October 25, 2012
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God’s Prevenient Grace for 80 Years
This has been a crazy month in Kiev. God is blessing, expanding ministry, and growing us every day. Here are a few highlights of the past month…
1. Pastors’ Meetings: Pastor’s meetings were held during the final week of September in Kiev, Ukraine and Rostov, Russia. Pastors and leaders from 6 countries gathered at these meetings for training in the Power of One… a plan for evangelism and church planting. We were blessed to spend the week with Dr. Gustavo and Rachel Crocker, our regional directors. This was my first time to meet them and really grew to love and appreciate them both in the week we had together. At the same time, I met with pastors from all over the CIS. What a fantastic week of leadership development and training! Since the meeting, I am hearing stirrings of the vision to be a missional church in a needy world. One district, Russia South, is taking the training to all the churches with a plan to enter new towns with the Good News of Jesus Christ! Very exciting!!!
2. Flash Drives for Pastors: In my early days on the field, I realized the need for our pastors around the CIS to have written resources for ministry. Printed material and textbooks are heavy and costly. I knew there was good discipleship material available in pdf format that could be more easily and economically shared. I had an idea that I would purchase flash drives for all our pastors and load Russian translated materials for ministry and give these as gifts at the pastor’s meetings. I placed an order for 120 flash drives from China to Ukraine. The flash drives looked so cool on paper… with our Russian Nazarene logo printed on each one! I had plenty of time for delivery and loading. However, because of an error in the shipping documents, the flash drives were stopped at customs in Kiev. A three-week struggle ensued as I tried to get these flash drives out of customs before the pastor’s meetings. God made a way! Three days before the meetings, I was able to receive the flash drives and proclaim to a number of people… God made this possible!
3. Cold weather is upon us: Jenni and I have truly become Texans. We know it full well when the fall weather in Kiev seems like winter to us. We have predictions for our first snow this coming week. Bekah and Sarah are excited. Mommy and Daddy are a bit nervous!
4. Dad and Mom Habegger: Early October was blessed by a wonderful time with Jenni’s parents, Farrel and Marilyn Habegger, visiting Kiev for the first time. They arrived on October 3 and were with us through October 15. We kept very busy as tour guides taking them to the city center, shopping malls and souvenir streets, birthday parties for both Bekah and Sarah, two Kiev churches, an indoor water park, an Ukrainian Architectural outdoor museum called Pyrogova, the Kiev Zoo, World War II museum, and the forest.
As I continue to study the Russian language, I learn more and more nuances to this great language. I was struck by the reality that during the Soviet Union, when the government was intentionally atheistic… teaching people that there was no God… the soviet people could not get away from the concept of God, even in their language.
The word for “thank you” in Russian is спасибо (said “spacybo”). That word comes from two different words, спаситель (said “spacytyel”) which means Savior, and Бог (said “Bog” with a long “o” sound) which means God. When someone says “thank you” in Russian they are actually saying “God save you.” Did you catch that? With a government that was intentionally teaching that there is no God, the people every day whispered a prayer to one another, “God save you.”
Here is another one… The word for “Sunday” in Russian is Воскресенье (said “Vaskreshenye”). Are you ready for this? Воскрес means “risen”. The word for Sunday in Russian means “Resurrection day”!
How cool is that? God’s prevenient grace on a generation of people who were taught, “There is no God.” These precious people of the former Soviet Union continually talked about God every day for 80 years!
This Sunday, I will be preaching at Vinnitsa Church of the Nazarene. Vinnitsa is about a 3 hour train ride from Kiev. Jenni and the girls will be with me. I would appreciate your prayers for God’s anointing as I share His Word.
Comments (3)
I recently read “Tortured for Christ” by Richard Wurmbrand. He related how the people had no Bibles under the Communist regime. But the Communists, in their attempts to disprove the Bible, continually put out propaganda containing many Bible verses and passages of scripture. The motive was to make these verses seem foolish when the effect instead put scripture in the hands of the underground church, people who were hungry for The Word.
“How cool is that? God’s prevenient grace on a generation of people who
were taught, “There is no God.” These precious people of the former
Soviet Union continually talked about God every day for 80 years!”
Just as you, a christian, used arabic numerals in this blog. The planet you live on is called earth, a word which originally referred to the goddess Jora of norse mythology who was basically “mother earth”, a term I’m sure you’ve used as well. She was the mother of thor, which is where the day thursday gets it’s name – it’s modified from thor’s day. Etc, etc, etc. The planets are named after the gods of other religions because when they were named they were thought to be those gods, countless things are.
The word “resurrection” in the meaning of the word sunday could also refer to the resurrection of the sun or the nightly battle between the god of the night and the god of the day in ancient norse mythology (depending how old the term is).
Every culture is a blend of countless religions and other cultures – christianity gets the golden rule (and eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth and many other things) from the code of hammurabi, ancient babylonian law.
@RoseMose - Christianity thrives under persecution and flounders in free, pluralistic, prosperous societies where the right of religious speech is protected. The more desperate and miserable people are the more they feel they need faith, church, prayer etc. If you look at statistical maps of the US the areas with the most obesity, poverty, crime, teen pregnancy and general unhappiness are all in the bible belt.