Ukraine: We Are All Responsible

Pastor Tony is joined by two missionaries from Ukraine for this special episode. 

Kim Forrest has been in Ukraine for a few years after God worked on her heart for several years to go. Kim has witnessed much devastation and a great move of God.

James Hopkins has served as YWAM (Youth with a Mission) for 25 years and lives near Lutsk at the Polish border. James shares the work that God has called him to do since Ukraine has pushed the Russians out of many of the towns and villages throughout eastern Ukraine. 

While the devastation is great - the revival winds are blowing in the midst of what has been described by the news media as a post WWII reminder of the the what much of Europe faced at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis in that war.  War crimes of all types have and are occurring to the people of Ukraine.

We all have a responsibility to the Ukrainians cry for peace and God's powerful hand of justice. 

You can reach Pastor Tony at akm@myrpt.org.

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Transcript

Podcast Intro: 0:00

Welcome to all the king's men, a ministry podcast of the Men's Ministry of restoration place Tallahassee, warning listeners to this podcast will hear authentic life changing stories from men who know Jesus and have experienced his work in their life. Be prepared to be impacted by their stories and relationship with Jesus. Here's your host, Pastor Tony Tolson.

Tony Tolson: 0:24

Good afternoon. Good evening, good day. Welcome to all the king's men Podcast. Today, we have something very special for you. Over the last year, we've seen such incredible devastation across the globe, from weather events, earthquakes, and war. This has been a really interesting and devastating year for the lives of so many people across the globe, both in the US and abroad. But today, I want to focus our attention on a group of people in Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, I've been working on this to bring to you something very special. A couple of missionaries in Ukraine have volunteered to spend some time with me to dive into what it's like to be on the ground. These two missionaries are Kim Forrest, and James Hopkins. James Hopkins has been in Ukraine for about 25 years, and has seen many changes in that country. And so when he talks today, you're going to hear someone who not only ministers to the people in Ukraine, but lives and has lived among them for many years. Welcome to the program today. James, can you tell me a little bit about what you've seen there in Ukraine,

James Hopkins: 1:52

the all of the people in the east, they're really, really broken more than you can more than you can understand. When you go to one village and you go to another village, some villages don't look too bad. But then you go to another village where there's just a few houses left, or you see all the schools and all the hospitals, the Russians destroyed. They just totally destroyed all schools, all preschools, all hospitals, all government buildings, there's homes left, but many of the homes they destroyed, too. I would guess more than a million structures have been destroyed in Ukraine. And it could be more from what I've seen, it's devastating. And I've been to a lot of places, in the nine months I've gone out, but it's really, really wonderful and really hard. Because when you see this devastation and stuff, literally you will cry every day, I cry every day, when I go out in these places. I literally have to get away sometimes just cry out to God. On the other hand, seeing all these people repent, you have great joy. So I have this amazing joy. And, you know, the Lord just kind of shared with me a long time ago. It's a joy he has with us, for his children that follow him. He has this amazing joy all the time. But on the other side of God, he's always weeping for the last. And when you go on a trip like this, it's compounded 10 times in your life. And you'll get a huge grasp of the love of Jesus, but you also have the brokenness of Jesus at the same time. Thank you, James.

Tony Tolson: 3:23

Before the war life was a little different. I want to welcome Kim Forrest to the podcast today. Tell me about Ukraine prior to this war breaking out, tell me what life was like. In Ukraine. What was the Ukrainian day like?

Kim Forrest: 3:43

They're very proud of their freedom. You know, they're not a lot of not kind of rules that we live with in our countries. Maybe that's some of why they ended up in trouble. But I think even the Russians were surprised at how well they lived and how well they were developing. I was surprised at how skilled they were with it. Like literally all of my Ukrainian Slavic English students, because I teach English online. They all are in some kind of it or software. So they're very, very much educated. And they're very multilingual people. So all of them speak at least two and as much as four or five languages. They're just very adept at it.

Tony Tolson: 4:32

Amazing. The day of a Ukrainian I mean, is it like we'd have in North America where we live in homes, we go to work, we go to stores, we go to movie theaters, is it kind of westernized in that sense?

Kim Forrest: 4:48

I was shocked at how the the average average monthly income of a Ukrainian is supposed to be about 200 us and that's the average and yet And the clothing stores and they're all expensive clothes. So I don't know, they just love their clothes. They get an average of $200. Us and they need to go buy an outfit. Is it? What you would pay us or? Yeah, yeah, and sometimes more. Wow, okay, yeah, I bought clothes. When I came, I had to come back to Canada in 2020. I had all kinds of problems that happened to me the last five years being there. But one of them was I had to come all the way back to Canada in 2020, to deal with my visa. And I brought clothes back with me, and I brought electronics back with me because electronics are also very expensive. So their cost of living, as far as maybe housing and such might be low, but all of the goods and services that they need or buy are very expensive, like some only certain things, yeah, okay. Everything else is pretty pretty darn cheap. Tell us about the church, in the state of the church, the Christian church, specifically in Ukraine? Well, there's certainly a lot of Orthodox, I became part of a church, Assembly of God church. Within a few months of being there, I joined their community English program that they ran through their church, and partnered with the pastor's wife because she was running the program. Within a few months of that, and it's a very lively church, there's there's still good, a van Jellicle tech churches, Baptist churches, but a lot of Orthodox

Tony Tolson: 6:33

take me to the day that the people in Ukraine come to realize that they're about to enter a war. What was that? Like? What was the mood of the country?

Kim Forrest: 6:47

They didn't people? They didn't. They were all in denial. They were in denial. They just didn't think it was going to happen.

Tony Tolson: 6:55

And is that because of the constant threats that have gone on for a long period of time?

Kim Forrest: 7:00

That was part of it? Yes. Because he'd been seen a saber rattling for a long time. But I mean, I knew it was going to happen. And I think everybody else knew it was going to happen, because we're surrounded. And he was building hospitals, right at the borders, field hospitals. So I mean, and tanks building up. So I mean, if you're not about to invade, what in the world would you be doing that day come when there was the first bomb? And so was that near you? Or was that a bit away from you? For most Ukrainians, the first couple of days it was near everybody. Because they targeted almost every major city I was in loads, which is a smaller city. It wasn't bombed as much. It was one of the safer ones. But yeah, the first couple of days was extremely terrifying because we had one small military airport, and the YWAM missionary base where I was living was just a few miles from it. So we could hear the gunfire, the huge gunfight that was going on for two days. We were scared all the time that we were going to start seeing Russians coming across the field. We were right on a gas pipeline, the property it was underneath. So one bomb would have blown up that whole area. And of course, we were bombed a couple of times in March. Which again, we woke up one morning to see like big bomb and smoke that burned for close to 18 hours. They that's when they that's when he bombed. One of our the fuel depots. Those were some of the targets that he wanted, of course to I mean, everything that's been done is just to make Ukrainians lives absolutely miserable and the most difficult possible, destroying all the fuel depots destroying the electrical substations, just everything to make life miserable.

Tony Tolson: 9:03

What has been the response of the churches in Ukraine to minister to their people in their communities?

Kim Forrest: 9:11

Incredible. They're all giving. The ones that I know of, are they they got trucks, they got their, their partners. My Church already had partnered up with countries like Sweden and Czech Republic and Poland, just trying to get humanitarian supplies so that they could pack up their trucks and go east, which they do and they get on top of their trucks and they preach the gospel while they're handing out whatever foods that's come in. The response of the people Yeah, they're, I mean, certainly, there's nothing like you know, your house, living in your partially bombed house, to make you think about God and especially if people come along with basic staples that you don't even have I mean, there's been a lot This winter that people in the East didn't have electricity didn't have windows.

James Hopkins: 10:04

You know, the Bible says that God takes things Satan meant for evil and turns it to good. And you can see this war is just horrendous, roughly 230,000, on our side dead. If you looked at the church in the West, if that's the west of Kyiv, and then you go to the east, and where the most of the fighting is, where the many of the cities were occupied by the Russians, and many of them then freed, hundreds of them, if not, more, of the villages have been freed. The eastern part of Ukraine was cut as far as Protestant Christian, point, zero 2%. Roughly, if you look to the west, where we're sitting, it's 3%, or more, depending on the city you go to. So huge difference, very few Christians in the east, very much still the Soviet type of thinking going on there. But they would call themselves Christians, because they're orthodox or Catholic Christians, but they really don't know anything about what they believe. And we asked them, and none of them can tell you about Christianity and explain salvation message or anything to that effect and zero. Now, we did run into a few villages where there was a few believers, of course, because there are believers in spotted in different places. But literally, you'd go to some villages of several 100 people, 1000 people, and there would be no Christians at all. And we would go into a village with a truckload of bags of food to give to people. And the goal is to not just feed them, but explain what Christianity is this giving the salvation message of Jesus Christ. So we gather we call the village leader, and we asked them how many people are there. If it's several 100 families, then we can handle it, the we gather the people together, then the mayor will call a few people and everybody calls each other and everybody needs food. So everybody in the village comes. And then we explain to everybody wants their gathered, we have a team of maybe 10 to 12 people, we gather them explain that everybody, no matter what we'll get a bag of food for one per family. And then we as a team, have a couple people share testimonies, we sing a couple praise songs to God. And then usually I or one other guy will give the salvation message. And when we give it really, in a strong way, we don't dance around much. We tell them Heaven and Hell, we tell them that about the love of Jesus Christ, we explain to them that you can't earn heaven through your good works. We give good examples to people so that they get revelation of that. And when we're done, we tell them now you're gonna have an opportunity to make the greatest choice of your life and the most important choice of your life. And that's to choose to be a Christ follower or not. And there's consequences. If you take the free gift of Jesus Christ, that means you get to go to heaven, it's your choice. If you reject the free gift of God, you ignore the message you choose, well, it's your choice, you get to send yourself to heaven, or hell, let us by the grace, and only one way is through Jesus Christ. But we say if you're not willing to read the Bible, every day, you're not willing to commit your life to Jesus Christ, please do not raise your hand, we don't want you to raise your hand, you're not going to get a bag of food, because you raise your hand, you're already in the bag of food. We want you if you're serious, to follow Jesus Christ, to raise your hand, and I raised my hand and 95% of everybody in every village raises their hand, some villages 100% will raise their hands. And then we lead them in a prayer of repentance and accepting Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. We pray for them. And then we get give them food and the food out to them. And fun part is people will come up and say, that's the first time I've ever heard what a Christian is. First time I understood. Somebody explained what I believe. Now I know what I believe. And it's, you know, very encouraging. When you hear things like that you, you come into these villages, and honestly, you have to understand they were occupied by the Russians. So their husbands or family members or neighbors were killed and other terrible things I won't say in this podcast happened. And a lot of terrible things happen. A lot of the villagers who go into their steel mines all over the place. We've had guys actually pick up a mine I actually walked into a minefield by accident. So things happen, but God is with us. There's a lot of pressure. When you're kind of walking, you need to be careful where you walk. And this is what these people live with every day. Not every village has mines all over it. But there's some villages there the kids go out to play and they lose a leg or lose an arm because there's butterfly mines out if somebody runs over a take mine with a vehicle then they're it's it's pretty terrible. When we go to all these places, we've been to about 100 villages and we've seen Praise the Lord, over 5000 people in nine months come to Jesus Christ. People are hungry, people are ready. You don't need to prepare them. They're ready. They're prepared. They've seen a lot. They fought a lot. They've prayed a lot. And they've cried out to Jesus, they wonder why God let this happened to them. And we have an opportunity to explain, you know, God didn't cause the war. Our sins cause a war of the sinful nature of man, the evil, pride and greed causes war. God was always with you. He never left you ever say to. He's calling you to, to him right now. People are getting revelation of God. And this isn't cheap, right? No, no, we we probably spend the, you know, between five and $10,000. Each trip, we go out buying food, getting equipment, the gas, it's a long drive, we drive for 10 days, we drive to many different villages. We don't take any money for ourselves. It's all for the ministry, and all goes to the zoo, the buying of food, equipment for gas, and things like that. So we've done 17 of these trips from seven to 10 days, basically.

Tony Tolson: 16:11

What are the other things that you can think of that people at churches, organizations in the US and North America can and should be doing?

Kim Forrest: 16:20

Well, I think everybody has seen what the prayers of God have done for this tiny little David of a country. He has beaten off Goliath against all odds. And I truly believe that all the prayers had everything to do with that. Yes, because I agree with how good they are so undermanned. And this is the biggest country in the world. How in the world can they be losing to such a small country? It's got to be the prayer. But the most practical thing is what I tried to do last year, my, the the pastor's wife, my friend, Kathy, ah, she asked me if I could try and get my contacts in Canada to organize shipments. That's the main thing like you can send money, yes, but we they need product, we tried to get as much product in as possible before the winter. And we were starting to do that in June, to prepare for winter. These Ukrainians are not lazy. I mean, the world is seeing that they are man. I've seen Ukrainians, you know, out, like construction guys out there for 12 hours in the heat, you know that they're just hardworking people. And they're not going to sit around. They need people to organize supplies that they can bring in, and they can ship and ship it directly to them so that they can get it to mostly east, but some some in the West. Because there's a lot of displaced people in the West, the cities are full node SC is I think twice the population. It was pre war.

James Hopkins: 17:57

We just see that is this is our calling. We've see everybody who's come, I'd say 90% of everybody comes in these trips are incredibly moved, and they want to be part of it. Because they see that there's they've never been part of something so amazing in your life. You know, God started this ministry. I didn't start this ministry, God started this ministry. I just fell into it with God was led by God to do this. So I don't get take any credit for anything. As I tell people, when they say, Oh, you guys are so good. I said, No, I'm not good. If you take God out of my life, I am selfish. I would never be here. No way would I ever be here. But because I have Jesus Christ, I want to be here and I want to share this good news with you guys. And I could be anywhere in the world I let him know I could be anywhere in the world drinking tea or cola on the beach. But I don't want to be anywhere else. I want to be here with you because God loves you. God is here for you and and we're just sharing Jesus Christ with you. We're sharing the hope. And we know this will change Ukraine. We know this will give you peace and joy that you've never had before. And this is what you need right now because they're broken nation.

Tony Tolson: 19:07

Thank you, James and Kim. We really appreciate you sharing with us today. I want to challenge you, as you've listened to this podcast today, think about the things that you are doing to affect your world for Christ. These two individuals have given up their lives and are living in a very, very challenging environment, ministering to people that have needs just that are so great, it would be hard to even fathom what they're feeling much less experiencing. But as Christians, we're called to do more than just think about or just send money, but we're called to act. And so this year at restoration plays were launching opportunities for you as individuals to become active Miss missionaries to go into meet the needs of individuals. And that will be lived out through local missions statewide, national and international opportunities as they arise. But I want to challenge you that this situation in Ukraine is not a Ukrainian problem. It is your problem, it is my problem. It is fellow men and women, brothers and sisters, who are suffering, who are dying, who are alone who need you and I to do more than just think of them from time to time. So today, I didn't want to just give you a story, I wanted to give you a challenge, that you have an opportunity to do more, we are told according to Christ, and according to his Word that we are to go into the highways and byways, preaching, teaching and sharing the message of the gospel. Jesus is very clear that the Great Commission is ours, that we are to go it is an action, it is not just a thought it is an action, it requires feet, it requires changing motivation. And so today, I want to really encourage you, as you listen to the words of these missionaries, that these are challenges to you to do more than you've ever done before, to, to put feet to your faith. And so we have, as an organization taken on James Hopkins, as a missionary, if you're listening to this podcast, you're getting the first word of that we've just done that, this month, supporting him every month. And we will begin a real relationship with James and his organization, whereby we can meet additional needs financially. But hopefully, very soon, we can take a team of individuals, to the Ukraine, to minister to actually go and go into these unoccupied areas, and help people where they actually are to love on people. This is not, again, something that someone else needs to do, it is something that we need to do. And so today, I want to challenge you that this is the message for the day. This is the message for the hour. God is pleased with obedience, God is pleased with action. And I want to challenge you that today is the day to think differently about missions because you are a missionary. And I just thank you again for listening today. May the challenge maybe the words that you've heard today be more than just a distant challenge that someone else needs to be needs to pick up and needs to actually live out, I want you to understand that it is your responsibility as an individual, listener, and believer. And so again, thank you for joining us today on all the king's men. If you have any questions, make sure you reach out to me. And please subscribe. That's how people get to hear more about us the algorithms work through subscriptions when people subscribe and when they like and comment. And so engage with us and share. We want to get the word out that there are exciting things in store for all of us this year. And God has a plan for your life that will blow your mind. So again, thank you for joining us today and have a great week.

Podcast Outro: 23:43

Thank you for joining us today on all the king's men. Please share subscribe and like the podcast anytime you can to contact Pastor Tony email Tony at my rpt.org He would love to connect with you. On behalf of Pastor Tony and all of us at restoration place. Have a great week and we will see you next time.