Greetings Saints- Well this update is more of a Gospel tract than an update. I am posting videos though that can give a person a pretty good idea of how things have been going. May the Lord Jesus receive the reward for His suffering and may you be blessed as you serve your King.
Shawn Holes and family December 2011
The road trip was wonderfully amazing for the 3 and a half weeks that Don Karns and we traveled through Oregon, Nevada, Arizona. New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. William and Lisa have been staying home this last year as I travel so it is a real hardship to be gone…We preached at 16 campuses, traveled 4,000 miles, handed out thousands of tracts, Preached in major cities including Las Vegas, Reno, Denver, Sante Fe, and Boulder among some. We preached at 3 “occupies”, and met up with some amazing brothers and sisters in Christ. Perhaps you were able to follow us on Facebook? Oh there were some really difficult times, trials, tribulations, persecution, false claims, etc. But there were great blessings, beautiful fellowship, sincere conviction, bold spirit filled and anointed preaching from the brothers I was with. We stayed in churches, on floors, two nights in hotels, and in homes. We ate like Kings but Don and I both recovering from stent surgery are learning to eat less. Much of the video and photos that I took while on the first two thirds of the trip was lost because of a computer malfunction (hard drive and logic board replacement). I still take lots of pictures while traveling and should take more video than I do but most of it was lost and not backed up. We met up with brothers in Portland to preach in the streets (Paval, and Jim) , Josh Bales flew in from Idaho to join in, the guys from California came out to share Good News in Oregon (Ken, Kevin Borden, Mike Lasiter), (Roger Hertzler and family housed us and went to the campuses with us along with Scott Schones), brother Ron Allen joined us at SOU in Ashland, Marty joined us in Vegas, Kelly Engebritson and his wife housed us in NM, Steve Johnson put us up in Colorado Springs, Craig Bauman and his family put us up in Cheyenne, etc. Thank you Jesus for providing for us as we travel… Amazing.
At times I am utterly overcome with grief and broken at how horribly blasphemous students treat the Gospel in their lives. If you could only see how much these students want there to be many ways to God. They boast of their good works. Many are Christians that say that Allah is just another name for God. There is much fornication, pornography, lasciviousness, drunkenness, ecumenicalism, socialism, humanism, relativism, atheism, and religion being practiced and preached on these campuses. But the Good News was shared in love. Men were called to repentance and the Good News of the cross was shared.
Nepal- the Nepal trip is still on the “praydar” for the family. A church has purchased me a ticket but we are still waiting on the Lord to see if He would allow Lisa and William to go as well. If you have been following what Jesse Boyd and Rick have been doing over there I’m sure you realize there is a request and a prayer for more laborers. Jesse has translated books of the Bible along with Bishnu who is a national evangelist, and they distribute those Bibles and also hand out thousands of tracts. The Muslims and Hindus are really hungry for anything having to do with Christianity, opposition is still very prevalent though at times. There are many Christian groups in the country that don’t do any sharing of the Gospel and consider making a friendship the same as sharing the Gospel (sound familiar as to what is happening here in America?). If you personally would please consider coming along side us as a family and support this trip financially it would be a blessing. Or perhaps your church is burdened with these souls in Nepal and would like to send us over there to help out. Or maybe the Lord is convicting you to go? We hope to leave the U.S. around the 15th of January. Many times people ask me how do we survive financially? It opens great doors of boasting as to how the Lord uses churches and individuals to send us as a family into the harvest field. So, thank you everybody for your help! It is very much appreciated. You could contribute to any ministry in the world and you have been gracious enough to support our. Again, thank you.
It was really funny what happened the other day. Pastor gave a message on handing out tracts this last Sunday. He encouraged us all to “lose tracts” as we go about our daily routines. So I took that charge and applied it to when I bought something at Fred Meyer that afternoon. As I handed out the tract to the cashier she said, “everybody keeps handing me these today!” Boy, I thought that is really good to hear. So I asked her if she was a believer and she said yes. So I added well, let the message be an encouragement to you and consider handing it to someone else. It is a good problem to have when someone has been handed a tract several times in one day. Let’s have this happen to us more often.
Since I have been home for the last few weeks from traveling I have had lots of opportunities to preach in the streets and hand out tracts. During the day families, shoppers, and professionals are out walking. As usual I run into some opposition while publicly proclaiming the Gospel but it is such Good News I just can’t keep it in! Other times though I get to pray with people and also get encouragement from some. One woman that is encouraged by our ministry helps out at the pro life crisis pregnancy center. She gives Lisa gifts as an encouragement to her and our family and I will often times run into her at the market. Its very Kind. One man that I got to pray with the other day listened to me for perhaps a half hour and walked up to me and said, “I am that hypocrite that you have been preaching about.” I got to counsel him and pray with him, praise Jesus! What a blessing when conviction falls upon a sinner. On another occasion at night while I was out at the clubs preaching late, I had a young man come up to me and get mad because he didn’t think it was right for me to be preaching outside the clubs late at night. He said he was visiting from Minnesota and was a Lutheran. He boasted of how religious his Mom and Dad are. I told him that I love him and want to see him in heaven but that he needed to be born again! He told me he was going to beat me up because I said that drunkards don’t get to go to heaven. He did not believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it is alive, and active, and sharp! He hated being told that God’s word is the final authority. He wasn’t having a problem with me he was ultimately having a problem with God…If he had hit me I would have been knocked out for sure. Praise the Lord I got to speak into his life. Praise the Lord that he was falling under conviction while hearing the Good News proclaimed. I think the thing that kept him from doing anything bad to me was my reminding him that my motive was pure, I love God and I love him. I explained how God had saved me from drunkeness and that my sin nailed Jesus to the torturous cross on calvary. I explained how God had taken my pursuit of sin and changed it to a pursuit of Him! I was sharing who Jesus is and how he can make him born again! Hopefully he will remember our conversation and somewhere down the road he can surrender his life to Jesus. I really do care about the drunkards and I really believe that we need to meet people right where they are at. So I go to where they are at in the streets. I don’t know if anybody else is realizing it but there is a whole bunch of sin in the world. We need to tell people about Jesus!
It seems like people like to get all excited when a prostitute gets saved from her tricks, or a drug dealer gets saved from their hits. Do we believe that prostitutes and drug dealers can be delivered? I do. Do we believe a man can be saved from looking at porn? I do. Do we believe that a man can stop getting drunk? I do. But there seems to be a real resentment in Christendom and the world when a preacher tells your everyday random sinner that there is hope in Jesus and that they can be saved from their sin. We need to personalize Jesus in our lives folks. Jesus is not just for poor people, or people living in the streets. Jesus is not just for people that go to church, people that go to colleges, people that are married. Jesus is for everybody. I remember how hypocritical I was when I was a student. I lied so bad about how I was living to my parents. If I had died in my unregenerate state I would have gone right to hell. Jesus can save a student so that when they go home over vacation they can openly be living at home the same way they were at school without being a double minded man.
How can the preacher be so judgmental to insinuate that there is sin in the world? Is it intolerant for a preacher to tell people in the church to repent? How can the preacher be so intolerant? Most people say how good they are and then in the next breath remind me that we are all just sinners! Can a preacher really get away with saying that Jesus is God? Won’t that offend people? That God is good and also just? Jesus is merciful and restores marriages and father/son relationships and changes peoples lives. Jesus can give us new passions and a new direction! Christ Jesus can be the sinners joy and their hope if only they will surrender to Him through salvation, the blood atonement! Jesus is beautiful and He can do miracles in your life for His fame, and honor, not ours. He is a deliverer and redeemer and It seems that people like to think of other people getting freed from their bondage of sin but as soon as it becomes personal and they have to start looking at themselves then it is hitting too hard and close to home. Perhaps they don’t want to be saved from their sin? Or, If I preach against sin people often times think that I am saying that I am better than them. I can assure everyone that I am no better than anybody else. But I can also assure them that we as being born again in Christ are better off than everybody that has not been saved! If I preach about sin often times I am looked at as being judgmental, hateful, and intolerant. When I quote the Bible, then excuses now start to surface such as, “That is no longer relevant”, “That’s your interpretation”, “You are turning people away”,”you preach too much about hell”,”what about grace?”, “you are preaching sinless perfection”, “you are a legalist”, and on and on and on… I believe that this world needs a real dose of hell fire preaching on repentance! I mean look around and you tell me that this world isn’t going to hell in a hand basket… If being nice to someone and inviting that person to church is so effective than why is there so much sin in the world and so much hatred for Jesus?
Some young people from a local church come out occasionally here in Boise and try to do some friendship evangelism and are mostly intolerant to me preaching. They tell me I am doing it all wrong. It got so bad one weekend that I had to go talk to one of their pastors to try and get the pastor to tell the young people to give me a break! I need them to stop snatching up the seeds that the Lord is giving increase to. People are becoming broken and repentant and the young people are encouraging people in sin! One night I had a nice sized crowd listening to me preach and one of these young people from this particular church was telling the crowd that everything I was saying was wrong. He kept saying that “Jesus is love, Jesus is love”. I tried to explain that Jesus is love. I also had to continually remind the crowd, many of them LDS, that Jesus is God and that we will all face Him on the day of judgment. I also explained that God is just, not just our big Santa Clause in the sky. Jesus was crucified for sinners because people hated His message, the disciples were all martyred for their faith in having seen Him resurrected and they told people about it, John had his head cut off because the King had been confronted in His sin, Paul was continually tortured for his faith including being imprisoned, stoned, five times had been scourged with a cat o nine tails… These disciples of Jesus preached repentance and faith in Christ alone! The disciples told the world that God was offended at sin and was kind enough to give us a Saviour. That the cure for disease called sin is Jesus! They preached that Jesus is the only way to be forgiven. They told mankind that Jesus is God, the only God, the only truth, the bread of life, the atoner for our soul, our redeemer, Saviour, King, counselor, shepherd, and that He is alive! He came back from the grave and hundreds saw him. Men hate being told the truth about Jesus because they love darkness rather than light. I have run into this a lot where effectiveness is the cry of the christians we meet while out witnessing. We are not commanded to be effective we are commanded to GO! One girl of the young girls from this church boasted of how effective she was to get a Wicken girl to come to her church. I said great, did she surrender to Jesus with a repentant heart and believe on His blood atonement for her soul? She answered and said no. Well I said, that is not very effective of you now is it? The point is that God gives increase to the Gospel. Nothing compared to God’s glory is effective. He saves souls, we don’t. Even a little prayer can’t save someone, it is only blood that atones for souls and that blood was shed by Jesus.
A question I get a lot from people is, Can a “so and so” religious person go to heaven? The answer is always YES, but they need to repent and put their trust in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. And then almost always I will hear, so then ALL “so and so’s” are going to hell! And My response is, of course not. If so and so’s repent and put their faith in Jesus then they get to go to heaven! And then I will hear, so all religions are wrong except Christianity? And my response is, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me! This is when people often times become agitated. It is normally the response to have people get upset because we are saying that Jesus is the ONLY way. Now, our objective while sharing the Gospel is to share the Good News that the world has a Saviour and His name is Jesus. Our goal is not to offend people. It is not to hate people. Our calling is to share the Good News but that can be very offensive. Listen, Allah is NOT God. Buda is not God. Jesus is God! It is offensive to people also when we share that Jesus said a place called hell awaits sinners. They do not like it when we quote scripture about Hell. I can’t make this stuff up. Christians we meet many times try just about anything they can to say that Jesus just loved on people and He never ever talked about hell… I can assure you those people just haven’t read their Bibles!
Think about Patti Smith (she does abortuary ministry in Orlando) who just did an update on her Facebook page. She posted, “”This is Maria (photo shown on her site). We met her as she came to kill her baby yesterday morning. Like so many sexually immoral murderesses we meet, Maria is a professing ‘Christian’. Proof positive that which AW Pink said is true: “If the Gospel were more faithfully preached, there would be fewer people professing to believe it. I wonder if the wicked Israelites who offered their babies to Molech believed they too could be forgiven by simply going through the motions of religion at the temple afterward?””
Listen, sin does not bring glory to God. No, we will never be sinless in this life but we are perfect in this life because of Christ’s blood that He shed. But that does NOT GIVE US LICENSE TO SIN! We are perfect in Christ. We hate sin because we are saved by a great loving, merciful, kind, forgiving Saviour. We forsake sin because we are saved! I will say it again, we foraake sin because we are saved. We get born again because the Spirit indwells us. We trust His word, believe His word, live by His word and deny ourselves. All that said, salvation is truly a gift from God. Let me personalize this… Has God granted you the gift of repentance? Has God taken you from darkness into light? Has God received glory and the angels are rejoicing because of His merciful payment for your crimes against Him? Are you born again? Is Christ Jesus your all in all?
The question has never been whether or not Jesus loves us. The question has always been do we love Jesus? Do we love Him enough to trust in His finished work on the cross? Do we love Him enough to live out our lives by faith and not by sight? Do we love Him enough to trust His word? Do we love Him enough to have him save us from our dirty, filthy, unjust, selfish, proud, ambitious, gossiping, drunken, lascivious, wretched lives? I pray we will. Friends, as we encounter opposition from people about the Good News of the cross let us remind them that Christ died for sinners! Explain what Jesus has done for you. Tell them how glad you are that you are no longer hell bound! Explain how effective Jesus was in our life. Friends I don’t want to trivialize the Good News I want to tell others the Good News. Let us share Good News. Lets hand out a tract, sit down next to someone and tell them about Jesus, let’s live for the glory of God.
Ok, now its time for New Years Resolutions 
1- Pray more
2- Read Bible more
3- Tell people about Jesus more
I should be in Las Vegas the 29th of Dec. thru Jan. 1st. I went there two years ago and was overwhelmed at the desperate need to evangelize during New Years again and so this year is the again. People from all over the world in droves come to Las Vegas for New Years and it is a wonderful opportunity to hand out Bibles, tracts, DVD’s, witness and preach. Pray for myself and the five men I will be with. We’ve all done outreach together before and work well together. Pray for the Lord to give increase to the words that are shared.
Thank you for visiting our site. Let’s press on for the glory of God and make him famous.
In His grip,
Shawn Holes and family
Video of Police encounter Santa Fe NM
The week before Christmas in Boise BODO Idaho
The new introduction to my site that Ken Fleck is working on for me…
Don Karns preaching on Pearl Street Mall Boulder Colorado
Shawn Holes and Don Karns at Utah Valley University
Thanksgiving 2011 in Vail Colorado
Josh Bales from Boise preaching at University of Oregon in Eugene
John Robinson's church where we stayed when we were in Portland.
Kevin Borden witnessing to a man that said he "tried" Jesus.
Lorena Adams joined us both at U of O and OSU. Her son heard us preach a couple years ago and was determined to join up with us this year and be a laborer for Jesus. OSU this year was one of the most hypocritical campuses we preached at during any of our travels. May God grant these students repentance and mercy.
Shawn Holes preaching at OSU in Corvallis
Don Karns ASU
Ron Allen at Southern Oregon University. Ron and I know each other from our days back in upstate NY. Ron is now pastoring a church in Oregon and took the time to join us as we shared Christ with a lost and dying world.
Marty Gillispie in Las Vegas openly lifting up his voice for his Saviour
Shawn Holes at University Nevada Las Vegas
Don Karns Las Vegas. While Don was preaching this message a man came up to me as I was handing out tracts and punched me in the chin, ouch!. He came back five minutes lated and punched me again, in the chin, same spot. I didn't have time to turn the other cheek I guess.
Boulder Colorado Black Friday 2011- Don preached here and I preached in Longmont. Its nice to have a captive crowd that is in pursuit of the world. Lots of spring boards to preach from and plenty of souls that need Jesus.
Craig Bauman preaching in Boulder Colorado while Don Karns hands out Gospel tracts
My old buddy Kent Rychel and I got to catch up while I was in Fort Collins
Shawn Holes preaching at Utah Valley University. This is one of the most respectful groups of students I have ever encountered. One teacher even thanked us for coming and asked when we would be coming back so that he could help promote our tour. btw, the teacher did not agree at all with the message of salvation...
