January 15-21

Last Monday was the start of Bible Institute. I began for Dennis Flower who was still in the States after his father passed away. I taught the class on Monday and Wednesday about Church History. We have a good group of about 10 students who will be studying this trimester. This week we have also been doing some work on the house. I hired a mason to come and build some walls. We started with a wall at the back of the property to replace the old fence. And then we are building two walls down in the basement to take advantage of the space better. One will create a storage area and the other will give us a room where we can have homeschool. Up until now we have used one corner of the basement, but it was impossible to heat. This will also be a space that we can take advantage of for the church.

On Sunday we had our normal group from here. It was the first time Maria Eugenia and Sergio were here on a Sunday since the Christmas break began. We started a new series of messages on the book of Galatians. Besides looking at the background information on the epistle, we looked at the salutation. We noted the three major themes of the book that appear in those verses (a re-presentation of the gospel, a defense of Paul's apostleship, and a treatise on the Christian's liberty) as well as the specific emphasis on the gospel: Christ died for our sins to rescue us from this present age because it was the will of God. After the service we took the kids and went downtown for a parade and to pass out some tracts. Unfortunately we didn't see much of the parade, because it hadn't started yet, but we got to pass out some tracts. In the evening we all met at Maria Eugenia's house and continued our study on the church. We were noting where the early church met, when they met, and how they made decisions. All of this is very important in creating a Biblical idea of the church.