Every Tribe, Tongue, and Nation

January 10, 2009

In contrast to Monday’s discouragement, thanks to joining the body of Christ today, I am very encouraged. Besides being a beautiful weekend in general, today’s service at church included people from all over. This is not unusual, as a couple of regular attendees are Arabic, and there are two Korean girls, and the pastor’s wife is Korean. Besides, there have been teams from Russia and a couple of other places before, too. And all that is in addition to the fact that there are brothers in Christ in Turkey! That in and of itself is enough to pump me up, knowing that here are my brothers even though I can barely communicate with them.

So what happens today? There’s an Iranian fellow in church, and after a short prayer in Turkish, someone asked him to pray in Farsi. After that, we went around the room, praying in all the languages that were represented, which ended up being an impressive list of five languages: Turkish, Farsi, English, Korean, and Kurdish.

The last was interesting too, since I didn’t realize that some of the men at church were Kurdish. I’m not even 100% sure it was Kurdish, but I’m guessing based on some previous experiences. Like the Christmas party, where the pastor was talking about the Kurdish word for “Come,” which is, apparently, “Wala!” I didn’t follow why he was talking about Kurdish, because I didn’t know that anyone was Kurdish. But when they asked one of the guys to pray in yet another language that wasn’t any of the other four, I realized it must be Kurdish.

Every time these experiences occur at church, I’m reminded of the global scope of Christ’s kingdom, and how He truly is Lord of every tribe, tongue, and nation. And nothing excites me more!