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Today’s Message was inspired by Hasan
(ex-Muslim refugee from Afghanistan)

 
- Praise report for financial support for Hasan
- “God sets the solitary in families” - a brief teaching inspired by this true story of an ex-Muslim, homeless drug addict, who believed in Jesus
 
Hasan (left) with Nikos at the fellowship area of 'Shalom Center Athens' on June 22, 2012, a month after he received Jesus in his heart. Nikos mentored Hasan for the first 3 years.
Last week (Fri 9 Oct) I shared a call for help for this immigrant from Afghanistan who needs a place to stay, work for provision, and to find out where he belongs, so that he may finally settle, so that he may have a hope and a future.
 

A highly respected and greatly appreciated friend from Belgium responded to the call and made arrangements for a foundation from the Netherlands to provide a certain financial support for Hasan. This friend provides a part of the foundation’s resources.
 
The purpose of the support is for Hasan to be available to be used by the Lord to spread the Good News of Salvation through Jesus Christ to the Muslim immigrants.
 

Thanks is also due to another friend and her church in Innsbruck, Austria. They offered Hasan accommodation and some support until he could start a new life there, if he had chosen that option. He didn’t mainly because he cannot speak the German language.
 
Thanks to the financial support from Belgium and the Netherlands, we enrolled Hasan at
the School of Ministry “PISTIS”, directed by George Rigos, part of Keith Butler’s ministry. The financial support was pledged last Tuesday; the first day of this new School of Ministry that just opened up, and the new 2-year program (3 hours per evening, 4 days a week), started the day before. So Hasan started classes right from the start of the School.
Hasan was a homeless drug addict in the streets of Athens, when he responded to an evangelistic outreach by a group from ‘Shalom Center Athens’.

He started attending our fellowship, under the personal care and follow up by Nikos, who was Deacon at the time and later became the Assistant Pastor (until he got married and relocated to New York last month). 
Hasan responded to the Good News of Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, without knowing that God would save him not only from living in the streets and a certain death from drugs, but Jesus would actually set him in a spiritual family (Ecclesia) that would take care of him as a son.
 
Elenka leads worship at Shalom Center, and is a blessed grandmother, whose married son lives in Bulgaria. She took Hasan under her care as her own son, over the last 3 years that he has been with us, providing shelter, food and a mother’s care, even though she also lives on very little doing cleaning work.

Now that Elenka is moving to another place, Hasan needed to make a new start in his life. He would need to be able to support himself, but the economic conditions of the country do not allow him to have work. But the Lord had another plan for him, as He is preparing him for the work of the ministry. Praise God for divine plans!
Let us please keep Hasan in our prayers!
Now that he made the next major step of faith, to become prepared for the work of the ministry with emphasis among the Muslims, he needs all the prayers we can raise for him to be protected, to stand strong against temptations of life, to be able to complete the School of Ministry, to remain faithful to the end.
Jesus "sets the solitary in families"
 
The title is made up of two parts, the name of Jesus and a portion from:

Psalm 68:5 A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, [is] God in His holy habitation. 6 God sets the solitary in families; He brings out those who are bound into prosperity; But the rebellious dwell in a dry [land.]
 
I did not substitute the word “God” for Jesus, even though that would not have been entirely wrong. What I suggest is that this characteristic of God that King David praises in Psalm 68 is also repeated by Jesus in the New Testament within the setting of the Ecclesia.
 
As I have done in previous articles, I often choose the original word instead of “Church”, because “Ecclesia” literally meant “the assembly of people”, as opposed to religious organisations, charity and humanitarian work, buildings, cultural traditions apart from faith in God, etc.
 
The Ecclesia of Christ from the start was like a family setting; the believers met in homes, ate together, and shared everything like a family, having personal relationship with one another.
 
Acts. 2:41 Then those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them. 42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.
 
43 Then fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. 44 Now
all who believed were together, and had all things in common, 45 and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need.
 
46 So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.
 
[The word “church” in v.47 above would have been “ecclesia” as in all NT scriptures, except that it is not mentioned at all in the Critical Text in this verse.]
 
The family setting with personal relations among the believers seems unthinkable today when all major traditional churches as well as almost all of the modern protestant evangelical churches provide services for religious audiences, apart from personal relations (only in home groups there is space for personal relations).
 
Moreover, the concept of having all things in common and sharing according to need cannot even be considered as an option. Naturally so, when “Church” today is an audience of unrelated people attending a religious service. No one is willing to share with strangers, and that is probably right.
 
But the Jews of the early Ecclesia in Jerusalem lived a different lifestyle; one that was saturated by the Biblical context from the start of the Jewish nation, when they departed from Egypt.

They all knew their roots, how they were slaves in Egypt, till the night that God instructed Moses to slay the lamb per household, and apply the blood on the doorposts of their homes.
 
They knew that the salvation of their nation from slavery and their lives from Death depended on each one of them being inside their homes, together with their families, sharing the same lamb, under the protection of the same blood that was on the house.
Exod.12:3...‘On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of [his] father, a lamb for a household. 4 ‘And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take [it] according to the number of the persons;... 
7 ‘And they shall take [some]
of the blood and put [it] on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it.
In our modern days of individuality and self-exaltation, even the theology of salvation has been adjusted to fit man’s self-centered perceptions of the Gospel. Many Christians believe that the Blood of Jesus is applied on them personally, individually…
 
They do not have the eyes to see the scriptural foundation of salvation through the Blood of the Lamb of God that saves when the believers are inside the spiritual homes where God positions each one, as in a family.
 
The blood was on the doorposts of the houses, not on each one individually; the destroyer angel in Egypt did not pass over individuals, he passed over the houses that had the sign of the blood.

Exod.12:21 Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover [lamb.] 22 “And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip [it] in the blood that [is] in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that [is] in the basin. And none of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning.

23 “For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and
when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to strike [you.] 

So, the Scriptural foundation of our soteriological understanding of the Blood of the Lamb, is that it stops the destroyer from coming into the (spiritual) house of the (spiritual) family. It is the blood on the house that provides protection, not the blood apart from the protection of the house

["soteriology" is the theology of salvation, and the "house" represents the corporate identity of the spiritual family which is the basic cell of the Ecclesia of Christ].

Even Jesus, when He did the miracle of feeding the thousands, He first made them sit in groups:
 
Luke. 9:14 For there were about five thousand men. Then He said to His disciples, “Make them sit down in groups of fifty.” 15 And they did so, and made them all sit down. 16 Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the multitude. 17 So they all ate and were filled, and twelve baskets of the leftover fragments were taken up by them.
 
God knows that no individual sheep can survive alone in the fields where wolves are roaming about. The Bible instructs that we ought to encourage one another daily, to pray for each other, to lay hands on each other, to minister to each other with words of exhortation, to correct each other and speak truth to one another in love; even to submit to one another, to obey those who rule over us and lead us, and carry each other’s burdens…
 
You cannot do all these things that the Bible instructs us, except in a family setting where the members of the assembly are like members of a household.
 
I remember a lady, Donna, years ago in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was a prostitute but she gave her life to the Lord. The Holy Spirit touched her in an amazing way during a time that I ministered there; her hands were literally dripping oil!
 
There was not even one family in that Church that was willing to embrace Donna, stand with her, and help her walk in a new life with Christ.
 
We stayed in contact by email with Donna for a while, and I saw her when I went back for ministry. She wanted to quit the life of a prostitute, but she had nowhere to live. She lived in her car, and the only place where she could have any kind of social life was in the same bars where she hanged out before, with the same people who knew her as a prostitute.
 
I was very angry with the local Body of Christ. I had even written a letter to some people I knew there. But the local Body of Christ did not have any training or experience of what the real Ecclesia of Jesus Christ really ought to look like – a family!
 
They were content to know that someone gave their life to the Lord but failed to understand their own responsibility to help that person walk with Christ, and become able to stand on their own when they mature in the faith.
 
I don’t know what became of Donna in the end, but at one point she told me that she was back in the same lifestyle as before… the only life she knew. No one provided any kind of family setting for her to feel welcome to her new life, and be encouraged to stay the course.
 
Donna was not as lucky as Hasan… (to be continued)
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