Acts 26:9-19
- Missionary, Don Dewing, preached this message on May 7, 2023.
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Audio Transcript
Foreign.
We’re very happy to have today Don and Talika with us. And I’m just going to give a word of introduction by reading from the missions bulletin. This is a little booklet that’s printed. They’re outside in the hallway and it gives you information and pictures of all our missionaries so you can pray for them and know a little bit more about them. Don and Talika have served at the Midwest Indian mission for now 48 years and they’re working on their 49th year.
The motto for their ministry is Reaching the First Americans for Christ there. Don is the pastor of two churches, both of which are located on the Potawatomie Indian Reservation. Did I get it right? They were all laughing at me in early service because I’m not from Wisconsin.
But if I found out, the problem was it wasn’t really my mispronunciation, it’s the fact that they put an N here instead of an M. So I’m forgiven. I butchered everything else before the M so it didn’t really matter. Talika takes care of all the treasury work and is very involved in the day to day operations of the mission there. At present they run a food pantry which is well used. They have a building in Crandon that is used as a shelter and a transitional house.
They have an active youth ministry program and a program for alcoholics and others with need. They have three sons. Benjamin is in charge of the youth program. Micah is the shelter directory and Adam is the associate pastor at one of the churches. And we have partnered with them since 2, 2003.
So many of you have known them for a long time and the number of years. Talika must have been three when they started. Right. Don was just a little bit older, but Don, would you come up and share with us today? We’re very happy to have you.
Really. I married Talika before she was born. We’ve been married 49 years and she’s only 45. So it’s one of those arranged marriages. We, as I said, work with Midwest Indian Mission.
We live in Crandon, Wisconsin. The purpose of our organization is to reach out to small tribes. There are many tribes around the United States. But our mission was started specifically in goal of reaching to small native tribes where the church has been closed or never began because most of the other larger organizations have gone to where there’s more people. Because some of these small tribes can be, you know, 100 or two, maybe up to six or 800 tribal members.
And most of the larger denominations felt that that was a Not a good expenditure of their money. They would never have a church much larger than two or three or four people Native American in America, as by the federal government standards, they’re only 4% Christian. And that includes everything from Mormon, Jehovah Witness, Catholic, Evangelical. They cut them all in one category. So if you consider that there’s only 4% Christian people among the native tribes across the nation, consider how many of those are attending a church where the gospel is being preached.
It’s a pretty small number, and our goal is to make sure that small tribes don’t get left behind. There are many churches across the northern parts of the United states, more than 100 that we know of that are closed because of lack of leadership, because no pastor wants to go and live there. Reservation can be a difficult place to live.
It’s not a gentle, kind place, but it is a place where the gospel is needed. Taliqa and I have ministered there for 48 years.
It says in the thing that Talika has part of our ministry notes, really does every part of the ministry. She just carries me along for a beauty snapshot or something. But, yeah, no, it’s true.
Our goal is very simple, is that people would know Jesus. It is a. A challenge when tradition is powerful. And among native people, they have their religious traditions that are very ancient. And when we come in with a gospel, their first response is, but that’s not traditionally how we do this.
That is the biggest obstacle to the gospel that we have is that it’s seen as cultural genocide, as destroying their culture, destroying who they are. They have a belief that you cannot be Christian and Indian at the same moment. If you become a Christian, you become a white person. And the worst thing you can call a native person is a Chemokman, which is white. Well, it’s, it’s.
Yeah, it’s a derogatory term. I wouldn’t want to tell you what it actually means, but it’s not. If you ever get called that, it’s not a compliment. So when you come into a native community, you have to come in with an understanding that this is not a place where you come and spend a month or two or three, and people just are, you know, coming to church in droves. It just doesn’t happen.
And if we as a church, and I mean the church universal, can’t commit ourselves to more than a short term, will never have much impact. I want to read from the Book of Acts, chapter 26, Paul’s defense of his gospel in front of King Agrippa. He’s going to be on his way to Rome, where he will eventually lose his life. His accusers accused him of bringing Gentiles into the temple, which he didn’t do. But really he was being on trial because he was a preacher that wouldn’t shut up.
I have to tell you, it’s a dangerous thing to have a native missionary in a non native church. Because if I preach for 45 minutes in my church, people are going, that’s it? That’s all you got? If I did that here, you’d be going, you were over 20 minutes ago. Stop already.
So I try to keep it within your comfort zone the best I can, but it’s not my comfort zone over time. But Paul is defending his ministry, defending his person. And he wants the King to know that being a Christian is not just what he believes, it’s who he is. It’s not just his belief, it’s who he is as a person. And this is where ministry in the native community really matters.
What you believe and how you live have to be exactly the same. There can be no contradictions. Now, no one’s perfect and we all have some contradiction. But you have to be able to live what you preach. You have to be able to live what you teach.
Because most Native people are not coming to the church to hear a message. It’s not coming. So the only message you’re ever going to hear is, I played softball on their softball teams forever. I raced stock cars with their guys. I was involved in coaching little league teams.
It didn’t really matter. Digging ditches, changing out septics. It didn’t matter what had to be done. I would always volunteer and say, oh, no, I’d be glad to take part because it was what got me into people’s homes. I was a young white man Christian preacher.
The two worst things you could possibly be. And I wasn’t going to get into anybody’s homes by just saying, oh, the preacher’s here, we should invite him in. So I got in through just helping, just being of service, just doing every unpleasant job or enjoying the sports with him, which I always enjoyed anyway, just a part. So Paul, in his defense of who he was, was really defending the fact that this is who I am. King, you can’t take it from me.
I can’t stop this. So chanting in.
And if I cough a little bit during the sermon, it’s because Teleka was choking me back there in the pew. Acts, chapter 26, starting in verse 9. Paul speaking. I was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem.
On the authority of the chief priests, I put many of saints in prison. And when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished. And I tried to force them to blaspheme in my obsession against them. I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.
On one of these journeys, I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priest. About noon, O King. As I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven brighter than the sun blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground. And I heard the voice saying to me in Aramaic, saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
Is it hard for you to kick against the goad? Then he asked, who are you, Lord? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. The Lord replied, now get up. Stand on your feet.
I’ve appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins in a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me, then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to that vision from heaven.
The process that Paul describes here was his salvation. But he started before that. He started to say, okay, grandpa, I’m a Jew. And I’m putting extra words here. I’m a Jew.
I was highly educated among the Jewish belief. I was making my way up the ranks to become a leader in the temple, in the Sanhedrin. And I hated Christians. I believed that they were contrary to our traditions and therefore did not represent godliness.
This is the belief of many native people that tradition, since it does not include Jesus, that we are the ones who are perverting godliness, that we are the ones who are preaching a strange message, that their belief has been theirs for centuries and therefore it cannot change. Because to change tradition is to dishonor God. That’s what Paul said.
I’m a Jew. I am educated. I am trained. And I hated the church. I hated them.
They had to die because they were promoting a false gospel, a false view of who God is. I can’t have that. I have to oppose them. And this is the first thing we ever faced on the reservation was that opposition of saying, you know, if you want to reach native people, they’d say to us, you know, you have to really include our belief system into Christianity. You have to bring what we always hold as traditional and weave it into the gospel.
There’s a term for this, it’s called syncretism. Trying to take a non godly worship and a godly worship and weave them together. And many places are doing it. But in doing it, you destroy both. You water them both down to where they’re nothing.
Paul says, I couldn’t let them destroy our faith. I couldn’t let these sect of the Nazarene this way. I couldn’t let them destroy what we as Jews have always had. They had to die. It was the right thing to do.
It was honoring God to do it.
Many native people feel that way about Christianity, that they’re honoring God by making sure the church does not succeed, by trying to close the church. Because that’s the way to uphold tradition. If there is no gospel being presented, then there is no opposition. If there is no opposition, that is godliness. But when you bring these Christian people in and they preach that there is a way called Jesus that doesn’t involve all of the other things we’ve always done, that really makes them null and void.
We can’t have that. That’s cultural genocide. We can’t allow that to happen. There’s a story in the Old Testament about Naaman. Most of you will remember it.
He’s a Syrian general, got leprosy. Heard that there was a man of God. I’m skipping a lot, but heard there was a man of God who could heal him. He went to visit the man of God and the man of God wouldn’t even come out and talk to him. Said, yeah, just go down the street, Jordan river and dip seven times.
You’ll be clean. And he left angry, going, he didn’t even wave his arms over me or nothing. There’s better rivers up in Syria than there are down here. I’m not washing no Jordan river. I’m going home and washing.
Finally some cooler heads. Said, listen, if he’d have asked you to do anything, you’d have done it, right? Well, of course, but he had to do some ceremony, right? He didn’t even hardly look at me.
He said, listen, he asked you to do a very simple thing. Yeah, but he didn’t want a simple thing. He wanted a ritual. He wanted a ceremony. Finally they convinced him he could just do the simple thing.
He could do A ceremony the other day, and again my added emphasis here. And he was healed because he obeyed. Simple. But many traditions that exist around the world and certainly in Native American community are very elaborate, very drawn out, very long. And people think that that’s godliness.
There’s not a personal relationship with God. They have. There’s no personal identity in Jesus. There is a community identity through ceremony, through ritual.
Unfortunately, many churches have that same relationship with God. It’s not a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s, I went to church, I went to the ceremony, I did what I was supposed to do. That’s not going to change my life. I’m going to go out and live the way I’ve always lived.
But I was in church, and that’s all that God requires of me. So Paul defended the Gospel, saying, listen, I had to destroy the church because it was contrary to our belief.
We need our ritual, we need our ceremony, we need our sacrifice because it makes us feel like we’ve accomplished something. Putting faith in Jesus Christ is too easy. It’s too simple. I didn’t work for it. There’s nothing I can really do to make it happen.
I just have to take his word for it can’t be that simple or easy.
So Paul had to make a choice when he met the risen Jesus. Tradition or faith? Many of us have to do the same thing. Tradition or faith.
And if you’ve been raised in tradition, it’s tough to set that aside. It’s tough to say everything I’ve ever believed. And now I’m going to step over here into something that’s not really that well defined. I can’t earn it. I can’t do some ceremony that makes me feel whole.
I just have to be a part of the family of God. And that’s. I need more. We hear it all the time among native people. Couldn’t you just bring some of our ceremonies into the church?
Well, certainly we could, but that would be saying that that ceremony then does something to bring you to God when the Bible says it’s by faith alone, not of works, as any man should boast. But that’s offensive. What do you mean? It’s got to be. There’s got to be something I can do.
There is. Believe. No. No, it’s not good enough. I need something more than that.
Paul says, that was me until I was on the road to Damascus and I met the risen Jesus. Said I hated Christians until I met Jesus. It changed my life. That’s what changes your and my life. Meeting the risen Jesus unfortunately, too many people in church think that being good, having been a church member or church participant for years, not being a terrible sinner is all that I need to have a relationship with God.
That just isn’t true. There has to be a personal relationship. Me and Jesus together, side by side, walking and talking and learning and growing. There’s a song in my grown up years, it’s called in the Garden. Many of you probably know it.
And the chorus is, Andy walked with me and he talks with me and he lets me know I’m his own. As a kid I thought God’s name was Andy because Andy walks with me and Andy talks with me.
But it means that I walk and talk with Jesus. Me, not us, me. That personal relationship with Christ is powerful because it doesn’t depend on anything I do. It depends on what he’s already done. And for many native people that is offensive because it says my tradition then is not necessary.
And that’s insulting.
What do you mean my tradition is not necessary? I need it. And they do because they’ve never met the risen Jesus. Because their only contact with God is through ceremony, through ritual.
So a young white guy comes in, a hillbilly. I know it’s hard for you to imagine me a hillbilly, but I am comes preaching this simple gospel.
No, we can’t have it. Because if you’re right, if that is true, then our tradition is outdated. Isn’t that exactly what the Jewish people were going through when Paul was preaching to them? If Jesus is the way, then our traditions have become obsolete. We can’t have that.
We’ve got to keep them.
He says, king, when I met Jesus, everything changed.
I can picture this. Paul was there at Stephen stoning. He held the coats while people stoned Stephen to death. It says that Stephen had a very simple gospel. All the leaders of the Sanhedrin, all the rabbis tried to argue with Stephen, he said, but Stephen was so powerful in his words.
This wasn’t an educated man. This wasn’t someone who had gone to school. This wasn’t someone who had graduated with a doctorate. This was a simple man who loved Jesus. And he said no one could out talk him because his logic of who Jesus was was so powerful.
Paul held the coats while they stoned Stephen. And I believe that Stephen’s words were in the back of Paul’s mind as he was standing there on the road to Damascus. As he saw there isn’t Jesus. He could hear Stephen’s voices in the back of his head saying, because he lives, I can Face tomorrow.
Paul’s life was transformed. He no longer tried to destroy the church. He tried to build the church. He traveled all over Syria and what is Turkey and Greece, preaching and teaching God’s word. And everywhere he went, he got ran out of town by his own people and by non Christians.
They ran him out. They stoned him, they shipwrecked him. They did everything they could to destroy this man. I’m sure his health suffered greatly, but he never quit. He never quit.
He never gave up.
This really is. If there’s any secret to native ministry, it’s time.
There have been atrocities done by Christians to native people for generations. I can’t change that. I can’t make it different. I can’t apologize for it. It’s not enough.
But I can live it down. I can say, yes, all of that happened. But trust me, that’s not me. That’s not my message. That’s not my life.
You and I are here today. Let’s deal with today. But native people have this belief that if you did it to one person, you did it to everybody. So if my great, great great grandfather was treated that way, then that’s why I was treated that way. It’s personal.
So when I come in with the gospel and teach that Jesus is God and that faith in him alone will buy my eternity, they say, man, but I can go over here to this ceremony and we can spend a weekend. And when I leave there, I feel great. Yeah, When I leave your church after a couple hours, I don’t feel the same way. Because I’m telling you that you’re a sinner and that you’re lost and you need Jesus and they’re telling you you’re doing the ceremony, you’re great.
Can’t we have both? No, because if we have both, we have works, we have earning it, and it’s not an urn. Years ago, our oldest grandchild was having Christmas and we went over to his house and we gave him a present. His parents had said he needed some pajamas. So we wrapped up some pajamas in a present.
We handed it to him, he squished it and he said, this is clothes, isn’t it? He. He threw it behind the couch and he never opened it. He says, I hate clothes. He never knew what he missed.
Right. Because he never opened it. We have the gift of salvation, this wonderful gift that we know what it is and we know the power of it. But it’s a gift that must be accepted and opened. And if it’s never accepted and opened, you’ll never know its power.
And this is where many people in our world, they hear it and they say, well, I hear your words, I hear you speaking, but I don’t know, I don’t feel that power. Oh, you don’t because the spirit of God doesn’t live in you yet. Yeah, but when I get done with ceremony, I’m floating. Yeah, because you did everything you were told. You feel like you’ve earned something, but it’s a false belief.
Paul says, I was given a job. He says, get up on your feet, get up on your feet. Open the eyes of the blind, stand in the powerful seat of Satan and preach Jesus. I remember I was a freshman in college. I’m, you know, a kid for the first time ever, away from home, in a big city, in his college university, and I’m sitting in my dorm room and I’m reading my devotions and I didn’t want my roommate to know I was reading.
You know, how dorm rooms where our backs were this far apart. He knew what I was doing, but I tried to keep it a secret because I was afraid he wouldn’t like me. And I’m reading my devotions and I’m reading the story about the little boy and the feeding of the 5,000. And God had been nagging at me for a long time saying, I need you, I need you. I want you to be a missionary.
And I’m like, no way, I’m not that guy. I want a life.
I use all the excuses. I’m an 18 year old hillbilly kid. I have no money, I don’t even have an education yet. I have no contacts whatsoever. Everybody calls us white trash.
No one wants to hear from me. And God was very clearly saying, this little boy didn’t think he had anything either, but he had all that God needed.
He says, you have all that I need.
I didn’t believe that. I’m not sure some days I even do still. But God’s been good because what he wants is us. Not our education, not our training, not our community standing, not our heritage. He wants us willingly submitting to him and letting him do what he needs to be done.
Not us doing it, but letting him doing it. When you bring someone to Christ, one of the first things you really want to do is get them involved in fellowship. On a reservation, we get them involved in. We can’t. We have no fellowship.
Most of our churches are two or three people. You bring someone into the church, what kind of fellowship can we have? Oh yeah, we have a good time with Each other, but it’s still three people. Let’s imagine you came to church every week and there was just three people here. The preacher and two other people.
Would you go away going, wow, that was great, man. I’m so proud I was there, man. We had a good time together. No, Most of you going, that’s it, that’s it.
If you think the singing is great with this number, try singing it with one person here and two out there and listen to the singing, see what happens.
That’s it.
This is what you told me to leave my tradition for? Yeah, this is it.
I turned my back on my family for this? Yeah, for this.
Paul says I’m going to open the eyes of the blind. That was his commission, Right? Get out there.
Spiritually blind don’t know that they’re spiritually blind. Those living in the control of Satan don’t know they’re living under the control of Satan. But once God walks in the room, they know. There’s a gentleman who’s now passed. But he was one of my biggest opponents.
And this sounds really weird and I am weird, but if we were sitting in a room and someone walked in the room, if my back was turned to the door, I knew his name because his spirit and my spirit just started going like this as soon as he came in the room. I knew his presence by what preceded him. I knew it by name. There’s still people. I can tell you when they’re in the room with me, even if I don’t see them because I can feel the presence and how it opposes mine.
There is real spiritual power that’s involved in a non Christian world, but we have more. But the church doesn’t necessarily believe that.
We say we believe it, but put us in a position where we have to fight and see what we do. Most of us run.
Because we don’t want to fight for somebody’s soul. We want them to come and give it to us willingly. And mission work, that doesn’t happen. People just don’t come in and say, hey, I’d like to be a Christian. There’s a battle that goes on and if you’re afraid of the battle, then you don’t go.
Told a story earlier of a gentleman I met when I first became a missionary. And I’m on the res. And the gentleman lived right across the church. An old fishing guide and I went over to his house and I’m complaining. His name was Ike.
It’s Ike. No one’s coming to church. What am I doing wrong? And you have to know how Indian people talk. They don’t come right out and say anything.
They tell stories, they lead you down a really long road and hopefully you catch up on the meaning. But they never come to the meaning. I got the meaning after about an hour of conversation. The meaning was this. There are churches on either side of me.
Not one of those Christians has ever stopped here and asked me if I was on my way to heaven or not. They just drive by and wave. He said, if they really cared about me, they’d be sitting next to me here like you are. If they cared about me, I couldn’t keep them away from my door, he said, but they’ve never even tried. Don’t tell me the church cares about me, he said.
Don’t tell me that the church matters to whether I live or die like we do. He says, you got to prove that you got to live, that you got to fight for my soul. Okay, I can do that. Are we willing?
How many non Christians do you know? How much battle have you fought for their soul? How much time have you invested that they would know Jesus personally and the power that comes with the spirit of God and a victorious life that comes with it? Or they know where church is. They can come anytime they want.
You know where the bar is, you can go anytime you want. Does it draw you? I hope not. What’s going to draw them to church?
The love of God which comes through you. The grace of God which comes through every interaction with them. Paul says I’ve devoted my life and again I’m adding his words here. My life of preaching to the lost, city to city to city to city. They have tried to shut me up, they have hurt me every way possible.
And I refuse, refuse to stop. And now that I’m here in front of you, King Agrippa, I’m not going to shy away from the gospel either. You need Jesus.
Paul says. King Agrippa, I was not disobedient.
Let me preach to kings, let me preach to paupers. I don’t care. They’re lost who need Jesus. So what do we do?
The burden that was on my heart back there when I was an 18 year old kid in school was God.
I’d heard this missionary stories. I know what it cost, I can’t pay it. I can’t do it. That’s too much.
But just as Jesus said to Paul, I’ll rescue you. I’ll rescue you from your people, I’ll rescue you from those people. You don’t have to worry. Whatever they can throw at you I can rescue you from. It would take a very long time to describe to you the things that God has rescued us from, but he has.
I can’t tell you that. We have a church full of 100 people. We don’t. But the people we have, I would put up against anybody because they know what it is to leave family, home and tradition for the gospel of Jesus Christ. It has set them free.
And they wouldn’t go back to tradition for nothing because they know the freedom of Jesus. This is the hope. This is what Christianity puts promises. There’s a tradition among Native people where we live. When you get a gift, you waver it over your head.
So give them something they can lift. But you know, if you want to give me a pickup truck, I’ll try to lift it for you.
Wave it over your head and you say, miigwech. Miigwech. Oh, mwechwech. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. The gift that you have given Native people where we live is a gift of God’s word and people willing to stay and stand there and take it. That’s the gift. Someone to at least preach and teach and live the gospel of Jesus Christ with a message of hope from our church to yours, Miigwech.