Let us turn to the end of Ephesians, chapter 1, while I get this thing set up here.
I want to share something final this morning. A few weeks ago, I saw our brother Ben Hebert, and we were sitting around with some time to talk. I shared some of the things going on in Russia, and he felt deeply impressed that you would benefit from hearing the testimony of what God is doing there.
I am glad to share it. I am not interested simply in getting you up to speed about Russia, but, more importantly, in gaining some perspective. In our lives, we are quite microcosmic. The Lord is working in our lives, and we worry about what we are going to do in college this year, or what we are going to do in high school. But the Lord is doing tremendous things. Our God is a huge God, and He is working in ways beyond our finding out.
It all comes out of the fact that Jesus has now been enthroned. Because He is enthroned, God is doing a work to bring His throne to bear upon the earth.
In Ephesians 1:20-23, we read:
Which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead,
and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion,
and every name that is named,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to come:
and He put all things in subjection under His feet,
and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
This gives us a twofold perspective on the Lord’s enthronement. He is enthroned as the King of the kingdom, and He is also enthroned as the Head of the church. Both are part of the same thing, but they are two different aspects of what He is doing today.
As King of the kingdom, He is capturing more people through the gospel of salvation. He is capturing people in Africa, China, Russia, and South America by the gospel of the kingdom. The King is moving by the power of His throne, snagging more people and saving them.
This is what we call the work of the kingdom. The gospel of the kingdom goes forth into the world, bringing light and salvation. The gospel of the kingdom must be preached as a testimony to all the nations, and then the King will come. He wants all the nations to hear that He is King, and if they come to Him, they will live in the kingdom of God.
But He is also on the throne as the Head of the church. He is taking those people whom He has captured and saved, bringing them together into a body, and perfecting that body into His bride so that He can return for His bride.
So there are two tremendous works going on: He is saving more people, and He is taking those who are saved and turning them into His bride. Jesus, on His throne, is the King sending out the gospel, and He is the Head perfecting the body of Christ.
In our part of the world, and even among Chinese believers who have immigrated here during the last twenty years, God has emphasized the perfecting of the church. Our brother Watchman Nee was one of those brethren who not only preached the gospel in China but also gained, by revelation, an insight into the place God wanted the church to occupy.
Much has been robbed from the church that we see pictured so clearly in the early days of Scripture. The church’s testimony has been robbed by compromise, human power, unbelief, and many other things. We believe that, in these last days, God is recovering things that have been lost and stolen from the church.
Martin Luther recovered the understanding that we are saved by faith through grace. The church had lost that truth in the midst of works, payments for forgiveness, purgatory, and all that kind of stuff. Then John Wesley had to recover some things. The Brethren had to recover some things. The charismatics and Pentecostals had to recover some things. Watchman Nee was part of the recovery of seeing the church as an organism—a living organism of people gathered together to remember the Lord.
The church is pretty much the same all around the world. But my blessing has been occasionally to go somewhere where you can see the kingdom moving.
It is almost like looking at a map. If we could be in the throne room of Christ right now, we would see a map of the whole world. The Lord might say, “Now we are going to launch a gospel mission into Russia. It is going to last about twelve years. We have to hit this place, that place, and that place.” Meanwhile, He may launch a coincidental attack somewhere in South America.
I am just making this up, but there are particular places where the kingdom is forging out. It is like a battle. Soldiers are out there preaching the gospel, and people are being saved. That is what is going on in Russia right now.
Meanwhile, behind Him is the body map. You see the body coming together, being recovered, and the church being perfected. It is all part of the same thing, but a different strategy is involved.
As Christians, we are two things. On the one hand, we are soldiers in the kingdom. That is why it is important to witness and preach the gospel—to let the kingdom go out. If we become centered only on the church and its perfecting, the church cannot be perfected without the kingdom. Part of the perfecting of the church is for the church to go out and serve.
But we are also members of the body of Christ. We are not merely soldiers running out and preaching the gospel. We are members of the body, learning how to live together, serve, and exercise our gifts and ministries for the perfecting of what God is doing in the church.
Across the world, we find one thing sadly lacking: these two things together. In some places, the emphasis is on kingdom work, gospel preaching, and all that kind of thing. In other places, the emphasis is on the church, the deeper life, coming together, and perfecting. These things need to be together.
That is why I have been blessed to go to Russia. When I go there, I am a learner, because God is moving in a sovereign way as King. I get to step into that and see a little of what is going on.
Let us look at Matthew 11 for a little more perspective about the kingdom. Most of you know church life, but God is trying to introduce you to some kingdom work.
In Matthew 11:12, Jesus says:
And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,
and men of violence take it by force.
The work of the kingdom is violent work. It is army stuff. It is battle work. It is going against the gates of hell. It is putting on the helmet of salvation and preaching the gospel. It is standing in a hostile world with the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. The King is moving in this way.
Russia is a very large country, even after being broken down into smaller nations. Perm is one of the two places where I go, near the Ural Mountains. Moscow is a cosmopolitan city, but where I go is a whole different story.
Once upon a time, there was a communist country called the USSR. They had Russian Orthodox churches and some Baptist churches, as long as they minded their own business and did not get involved in political activity. Christianity was largely kept quiet. The Russian Orthodox Church was, for the most part, an idol-filled religious system.
South of Russia is Ukraine, which was part of the USSR. Ukraine had many Christians, mostly Pentecostals, but they had to live largely underground. They preached the gospel too strongly for the government’s liking, so they hid themselves, like Gideon in the threshing floor, holding their meetings.
These Pentecostals were strict. The women wore dresses and no makeup. The men had to live holy, and everybody wore a white shirt on Sunday. They were separated from the world and living almost like cave dwellers.
But, without anybody knowing except God, they had a whole generation of teenagers sitting there. They had learned how to live holy lives. They had learned the Word of God. They had learned faithfulness, giving, and how to hide in a cave.
Then, in 1992, the Iron Curtain fell. Suddenly, Russia was open for gospel preaching. Who was ready to go? That generation of teenagers who had grown up in the church, knew the Bible, and lived holy lives.
God sent young men into Russia—many of them only twenty-two years old—and did amazing things. Who started this revival in Russia? God did. It was His sovereign move.
Perm has about one and a half million people, but go five miles outside the city and you find little log cabins. There are millions of such cabins in villages of perhaps two hundred homes. They may have one water pump for the entire town. Sometimes there is an electric line, and each house has one light bulb hanging in the middle of the living room.
In Moscow there are modern conveniences. In Perm, city residents may have apartments with running water. But most Russians live in little villages of log cabins.
God’s strategy was this: brothers went to major cities such as Perm and began preaching the gospel. Within about five years, three thousand people had been saved and become members of the church there.
Then people from the villages heard about the gospel, came in, got saved, and returned home. They lived too far away to travel to the city meetings. Some had to walk five miles through snow just to reach a road, wait for a bus, make another bus transfer, and travel four hours to attend a meeting.
So they began little Bible studies in their homes. A few neighbors came. One sister told me that she had a church of sixty people in her home. I asked her how it started. She said, “You know what? I do not know how to preach. All I did was have people come over, read the Bible, and explain it to them. People got saved.”
Then her house became full, so another saved sister opened her home. In a little town of two hundred houses, there were soon two full house meetings. Then someone from the next town heard the gospel, got saved, returned home, and began a meeting there.
The church in Perm has a large central meeting place where they preach the gospel, but they also have about two hundred and fifty house churches. These are led by ordinary men and women. They do not have enough preachers. In the villages, it is simply saved people meeting together, reading the Bible, drinking tea, sharing a little cake, inviting neighbors, and seeing people come to the Lord.
Pastor Edward serves the church in Perm, with its three thousand members and two hundred and fifty surrounding house churches. He began the work by himself.
I met a brother studying for ministry who was helping bring in luggage through the snow. His shoes had huge holes, and his bare feet were inside them. He had no socks. I gave him twenty-five dollars. He came back with shoes, a jacket, and a very happy face.
It is a wonderful thing to help brothers and sisters who really have need. They are faithful servants of God. They have very little, but they are happy to serve the Lord.
They minister to widows and veterans, providing food and preaching the gospel. Many are saved. They also train young people in Bible school and mission school. Some are preparing to preach the gospel among Muslim peoples in the southern regions of Russia.
One young Muslim woman, Dinar, had been saved only one month when she attended mission school. She was eighteen years old and had been thrown out of her home because she had become a Christian. A friend brought her to mission school simply to give her a home.
Later, the school ran out of money and had to close. The students were sent out into Muslim areas. Dinar returned to Bishkek, where she came from. Though only nineteen years old and a Christian for one year, she began handing out tracts on the streets with another believer.
One day, a man took a tract and said, “Come with me.” He brought this nineteen-year-old girl into a Muslim mosque where four hundred men questioned her about Jesus for three hours. She told them the whole gospel. They had never heard it before.
Her friends and the pastor gathered outside, praying that she would come out alive. When she emerged, they asked what happened. She said that some argued, some yelled, and some simply listened—but she told them about Jesus. When they said they were glad she was alive, she replied, “Of course I am alive. Jesus takes care of me.”
My translator, Svetlana, was pregnant and about to have a child. At the end of my time there, I gave her two hundred dollars as a gift. She ran away quickly after receiving it, and I did not know why.
The next day she came back and said, “Oh, Danny, you do not know. You just do not know.” She explained that she and her husband had been praying for summer shoes for him. He had winter boots but no shoes for summer. With the gift, they were able to buy him shoes—his first pair of sneakers.
These servants of God are faithful. They have very little, but they are so happy to be serving the Lord.
The church in Perm had only a narrow meeting room that could hold six or seven hundred people. Since the church had grown to three thousand, they held four services every Sunday.
Then they purchased the bankrupt Lenin Cultural Palace, a five-story building with a statue of Lenin out front. It had been a center of communist culture, hosting ballet performances, musicians, and major communist gatherings. After the collapse of the communist government, it became bankrupt, and the church was able to purchase it.
But there were daily demonstrations outside. People said that the building would never be given from Lenin to Christians. The government wanted to buy it back and give the church land somewhere else. The believers were praying and waiting to see what would happen.
Pastor Edward was a twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic in Ukraine, the son of a pastor. He was sent to Latvia to obtain Russian Bibles. While he was there, he attended a Pentecostal church, and a preacher came to him and said, “Thou art the man. God is raising you up for ministry in Russia. The doors will open in Russia.”
Edward thought, “What is he talking about? I am an auto mechanic.” The doors were completely closed at that time. But he prayed, and his parents prayed and fasted. The next day, the first evangelical Bible school in the USSR was beginning in Latvia. He joined a class of twenty-five students being trained for ministry.
When he graduated, the students were shown a map of Russia and told, “Pick your city and go there to preach the gospel.” Edward wanted to choose somewhere in Ukraine. But the Lord spoke to him: “Pick the city that nobody else wants.”
The other students chose Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the desirable places. Edward chose Perm, a difficult city near Siberia that nobody wanted. He and a friend went there. There was no evangelical church apart from the Russian Orthodox Church and a Baptist church.
The Lord told them to hold a gospel meeting. The night before the meeting, Edward received a call from his wife in Ukraine. She had given birth to twins, and one of them was very sick. She begged him to come home.
Edward cried all night, but he felt the Lord telling him to stay. They preached the gospel in the streets and held meetings by the river. In four days, seventy-five people were baptized and saved.
Eventually he returned to Ukraine, gathered his wife and two children, and brought them to Perm. Thirteen years later, the son who had been expected to die was still alive. He was frail and could barely move, but he had become the prayer warrior of the church. He prayed for the preachers, the lost, the church, Russia, and believers by name.
Pastor Edward told me that the work was not his work. He said that the Perm region was where Stalin had built the Gulag Archipelago—a chain of prisons for political and religious prisoners. Millions of Christians died in those prisons, praying for their country.
He said, “Our church is born on the blood of the martyrs who died in the prisons.”
The brothers go into those prisons preaching the gospel. The prisoners may have no heat even in severe cold, and many are dying of tuberculosis. Yet many people are being saved.
The other place I visit is Izhevsk, near Perm. It is known for the arms factory associated with Mikhail Kalashnikov and the AK-47. The church’s Bible school meets in a building that is difficult to maintain legally, but it is full of believers.
There are former prisoners in the Bible school, including one man who had spent twenty years in prison, was saved, released, and then joined the school. But primarily, young people attend.
When a young person is saved, reads the Bible, prays, and shows that he loves the Lord, the church sends him to Bible school. While in school, they do street preaching, vacation Bible schools, summer tent meetings, and practical service. The brothers observe whether that person is genuinely called to serve.
A young person may attend Bible school for one year and then be sent out the next year to serve God. Are you ready for that?
The church in Izhevsk calls itself the Work of Faith because it serves not only through preaching but also through helping drug addicts and others in great need. At one rehabilitation center, the men studied the Bible four hours a day. They praised God, sang for over an hour, prayed, and loved one another.
One night I asked what we should pray for. They asked prayer for those with HIV and AIDS, many of whom had contracted the disease through intravenous drug use. They knew that unless God intervened, they would die, but they were happy to be Christians because they knew that, if they died, they would go to heaven.
As we prayed, their fellow addicts and rehabilitation residents wept and prayed for them. They loved one another. They shared what they had. They were living clean and godly lives.
They had no church building, so they met in movie theaters, renting four different theaters each Sunday because the congregation numbered around two thousand five hundred people. For special occasions, they rented a professional ice rink. At Easter, thousands gathered, and monthly baptismal services included many people who had come to Christ during the preceding month.
Pastor Vitali and his wife served in the area around Votkinsk. His wife had nearly died of cancer but recovered through chemotherapy and much prayer. She had already helped begin about fifteen churches in the surrounding region.
Their daughter, Svetlana, was a young evangelist. At twenty or twenty-one years old, she had already served as a house-church pastor for two years. She had only one year of Bible school, but she preached the gospel and taught from the Bible to about thirty-five people in her group.
Two men, Vasili and Sergei, came forward one night to receive Christ. They had seen alcoholics in that little house transformed into sober believers. They knew God was real.
At a retreat for pastors, evangelists, and their wives from the two hundred and fifty churches, we gave them what seemed to us like small gifts: cell phones, travel bags, and household items.
A cell phone was an enormous gift. These workers travel long distances over dangerous roads, often with very few cars available among them. If their old car went into a ditch, they could be stranded for days with no telephone to contact anybody. Some walked twelve miles between meetings late at night or early in the morning.
These brothers and sisters serve in difficult circumstances, but they rejoice in the Lord.
A young couple serving in a rehabilitation center loved one another but had no money to marry. Their monthly income was around thirty dollars. A gift of two hundred dollars enabled them to plan their wedding.
Another sister, Svetlana, lived with her husband and five children in a banya, a small bathhouse, for two years because they had no home. She suffered chronic bronchitis, which worsened whenever she went to a village known for witchcraft to preach the gospel. She told me through tears that a voice would say, “You are going to die.” Yet she only asked, “Would you pray that I could have more faith?”
While we were holding the retreat, police came into the Bible-school meeting place and arrested thirty-seven Christians who were attending a prayer meeting. The next day, I asked some of the young people who had been arrested whether they were afraid. They said, “Of course not. God is on our side.”
I asked if they had any money. They said, “No, but God will provide.”
One church had provided money for a worker to buy a car. He said he could not afford to drive it much because of fuel costs, but everyone in town used it when they needed it. He said that many people had been saved because of that car.
Another worker was given a chainsaw so he could cut wood and earn money for himself and his wife. But when poor villagers needed wood, he could not charge them. He gave them the wood. He said, “We do not make much money, but many people are saved by the logs.”
These are the people the Lord is using in His army.
These believers are faithful, though they have not had the opportunity to learn many things that we may take for granted.
One American brother visited the Bible school when a sister was sick. Everyone immediately gathered, joined hands, spoke in tongues, and prayed aloud at the same time. The brother said, “Wait. Let us pray one at a time while the others agree.”
They had never heard of doing that. It was a brand-new idea to them.
Another brother spoke to them about communion and the Lord’s table. He said, “This bread is a revelation of Jesus. This cup is a revelation of Jesus’ blood.” They were amazed. They knew that Jesus had taken bread and a cup, and they knew He died for them, but they had not understood the meaning in that way.
They have much yet to learn, but they are faithful. Let us help them.
I once learned that three women in the Bible school had children, and all were single because their husbands had left them when they became Christians. I gave each of them two hundred dollars.
One woman began crying while I was trying to teach Galatians. Later she explained why. Her teeth had become rotten, affecting her health. A brother at the school had urged her to have them fixed, so she borrowed two hundred dollars. She had been unable to repay it.
Then that day, God answered her prayer. That is why she was crying.
God is so faithful. These things are wonderful things.
At an Easter crusade, four thousand people came to the rink. Pastor Yuri preached plainly: “Jesus will get you off drugs. Jesus loves you. Jesus wants to help you. Do you not know that He died for you?”
The people cried, and about three hundred were converted. This is kingdom work.
Some people came forward because their lives had been wasted by vodka. Others wept because somebody had finally told them that they were loved.
At Christmas, the believers make little newsletters about Jesus’ love, testimonies of salvation, and the gospel. They include a few pieces of candy and go door to door in villages of log cabins. They knock and say, “Merry Christmas. Jesus loves you. He came to earth, became a man, and died on the cross for your sins.”
One sister told me that they knocked on the door of a house and nobody came. They could see the glow of the stove and knew someone was home. Finally, they heard shuffling, and the door opened.
A woman with only one leg had made her way across the floor on her hands to answer the door. The sisters said, “Jesus loves you. We want to give you this. Jesus came and died for your sins.”
The woman began to cry. She received Christ that very moment. She said two things: first, that she was fifty years old and nobody had ever told her that they loved her; second, that nobody had ever given her a gift.
A little newsletter and some candy.
That is how desperate the situation can be. The believers now pick her up and bring her to the meeting every week.
It is harvest time. They do not even have to fight for the harvest; they simply have to go into it. Every time they go to a new village, a new church begins. It is not a question of strategy. Someone may already have been saved in that village and be asking them to come hold a Bible meeting. They go, hold the meeting, and people are saved.
This is God’s work. It is God’s open door. It is God’s time of advance.
I asked Pastor Yuri how much longer he thought this move would continue. He said, “Four or five years.”
I asked why. He said they were already receiving resistance from the government and from the Russian Orthodox Church. The arrests were not based on any real crime; the authorities were simply harassing them.
But Yuri said something else: “There is oil here. When prosperity comes, people will turn away from the gospel.”
In Moscow, it is like a different country. There are many workers, churches, evangelistic organizations, and mission groups. But go to the places where nobody wants to go, and you find that the Lord wants to go there.
There is a season of harvest, and then it shuts. We have to work while it is day. When the night comes, we cannot work. The door may be open in one place and closed in another. Then it opens somewhere else.
When I go to Russia, I feel as though I fall into the Volga River and the current carries me along. I preach the gospel several times a day, teach for hours in Bible school, and people are being saved because God is pouring out and sending servants.
Why do I report this to you? Because you and I are in the church, and the Lord is emphasizing our being perfected as the body of Christ. But there is this other thing going on that we need to know about.
We need to pray for them. But we should also not be surprised if, in Canada, the United States, or somewhere nearby, a door opens and God says, “Who will go for Me?”
You may be twenty-seven years old, the greatest surgeon in Toronto, with your whole life ahead of you. But if God says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” are you willing to say, “Here am I. Send me”?
There is the work of the church and the work of the kingdom. It is all one work under the Head, the One ruling on the throne. Will we be obedient?
Would it not be God’s great irony if He brought a whole generation of Chinese young people to the West Coast and the East Coast, and then sent you all back to China?
Nobody thought the Iron Curtain could ever fall. Nobody. It was an idle dream to think that the monolithic power called the USSR could collapse and open up. It seems almost as incredible to think that the bamboo curtain could ever fall and open completely to the gospel and to churches.
But God knows His time. You be ready.
Meanwhile, in every area—whether in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere—God is working both the kingdom work and the church work. We need to do both. We need to be faithful to share the gospel.
The door may not be as wide open here as it is in Russia because prosperity is our chief robber. Prosperity gives people a false sense of security.
After September 11, New York City changed. Proud, strong-willed, success-oriented people were undone when the planes hit the buildings. People were afraid. Some moved away immediately. Some cried in the streets.
I live about a mile from where the World Trade Center stood. On September 11 in the years afterward, people in my apartment building would go to the roof with bottles of wine, sit there all day, get drunk, and cry. They remembered the day they saw the smoke and flames. They thought the end had come. They had lost friends and lost their security.
Who knows? The Lord can shake a door open where things seem shut.
Are we ready to be servants of the King?
Serving the kingdom is a violent business. It may involve putting your career aside. It may involve sacrificing a large home in the country in order to serve in the city. It may involve delaying having children in order to do the work God wants you to do. It involves sacrifice.
That is why there is always the necessity in the kingdom to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Him.
God is not moving only in the fields of Russia. He is teaching us all how to live as servants of the kingdom, without carrying so many worldly things around—ready and willing to serve God in whatever way He wants.
I have a feeling that God is preparing this generation sovereignly for something. It has been forty years since the last great move in the United States—the days of the Jesus people. A generation has gone by. Something may be about to happen, and He needs people who are ready.
Only God can open the door. No human being could have opened Russia.
I wish I could take you on a trip there and send you out. On one of my trips, three brothers from Delaware came with me. One was an older brother who taught in the church, but the other two had no teaching ministry. They were just faithful brothers.
During the first week, I did the preaching. During the second week, I was separated from them because I was teaching in Bible school. The Russian brethren assumed all three were preachers and sent them out to different villages.
The brothers said, “Wait, wait, wait. We have never preached the gospel before.”
I said, “It is okay. God will help you.”
Every morning I saw them at breakfast at seven o’clock. They had often returned at two or three in the morning after traveling sixty miles, preaching the gospel, and coming back through snowstorms. Then they would be picked up at eight to go somewhere else.
Were they tired? They were rejoicing.
They said, “I cannot believe it. I have never preached the gospel before, but God gave me something to say. I said it, and four people were saved in that little house that night.”
By the end of the week, those three men had become gospel preachers. All they did was tell the story of Jesus, and people got saved.
You would be amazed at what you know. You would be amazed at what the Lord can do. You may think you are only young people worth twenty-five cents—perhaps Canadian—but you have no idea what God has built into your life.
You are responsible for what you have been given. When the shaking comes and the door opens, may you be able to say, “I knew it was going to happen. Okay, God, here am I. Send me.”
May God use you and bless your socks off as you see what it is like to serve in the kingdom of God. It is a great opportunity. May the Lord give us all that chance before He comes again.
One question was asked: “Where do you think you have made the most impact?”
Why would God send an oaf like me to Russia to preach the gospel? They preach the gospel a thousand times better than I do. But I have some things they have not heard.
At the retreat, I spoke about how to serve God while resting in His life. They had never heard that before. They were serving out of their own energy. Some were exhausted; some had been crippled by tuberculosis and other illnesses through pouring out their lives.
I taught them how to know that they had been crucified with Christ, how to live out of His life rather than their own, and how to discern whether they were operating by their own energy or by His impetus.
I shared things I had learned from brothers such as Stephen Kong and found real in my own life. One brother came to me after a session with tears in his eyes and said, “I see it. I see it. I see it.” That was my reward.
A woman who had been a Christian for four years said, “I have had a struggle inside and did not know what it was. I did not know there was flesh and there was spirit. I did not know that there was a life inside of me fighting against the will of God. Then you spoke, and it all became clear.”
That is my reward: to bring things we have learned to people who have never heard them before. Then they bring to us the scenes they have seen of God moving.
At one retreat, the sisters gathered for prayer. Many were village sisters without education or college training. They had been saved only a few years, but when they prayed, they prayed loudly. They prayed in tongues, and I kept hearing slava Bogu—“Praise God.”
I wondered why they were so loud. The interpreter, a brother named Taras, later explained it to me. He was an educated Ukrainian brother, the principal and teacher of the Bible school.
He said that when he went into certain villages to preach the gospel, there was intense witchcraft. People worshiped death and practiced dark things. As he entered, his mind would begin to grow dark. He would forget what he was supposed to say and even begin to forget the gospel.
He said, “The only way I have found to come into victory and preach the gospel is to shout the name of Jesus, worship Him as loudly as I can, speak in tongues, shout some more, praise Jesus, and take His life. Then something pops off the top of that place. My mind becomes clear, and I preach the gospel.”
He said, “Those sisters live out in those villages all the time, surrounded by that darkness. They have learned how to pray.”
I had thought they were merely shallow Pentecostals who liked loud yelling. But they had learned by experience how strong the demonic forces are and how to break through.
I have been a Christian for forty years, and I had never understood that before. Perhaps when things start getting dark, even in a difficult youth meeting where everybody is restless and distracted, I need to pray louder and preach louder so that the Lord can come down upon us.
Maybe I can learn that lesson from Russia.
The Russian believers believe that the North American church is rich and lukewarm. They come here and see the lukewarmness. Often their first impression comes from former Russian brothers and sisters who moved to the United States and became worldly.
Pastor Yuri told me of a pastor from Ukraine who had moved to Seattle. The man had two cars and a nice house, but he was working two jobs. He attended a meeting on Sunday, but Yuri said, “He used to be a servant of God.”
That said a lot to me.
But Pastor Edward also visited a fellowship in South Jersey. After he spoke, the believers gave him an envelope. He opened it in the car and became deeply moved. He asked, “Why do these Chinese brethren love us so much? They have given so generously to us.”
He loved their worship. He said, “They sing so many hymns.” His interpreter translated the hymns for him as they were sung. He had never experienced a gathering quite like it. He loved the people who loved the Lord.
We have run out of time. Let us close with a few prayers for the kingdom of God in Russia.
Right now the kingdom of God is advancing there. They are serving and evangelizing. But the church is still a baby church—very young. If we are not careful, they may lose something of the church’s simplicity that they have now in the little house meetings. With time, the church can become structured.
Let us pray for the brothers and sisters in Russia as the Lord leads.
Lord, we thank You for our brothers and sisters in Russia. They are in an hour of great need, great blessing, and even great persecution. We pray for them.
Thank You, Lord, for what You do in my life when I go there and realize how much You love the sinners of this world.
Oh Lord, teach us the lessons of Your kingdom, even here where we live. We pray for our dear brothers and sisters, that You will provide for them and continue to open doors as they go and share the gospel in villages where most have never heard it, not even one time.
Oh Lord, do Your mighty work in these days of open door. We thank You for the lessons learned. We thank You for the blessing they are to us. We rejoice with them, even as they rejoice in what You are doing.
We are all there together. We are all working together.
Lord, we pray that the lessons we learn regarding the church—its perfection and beauty—we may pass along to them. And we pray that the lessons they are learning regarding kingdom service, they may pass along to us.
Oh Lord, cross-pollinate all of the fullness that is in the church, for Your glory, for Your benefit and sake. We pray in the name of our King and Head, Jesus Christ.
Amen.