A Digital Newsletter from Living Stream Ministry
September 2023, Issue No. 24
Background of Christian Literature in Modern Turkish
Modern Turkish, with its Latin alphabet, was introduced to Turkey in the 1930s to replace Ottoman Turkish with its Arabic alphabet. Today, there are approximately 84 million Modern Turkish speakers worldwide. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a great population exchange of about 2 million people between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Christians left Asia Minor, East Thrace, the Pontic Alps, and the Caucasus to move to Greece. This reduced the percentage of the Christian population in Turkey to next to nothing. Today, the regenerated Christian population is under 7,000 in all of Turkey. The Turkish Bible Society published its first Modern Turkish Bible in 2001, and there are only two Christian bookshops in Istanbul (the largest city in Turkey) besides the Turkish Bible Society. Christian publication works in Turkey are primarily funded by missionary groups and limited by the size of the Christian community.
In the summer of 1964, Witness Lee spoke the messages published in The Economy of God as an informal training in Los Angeles. Then in 1968, The Economy of God became the first ministry book published by Brother Lee in English in the United States. The questions that this book addresses and the experiential key it provides to the reader make this book foundational to a believer’s understanding of the divine truth.
Living Stream Ministry has been posting content on our YouTube channel since 2021, providing free access to our ministry material in the form of video messages and audio programs. Various series of video messages are selected from the ministry of Witness Lee from 1978 through 1997. Audio programs comprise an extract of Brother Lee’s extensive life-study of the entire Bible from April 1974 through July 1995. We also have a second channel for sharing spiritual Christian hymns. The videos on this channel include the audio of each hymn being sung along with its lyrics so that you can sing along. We encourage you all to visit and subscribe to these channels to enjoy the riches of this ministry. Please note that we have just begun a new series of video messages by Brother Lee entitled The World Situation and God’s Move.
March 2023 International Training for Elders and Responsible Ones
The New Jerusalem is the ultimate consummation of the mingling of the Triune God with man…He went to so much trouble not only to save us but also to join Himself to us and to mingle with us. When we all get there in the new heaven and the new earth as the New Jerusalem, we will be in ecstasy. We will be crazy to the uttermost!
Whether or not we have actually gained Christ can be proven by five points. First, we will have the presence of God; we will sense that God is like fresh air being breathed in by us. Second, we will sense that we are in the light and are shining inwardly.
See the full issue of the email newsletter here.
