Last day of class is a sad time. I have just gotten to know the students and now it’s over. Fittingly for a spiritual warfare class, we ended in a prayer circle. The last notes on the board were of the work that God has done in all believers. Most of the students had extensive experience in dealing with evil spirits but their foundation was more experience than Bible, so the instruction was very encouraging and in some cases, a major change of direction as they evaluated the practices they had seen from a biblical basis. That’s exactly what I want.

I began the day with speaking in chapel from Philippians 2:6-7. I asked of what the Second Person of the Trinity emptied Himself. I suggested that the “form of God” means His divine nature, but noted that He could not have been Emanuel then. Then I looked at “form of a servant/slave” and suggested that meant role or way of life. That rang true, so we worked through the idea that He emptied Himself of His divine way of life and equal status with God to take on the way of life of a perfectly Spirit filled human. If that’s true, then we can really be like Him. It turned out to be a very good word.

Unfortunately, teaching entails paper grading. Ugh. Walid read the Arabic papers to me and I dictated comments for him to translate and type into their papers. It is a very long process! I was glad to see that the students did quite well in their papers. But still Walid’s smile was large when we were done. Mine too!

I did have a very interesting visitor who wanted to find out about more about spiritual warfare. 

Just after I came back to the room the telephone rang. It was Walid. There is one more paper to do. Tomorrow!

Our evening was spend with Elie and Marielle Haddad. He’s the president and they are great couple. The Lebanese feast down town was followed by a continuation of last night’s theological discussion with Marvin at their home. It went late enough that everyone else was falling asleep but us.