Lynn Green

Category: Current Events

  • United Nations, Israel and Settlements

    United Nations, Israel and Settlements

    Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

    **This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**

    The United Nations has condemned Israel for continuing to build settlements in the West Bank.  The motion carried because the USA turned away from its usual policy of vetoing motions that censure Israel.  However, with President Obama in his last few weeks of office, he instructed his UN ambassador to take a stance which probably more accurately reflects his, and his administration’s, true feelings on the subject.  Relations between Israel, and especially between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama are distant and cold.

    This will be a largely symbolic gesture because President-Elect Trump has already stated that “things will be different after January 20th”, when he takes office.  We have reason to assume that President Trump and his government will be considerably more supportive of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.

    The General Assembly of the UN has long been obsessed with condemning Israel.  In 2015, for example, it entertained 20 motions criticizing Israel and 3 for the rest of the world!  The other three consisted of one for North Korea, one for Iran and one for the Syrian regime of Assad.  Given the number of tyrannical governments in the world and the absence of basic human rights in scores of nations, this represents an almost laughable and cynical hypocrisy.

    But I wonder how Daoud feels about all this?  I met him some years ago near where he lives, just outside Bethlehem in the West Bank which is Palestinian Territory.  Daoud lives on his family farm which consists mostly of olive groves.  Unusually for such an oral society, he has authentic deeds for the farm dating back to the nineteenth century during Ottoman times.

    One day he heard a disturbance in his olive grove and went to investigate.  Orthodox Jews, recently immigrated from the USA, were setting up camp on his farm.  He told them to get off his land, but they threatened him with automatic rifles. The Palestinian courts have no real authority to decide on these matters (think about that!) so he took his case to the Israeli judicial authorities.

    The legal process moved slowly and was very expensive.  Meanwhile, a large perimeter of razor wire was erected by the settlers and they began to bulldoze the trees which were hundreds of years old and the most valuable asset Daoud and family owned.  Then the Israeli Defense Force sent soldiers to guard the perimeter which kept expanding into the family farm.

    When I last spoke to him he said he had spent about three times the value of the property just trying to hold onto the family land.  (Few of us in the West have ever lived, as a family, on one piece of land over a period of hundreds of years so we don’t readily identify with the depth of attachment they feel.)  However, the courts just kept creating more and more procedures for him to comply with before they would make a decision.  When we talked, that had been going on for years.  I so admired his determination to prevent this dispute from becoming violent, even though he is unlikely to ever get justice.

    So, that is just one story of how a settlement can start and how it impacts those who already live on the land.  As anyone knows, every story is different and some claims are bogus, but there are thousands of displaced families.

    Is this right?  Is the government of Israel fulfilling the divine mandate to all governments to create a just society? (1 Peter 2:13,14)  Or does that only apply to Jews who live in Israel?

    Oh, I didn’t mention that Daoud and his family are a “disappearing breed” in the Middle East–they are committed Christians.  He told me that he was explaining his situation to a group of Christians visiting from an evangelical church and they gently explained that he had no right to live on his family farm but should move to another country because God had given the land to the Jews.

    Is that our best answer?  Does that take into account what Paul wrote about who is a true Jew?  In Romans 2:28,29 he writes, “For you are not a true Jew just because you were born of Jewish parents or because you have gone through the ceremony of circumcision. No, a true Jew is one whose heart is right with God.”  Does this scripture apply to Daoud and family or is it set aside because he is Palestinian?

    It seems that quite a number of Christians feel we have an obligation to support Israel unconditionally–so we can be blessed!  Doesn’t that simply set aside the New Covenant in Christ Jesus in favour of the Abrahamic Covenant?  But Paul addresses that in Romans  too.  He goes to lengths to explain that Abraham was justified before God by faith, not by the law of circumcision.

    So, before we assume that we, our nation or nations, should unconditionally support Israel, we should do some of the hard work required to search the scriptures and understand the issues, then grapple with them in prayer and thought.  It’s not a simple process!  I well remember the struggle I went through after walking the length of Israel twice and meeting Jews and Arabs alike and listening to their stories.  As I tried to make scriptural sense of it all, I thought and prayed and read the Bible and worked on it for days as I stayed by the Sea of Galilee.  I eventually came to some conclusions and have worked since then to keep adjusting my thoughts to new information and more study of the Scriptures.

    Finally, I don’t want to leave anyone in doubt:  I believe the modern state of Israel came into existence by the will of God and I believe it has continued to exist by His will–although not because it is a Godly nation.  It is a modern, secular, Western nation founded on socialist assumptions and its people are from very diverse religious backgrounds.  

    Very few Israeli citizens have a faith in Jesus, under 20,000 out of 8 million citizens. An increasing number are Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, nearly a million, and they are outspoken in their rejection of Jesus and the Christian message.  Sometimes the “support” a nation needs is of a prophetic nature.  The prophets of the Old Testament very often blessed Israel by clearly defining their sins, but they could only do that with God’s anointing if they loved the nation and the people sacrificially, even to the point of death.

    Israel needs friends like that today.

    Lynn Green.

  • Is it too late for Hagar and Ishmael to Return to the Table?

    Is it too late for Hagar and Ishmael to Return to the Table?

    **This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**

    What an odd question!  But there is a reason for it and I need to explain.

    Many people would rightly trace the complex enmity in the Middle East all the way back to Abraham and Sarah’s household 4000 years ago.  You probably remember that Sarah was barren and yet God had promised Abraham that he would have a son.  Sarah knew she was getting too old, so she asked her husband to sleep with her Egyptian maid Hagar, and Ishmael, father of the Arabs was born and was a joy to his father.

    More than a decade later, Sarah did conceive and Isaac, father of Jews, was born.  Tension in the family between the two mothers and their sons became unbearable and Sarah demanded that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away.  You can read the story in Genesis 21.  But also notice in Genesis 17 that Ishmael was blessed by God and made part of the covenant with Abraham when they, and all the men of their household, were circumcised as a sign of that promise of blessing.Hagar and IshmaelThat is the ancient story, and it still influences our world today.  And that brings me to the title question.  Is it too late for reconciliation between these two branches of the Abrahamic family?  If it is even remotely possible, how could it start?  Countless attempts have been made and all have failed.

    Jesus made some startling promises to his followers and one of those was, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  That promise of authority is then repeated frequently repeated in the epistles.  In other words, in the right circumstances of obedience to God’s direction, we can exercise governmental authority.  When God speaks, and we obey in faith, we can change the world.

    This brings me to events that occurred this week on a small holiday island in Thailand.  We were about 150 people from 25 nations.  We were not drawn together by an organization; what we had in common was a deep sense of family love and God’s direction on our lives.  Some have walked together for twenty years or more and others were there for the first time but came because they were convinced that the Holy Spirit wanted them there.  You might say these 150 were a microcosm of the Body of Christ—Chinese, South African, Canadian, Japanese, Korean, German etc.  For the first time, there was a strong group from Egypt, along with Israeli leaders from the Messianic movement. The Lord is preparing the Church to be a bride fit for The King and the movement this group represented is one of the many unprecedented expressions of His work on the earth. We are in the epoch of the “last days”; how long it will be no one knows, but it is marked by turmoil, suffering and powerful growth of the Kingdom of God.  The Bridegroom is coming!

    Back to the 150 men and women in Thailand:  though this movement started more than 20 years ago in Canada under the leadership of an Egyptian medical doctor, much of the focus of the past several years has been on East Asia with many gatherings of believers, sometimes numbering more than 20,000 people.  These very large gatherings are the more visible manifestations of a deep work of unity and family love among leaders of millions of Christians in China and Korea and Japan and the many nations of that region.

    Meanwhile the Holy Spirit has spread this fire of love to other parts of the world as diverse as Guatemala and South Africa, but the spotlight has begun to focus on the Middle East and also Europe.  I believe the strength of what God has done with the East Asians is a force for breakthrough in these other parts of the world.  The Church in China, having been purified and made strong by suffering, is particularly powerful in prayer, often acting as “midwives” to the birth of new unity and love in other nations and between nations.  They are prepared to travel in their thousands to other nations to pray and travail until they prevail in God’s purposes for the nations.  This is the nature of Chinese spiritual leadership for this season.

    And so we came to worship, enjoy family ties across the tribes and nations and to ask God what he wanted to say to us.  On the face of it, that seems an extravagant thing to do—people flying half way around the world in some cases, to spend four days together with no other agenda than to worship and wait on God.  But, remember those amazing promises of God—that His people can have the authority to change the order of things in the unseen world.  When things change in that dimension, it impacts the earth.

    From the first session there was a very strong sense that this was one of those occasions, quite rare in my experience, when the Holy Spirit grants governmental authority to a group of His people.  That means that He can lead us to ask and believe for things that are on His agenda and they will be done.  As is often the case, the spiritual momentum grew each day until there was a great sense of authority on the last day.  That did not come without a price though.

    God-given authority is safest in the hands of humble people who only want what He wants.  So there were times of public confession, tears and joy.  As is so often the case, some of the Chinese led the way a acknowledging that they were often a fractious people, used to fighting against the odds and sometimes fighting each other.  All of us grew to love them more as some of them confessed that they had been alienated from one another, but now were reconciled by God’s loving transformation of their hearts.  The confessions were deeply personal, emotional and public.

    The atmosphere then changed to one of governmental authority to loose God’s purposes on earth.  The Holy Spirit directed us to address the issue of women’s freedom to be all that God intended for them.  Women make up the majority of the Body of Christ globally but they are often reduced to a shadow of what God intended for them as men hold them back and dominate them.

    Almost as if to demonstrate what the Lord intended for women, when the subject was the enmity in the Middle East, the women took the lead.  Egyptian women willingly identified with Hagar and confessed the rejection, envy and resentment she felt when Abraham cast her out of the family as Sarah demanded.  (This spirit of rejection has dogged the Arab peoples every generation since.  Those who have been set free from it are often magnificent people, but the ethnic type prevails.)   Agonised tears were wept by the Egyptians and everyone else as we experienced a measure of those emotions.  They confessed that they had hated and mocked “Isaac” and his offspring.

    Then an Israeli mother stepped forward to plead, “There are two empty places at our family table.  Won’t you come home?  Our family is not complete.  Isaac needs his older brother, who was blessed by God first.”  These words I have used don’t begin to express the depth of significance and emotion of the moment. I hope you can imagine a bit of the atmosphere.

    Some people will no doubt think, “So what?  It might have been a touching moment for a small group of people, but what difference does it make?”  I understand that, and in human terms it will make little difference.  But if God was really speaking to and through those women, as the rest of the 150 felt at the time, then it will make a big difference.  How will we know?

    The Lord often starts to change the world with just one person and then He draws in others who are in the place of obedience to Him and will walk in unity and love.  Then what they do will spread to larger groups, then even larger groups, until the change is felt widely.

    I have had the privilege of participating in many events where Jews and Arabs have come together in Christ-centred unity and this was the deepest time yet.  God is on the move in unexpected ways.  Never in history have so many Arabs come to faith in Jesus, but many of them have been soaked in a cultural atmosphere of hatred for Israel and Jews, but the Holy Spirit is making the Bride of Christ ready for the Marriage Supper and the usual national, ethnic and tribal hatreds cannot continue.  We are approaching the time “when the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come Lord Jesus, come!”

    I am writing as I travel back to London and the world around me looks the same as it did a few days ago, but in my spirit I know there have been some big changes in the unseen world and those changes will be worked out visibly in due course.  Please remember these believers as they return to their countries, especially in the Middle East where it is dangerous to not hate “the enemy”.

    Also note that one of the larger global gatherings will be held in Jerusalem, November 7-11.  If you yearn to worship with the nations, to just be in God’s Presence with no agenda but His; if you hunger to be with some of the great Chinese family of God, with Israeli believers, as well as Egyptians and other Arabs, ask the Lord if He wants you to go.  A website will soon be available; just do a search for Global Gathering Jerusalem 2016.

  • Tired of reading about refugees?

    Tired of reading about refugees?

     

    **This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**

    The river keeps running at full flow.  The numbers of people fleeing Syria can hardly be counted, let alone contained.  But we have to add to that the Afghans, Libyans and Iraqis who have given up hope that their nations will stabilize.  Then there are the economic refugees from various parts of Africa and the steady “brain-drain” of Christians from Egypt and other parts of the Arab world.

    We will have to keep reading and hearing about it because it is one of the great, human tectonic shifts of our world.  It will keep flowing for a long time.  And it is changing our world.

    Within that big, attention-grabbing mass movement of suffering people, there are a number of sub-stories that are worth some attention.  One of those stories is the very large number of Muslims who have become, or want to become Christians.

    The Greek government noticed that story a few weeks ago and responded by shutting down faith-based aid groups in the Athens area.  I understand that.  It is a form of manipulation or exploitation to try to persuade people to change their religion when they are desperate—right?  I assume that was the tone of discussions behind the doors of Greek politicians.  Most European, and probably most American, politicians would take that view.

    Again, I understand that IF:

    Christian aid agencies were only offering assistance to Christian and withholding it from others.

    Threats were issued.

    Longer term benefits, such as residency was being offered to converts. Refugees were being forced to listen to propaganda against their will.

    I now know of at least 200 volunteers from YWAM alone, who are helping these same refugees and there will be thousands of other Christian volunteers.  If I visited every location where these Christians are working, I doubt that I would find even one instance of the practices I have just listed.  I say that because such practices are simply not Christian and Christians know that.

    I think there are some reasons why it is good and right to present the Christian message to refugees.  Evangelism, after all, means “good news”.  So here are the reasons.

    1. Many of those who are fleeing are looking for a new life.  Their governments and their religion have failed them.  They would like some good news.
    2. One of the amazing sub-stories is the hundreds or thousands of people who have had visions, or dreams or experiences of healing or miracles where Jesus is the central figure. There is something supernatural going on here.  God is answering the prayers and labours of recent decades or even the prayers and sacrifices of Christians for centuries and many Muslims want to know more about Jesus.  (And remember, they already revere him more than most of our fellow citizens in the secular Western nations.)
    3. It is not uncommon for people to come to faith when they are in very difficult circumstances. Desperation can result in a deep, heart honesty leading to faith.
    4. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

    When Article 18 was adopted in 1948, many Muslim nations signed it, including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.

    When a nation or religion tries to withdraw that right, they are in violation of one of the most foundational documents in history.  Not only that, but they are encroaching upon a universal right that was extended by our Creator.  He gave the issues of personal beliefs and conscience to each individual and each individual will be accountable to their Creator for their beliefs, how they obeyed their conscience and the choices they made.

    Tyranny is when a religion or government (or any other authority) attempts to coerce people at the level of their personal beliefs.  The river of human misery flowing primarily from the heart of the Arab, Muslim world is fleeing the spread of that exact brand of tyranny.  Can we, in good conscience, withhold from them the wonderful faith that first gave birth to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

    Jesus said, “Freely you have received.  Freely give!”  This precious gift should be available to all.

    Lynn Green.

  • Long Live Secretaries!

    Long Live Secretaries!

     

    **This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**

    For the past 43 years my wife and I have worked with a person who knows she has a high calling.  God gave her gifts for this calling, and the ministry she has exercised fits who she is and gives her a sense of fruitfulness and satisfaction.  That is the way it is supposed to be in God’s economy; he designs us with specific qualities to match His plans for us and to make us fit well with others who have different abilities.

    A few years before she came to YWAM, she trained and then practised as an executive secretary.  When she arrived I had no idea how much she would change our lives and increase our effectiveness.  In those days secretaries were honoured in the workplace; it was a respected and essential position in most companies and organisations.   Secretarial skills required time and hard work to perfect, and anyone aspiring to that role had to be intelligent with good social skills.  They had to have good spelling, grammar and typing and they had to master shorthand—a completely different way of writing!  They also had to be able to keep confidences, be a source of wisdom in sensitive conversations, and extend a sense of welcome to anyone contacting their office and the person they served.

    In my case, my secretary also had to train me and I am sure that more than one “boss” was mentored by his or her secretary.  I had never dictated letters before and it was an uncomfortable exercise.  When I had finished a paragraph and she had taken it down in shorthand, I would sometimes ask, “How did that sound?”  She often replied with a gentle correction, “Perhaps you could say it this way….”  Then, when I was finished, she knew exactly how to layout a good letter and type it without mistakes.  She also had the skills to sit in a board meeting, take notes and produce an accurate record of the meeting in the form of minutes.  What a treasure!

    Then, along came personal computers, personal digital assistants, smart phones and some wonderful communication tools.  It seemed secretaries were no longer needed.  But I recently read an article where the author expressed how many people feel these days.  She wrote that she has five PDAs, including Siri and Cortana, but complained, “so why do I get so little done?”  It’s because she doesn’t have a secretary!   No digital assistant can do what a secretary does.

    God designed us so that we need one another.  When Paul wrote to the Romans and Ephesians, he made it clear that we can only live well and fruitfully when we see ourselves as part of a body (or you could say team).  God has designed people with a wide array of gifts, and no number of digital assistants can come close to the effectiveness of people working together according to the gifts God has given.

    The letter to the Romans lists a number of ministry gifts in Chapter 12 and the second one is the gift of helping:  “If your gift is serving others, serve them well.”  A good and contented secretary will almost certainly have the gift of service.  If that person has applied themselves diligently and acquired the skills of a secretary, then their service will “bear much fruit”, as the scriptures say.

    At this stage of our lives, Marti and I spend quite a lot of our time training younger leaders and we get to know their joys and their pressures.  One of the most common pressures is stress and stress often comes from doing tasks we are not gifted or skilled to do.  Many people who carry leadership responsibility actually spend much of their time, typing emails and texts, organizing their schedule, coordinating dates and invitations and other arrangements for meetings, booking transportation,  keeping accounts and many other administrative tasks.  Good leaders rarely have the gifts and skills to do those things well; they need others to serve with them.

    On the other hand, I think there are those who do have the gifts to do those essential administrative tasks, but they are often not available.  Why?  Perhaps it is because we think digital tools have made secretaries redundant so people with the gift of service are no longer drawn to that role.  There is probably a more likely reason.  Paul addressed it in some measure when he wrote about spiritual gifts in his letter to the Corinthians.  He said it rather bluntly when he said, “In fact some of the parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary.”  Given the way people think, some of the spiritual or ministry gifts get more honor than others.  Those who have a healing gift, or a leadership gift, or a teaching gift, get recognition and honor because they use their gift in public.  Not so for those who serve at a desk.

    We are created with a need for some measure of recognition and honor; it’s not wrong to feel that need.  So, as Paul suggested, those with the gift of helps should be given special honor.  If we honor that part of the body more, then we will see more people using the gift of service they have been given and some of those will also put in the effort and hours to acquire secretarial skills.

    I can now look back on 45 years of ministry in YWAM.  Because God gave me a wife who is both a secretary and a very good organiser, and Terry, a secretary who is highly skilled and has served with us for 43 years, we have been immeasurably more fruitful then we could ever have been otherwise.  Many people who know me think I have been very fruitful but it’s simply not true.

    We have been fruitful! I am part of a body/team and, as we have all worked according to our gifts, fitted together with one another in harmony, we have indeed been very fruitful decade after decade.

    Long live secretaries!

    Lynn Green.