Msindisi Newsletter # 103

SALVADOR & DIANNE’S MSINDISI MONTHLY

NUMBER: 103 Apr 2013

PO BOX 1481
VRYHEID 3100
KWAZULU NATAL
SOUTH AFRICA

+27 (0) 728311008
+27 (0) 815836288

Email: msindisi@gmail.com ,
salv.di@gmail.com

KwaZulu Mission Website: http://www.kwazulumission.com
Dear Friends and family,

Firstly we would like to send our condolence to Salvi’s mum and her family for the passing away of his grandfather. He passed away on Tues 19th in the evening from a heart attack. He was in china at the time visiting family there. Also we send our thoughts and prayers to Di’s Uncle Ross and family at the passing away of his wife, Jan, who suffered with cancer. Di was grateful to be able to talk with her aunt before she passed away. We thank the lord she was a believer so is now home with her lord and Saviour.

Mid march bought Clayton and Jessie Wells from the UK to visit for a night. Clayton is Allen and Sue’s second oldest boy. It was truly wonderful seeing them again. Although we had seen Clayton late last year, this visit was the first time as a married couple they had stayed with us. The time went far to quickly as they could only stay the one night but we were very thankful and grateful that we got to spend time with them. Please check out the Wells family photo it is very rare to have them all together in one place.

Phumulani and Thabi have had a difficult month as Thabi has been very sick, she has had a couple of visits to the hospital and also to the local clinic. Please keep them both in your prays.

We celebrated the 37 years of marriage of our dear friend Kogie and George on the 20th of the month. Di made roti for the celebration. Sadly it worked out being only a small number who could attend but a very special time was still had. Along with this we also attended the wedding of our dear friend Belinda’s mum a week later.

Sal was asked to preach again at the baptist church on a sunday evening. His message was titled ” who is this man and what is he doing ” taken from Mark’ account of the stilling of the storm. We both have continued with care bear teaching and kids club. This month at kids club we were able to give out more small Zulu bibles to a group of children who are attending regularly so they can go home and read the verses that were taught that week with there parents, brothers, sisters, Gogo’s. A couple of the boys have been regularly attending the Sunday services with great enthusiasm, always dressed in their Sunday best. Even on a couple of occasions when they missed lifts they started walking to church and hitchhiked. At church they always pray and share what they learned at kids club in the meetings. When Phumlani or Celani asks who would like to open the meeting in a word of prayer one of those lads volunteered the one Sunday. We are praying for their salvation.

Sal was asked by Kim from the Louwsburg bible study to speak with the Zulu craft ladies in Louwsburg concerning their involvement with the ecumenical global day of prayer. On that occasion the global day of prayer meeting had a Nazirite pastor involved in the proceedings who spoke about how they are all one in the Spirit. The Nazirites believe that Jesus was the white Messiah and Isaiah Shembe is the Messiah for black people. Some even consider him to be God. This is on account of the many reported healings and miracles he did, people testifying in the genuine nature of such miracles and some believing that Shembe would speak to them in their dreams. Even today you will see cars with bumper stickers saying “Shembe is the way!” This meeting in demonstrating why biblically the global day of prayer is unbiblical turned out to be a wonderful time of discussion. Where people asked questions to get understanding. Salvi emphasized the need for people to be truly born again and for believers to be faithful to the Lord stating that mixing with ancestors and Isaiah Shembe or partaking of the mass, prayers to dead saints or trusting in Mary in the Roman Catholic Church is spiritual adultery.

At the end of this month we were asked to house sit in Vryheid. This gave Di an opportunity to complete the yearly finance report and Sal to finish his latest assignment that was due. We continued with kids club, church and bible study on the Friday evening with Johnny and Kim and Nicky and Guy. Also we were able to attend the friday morning service at the baptist church. However the break away was timely for Di, the ease of being in a normal home environment was gladly received to recharge the batteries.

Phumlani and Salvi have almost finished preaching throughout Ngenitsheni, which they should finish in 2 weeks time. Then they will start preaching in an area called Khambi. There they have met a physics teacher called Trust Moyo. He is a lovely brother in the Lord who has started leading a house church. He has been enjoying the teachings we have given him and is very teachable concerning the truth of God’s word. He has testified concerning how they Lord has chastised him concerning things he has said or attempted to do and has changed accordingly. Please pray for him. He has a visa to work in South Africa but the department of home affairs in Witbank needs to send a letter of confirmation to the department of home affairs in Ulundi in order for him to receive payment for his teaching services and no one seems to be helping him. He has not been paid since december last year and even before that time there have been other sagas where there has been reason given to him concerning why they cannot pay him. He testifies that the Lord is providing his needs but please pray for him. We are hoping to partner with him in evangelism so that if people in that area respond to the preaching of the gospel we can put his phone number on the tracts so they may contact Trust.

Today, a small group of students from the Union Bible Institute should be visiting us to evangelise in the area of Ngenitsheni and tomorrow teaching kids club. This bible institute are one of the few publishers of Zulu bible commentaries in the country. We have their commentaries and use their hymn books for our church meetings. We trust this will be a blessing for them.

Hopefully next month Caleb Massey, who started the Kwazulu mission back in Aug 2002, will be visiting and we trust it will be a time of spiritual blessing for all. The people on the area always ask about him and his wife bearing witness to the impact and the godly witness Caleb and Sophie left in this community.

In Cell group Salvi has started a teaching series on marriage. It is a timely series as we see people marriages being changed by the Lord as husbands and wives humble themselves under God’s word. We find it is one of those vital areas that are seldom preached about in pulpits. Phumlani states that these teachings are revolutionary for Zulu culture and unlike Zulu marriages where the husbands dominate their wives and rule as kings. We told him that western culture would also find the teachings to be uncomfortable or offensive for western culture does not accept that men should have first place in marriage or to be in authority over their wives. The Bible does not match any culture but is critical of all. Meanwhile, Phumlani also brought us all a teaching concerning syncretism in the faith and asking us which God/god were we actually serving.

To all our friends and fellow laborers may we press on looking always to the return of our coming King.

Shalom

Salvi and Di

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For those who are interested the KwaZulu Mission teaching website has more teachings uploaded with a couple by the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Vryheid and Mark Van Niekerk of Hazorim. Some teachings are also in Zulu. http://www.sermon.net/msindisi . More teachings will be posted in the future.

EMETH – A CALL TO TRUTH AND CONSISTENCY

PART 4: EMETH IN ALL AREAS

The problem we must face in the business of discernment is that we can easily focus on what is wrong in the church. It is unfortunately a necessity to be critical in this day and age. We feel everywhere we turn the danger of compromise acutely. We know that if we are not on the alert we can easily be swept away unawares. Thus it becomes so easy to become absorbed with the errors and heresies in churches that we can speak of little else. This is not what it means to stand for truth. It is only a part of the story. We have gotten so caught up with guarding orthodoxy, and I feel I must emphasise that we MUST guard orthodoxy, that we have gotten slack in our own relationship with the Lord, with seeking the Lord for His fruit to be manifested in our lives, and pursuing Holiness, which means a close abiding and separation unto the PERSON of Jesus Christ. There is little talk of intimacy, God’s discipline in our lives, victory over sin and the simple but marvellous exercise of adoration as we consider His work and attributes afresh. Oh to adore the Lord like a child marvelling at a beautiful sunset as if it was the first sunset he ever saw! In my mind I can hear the murmurs of agreement because it is the doctrinally right thing to say but how much do we take this very thing to heart?

In 1 Timothy 1:9-11 Paul lists sins such as rebellion, profanity, immorality and lying as contrary to sound doctrine. Those of us who make a stand against heresies pervading our churches, how is our private life? Are we rebellious to the Lord? Are we entertaining immorality, pornography, adultery or fornication? Are we lying? Do we use profanity and foul language? Are we taking what does not belong to us without the express permission of its owner? Are we harsh and abrasive to people whom God calls us to be gentle towards? If so we do not hold to sound doctrine, no matter how much we rail against Benny Hinn, or Kenneth Copeland! Doctrine is not only about profession or public action but it involves our private and personal lives. Truth must be truth in all areas. In 1 Timothy 4:16 Paul warns Timothy to pay close attention first to his own life and then equally to his teaching. When we stand in the pulpit, or seek to instruct those younger in the faith, or if we make strong stances against the blatant abuse of God’s word by various preachers, but then we compromise on our lifestyle, excusing it because it is not as bad as what the heretics are doing, we give those whom we are trying to reach an unnecessary reason to reject the Truth of what we are saying! They reject the profession of truth to some extent because of our rejection of the possession of sound doctrine in our lives. Of course for a number of people, our failure to live it, is a convenient excuse for them to reject the Truth. But woe betide us if we use that fact to excuse our failure to live out sound doctrine! As Titus 1:1 says, Truth is according to godliness.

INTRUSIVE, GENUINE AND PRACTICAL EMETH

Truth is not merely on the level of public, ministerial and corporate. Truth penetrates into the secret place. Truth is intrusive. God is Truth, He is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. We all know Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish builders in Matthew 7:24-27. The one who hears Jesus’ words and does them will be like the wise builder building on the rock. What we often forget is the context in which Jesus gave these words. The context was the sermon on the mount. Which words was Jesus speaking about? In Matthew 5:20 Jesus told his readers that unless their righteousness surpassed that of the scribes and the Pharisees they would not enter the kingdom of heaven. When we hear that we generally think of Pharisees, on the whole, as the bad guys. But from a Jewish perspective of that time, Jesus’ words would have seemed radical. From their perspective the Pharisees were holy people. The modern equivalent would be that we would have to be more holy than Mother Teresa. This is a good equivalent because Mother Teresa, like the Pharisees, appeared good before men. When you criticise her many people get upset. But before God she was a deceiver who withheld the gospel from people, not that she believed the gospel herself. She wanted to alleviate people’s pain before they faced a lost eternity of suffering hell-fire. She did not believe in sharing the gospel and seeing them saved, http://www.evangelicaloutreach.org/mothertereasc.htm .

To appreciate what Jesus was saying you have to understand Israel’s history. Because of Israel’s sins and treachery against God’s covenant with them, God sent Assyria and then Babylon to judge them. Upon their return to the land with Ezra, Israel experienced revival which soon waned as we see with Malachi. Later the Greeks came in and under Antiochus Epiphanes many Jews turned their back on God’s law and followed wickedness and God’s temple was desecrated. Because of the radical actions of the Maccabees, Israel had their temple worship restored and there was an understanding that the law had to be kept or else judgment would fall on Israel yet again. The Pharisees came out of this group of pious Jews and truly sought to keep God’s laws. Through their own human reasoning they figured out that to keep people from breaking God’s law they would build a hedge around God’s law composed of man made commandments that were meticulous. The idea was that you had to break the fence before you could get to breaking the law but if you kept the fence you were automatically keeping the law. The fence of man made commandments were known as the ‘traditions of the elders’ and this was the stream from which arose the idea of the oral law in later Talmudic Judaism. The problem with that is, despite the denial of later Rabbis, when someone raises man’s commandments to the same status as God’s laws, inevitably they will end up breaking God’s laws in order to keep their own man made commandments. In other words they allow the law to be broken so long as no one touches the fence so that they may appear righteous before men. When Jesus said “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” Jesus was not saying that we are to be without any failing whatsoever. It is in the context of keeping the fence and ditching the law. The Pharisees would make a show of righteousness but they did not allow the law to intrude into the secret places of their heart. They looked righteous before men but did not deal with their envy, greed or lust in their heart. What Jesus meant was that our outside life is to match our inward life. We must not be white sepulchers, lovely on the outside but inside full of all wickedness and death. We must accept God’s intrusion of Truth for when we take God out of Truth we are left with death. Jesus agreed with many of the tenets of the Judaism held by the Pharisees. He accepted the resurrection, the existence of Demons and Angels, the reality of the miraculous and the afterlife. But though the Pharisees held to these ‘truths’ they did not have THE Truth for they would not accept a Truth that was intrusive and would show them up for what they really were.

The Greek word for Truth is Aletheia. It comes from the word, Alethes which means Truth as not concealing. Aletheia is reality in its unveiled form. This does not simply mean that through Truth we see new and wonderful things we have never seen before. It is much more personal than that. Truth is showing the nakedness of a thing. Truth cuts through all pretense and reveals something as it really is. No wonder we say, ‘the truth hurts’ or that ‘we cannot handle the truth’. Truth gets right to the nerve, it touches the bone. Truth is not only intrusive but it lays us bare just as we are and makes us face it. In the marketing world, and the journalistic world it is not about what a thing really is but about the way you present it. A website called Honest Reporting commented on a photo that was used on a Facebook page to show that Israel is oppressing ‘Palestinian’ people. The photo shows an Israeli soldier with his foot on a palestinian boy and a gun in his face. However when one looks at the photo, “in this case, the “Israeli soldier” is carrying an AK-47Kalashnikov – the weapon of choice for Arab regimes and terrorist organisations around the world. The IDF standard issue weapon is the US made M16. In addition, the uniform is not IDF issue either.” http://www.honestreporting.com/false-photo-incites-on-facebook/

In advertising, a product is presented in a way so as to motivate the consumer to put their money into that product and not someone else’s. So advertising companies and journalists become spin doctors. Some of it is obvious. The advert does not say that it is a bar of coconut covered in chocolate but that it is the taste of paradise. In the above example there is not much problem because everybody knows that it is an advert. When someone says that they are starving to death we do not immediately rush them to hospital so they can be rehydrated. We know they are just saying that they are very hungry. However, as in the case of the anti-Israel journalism of spin, it is a problem when people really lead others to believe that their story, as it is presented, is reality. When that person observes the real story, the actual case, they feel that they have been misled. In that moment they have experienced Aletheia. All the verbal chocolate coating has been stripped away and they now see things as they really are. This is what Paul meant in Titus 1:13 when he comments that the claim of the Cretan prophet of the circumcision is true that Cretans are lazy. He means that the claim of the prophet describes the reality as it is. Thus Truth is also sincere and genuine.

In Philippians 1:18 Paul states that some people’s motives in preaching the Gospel was to cause some emotional distress to him, as Paul was not able to minister as they freely could being imprisoned at this time. They were probably boasting of their efforts while Paul was stuck in a cell. Paul said that those who preached with wrong motives were preaching in pretense but those who were pure in motive were preaching in Truth. When it comes down to it, Truth must be the manifestation of something as it is, internal and external. Thus, if it is not genuine, it is not true. If it is an act, it is not true. If it is an exaggeration portrayed as reality, it is not true. If it is spin and hype, it is not true. If it is claiming to be what it is not, it is not true. In short Truth is reality in its naked state and the Lord wants us to apply this to all our secrets and the hidden motions of our hearts. If we are not willing to do this, we fall short of Truth.

EMETH AND LOVE

Lastly it is imperative that we recognize the need to hold Truth together with love. In Ephesians 4 Paul teaches that God has given the eldership ministries to the church that every body in the assembly may be equipped to do works of service in order to build up one another unto maturity. The result is that we will not be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men or by craftiness in deceitful scheming. The antidote to such deception is found in verse 15. We are to speak the Truth in Love and thereby grow up in all aspects unto Him who is the head, that is Christ. Thus if we do not speak the Truth in Love I doubt that we will grow up in all aspects. Truth needs to be spoken in love. If we confront someone with the Truth and they retort that we are not showing them love, how do we react? If our defense lies in saying, “Of course I love you. I am telling you the Truth. If I did not love you I would not be telling you the Truth” then we may not have grasped the truth of what Paul is saying. The fact that Paul admonishes us to speak the Truth in love is an indication that it is very possible that we can speak the Truth without love. While I agree that love is not soppy emotional slush, yet there must be something of genuine concern for the person we speak the Truth to or else we will not experience that growing up in all aspects.

In Matthew 23 Jesus vehemently opposed the Pharisees and scribes for their blatant hypocrisy and refusal to submit to the Truth. But at the end Jesus wept over the coming judgment. Jesus desperately desired the Pharisees to come to Him. He desperately wanted their salvation. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!'” How can anybody read this, especially a Jew who knows God’s love for Jerusalem, and not sense the pain Jesus felt in speaking these words? Do we have this concern for people stuck in error? When we try to reach them that they may be sound in doctrine do we weep out to the Lord for the Lord to touch their hearts? Are we heart broken or are we simply trying to win the argument and show that we are right and the other person is wrong? Is the extent of all we do and say dominated by combatting false teaching? Where is our love? Where is our genuine concern? A loveless discernment is a stench in God’s nostrils. Does this make you feel uncomfortable? It does make me uncomfortable. How I have so failed in this regard throughout my walk but the Lord is still calling me to love. But conversely what does it mean to love? Does it mean to help people, feed the sick, look after the downtrodden and despised? Does love mean to tolerate people that really get on our nerves? Does love mean self sacrifice? According to 1 Corinthians 13 we can do all those things and still not have love. I can give all my possessions to feed the poor and still not have love. In Romans 12:9 we are told to let love be without hypocrisy and in 1 Peter 1:22 it says “Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart”. How often do we see two faced love. We see people tell someone, “Brother we love you” and then behind that person’s back they make disparaging remarks and cut them down. We make an appearance and show of love but it is not from the heart. This is not God’s Truth. God’s Truth is to be held together with love.

When I look at these things, which are just the beginning of the practice of Truth, I see how I have failed the Lord and no doubt you will have seen how much you have failed Him. We have all failed Him. But with repentance and facing up to the Lord, confessing things as they really are, we are to push forwards, onwards and upwards. Is there somebody in the body that you need to put right with? If there is, go to them and seek the Lord to empower you to change towards your brother or sister. Forgive. If your brother has offended you or has sinned against you personally, go and show him his fault in private and sort it out. But do so with a genuine concern for your brother, looking to yourself lest you also be guilty of the same thing. If there is wrong doctrine in the local assembly contend with a gentle spirit as much as possible, patiently instructing. Do not be arrogant towards the person whom you are trying to reach. Listen to the genuine concerns your brother has and answer with scripture. If your brother sees something wrong in you do not be proud and hold it against him. Confess your sin and put it right. The blood of Jesus cleanses from all unrighteousness. If your brother is slow to turn away from wrong doctrine be patient. As long as they are responsive to the word, to some extent, there is hope. It takes time and the person may have many issues. Do not minimize the need for long-suffering. Do not contradict your profession with unrepentant sin. Then forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead we are to press on toward the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. This is what EMETH is about. Not just profession of true doctrine but the experience of Truth in all areas of our lives. May the Lord richly bless you.