May 2019 E-newsletter

Into China for Christ

Copy for GCC Communique/GL E-newsletter

By Jeff Wilson

IMPORTANT NOTE: We must change names and partially cover faces in photos to protect this outreach!

We can't tell you their names. We can't show you their picture. But we CAN tell you their story and the amazing way God is using these two dedicated members of our Georgia-Cumberland Conference and how God can use you.

Joe and Jan Smith* live in rural East Tennessee. Recently they were about to travel for three months on a personal missionary tour into China and wanted to make sure their estate plan was updated and complete. And it is the rest of the story that came before our Grateful Living Representative met to assist them that is one of God's Amazing Stories

Sometime ago, the Smiths felt impressed after much prayer to travel to China to share their faith. They had no definite plans, but were impelled by the Holy Spirit to go, all on their own at their own expense. After arriving in China and knowing only a few words of Chinese, they prayed as they walked the streets for a way to impact those they passed on the busy thoroughfares.

One day, several young people came up to them and in broken English inquired, "Do you speak English? Would you converse with us?"

These college students invited the Smith's to a restaurant and peppered them with questions. Anything so that they could grow in learning conversational English.

Cell phone numbers were exchanged and the students invited them to visit their dormitory at the government university several hundred kilometers away. After the Smiths traveled to that city, the students picked them up with a van at the train station and arriving at the university, showed them Bibles printed in Chinese on the left page and the English on the right page. Providentially the university's English department was using bilingual Bibles as textbooks.

The Smith's suddenly had the tool they needed to give doctrinal Bible studies! And they had an enthusiastic audience of students drinking in every English word freighted with Bible truth about the saving grace of Jesus Christ and His soon return!

Please pray for the Smiths and for their work as they spend the next three months following the Holy Spirit's leading to some of the 1,420,000,000 hungry souls in China.

The Smith's worked with the Grateful Living department of the Georgia Cumberland Conference to establish an estate plan. Most members wish to remember aspects of God's work in their estate plan. They, like the Smiths, recognize that God is the owner of all. And it is our privilege to return to the Lord a portion of what He has so graciously loaned us during life.

And if you would like to follow the Smith's example in Christian estate planning, please contact the Grateful Living department.

*Names changed. Such information would seriously jeopardize both their work and their freedom, as well as those whom they are reaching for Christ.