Day 76 Paul’s first full-length Japanese Sermon

Sunday November 15th 2009

Paul was excited and a little nervous to preach his first full length sermon in Japanese. He has addressed the congregation before, like our first Sunday here, but that was to introduce us and give a short message. That was definitely a big step but this was a little different. He volunteered to give the 20 to 30 minute sermon because Obata-san was having some medical tests done and we want to try to be as big a help here as we can. It took a lot of thinking to decide on the topic. There are so many different levels of spiritual maturity here and so many needs. Finally Paul decided to speak about who Jesus is. Brother Obata graciously translated Paul’s sermon into Japanese and then Paul practiced it many times. We believe it went well and one of the members even said Paul was as good as a first grader in his speech. (We both had to laugh at this, but it is actually a compliment as most of the time we probably speak like 2 year olds.)