Yesterday, one of our small group leaders led a 40-year-old man to the Lord named Ben. It was great! Their small group has been praying for Ben for 5 months now. Sure enough, Ben came to the LifeTeam (small group) and saw that they had his name listed for prayer. Instead of running from prayer, he asked them to keep praying for him so that he could know the Lord. Ben has also attended faithfully at church for the last 4 months. Yesterday, gentle Ben asked the LifeTeam leaders to “have that spiritual talk” with him. Last night, a few of us fellows gathered to watch some NFL. During a very boring opening quarter, the LifeTeam leader couldn’t keep it a secret and gave us the good news. Not a difficult spiritual exercise — we turned off the NFL and just prayed together with a weeping, gentle Ben and gave thanks for what God has done in his life. He wants to be baptized soon and wants to follow Jesus for the rest of his life. Many of his friends were there who are in his small group and were so excited because they all had a part. This is the second person saved in their small group in the last 4 months.
I was recently working on a message where Jesus speaks out against murder. In my research, I came across this fascinating page on Abortion Statistics — You should check it out.
Let me pose these questions to the devoted Christian, “should not the fundamental issue of the sanctity of life be the starting and primary plank of any political candidacy? If not, what should be primary and priority when speaking of the government and how it governs its people?”
Then, another interesting quote came from a Mr. R.J. Rummel who compiled statistics for the Center on National Security Law. His analysis was directly related to Democide and Genocide. I’m going to quote him here below because I found his reaction remarkable as he seems to be challenged in his own spirit about the God-given conscience of the sanctity of life.
“As of 1986 what remained to be tested was an often asserted negative relationship between democracy and murderous government violence against citizens or foreigners. Moreover, it also made good theoretical sense that the less liberally democratic and more totalitarian a regime, the more people it murders. Unfortunately, good comparative data on democide for testing this did not then exist.
Accordingly, after a preliminary pilot study,[6] I applied for a grant from the Unites States Institute of Peace to pursue the data collection and testing of the relationship between democide and democracy. This I was granted for two years, subsequently renewed for another three.
Collecting data on democide was an horrendous task. I soon was overwhelmed by the unbelievable repetitiveness of regime after regime, ruler after ruler, murdering people under their control or rule by shooting, burial alive, burning, hanging, knifing, starvation, flaying, beating, torture, and so on and on. Year after year. Not hundreds, not thousands, not tens of thousands of these people, but millions and millions. Almost 170,000,000 of them, and this is only what appears a reasonable middle estimate. The awful toll may even reach above 300,000,000, the equivalent in dead of a nuclear war stretched out over decades.
I found that so much of this killing was unknown or ignored…”
Last night, we took the kids on a walk for about an hour and a half. We like to think of it as a “power-walk” when really the power was just getting the kids in the strollers and out there.
The seasons are changing and the harvest is beginning to come in. At night as the weather changes, a light mist and breeze begins to set in and the feel of Autumn is in the air. As we were walking, we would pass by a vineyard about every five minutes or so. The vines are almost to the ground and grape-laden ready to be harvested. While walking past the vineyards, the beautiful and powerful aroma of the harvest would waft past us. It was a perfume of nature worn once a year.
My mind went back to the early chapters of Leviticus where God commanded a sacrafice with a sweet savor. The smell of the smoking meat had to be very pleasing as the people came near the temple. Then we see that God requested incense to be mixed in with the sacrifice to cover anything that would not smell pleasing. Just like the vineyard harvest, every act of worship had to sweetly draw the worshipper to pleasing conduct before Yahweh.
May we be so sensitive in our worship that passers-by smell the fruit of our lives. A good friend said to me that “fruit is what people taste and we need people to taste the Lord and see that He is good.” I totally agree, but I think they’ll smell us coming first.
As I type this post, the printer is still cranking out more hard copies of our newest prayer letter. But you can have our newest issue of the Friuli Files prayer letter made for September by clicking here or visiting our download area. If you don’t have Acrobat Reader installed on your machine. You can read a simple text version of the September issue.
On another note, we met with our bank this morning as they have been reviewing financing for our new worship center. It is common for European banks (especially Italian) to not want to take any risks whatsoever. Originally, they requested a guarantee of $180,000 which we said we could do. Now they’re requesting double. They want a guarantee of $360,000 so that they can finance our project. I told them that was absurd and that we would have no money to pay the tax burden placed on an initial sale of property. Oh yes, Italy gets theirs up front & more. The bank manager said that he thought our original amount was sufficient and that he would talk to the Direzione about it. But they hit another obstacle. They were also fearful of what’s called the “Destination of Use” which is similar to zoning laws. We have been assured that we fit into a “commercial” sector and we were approved for usage on our last property by the Municipality. However, they want new Municipality documents from us. So, we chase the tail a little bit.
More to come — for sure 
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