It is good to be here again, you guys. I figured it out. It was 2016 when we were here last, in July. We had taken our daughter to Waukesha and then we came, so it’s been a long time. And I do want to say, just thinking about the brother and sister in Christ who serve full-time, for you guys to support us all these years allows us to do this full-time, and that’s just our heart, it’s our life. We were talking with Alan this morning, especially about, also Michelle, about retiring, you know? What is retirement? And we don’t plan to like retire; it’s our life’s calling.
We’re going to get too old to do a lot of what we do now, and we’re feeling it, but it’s just a life that we’re so privileged to be able to invest in other people, share the gospel, see them sharing the gospel, and that’s a lot of what the Pass On is about. It was 1988, I was a student, or staff, I guess, over at Jackson and started to come here for two years. And I just want to say one thing, because it relates to Pastor Ron.
I was young, heading into ministry full-time, thinking, wow, what am I getting myself into, and how will I last? Like, how will I ever go long-term into this kind of a long-term work? And a pastor at a church I visited, he was there 25 years at that time, and I asked him, how have you stayed for 25 years in your church? Because I hear the average is four to five years that a pastor stays. And he said, I keep my eyes on Jesus. And it was such a good word for me, and I’m thinking about you, 25 years.
Pastor Ron, you’ve kept your eyes on Jesus. And I’ve been reading, I love 2nd Corinthians, but there’s just a little passage here I want to read, because it’s sort of, I guess we would say it’s sort of the secret to long service, because we have to keep looking at him. Yeah, such confidence we have through Christ toward God, not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who has made us adequate as servants of the new covenant.
And then he talks, Paul talks about the old covenant being the law. And then he says, when Moses spoke about the law, there was a veil over his face. And it says here, and this is chapter three of 2nd Corinthians.
And I love this verse. In 15, it says, to this day, whenever Moses, the law is read, a veil lies over their hearts. But whenever a man turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
And I found there are many veils over my heart that God reveals through the years that this is blocking my view of him. This is blocking my view of his power in my life. And it when a man or a woman turns to the Lord, and it really is looking to Jesus away from the thing that is really just hurting us or causing us a lot of pain, but to look to him and he enables us to keep on.
So, thank you for your faithfulness to us. And we praise the Lord together for his faithfulness to us, because without it, it doesn’t happen. Thank you guys.
Good morning. Yeah, it’s obvious that you are a very, excuse me, a very giving church. It’s obvious even from these numbers that we just saw here, that your focus is not just on you.
You are seeing the world and so many presentations from different missionaries. And we have been able to benefit from that. So yeah, it’s very encouraging to be in a church like that.
We are Dave and Susan, and we have two daughters, Melanie and Rebecca. We have been serving with Ethnos for almost 40 years. So, we started young and hopefully we won’t finish till the Lord calls us.
But yeah, that has been our long service. And 20 of those years we spent in Siberia, and we would have loved to be back. But for the last five years, we haven’t been able to because of the war with Ukraine, and that sort of closed the door for us to go back into that country.
Like Pastor Ron already said, I just finished the book, The Iron Broom. Some people think it’s a new broom for the kitchen. That’s not the case.
It really has to do with our history of Russia. And it was just printed about a month ago. And the subtitle of this book is Turning Oppression into Opportunity.
I never wanted to just write a story about us. I wanted a book that has a message in there. And so, I eventually subtitled it that we, with God especially, we can turn oppression into opportunities.
And so that is going to be my topic today. Now, you might not have experienced or you might not experience oppression as such, but all of us at some point in life are going to go through hardships. And Charles Stanley used to say that each one of us is either entering into a life storm, or is in a life storm, or is heading into a life storm.
And the longer you live, the more you experience that. For Susan and me, last year was one of those quite stormy years. And it felt like one storm after the other one.
One came rolling in and out. And it wasn’t issues between us. It was issues that were coming at us.
And we sometimes had very short nights and long days. And we dreaded to receive the next email or the next phone call, because we didn’t know what it would bring, what kind of a storm it might bring with it. And our daughter had given us for Christmas a white piece of paper with a nice writing on it.
And it was laying on a pile of papers. Didn’t mean much to us. It was a gift from her.
And when we started to go through these hardships, we noticed this verse on this paper. And so, we took the best frame that we had and put it in there, because it suddenly became the best message for us. We hung it right next to the door to our bedroom.
And every morning I would get up, I would be seeing this verse. And that would focus me in the right direction, because another storm might be coming in. And it helped me focus to where my eyes should be fixed on.
And so, these words were spoken by King Jehoshaphat. And we find this story in the Old Testament. And King Jehoshaphat was suddenly heard one day that a huge army was coming their direction.
And that army, he realized, we have no power against them. It was too big. And he knew this army is coming to destroy us.
And so, the first thing he got the people together, and knowing that he has no chance, it actually reminded me of the last battle in the Lord of the Rings. I think this picture portrays it a little bit in the condition they probably saw themselves in. There is no chance for us to stand against this kind of army.
And so, he got the people together. And what he did is he moved their focus from the problem, from what was coming, to where they could get help. And we find it in 2nd Chronicles 20, where this story is being described.
And that was an incredible move of this king that had no power. And it’s very, men don’t want to admit weakness. Men want to show power, strength, and to say, hey guys, I can’t do this.
We cannot do this. That is not really in the nature of a man. He wants to show that he can do something.
But this king was humble enough and recognized, I can’t do this. We can’t do this. But we have somebody that can do this.
And so, he put the focus on the one who could do the impossible. Focus determines the outcome. Focus determines the outcome.
God instructed them not to hide, not to sit back, but he instructed them to get up and face the enemy, face the impossible, while he was turning oppression into an opportunity. And that verse, as Susan and I, we were going through our set of storms, that was a reminder where we can find the one that is going to do it for us, on our behalf. He doesn’t encourage us to just sit back and not do anything.
He encourages us to face it and then to rely on him as we keep our focus on him, that he’s going to do the impossible. As I was going through these storms and as I was writing the book about oppression, it in a way helped me to be more emotionally involved in the book and to write it in a more emotional way. And I was going; English is not my first language.
It’s not even my second language. And so, for me to write a book in English was something of an impossibility. And people had encouraged me for many years to write our story down.
And to me it was like, no guys, let the English people write stories. But I had the story. And I heard Jerry Jenkins one time, and you know Jerry Jenkins.
He wrote a series of Left Behind, and he has written many other books. And he said, if you have a message, you have to write it down. Other people need to hear it.
And so, the time came when I felt like, okay, now it’s the time for me to write this message down. And so, my story starts way back when your forefathers were going from Europe to this country. And I think if I would ask you where your background is, and if you have done a little bit of research, you probably would say Scotland, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy.
But most of them are connected somewhere in Europe. And so, during that time that your forefathers went on ship, and crossed the ocean to settle in this country. And they did that in search of liberty, prosperity, and freedom of faith.
Now Europe was getting a little too small for everybody to find a piece of land, and farm, and prosper. And so, when they discovered America, that’s where many of them went to in order to find prosperity, freedom, and liberty. My forefathers did the opposite.
Instead of going by ship to the west, they went east. Because there was lots of land on the eastern side of Europe that was totally undiscovered. And so, they went by horse and buggy, left Germany, and went to Ukraine.
Ukraine has been in the news almost every day. And they actually settled on the shores of a river called the Dnipro. If you have paid attention, that there’s a big nuclear plant.
And around that plant, it wasn’t there of course at that time, and that’s where they settled along that river. And so, they worked hard, the soil was good, and they prospered. And as families they grew, they had big families, and they needed more land.
And so, they started to go further east, just like your forefathers. The reason you are here in Michigan is because your forefathers, they went by horse and buggy, and they discovered Michigan. And so, they settled here somewhere, or settled somewhere else, but eventually you landed into the pathway of your forefathers.
And that’s what happened to me. My forefathers, they went more east, and eventually from Ukraine they left, and they settled on the Ural Mountains, the southern part of the Ural Mountains. The Ural Mountains, they divide Europe and Asia.
And again, they worked hard, and the soil was not so good. Lots of children died because of starvation, and fail of crops. But they kept on moving forward, and just as they were starting to live normal, so to say, they heard just like Jehoshaphat, a big, big red army was coming their way.
Russia was the first country to implement a new socialist system called communism. Nobody had done that experience before. Nobody had changed completely from one society into the other one almost overnight.
And so, this had to be done with huge force of power. Communism, the way I would describe it, is basically trying to bring back the paradise we lost without God under the barrel of a gun. And that’s basically what they tried to do.
As the red army swept through the land, they left millions of people dead in their wake. The secret police used a phrase that doesn’t work. Maybe, oh, maybe I switch this off.
No, something is not working with the power point here. I’m, oh, there we go. Okay.
Is this, for some reason, this clicker doesn’t work. Oh, there we go. Yeah, it’s starting to work again.
Thank you. But anyway, I got this picture, and I thought, yeah, this describes a little bit of what was coming, storms. And if you are, if you studied a little bit of history, this was coming into our land, into our country.
And during this time that the red army was sweeping through the country, it’s a huge country. It has 11 time zones. America has four time zones.
So, you can imagine how this army just had to march and march and change everything, lifestyle. It brought so much suffering with it. And during this time, the secret police, they took out a phrase that the Russians would use, that a new broom sweeps clean.
And they used it and called it the iron broom. That’s why I called my book The Iron Broom. So, it’s not a new broom for you ladies, for your kitchen, okay? It’s the iron broom that swept through the country.
And this was, the meaning of this was that any people that were not 100% for this new system would be swept out. And it became like the human trash. The human trash would be swept out by this iron broom.
And we had these kinds of pictures hanging in our school. And they were proud of this iron broom. There was a lot of iron in the communistic system.
The hammer and sickle, iron. Stalin called himself steel Stalin. And so, they felt like we are the hard people and we are going to make this thing work.
And so, communism didn’t tolerate anything that was not 100%. If you weren’t 100% for this system, you were that human trash. And this iron broom would sweep you out.
My grandparents got under this iron broom and were swept from prison to prison. They weren’t criminals, but they were, their crime was our German background. It would be similar if the government here suddenly had something against the Scottish people.
And they would come to you and they would say, what is your background? Scottish, okay? And then they would write it actually in your passport. And anybody picking up your passport, they would know, oh, Scots, the enemy. And that’s how it was for us.
In our passport, it was written German. And so, we were the fascists after the Second World War. We were the enemy of the state.
And you, no matter what you did, you were born already guilty. And so, that’s how my parents grew up. And I eventually grew up this way.
My parents, my grandparents, the ones that you just saw here, actually this picture was taken in a prison where grandma went to visit grandpa. And later, after she came back, she got imprisoned. And of six kids, I don’t have aunts or uncles because of six kids, five died.
My mother was six years of age when both of them were taken to prison. And she was left by herself. And she was basically on the verge of death.
And a neighbor lady found her. And that’s how she was saved. And eventually, she married my dad.
And together, they had 13 kids. This is not a picture of duck dynasty. This is my dad there on the right.
And then, I’m the next one to him. We are nine brothers and four sisters. So, of 13 kids, my parents already passed away.
But yeah, we all are pretty much alive. So, despite the fact that communism was determined to eradicate any kind of religion, especially Christianity, of all the religions that they were after, one religion was not persecuted. And that was the Muslims.
So, after my parents or my grandparents eventually came from the prisons, which was not very often that people came back from there alive, I had the privilege of having both grandparents that way. And they started to have secret meetings, church meetings like you guys have. Of course, it was very secretive at night when nobody was watching them in their homes.
It was maybe a couple of people together. Bibles weren’t allowed. And so, my grandpa started to have those kinds of meetings.
They were actually preachers that went by night from place to place, from house to house, to conduct church services. And so, when the police found out about it, they came to grandpa and they warned him that if you keep on doing this, we’ll send you back. The iron broom is going to sweep you back, human trash, to Siberia.
Siberia always was that dumping place for anything that Soviet communism didn’t like. And so, my grandparents together with my parents and myself, I was three years of age, we moved from the Ural Mountains way back into Kyrgyzstan, into Central Asia. So, this whole area is all Muslim.
And the Soviet Union at that time, they recognized the fact that Muslims are not like Christians. Christians are humble enough and they will go and suffer for the Lord. Muslims, they will pull out their knife and say, what? I cannot believe in Allah.
And they can easily start a holy war. And so, communism was very careful with them. Now, we moved amongst them and we had a little bit more freedom than in Central Russia, but nothing like here.
We didn’t have churches like this and didn’t have the freedom for our meetings. So, together with my parents and grandparents, we moved into the mountains of Central Asia, lived amongst the Kyrgyz people, nominal Muslims, and they are nomads. They live in these mountains and very, very hospitable people.
And so, we found our home there. And this was my first home. I grew up in a Saudi.
And we didn’t go up, we went down. So, when it rained, everything that we could use as a cup or some kind of a dish, we would place them where it was running. When it rained outside, it rained inside.
We didn’t have a floor, it was mud. And so, that’s basically how I grew up. But it was a very happy childhood because I had both my parents and my grandparents living in this little Saudi.
Three kids, grandpa and grandma lived on one side and my parents lived on the other side. And they thought they were the happiest people in the world. And so, we worked for the collective farm where nothing belongs to you.
Now, they will give you tractors, they will give you combines and everything else, but really nothing belongs to you. And you don’t really have money. So, basically, they give you a little plot of a field and that’s where you, that’s basically what you plant and you grow your food from there.
So, at the age of 18, I had to go to the military. And there’s, you have to do that. If you have two legs and two arms and two eyes, you have to join the Soviet military.
And so, when I came to the office where I was taken from, for some reason, of maybe 400 young men, they asked me if I believed in God, as if it was written on my forehead. And I still don’t know why he chose me to ask me that question. And I was a little bit stunned, but then eventually I said, yes, sir.
And he shook his fat finger in my face and he said, young man, I’ll send you to the worst place of this country. And that meant the white bears and that meant Siberia. And that’s where I ended up.
And it’s, ironically, I became a prison guard. So, here are my grandparents that were in a prison and suddenly their grandson is a prison guard with his dog, guarding prisoners. And if you are interested, you can read it in this book, but my struggle, my struggle, how can I shoot prisoners? And we were trained almost day and night to be good shooters for one purpose, and that’s to shoot prisoners.
And so, that was a huge struggle for me. And eventually I had the nerve to say to the officer, I’m not going to shoot prisoners. And he was like, what? Did you forget that in the Russian military, you never say no to anything. You always obey orders. How can you say that you are not going to shoot prisoners? Well, they put me through, yeah, a grinding machine to prove that I was not going to shoot prisoners.
And all of that is described in this book. If you want to buy it, you can do so, purchase it after our service here. But anyway, so for two years I was guarding prisoners and it was an incredible time for me to grow up.
It was almost overnight. From a child, I was suddenly had to become a man. And I had to make choices.
I had to really figure out what are my values in life. Values that I’m not going to compromise. And so, it was a time that was not easy, but I look back at it and actually start to thank God for that school, for me.
So, in Siberia, we had two extremes. Maybe you can’t see it here, but it’s mosquitoes. In the summertime, we would have thousands, millions of mosquitoes, just a whole cloud coming over.
And you could see it moving over the sun. And it was almost like a shadow on the ground because mosquitoes were coming. And then in the winter time, we had the incredible cold, minus -80° Fahrenheit.
You can hear your own breathing. And when you spit, it doesn’t just plop like you try it out here. It would go, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, because it would break up and would be icicles by the time it hit the ground.
But anyway, that was a little bit of our life and I’m not going to go into details about it. After two years, I was able to come back. And then shortly after that, the iron broom, or God used the iron broom to sweep us out of that country because the communists eventually realized these people are not going to change.
So, we don’t need them. Let them go back where they came from. So, 200 years after my forefathers went into that country, we were able to leave and get to the freedom that we didn’t even know existed.
So, after the fall of communism in 91, I realized this country is suddenly open for me to be able to go back. And so, we got married in 91, and my American wife was willing for me and us to go back to Siberia. And our kids actually considered this country as their home childhood country because we lived there 20 years, they grew up here.
And in 94, with our first child, we went back to Siberia. That was almost like the gulag for me and my grandparents. And now it became the home for our family.
And so, we lived there and served there for 20 years. Our main ministry was church planting. And we first had a deaf church, and then we had this church, the hearing church, and they had a lot of kids.
And in the midst of poverty, alcohol abuse, and criminality, kids growing up on the street, yeah, it still is very much part of that country. Then also facing deportation to the front lines. A lot of our young men, they were actually, they, at some point, they left the country.
They left Russia to go to another country in order to avoid being taken to the front lines with Ukraine because they are opposed to this war. And some of them have come back, some of them have stayed somewhere overseas. But despite all these huge obstacles, they’re also facing the obstacles of Buddhism.
Buddhism is on the rise. So is shamanism, so is animism, and so is communism. They are going back to their old ways.
And it’s amazing to us, but that’s the country. And probably one of the biggest oppositions they’re facing and we faced during our time is the Orthodox Church. All of these religions, they’re very, very much opposed to Christianity the way we know it.
And so, despite all these oppositions, the believers are still doing camps the way we started with them many years ago. And we started with camps, and they’re still doing camps. And they’re still doing Awana, like you guys are doing Awana.
And somebody told me here this morning that actually Awana started to bring in kids. And so, you can see here, a lot of kids are being brought in through this program of Awana. So, you must be doing something right.
And probably we copied something from you guys, but Awana is bringing back the kids that have really no understanding of God or Christianity. And then the men’s ministry, it’s amazing. Some men came over to me and they said, oh yeah, we remember you from crossing the frozen lake.
Well, I did it with them probably 15 times. And then we left and they are still doing it. Just about three weeks ago, they came back and sent me pictures.
And I thank the Lord every time they all come safe and back from that one week of hiking across the lake. Now, the hike is not the purpose. It’s the means to the purpose.
The purpose is character. And these men need biblical masculinity. They need to understand what God meant when he made Adam.
And so, the lake and the frozen ice is the means to build character, to put theory into practice. So, my time is running out. Yeah, this is, they are also sending out missionaries.
And so, they’re sending out missionaries to Mongolia, to Indonesia, to Central Asia, to some other places within the country and outside the country. But like all of us, we look at life and we think it’s going to be a straight line. We’re just going to have an easy ride.
And so it was for our believers, they thought, well, Christianity is probably going to give me an easy life. And then we step in and we start to realize that’s not God’s plan. It was maybe my plan, but God’s plan looks very different.
And that’s the bottom picture. That’s how often our life looks like. And that’s God’s way.
So, we have plenty of stories of oppression, suffering, hardships in the Bible. And why not us? Just like Job said, are we going to only accept good things from the Lord and not hard things? And so, hardship is a universal experience. And the Bible is full of these stories.
Suffering is part of life, also our life. And Jesus warned his disciples that you will be persecuted. You will have hardships in your life.
And the sooner we learn to face, rather than to run away from them or fight against them, because if we believe that God is sovereign, then he is the one who is allowing these hardships in our lives. And there must be a purpose, even when we don’t understand it and it doesn’t make sense to us. And so, the sooner we discover that if we face them, like Jehoshaphat taught his people, we start to realize that it shapes our character.
It deepens our faith. It forges strength into us that comfort and ease could never produce. So, in Romans 5, three, it again points us that it does something.
It helps us develop. And then Benjamin Disraeli, he says, there is no education like adversity. Wow, that’s quite powerful.
And then Zig Ziglar, oh, there it is. Zig Ziglar says this, fear has two meanings, forget everything and run, or face everything and rise. And I really like this.
Every time we face storms in life, we have to make a choice. Are we going to run or are we going to rise? I hope that this encourages you to stand up and face what the Lord is allowing us to face because it’s not the power is not in us. But as we look, as we change our focus from the storms, from the hardships onto the one who can get us through it, that’s where the power is.
And that’s, I hope is going to encourage you to make that change of facing, instead of facing the storms, facing the one who can lead us through that storm. Thank you very much.