C H Spurgeon
Manton: There is a clock with which providence keeps time and pace, and God Himself sees it.
Spurgeon: Everything happens with divine punctuality; Israel came out of Egypt on the selfsame night in which their redemption was appointed, and afterwards wandered in the wilderness till the hour had come when the iniquity of the Amorites was full. Our time is always come, for we are in selfish haste; but the Lord, when on earth, had His set times and knew how to wait for them. The great God is never before His time and never too late. We may well admire the punctuality of heaven.
Our trials come in due season, and go at the appointed moment. Our fretfulness will neither hasten nor delay the purpose of our God. We are in hot haste to set the world right and to order all affairs; the Lord has the leisure of conscious power and unerring wisdom, and it will be well for us to learn to wait. The clock will not strike till the hour; but when the instant
1Taken with editing from Flowers from a Puritan Garden by C H Spurgeon. For this book, Spurgeon collected many graphic quotations from Thomas Manton on Psalm 119. He then added comments to each quotation.
comes we shall hear the bell. My soul, trust in God, and wait patiently when He says, “My time is not yet come”.
Eastern Europe Mission News
Rev Dmytro Levytskyi
This is an update on the situation in Ukraine, and the present circumstances of the Eastern Europe Mission. The sad condition of the Ukrainian nation is obvious because battles on the frontline have not stopped; we cannot see the end of it. One might ask why the Ukrainian people do not give up their claims to the territory of Donbas or Crimea just to stop a stream of deaths of Ukrainians. We fear that the invader will go on killing us until Ukrainians as an ethnic group, or Ukrainians as a political nation, will die out or dissolve into the vast sea of the Russian people.
It was a tragic scene when, at a memorial dinner, over 50 men and women from the same village were killed in an instant on October 5 by a Russian missile attack. It is also a sad fact that the world, as it might seem from here, has become tired of the war in Ukraine since so many nations have donated money and weapons to support the Ukrainian people, which has laid a heavy burden on the budgets of the donors. However, what would the world do if Putin overcame Ukraine?
At the same time, it is our task to continue preaching the gospel and doing mission work – both of which we do, but not as much as before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, last year. Several people are writing letters asking us for literature. We send literature to every place from which genuine requests come.
However, not as many people are attending public worship as there used to be. We ourselves as a congregation have six adults and two children. I was invited to visit the state registration office recently in order to prove that our congregation is still in operation. Usually, this type of identity verification is done by the bank every year in the fourth quarter of the year.
The usual flow of daily life has slowed down dramatically. Men are under tight state control. When they are moving somewhere for several days, all who are eligible for military service have to report to an army unit before going.
The cold season is approaching, and we are getting ready for it. We buy wood and coal because, since the start of the invasion, natural gas has become too expensive. Also we have to stock up on food and other goods for winter. We had five goats, but we had to get rid of them since it became too expensive
to keep them. At present we only have hens, which keep us supplied with eggs. In all of this we must say that the Most High is gracious to us in providing food and preserving our lives while under missile attack. Without the support of the Church, our survival would be in question. However, many of the Ukrainian people are in the same circumstances but they are trying to manage their survival without God’s blessing, blindly following their idolatrous religion.
Our task in these circumstances is to preach the gospel of Christ to the people who live around us. In spite of difficulties and by the grace of God, the Odessa congregation is still operating as a congregation, as well as a mission station. May the Lord give the increase to our work! “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Cor 3:7).