What led me to write: my background in serving and equipping others
What led me to write: my background in serving and equipping others
Summary:
I wrote articles (in multiple blogs), which can be found under the following link:
I only started writing the first articles many years after becoming a Christian.
Before writing, I spent many years of preparation, and also in service and equipping of others in various ways.
Here is an overview of the content of this article:
1) The Lord reaching me through social media, and the Holy Spirit leading me to the Bible.
2) Being devoted to learning.
3) The importance of the Scriptures to edify others.
4) Creating a literal New Testament translation and interlinear by hand.
5) Creating hundreds of teachings by hand on my personal documents.
6) Taking care of a group of Christians.
7) Traveling to multiple countries to serve and equip.
8) Creating the blogs and reaching the whole world.
You can find more details below:
1) The Lord reaching me through social media, and the Holy Spirit leading me to the Bible:
I wrote about how I came to Christ:
In it, I described how the Lord used social media to reach me. He also instructed me in that very evening that I received Him to also reach the whole world with what He had done (which I understood it at the time that I would one day use an online venue to do so).
Furthermore, the very next day, the Holy Spirit led me to find a Bible.
Using the Bible, the Holy Spirit led me to texts that were explaining what had happened to me when I received Him the day before.
These texts gave me the vocabulary and understanding that I needed to comprehend the spiritual realities I had experienced.
I understood from that day on that the Holy Spirit found that what is written in the Bible is profitable to teach spiritual realities.
2) Being devoted to learning:
As a new Christian I started devoting all my time to learning more about Jesus, the Bible, teachings.
I had an entire reality to discover. I started spending 12h a day every day learning everything I could about Jesus and things found in the Bible.
I was constantly praying to God for more wisdom.
I became aware that I had all kinds of presuppositions from the worldview I had before I became a Christian that I had never questioned. Many of those unquestioned beliefs were not completely accurate and so I dedicated a lot of time undercover those so as to update my worldview.
I also took courses online from a school based in Seattle (United-States) on the historical faith to know what Christians throughout the centuries have been teaching. This was only a small part of what I was learning as on the side I was spending thousands of hours over the course of several years learning about all kinds of things concerning the faith from a multitude of sources online.
3) The importance of the Scriptures to edify others:
As I was interacting with other Christians, I noticed that not everyone had the same level of knowledge or/and revelation of spiritual realities.
I could talk freely sometimes about a topic with someone with whom it would be obvious, and then talk about the same topic with someone else who did not know about those things.
However I noticed that something could help them, as for example someone one day asked me: "where is that in the Bible?".
I provided passages witnessing about those things. The person did not know about them, and it did help in the end.
After that interaction, the person gave me an advice: that if I am witnessing about something spiritual, it can be profitable to others (and maybe even reassure them) if I also provide Scriptural examples to help.
4) Creating a literal New Testament translation and interlinear by hand:
In my interactions with diverse arguments concerning diverse teachings, I realized that some issues had to do with how some words or verbs were translated in Bibles that people were using.
The original manuscripts of the Bible were not written in English or French.
Many people were not checking what the earliest manuscripts were saying, and as a consequences were sometimes teaching things based on inadequate translations.
I wanted to have a quick way to determine if a sentence read a certain way or not, based on the earliest manuscripts of the Bible.
I found out that some translations were more literal but still they were missing the precision I needed to do what I wanted to do. I also did not want to constantly look at an interlinear Bible.
I thus decided to revisit the New Testament using as a base the closest literal translation I had found, and then editing by hand the words not in the earliest manuscripts, and linking the words that were supposed to only represent one word.
For example:
Matthew 24:12: "the love of the majority will grow cold"
Became:
Matthew 24:12: "the love (of) the majority will-grow-cold"
Because:
➔ "(of)" is not present in Greek
➔ "will-grow-cold" is only one word in Greek.
I did that by hand, with every single verse in the New Testament. It took me a few months doing that several hours per day (while listening to Biblical teachings at the same time to continue to learn tok on the side).
I created documents compiling each verse one by one. I created links to find them quickly, such that if I was speaking to someone I could quickly verify how the earliest manuscripts were reading.
I also ordered them such that they were by themes. For example:
Matthew 1:1-17: Genealogy of Jesus.
Matthew 1:18-25: Announcement of the birth of Jesus.
Matthew 2:1-12: Birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.
Etc.
In my discussions, people were also asking what certain Greek words were when I was checking my translation. I wanted to be able to answer quickly instead of having to manually check an interlinear Bible. I thus decided to also add those by hand word for word (along with their respective strong's number) under each verse in my documents.
For example, under the following verse:
Matthew 24:12: "the love (of) the majority will-grow-cold because-of lawlessness being-multiplied"
I wrote by hand:
Matthew 24:12: "And [Kai 2532 in Greek] the [hē 3588 in Greek] love [agapē 26 in Greek] (of) the [tōn 3588 in Greek] majority [pollōn 4183 in Greek] will-grow-cold [psügēsetai 5594 in Greek] because-of [dia 1223 in Greek] lawlessness [anomian 458 in Greek] being-multiplied [plēthünthēnai 4129 in Greek]."
I did that for the entire New Testament. It took me more than a year and a half doing that for several hours a day almost every day.
I learnt also through it many things: how certain words are used, what the verses say and what is their reference, what passages are similar or use the same terms, etc.
After finishing it I wanted to do the same with the Old Testament. But the Lord led me to do something else after this.
5) Creating hundreds of teachings by hand on my personal documents:
Over the years I created hundreds of teachings on my personal documents on all different kinds of topics found in the Bible, compiling all the verses and passages that I knew could be relevant about them.
I wanted to find out exhaustively what the Bible was saying about those topics so I was compiling everything I could, and finding out how the authors of the Bible in their own terms were describing those things.
I wanted to have available quickly the relevant passages concerning a topic, and also to learn how those topics were addressed in the Bible in their own terms.
6) Taking care of a group of Christians:
At some point, I was led to take care of a group of Christians.
They were between 16 years old and 35 years old. The group varied over the years from a few people to about 8 people maybe.
We were seeing each other every day for several hours to edify each other in the faith and help each other grow in Christ.
I had on my heart to teach them things that I had learnt. My first reaction initially was that I did not want to do such a thing because I knew that those teaching are subject to a greater judgment, and being a perfectionist I did not want to take such a risk. But I was led to see that if I would not do it, nobody there would at that time, and so I was taken by compassion and did exactly that.
I took this responsibility. Every day I was spending hours studying the Bible, and be led to labor on specific topics to later that day share it with that group. I did so faithfully.
7) Traveling to multiple countries to serve and equip:
In parallel to all of the things mentioned above, I also traveled to multiple countries to serve and equip other Christians. The trips could last from a few days to a month and a half.
I was sometimes going there with a team of Christians, or sometimes alone.
Here is a list of countries I have traveled to in the span of six years, in chronological order:
United-States (Chicago, Dallas, Texas).
Israel (Jerusalem, Capernaum, Zikhron Ya'akov…).
France (Paris).
Montenegro.
Canada (Montreal, Toronto)
Netherlands.
United States (Cleveland, Smallville, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC)
Switzerland.
England (London).
Europe (Munich (Germany), Vienna (Austria), Graz (Austria), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Venice (Italy)).
Brazil (Recife, João Pessoa).
I did not add the various places I also went to over the years in Eastern France (which is where I was born).
I did all those travels to serve and equip other Christians there. The Lord has done so many things during those travels. I have seen people being edified, getting delivered from demons, miracles happening, etc.
I have met Christians from all over the world who considered me a genuine brother in Christ, and I have received multiple spontaneous invitations to speak in their local congregations after they met me. I did not even seek to be invited by anybody, I was only going wherever the Lord would lead me to go, and God would open doors for me to be able to edify other people.
8) Creating the blogs and reaching the whole world:
Over the years, as I was laboring to edify people in person where I was living and in multiple different countries I was traveling to, I realized that for many of them having a written support would be profitable.
I was helping new Christians be equipped with free tools to study the Bible and have basics in place. At some point I became led to create an online ressource to provide for that as new Christians were coming into the group I was taking care of.
I created the first blog for that.
Several months later, I was led to start creating blogs about main Biblical topics such as salvation, forgiveness, love, deliverance, etc.
I created on the same month the two first main blogs regarding those topics. I realized a few years later that I had created them exactly on the very month that I had been 30 years old. These blogs were only the blogs ones among multiple others following them.
The Lord started then to expend my reach online. I was led to start edifying people from all around the world on various forums for years, while continuing to create more content on the blogs.
I received many directions since the beginning of my walk with the Lord concerning reaching the whole world and touching many lives through that. I did not imagine at the time that writing would be involved in that, and I am happy about it because it does fit well with the specificities of who I am and how in my own way I can provide some help to other souls on their journey with the Lord.
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