The Big Announcement

The Big Announcement is Coming in Just

Days!

St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church of Washington, DC and OrthodoxBookstore.org have a very important announcement about a new project that has been in the works for several months now and is sure to help spread the word of God to all the ends of the earth! Stay tuned!

The Mission in Jerusalem

This past Friday, my roommate came with me to a bible study at the church in Queens. He’s the one that actually initiated it, I mean I had seen him at a couple of the meetings of the Christian Organization at Stevens (my college) and we had had multiple conversations about Christianity and the lost arc, and because our church is in a fast for the apostles, he noticed that my eating habits were different, but he bluntly came up to me and said, “I’d really like to go to church with you sometime.” I didn’t want to be overly anxious or anything, but our church is a very traditional church, so we agreed that we would go to a Friday night bible study. This bible study let me tell you, is one of the greatest treasures of New York, so I was confident about it. At this point, I should mention that my roommate is one of the most educated and well read people I have ever met, and we had discussed many times Christianity in a very scholarly manner.

Personally, in my time in Africa, God revealed how I was taking my faith in a very scholarly fashion: I was reading books, attending bible studies, learning hymnology – learning about God. But that wasn’t enough – in fact, it didn’t count for anything in the mission. The only thing that was beneficial was just to spend time with God, and to open my heart to earnestly seek Him. This was something that I struggled with the entire time in Africa and afterward. It is ironic how God uses others in our lives and us in the lives of others. It wasn’t until after Africa, when I started rooming, that it started to make sense. The knowledge isn’t bad, in fact, its necessary, but the knowledge itself produces no fruit – in fact, it produces frustration and hardness of heart. It’s like what St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2 – that we must be the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ.

But anyways, near the end of the bible study, my friend had questions that him and I had discussed, but he continued to struggle with, that were hindering him from really selling out for Christ. So he asked these questions, questions that probably have hindered many Christians that we are afraid to ask for fear of their not being an answer. Our priest answered these questions with the most confident, clear, and logical answers that I have ever heard, and even though my roommate is still doubtful, the answer for those questions strengthened me and everyone else who was there, to stop the seeds of doubt from growing into trees that harden our hearts. It also made me realize another trick of the adversary, to make us fearful of not finding an answer, to prey on our faintness of heart and faith – but we need to test our faith, to go to God expecting an active response, because our God is not a dead God or one that has left, but one actively and continually giving us grace to spend time with Him and receive power through His son, Jesus Christ. That is the way to prove our faith and to show it to others, not through endless arguments of human logic.