Author: David

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  I pray that God blesses you and your families on my favorite holiday.  Thanksgiving was the biggest holiday in my family.  We would all get together, cook ALL DAY, and then sit down for a meal.  Right before we ate, we would pull out the “Thanksgiving Book,” a book chronicling all the things that we were thankful for through the years.  Each member of the family would say and write what he or she was thankful for.

This year, I celebrated with the Pratt family.  Pam Nelson and babushka Lita were with us as well, so we had a nice big group around the table.  Afterward, I went home to call some of my relatives and friends.

A Friend in the Hospital

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There’s a university student friend of mine in the hospital now that’s been diagnosed with tuberculosis.  They tell him he’s not contagious and he told me he’s feeling fine, but they still won’t let him resume his studies.  I think they want a bribe.  Please pray for him.  I’m trying to minister to him with visits and bringing him food and stuff at the hospital.

Couple of picture stories…

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Right now we’re looking for a building in town.  We really want to have a place for Ukrainians to come to every day and receive the Word, be ministered to in prayer, and have Christian fellowship.  This is one of the places around town that I took a picture of.  “ОРЕНДА” means “For Rent.”  Please be praying for this.

 
This is my friend, Shane, at his baptism the Saturday before last.  It was a really cool time of fellowship.  Only one of the baptist churches around here has a baptistery, so all of the baptist churches get together and have a group ceremony.

This is at the baptism again.  All of the people who were baptized went up and were prayed for.
This is the L’viv train station.  This past week, I went to Hungary for a conference at the Calvary Chapel Bible College in Vajta.  I was able to travel with my friend Tim and his family.
Worship at the conference…  God really spoke to me during that week.  The messages had many different focuses, but it felt like they were all directed straight to my heart.
On the way home, we were able to stop at a mall in Budapest that had a KFC!  I haven’t had food like this in a LONG time…  haha.
This is Tim’s daughter.  She was being a trooper while waiting for our train from Budapest back to Hungary.  It was delayed for several hours.
The Ukrainian countryside outside my train car window…
Ladies and gentlemen… Ukraine has Oreos.
 
This is a church in Levandivka, the region of the city I live in.  It’s the big Catholic church in the last post.  Please be praying for the people in L’viv, that they would know God instead of simply following a religion of “do’s” and “don’t’s.”

Religion and Relationship

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I was walking home tonight after being at the Pratt’s house this evening, and I saw something that struck me with a spiritual picture.  It was a local church with a big fence around it.  There was a guy knocking at the door and nobody was letting him in.  It’s the perfect picture of what happens to people when they loose sight of a relationship with God and replace it with empty religion.

Jesus was the everyman’s man.  He wasn’t a high-and-mighty clergyman that spoke in lofty tones.  He was a carpenter from Nazareth that hadn’t gone to any seminary, hanging out with twelve other guys from various parts of Judea and Galilee of similar blue-collar backgrounds, simply speaking the truth and loving people.  He let children come to Him, he let prostitutes come repenting, he ate with tax collectors to reach out to them

Look at the fence.  Look at how high the cross is.  It’s almost like it’s unreachable – an unattainable holiness that is exhibited by spiritually high walls.  No!  Jesus Christ’s cross is a symbol of how He already came down to us, not how we are to climb just high enough to get to Him!

…but they don’t see that, and that’s why we’re here.  We are here to get the word to the everyman – that the Everyman came down to give salvation every man… every man that will come to Him.

Prayervangelism

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This is probably why spiritual warfare’s been a beast lately.  In FNL, we’ve switched our focus to prayer.  It’s become a group that gets together, fellowships, reads and discusses some scripture or scriptural truth about prayer, prays hard, plays some games… and then takes its faith to the streets.

Saturday, we went out around L’viv Polytechnical University, Ivan Franko University, and downtown, and just prayed for the city.  That’s the vision that God gave me for our first outreach…  It’s like Joshua and the people of Israel did around Jericho.

These are a couple of the devotions that God used to lead us in that prayer outreach:
http://utmost.org/the-key-to-the-master%E2%80%99s-orders/
http://utmost.org/the-key-of-the-greater-work/