Peru: The Gospel Continues to Spread

UPDATE
Most of the remaining $600 I needed has been provided. Praise be to God who always provides. If you would still like to give, teams will be returning to Peru in the future, so please contact me. For now, I am taking down the Paypal link below.

Blog readers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, brothers and sisters,

The purpose of this post is this: to present you with an opportunity to partner with your fellow worker in the Gospel for the spread of the good news of Jesus Christ. Let me give you a brief history of my connections with Peru.

I traveled to the nation of Peru in 2007 (2 weeks) and 2008 (2 months). This year, from June 28-July 13 I will return to Peru. In 2007 I and others traveled to a small village called Huancapi and in 2008 a team stayed in a village in a different region: Laramate. Laramate and the surrounding towns have been “adopted” by a consortium of Baptist churches in the Central New York region. The team I was on in 2008 was among the first groups to visit Laramate and establish significant connections there. At the end of our stay in 2008, we recorded around 50 confessions of faith in Christ. In the time since my return from Peru, I have not had the chance to gain much information regarding the spiritual state of the people in Laramate. Multiple teams have visited Laramate since my departure in 2008. I am not sure how much fruit has been borne to God’s glory, simply due to lack of information. That said, I am eager to return and see how the Spirit has been moving in Laramate and also eager to proclaim the gospel and encourage the saints in Laramate.

When I soon return to Peru our team will continue the primary work we have done before: engage the people there in conversation and relationship and plant seeds of gospel teaching in their lives. We have previously done this through one on one meetings and Bible studies, often walking through the gospel of John.

Having now explained the trip and some background, I could tell you all the biblical reasons to give financially and pray for this endeavor, but I trust that you are familiar with those passages and teachings. More than anything, I want to give you a chance to:

1. Partner with me in spreading the gospel
2. Express generosity and pray with impudence (Luke 11:8)

That said, I plead for your prayers for the people of Laramate and the visiting missionaries more than anything. I am convinced that God moves when we petition him with our prayers in a shameless and frequent manner (Luke 11:5-8). Please pray frequently.

I forgot to mention this in the original post, but I am bringing a small library in Spanish from Desiring God set to present as a gift to a seminary in a city near Laramate. I am friends with the director of the seminary and I am really looking forward to surprising him with this gift.

The nitty-gritty:

 - Any questions? Please email me (trevormarsteller at gmail dot com). If you would like to talk with me, I can arrange a Skype call.
 - At present I am unsure of the ability to use these donations via Paypal as a tax-writeoff. If you have questions about this, I can dig into it further.
 - Paypal charges some fees for using their services (2.9% per transaction + $.30). I will personally add money to the Peru fund to make up for these charges.

New Blog Schedule

Hey everyone, I have been thinking lately that I would like to be a better blogger in many ways so I am going to be stepping back from writing for a while (and posting random things) in the interest of getting a plan together for writing well. I imagine this will look like 1-2 thought out original posts per week from myself and then sporadic links to other blogs throughout the week.

So, until the new schedule takes effect, the "Daily Gospel" posts will become less, well, daily. (Don't stop beating the gospel into your head though!)

If you would like to read my thoughts on any specific topic, please leave a comment. I would be more than glad to accommodate any requests I receive.

A new venture: Daily Gospel

I was re-visiting an excellent article by Jerry Bridges this past weekend in the midst of some spiritual darkness and was greatly helped. The article is titled, "Gospel-Driven Sanctification," and can be found here. I highly commend the article to you all.

Bridges raises a number of memorable points in the article, but let's take a look at one thing I was especially captured by:

Gradually over time, and from a deep sense of need, I came to realize that the gospel is for believers, too. When I finally realized this, every morning I would pray over a Scripture such as Isaiah 53:6," All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all," and then say, "Lord, I have gone astray. I have turned to my own way, but you have laid all my sin on Christ and because of that I approach you and feel accepted by you."

I came to see that Paul's statement in Galatians 2:20, "The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me," was made in the context of justification (see vv. 15-21). Yet Paul was speaking in the present tense: "The life I now live ...." Because of the context, I realized Paul was not speaking about his sanctification but about his justification. For Paul, then, justification (being declared righteous by God on the basis of the righteousness of Christ) was not only a past-tense experience but also a present-day reality.

I was struck most powerfully by reading this as I saw the need to fill my heart and soul with gospel meditations daily - ideally before I engaged the world for the day.

Later in the article Bridges commends us to preach the gospel to ourselves daily. This is something that I see as an unparallelled need for my soul, living, joy, and all manner of my interactions and thoughts which occur throughout the day. If I do not begin my day with thinking about and actively meditating on the gospel, I will largely come to the end of that day joyless, useless, empty, or some combination thereof.

That being said, I would like to undertake a new venture for this blog. Lord willing, I will post a short Scripture, quote, hymn or some other gospel-centric content on the blog each morning. This will be done first for the help of my own soul (I shouldn't write for the sake of writing) with the goal of making Christ and his gospel my joy and focus. I believe Piper's maxim, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him," is certainly relevant to this endeavor. If along the way, some of you readers are helped, glory be to God.

This is madness...

...No. THIS IS FINALS WEEK!!!

Now that I am a graduate student everything conveniently comes crashing down in a 3 day timeframe as opposed to the week or so of dare I say, the madness of undergraduate finals. Sunday I will be finished. In the meantime I will be pulling a Leonidas and slaying some serious Persian invaders in the form of marketing essays, exams, and Excel projects. All while working a job that starts at 6am.

Expect a post on something great by Monday at the latest!

Incoming

I have been slacking this week and last on blogging. Forgive me, my few readers. I do have an idea that might be beneficial for your edification: The next series of blog posts will be just that, a series, on Galatians 3:1-5. Oh, and I am preaching my first sermon on that this Sunday at the Baptist Campus Ministries at Syracuse University. That being said, expect some in-depth, hopefully pithy, and beneficial words from yours truly as I have been attempting through my first shot at expository preaching.

I have a Star Wars analogy in the sermon. No comment.