8 June 2014
Dear Phyllis,
Today was a banner day. I had the privilege of baptizing my dear brother Singha. Two years ago, when we had Annie, Pammy had to go shopping to find a good school for her. She came back saying she found a very good place, but it was a little expensive. But after she explained it, I agreed that Nettrahong was easily our best choice. After Annie was enrolled there, Singha and his wife Lek asked me to come to speak to the children teaching them English. Through that we developed a very deep bond with Singha and Lek.
They were amazing in their obvious quest for spiritual truth. Pammy used to go over there every day teaching them Bible for an hour or more. Seldom – if ever – have I seen anyone reach out for truth like that. Pammy's hour a day didn't seem adequate so we invited them to come to our house every Saturday night for Bible study. One night we got to the place of dealing with John 1:12 – “but as many as received Him to them gave He power to become sons of God” – I asked Pammy to lead the horse. Rather than having me lead the Bible study she is better at personal work than I am, and I wanted her to deal with the issue of accepting Jesus. It was a night of real spiritual reality but we hit a stone wall. Singha clearly wanted to get saved, but the school was under Thai law that it had to teach Buddhism. Singha honestly said he couldn't go both ways at the same time. I asked him, “Do you want to follow Jesus?” “Absolutely!” Then I advised, “I have no idea how to get out of your mess, but if you will ask Jesus to lead you I am sure He has some solution for that problem.”
Everything went dead for six months. Then Singha came back on line by starting to come to church. One morning I preached on the invitation to attend the King's Son's wedding (Mt. 22-1-14) and said there were five response. The 4th response was “Oh thank you very much”, but he didn't have the wedding garment, and got thrown out. The 5th response was the guy that was clothed with Christ. During the meal after the service Singha said to me. “I am half way between 4 an 5”. I told him, “Hang 4! Get on to 5!” I honestly don't know the details but it was obvious soon after that that Singha was clearly born of the Spirit of God. He has a friend who is the pastor of a church in Chiang Mai and started attending that church, Fine. And every day when I go to school he loves to talk about the Bible.
The other day he spoke to me about baptism. His English is quite limited so I asked him to come to the house so Pammy could interpret. I explained to him that there are two views of baptism – the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical aspect of baptism is a man's relationship with God. And the horizontal one is a persons relationship with the church that they are joined to. I strongly recommended that he get baptized at the Chiang Mai church. He told me that there was pressure from there to be baptized but he told them that he preferred to have me do it. I couldn't refuse that.
There is another interesting related incident in this picture. Paul happened to show up the same time when Singha came to speak to me about being baptized. We have a dear friend, Pascal, who is the leader of our Wednesday morning men's prayer meeting. Kent had led Pascal to the Lord about seven years ago but he had never got deeply identified with a church and had never been baptized.
Pascal is an interesting phenomenon. He is a highly phlegmatic, quiet spoken, brother from Holland. I have known him for probably seven years and had very little involvement with him other than at the Wednesday morning meeting. I have no explanation for what has happened but after he got the responsibility for the Wednesday morning meeting – or about then – a strange change started to happen to him. He starred to change from being a wall flower to a serious man of God. You would almost wonder if he was saved before, but now the Holy Spirit is highly visible in him. Paul was concerned that Pascal had never been baptized and when Singha was at the house talking about baptism. Paul brought up the subject of Pascal. We said, “If Pascal is interested lets baptize them at the same time. Surprisingly, the Lord had already spoken to Pascal about following the Lord in baptism and was readily agreeable. The first discussion was for me to baptize him but Pascal was going back to Holland for a few weeks the day that Singha wanted to get baptized so we would have to do it separately. And then Pascal suggested, because he was the closest to Paul, would it be alright for Paul to do it instead of me? No problem.
Man howdy did we have a good time! Four of us went to a lovely lake Wednesday morning for that important event. Usually we think of baptisms as being more ceremonial and a large group of attendees. But in the Bible it seems that most baptisms were more private. There was no large crowd for Jesus (Mk. 1:9), the Ethiopian eunuch
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I finished this letter concerning Pascal and Singha's testimonies and baptism. I was going back over the letter with a spell check. I have no idea what happened but somehow half of the letter got deleted. If Jesus dislikes this letter that much I won't rewrite it. I will just send the part that didn't get deleted.
Zan nen (too bad) bill
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