For this reason it says,

“Awake, sleeper,

And arise from the dead,

And Christ will shine on you.” Eph. 5:14

Hey Brothers and sisters in Christ,

I hope your fall has been blessed so far and you have plans for Thanksgiving to see friends or relatives and thank the Lord for all He has done and is yet to do. We’ve been here and there and looking for places to share the Gospel. We have the Bible study at our house each Thursday night and have been discipling the students who come, as many as 8 or as few, some nights, as 3 depending on changing schedules. This week one student received Christ in a roundabout way after a different Bible study. His name was Phillip. 

I have also taken up to hang around a bit with some Christian bikers in their motorcycle club. They have a bible study on Wednesday nights that frankly I was too exhausted to add to our lives last fall. But this week we took it in again. It is primarily adults. Ellen came with, and the guy teaching this week, JR, is the Treasurer of the club. He’s a friend who has helped me with questions about the workings of my bike and helped me fix up my last one to sell as he has a repair shop. Toward the end of the bible study the only young guy in the room, Phillip, was singled out by JR to respond to the bible study after a few adults had spoken. JR kept pressing him to respond a bit to the teaching and then was looking at me, two seats over from Phillip. Phillip said he was excited to get baptized this Sunday but didn’t really seem to interact with anything that had been said. At first I thought JR was kind of unfairly leaning on him. But listening to his responses and that he was going to be baptized it sounded like he was excited to kind of join the club of Christianity. (I later realized JR was signaling me to talk to Phillip.)  I’d been putting in my two cents here and there and so soon after when we prayed and broke up, I found Phillip in the kitchen of the house where we were gathered. He knew I was a college pastor from the brief introductions around the room to begin the study. Phillip is a big dude, about as tall as me and wider. He has a full mop of dark hair trimmed really short at the side.

The kitchen was full of others from the study but I got Phillips ear and asked him if he’d like to answer the question I ask students on campus. He is 15. He said, “Sure.” I asked him, as I have thousands of times to other kids, “So say you are walking down the road, you get hit by a bus and you stand before God and He asks, ‘Why should I let you into Heaven?’ What would you say?” Phillip got stuck on being hit by a bus for a minute, so I shrank the question down to “You’re dead, what do you say?” He finally said he was following God and Jesus. I said something like, “That’s what you’re doing but I want to know more what God has done.” I began to go through the Gospel with him then to explain it, taking a booklet out to help a bit from a zipper pocket in my biker boots. I borrowed a pen from David one of the other officers of the club standing nearby. I talked about how God wanted to live inside him but had to take away his sins. He was not sure how God had done that, so I explained how Jesus’ sacrifice cleansed us of sin. His perfect life was to our credit I explained, like extra credit in a class. Phillip said he’d done all the extra credit in his math class and had finished with 110%. I said there was no credit we could do being good that would get us into Heaven, even trying our best on our own to follow God. We had to live a perfect life. I told him the answer to the question what you say to God is that you believe Jesus is God, died for your sins and rose from the dead. I wrote that on the front of the booklet and he repeated it to me. I finished the Gospel saying he needed to place his trust in what Jesus had done and asked if he had understood that or was just trying to be good and follow God that way. He said he’d just been trying to be good. So I said he could pray a prayer receiving God’s forgiveness based on what Jesus had done, taking away his sin so He could live inside him. I walked him through the prayer and said he could pray it right now and he took the booklet and prayed to receive Jesus. I gave him a high five then. He was grinning then, understanding the gift of salvation for the first time. When you get baptized that is what you want to say, ‘I believe Jesus is God, He died for my sins and rose from the dead.'” He repeated that then again. I explained the Christian life was trusting in God’s power by the Spirit and everything in the Christian life really was “Just ask” and God would give him the strength living inside him. He thought that was great. “Just ask,” he repeated. Phillip then said he was holding back on the high five because he often hurt his friend’s hands. “See look,” he said laying his hand palm up on the counter Island beside us for me to lay my hand on top of, his was about 3/4 of an inch wider than mine with thicker fingers. “Wow huge hands,” I said. And he grinned. We talked a bit more and I gave him the booklet. “Do you got those tucked away everywhere?” he asked. “No, only in my boot,” I said.

So thanks for your prayers for the ministry, and for evangelism this semester. The opportunities have been few and I’ve been shot down a couple times with disinterest. But Phillip came in and we are hopeful for better things as time goes on with the lock down. We are praying for you.

In Him,

Bob