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Source: https://www.sermonindex.net/speakers/david-booth/report-on-russia-david-booth/
Let us turn, please, to Acts chapter 22. After a build-up like brother Randy just gave, it's almost frightening to get on the platform to give your report. Acts chapter 22 and verse 10. Acts 22 and 10, And I said, What shall I do, Lord?
And the Lord said unto me, Arise and go into Damascus, and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed, ordained, planned for thee to do. May God bless the reading of that very dramatic verse in the life of the Apostle Paul.
Every Christian should realize that they need to live by faith. It's not just missionaries and preachers that have to live by faith. Every believer should live a life of faith. God has offered to us a wonderful bargain.
And He tells us, if we are willing to put His kingdom and His righteousness first in our lives, He makes a solemn promise, He will make sure we need what we need to keep body and soul together and a roof over our heads.
Many years ago, I accepted that bargain and I do not have to worry about what will happen to us in old age. Winston Churchill made a very perceptive statement regarding Russia. He said, Russia is a riddle wrapped in mystery and hidden in an enigma.
Having lived in that beautiful yet harsh land and having known its troubled but resilient people, we can testify that that statement of Winston Churchill is absolutely true. Russia is so vast, it is so dark, that we could spend the entire missionary report talking about its sad history, talking about its pagan past, talking about its sad experience with Christianity when in the 10th century it underwent a forced conversion with little or no turning to God from idols to serve the living and true God.
As I look here at this audience, I am very much aware there could be a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, that during this weekend has been thinking about what they are going to do with their life and feeling perhaps the movings of the Spirit of God in their life.
I would like to, with the help of God, give you an idea of what it means to be a missionary. The joys and the sorrows of the mission field, there is no glory in missionary work, but there is no work on earth more glorious than taking the gospel to people that have never heard it.
Missionaries were my boyhood heroes, and one especially, Jim Elliot. The death of those five martyred missionaries that occurred in my youth, it had a tremendous impact on my life. In fact, I would almost wonder if not that I am a missionary today because of the things that happened then.
Jim Elliot's statement, he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose, became the motto of my life. The story of our moving to Russia from Costa Rica really began down in Ecuador.
Our brother sang that, gave out that hymn, I never hear it without starting to weep because it has a very important part in our going to Russia. We had never planned to go to Russia. We thought, Nancy and I, that we would spend all our days in that beautiful country of Costa Rica and that we would die there.
We wanted our children to see another mission field, an Indian work, and I personally wanted to see where Jim Elliot and his companions were martyred. We went down to Ecuador. In Ecuador, Nancy and I, we had an experience there that caused a deepening sense of commitment to the cause of Christ, to the risen Savior.
Mine came sitting in the conference with 600 Quechua Indians and with the rain pouring down, thundering on the roof, a brother gave out that hymn that we just sang. Francis Ridley Havergale, standing before the painting that Stenberg had painted of the crucified Christ, and on the bottom of that painting, that artist had put a sign, All this have I done for thee.
And Francis Ridley Havergale looked at that, and the words of the hymn we have just sung, they just seemed to pour into her mind. My life was given for thee. What hast thou done for me? And sitting there in tears, with all those others singing around me, I realized how hard my heart had become, and I bowed in the presence of the risen Christ.
And like Nancy, in her experience, we told the Lord Jesus we would do anything for Him. And we meant it. Unknown to us, in that same meeting, sitting beside me, our daughter, Sabrina, when she looked at about 60 little kids up on the front, facing us at the front of the platform, and they had been singing, Jesus loves me in the Quechua language, Sabrina was so moved, that she, in her turn, made that sacrificial presentation of her life to Christ for service, that ended with her being in Russia today.
We went on furlough, and on that furlough, sitting at the kitchen table of the house we had rented, Nancy had a very vivid impression in her mind that we were to go to Russia. She was horrified at that, but she asked the Lord Jesus to kindly guide us.
She was willing to go. She didn't say anything to me, because she knew my feelings about Russia. I grew up in the Cold War. Russia was my enemy. In fact, I was determined when I got out of grade 13 to join the U .S. Marines to go to Vietnam and fight against communism.
So she never said a word to me. Unknown to her, in that exact same week, in the exact same place, I had the vivid impression in my mind that we were to go to Russia. I was horrified, and I did not say a thing to Nancy.
When we got back to Costa Rica one day, she said to me in tears, she said that she believed that God was calling us to Russia, and I said to her, I said I had exactly the same experience. We put it before the Lord.
We said we would go if that was what He wanted. We told the brethren there in Russia and all the assemblies what we were thinking, and they were very sad, but they had prayer meetings all over Costa Rica trying to find out God's will for us.
I appreciate that very much. I dragged my feet. I have to admit it. My wife was more willing to obey the Lord than I was, but I dragged my feet. And I have always believed that when you have a call, that God will confirm it with Scripture.
And can I say this to anybody that is thinking of going out in the mission field? Make a determination before Almighty God to guide your life by what is written in His Word, because when you launch out into the deep and you end up in areas where if God doesn't come through for you, that you are absolutely finished.
When you see God coming through, it changes you forever. Brother, sister, don't let anyone ever take the sense of the miraculous out of your Christianity. I had to speak in San Ramon one Sunday morning.
I didn't even want to be there. I was in such an agony of soul over this. I knew we'd been called. I didn't know what to do. I really didn't want to go. And that Sunday morning when I was ministering, a few months earlier I'd been in Honduras and I had underlined a verse that a brother had pointed out to me, the one I read just now.
And I was speaking on an unrelated subject, but I looked down at my Bible and there underlined was this verse. And I said, What shall I do, Lord? And the Lord said unto me, Arise and go into Damascus, and there it shall be shown or told thee of all the things which thou art appointed to do.
I stopped dead. I read it over and over. I couldn't even speak. And the people were looking at me, wondering what was happening. And I said to them, And you all know the agony that we have gone through.
I said, This moment, the Lord has given me the confirmation we are going to Russia. I told Nancy, I told the kids, our kids never raised any kind of opposition about uprooting and going to Russia. In fact, there were so many times in Russia that our kids were the greatest encouragement to us and in a very real sense kept us going.
To any kids here, you can be a tremendous help to your mom and dad with regard to the Lord's work by your attitude and your cheerfulness in it. The assemblies in Costa Rica, they had a farewell for us and each of the six assemblies there, they signed a letter of commendation for us to Russia that I treasure.
When we arrived in Russia, an additional verse had been given to me by Mr. John Adams. It was, The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him to deliver them. Neither he nor us had any idea of how prophetic that verse was going to be to us.
In many ways, our call to Russia was far more dramatic than our call to Costa Rica. When we arrived in Russia, it was so different than when we arrived in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, the Reed family was there to meet us and they were there to help us get settled and get into language learning.
When we went to Russia, there wasn't a soul there that we knew and we didn't speak a word of Russian. We had a reservation for one night in the Sovetskaya Hotel and standing in the airport, waiting for our bags to come off.
I waited until the carousel stopped moving and our luggage never came. I turned and looked at Nancy and Jordana and Jesse and they looked like refugees standing there. We all did. I've never been able to look at a refugee ever since without my heart going out to them because I know how it feels.
Right at that moment when everything seemed so black, God did something wonderful. A man came up and stood by me. He said, what are you doing here? I said, well, we're missionaries and I didn't really feel like a missionary at that point.
He said, well, we have come to visit a family from our church. They're missionaries here. I'll give you their phone number. Call them. They'll be able to help you. And right at that darkest of moments, when we were utterly helpless, God had a man come up and say that to us.
We went to the hotel. We started looking for a place to live. In Russia back then, there was not the agencies to help you find a place to live. The state controlled everything and we walked the streets of St. Petersburg, a city of five million people, and we couldn't find a place to live.
We had enough money for one month in a hotel and if at the end of that time we couldn't find a place to live, we would have had to come back to Canada. And the third week, after night after night of praying, I learned what it was to pray all night long.
I'd never had that experience before. But one morning, it was a Thursday morning, I woke up and I asked the Lord to give us a visible sign that we were moving according to his will because I had severe doubts.
I'd never done that before. We went out looking for a place to live. We went to a park where we often went and we had our lunch there and Nancy and I were sitting rather dejectedly on a bench and the kids were playing up in the trees.
And then we left. I had done something that morning that... I still don't know why I did it. I had felt that everything would be safer in Nancy's purse. And I put our visas. You couldn't walk the streets of Russia without visas.
They'd arrest you back then. I put the keys for our hotel into her purse. You couldn't get into a hotel without your keys. I put our traveler's checks. I put every cent of cash. And a final stroke of brilliance, I put my visa card in her purse.
And we walked 15 minutes down the street and all of a sudden Nancy cried out, My purse! And I turned and I ran because if that purse was gone, we were sunk. I ran down the street. Jesse stayed with Nancy.
Jordana ran behind me. Ran into that park. And I will never forget the relief. The last time I was here, I said we've been the object of the angelic ministry many times but I said I don't think I've ever seen an angel.
And then I backed up and I said I think I have because there was a man sitting on that bench right beside the purse. And when I walked up, he turned and looked at me right in the eye. And then he got up and he left.
It's one of the questions I'm going to ask in heaven if that was an angel or not. I thank the Lord for giving me that sign. I will not do it very often, I don't think, because it was so traumatic that my heart went into an irregular rhythm as I sat there on that bench.
But I knew that God was with us and we were moving according to his will. That night, we got a call from that man whose number was given to us at the beginning. He said there was a missionary family from Campus Crusades had a medical emergency, had to leave, and they wanted to know if we could take over their apartment.
And that next day, we moved into that apartment. One week before our money would have evaporated. We had always wanted to have a house and what was interesting, God always brought a Russian into our life that could do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves.
And we ended up with a nice house out in the country. Brother Louis Smith, sitting here, has been there a number of times. It was a beautiful place in the Russian forest. One week after we moved into that house, Jordana woke us up in the middle of the night and she said there's people with torches all around our house and I got up and looked and here was a group of about 40 people all dressed in long hooded capes, their faces painted up like demons and carrying long flaming torches.
When they saw we were up, they came up on the veranda and were knocking on the door and on the window wanting to be let in. I didn't have enough Russian to even call the police effectively. But I remembered in that dreadful moment that verse that Mr. Adams had given us and I said to the Lord Jesus, I said, Lord, we came here on the strength of that verse.
I claim that verse now. And the words were just out of my mouth when the people stopped knocking on the door and on the windows. And they turned and they looked at each other and then they walked down the steps and down the driveway and melted into that forest.
And the last we saw were those flickering torches. In the morning, Nancy said, it was like a nightmare that never happened. But she never ever in Russia said, despite all the things that happened and I would say she suffered far more than I ever did living in Russia.
She never said, we should leave here, find another spot. I pay the highest tribute to her. How do you begin a work in a country like that? God gave us a contact. He was a doctor in the hospital in Zelenogorsk.
His name was Vasily Karpovich. He took a liking to us and he opened his hospital to us to preach in. I used to go there and preach every week. One week when I went there, I did what I usually did. I went down the corridors and I went to the different rooms and asked people if they would like to come to a meeting.
I went to the women's section and in that room with about 40 ladies, I announced I was having a meeting. There was one old lady. She had come from Kursk to visit her daughter and had taken sick and ended up in the hospital.
And she swung her feet out of the bed and she said, I'll come to hear you. And she took my arm. Sometimes people think Russians don't have a sense of humor, but they do, especially when you know them and they feel they can trust you and speak their language.
And she took my arm and we began walking the hundred yards down to the room and she was just taking little steps like that. She was so old. And she looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye and she said, I'm going a long way to hear you preach.
I hope you're good. Well, she'd already listened to my wretched Russian. But that night I spoke on the destiny of the dead, the lake of fire. I did not know that she'd been a tank driver during the Second World War and was in the battle of Kursk, the greatest tank battle of history.
A German shell had opened up her tank and she got out of it wrapped in flames and when she stood up, she said, I know what fire is like and I don't want to die and go to the place this man has been talking about.
And she said to me, how can I be saved from there? I sat down and told her about the Lord Jesus, told her about how he died for the sins of the world, told her he loved her. It's the only opportunity I ever had with that lady.
I don't know if she got saved or not because she left the next day to go back home. But once she heard the gospel. That night, Vasily Karpovich, who had been an atheist, in fact he taught atheism in the Naval Academy, he called me into his office.
He sat me down. I'd watched the progress of him over the couple of years that he'd come to our meetings. Once he told me, he said, I've become a believer. And what he meant was he no longer was an atheist.
He believed God existed. But that night, he said to me, why did you ever leave Costa Rica? He knew Costa Rica. He'd been there. He said, why would you ever leave that country and come to this one? And I told him of our call.
And then he said this. He said, you came to Russia for me. Because tonight, in that meeting, I accepted Christ. Vasily Karpovich lived two years, died of a massive heart attack. But that was the night I realized why God had moved us to Russia.
Russia was a sad and heartbreaking place. We saw human grief and despair so deep that it was hard to know where to even begin to heal the wounds. Communism took God out of national life and it cut the people off from the source of beauty and inspiration and the whole country stagnated.
The communists made one mistake. They didn't take the old master's paintings of religious themes, Bible themes, out of the Hermitage and Russian Museum. It was their heritage and kids came from all over Russia and looked at those paintings.
There was one that was the Lord Jesus coming to John when John was baptizing in the Jordan and there was a sign under it that said, Behold the Lamb of God. Russian kids looked at that painting. There's a sister in the meeting in St. Petersburg used to look at it as a girl.
And when the gospel came in, she heard that Jesus is the Lamb of God and that He took away the sins of the world and she realized He'd taken her sins too and was saved. Not all stories were so happy. One day, because when we were there, there was a growing army of old people.
They weren't beggars. They were old people that couldn't make ends meet as their pensions were destroyed. And she was sitting on a ledge. She was wearing a blue coat. She must have been a beautiful lady in her youth because she was still a good-looking woman in her old age.
And she was sitting there on a cold February morning and she was weeping. I automatically gave her a New Testament and I gave her some rubles, some Russian money. And I looked into her face and I realized she is going to die very, very soon.
It was written all over her. And I got to the corner and I was so convicted that the Lord, if He was there, would do something for her and I realized He was in me and I was responsible to act to her as He would.
And I went back and I did something I've never done in my life. I got down on my knees in the slush and I took a Bible out of my pack and I extended it to her with my two hands and she never moved and I realized she was blind.
I had just put into her hand enough Russian money to keep her, I believed, until she would die. I looked at her and I tried to tell her about the Lord Jesus. And I spoke to her about His love and the work of the cross and then I realized she was deaf.
That has haunted me over the years. To think that that woman denied the knowledge of Christ all her life and when the Gospel came, someone came that knew Christ, it was too late for that woman. And inwardly I raged against the system that had done that.
One day, Nancy and I were walking down the street and a woman jumped to her death. When communism fell, there was so much despair that people were taking their own lives. We went the next day to the cemetery in our town and as we went through it, there were all sorts of beautiful inscriptions on the tombs, the Russians' wonderful poetry, the Russians' love poetry.
When we came out, we were standing there and there was a light drizzle falling that fall day and the golden leaves were dropping from the trees. And I looked at Nancy and she had tears in her eyes and she said, to think, all these people for all these years lived, grew old and died.
And when they were dying, there wasn't one word of encouragement from the Bible because they didn't have one. And they died like that. A vast number of Bibles were given out throughout Russia by our brethren and sisters.
One day, Jesse and I and some of the brethren from the assembly in St. Petersburg, we were on our bicycles and we were going out through the countryside giving out Bibles. We found a little assembly there.
It was started by an American who in his latter years went over to Russia, preached, saw souls saved, formed a little assembly. When we were there, he had gone back to America and the assembly was in very sad shape, just a handful.
And we looked at that and we wondered, is there any point trying to do anything? And then we realized they were like sheep without a shepherd and we decided we would try and help. We were a help to that assembly.
It's still going on today. Our daughter Sabrina is in it. And that assembly became an anchor to our own family. And we had precious, precious times of worship with our Russian brethren and sisters. We're thankful for it.
We were giving out the Bibles and I was ahead of the rest of them and I came to this garden gate, a little dacha, a house with a vegetable garden. All the Russians have these little plots of land to produce vegetables.
I talked with the lady for a while and then I said to her, were you here during the blockade? And she looked at me and she said, please come in. The blockade was 900 days with the German armies ringing from the south and from the east and the Finnish ones in the west.
The city of St. Petersburg was encircled. Hitler decided to starve the population to death. 1 .5 million people died of starvation. I remember when our brother Louis was there, one of the last times I saw him in Russia, we went to the cemetery.
Huge berms, mounds, every one of them containing 100 ,000 bodies of Russian civilians. The food ration was 1 .5 grams of black bread. That was mostly sawdust a day. A million and a half starved to death.
She brought me in and she took me over to a little depression in the ground and she said, we watched a bomb come out of the belly of a Stuka dive bomber. We were standing over by the house. My mother was hoeing potatoes right here and the bomb fell on her and blew her to pieces.
She took me in and made me a cup of tea. I was sitting on the bed and she said, on that bed where you sit, my father starved himself to death so that my sister and I could eat his ration of bread and maybe survive.
When he died, my sister and I were too weak to even pull his body out of the house, lay there for four days until Russian soldiers came through and dragged him out into the yard. Didn't even bury him.
She said to me, yes, I was here during the blockade. There's a story that is probably my favorite story of Russia. There's so many things we could say. I wouldn't dare to talk about Siberia and the assemblies there because I've never been there, but I can tell you these stories.
There's a plate. If you walked into the kitchen of our house, you would see a plate in the corner of the kitchen. It is a blue plate. It is fire burned around the edges and if some millionaire in this meeting offered me a million dollars for it, I would not take it because you can't put a price on blood.
One day a lady came to our house. Her name was Nina. She was bringing our dog home. Our dog Bowser was kind of an embarrassment to our family but turned out to be a missionary dog because Bowser would actually get on the train and go to the next town and somehow make her way home.
One day she disappeared for a month and we thought she was gone for good, but we got a call from this lady named Nina. She said, I think I have your dog. And she came down. When she found out we were missionaries, she said, can I come in?
And she started to tell her story that developed over the next few weeks. When finished missionaries came, she was given a Bible. She read the Bible cover to cover five times and then her house burned and as she stood watching the house burn, her neighbors said to her, God doesn't care for you.
And she cried out, I know he cares. And they would cry, he doesn't care. She told us a story that was so sad and because of the presence of so many children here, I'm not going to go into all the details except to say that the secret police came one night, took her family, put them on cattle cars and shipped them off to Kazakhstan in the middle of winter.
Some people were frozen to death against the rails of the cattle car. Others had smothered in the interior of the car. When they got out of that car, they were expecting that there would be a concentration camp.
When they stood out there, it hadn't been built and they stood on that vast Russian prairie in the winter and nowhere to go. Nina saw some terrible things happen then. The men took the tools that were provided and they dug holes in the ground and they covered them over with thatch and survived till spring.
In the springtime, there came into the camp a little dog and Nina's father built a dog house. She said, I used to go into that dog house and try to pray to a God that I did not know. She was finally released from the concentration camp and all her life she carried the stigma of being an enemy of the people.
Her husband could never get a really good job because he was married to an enemy of the people. She came to our meetings. She finally found a place for us to preach and we had gospel meetings in Kamarova and Ivan Pavlov's granddaughter actually came to some of those meetings, Pavlov's dog experiments.
One day after I preached on judgment, she came out in a rage and she said, David, preaching about hell doesn't scare a Russian. We have lived in hell. I quickly said, Nina, no you haven't. I went home and I tried to think what had she meant by that and if you take the fire out of hell, what is it?
It is a place where there's no God and that's what Russia was like. I said to her what I had thought and she said to me, maybe you as a Westerner will understand. She kept coming to the meetings and one day I had to go into St. Petersburg.
I had to preach in Russian that night and my Russian was never very good and I was looking up all the words that I would need in my message. I was standing on the train platform, a quarter of a mile long and I saw Nina get on the train platform and I thought, oh no, she'll want to talk to me and I need to study and so I did something awful.
I actually went and hid behind some of these great big babushkas and I thought I was safe but she saw me. She came up, she said, David, I've wanted to talk to you and I said, well I have too but not at that moment and we sat down on an almost empty coach and she said, David, you know the journey I've gone through, how I always believed that God existed?
She said, listening to you preach and reading the Bible, I've come to realize that God's Son is Jesus Christ. That was a wonderful revelation to her that the Lord Jesus was the Son of God and that He was God and she said, in listening to the preaching, I have come to believe that I am a sinner and I have come to believe that Jesus died for my sins and I thought, what a wonderful revelation to that woman and then she said this, but He's not in here.
How can I have Him in here? And a verse of scripture came to my mind, Revelation 3 and 20, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and she said, I don't understand that.
I said to her, Nina, if somebody came to your house in Comorova and they knocked on the door, what would you say to them? And she thought for a moment and then she said this. She said, I would say, the door is open.
Please come in. You're welcome in my house. There's nothing more I could say. I just sat there and then she began to pray and she prayed this prayer. She said, Lord, you know that I know I'm a sinner and you know I believe that you died for me.
She said, the door to my heart is open right now. Please come in. You're welcome in my life. I don't know what to think. I've never seen anything like that. But sometime later, when we had to leave the country, Nancy had been extremely sick.
She had blood poisoning that went into her heart. There was a kidnap attempt on her by Muslim mafia and we had to get out. And we were giving away a lot of our things and Nina was there. I was talking to her husband outside.
He had not been sober since his son committed suicide right on that very train platform in town. He was weeping as I spoke the gospel to him. He said, if only, if only I could believe that was true. He said, it's too late for me.
Nancy was inside saying goodbye to Nina. And I went in and Nina took out of her purse. She took out that plate that I told you I wouldn't take a million dollars for. And she held it out to us. She said, this is the only thing that I was able to save from my home when it burned.
She said, that's the plate I used to eat off of in that concentration camp in Kazakhstan. She said, I want you to have it because I don't want you to ever forget me. She put her arm around Nancy and her arm around me.
And she said, thank you for coming to Russia. She said, I will meet you in heaven. There's so many things we could say. Russia changed us. It made us weep. Our daughter Sabrina is there. We go to visit her and try and help her in her work when we can.
We're very happy to have a daughter working with the Russian people. There's so many burdens there. And as we close, Brother Randy suggested that we sing a hymn. And there's a hymn I've been thinking of all week when I was thinking of this message.
It really describes to me what is the only solution to the Russian problem. It's not in your hymn book, but Randy assured me most will know it. Burdens are lifted at Calvary. Days are filled with sorrow and care.
Hearts are lonely and drear. Burdens are lifted at Calvary. Jesus is very near. Cast your care on Jesus today. Leave your worry and fear. Troubled soul, the Savior can see every heartache and tear. Burdens are lifted at Calvary.
Calvary, Calvary. Burdens are lifted at Calvary. Jesus is very near.