Battle Log
Saturday 8 August 2009
Posted 20 August 2009, 6:43 PM by Ryan Hemelaar. PermalinkOnce we arrived at Surfers Paradise, Blake and I spent a bit of time reading through 2 Corinthians 5 which talks about how God has entrusted to us this awesome message of reconciliation through Christ, and that He asks us to make this known everywhere. After being encouraged by that we prayed together, and then ran into a fellow brother in the Lord. It was Craig Ireland, and he was faithfully handing out gospel tracts throughout the day, praise the Lord!
I was the first to get up and preach. And immediately as soon as I had said only basically one word, a guy sitting on a seat about 30 metres from me yelled out something about Jesus. So I dialogued with him in the open-air. He was very resistant to anything pertaining to God, but God still saw fit to use him to draw in a crowd to hear the Word being preached. This lead into a number of other hecklers piping in with their questions or objections.
One heckler was a Muslim bloke who was arguing that the Bible did not exist only 700AD. So I responded, "The Dead Sea Scrolls clearly refute that assertion, as they date back to about 300BC and contain every book of the Old Testament bar Esther. Plus we have thousands of manuscript copies of the New Testament, many dating back to prior-700AD. Moreover," I argued, "Your statement is simply not compatible with the Qur'an, as the Qur'an states that the Bible is a prior revelation, yet it came into being at about 650AD. So if your statement is correct, that would mean that the Qur'an came before the Bible, which would contradict what the Qur'an says." At this the gentlemen saw the error, but wasn't open-minded enough to continue the dialogue. I made sure that I preached the gospel over and over again, calling everyone to repent and trust in Christ alone for their salvation.
After preaching for just over an hour, I stepped down and three guys in their twenties came up to me and thanked me for the message. They said that they aren't religious, but the fact that I was willing to get up there and talk about my faith even when objections came was a testament to them that this must be something pretty important. So they said they would now definitely think about the message they heard, and I was also able to have further discussion with them about the gospel. After this, we stopped to have a bit of lunch, and after that Blake got up to preach. He faithfully proclaimed about the coming judgment, sin, the cross, and what a person must do to be saved (repent and trust in Jesus).
During this time, I chatted to various people one2one. One of the conversations I had was with two young ladies. They thought they were good enough to get to Heaven on their own, so I show them from the Scriptures that no one is good enough on their own. They understood that and so I explained the cross and that they must repent and trust in Christ's death alone to be saved. They were very open to the gospel and were very keen to repent and trust in Christ. So I continued to chat with them more about the Christian faith and the cost of discipleship. Please keep these girls in prayer.
Overall, another great day! To God alone be the glory!
View previous Gold Coast (QLD) report (1 August 2009)
Gold Coast Team (QLD)
Meets 7:15-10pm Friday nights at Surfers Paradise on Cavill Avenue.
Contact Ryan Hemelaar for more information.