David Sawatski – Ethnos 360

What this episode covers

It is good to be here again, you guys. I figured it out. It was 2016 when we were here last, in July. We had taken our daughter to Waukesha and then we came, so it’s been a long time. And I do want to say, just thinking about the brother and sister in Christ who serve full-time, for you guys to support us all these years allows us to do this full-time, and that’s just our heart, it’s our life. We were talking with Alan this morning, especially about, also Michelle, about retiring, you know? What is retirement? And we don’t plan to like retire; it’s our life’s calling. We’re going to get too old to do a lot of what we do now, and we’re feeling it, but it’s just a life that we’re so privileged to be able to invest in other people, share the gospel, see them sharing the gospel, and that’s a lot of what the Pass On is about. It was 1988, I was a student, or staff, I guess, over at Jackson and started to come here for two years. And I just want to say one thing, because it relates to Pastor Ron. I was young, heading into ministry full-time, thinking, wow, what am I getting myself into, and how will I last? Like, how will I ever go long-term into this kind of a long-term work? And a pastor at a church I visited, he was there 25 years at that time, and I asked him, how have you stayed for 25 years in your church? Because I hear the average is four to five years that a pastor stays. And he said, I keep my eyes on Jesus. And it was such a good word for me, and I’m thinking about you, 25 years. Pastor Ron, you’ve kept your eyes on Jesus. And I’ve been reading, I love 2nd Corinthians, but there’s just a little passage here I want to read, because it’s sort of, I guess we would say it’s sort of the secret to long service, because we have to keep looking at him. Yeah, such confidence we have through Christ toward God, not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who has made us adequate as servants of the new covenant. And then he talks, Paul talks about the old covenant being the law. And then he says, when Moses spoke about the law, there was a veil over his face. And it says here, and this is chapter three of 2nd Corinthians. And I love this verse. In 15, it says, to this day, whenever Moses, the law is read, a veil lies over their hearts. But whenever a man turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. And I found there are many veils over my heart that God reveals through the years that this is blocking my view of him. This is blocking my view of his power in my life. And it when a man or a woman turns to the Lord, and it really is looking to Jesus away from the thing that is really just hurting us or causing us a lot of pain, but to look to him and he enables us to keep on. So, thank you for your faithfulness to us. And we praise the Lord together for his faithfulness to us, because without it, it doesn’t happen. Thank you guys. Good morning. Yeah, it’s obvious that you are a very, excuse me, a very giving church. It’s obvious even from these numbers that we just saw here, that your focus is not just on you. You are seeing the world and so many presentations from different missionaries. And we have been able to benefit from that. So yeah, it’s very encouraging to be in a church like that. We are Dave and Susan, and we have two daughters, Melanie and Rebecca. We have been serving with Ethnos for almost 40 years. So, we started young and hopefully we won’t finish till the Lord calls us. But yeah, that has been our long service. And 20 of those years we spent in Siberia, and we would have loved to be back. But for the last five years, we haven’t been able to because of the war with Ukraine, and that sort of closed the door for us to go back into that country. Like Pastor Ron already said, I just finished the book, The Iron Broom. Some people think it’s a new broom for the kitchen. That’s not the case. It really has to do with our hi

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