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<2023.04> With Patience and Teaching in All Things

With Patience and Teaching 
in All Things
Anseong, August 16th, 2008
Meeting with the Young Adults in Korea
Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. … As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.  2 Timothy 4:2, 5
What God Shows Us through the People who Appear in the Bible
It is good for each one of us to consider in front of the Bible and in our consciences, what we think about working together and having fellowship with the brothers and sisters.
I am reminded of when I was in my early 20s in the early 1990s. It was a time when it was very difficult for us to have fellowship together. When I look back to the way I was then, I wonder if I am qualified to rebuke the young people in our fellowship today and point out the mistakes in their thinking.
At that time I was very confused and distressed, and I was very lost. I was living in New York, and one day, I drove to a park where I sat on a bench and opened my diary. As the sun set, I sat in the evening gloom and began to write. It was a time when my family in Korea was facing very difficult circumstances along with all the saved brothers and sisters. I am so ashamed of what I wrote in my diary at that time that I have not read it since. Even so, I still remember what I wrote.
I wrote, “I have lived in this fellowship ever since I was born, but I still do not know what the sphere of my family is and what the sphere is of what I can call my own. I don’t know anything at all, and now I’m simply tired of living like this. When I’m an adult, I want to start a family, and live my life for that family.” I still do not know if those were the thoughts of my heart or if it stemmed from the anger in my heart. Yet, after I had been through that process, my eyes were opened to the words of the Bible. There were many similar incidents that happened to me when I was in my early 20s.
Even though I had lived my entire life in this fellowship, at that time I did not really know the Bible. I had no idea what fellowship is or what it means to spread the gospel, and neither did I know anything about the work that we are carrying out. I spent my life feeling sorry for myself in the midst of that confusion, but in the end, after many twists and turns, I was born again. Then, when I was over 30 years old, I married a born-again sister and started a family.
When I think back over that process now, I wonder if at that time I had the heart that the Bible asks of us. You may of course think it was because I was young at that time, but when I think about it all with the Bible open in front of me, I ask myself whether I had within me the heart that the Bible requires when I had fellowship and worked with those with whom I got on well, and whether such a heart was behind the words that came from my mouth and the things I saw.
We are now living in very interesting times. Through the Internet, we can acquire and exchange information very quickly and we can easily transfer money using our phones. This is how complex the world is becoming, but in the midst of this, are we really living in a way that is separate from the world? This is not the case. Of course, once our spirits have come to realize the truth of the gospel, there is a clear distinction between us and the people of this world. Nevertheless, the way we live our lives and the work we carry out together is intermingled within the frame of the world and society as a whole.
We move ahead within all of this in the midst of many struggles and battles. We also spread the gospel to those who do not yet know it. We live our lives in this way buried beneath all these many incidents. But what is the work that we carry out? Whenever we have a meeting, we clean and tidy and prepare all kinds of things together. But do the people who carry out this work together remember what the Bible requires of us every day as they are working? Have you ever wondered about this?
Through the Forefathers of Israel 
When we read the Bible, we tend to see it as though it is merely stories of long ago in an age in which certain special people lived, and we see the accounts as being merely historical events within the situation at that time. Yet, if you read the Bible very carefully, you come to see that the answer as to why they lived in that way is definitely to be found in the Bible.
an, where his father died, and then he entered the land of Canaan. Abraham went through many events in the course of his life, but behind all of this, there lay the words that God had clearly said to him, words that revealed His command and His purpose. God had said, “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 22:18 NKJV). So it is that in the letter to the Galatians it says, “to Abraham and his Seed”.
How did Abraham live his life? In obedience to God’s command, he left Ur of the Chaldeans and entered the land of Canaan, where he settled and brought his children into the world. Also, he went past the Red Sea and into Egypt, he fought a battle, he entertained angels, and he dug wells. Through the life of that one man, we can see God’s earnest purpose that is revealed to us through the entire Bible. God was controlling Abraham’s life in order that He might some day send the Messiah to this world.
What about Jacob? He fought with his elder brother from the time he was still in his mother’s womb. When Jacob’s mother Rebecca was concerned about her two children struggling with one another in her womb, God spoke about these two children. He said, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger” (see Genesis 25:21-23). The twins were born in this way. A long time before this, when Adam ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said to the serpent, “he [the seed of the woman] shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). At the point in history when this was about to begin to become a reality, Jacob was born holding onto his brothers heel. He was a person who was to be blessed. 
Let’s take a look also at Jacob’s life. He bought the birthright from his elder brother in return for a bowl of lentils. In the letter to the Hebrews it says in regard to this incident, “[See to it] that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal” (12:16), and in Genesis it says that “Esau despised his birthright” (25:34). Also, Jacob would appear to us to have deceived his father when he received the blessing of the firstborn. Because of this incident, Jacob was hated by his elder brother, so he went to Paddan-aram where his relatives lived. He spent almost twenty years there, during which time he had children, and then he returned once more to Canaan. This was a patriarch of Israel who truly lived a life of ups and downs.
There is much for us to learn from this image of Jacob. There is clearly something that God wanted through the life of Jacob. Jacob did not just live as he pleased. There is, of course, no one in this world who is perfect in God’s eyes, and Jacob also committed sins and made many mistakes.
Nevertheless, God clearly carried out the work He intended through the life of Jacob, in that He caused Jacob to have twelve sons. This was God’s aim in the life of the man called Jacob. Then through Joseph, the eleventh of those twelve sons, God brought the whole family down to Egypt.
Then what about when we come to the book of Exodus. About 350 years after this family went to Egypt, a king rose to power in Egypt who did not know Joseph. When he saw that the Israelites had many children and were increasing greatly in number, this king made them slaves. It was actually inevitable that the Israelites would increase in number since God had first said to Adam the progenitor of all mankind, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), and he had said this again later to Jacob (see Genesis 35:11). 
So it was that the Israelites lived as slaves in Egypt working in mortar and brick and doing all kinds of work in the field (see Exodus 1:14). The Israelites had been raising livestock even before Jacob had received the land of Goshen from pharaoh as a gift. Even so, once they became slaves, they had to make bricks out of mud and bake them.
What is mud? Mud comes from the ground. The Bible says, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). And what about baking bricks?
Bricks are built up one upon the other. Then when it comes to all kinds of work in the field, we might think of the story of Cain who was the farmer. As the Israelites were living in Egypt, they carried out work that was associated with the ground. Yet God did not say that they sinned in doing this. They were simply doing the work that had been given to them in the circumstances of the times in which they lived.
As I was reading through the first part of the book of Exodus, I really felt that the image of the Israelites presented there is very similar to the image of our lives in this world. We live in this world with the mission of spreading the gospel, yet outwardly it would seem that the work we do is not much different from the work carried out by the people of this world. Nevertheless, when we read carefully in the books of Exodus about the process by which God led the Israelites out of Egypt and in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy about how the Israelites lived in the barren environment of the wilderness for forty years, we come to see that God was not only developing a strong character within this nation, but also hundreds of years earlier, from the time Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt and even before that, God was already preparing everything they would need. 
Through the Lives of Moses and David 
As the Israelites were living as slaves under the oppression of Egypt in this way, a man by the name of Moses appeared. Moses was not just a great man who lived his life and then died. God clearly had a definite aim in mind as He was controlling the life of this man, and He had everything planned all the way through to the fulfilment of that aim.
In order to limit the growth in the population of the Israelites, pharaoh king of Egypt summon
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