Mission Nannys has a volunteer named Ashley serving in Rovigo, Italy. She has been there for two years, helping local church members’ families by rotating her work with them on a weekly basis. In addition, she helps the church pastor (named Marco) with office work, in an effort to support his ministry. One of her tasks was helping to get Pastor Marco’s sermons online. He shares below one incidence of how this work impacted his ministry.
sermons on the internet!
Last Friday I was sitting at my desk working on the sermon when the phone rang. I answered and a lady asked if I was Pastor Marco. She went on to tell me that she and her husband have been listening to my sermons every day for about 10 months. It took a few minutes to recognize that God was doing a mighty work in her life, and also in her husband’s.
My wife, Sherrie and I decided to invite them to visit the next Saturday and they drove 3 hours to get here in midmorning. They had lunch with us, and two other ladies came to join us, along with a couple from the Rovigo church. On Sunday morning, they stayed for the worship service and went to another couple’s home for lunch.
Words can hardly express our joy to see the clear work of God in their lives. They live in a town with no church, no work for the Lord, and about 10 months ago Anna began to feel terrible guilt for her sins. She went to Google and typed in Jesus, and continued searching until she found www.aiutobiblioco.org (which is our site) with my sermons on it. I have well over 350 sermons on the site.
After Anna had listened for two days to constant sermons, she put one on when her husband was in the room so he, too, could hear. He began to listen with her everyday. They have listened to almost every sermon on the site. After two months, they realized that they needed to be reading the Bible so they purchased two and began to read daily. She started in Genesis in August and has now finished the whole Bible. He is not a fast reader but he reads daily. Pierluigi is 53 and was a blue-collar worker but has never read a book in his life until now.
How amazing to hear this tall, rugged Italian man weep and say over and over again that the most important thing in life is having salvation in Jesus Christ. After the morning sermon, he had tears in his eyes and was speechless. Anna too was greatly moved, and God had clearly opened their eyes to see the truth of the Gospel and to believe in Jesus Christ. She shared that the sermons which gave her the most hope were about election and predestination from Ephesians 1.
And so unbeknownst to us, God has been using the teaching of our church for months, in the lives of these two people who live in a small town with no witness of any kind. –Submitted by Pastor Marco