A week of many blessings. That is how I would describe the days from Good Friday through the following week. Our Good Friday worship is unique in Taiwan. I know of no other Christian churches that have a Good Friday worship opportunity in Taiwan. We always have worship on Friday evenings and so we are yearly blessed with the chance to observe and review what all our Lord Jesus did to redeem us. How can you celebrate on Easter without having spiritually passed through Good Friday?

This year we did something different for Good Friday. One of our members made a styrofoam cross that stood 8ft high with a cross beam that was about 5 feet long. When worshippers came to church I gave them instructions for spending some pre-service time in meditation and confession and then asked them to confess their sin to God by writing them down on a red ribbon of paper. They were not to sign their names and were assured that no one would read them. Later in the service each worshipper came forward, nailed their ’sin ribbon’ to the cross and then the communicants recieved the Lord’s Supper and the others were verbally assured that in Jesus their sins were forgiven. Following the service we viewed the ‘Passion’ movie (Mel Gibson). It was midnight when I returned home.

Saturday AM our members boarded a bus for the mountians near Taipei for a joint Easter weekend worship service. It rained all weekend! We first stopped at the zoo for a few hours and then went to the retreat center on Yang Ming Mountain. Saturday evening we had a praise hour of singing songs and then Evangelist Chen DyanMing shared two doctrinal powerpoints he had prepared. One was on the doctrine of justification and the other on original sin. It was nice for me to hear him verbalize his understanding of these Bible teachings. He did a very good job, though it was not perhaps the most exciting activity for some of the kids and some of the adults. It was helpful for me however to see where he was at with his understanding of these important doctrines.

Easter Sunday morning I was up early to work through my sermon for the morning worship service. I thank God for the opportunity to share with the 100 who gathered for worship from our 4 churches in Taiwan. Christ is risen and because he is forgiveness, a meaningful life now and forever in heaven are ours. The Easter gospel is good news we have and must share that others may also come to know Jesus as Savior! Share it! God bless!!