February 2010 Prayer Letter

Below you'll find the text to our February prayer letter. If you'd like to receive these letters by email, please send me an email and I will add you to our list. If you'd like to view the letter with pictures, visit www.clfcostarica.com and click on "newsletters' Matt and Brooke...

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Greetings! We write to you this month with joy in our hearts for the great things God is doing in our family and in the ministry in Villareal.

We’d like to share our ministry vision with you this month and share with you what we are asking in faith of our God.

We recently took a tally of the number in weekly discipleship with us. We were surprised that the number was just a few short of fifty! We have lived here three months and in that very short time, God has blessed our obedience to follow Him here with so many eager, energetic, and on fire disciples that we are just completely overjoyed. And so we come before our God and ask Him to bless these disciples, to make them into fruit bearers, whose fruit bears more fruit so that what has begun with just fifty will result in much fruit.

About 35 of these fifty disciples live in Villareal. We’d like to share with you a concept we first read about in a book some time ago called “The Great Omission,” by Steve Saint. For this example, let’s assume that all fifty of our current disciples live in Villareal. Let’s also assume the discipleship process lasts about six months. If after six months of discipleship with us, these current 50 disciples were to each disciple one new believer for six months [and we took ourselves out of the equation], there would be 100 active disciples in Villareal after one year. If then, those 100 each began discipling a new believer, there would be 200 active disciples in eighteen months. Using the same system, there would be 400 active disciples at the end of 2 years. After 3 years, there would be 1,600 active disciples in Villareal. And to God’s glory, after 3 1/2 years, following this same pattern, Villareal, a city of about 3,000 people would be full of true disciples of Jesus Christ, following His commandment to go and make disciples!

If you compare this to one person sharing the gospel each day every day for the next three and half years, assuming one person each day accepts the Lord, the results are drastically different. After one year of sharing the gospel and one person each day accepting the Lord, there would be 365 new believers. After two years of this same process, there would be 730 new believers. After three years Villareal would be home to 1095 new believers. Finally, after 3 1/2 years of sharing the gospel every day, there would be 1,277 new brothers and sisters in Christ. The heavens would clearly rejoice for these new believers.

Our concern is what happens to these precious new believers if no one encourages their decision, their direction, their denial of self, the dying of oneself and their devotion to Christ (discipleship). This is what drives our passion to make disciples. We pray that you can embrace our vision as well. This is why we ask you to join us in praying for true disciples to be made in Villareal.

"Then He said to them all, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.’”
Luke 9:23