Here in Mexico, Halloween is not nearly as big as El Día de los Muertos. On this holiday people commemorate their dead loved ones and pray for them to get out of "Purgatory". For some it's a day to venerate death; for others it's just another opportunity to party and get drunk. In any case I didn't want to miss this great opportunity to preach the Gospel. So on Tuesday we went to el Centro de Guadalajara to be light among all this wickedness and darkness. I remembered to get some pictures:
They set up booths in one of the plazas were they sold sweets and baked goods, especially pan de muerto, bread of the dead. This bread is eaten, but also offered up in shrines to departed loved ones.
Chocolate skulls...the horror!
People like to stop and listen to clowns and their foolishness, but not the foolishness of the preaching of the Gospel.
Here are some shrines of dead people in another plaza. They appear to be celebrity shrines. Notice the drinks, bread and candles. The whole area smelled of incense. Hmm...what does the Word of God say about making altars and offering up incense to strange gods?
These skeletons got a lot of people's attention.
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of us sharing the Gospel (Lina did, hopefully I'll put some of those up soon). But we went to our usual fishing spot, Plaza Tapatía. While open air preaching I was ruthlessly heckled by a militant Catholic. When he heard me preaching the Gospel and say that salvation is through Christ only and not any man or religion, he started to loudly yell that we were a cult that began in the 1900s in Kansas (I think he confused me with a Pentecostal) and gave some of the usual erroneous Catholic arguments. He stood a few feet in front of me and was trying to preach over me. He actually managed to gather a good-sized crowd. I tried to reason with the guy, and even challenged him to a debate right there on the spot but he didn't want to let me get a word in, he just kept loudly and angrily "preaching". It remained like this for several minutes. I just kept preaching the Gospel, and refuted some of his erroneous arguments, but the crowd's attention seemed to be focused on this man (and mind you I was talking through an amp!).
Because of this some of my brothers and sisters stood right next to where he was (as he was shouting) and started to preach to the crowd--at the very same time that I was preaching.
And the tummult got worse: some professing Christians who had been listening to me share the Gospel came over to "help" us and tried to scare the guy off. One Christian street preacher that we met right then and there, who was holding up a large sign about salvation through Christ, even got angry with the Catholic, went up to his face, and just about pushed him, telling him to go away.
It was sheer chaos for a couple minutes.
Finally he left, and the crowd shortly dissipated. They had probably only stopped to listen to the crazy Catholic because it looked like he was angry and looking for a fight. The people here seem to love to be spectators of such commotions. But the Gospel went forth, many people heard, and that's what's important. Please pray for those who heard the Gospel and for the angry Catholic heckler.
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