is a supermarket. And so the ladies were able to have a conversation with a neighbor named Karen who was there in the supermarket. And so she's been attending the church for the past month or a month and a half or so. So she's coming out of a difficult background. Her father was murdered and tortured to death when she was three years old. She never knew him. He was coming out of a military background in working the police. And then so the gangs or what kidnapped him and killed him, which is that kind of story is not that unusual in Guatemala. And so her husband died when about five years ago, is it? And so she's a nine-year-old son who really didn't know his father either, named Brandon. And so she has Gabby is taking her under her wing and teaching her what does it mean to discipline your son? What does it mean to, and how does that apply to the gospel? How does the gospel apply to disciplining your son? How does it mean for him, for the good of his soul to discipline him? And so she's using all different avenues to be able to explain the gospel to her. Karen was somebody who didn't understand the gospel. She would be somebody who would have attended a prosperity church just a little bit. And the first service she came to, afterwards she came up and she asked me to be a mediator for her. And so I was asking, what do you mean by that? And she explained that she wanted me to lead her in the sinner's prayer and so that she could be saved. And I explained there's only one mediator between God and man. It's not Mark much, it's Pastor Marcos, it's the Lord Jesus Christ. And that he didn't say that's how we have faith in him, but that's how we become Christians by praying a sinner's prayer. So we're praying the Lord would save her. She's very humble and teachable and continues to come to everything last Sunday. A week ago she's at fellowship and we try and use every opportunity, every car ride, every fellowship time to be able to explain the gospel to her in a different way. And in every way that we open the Bible and explain it, she's very humble and teachable. We had a, we're going through on Sunday mornings a strange fire class or focusing in on cessationism, charismatic issues by using that book for them to read and then going through a class that's outlined similar to how the book is outlined. So I asked one of the brothers in the church to get videos, kind of like Justin Peters did, but to get them in the Latin world. And to find Latin preachers that are doing abuse. So he found one of the brothers in the church Ricardo Pablo, his face is on one of the pictures over there. He's a white looking tall guy from Argentina. And he's a very studious brother and very zealous brother. So he's able to find some of those videos. He found a video of a guy, where was the preacher from, Costa Rica or something? So the guy's picking up money and he's like dropping the money and he's talking about prosperity. And he was a very obvious example of prosperity preaching, right? But what Karen said is afterwards is, you know what, if I hadn't been here, like in our church, I probably would have believed what he said. And for me, it was like such an obvious example. I was thinking, oh Ricardo, why did you get such a obviously bad example that everybody's gonna know that guy's bad. Nobody would be fooled by that guy. He's got money on the table dropping it while he's talking. And what's sad is there are many people that are deceived and fooled by even what we would consider to be very obvious false teachers. So that's some street evangelism. Open Air has been such a blessing to be able to, we've been usually open air preaching in the central park there. Lee was able to find a side street that is normally shut off. And so in this shut off for people to walk, their shops, street performers are typically on that street. And the street is within two like tall buildings downtown that the other building is probably as far as ways the wall is from here. And so it kind of protects your voice so that your voice doesn't get lost in a large open area. And so people are able to hear as they pass through in the streets. And in Guatemala, many people stop and listen to the preaching. It's not unusual to preach there and have 20 people, 30 people all sitting there and listening for half an hour or to an hour and listen to the sermon. And so I began to thinking, man, there's more people listening to my sermons in the park than in church. And so I better bring actual sermons as opposed to just winging it and just talking about the gospel. So in Christmas time, that the downtown park area was absolutely packed. We had like 50 people listening to a sermon. We tried to do this thing where you do carols and then preach the gospel and preaching short sermons. What happened is we first did it. We started to sing, few people gathered around and maybe it was because of my singing. But the few people gathered around and then I began to preach and I planned just to preach for like five minutes. And so then a number of people stopped and were listening to the preaching and then, so I just preached for a short time, five minutes, 10 minutes, I went back and we started singing and all the people dispersed. And so we said, let's just preach instead. So we just then we just preached and then 50 people listening. It's a large amount of people develop in a circle and they're listening as we're trying to describe the gospel and really focus in on themes like justification and regeneration because Pentecostals don't understand those themes in large part and large part and their essential themes, essential themes and George Whitfield would focus on those themes in his open air preaching because of the great ignorance of justification and regeneration. And so we try and focus on those things because they rightly defined, they help you differentiate between the lies of the prosperity thinking and Catholic thinking as well. So the one such time, it was only I think maybe a month ago or so, Lee and I were preaching, 25 people stopping, listening for half an hour on a Saturday afternoon. And then afterwards there's a TV channel there that is called Channel 27 and they're known for Neopentecostal, kind of subdued Pentecostal prosperity thinking. They're not like crazy, they don't take off their jacket and kind of winging around but they still have the same beliefs, kind of like Joel Osteen. Joel Osteen, he doesn't do something crazy when he preaches, but he still has that same theology, right? So this Channel 27 is known for that and so they came up afterwards, we're after preaching, they came up to us and said, oh, do you wanna take a video and would you promote our new Moses Tank Amendment series that's coming out? They had billboards everywhere throughout the city and I said, well, I'm really thankful for the opportunity but we, I don't know the movie so I can't promote the movie because they were asking if I'm a pastor, they wanted pastors to make a little commercial so they could play on the TV station and so I said, yeah, I really can't promote that. I just, I don't know the movie and but Lee said, but we can talk about the Tank Amendments, who you talk about the purpose of the Tank Amendments, because that's the name of the TV series and so they said, okay, let's do that and so we talked about the purpose of the Tank Amendments and how it drives us to Christ and so I don't know whether they put the video a lot on the TV station or not but it was a very good idea from Lee and so we've also been able to use Lee Wall so sometimes play the drums downtown and people will come and listen to the drums and then he stands up after playing the drums and then preaches the gospel to crowd so he's done that on numerous occasions and that also has gathered many people and many people will refer to the gospel from that. The, another type of evangelism that I've been excited about is what I would consider synagogue evangelism so how I would define that is inviting yourself to a religious group and having the opportunity to be able to preach the gospel to them so in other words, so I began to hear I had wanted to do that but I know like Edgar has opportunities to do that. Edgar gets invited to churches around Florida or goes and preaches to them or has these kind of connections. I'd never had that until I got to Guatemala then I'm like, wait a minute, I'm the missionary and people will invite a missionary to come and preach their church so I thought, well let's just start inviting ourselves to do churches and see if we can go and preach the gospel there. So we started in our neighborhood so we'd go up to some Pentecostal churches that in the neighborhood and by ourselves hey, I'm a missionary, my name's Mark, I live across the street and I would like to be able to preach the gospel. Youth group, whatever, here's our doctrine, here's our gospel track. We believe this is our doctrine in 1689, call us back if you need somebody to preach to and we'll preach the gospel. So we got rejected a few times, they were very friendly, they just didn't give us a call back and so but then other opportunities that we're going to have opened up in that regard. Edgar went to a conference in California where at John MacArthur's church for Spanish pastors or the church that's associated that's right next to Grace's community in California. So there was a brother from that church in California named Redolfo, he drives two hours every Sunday in order to get to church. So he, so everybody in the west side don't feel like you drive a long ways. It's not a burden for him, it's a joy for him that in California to drive two hours, he's a very joyful, zealous brother. He has family who had a Bible study in Guatemala and so we were in the west, south side of the city, a poorer area and so we were able to go there and preach the gospel to a Bible study of people there. We were able to preach the gospel at field rolls. We've been able to preach the gospel at there's somebody, Jeffrey Johnson knows, if you remember Jeffrey Johnson, a pastor who came to conference on Islam, he knows somebody who's Guatemalan who lives in Kansas and so she's been inviting all her family and all her friends to come. Some people have come to the church and visited from her friends and so her family, God willing when we come back, her family has a Bible study and then we're gonna visit that Bible study for another synagogue of Angelism. There's also a, you saw the video of a couple named Joshua and Monica. They've been coming to the church, very committed to the church, very joyful, thankful to be following the Lord. They believe they've become believers in the past couple of years and so his father has been a Pentecostal, somebody's of God, pastor and so he's had the opportunity in a very small church to be able to have a regular time to preach there and so when he started to come to the church, he said, well this is what I've been doing, I've been doing this, going to this church for some personal reasons, his father is not qualified to be running that church anymore so he's trying to step out by March, he's trying to get out of this group so he's trying to get his son to take it over and so his son is saying what should I do and so I said, well you should come to our church and be disciple and then try and change the time for that service so he was able to do that, he's able to come to our church in the morning, we don't have an evening service at this time so he's able to change that group to be the evening service time on the north side of the city, we were meeting on the south side of the city so he's able to come to church with us and then still be able to preach at this group so how that went before we started was I was saying, okay we're gonna go, I'm gonna disciple you in this, I'm gonna help you learn how to preach but this is how it's gonna go. Watch in the Bible with synagogue evangelism. What happens? It separates, separates, it divides when the message is very clear then by God's grace some people believe and other people don't so as we started there, I got the opportunity to go and preach at that place and so I preach on the beatitudes and what is a true Christian, what is not? Someone who's not, how do you know from how Christ describes what a true Christian is and so afterwards people were like, you remember with Ezekiel, in Ezekiel people said, oh that's a beautiful song, yeah it's the way you preach it sounds very, so afterwards it was like that, people were going oh thank you for that word, it seemed that way, like they said, oh that, what you're preaching was a beautiful song but they don't go and do what or examine themselves or test themselves so afterwards Joshua was like, oh it seemed like it went well, I was like, smile and nod, just smile and nod Mark and we'll wait to see how it goes so he, Joshua's dad wanted Joshua to preach and not so much me to regularly preach so him and his dad were then taking turns so we would just go the weeks that Joshua was preaching and we were trying to make it known to him that this is a evangelistic time, that should be our focus, don't think of it as a church, think of it as an evangelistic time and so afterwards the Rousses and we would go and afterwards we'd have conversations with people and we'd try and help him grow in his preaching. Within a few times of preaching and a few conversations afterwards, for example one, the guy who owns the building that they meet in, the name is Pedro, Lee would continue to have conversations with him and Pedro is very religious, he's maybe a man about 50 years old, 55 and he likes the book of Revelation, he likes to talk about the Bible and Lee would come up to him and say, how do you know, what's the gospel, how does somebody go to heaven when you die and Pedro would talk about Revelation and many religious things and he'll have many words about the Bible but wouldn't answer about the basic question about what's the gospel, how do you go to heaven when you die, how do you have your sins forgiven, so Lee would kindly ask the same question in a different way and then he kindly asked the same question in a different way and he'd say ask the same question in another way and then he would plainly say, Pedro, you don't know the gospel, this is the gospel, what Jesus Christ has done, he's died on the cross for us, he's the only way we'd have our sins forgiven, we need to repent and believe in this good news and so the next week Lee would come back and do the same thing, Pedro, how did somebody go to heaven, did you understand from the message, how did somebody go to heaven when they die and Pedro wouldn't be able to, didn't have eyes to see, didn't have ears to hear but instead he was kind to Lee's face but and then later on he was asking that we wouldn't come back anymore so those doors are beginning to close, we preach the gospel to most people there, there's only two families left and so instead of continuing to go there, we're gonna try and focus on those two families that we haven't talked with, otherwise we've had personal conversations with everybody else one on one and preach the gospel to them and so it's an example of synagogue evangelism that it's a great joy to have these opportunities, I was saying to one brother earlier this week that I used to think here when I preach at Crane's Rouge, something, if only people would stop and listen, people just, so many people would just go by, if they would just stop and listen or you hand them the track, if they would just read the track, so few people would read the track in Guatemala, many people would read the track, many people would get the track and while you're handing out tracks and they read it there right in front of you, they sit down and they read the whole thing and you watch them reading the whole thing on the street corner and or many people hear the gospel and it makes me think of the gospels where many thousands heard Jesus Christ himself explaining the gospel, who could do it more lovingly, who could do it more clearly, who could do it more boldly than Jesus Christ, perfectly preaching the gospel and it makes me more and more of a Calvinist that the one who has ears to hear, let him hear, you have eyes to see, right? So we see more and more that conversion is a miracle. Conversion is a miracle and that it's a work of God. It's a work of God and that's what makes it last too. So it makes it last that it's a work of God and so that's what we pray for, we long for and we have faith that the Lord will use these many opportunities and many different doors. So the city is full of evangelistic opportunity. Now I'm gonna pick up the pace a little bit to cover the other aspects of the ministry. So we have many opportunities for evangelism and then discipleship is something what we really wanna focus in on. We have a small group of people in the church, some relatives from Pastor Victor from Miami. If he's come before for a marriage conference last year and he's a good brother with a good church there and some of his family comes to the church. There's an Argentinian brother who's a very encouraging named Ricardo Pablo, there's Joshua and Monica and then there's a Rousses and us and then there's people who've come from evangelism. There's also people who are interested in the church but they're thinking about whether they're gonna move from the US, a couple that's living in Texas, they heard about us from the website. When you look for a Reformed Baptist Church in Guatemala, we are the only ones for sure, we're the only ones. So having a website that talks about how a Reformed Baptist has been a very great help because how do people come to our church? They come to our church by the preaching of the gospel. Either they hear online, somebody preaching the gospel, Paul Washer, Miguel Nunez, who held Michelin, some of these Reformed Spanish preachers, they hear on the gospel on the internet or they hear the gospel from us in the street. That's how people are gonna end up coming to the church and remaining with us. People who come looking for a show or looking to be served, just like here, the people who have come here from driving by the church and they're like, oh, I'm gonna try that out. They're very often the ones who walk out before the service ends. The people who stay here are the people who are being having the gospel preached to them, understanding the difference, whether it's the gospel preached to another church or online or another place, or whether they've heard it from us preach the gospel. So it's the same there in Guatemala. And so I'm very thankful for this group of believers. We're very excited. I'm wanting to disciple them and it's a great blessing to be able to do that. And it's a great blessing to be able to, for me as a pastor to spend, personally spend time with each of the men in the church. That's something I only could have dreamed of here and I would have desired to do. But there, it's a great joy and blessing of the dynamic of being able to disciple each guy. So with Joshua, the guy in the video, young guy in the video, I've been able to disciple him on how to read his Bible. After hearing him preach, I thought, well, the place to start is he needs to learn how to read his Bible. How to make observations, how to make interpretation, how to make an application. And so I've seen him grow and have a great hunger for the word of God through these basic things. And it was very encouraging to see him grow and just learning how to read his Bible. Him and his wife, they would do that together. And with Ricardo Paolo, another good brother, he's been a Christian for about four years, I believe, and he knows a lot of theology. He's the one who's the most theologically astute in our church, besides Lee. And he reads, has a great appetite to read and to read good literature. And so we went through this trial of Saint of Vine with him, that's a book on disciple making and how everyone is to be a disciple maker. And that that's how healthy churches are developed and how they're able to raise up pastors from within the midst. That's the ideal. That's the ideal for what a church should be is to be able to have like Pastor Michael and Pastor Dale, where we've known them for many years and they're raised up among us. And we're able to recognize their lives and their doctrine and their abilities. And so how does that, how do things like that happen? Well, it happens by everyone understanding that everyone has a responsibility to be a disciple maker. And so Ricardo Paolo, a good brother who's been hearing good preaching, reading great books on his own, but on his own, not within a good church, what does he need to grow in? He needs to grow in humble service in the local church, the nitty gritty local church and getting his hands dirty, learning to sacrifice for others and learning how to be discipled and to disciple others, how to be poured into and how to pour your life into others. And that that is how the commandments of Christ are passed on. And what it means to follow Christ is passed on. So that's been a great joy, great blessing. We are now switching to focusing on Deuteronomy. We're studying Deuteronomy and how to study our Bibles. And it's a great joy to me to see how the people in the church are so studious with their studies in Deuteronomy, that come back with their inductive sheet, like how Pastor Rick makes an inductive Bible study sheet when you're going through a book. And then they come back and have that all filled out with all the different notes and have them hungry with like a fork and knife ready to be taught, the word, as extremely encouraging as a pastor to see them put in the effort to know God's word. So the, now as a church plant, some of the things that we are focusing in on is I'm taking Spanish classes, that's necessary for the church plant. And necessary, I'm not able to preach yet. I'm teaching in Spanglish. So Lee, I'm trying to teach classes in Spanish. And it's rough, it's rough. Lee helps me out. And sometimes the ladies are like, have been, and Lee have been like, it's just better if you teach in English for now. Keep growing, keep going to classes. And it's clearer if we just translate for now. So I'm working on it, please pray for me. I want to be humble and be corrected. It's a great opportunity for me to grow in humility, to be constantly corrected by everyone in the church on my Spanish pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary, everything. So it is growing, and then it's necessary. But I would have the goal of wanting to be able to preach simple sermons by October or something like that. I would want to have the goal of teaching by something in the summertime on my own. So we'll see how that goes. And please keep that in prayer. We're going through the book of Mark, verse by verse, Sunday mornings. We're going through Sunday school. What we have in our church is, we focus on small group time on Sunday mornings as opposed to the weekday. Because in Guatemala, it's more difficult to make it during a midweek service. Because of a number of people, maybe they have a car, they don't have a car, so they're riding the bus. And traffic there is on another level. It's another level of, I imagine everywhere's like I-4. All the side streets like I-4 during traffic time. Edgar knows he's driven where it takes an hour and a half, two hours, what time we're trying to get across the city during rush hour. And that's not unusual. So in order to have, having a midweek service, and when we're also, we're spread out too. Having a biblical church is not unusual to have the people spread out. Because it's rare for someone to have eyes to see and ears to hear. And when they do, then they see it's worth the distance to be able to drive to it. So we're like cornerstone in that respect that we're relatively spread out. So the point is, we have our small group time at Sunday school in order to try and help that and make those essential times for a member of the church to be Sunday school and the Sunday service that morning time. So that's when we do our accountability, our prayer together, and we do our studies through Strange Fire. And then in the midweek study, if you're able to make that, then we focus in on study and deuteronomy, the inductive study. We're looking for a central church location. And so please keep us in prayer with that. We were supposed to be moving forward to a central location, but it didn't work out the, they were having meetings and it doesn't look like it's gonna work out that location. So we're, that's a continual thing that I'm doing on the side is looking for a place that's gonna be an area that's not too rich or not too poor, so that all different demographics of the people can be able to come. A place that has access by the bus. A place that is central to the city. A place that is cheap enough and a place that's large enough. So all those factors, it's difficult to find a place that fits all of those things. So I've been working on that for some months. So that, because during our evangelism, a lot of people were a ways out from the city where we're meeting now in one of the homes of the brothers. It's better to have a central location starting out. So that's some of the things that we're doing with evangelism, discipleship and the church plant. To close, I would just wanna express my gratitude to you all, there are many, many, many times where I have been so grateful for all of the things the Lord has taught me here through you all and with you all, whether a trial or a doctrine or a practice, there's just, it's hard to describe how much and how, what a blessing it was to be serving the Lord with you all here for, I can't remember how many years I was here, about a decade, maybe a little bit more. But there's so many times, so many conversations, so many shepherding issues where I can look back at what I've learned here and how I was discipled here and how a blessing has been to me. And so I would want by expressing that thanks to encourage you to press on and encourage you to persevere, encourage you to be discipled and to disciple others here, for you to be evangelizing here, for you to be humble and applying the marriage conference and what a blessing the marriage conference was to me to just sit and be preached to as a pastor who doesn't have other pastors. That in Guatemala, it is a great blessing to be preached to. And I just wanna express my thankfulness and your providing. Most of the majority, there's other churches that pray for us and support us, but most of the financial support has been from you all. And I often tell the people there that look at how we haven't come and asked you for money and you don't have the burden of trying to pay for me to preach to you all because of other brothers who've sacrificed and other brothers who have been generous and kind in another place so that you could hear the gospel and they have expressed the thankfulness like Joshua and Monica in that video. That's the other brothers are thankful like that for your sacrifice to be able to send us there. And so I know that that, like Philippians four, I know that you're receiving a great blessing out of seeing the fruit of that ministry. And I'm not doing that, they asked for more support. You guys have supported me plenty. Our needs are provided for. I'm just wanting to express thanks, that's all. So things to pray for. Oh, and one thing I wanna express thanks to is, I don't know if Lee and Gabby are watching, but they probably are having to leave now for church. But often we eat breakfast and we watch Sunday school. And right around this time, we're running out the door right at, and they need to close the laptop with Pastor Rick's face in it, just as he's closing. But I asked my wife, what's the one thing if you would say you're most thankful for for our time in Guatemala? And she said to the Rousses, Lee and Gabby have been, it's been such a blessing to be able to serve with them. And so I would want to give thanks to God for the work that he's done in them. And I know you would do the same. It's such a joy to be so like-minded with someone and to be on the battlefront with someone. Not just doctorly, but in practice. That to have so many conversations with somebody, and then with Lee and then to walk away and I'm thinking one thing, but I'm wanting to hear his opinion first, and he has the same exact opinion about what the person need to hear about the gospel or what it's shepherding issue or whatever. It's so encouraging to be so like-minded and for them to be sacrificing, for them to be serving faithfully with us and the joy be able to see. When you live with somebody, you know there's a phrase in Guatemala, you wanna know somebody live with them. It's a common phrase there. And so it is a great joy to be able to live with them, see them, pastor their sons, see them in their faithfulness with us. So things to pray for. Things to pray for. If you wanna write this down, please pray that Lord will provide us with a church location. That would be providing and praying for a church location at this point in the church plant is kind of like you're praying for somebody to marry. You're like, you don't know all that you, you don't even know how to pray for all that you need when the Lord provides you with a spouse. You know that the Lord has to do that. The Lord has to do that, right? It's got like that with a church location. Because in the church location, there's so much impact and so much, it's gonna happen from that because that's gonna be a center for evangelism. There's gonna be people that are gonna hear the gospel as a result of where that church is that wouldn't otherwise. And so we're asking for the Lord would guide us and provide for us in that church location. So that's one. Two, please pray for laborers for the harvest. It's exciting to be able to see some of the brothers be discipled in evangelism with us like Ricardo now and in Joshua and some of the ladies. But please pray for more laborers for the harvest. The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few in Guatemala. You just, when you go to like a central park and you see hundreds and thousands of people pass by and you see that there's no way to reach this four million people on your own. So there's a great need for laborers for the harvest. So church location, laborers for the harvest, excuse me. And then Ephesians one versus 15 to 23. And Ephesians one versus 15 to 23. Paul prays for the believers in Ephesus and the region in Laodicea there that they would grow in an understanding of the hope they have in their calling in Christ. That they would grow in their joy for the inheritance they have in Christ and that they would grow in the understanding of the power that they've received in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I remember that by the acronym HIP. Are you HIP? Hope, inheritance, power. So that those, the way Paul prays for the believers there, are you HIP? To pray for those things. Hope, inheritance, power. That you pray that the church there would grow in understanding of those things and in that Ephesians one, you can see how Paul is been faithful and so I also express my great thankfulness to you all for your faithfulness and prayers. Church is a new, Reform Baptist Church in New Jersey. Spanish speaking is praying for us regular basis. There's a church in Costa Rica that's a Reform Baptist Church. They are praying for us on a regular basis. The church in Miami is with Pastor Victor. They're praying for us on a regular basis and I know you all are praying for us on a regular basis and so all the good things that have happened have been, I see them as a result of the Lord working through prayer. So I plead and ask that you would continue to pray for us. So thank you for hearing this update in Guatemala. I'm looking forward to answering your questions in the hallway or tonight if you're able to come. They will be a joy. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for the blessing of being back here with family. Thank you for being able to worship you together. Thank you for, I pray that you would have helped them to grow in an understanding of the inheritance that they have received in the gospel. I pray that you would help them to take greater joy and have greater faith in the hope of their calling. I pray that you would help them to grow and be confident and apply the truths of your power in salvation. So I pray, Lord, that you would bless Cornish and bring them, have them to have more laborers for the harvest and help them to grow and persevere here in this city. Amen.