Good afternoon.
I think maybe I'm double micing.
I?
Okay.
Making sure.
I'm not used to this body mic.
All right.
So as you all know, my wife and I recently made a missionary survey trip out to Japan.
And that is what we are going to be talking about this evening.
Some of the things that we discovered there were good.
And some of the things we discovered there were very bad as well.
It's a nation that is crippled by false beliefs and false deities, but also full of a people that are hungry for the Word of God.
The ones that know it and believe it are literally begging for more missionaries to come over.
But...
Japan as a whole is a wonderful country, one I've always wanted to visit as a young child.
And as I grew up, I noticed that there is more use to going there than what I had originally perceived being young, that being the spread of God's word.
Japan itself is a country on the other side of the planet.
For us getting there, it was about 16 hours total flight.
So we flew out from Memphis out to Chicago, and it took a 12 hour flight from Chicago all the way to Japan.
the North, the Great Circle route, I believe it is, over the top.
And we landed at about 6 p.m.
in the evening and didn't make it to our hotel until about 11.
The population of Japan, as it is right now, is about 124.5 million people.
That is a lot of people as of the last survey that was taken.
It is one of the most populated countries in the entire world and it is home to Tokyo, the largest city in the world, which the city itself houses 47 million of the people of all
Japan.
These people, if you've ever seen photos of Japan, you see, especially photos of Tokyo, lots of high rise buildings, apartment complexes and the such like.
There are a lot of people in a very small...
The entire country itself is only slightly larger than California as I show here on the map.
I actually found out before coming tonight that there's a program I could use to overlay it with several states and so I overlaid it over top of California to give you a nice
visual representation of what it looks like.
We have so many missionaries and churches going to all over the United States.
There's plenty out in California, and yet the lack of them that are in Japan itself is stifling.
It's also known as the tech capital of the world.
And yes, for the young folks, I did take the opportunity to stick a photo of a Gundam in there, because why not?
They're cool mechs from Japanese anime and animation.
Now here's the bad.
less than 0.5%, half of a percent of the entire nation identifies as Christian in general, let alone biblically accurate Christians.
They're even fewer than that.
As far as I've heard from now Fukushima, Shinozaki-san out in Shizuoka and Ikawa-san out in Ochanomizu, I know these are hard to pronounce names.
It took some practice to get used to it.
I only heard of less than 10 missionaries in the entire country.
And yet how many do we have in the US?
How many do we have in Africa, Europe, Asia?
There's lots around, but less than 10 that I've heard of by name in Japan alone.
50 % of the Christians that do attend church in Japan, only half of them attend regularly.
most consider it more of a convenience or a once a month thing.
They're not going all the time.
Thankfully, the church that we stayed at in a place just northwest of Tokyo called Tachikawa, the Tachikawa church has members there that thankfully attend all the time.
Same for the churches, the other churches that we visited while we were there.
Unfortunately, Japan is a nation where the beliefs and religions of Shintoism and Buddhism
are very prevalent.
Now Shintoism is something we don't typically hear about.
Mostly we hear about Buddhism and we think of, you know, the fat Buddha statue you see at the Chinese restaurants.
I used to jokingly walk past it and I'd rub his belly for good luck and didn't mean anything.
We know that the Bible says that our Lord is more than just rock and gold.
He's the only living God.
But they don't see it this way.
We got to think...
Christianity has only been in Japan for roughly the past two to three hundred years.
It has not been there very long at all.
Their technological advances came very very quickly to them.
Before that you had the end of the Edo period, which was like the end of the samurai.
You had great wars happening where the different shogunate classes would fight each other.
And now even their emperors, kind of like the Queen of England, he's only the emperor in name alone.
But what is Shintoism?
Shintoism is a belief structure that believes in many gods, or the Japanese word kami.
Kami are demons and spirits and gods of all natures and sizes.
These reside in nature, in the rocks, in the streams, in the trees, within yourself even.
Shintoism is a very odd thought process for us to come into terms with.
It has emphasis on purity,
and reverence.
I think that lends itself to why Japan is so clean.
You go down the streets and even their subways are cleaner than some of our streets that we have throughout Memphis.
They're incredibly beautiful.
But it's a big portion due to Shintoism.
Shintoism even pushes forth the idea of worshipping one's ancestors.
They have this thought process that
Whoever the oldest in your family is deserves the most honor.
And we give honor to our elders, like the Bible teaches us to, those that are older, more experienced from us, but they take it to an extreme, to where the further back that they
can trace their lineage, the more honor their family holds.
Another crazy part about Shintoism is there's no scripture, there's no proof, there's no book of prophecies or anything like that.
This is simply a religion that has been passed down from generation to generation to generation, all by word of mouth.
You'll find lots of books about Shintoism, but you will not find anything that would even slightly compare to our Bible.
It's not like some of the other religions where they say, prophet came from the mountains and wrote this scripture and now this is what we believe in.
Shintoism has first, and we're going to address all of these, Shintoism first has a belief in many gods or kami.
But the Bible says in Isaiah 45 and verse 5, am the Lord and there is none else.
There is no God beside me.
In Deuteronomy 6 and verse 4, we hear Him say, hear O Israel, the Lord is our God.
The Lord our God is one Lord, not many.
There's not one in the rock, there's not one in the stream, there's not one in the trees, there's not one within me and you, there's not a self-preserving God, there's only one
God.
But this is something that has, I almost want to use the word indoctrinated them, or brainwashed, but it's something that they've been raised with for generations and
generations to believe that there's gods everywhere.
You can walk down the streets of Tokyo and even in the back alleys find these little shrines
with a torii gate, the big red gates that you see in the pictures.
And they'll go up and put some incense and bow and rub their hands together.
Now in modern Japan, it's not all necessarily religious either.
Just like we would go to the local fair or we say that, you know, a cat crosses your path, a black cat, it's bad luck.
It's kind of superstition.
Some of the religious practices they do
especially when going up to the temples, are more of like a cultural thing.
It's not even that they're thinking about the underlying question of, I actually worshiping this deity?
It's just, my father did it, my grandfather did it, my great-grandfather did it, and so I need to do it as well.
So they'll come up every appointed day that the shrine priestesses, the shrine maidens would say, they'll pay their money by the good luck charm, write their prayer on it, hang
it on a tree, and we'll show that a little later.
and then they'll ring the little bell at the beginning of the temple, bow their head, pray to the little god, and go right back to a sinful life.
A lot of Shintoism and Buddhism, in fact, doesn't even have the concept of sin.
And so this is a whole new concept that we have to bring and have to teach them here.
This is actually one of the shrines here, speaking of kami and multiple gods.
We took the opportunity to visit a shrine that's actually the beginning of a long running line of belief in kami.
here within the Tokyo province.
So on the outskirts of Tokyo, you'll find this shrine.
And have you all ever seen, you go into the little Chinese restaurant, you see the little white cat that holds the coin and he's got his little arm doing the thing?
That's actually originates from this shrine.
And he's known as the Mononeki Neko.
They build these large shrines and buildings.
Hundreds of thousands of man hours go into these.
They're beautiful structures, but they're all in worship to false gods.
Here you can actually see one of the small areas that they would come in, very similar to a funeral plot, which I'll show you later as well, where you have spots for the incense,
and you can see those, yeah, you can see those here, the little incense sticks.
This is a purifying ritual right here.
You would take some of the water.
You would pour it over your hands and wash your hands before you would worship.
And then you have all the cats.
Now this one in particular does not hold the good luck coin, but this is where it all started.
And they have a lot of them.
Can you guess what they do with a lot of them?
They sell them.
See, they're not stupid.
They know what they're doing over there, especially the shrine priestesses and those working in the shrine.
Now, I will say, we may have seen the Mononeke Neko.
While we were at the shrine, we caught a glimpse of a cat drinking out of a pool of what seemed to be dirty water at the base of the shrine.
I can't prove it or not, but.
I'm guessing it wasn't.
It's most likely a straight.
Here we see a good example of some of the cheaper prayers and wishes that you can get granted.
If you go up to the shrine and approach one of the shrine priestesses, you can buy these little slips of paper that have been handwritten by the shrine priestesses and will give
you good luck and fortune.
You can see them here.
You tie them in a specific knot, tie them on the tree there, and as they wilt and fall off, they're supposed to grant you whatever...
It was that you asked for, for a low price of 200 yen, which is roughly, I think, $1.50 in the United States currency.
But they're selling slips of paper.
If you have more yen and you want to spend about a thousand yen, which is equivalent to a little about six USD, you can buy these, which are these really nice wooden tablets.
And I actually have one in my backpack right now that we were able to bring back.
I forgot to bring it up here.
But it actually, she's actually pulling it out.
It has the Mononeki Neko on there.
Which is weird because he's sitting in front of the Buddha of all things and it's got a little bell to make you feel, I don't know, pure or what not.
But you would go to the back and write your wish and...
You wonder what happens to them.
They can't sit up there on the tree indefinitely.
I have the personal belief, and I can't prove this, that these get washed and reused and resold.
It's a great way to make money, especially if you're at a temple.
Unfortunately, that's one of the facts about Shintoism.
People aren't thinking.
They're going along with passed down tradition.
If it was good enough for mom and grandma and great grandma, it was good enough for me.
But every now and again we run into the Japanese that are willing to listen and willing to learn.
Evangelism is what I've found so far in Japan doesn't work like it does here in the US.
While we use things like apologetics and we can think through things, they're very much tradition oriented.
We call it friendship evangelism.
You have to be able to make friends in Japan and get to know them and work in the local food eateries or
donate your time to local services that help those who in need, because they have to earn your trust.
Once you earn their trust, then they'll start listening to you and may inquire about God and the Bible and why you act differently from everyone else.
So, evangelism, while different, still works there, but it is fairly slow at the moment.
Shintoism also worships creation in and of itself.
not just the spirits in the rocks, but even the rocks themselves.
But we know that Romans 1 and verse 25 says, Genesis 1 says, Why would we worship a creation and not the Creator?
And yet they do all over the nation.
Shintoism, as I said earlier, lacks the concept of sin as rebellion to God.
And yet we know in Romans 3 and verse 23, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
1 John 1 and verse 9 says, we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
They have lots of purification rituals in Japan.
Even so that you have to purify your hands before even offering the incense.
and yet they have no concept of sin.
If you ask them what they're purifying, they would say, well, my body.
They wouldn't say sin, they wouldn't say evil spirits residing in me.
They have no concept.
Shintoism also emphasizes honoring ancestors and, believe it not, seeking their guidance.
I'm sure most of us in here have seen the movie Mulan.
This is very reminiscent of Mulan where she goes into the room with all of her ancestors and prays to her ancestors, not to the created God, but to her family members who lived
before her and died as human beings.
And then of course in the film, they all gather and try to, they end up sending the little dragon Mushu and he comes down and gives, it's nonsense.
But who is our mediator?
Who should we be seeking for guidance?
The Bible tells us very plainly in 1 Timothy 2 and verse 5.
For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.
He's the one that we should be looking at for support, for mediation, for guidance.
My computer has turned itself off.
And then we'll also look at Deuteronomy 18 verses 10 through 2.
Thou shalt not be found among you anyone that maketh her son or daughter to pass through the fire.
Now that would be child sacrifices and things.
or uses demination, or an observer of the times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consultor with familiar spirits.
There's the commie right there.
Or a wizard, or a necromancer.
For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord, and because of these abominations, the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
And yet all the things listed in Deuteronomy chapter eight, verses 10 through 12 is being practiced
Shintoism and Buddhism.
It also has no clear answer about life after death.
They don't know what happens.
In fact, they don't really even have stories about what happens.
We know, John 3 and verse 36 says, "...he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on
him."
Moving on, we've talked about Shintoism and defined that.
No clear motive, belief in many, many gods.
Even looking to ancestors for guidance.
But what about Buddhism?
I always thought Buddhism was actually just worshipping the idol, the little fat guy that I saw in the Chinese restaurant.
But it was actually founded, and I'm going to butcher this name, founded by Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, which was just a normal man.
in the fifth and fourth century.
I messed that up, it should have been fourth and fifth, but...
Buddhism teaches what they call the Four Noble Truths, and this is the foundation of Buddhism, this is the core beliefs.
Number one is that life itself is suffering, not a gift of God, not something that we should be happy about, but that life is suffering, or as they call dukkha.
Life suffering is also caused by desire, good desires, bad desires.
They're what cause our suffering.
Suffering ends when desire is eliminated.
And the eightfold path leads to the end of suffering.
It's path, something they call the eightfold path.
The eightfold path would be karma.
I'm sure we've all heard of that.
Do something good.
Something good will happen to you.
The idea of reincarnation, when you die, you don't face judgment like the Bible says, what Christ told us about.
But instead you're reborn into a different body, maybe in a different nation and you live your life again.
And then the fact that Buddhism teaches that there's no personal God, rather self-liberation and enlightenment.
This is one of the most well-known Buddhist temples in downtown central Tokyo.
I would tell you the name, but I can't remember the pronunciation.
It's massive.
Millions of visitors visit this every single year.
In fact, when we walked, before you walk up to the shrine, and this is just the entrance gate, beyond this you'll have vendor stalls.
on each side lined with people, wonderful foods, full of good luck charms, promises for wealth and prosperity if you'll just spend a little bit again.
Here was the closest shot that I could get of the temple because we still try to honor their customs and we try to obey the laws and they had posted no photos beyond this point.
So I stood right at that point and stretched my arms out and tried to take the picture as much as I can.
But here you have a room, I'd say about half the size of the one that we're in now.
And in the center of it, the centerpiece was a golden idol statue of Buddha.
And all around him were gold and jewels and antiquities and things of great, great value.
And they were behind metal bars and glass.
but if you wanted to throw your coin in the water and get some good luck, they had this nice tray set out.
and you dump your coin and never see it again.
And it would slide down towards the inside of the room where you couldn't get it.
They spend a lot of money on these things.
Multi-story building complexes, all for the worship of something that I don't believe they truly believe in.
They don't think about it.
They don't think through it.
So, Buddhism says there is no God.
Genesis 1, 1 says the opposite.
There's one God and He created the heavens and the earth.
Isaiah 45 in verse 5 says, am the Lord and there is none else.
There is no God beside me.
Not Buddha, not Kami.
It teaches that suffering, not sin, is the problem.
My suffering is the problem in life, not sin.
Last time I checked, the Bible taught us that sin is what caused suffering.
all the suffering of the world.
And sin by definition being the transgression of God's law.
When God first told Adam, do not eat of this fruit, and then Adam and Eve did, they broke that law, transgressing it, causing sin, and from it we now all suffer.
Because of that, sin is the problem, not suffering, and yet this is what they teach.
Romans 3, 23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
Romans 6, 23, the wages of sin is death.
But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There's a lot of negatives.
We have got to get on our feet and bring them the positives of what Christ teaches.
Because if you go off of Shintoism and Buddhism, they don't know what happens after death.
They think life itself is suffering and is what's causing the problem.
What a sad state to be in.
It breaks my heart to think about worshiping that way and seeing them do that.
When we were there at the...
the Necco shrine, there was an old lady probably in her 80s.
And she came up and she walked up to the front of the temple and this one had a large room as well, but it was mostly empty.
And she cracked open her little coin purse and emptied it out.
And she went up and put her little hands together and prayed.
It broke my heart because she doesn't know who Christ is.
No one's gotten to know her well enough to earn her trust for her to listen.
to who Christ is.
She doesn't know where to go, so she's praying to a cat of all things.
Buddhism teaches enlightenment instead of salvation through Christ, thinking that we can do it ourselves.
But Ephesians 2, verse 8 through 9 says,
The Catholics back in the day used to teach that you could get absolved of your sins if you just paid a little bit of money.
It's not too much different in Japan even now.
We like to think that these things happened in antiquity, that it was a long time ago in a far off place that won't reach us.
But if we don't actively combat it, it could very easily make its way here.
They need Christ.
It teaches reincarnation and not resurrection.
Hebrews 9 and verse 27 says, and is appointed for men once to die, but after this, the judgment.
They have no proof of reincarnation.
You don't keep your memories from your last life.
John 5 and verse 28, Marvel not at this for the hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth.
That doesn't sound like reincarnation.
Sounds like resurrection, doesn't it?
They that have done good under the resurrection of life, they that have done evil under the resurrection of damnation.
But how can we teach this when they don't even have a concept of sin?
We have to teach them what sin is.
Next we're going to go through a little bit of a history of Japan and how Christianity came to be.
The little kanji that you see up there in the middle actually is the word for history.
One of the first missionaries to come to Japan was a man named John Moody McCaleb.
Don't ask me why he's called Moody, I'm not sure.
I couldn't find that online, but he lived from 1961 to 1953.
Now put this into perspective, Christianity has not been in this nation for a very long time.
If one of the first missionaries came in 1861, 1819, 20, less than 300 years total.
because we're not at 2061 yet.
And that's if he started directly in that year.
He was one of the first to the Japan.
Born in Tennessee, he studied at Mars Hill Academy.
So he's actually from this state.
I really wish this would stop turning off.
There we go.
He studied under T.B.
Larimore, a well-known preacher of the Churches of Christ at the time.
He was inspired by evangelistic spirit of the Restoration Movement, and he felt a strong calling for mission work.
So, in 1892, without any centralized mission board, he decided to go to Japan.
Now, at this point, he couldn't hop on the plane and be there in 16 hours.
I complained about that 16-hour flight because I almost got no sleep, babies were crying.
Megan had to get up repeatedly and walk the aisles.
Now granted, we got three meals, but I mean, we're talking the size of the little children's lunch, dinner things, the mighty meals or whatever they called.
He sailed to Japan, which at this point would have taken around three months.
That's quite a commitment to go teach complete strangers the gospel.
And yet he did it.
He wound up settling in Tokyo in Yokohama.
His centralized house was in Tokyo, and we're going to take a look at that in a minute.
The song we just sang before this was written by John McCaleb.
The gospel is for all.
And he firmly believed it.
wasn't just for citizens in the US.
or the UK, but everybody.
He's been called the father of mission work.
And he produced several books in both English and Japanese.
He did a lot of translating during his time there.
Here we actually see a photo of John McAleib's house that we took while we were in Tokyo.
Now this is kind of on the outskirts of Tokyo, but it's a nice two-story regular western house.
And let me tell you, when they tell you that you walk down the street there and it'll be on your left, you can't miss it.
I promise you can't miss it because all the other architecture.
is strictly Japanese and then you just see a western house with a little bit of land just sticking out of the thicket.
It's all by itself, wooden floors and actually you probably can't see it but at the base here at the foot you can see these little dots.
I know I didn't zoom in close enough but those are all slippers.
So we would still, even though this was turned into a museum, you still had to take your shoes off, put on the guest slippers before you entered the house.
This is standard practice throughout all Japan, in all homes.
You don't have to do it at the local Denny's or when you're out shopping, but anytime you go into somewhere of any significance, you have to show honor to that place by taking off
your shoes and putting on the slippers.
Now his house has actually been there so long they've actually turned it into the Missionary Museum.
And after worship I have a handout that you're welcome to look at on the back table.
I was only able to get one.
I know you won't be able to read it because it is in Japanese, but it has more photos of the layout of the house and more details about it.
And if you take your phone, you can translate it using Google Translate.
Here's the inside of the house, one of the rooms that were used.
A standard westernized type bed.
You still had the wood furnace to go there.
But he actually taught Sunday school classes and preached from his house for many years.
Here's the middle.
The piano was not in there originally.
They added that when they turned it into a museum.
because McCaleb was strictly against instrumental music use in the church.
Here's an early model that they actually have on the upper floor in one of the bedrooms of how the complex looked before it was turned into a museum and before Tokyo kind of
overtook.
So what you have is the main house here where you had your farming plot.
While he did get support from local churches back in the U.S., he did not rely on that.
He actually started his own.
Homestead would farm and bring forth his own money working with the Japanese people.
He had the idea and the belief that working together with them would help make them more self-sufficient instead of just sending them money, telling them to set up a church, and
then moving on to the next place, which happens far too often today.
Now this area over here where we see the buildings on the left, right now those are just apartment complexes.
Where we entered was actually a small street that ran right about here to the house.
And then going diagonal, you had about five city blocks of graveyard.
And so he had to compete with this.
The graveyard I'm sure wasn't as expansive as what it is now.
But you can see the grave plots.
Each grave plot, instead of just having a standard tombstone like we have in the U.S., they not only have the tombstone, but at every single base you have a spot for washing,
Cleansing, incense, and worship.
Didn't see a single grave that didn't have it the whole time there.
And we walked through probably four city blocks of promoting, again, the Shintoism and the Buddhism in the area.
Someone that worked a little past him a little later was a woman named Sarah Andrews, one that won the hearts of the Japanese people.
She lived from 1892 to 1961.
She worked briefly with John McHale before he returned back to the US.
John McHale never came back to the US, but Sarah Andrews eventually died in Japan, giving her entire life to the Japanese people.
She started mission work at only 24 years old.
And she was well known for telling her mother something really cool.
So the story goes in her autobiography, which I was given by brother now Fukushima-san.
He gave me her biography and when reading it you can see that her mother didn't want her to go to Japan.
She said, Japan wasn't a place for Christians.
It's not somewhere where you should be going.
It's too far away.
Please stay at home.
And yet she's known for having told her mother heaven is just as close from Japan as it is here.
And what a true statement.
During her time in Japan, she planted five churches in Shizuoka.
Now know Shizuoka doesn't mean much to you, so I pulled up a map.
So here we have the greater Tokyo area.
We landed our plane in Haneda Airport, which is there at Kamakura.
We took our train up north and over towards Saitama, and so that upper area is where the Tachikawa Church of Christ is.
Tokyo, there's the main city, and you can see how large this city is.
But Shizuoka is the red prefecture down here.
Her church is right off the coast there, maybe a 10 minute walk from the beach.
but she established five of these congregations.
The one we were able to visit was the Okitsu Church of Christ, and that's where we met our brother in Christ, Shinozaki-san.
Shinozaki walked us through and told us about the history of Sarah Andrews, the early church, and how it was founded in Japan.
And of all the strange things, I say strange, but...
At the end of our visit, he told me he looks forward to seeing me again and he'll pray daily that we can work together to spread the gospel in Japan.
He was borderline begging to see more missionaries come, not just me, but others.
He told me of another couple that was planning on moving there eventually later this upcoming year and said that he was so excited, the members were excited.
Now granted, there are only five members in this church building.
A little further north, about an hour north of here, there's one called Oewa Church of Christ.
As of last November, their last member actually died.
She was a 93-year-old woman, and yet she still went to the building every Sunday for worship to her God.
Now the building sits empty.
But this is the Okitsu Church of Christ, and this is the sign up on the front.
Easy to read, right?
Google Translate helps with that.
Okitsu Church of Christ.
founded by missionary Sarah S.
Andrews.
Yeah, her birth and death date.
It was dedicated in 1926 by the Okitsu Mission First Memorial Church.
So now not only is it a place for worship, but it's now, what's the word?
It's a piece of history there that the city will never break down.
They're going to keep it there, similar to the missionary museum that we saw from John Caleb, John McAleib.
John Moody.
Here we see a photo of her.
I did have it circled.
I had him circle one of the last pictures because I didn't think it had it circled.
Here you see in the white hat is Sarah Andrews.
And there's her Sunday congregation, all of them wearing kimono.
At the time, they were coming out of the Edo period and technology was on the rise.
For the longest time, Japan has been very much open to foreigners.
They've been begging for it.
This was when Shizuoka was at its strongest.
It had lots of families, lots of children, all growing up in the nurture and admonition of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And today we're down to five members.
When you walk through Shizuoka, if you mention Sarah Andrews' name to anyone, their eyes will light up, a smile will come across their face, and they want to talk to you about
Sarah Andrews.
What a great end to talk about the Gospel and Christ.
We experienced that while we were there.
Sarah Andrews had a heart for mission work and a heart for the Japanese people.
Moreover, she had a heart for Christ.
She chose to stay during World War II.
When the police came to get her, to have her evacuate because Japan had decided to side with the other side and fight against, this was pre-Pearl Harbor, she told the police,
have no home but Japan, and decided to stay.
They arrested her.
They placed her in a prison camp, and she faced male nutrition for the following few years.
From what I was told by Brother Shinozaki, she sat there,
and she was given one cup of rice.
It was rice meal every single day.
And it had been boiled.
was the bottom of the pot for the local military in the area.
And so it would have been an equivalent to gruel but worse.
She was rescued eventually.
After we had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we eventually put ground troops in.
The ground troops came and one of the members in the Army Battalion that was in that ground troop was actually a member of the Church of Christ back in the US.
He had heard of Sarah Andrews and he went and looked for her and found her.
He gave her his military rations.
She slowly started to get well enough to walk.
They took her back to the US.
After she went back to the U.S., she recovered.
And the moment she was able to, she went right back to Japan.
She was not taking no for an answer.
She went back and helped with the reclamation and the rebuilding process after the bombs were dropped.
She taught for 45 years and eventually died in Japan in 1961.
A close friend of hers was Hedy Lee Ewing.
Sister Ewing lived from 1896 to 1986.
She set sail for Japan in 1926.
and I already said she was a close friend of Sarah Andrews.
She started Sunday schools and Bible classes in Okitsu.
Okitsu was just a hop, skip, and a jump.
So there we have Tokyo, and Okitsu is down at the bottom there.
Now we have a land bridge for one of the Shinkansen trains that goes across the bay.
So you can get to Okitsu in just a few short hours.
She left Japan in 1941.
Now to put this into perspective, the bomb was dropped on August 9th, 1945.
So she left just a little before while her friend decided to stay.
She returned in 1947 to aid in rebuilding despite the hardship.
We think hardships are tough here.
I can't imagine what it would feel like to have a missionary come after a bomb had been dropped on my main city.
And yet they came anyway to help them.
She worked there for 40 years before returning to Texas in 1974.
Now, we're going to get into where we stayed and the people we met.
This is Tachikawa.
I said it was a little north, I guess it's a little southwest of Tokyo, now that I'm thinking about it.
But there's Tokyo proper and Tachikawa.
We stayed at the Tachikawa Church of Christ.
And I guess these got out of order.
I did get to blame you for one of the slides after all.
This is our Christian family in Japan.
And the kanji down there means family.
It's a super fancy version of saying family, but it is.
This is the church building where we stayed.
Our brother and sister in Christ, Brother Nao Fukushima and his wife Noriko are to my right in the photo there, to the left on the actual picture.
He's been the preacher there for quite a while now.
Nao actually came to the US.
He speaks very great English and he graduated from the Sunset Church of Preach, School of Preaching out in Texas.
So he went to Sunset, got his degree, came back to Japan and opened up.
the church.
Now the church is kind of neat because if you look on the left side of the picture you can kind of see the monorail sticking out over here.
The church used to be a one-story building that was a bit wider with more land but as the city grew they decided they needed to put a monorail there and so the city actually bought
half the land from the church at a great price being a country as small as essentially California is now.
land is in very short supply, especially in the Tokyo area.
So it actually wound up being a great blessing for the church because they had started having water leaks, they didn't have air conditioning, a bunch of other things were going
wrong, but because of the money that they were given from the government, yeah, they've got the rail system right across the street, but now the building is shaped kind of like a
triangle, but they were actually able to build on two more floors and build this building and still have money left over to support.
and start the Japan School of Evangelism, which actually is housed in this building.
They don't have any current students, but they're always looking for more.
Moving forward, this is the inside of the church here.
Again, of course, everything's in Japanese.
This church has about 10 to 15 members, 20 on a good day, so not too many.
I was actually privileged by now, very honored in fact.
I was able to give a small devotional about the Lord's Supper before we all took the Lord's Supper together.
So I went up there and talked and I would say one to two sentences and then now would translate them into Japanese for everyone to hear.
Here we have the little kids sing that happens before worship and so we have two young ones.
One is, do you remember the ages?
I think it was five and three.
They are being raised able to speak Japanese and English at the same time.
And so we got to lead this little Christian light of mine.
And so they got to hold their little fingers up and do the Christian light just like we do at Vacation Bible School.
Afterwards, we sat down for lunch with the congregation and got to know them.
Lots of fantastic foods.
Many foods that I'm sure many of us in here probably wouldn't try.
But we tried just about all of them.
It very good home cooking.
From there, we traveled around the Tokyo area to see the different temples, learn and research more into the Shintoism and Buddhism.
And then we made our way over to Ochanamizu to meet with Aikawa-san.
I believe I've got Ochanamizu there, up northwest of Tokyo.
Ochanamizu is home of the largest congregation in all of Japan.
It has about 120 members and four elders.
It is also the only Church of Christ in all of Japan, the entire nation, that even has an eldership.
They just don't have the people there.
Aikawa-san is what I like to call the Church Historian there at Ochanomizu.
He keeps the library and things, but he also teaches a history class on biblical history every Sunday.
He not only agreed to meet with us kind of last minute, we had sent him several emails months prior to going and never heard back.
One call now messaged him the day before and he said, I missed the emails.
I'm sorry, I'll meet with you tomorrow.
And so not only did he meet, this man had a full one hour PowerPoint presentation ready to teach us about the history of Japan, about John McAlib Moody, about Sarah.
Andrews, Hetty Ewing, and many, many others.
And so he went through and showed us all that.
Of the things that we were given by both Ikawa-san and now's wife Noriko was a list of congregations of the Church of Christ in Japan.
And you can see each of the ones that are registered here on the map.
In an entire nation, we have 44 congregations.
How many churches do you think we have in California?
How many churches do we have in Memphis?
Not saying strictly sound congregations.
Unfortunately, not all 44 of these are sound.
So there's even fewer than that.
See you all right?
Is he okay?
Okay, just wanted to make sure.
Alright, just wanted to make sure first.
So we have less than 44 congregations that are sound churches of Christ all throughout Japan.
This is Brother Shinozaki-san.
He offered to meet us down in Shizuoka, which was about a three hour train ride from Tokyo.
Wonderful man.
He's currently preaching at the same congregation that you saw earlier that we went to that was built by Sister Andrews.
So he's maintaining that building.
He's teaching the five people there and he's actively trying to evangelize now, but he doesn't have much help, unfortunately.
He sat with us over a meal.
We went out to eat wonderful food again.
Of the things that he brought to my attention were a couple of books about evangelism in Japan and things like that.
So he showed me the books and went through.
And he showed me the photo of Sarah Andrews and all of the people there.
Now, I don't have notes on these.
I did originally, but they're not on my computer.
They're actually left on my iPad.
But he had pointed out some of the historical figures were there.
So this man here, I don't have his name, unfortunately, but he was actually the mayor of the town of Shizuoka.
We'll call it a town.
They have a different name for it over there.
but he actually not only attended and was a member at the time that Sarah was there, she would teach the gospel, but when a man became a Christian, she would let him kind of take
over.
Like she wasn't the preacher.
I want to make sure I state that.
She still sat exactly where she should be, but he actually became a preacher.
And if I'm not mistaken, he became an elder as well at Shizuoka at the time when they were large enough to have elders.
Lots of missionaries come through Japan.
It's a nation that is both beautiful and tragic all at the same time.
Beautiful in the sense of what its people offers, the ideals and thought processes of the people and how hungry they are for the Word of God.
Tragic in the fact that we don't have many churches there, not many teachers, and things have grown in the entire nation from Shintoism and Buddhism to simply worshipping the
American dollar.
how lucky we are to be able to have the Bible and access to sound churches of Christ like we do here in the United States.
Tonight I want us to think about how privileged we are to have the opportunity that we are afforded here in the U.S.
to learn the Gospel, to obey Christ's Word.
We don't live our lives perfectly, but we can spend our time in the Bible and learn how to be better.
We can learn of the hope that Jesus Christ offers us.
John Caleb wrote the song, The Gospel is for All.
It's more than just for us.
It's for everyone all over the world.
When was the last time we even spoke around the water cooler at work to our friends about Christ?
Tried to earn their trust, whether it's apologetics or friendship evangelism.
We need to learn how to spread the gospel, not just in Japan, not just here in the States, but to everyone we meet.
When we were heading over there, we even met a lady who saw me have my Bible open and we were talking.
And she asked for prayers on the plane for her uncle, I believe, that was sick with cancer in the Tokyo hospital.
She told me that he was studying his Bible, didn't have a teacher.
but he was sitting there studying it and he was considering baptism of all things.
I gave her my information, I messaged the boys at the school, and we all sat down and prayed for her.
I prayed for her on the plane right there and let it in front of everyone so that they could see.
Sometimes we don't think about evangelizing as much as we should.
Sometimes we get caught up with the Almighty Dollar, the TV shows we watch, the sports games that are coming on.
We've got to try to realign our thoughts to focus on our God and our Savior Christ.
If tonight you realize that you haven't been living the way that you should and need to repent of your sins.
If you need us to pray for you for any way, if you need us to pray for one of your friends, or maybe even start a Bible study, whatever the need is, if you have a need,
please come forward and let it be known tonight because we're ready and willing to help you do that.
Our God is an amazing God.
He loves each and every one of us.
And He's here for you tonight if you need to come forward as we stand and as we sing.