This is a sermon that was recorded at our church recently during the tour of New Zealand by Patrick Sookhdeo of the Barnabas Fund. It is published here with Dr Sookhdeo's permission.
This talk covers the entire evening including an introduction by Peter McKenzie, an overview of the projects and work that the Barnabas fund is doing around the world followed by Patricks presentation.
If you can, I recommend listening to the entire talk by all three speakers. If you want to skip to a specific speaker the times are:
- Peter McKenzie – Introduction (Start- 8 minutes 30 seconds)
- Caroline Kerslake (Director of Projects, Barnabas Fund) – 8:30-40:22)
- Patrick Sookhdeo – Psalm 31 – 40:22-end.
The entire audio is just under an hour and a half.
Caroline's talk is an eye opener that examines some of the issues faced by Christians in minority countries around the world (that is countries where Christians are a minority). Christians in many countries have very hard lives and live with a knife at their throats. The Barnabas fund is working to help these believers by supplying them food and even livestock to help them live and work. It is a great work that they do, and well worth supporting.
As noted above Patrick spoke from Psalm 31 and highlighted three themes from this Psalm and related it to what Christians around the world are experiencing and at the same time learning. He explained five challenges that are faced by Christians in Iraq to explain distress, reinforcing what Caroline had said earlier, then he explained the role that trust plays in the lives of these believers – that they have nothing to do but simply leave their lives in the hands of the Lord.
He closed by saying "distress leads to trust, trust leads to love, love carries hope – we are not in despair".
As believers in the west where we have freedom and abundance, we owe it to our brothers and sisters in Christ to listen to this message and be convicted by the faith and distress of others in Christ and to be convicted to love them and provide however we can.
You can download the message from here.
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