Msindisi Monthly August 2009

PO Bos 1481
Vryheid 3100
Kwazulu Natal
SOUTH AFRICA
+27 (0) 728311008

Email: msindisi@gmail.com , salv.di@gmail.com
Moriel KwaZulu Mission Website: http://morielkzn.googlepages.com
Personal Website: http://msindisi.googlepages.com

Well after returning from Springs it was a nice surprise to see most of the hut finished from the builders’ point of view. We set about getting the windows in, doors hung, walls painted, curtains hung and floor polished. It was a busy couple of weeks but eventually we moved the furniture in. It is the time of year when the long grass gets cut for thatching, many ladies were going past with huge piles of grass on their heads and several popped there heads in for a look.

There are still many jobs that need to done like getting the guttering up, staining the doors, waterproofing the roof, and plastering the outside. We have had a few days of rain and the plastering on the outside will be our first priority.

We have set up a wall planner with our schedules for the week; this is proving helpful to know which areas are getting covered when Salvi goes out to share the gospel. Di usually goes with him when she is able. At the moment Di is concentrating on her Zulu, kids club, and general running of the home.

At the beginning of last month we had Salvi’s friend Joe Rumley come to stay with us as he is visiting the country. He is engaged to a South African girl whose father has just accepted a pastorate in a Baptist Church in Bedfordview, near Johannesburg. Unfortunately at this time they were hijacked and the mother had a gun cocked at her head. Her brother was hit in the nose. Please keep the Duncan family in your prayers. Understandably Joe didn’t want to be away from his family there for too long but it was good that he could come out and do evangelism as we started to reach out to the communities around us. Salvi continues to evangelise four afternoons a week, prepare bible studies and sermons, and crack on with his studies. He has time set aside on Sat morning to do jobs with the hut while the afternoon is taken up with a bible study. He is very happy to be focused on the work of the Lord and getting out into the communities.

He is visiting most Kraals in the three different areas, when there are several grouped together in will preach between them all. If there is a Kraal standing by itself he will visit them personally but if there are a few Kraals bunched together he will preach open air. It is amazing how many people appear from no where and sit in the grass and listen. Many questions have been answered and many old unbiblical cultural beliefs challenged.

We attended the funeral of a young lady called Nomusa who sadly passed away. She had attended the bible study group that Caleb and Salvi had started in 2002. She had been coming to a few that we had started up again. It was a huge funeral, many people attended and Salvi managed to catch up with some people he hadn’t seen since he had left the area.

We also had a lovely meal with an Afrikaans couple and their family, local farmers who we are just getting to know. Salvi went out with Johnny on his run where he sells milk and chickens to the surrounding areas. They are a lovely family and they would do anything to help us. They are believers in Christ and with a heart for Israel but they have been mixed up in word of faith and other false teaching. We are trying to encourage them to get into the word. It is lovely to know that there are other believers in the area though.

We continue to meet every Wednesday night with the bible study group in Vryheid. We attended a meeting on a Monday evening as Salvi had a dentist appointment that day in Vryheid. This night we got to meet Mike and Norma Geel from Newcastle. He takes a small group with him into other African countries for mission trips; we had a lovely evening of sharing and teaching.

The Mondi outreach has branched out into two outreaches. One Sunday afternoon we were asked by some workers who live in a place called Misty Valley to start preaching there also. So the following Sunday Salvi dropped Phumulani off at Misty Valley and continued preaching at Mondi. Salvi shared his testimony and had someone asked him many questions about ancestral spirits. But Phumulani was in his element at Misty Valley. After preaching he had someone ask him, ‘Why doesn’t God send a Christian with a cure for AIDS?’ Phumulani answered that God had done because most HIV transmission is spread because of promiscuous sexual practice. If people would wait for marriage and be faithful to their marriage partners then the spread of AIDS would dramatically change in this country. The person who asked the question walked off. Another person asked if we can’t fornicate then how can we fulfil God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Phumulani said that we should get married. He came back from preaching elated.

Please keep us and the work in your prayers; that God may pave the way, open the doors, and speak to the hearts of those who hear the message for if they don’t hear His voice what we are doing will be futile.

Devotional 11

Exodus 5: 22 – 23

“Then Moses turned to the LORD and said, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.

Moses had been sent by God from the burning bush to tell Pharaoh to let His people go. He was given signs to show the elders of Israel and then he was to speak to Pharaoh. When he showed the signs to the people of Israel, the Israelites believed and worshipped God (5: 31). There was optimism and hope of deliverance. However when Moses approached Pharaoh to command the release of God’s people, Pharaoh was hard. He refused to let the people go and instead punished the Israelites by ordering them to make the same amount of bricks but they would be given no more straw, they had to fetch the straw themselves. The Hebrew foremen were beaten by their taskmasters for failing to make the quota. When they asked Pharaoh why he was being this unreasonable, Pharaoh replied it was because they were lazy and that is why they had sent Moses to command their release. The optimism that the Israelites had of deliverance was dashed and they desired that God would judge Moses for making it harder for them. Instead of deliverance, Moses had intensified their suffering and in no uncertain words they told Moses what they thought of him! For Moses this must have seemed the greatest failure of his life. Pharaoh had refused to obey the words and now the people of God had turned against him. Everything was going wrong and nothing was going right. He and Aaron were alone without any human backing. It must have been a far cry from the blessed experience of showing God’s signs to Israel and seeing them worshipping God.

When God calls us, when we have the mountain top experience of hearing God’s voice we are then lead to carry that vision into details and the actualities of this-worldly experience that does not seem to fit in with what God has told us. We are to live in the temporal reality in the light of the eternal one. Jesus has told us to preach his Gospel among all the nations, to make disciples of all the nations and to teach them. When we receive the revelation of that commission on our specific corporate and individual lives we may walk out, excited to see what God is going to do through us. But how do we fare when people to whom we are sent don’t respond to the message? How do we fare when things start to go wrong? Maybe we will be tempted to think that the whole thing was a mistake and that we were only following a whisper of a dream. That was not how Moses responded. Moses spilled out his heart to the Lord but he never said that it was his mistaken about going to Pharaoh because he knew something that some of us don’t and many of us forget… God had sent him. When we know that God has sent us then we may still baulk at the problems that challenge us in the ministry but we cannot simply shrug it off because we know that God has sent us.

“I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision” – Apostle Paul (Acts 26: 19)