It is good to remember how Christ came to us as a baby but let’s not keep Him there. Let us look beyond the food and tinsel and remember, today He dwells in us through the Holy Spirit. As we learned in the lesson that I taught last week, “If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.” This will be our last Christmas here in PNG so we thought we would give this Christmas letter a PNG flavour by decorating it with some PNG flowers.
Our network was out when we came back on Friday, so I didn’t get this letter out before today. This time I took a Mexican, Isaac Hermadez, up with me. Isaac is waiting for co-workers, then they will decide where they will go and what kind of ministry they will be involved in. When we arrived, we met Samue from Flegokonalo, (the village across the river from us). He said that he was going to sleep there that night and go across to his village in the morning, so we decided that we would go with him. That night’s lesson was from Romans 8:10-13 where Paul talks about our bodies growing old and dying but our spirits being alive. But even our bodies will be raised and changed when Jesus returns. But verses 12 and 13 gives a warning. We can choose to live our lives the way we want to and indulge our sinful nature but this road ends in death. There were some there who had not made a clear profession of faith in Christ so I am praying that the Holy Spirit will use God’s to convict them with the need to put their trust in what Christ did for them on the cross.

The next morning Samue came at six o’clock while we were just crawling out of bed ☹. We decided that we would go with him and have breakfast when we come back. We had just had a dry spell, so the river wasn’t very deep. It is usually about a half hour walk (for them😊) but it took me more than half an hour!!☹. There was a fairly steep climb up to the village, so I took my time. Just about the whole village got together and let Isaac know that they wanted missionaries to come to live there (The village leaders had approached me the week before and asked for missionaries to come and live there). I made it clear to them that he was just looking and that he will be looking at other places too so there was no guarantee that he would be coming there. We don’t want them to be getting false hopes. Some of the young people took Isaac around the village then up to the top of the hill behind the village where there is a good view around the area. We then came back and had breakfast. Sevis came and we did some translation and lesson checking. That night we did the lesson again but put more emphasis on asking questions. There were quite a few there who hadn’t been to the teaching before so we pray that God will use this to give them a desire to hear more.
With love from
David and Wendy