<<First Name>>, please pray for Ukraine!

These are some of my thoughts as the war enters month 4. Follow my Facebook for more frequent updates. You can also find this same post there with more photos.

Today is the beginning of month 4 of the war. When this started, we genuinely expected to have gained a full victory by now. As it is, we are still gaining victory steadily—but a full victory and end to the war looks like it'll still take a while.

In Psalm 57, David writes about God’s ironic victory over the evildoer: “They dug a pit in my way, but they have fallen into it themselves.” We are seeing this very thing happening:

• Putin claimed his war was to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders. Now because of his evil invasion of Ukraine, there are two new countries joining NATO, one (Finland) with a long border with Russia.
• Putin wanted to “demilitarize” Ukraine. What he has ended up doing is demilitarizing his own country. Russia has actually “given” more tanks to Ukraine than any other country during the war by its troops abandoning equipment here, and has lost 1,300+ of its own!
• Putin wanted to cut off Ukraine from deeper partnership with the west and expected to return us to Russia’s control. What he has accomplished it’s cutting Russia off from the west and global economies like never before since the days of the USSR. Russia is quickly becoming the next North Korea. At the same time, Ukraine is now on the threshold of becoming an EU candidate country and is more integrated with the west than ever before.

There are many more such points that clearly demonstrate how the devil in the Kremlin is losing. But here are some other numbers that are encouraging us as we head into month 4 and reminding us that God has already won the victory, has defeated the devil, and will soon shine forth in His justice:

• 17 people have come to faith in Christ over the last 3 months just through our church. I'm convinced that church historians will look back at this time as a period of revival among Ukrainians and possibly Europe as a whole. We are actually going to start a new believers class tomorrow with 8 of them.
• 17 new or renewed church members. Some of this group overlaps with the new believers just mentioned, but some are refugees from other cities that were already believers. Conversely, not all of the new believers remained in Svitlovodsk. Granted, 28 of our members have evacuated further to Europe since the beginning of the war, but it's still encouraging to see God adding new people to our local congregation.
• We’ve run 7 evacuation trips to the front line of fighting in Donbass that have gotten 120+ people out of direct danger of shelling.
• We’ve housed over 300 refugees since the war began. During that time, we’ve been able to add things like showers and a functioning kitchen to the church building to serve all these people.
• We’re feeding over 550 refugees each week through our church. They are all receiving not only physical food, but also spiritual food as we pass out New Testaments and other literature with the aid, and of course inviting them to the Sunday service. It seems the whole city now knows where our church is now and what we're doing. We often get stopped by random people to thank us.

We are grateful to God for all of you who are helping us meet these needs through your generous donations! You can donate to help us continue serving by clicking the button below.

Would you pray for us the words of Psalm 57 today?