The Scarlet Cord - Moriel Ministries

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Moriel Israel Elon and Hadass Moreh Northern Galilee July 2012 Dear Friends, Greetings from the sunny and somewhat sweaty Mediterranean coast, where Hadas and I gasp and drip our way through Summer. Here are some things that are happening. As the Lord leads, please take it upon your hearts to pray. For the time being at least (until more babies are sent our way) Hadas’s childminding services are not needed. So she is feeling the need to find other ways to serve and looking for the Lord to open other doors. Please pray for her. Because of her dyslexia, Hadas has always had problems with Hebrew. Her understanding has grown but her ability to express herself is severely limited. Anything in Hebrew I usually take care of, but am naturally more reserved and less talkative than she. We make an odd couple, but the Lord is bigger than our limitations and we would appreciate your prayers for ways to develop relationships with our mostly Hebrew-speaking neighbors and even people we meet on the street. For example, twice a day at least we walk with our funny little dog. Just some days ago a lady stopped us and, smiling, said in Hebrew, “I see you from my flat regularly and that dog gets more walking than I do!” The following night as we stepped out again with Doggy, we heard a shout from above, and there was the lady waving and calling from her balcony. Please pray that the Lord will give us opportunities to open our lives and develop genuine relationships and friendships with people like these, that we can serve our neighbors and also that a door will be opened to share about the Savior of Israel. Congregation Or HaGalil (Light Of The Galilee) Ephraim Goldstein (http://www.cjfm. org/about-us/intl-representatives/efraimgoldstein.html) has been appointed leader, and at long last the congregation has a permanent pastor. Ephraim is a very mature believer with many years experience in outreach activity as well as nurturing believers and encouraging growth in the Lord. He is highly respected and of good repute here in the Land. There is eager anticipation to see how things will develop under his hand. He should be formally inducted at some point in the coming months. I would say most are very pleased indeed about his coming to Nahariya, and perhaps we will also begin to see some greater inroads into the local community. Please pray for him and his wife Jeannie, that they will quickly become a part of the furniture here and have a fruitful and blessed ministry. Sad Departure With sadness we recount that one of our young couples is leaving Israel and returning to South America. Our soldier and his wife are leaving for Brazil at the end of August. Economic conditions here are harsh for young families who are not at the top of the employment tree, and state assistance is minimal. (Bituakh Leumi (National Insurance) agency here is considered to be one of the most obstructive, inhuman, truculent and notoriously stupid of all our government bodies, barring of course our (equally infamous and universally loathed) Interior Ministry. Our soldier’s wife suffered from chronic elevated blood pressure during her first pregnancy, which made it impossible for her to work. To their shock she fell pregnant again some 6 months after the birth of their first child. She was hospitalized, but she discharged herself because the doctors were pressuring her to abort the baby. However, once more, this means that she had to stop work. Because both incomes were needed, their fragile finances have collapsed and they are returning to Brazil where their respective families can help them get back on their feet. We would ask your prayers for them. O and C Among our dear friends is another delightful couple from South America. We ask your prayers on their behalf, for their growth and maturing as they develop their ministry within the believing community here. The husband is very keen to reach out to the unsaved with the Gospel so please pray for their success in this regard. On a personal note, they would dearly love to have another child but that does not seem to be happening at the moment. I am sure that your prayers for them in this matter would be appreciated. Sister T Sister T lives in what should be a beautiful apartment block. Because of greed, graft and corruption by both the building contractor (who among other things built another three stories without a permit) and (I am told) our Moroccan mafia controlled city hall, her building has not received its final approval and thus cannot be legitimately connected to the electricity supply. She (and the rest of the block) relies on intermittent electric from an illegal supply shared off a neighbor. Because of this, it is impossible to run air conditioning or heating. This would be difficult enough for a younger person, but Sister T is 78. Because 18 Moriel Quarterly • September 2012
of legal complications the residents of this block are paying for the sins and corruption of the now bankrupt contractor and the incompetence and indifference of the municipality. The total bills could be nearly 100,000 Shekels per resident of the block, but even after that there is no guarantee that the building will ever be finished! This building has become a city joke. Everyone knows about it, but nothing is being done and it is tragically symptomatic of the endemic corruption and outright wickedness that plagues local and national government here. We covet your prayers that the Lord bring a solution to this situation for Sister T who is suffering greatly. Some Observations From The Israeli Pro-Life Conference. In late June I attended the annual B’ad Chaim conference in Tel Aviv. I have known for quite some time that the abortion rate here in Israel is shockingly high. About 1,500,000 Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Israelis themselves have murdered more than 2,000,000 in the womb. Abortion is used as a regular means of contraception in the Army here. Each girl, if she falls pregnant, is allowed up to 2 free abortions during her army service. I have known these things for some time. However, because I have not followed pro-life issues too closely what really surprised me was the following: Babies in Israel undergo more pre-natal testing than anywhere else in the world. This is in order that “defective” babies can be screened out and disposed of before birth. Approximately 40% of all abortions are undergone by married women, because the couple either feel they cannot afford, or simply do not desire, another child. If a couple have three children of the same sex already, and the woman falls pregnant with another who is found to be of the same sex, then it is perfectly legal to abort the baby as unwanted on grounds of gender. In Israel it is legal to carry out abortions almost up to the moment of birth. Due to its horrific abortion record, Israel is now 4,000,000 Israelis short of the population we should have had since 1948. Precisely because of this we have a major demographic problem vis-a-vis Moslem Arabs, and the demographic issue is one of the main reasons why Judea and Samaria were ceded to the control of the Palestinian (Terrorist) Authority. Our national sins have found us out. In many ways Israel is very child-friendly. Child protection legislation is very strong here (even corporal punishment is illegal contributing I am sure to our ma- Elon and Hadass Moreh jor school and home disciplinary problem, but that’s another story). For the most part, children are much safer to roam the streets than in the UK for example, where parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. However that protection and friendliness does not extend to the unborn who are a disposable commodity. One speaker at the conference put it this way: Israel is an intensely hedonistic society, taken up with quality of life rather than the sanctification of life. Thus the intense obsession with having a “perfect” baby, which leads to the slaughter of so many of our unborn, or the disposal of unwanted babies that may intefere with a couple’s lifestyle or financial prosperity. A nation cannot indulge in such sins without some adverse effect on itself. In the film, The Pianist, a family watched the German soldiers enter a second-floor apartment across the street to arrest the occupants. They saw through the window the soldiers begin to push the Jews out of the door towards the stairs. One man however was in a wheelchair, so they simply shoved him through the glass window to fall two stories to the cobbled street below. It struck me that the Germans, in treating the Jews like vermin—in dehumanizing them—actually became less than human themselves. In like manner Israel cannot continue unrepentant in the sin of mass murder of the unborn without paying a terrible cost in the loss of her own humanity. Some moral sclerosis or induration of the heart must and will occur. Though all sin is grievous in the sight of God, there are certain sins which are particularly loathsome and defiling which will provoke him to anger more than others. Nationally sanctioned and approved child murder certainly falls into this category. So the question that arises is what will it take for us to wake up As I ask this question I am well aware that 10km away Hezbollah has been stockpiling rockets since the last Lebanon War, and evidence is coming to light that Syria has not only been producing biological and chemical weapons for years, but may have inherited the WMDs that went missing from Saddam Hussein’s regime. On our southern border is an Egypt that is increasingly Islamic and hostile, and we also have an Iran that is racing to produce a nuclear bomb that it can use to precipitate the apocalyptic events that will usher in the “Mahdi.” While I do not for one moment think that the Lord will abandon us, in light of our national sin I cannot believe that we will escape heavy chastening at His hand. I also cannot believe that the Lord is anything but grieved and angry at our national conduct. I do not say these things with any kind of relish. There is a tendency to read about Moriel Israel Last Days events with a kind of emotional distance, as if they are to happen to someone else. The gathering clouds and lowering sky close to our borders remind us that we may well be the players in this narrative and not merely the readers of it. It is all too easy to forget that the purpose of End Times prophecy is not merely to increase our knowledge or get our eschatological order of events right (though there is most certainly a basic order of events), but to prepare ourselves so that we may stay the course. We do not know for certain what events will be unleashed upon us in the future here. Please pray that the Lord will ready us for whatever lies ahead, and may we plead with Him for the nation that “in wrath He remember mercy” (Hab.3:2), and that whatever comes our way, we may be a light and a voice here for the Savior of Israel. With our blessings, Elon and Hadas Moreh Chris Brown, beloved husband of June and father of Greg and another son who resides in Australia, has been a faithful servant of The Lord and loyal member of the Moriel UK team working voluntarily as a conference organiser. His long and courageous battle against a rare malignancy saw Chris repeatedly defy the odds to the point of benefitting from a radical surgical procedure at one point that carried only an 8 percent success rate. Yet Chris laboured on in The Lord surviving years beyond the normal clinically projected life expectancy due to his faith, his faithfulness, and the power of prayer seeing his son complete medical studies as a physician and the birth of two beautiful grandchildren. The confidence in Christ and peace of Christ that Chris continually demonstrated throughout his health struggle was nothing short of remarkable and an example of Christian fortitude to others around him. Because of his saving trust in Jesus, our separation from Chris will of course be but a temporary one. We do ask prayer for his wife June and his family during this period of bereavement until we are all united on that great and coming day in Jesus. September 2012 • Moriel Quarterly 19
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The Scarlet Cord - Moriel Ministries

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