Pastor Hong SungSun

Ministerial Secretary, Korean Union Conference

“My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” (Psalm 42:3)  “…My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” (verse 10)  “Why do the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’” (Psalm 115:2)

The Seventh-day Adventist Church believes that God lives.  But where is the living God that the Seventh-day Adventist Church believes in today?  Where is the living God for you, Adventists?  Is the living God with you?  Where is God when you’re not going through severe hardships?  Are you thinking of Him, and of His people?  Have you felt the longing for God’s presence with you today?

I once wanted to hear God’s voice tell me that He’s with me.  I had a desire to experience His presence beside me, just like people experienced Him in the Bible times.  So I climbed up a rocky mountain in Sahmyook-dong one night, lay down on a rock, looked up at the sky and prayed earnestly, expecting to hear God’s voice.  But I heard nothing.

It wasn’t until I graduated as a theology major, was sent to Yeoju in Gyeonggi-do as a pastor and worked in the mission field that I felt God’s presence right next to me.

If you want to see proof that God lives, please go to the mission field.  Then you will know that God lives and is working there.  Theologically speaking, God is said to be omnipresent.  But He is not recognized by many people.  Even Christians may sometimes feel that God is absent from their lives.  Why is that so?

Jesus promised His disciples, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).  However, not everyone is offered this promise.  God’s promise of being “with you always” is given to you when you accept the mission to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19).  It is given when you decide to be among them that bring salvation “to all creation” (Mark 16:15) and “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).  Therefore, God lives in the faraway mission fields of the 1000 Missionary Movement missionaries.  He also lives in the mission fields of PMM missionaries in Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia and other places.

The stories in this book clearly reveal the fact that God is alive, active and omnipotent.  Jesus said, “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49)  Anyone who reads this book will know that the fire God has thrown is “already kindled.”  I pray that the fire of God’s Holy Spirit will be kindled in you as you read this book.