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Logos Ministries Incorporated
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Volume 9 Number 1 - March 2001 GREETINGS FROM DONETSK, UKRAINE Greetings! I am writing this from Donetsk, Ukraine. The name is pronounced "donyetsk". Since coming here, I have not slept well because of the time difference. At night I am wide awake and cannot go to sleep. About noon, however, I begin to fade. This is surprising because it doesn't usually happen. Today is Sunday. During the night, I was wide awake so I got up and studied until 6:00 A.M. I then could sleep. I almost missed church at 10:00 A.M., but woke up in time to get there about ten minutes after it started. Then, however, the seat next to the only person who could translate for me was taken and thus, I was alone in a service being conducted in a foreign language. They sang a hymn that is in our hymnal so I sang it in English. The person next to me took my Bible and found the text for the first sermon for me (there are at least two and usually four sermons in each service). I did not understand a word the minister spoke, but studied the pas-sage carefully for the 25 minutes he spoke. I had wonderful fellowship with God as I studied. Their music is beautiful, so I really enjoyed that. The second sermon was by the university president and there was no one to show me the passage so I prayed during the entirety of that sermon. I heard the word "boga" occasionally, which is the Russian word for "God." As we knelt to pray at the close of the service (and they do kneel to pray in church) I silently thanked God for this time to just share fellowship with Him. I don't know what this says, but this was one of the most wonderful services I have experienced in years. The presence of God was more real than most any in recent memory. I teach four to six hours a day and have one more week to finish teaching this course. I have most evenings free so I can study and write until time to sleep. Each week we have a prayer and Bible study time with other professors and workers in the school. We study a bible passage together and then spend about an hour praying for the school, student needs and the needs represented in the group. FROM MY STUDY TIME IN UKRAINE I can remember clearly, as a small boy, hearing a preacher say, "These people are 'in Christ,' that means that they are Christians." Well, that is true, but it is not the whole story. When Jesus taught, He often mentioned things that would be hard to explain and equally hard to understand. He dealt with that problem in a most beautiful way. He used something they understood very well to ex-plain something they did not understand at all. Peter, Paul and John learned well and did exactly the same thing. Paul often used the Olympic games to illustrate spiritual truths and Peter and John did much the same thing as well. Paul wanted to talk to the Roman church about being part of the family of God
and used the image of "adop-tion." Both the Jews and the Romans had a
specific law for adopting a non-family person into the family. As they pondered
what it meant to be adopted into a family, they understood exactly what Paul was
trying to say. Through-out the entire New Testament other family images were
used - Father, brother, Jesus as brother, heirs and joint heirs. If one ponders
each of these images, carefully, it becomes clear that they describe an intimate
relationship with God and fellow Christians that is far beyond what most
Christians tend to think about. Jesus spoke about "the bride." Most everybody every-where had some
knowledge about a "bride." Paul particularly goes into careful detail
about what is involved in this mental image. In so doing, he was able to convey
some very beautiful truths about the relationship between the believer and the
Lord. When Jesus was trying to calm His disciples after He told them that He was going to die, in John 15, He used the image of a vine and branches. Every person who listened to Him understood how vines and branches functioned together. He was trying to explain to them just how intimate their relationship with Him and the Father would be even though He would not be with them physically. In John 14, Jesus talked with His frightened disciples about "abiding in Him" and His "abiding in them". In that day, if a person did not live in a city, they probably lived in a tent that was periodically moved from one place to another. The disciples didn't have a prayer of understand-ing what it meant to "abide in Him." They did know what it meant to pitch your tent and stay a while. It meant to take up residence, even if it was a temporary time. By the use of this imagery, Jesus was able to help them under-stand, at least to some extent, what it meant to abide in Him and for Him to abide in them. The New Testament talks about each member of the Trinity taking up residence in the lives of believers. Need-less to say, this was a difficult concept for them to grasp. It is not much easier when we think about it. Paul knew he had to find some image to describe what this was like. He talked about our bodies being a temple of the Holy Spirit. Every person in that part of the world knew what a temple was all about. Whether they were pagan or Jewish, they all had knowledge of temple use. They would be able to use Paul's image of the temple to help them understand what he was trying to tell them about our relationship with God. Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit. There is a lot of con-fusion and misinformation among Christians, both then and now, about the place and ministry of the Holy Spirit. Though they may not have been able to explain the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in detail, they all knew what was meant when someone spoke of the "Comforter." This was the word they used to describe an attorney. In Jerusalem, to-day, you will see an office sign advertising the office of an attorney, a "paraclete," which is the Greek word for "comforter" and identifies one who stands beside you and speaks on your behalf before the court. Because most of the people who received the epistles were converts from paganism, they did not understand the doctrine of the church very well. Paul spoke of the church as a "fellowship." A fellowship they understood. It was a gathering of people, often it was a political gathering, but they got together around a specific purpose. Knowing this, they were able to begin to understand what Paul meant when he spoke of the church. These are a few of the ideas that will be covered during the retreat in April and will make up the body of the book that follows. I would ask that you join me in prayer that God would use these ideas to touch the hearts of people who really want to grow in their intimate relationship with God. I appreciate it a lot. In His care, Bill Cooper TEACHING IN INDIA, HAITI, KAZAKHSTAN, UKRAINE, INDIANA AND ILLINOIS In December I taught in Allahabad, India, a place not all that far from where the recent earthquake took place. You may not have heard about it, but while I was in India, the police in one city broke into a church and placed the Hindu monkey god on the altar of the church as well as damaging most of the building. The government of India is Hindu. They have a law that once a monkey god is placed, it should never be moved. The Hindu's are becoming quite militant. The Bishop rushed to that city and entered the church to go on a hunger strike until they removed the monkey god. He was thrown out of the church by the po-lice and spent the next week or so in the hospital. I taught an introductory course in the Epistles and Revelation. I also taught a course using one of my books as a text. It was a course in Inductive Bible study. There was a professor in the class as well as the students because he will be teaching this course from now on. Inductive Bible study, using my book as a text, will be a required course in this seminary for every incoming student. In January, I taught in Haiti. This, also, was a course in the epistles. While I was there I was asked to redesign the courses they offer in Bible. In the past, all their Bible courses were survey courses. Starting in the fall of this year, the students will begin a new series of Bible courses that were designed while I was there. They will have a survey course, but the rest of their Bible study will be in-depth courses in the five different kinds of writing in the Bible - Historical, poetic, prophetic, epistles and apocalyptic. They also want to include a course in Inductive Bible study and I will teach the first class for them in November of this year. I did not study much in the evening there be-cause the electricity is on from 6:00 A.M. until 10:00 P.M. After that it is candles! When I finish teaching here, I will be home for a week, to get my visa to go to Almati, Kazakhstan. There I will teach a Bible course and work with them on the courses they teach in Bible as well. In this seminary they already use my book - Discovering the message of Scripture - as a text to teach Inductive Bible study. (This makes four different seminaries where this book is being used as a text-book.) In late April, I will return to the Ukraine to teach another course in Bible for most of the month of May. After May, I probably will not return here often because they are get-ting enough of their own former students back as teachers and they can do a much better job teaching in their own language than we foreigners can. That, of course, is why we go to these schools in the first place. As I have done for more than 20 years, I will again go to Evanston, Illinois, in August, to teach a course in Old Testament at the Course of Study School that meets at Garrett Seminary. As you probably know, I will be leading a spiritual life retreat for the
North Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church in early April. The 18
lectures during these three days deal with the different ways the New Testament
describes and defines the Intimate relationship God intends for those who love
Him. It will include what the New Testament says about being "in
Christ," "the Bride of Christ," "the body of Christ,"
"adoption" and others. While I am in Kazakhstan and again in the
Ukraine, I will be preparing this material for publication as a book. |
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