Lyme’s It Is!

Psalm 7:17, “I will praise the Lord according to His righteousness, And will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.”

It has been a while since I posted anything here, but we have been busy unpacking and getting settled back into the U.S.

I met with the neurologist a couple of days ago and once he looked at the blood work, he immediately said it was Lyme’s Disease. In my case it is late stage Lyme’s disease, and according to the doctor the likely hood of killing it all together at this stage is very rare, but possible.

They are going to do a lumbar puncture to see how active the Lyme is and also do a test to make sure it is not MS, but as of right now he is pretty sure it is Lyme from the blood work that was performed in India, as it shows the virus active in my blood.

After the lumbar, they will place a pick-line into my arm or chest, not sure yet, and every day for the next 6 to 8 weeks I will have strong antibiotics injected into my system. Then, as an added plus, after 10 days to 3 weeks of treatment, I will become very ill and in a lot of pain (sarcasm about it being a plus). If it is Lyme this means it is being killed, because as Lyme is killed it lets off a toxin into the body that has to be flushed out of my system. If I go through this, then we know for sure that it is Lyme’s disease. After the week of sheer pleasure, I should start to feel a lot better and prayerfully the Lyme will go into remission. If it has not been killed or in remission, I will have to go through a second round a month later. . . .yeeehaaaa!

Lyme is the best of the worst circumstances, though, as there can be relief for long periods of time and if God allows, it can be killed. Our spirits are high, as we know that God is in control and He will use even this to conform me more to Christ’s image, and ultimately use it for His glory.

We have been so blessed by family and friends that have been helping us as we settle. The amount of love shown has been immeasurable and we are so thankful. Also, since I am not going to be able to seek employment during treatment, REAP (our missionary arm), has agreed to extend our support through October to make sure that we have funds in case I have to go through a second round. Donations will still be accepted for me through October that will be used for our living expenses here. God is good all the time, and we see it through all of you.

I am still performing my duties on the committees that I have committed to in India, and we have already started a Sunday night Bible study out of our home for college and career. We are actively still in ministry as much as my health and God will allow. I have also restarted counseling, and I am looking at some other ministry opportunities that God seems to be presenting to us.

Please pray that the Lyme is killed, or at least put into long term remission and that He guides us in the next step of our life.

Psalm 21:13, “Be exalted, O Lord, in Your own strength! We will sing and praise Your power.”

The Return Home

We are now back in the United States and settling into our home. We are so thankful to everyone who has helped prepare our home and those who donated food and furniture for us. You have made us feel so loved and we are thankful for every one of you. Your help has made this transition smooth and stress free for us.

I, Alan, will be starting testing shortly to see what is exactly going on in my body, and I appreciate all your prayers. Please continue to pray that our insurance will be easy to attain and that our crate will make it to our place very shortly.

During our last week in India three young adults came to visit and see what the ministry is all about and what I did during the past year. Though a week is not really enough time to see everything and truly get a feel for what is going on, they were impacted nonetheless. It is hard not to be when you personally see what is happening in India and how many Christians live, often in severe poverty, and so contently.

We took them to Khandili to visit the medical center and then had the pastor take us into the villages to visit some of his congregation. All of them lived in mud huts with thatched roofs made of palm leaves, but they were so welcoming and loving that it is overwhelming if you are not prepared for it. They are totally reliant on Christ for everything and they are so content.

They gave of what they did not have. They gave us coconut juice and coconut to eat, and then cut up mango to eat and then handed us a bag of fruit to take with us. Their demonstration of love to visitors is amazing, as they were giving their very own food that they “need” to live as gifts to us. We prayed at each house we visited for the family, and it had to be done through an interpreter, as none spoke English.

It was a bittersweet experience to leave India, to say the least. Of course, we were saddened to have to leave early due to health issues. We grew to love the people and the country and had thoroughly adjusted to our new way of living. We were blessed to be involved in ministry right up until the end, teaching and mentoring and preaching. Much still needs to be done in the ministry there, but much was accomplished, as well. God was so good and blessed our time there and made it very productive and fruitful for His Kingdom.

My involvement with India will not end because I am back in the U.S., as I am still a part of committees and will continue to be part of helping BBCM/ACPL grow and develop from here. We are looking at avenues where I can continue to mentor and be part of the ministry. As areas develop, I will let you know what is happening within the India ministry.

Thank you for your support and prayers and continue to pray for us as we look at where God is going to place me next, and as I start medical testing.

Comfort in the Changeless

“The godly man does not arrive at spiritual maturity instantaneously. It is a lifelong process, but every stage of that growth must come from the Word.” Dr. Morris

At the church we attend, the Pastor has been talking about the immutability of God’s precepts, meaning that God does not change in what He commands. He has been going through the Psalms to demonstrate this very fact. Last week, he stressed that if we would follow these precepts that God would give us Victory (Psalm 119:87), preserve us for His purpose (119:93), give us increased wisdom (119:104), and guarantees us that we will have enemies and that we will be despised (119:141).

It was a challenging sermon to say the least, and very convicting in what was presented by Pastor Jayakumar through the Scriptures. A day later, I get a phone call and find out that I am to preach on May 3rd, tomorrow for me, and that I am to continue with the theme he has started. Now, I had asked for May 10th, as then I could choose what I wanted to preach, as my friend who is preaching on the 17th is able to do. He gave me a section of Psalm to look at:

Psalm 119:33-40, “Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, And I shall keep it to the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keepYour law; Indeed, I shall observe it with my whole heart. Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, For I delight in it. Incline my heart toYour testimonies, And not to covetousness. Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things, And revive me in Your way. Establish Your word to Your servant, Who is devoted to fearing You. Turn away my reproach which I dread, For Your judgments are good. Behold, I long forYour precepts; Revive me in Your righteousness.”

My prayers and studying were focused on how to tie this verse into the immutability of God and His precepts. If you are a regular reader of my blogs, then you know I have written on the immutability of God already and given that defense, so I will not do that here, nor am I going to in my sermon. Taking that out, I started to think upon and asked God what can He say through me in this Sunday. This is what God gave me to preach.

Psalm 119:33-35 tells us that we should observe His Precepts/Word until the end, then, says “Make me,” which indicates a battle going on within David, not unlike the battle we all struggle with today. What can be called the Old Man (sinful nature) battling the New Man (Salvation), as we see Paul talk about in Romans 7. We need God to do it, as we cannot do it on our own.

1 Samuel 15:29 says, “Furthermore, the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or change His mind, for He is not man who changes his mind.” Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.” You can think of precepts like boundaries for our life. We all should have healthy boundaries in our relationships that are aligned with God’s Word.

A boundary is like a fence with a gate. The gate allows good to come into your yard, or boundary, and it also keeps out and helps you get rid of the bad. Whether that is sin in your own life, or allowing sin of other people to effect you as well. Precepts/boundaries protect us and keep us safe. They are for our own good and we can know that since God made these precepts that they are good and pure. We can rely on these boundaries if they are in tune with the immutable precepts of God.

Psalm 36-38 tells us that we are to direct our eyes straight on the path. Again, realizing that we cannot do it on our own and need God to direct our eyes, but have to do it through God. If God is pointing us in a direction that He desires we can know it is the right direction, because God does not change and if He tells us it is good or bad then we can rest assured that it is. All we have to do is obey. James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

Lastly, Psalm 39-40 requests God to keep me on that path and protect me from the wrong direction. Knowing we cannot do it on our own, we must ask God to keep us on the path and to guide our ways, because as anyone knows who has tried to make it on their own, we tend to move toward sin or against His precepts. God will not take us in a deceitful direction, and we can rest assured that if He tells us to move in a certain direction we can be sure it is for our own good. Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?”

Taking all this together there are some comforts that we can take away in the fact that God is changeless. For us there are many times that it is good to change. We change from evil ways to righteous ways. Those who are believers changed from condemnation to eternal salvation in regards to eternity. We change our attitudes for the better, and at times for the worst.

As humans with a beginning, which means we are finite, we change. We get older, we think differently at different times, changing our thoughts. We change the way we dress to keep up with the latest fashions. We change the music we listen to. We are a people that change. God is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, and even the name He gave Moses also says that He is infinite, which is “I AM.” Being eternal means He cannot change because He is without end or beginning.

We can rely on what we read within the Scriptures as being what God said with confidence and that certain aspects are not going to change. If God could change His mind then maybe He will one day change His mind on the requirement for Salvation. If God can change His mind then it is possible that He could change His mind about salvation, right? But if He cannot change then we have security in our salvation. For the Muslim they cannot have this confidence, because God can lie and deceive, which is why they live in fear, the wrong kind of fear, because they are hoping their “good” works to out weigh the bad. They have to live like this because their God can change.

We know that He loves us continually and is passionate about us, as is proclaimed all through out Scripture. If He could change then He could change His mind about the way He feels about His creation. Yes, He hates sin, but He longs for relationship with His people. 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord does not delay His promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” A Muslim cannot ever rely on this, because Allah according to their Koran can change and lie and deceive. Of the 99 names they have for their God, the only one that comes close to a relationship is that God is close to your jugular, which is not love at all. It actually means that God can kill you at any moment.

He would not be God at all if He could change. Only something that has a beginning can change from one aspect to another. If you could literally change God’s mind that would mean that you in some way gave a defense that showed God He was wrong in some fashion, whether it is emotionally or logically. He is wrong in the way He is being merciful or wrong in the way He decided to perform an action. Either way that would make you smarter than God. What kind of God would that be? 1 Corinthians 1:25, “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” If God could change that also means that He had a beginning, and a starting point somewhere, which means that someone then had to create Him as well.

Lastly, this change means that we can rest assured that the Word of God that has the precepts of God can be trusted as reliable and preserved throughout the ages. God said His word would not change, that not one jot or tittle would be eliminated from His word. Matthew 5:18, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” Luke 16:17, “And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail.”

Through Him we can rest assured that as 2 Timothy 3:16 says, that this book is God breathed and everything in it is true. If God wrote it and cannot change then we can rest assured that if we live by what it tells us then we are pleasing Him. If He can change then we can never know for sure. We know that He is not going to change the way of Salvation through Christ, because He does not change.

Precepts of God are good and will not change, but they will change you and me if we follow them. We are the ones that need to change, and not God. We always want God to do things our way, but in reality life would be so much easier if we did things His way by following the precepts He laid down before us in the Bible.

Psalm 119:38-40, “Establish Your word to Your servant, Who is devoted to fearing You. Turn away my reproach which I dread, For Your judgments are good. Behold, I long for Your precepts; Revive me in Your righteousness.”

Biblical Worldview

Below is an article that I wrote and is to be published in a Christian Indian Magazine, India Church Growth Quarterly:

“Worldviews are the most fundamental and encompassing views of reality shared by a people in a culture. The worldview incorporates assumptions about the nature of things—about the “givens” of reality. Challenges to these assumptions threaten the very foundation of their world” (Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues, Paul Hiebert, 38).


Everyone’s worldview is tainted in one form or another. All of us have our own set of biases in how we perceive our world. Your sex (male or female), your parents, your country, your schools and teachers, your friends, the experiences you have had in life and the temperament that God created you with are all ways in which your worldview is tainted for either the bad or good. The only way to straighten out our worldview is to bring our current worldview into a Biblical Worldview through discipling. The question is then, “Is there a Biblical Worldview and if so how do we attain it?”



All cultures change to some degree, as none remain stagnant. If you were to pick any culture and look at their history for the past couple hundred years you would see a continuum among them in their customs and relationships that tend to stay for long periods of time, but there are several areas that always start to incorporate change within the culture and ultimately within the worldview of the culture. One aspect that changes the worldview is the education systems within villages, cities or rural communities, as children never learn perfectly and this will result in some change. Some of these mistakes become habitual among the younger generation as well, because they perceive them as being current, progressive, or it differentiates them from their past generation.



People are also naturally creative and will devise new ways in presenting their culture through art, music, novels, or invention. They may also visit other cultures and adopt their customs because they prefer them to their own. They may visit other market places, or social gatherings; and even wars change the customs of a culture’s worldview. Lastly, people may just outright choose a different alternative to their normal customs, as we generally see in the youth; whether it is how they dress for church, or whether or not they go to church at all anymore. The goal of ministries, churches and parents is to help direct our culture into a Biblical Worldview, which does not mean the entire culture has to change, but only those practices that are outside the will of God, which is seen in the infallible Word of God.

Dr. Hiebert, in Transforming Worldviews, says, “To say there is no biblical worldview is to deny that there is an underlying unity to the biblical story, to say that the God of Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus are different gods, that the New Testament is discontinuous with the Old, and that Scripture is simply the record of individuals and ever-shifting beliefs shaped by history and sociocultural contexts” (Transforming Worldviews, Paul Hiebert, 256.)



Dr. Hiebert is exactly right, in that, there is a Biblical Worldview that has been laid out for us in stages and completed in our Bible, and to say otherwise is to negate what God has been doing through the different dispensations throughout history. As leaders within the ministry of God we have led those under our tutelage into a Biblical Worldview, which means helping them line up their innermost being with the Word of God. Romans 12:2 says, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” For the purpose of this article, I will be focusing on three different areas that will help in moving towards a Biblical Worldview: Wisdom, Discernment and Contextualizing the Gospel correctly.

“Wisdom, then, is the consistent outworking of belief, action, and discernment from worldview. It is the process of sanctification” (G. C. Berkouwer, Providence of God, 133). We first must remember the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Proverbs 1:7, 2:5, 9:10; 10:27, 14:26-27, 15:16, 33, 16:6, 19:23, 22:4, 23:17; 2 Chron. 19:7-9; Job 28:28; Psalm 19:9, 34:11, 111:10; Isaiah 11:2-3, 33:6; Acts 9:31; 2 Corinthians 5:11). We are to become mature believers and one of the most important disciplines is growing in wisdom. Just praying will not gain you wisdom, as this plays a different role in your relationship with God. We forget about the thinking aspect many times in our Christian walk and instead look for the warm, bubbly feeling. What I call the soup feeling, when you eat soup; you get the warm, bubbly feeling. Growing in wisdom should lead to changes in our worldview and in how we behave within our cultural system. We need to have a right belief that leads to right action, and cannot have right actions without right beliefs.

Wisdom is the person of Christ and all that He is and stands for. Wisdom is found in the Bible, and to look for truth in other places that do not line up with the truth of Scripture is following a false truth. How many of us pray to be more like Christ and then complain when we are persecuted or what seems like a tough time comes along? Your worldview is not truly lined up with Christ then. Wisdom is not about right and wrong, but about what God thinks. Right and wrong may fit into this at times, but our main concern should be Christ. Our thoughts must correspond to His in order for us to be wise. More than right and wrong it is seeing good from evil. This will help us figure out orthodoxy (what we should believe) and orthopraxy (what we should do). We must take responsibility for becoming wise. It is a matter of willing it and going after it, and it sometimes causes pain and it is a life journey with no end, but it is a journey with eternity in sight.

James 1:5-8, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all with out reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts are like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

“Belief systems guide thought processes, and enable people to focus on experience and formulate theories to help them solve the problems of life and to pursue their goals” (Understanding Folk Religion, Hiebert, Shaw, Tienou, 40).

This leads to the second aspect of defining a Biblical Worldview, which is discernment. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus each year claim healing by their God and return to their temple of Venkateswara at Tirupathi, South India to fulfill the vows they made for their healing. 15,000 claim healing at Lourdes, and more then that at the Virgin of Guadalupe near Mexico City, (Louis J. Luzbetak, The Church and Cultures: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology, 375). All the “special” signs are used in almost all religions (tongues, miracles such as healing, exorcisms, and prophecies). Remember Satan can act as an Angel of Light. We must even test the experiences of people and test the spirits (1 Cor. 12:3; 1 Thess. 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1-6). We are to be careful not to be led astray, as Paul told Timothy quite often in the Timothy Epistles. In order not to be caught up in wrong cultural actions, we need to apply wisdom in discernment.

There are some tests for this: Does it give glory to God rather than humans (John 7:18, 8:50)? Does it recognize the Lordship of Christ (1 John 2:3-5; James 2:14-19). Is the power through the Holy Spirit emphasized, or the flesh? Does Scripture confirm it? Are the leaders making any claim accountable to the Church? Do the leaders manifest the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-25)? Does this lead to Spiritual Maturity (1 Cor. 12-14)? Does it lead to Unity in the body of Christ (John 17:11; 1 John 2:9-11)? (Ibid.). As Christians we must not take the beliefs of those we are trying to reach lightly. We must take them seriously, as we want to understand them so we can reach them. For many their beliefs declare the way things truly are. Why things happen the way they happen and for the reason they happen.