Monday is the day off for most pastors as well as for me. It’s the first day after an often very intensive weekend, many times I travel Friday and Saturday and come back just to our Sunday service here in Kharkov. Now a days we also have a second youth service after our first morning service.
This particular weekend we have had a family seminar with Pastor Alexander Batanov and it has been such a blessing! Saturday was for couples and Pastor Alexander taught 3 lessons on the family, simple, applicable, honest, openly without ‘forgetting’ to talk even about the hard days in his and his wife’s marriage. It gave hope to so many people to hear that even preacher and pastors that are successful have/has hard days in their marriage and families BUT Alexander also showed the way to victory, the way out of the problems, out of the conflicts. We had 80 people present and I can say all of them where touched by God that day. After the lessons we had ‘fika’ (Swedish word meaning some snacks, coffee and tea) and people were mingling , chatting, laughing and simply having a very good time as I could hear and see.
After our ‘fika’ we continued with a talk show with questions and answers. It was scheduled to be about 1 hour 20 minutes but after 2 hours it was getting late and we had to slowly end the session, but the questions were many and serious, questions that touched us all and both myself, my wife and Alexander did our very best to answer in an honest and truthful way. At the end as I looked upon the faces of the participants I saw satisfied, happy people that had gotten new hope and faith to believe and work on their marriages.
The need to family teaching, not god theories but truthfully talking about the realities of life, conflicts and hardships, frustrations and defeats as well as sharing biblical principles that has helped us out of difficulties and sometimes ‘dead-end’ situations is so very important. I think a pastor that is not openly sharing both these sides of his own marriage never will be fully successful in helping others in their struggles because people then loose hope when the compare their own marriage with this told success stories and lost hope is very difficult to restore, we call it a broken spirit in the bible.
Sunday Pastor Alexander, first in our Sunday morning service taught about the relationship between parents and children and I felt his message was prophetic in its essence, touching very important principles in a Christian person’s life. In the youth meeting Alexander spoke to the youth about getting to know God and to choose right friends. Our youth meeting under the leadership of Jevgeny and Soya Gaidash has really taken off this fall. The meeting is held Sundays 14:30 in our office and this time nearly all the places where taken!!! If this continues we will have to move to the hall next door quite soon and that is good news for us in Word Of Life Kharkov.
Next Sunday I will preach about the Secret Place and continue the series of our inner life, if you are in town please join us in worship and prayer next Sunday 11:00 at Musicalnaja Comedia Theatre in Kharkov or 14:30 at the youth meeting in the same place
Please visit www.slovazhisni.org for more information
Matsjan