How do people encounter God’s presence? Through Jesus’ healing power and the faith of Christians in Cambodia, this sermon explores spiritual hunger, perseverance, and the impact of living out Christ’s love. Listen now!
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We are a welcoming and growing multigenerational church in Doncaster East in Melbourne with refreshing faith in Jesus Christ. We think that looks like being life-giving to the believer, surprising to the world, and strengthening to the weary and doubting.
Read the transcript
Good morning. This morning the Bible reading is from the gospel of Mark, chapter four, verses 21 through to 34.
Bible Reading
When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him, and a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had. Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you?” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
There you go. If you're going to sleep now, you can wake up if you're getting warm. How about you, say to Pedram, put on one of the coolers because we don't want you falling asleep.
We've got an opportunity to hear more about the way in which the life and ministry that Tim and Olivia and the boys are experiencing over in Cambodia teaches us something about the theme that we have for this year. (That theme, taken from 1 Corinthians 14, is that when people come into the orbit of the people of God, they experience that God is alive and active, working in the people of God and present in the community.) And so, it's a great privilege for me to have asked these guys if we can get some extra insight from you as you come and do your deputation. I think there's a lot that we can learn about what it looks like for you to see people (like in the Bible reading) drawn to the Lord Jesus, because they know that there is hope of restoration and healing in Him. And we long for our friends and family, our colleagues, and our acquaintances in the community to have that hunger to come to Jesus because they know that He is good.
How do you see spiritual hunger and people kind of reaching out for the presence of God in Cambodia?
Yeah. Thanks. Although we were wondering, has anyone ever coined the term a Megan Curls curly question, or can I patent it?
You definitely can.
Thank you, because plenty of curly questions here. So we are going slightly off script – you know, apologies for that.
So, like we mentioned in the Kids’ Talk, most Cambodians are Buddhist and the society is very spiritual in the sense that if you walk around the streets, you don't have to go far to see a temple. There are monks walking the streets everywhere. The spiritual realm in a physical, visual sense is very obvious and very present in people's lives. And so I think people are always – you know, anything that goes on, people will resort to their usually Buddhist roots. Sometimes we think that's a hunger for the spiritual. Sometimes it seems like a fear of the spiritual. Some of the cultural practices come out of fear of the spirits and of people who have died. So is there a spiritual hunger? Is it a fear? Is that kind of the same, you know, different sides of the same coin? Maybe. But I think very much so.
Often when people become Christians, it's not that unusual for that spiritual realm to continue through their Christianity, so I think it's a bit more visible in the way they go about things. So there's an expectation in their worldview that spiritual things happen and that unseen things can impact your life.
Can that be a barrier? Are there kind of cultural barriers that make it harder for people then to recognize God's presence in the gospel of Jesus, in the community of God's people?
Yeah, there are a lot of cultural barriers for the Buddhists who would like to follow Christ. The biggest one, the biggest opposition, is their family, and just the society as a whole. (Tim said almost everyone — there’s a phrase, “to be Khmer is to be Buddhist.” And so if you are not a Buddhist, then are you truly Khmer?) We see the Christians at the hospital we work at come up against great opposition from their family. And it's along a spectrum.
So we have seen some whose families completely disown them or who still expect them to visit the temples during the festivals and behave Buddhist, if you like. And then at the other end of the spectrum, one of the women that I mentor – when she became a Christian, her parents weren't happy. But then her brother and her sister also became Christians, and they've kind of gotten used to it, saying, "Oh, well, you know, it's not our ideal, but so be it," and they don't expect anything from them. So the Khmer Christians have really had to, in their own family and society, work out almost what their line is. And that's very much dependent on their families.
We know some who say, "I go to the temple with my family, but I will not do any offerings. I go there as a cultural practice and to accompany my elderly grandmother, but I won't take part in any of the offerings or anything like that." So there is that cultural barrier.
The other cultural barrier for us is obviously that we are not part of the Khmer culture, nor did we grow up in it. So, MMC has a spiritual impact team that does a lot of outreach and on-the-ground ministry and evangelism, and there are missionaries who are part of that team, but they are not the ones at the forefront of that evangelism. It is always the Khmer people on the spiritual impact team who go and do outreach, or who speak to the patients at the hospital about the gospel, because we want to make sure that it is coming from people who know the culture well, who are in that culture, preaching God's news.
So how did they become Christians?
Yeah. So I think it's pretty amazing when we stop and think about it, that these young people do become Christians. For example, there are two here on the screen – they're both doctors. On the left-hand side and on the right-hand side, both of them come from rural villages in Cambodia that are still very traditional in the way that things happen. So their background is very Buddhist, very animistic, and both of them have grown up in these environments. Also, both have grown up in quite poor environments. So it's remarkable that they've come to the city and become very competent doctors. It's also remarkable that they've become Christians.
Most of them become Christians through student movements at their universities (a lot of them through Campus Crusade). A medical degree is actually eight years, so there's eight years of involvement with these groups. That is how a lot of our doctors and nurses have become believers.
(Speaker 2 adds:) On the previous slide, there was a photo of one of our other doctors, Dr. Vathai, with her family. She is an exceptional doctor who runs our women's health program at MSI. She's also married to a doctor (in that photo) who does not work at MMC and is not a Christian – he is a Buddhist. And that is actually the case for a lot of our female Christian staff at MMC: they have married a Buddhist either when they were Christian or they became Christian after getting married.
And one story that we have from Dr. Vathai is that last year in October, during the Pchum Ben festival (which is a religious holiday in Cambodia – a very dark holiday), there is a great burden of spirits. People go to the temple for 15 days, making offerings to ward spirits away from coming to their house. They believe that when the spirits come out of the grave, they don't want them coming to their house and imposing upon them, so they take food to the temple for the spirits to go there rather than to their house. Dr. Vathai told us that one night during this time, she had a dream where her husband's eyes were bleeding, and she woke from that dream and realized that in her house, her mother (who is still a Buddhist) and her husband were making offerings to the spirits and burning incense. And so there is really a very heavy spiritual realm in Cambodia. It can be a heavy burden for the Christians, even once they become Christians.
How do people, your regular community people, encounter the presence of Jesus in your midst? Is there something different about your team, the hospital? What stands out?
Yeah, I think what stands out to them is the fact that at MMC, we, in a sense, go the extra mile in a way that a local hospital would not. In terms of if the patient doesn't have the means to pay for their treatment, then we usually can find means to do that rather than just kind of pushing them out the door.
Another very concrete way is: in Cambodia, if you need a blood transfusion, you need a family member or a friend to go to the blood bank on your behalf. They go with a form and it's a bit of a one-in, one-out system. So you need to donate so that your uncle can receive a blood transfusion. If patients don't have this person, then in a normal public hospital, they just won't get a blood transfusion — they may die as a result. At MMC, usually if a patient comes in and doesn't have someone to donate, the staff members (both expatriate and local) will put out a message asking if someone can go to the blood bank and donate on the patient's behalf. This kind of generosity really overwhelms the patients, especially because people in Cambodia are quite reluctant to donate blood (they usually only do it for a family member).
There was one specific example of a woman who received a unit of blood. She said to one of our residents, "Where did this blood come from?" and the reply from the resident was, "It was donated as a blessing to you by someone who loves God and loves you, even though they don't know you." I think this just characterizes our residents, because they are so faithful, but at the same time they're not pushing anything on our patients (who are mostly Buddhist). They’re just taking those opportunities to show them the way that God’s working through them and through Mercy.
It’s incredible and such an encouragement to us that just being a blessing and serving and sacrificing can bring someone closer to Jesus.
It sounds like it can be quite a hard place to be a Christian in Cambodia for those that have become Christians. And also, you know, you've hinted that there's been some hard stuff that you guys have gone through as well.
How have you, and what you've observed around you as well, cultivated that presence of Jesus to keep you persevering in that challenging place?
Yes – in very unimpressive ways. I don't really feel qualified to answer this question, necessarily, because we are very normal people. But yes, as you said, the past three years have posed many challenges for our family. We knew that there would be challenges, but obviously we didn't know what they would be, and we could never have predicted these things.
Mainly it’s been to do with the missionary team that we work with at MMC. There has been quite a lot of hardship – a lot of curveballs, unexpected things. Not conflict within the missionary team, but things happening to members of our team. And we have actually seen that as quite a bit of spiritual attack as well, because we know that MMC is doing really good work, and the devil does not want [MMC] to be doing that work in Cambodia.
So we've had good friends leave the field – very good friends of ours left the location – because of mental health issues in their children.
We've had multiple cancer diagnoses within the team that have made people leave or be away for quite a significant amount of time, or leave permanently.
One example of that: on the screen there's a photo of our family with Anna and Thomas. They are an American couple. Thomas is one of the doctors at MMC, and Anna and Thomas have both, separately, been working in Southeast Asia for about 25 years. But they only met and got married about ten years ago. So they're doing wonderful work in Cambodia (and they were in Vietnam as well, and Thailand). Anna lived close to us – she was our older two boys' piano teacher. They were both wonderful people, and she was a wonderful lady. I was really getting to know her. She was also part of the Sunday school team, so she really helped me out because her camera is much better than mine! She was there weekly, being a great support to us at church.
In October 2023 (about 18 months ago), she was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. In about ten days, they packed up their life in Cambodia and went back to the States. We had to say goodbye, and we knew we would never see her again. (Sorry, this always makes me emotional.) She died three months later – it’s just been the one-year anniversary of her death. That has had a significant impact on our family, on myself. I spoke of my loneliness before, and this was really the start of that deep loss and sense of loneliness being in Cambodia. It's really impacted our missionary team and the MMC church that we are working with over there, because Anna and Thomas were a great part of that. So there's been a lot of loss.
We also had a huge fire a few doors down from our house last year. That caused quite a lot of trauma within our family, with our kids – working through those things with them and helping them to understand why these things happen, and asking "Will God protect us if another fire happens?" – all of these uncertainties that we have.
I guess what I want to say is that through these challenges and hardships, our understanding is that He is there even though it is hard. Every day we say to our children as they go to school (especially when they're upset), "Jesus is with you. Even when I cannot be there with you at school or at kindergarten, Jesus is with you, and you need to remember that." We have memorized some memory verses, and I remind them of that. I don't know if they remember the whole of Psalm 23 while they're sitting in their math class at school, but we are attempting to cultivate that awareness of God's presence in their everyday – and we are reminding ourselves of that in doing so as well, because it is easy to forget when you get bogged down in the routines of life. It happens to us in Cambodia as it did to us in Melbourne, as I know it does for all of you here today.
Another thing that I was speaking to Tim about just an hour ago is that I've noticed with the women that I meet at the Khmer church we go to (the Bible study that I am a part of in Khmer), they are constantly saying the phrase akun Preah Yesu – which means “thank you, God, praise God” – constantly, in every sentence. I just kind of brushed over that because in my mind I knew what it meant. But then when I thought about it being translated to English… If I used the phrase “Praise God, thank you, God, Lord Jesus” in every second sentence as I talked to people around me here in Melbourne, that would not be normal, would it? So I think that's a real way that I've learned from the Khmer Christians – about how they just integrate Jesus Christ into their everyday. And that is such a wonderful witness as well to the people around them.
Yeah. Thank you. I'm aware that time is going. And it's a real privilege to share even a tiny bit of the emotion that has made up your last three years.
How do you see the unity and love among believers – the people that you've loved and lost – affecting the way that non-Christians are perceiving God's presence among you?
Yeah. So I think as this photo probably shows, there is a great group of young Christians who, for the most part, enjoy working with each other, and it's usually a fairly fun, jovial place to work — people most of the time supporting each other. And I think our patients and our non-Christian staff members see that as something that, you know, they want to be a part of. They see the fruits of the Spirit being played out. And I guess for me, I see that as how the body of Christ should be. It's obviously not always the case, but you hear about it in Australia as well: you hear about people being drawn into a church or a mission group or something simply because of how they see people interacting with each other. And through that, they start realizing, "Oh, that's actually the body of Christ that I can see there."
So our patients do see that, and especially our non-Christian staff members. And they kind of want to be a part of that. So yeah.
What encouragement would you give to us, who want to facilitate people encountering the love, the presence of God here at Deep Creek, where we are in our workplaces, from your first term?
Yeah, I think we're probably not saying anything particularly new — it's probably more of a reminder. But I think for us, we are part of a big team at MMC, a big team that is made up of Cambodians and many other nationalities, and each person there has been placed by God for a reason, for a purpose (often for a different purpose and with different gifts and skills). And I think that's really important to remember: we're not all there trying to do the same thing as the person next to us, and we should be remembering, well, what are my God-given gifts and how can I use them for building up the body of Christ and strengthening other believers?
So I guess my encouragement is:
- ...you know, let's just make sure remembering what are my gifts, you know, what are my skills and even what do I enjoy doing?
- I enjoy cooking for someone. Well then, you know, use your hospitality to – how can we, you know – further the body of Christ through hospitality.
- I mean, it's all very biblical, and we don't want all of us doing the same thing.
And we are not in Cambodia doing full-time Bible teaching or that kind of thing in a Bible college – we are doing ministry through a hospital, through medicine. And so that's different to a lot of other missionaries.
But yeah, but you're still seeing fruit, in the way that you're building up the church through what you can bring to the church, and in the way that you're seeing people come, wanting to be close to Jesus because sometimes maybe they want to be close to you guys.
Yeah. Well, Bob's going to pray for us, and I want to make sure that there's nothing else that you want to say before we do that, okay? ... All right. Bob's going to pray. Bob's going to come up, and he'll make sure that he prays particularly for these guys, and then a couple of other things. Then we're going to sing and we'll finish our service.
