One of the greatest blessings of my life was creating Operation Mercy and working for 24 years with orphans in the Ukraine. Todays story hopefully will give you a reason to be thankful.
Victory Today
VT 20241126 Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice.
I've got the victory My God would hide for me Since the U.S.C. took it for me Well a good day to you and welcome to our Tuesday edition of the Victory Today program for this 26th day of November. Hey we're getting close we're getting close and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving Day. I hope you're surrounded with joy and people who make you happy. It's a marvelous day for most of us. But I want you to keep the kids that are on the streets, the kids who it's not a happy time. And I've told you before between Thanksgiving and Christmas the suicide rates skyrocket, the overdose rates skyrocket. And we're doing everything we possibly can to reach every young person we possibly can. And so please please please keep us in your prayers as we minister to these kids. If you took my calls for one day, just one day. I guarantee you the tears would not stop. The heartache and the loneliness and the desperation. Our enemies are meaninglessness and hopelessness. And when you have a life young or old but when you have a life who feels like they are hopeless. And by the way, I don't know about you but when I was a kid, my teachers, my neighbors, the message I was getting was not one of hopelessness. But these kids today have been told their jerks, their hopeless, their disordered by the way. Go ahead. Listen, it does so much for the self-image of a child to say, you know what, your attention deficit disordered. You're disordered. I don't know about you. Nobody was telling me that. Nobody, nobody. My mother, I'm sure if there was riddling around when I was a kid, I'd have probably been on it. No, no, I doubt that. I doubt that. But I was attention deficit hyper-disorder. As a matter of fact, probably still am. But I hit the ground going 90 every day. But you know what, I had teachers who channeled that energy. I remember Mrs. Hess, my kindergarten teacher, plus her heart, she's in heaven now. But I couldn't take a nap. She bribed me with candy and everything else you could think of. And she finally discovered that, you know, having me erase the chalkboards. Did you have chalkboards in your class when you were a kid? We did. When I got to, I was special. Yeah. I got to erase the chalkboards while the other kids met. And you know, whether it was the message we got from television, you could sit your child down on Saturday morning and you didn't have to worry whether Sky King or my friend Flecko or Rin Ten Ten or Roy Rogers or any of the other Saturday morning programs were going to corrupt their morals. And there was usually a moral to that show. And I mean, Roy Rogers, bless his heart. I remember when we had Roy Rogers, Roy and Dale came to Freedom Village many years ago. And we did a television show for 27 years, Daily Show. And I remember telling the kids, you know, Roy Rogers is coming next week. Roy Rogers is coming in. Oh, the guy who's got the hamburger joints. Yeah. Hey. No, he's the king of the cowboys, you, Yardbird. But it's amazing that we've allowed the traditional moral values, the encouragements, just the great things that many of us grew up with. We've allowed them to slip by. But do this. Be thankful. If you're of the generations that grew up with a godly, moral America or godly moral Canada, thank God for it. Thank God for it. And by the way, if you had a mom and a dad who were home, first of all, if you had a mom and a dad who encouraged you, not that they were perfect, but to have a mom and dad and to have a family that cares. And many of these kids I talked to, and I'm sure it's as much of their fault as anybody's, but they feel so alone. They feel so desperate. And so please, please, keep those kids in prayer. And you know, when, when a kid calls and wants the teenager, someone does care booklet, we want to get it to them like that. And it just, it grieves me to know that one out of every five kids that gets that booklet will get saved. And we've got over 1700 on the waiting list right now waiting to get that booklet. Please help us. Please help us. Please help us. One of my favorite verses in the Bible, Philippians chapter four, Rejoice in the Lord always, verse four, Rejoice in the Lord always. And again, I say rejoice. Now, quite honestly, we don't do that, do we? Now, we're real good at playing an awful and complaining. You know, I've said to you many times over the years, someplace somewhere there is someone who would give anything in the world to trade places with you. And whether it's your health or whether it's the car you're driving, whether it's the house you live in, stop and realize there are, did, did, have you seen the pictures of the people in Asheville, North Carolina, whose homes have been absolutely destroyed? Man, if you can pull into your driveway today and look at your home and it's intact, the windows are there and what? Thank God. If you can feel your feet, thank God, if you can get up in the morning then put your feet on the floor. Thank God. Rejoice in the Lord always. And don't forget, he's a rewarder, isn't he? Isn't that what he said? He's a rewarder of those who doesn't necessarily serve him. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be known unto God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. My friend, there is right there the recipe to have the peace of God. First of all, you need to know there is a peace of God and secondly you need to know how to get it. Be careful for nothing, but in everything through prayer and supplication, big things and little things through prayer and supplication. Let your requests be made known. I was telling you yesterday about McDonald's in Kyve, Ukraine. Now, I haven't finished a message in 52 years, so why should I start now? But understand, when we first went to the Ukraine 27 years ago, the wall had just come down. It was a third world country at best. Over the years, obviously, prosperity started to invade Ukraine and restaurants would open. McDonald's came. I think that was about the seventh year we were there. McDonald's came into town and whatever. I mentioned to you yesterday that I have so many memories. I love the kids at the village. I love all the things we did through the village and whatever. I missed the parade ministry. I loved America programs. We did over 200 of those. But it was the Ukraine. I told you yesterday that I went there 27 years ago with the intent of stopping the starvation at Pugetchilkov. We did that. But we eventually would have nine orphanages. We'd have an orphanage for the blind. We'd have an orphanage for the deaf. We had an orphanage for Spinalbetha and Cerebral Palsy children. That was Potifka. That was my favorite orphanage. I remember going to Potifka on my second visit there. I met two boys. The two boys I met first, Victor and Igor. Igor had a severely deformed leg. It didn't touch the ground. It would kind of hung there in kind of a crook position. Victor was severely deformed in his back. We would bring both of those boys to the United States for surgery. Igor's leg was amputated and he was fitted for a prosthesis. By the way, Igor became a pastor. Igor ran our summer camp program for several years. That in and of itself is a miracle story. But when I first went to Potifka, you could scrape the frost off the walls. Inside the building, it was about 50 degrees at best. The furnace had given out. Kids would walk around with mittens, one color mint, one hand, one color mint, another hand, ratty, winter jackets. These children in Potifka were all Spinalbetha or Cerebral Palsy kids. Just picture, you arrive at this facility. The frost is inside the building and these children are scooting along on about a 12 by 12 board with casters on it. That's how they maneuvered. They would take that board in their hands and kind of roll step by step by step up and stairs down the stairs and then get back on the board and scoot some more with little sticks. We would eventually get over 200 wheelchairs donated through the Cripple Girl. Erica is Tada, I believe. We worked hand in hand with her for many years and got all kinds of equipment for Cripple children and what have you. One of the first things we did was to raise the money to rebuild the whole heating system in that facility. I've got a picture somewhere here in the studio of Ivan, the director of Potifka, holding up a thermometer and it's reading 72. We would over the years. I told you I picked up a cold here, pray for me. But we would over the years build bakeries in all of our orphanages. The kids, they call it bread, call it, I guess, but it was something you'd feed to the pigs. We eventually would build bakeries, we eventually would redo laundry facilities, we would redo kitchens. As I said, we wound up with nine different orphanages and a freedom village there for teenagers when they graduated from the orphanages. These two boys, now I said to you yesterday, this is a reason to be thankful. My wife and I took Igor and Victor to McDonald's. I'll just picture this. These boys had had meat. Now they were, at that time I would say 15, 16. They had had meat once in their entire life. One time they had a chicken leg. Now bear in mind, I remember, I remember in last night, one year we put on a complete Thanksgiving, US Thanksgiving dinner for all of our orphanages. We cooked, they cooked. We took a chef from Buffalo, New York, brother Mike, we took him with us and we had 15 volunteers with us. These people helped orchestrate the cooking of, now when I say turkeys, you need to understand, you ain't never seen a Ukrainian turkey. Now, maybe somewhere along the line in your lifetime, you've seen a turkey buzzard alongside the road. What they call a turkey is very closely resembling a turkey buzzard. It's not like anything you are going to serve for Thanksgiving back here. I remember looking at them and I'm thinking, that's a turkey? That's what you call a turkey? That looks like a weird overgrown chicken. But nonetheless, these children had never ever, ever, ever, ever had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner like you and I might think. I remember one little girl in Ratamishill, orphanage, she kept moving the cranberry sauce with her fork and I said to her, I said, "Try that. Try that." I threw an interpreter, I said, "Try that." She took her fork and she took just, oh, I don't know, what would fit on the end of your finger. She tasted it. Oh, good, good. Man, she gobbled that stuff up like there was one tomorrow. But it was so interesting because these two boys that we took to McDonald's, now bear in mind, okay, you want a reason to be thankful? Bear in mind, they had meat, they had a chicken leg, one time in their lifetime. Now, come on, stop and think about the plenty that you've eaten over the years. I said to you yesterday, I have never sat down to a meal. God is good, God is great, thank you for this for the day, man. No, no, no. I don't pray that way. I really thank Him. I am so grateful. When you've seen starvation, when you have stood in a cemetery surrounded by mounds of little dirt, under which our children who died because they starved to death, it brings a whole new level to thankfulness. And we took these two boys to McDonald's. They had never, obviously, they'd never had a hamburger. They didn't know how to eat a hamburger. Matter of fact, they took the bun apart and they ate the hamburger and then they ate the bun. They didn't understand you eat that bun and hamburger together. They didn't know that. Ketchup? They had never seen ketchup. They had no idea what ketchup was. French fries? I remember sitting in there with them and say potato. Potato? And I remember Victor picked up a French fry and held it up and looked at it. Potato? Potato? Yeah. But they didn't know that. Never, never in their life had they had a Coca-Cola. Never. Never had a French fry. Never, never, never. I mean, here we are in McDonald's and we're teaching them, we're trying to teach them, but you take that French fry and you put this red stuff on it and you eat it and it's good. You can't fathom that. I don't care where you are, I don't care who you are. You can't fathom that. You cannot fathom. A woman, Lala, our cook at Freedom Village, Ukraine, one year we gave her a bicycle for Christmas, a bicycle. Her son was severely deformed. She would carry, she would drag him or pull him in a old rusty wagon to work. Now she lived two miles from Freedom Village, Ukraine. She would walk two miles in the dark of the morning to be at Freedom Village, Ukraine, and buy six o'clock. You can't imagine that. She had no indoor oven. She cooked everything outside in her house and she would heat her house with wood every three days. We gave her a bicycle and a new wagon. I had our guys show her how to attach that handle of that wagon to that bicycle. I'll never forget. She hugged me, hugged me, hugged me, hugged me, and wept. You can't imagine that. You won't get in your car, turn the heat on or turn the air conditioning on. You just can't imagine it. But you need to be thankful. You need to be thankful. This is for all of those crippled children. I saw the blind man tapping along, losing his way as he passed through the throne. Tears filled my eyes. I said, "Friend, you can't see." But with a smile on his face, he replied unto me, "I'll see all my friends in Hallelujah Square. What a wonderful time we'll all have of there." We'll sing and praise Jesus. His glory will share and there'll not be one blind man in Hallelujah Square. I saw a cripple dragging his feet. He could not walk like we do down the street. I said, "My friend, I feel sorry for you." Oh, but he said, "I've been heaven. Well, I'm going to walk just like you." Now I saw an old man. He was gasping for breath. Soon he'd be gone as his eyes closed in death. He looked at me and said, "Don't look so blue cause I'm going to heaven." Now I found you and I'll see all my friends in Hallelujah Square. Oh, what a wonderful time we'll all have of there. We'll sing and praise Jesus. His glory will share and we'll all live forever in Hallelujah Square. Amen. Yes, we'll all live forever in Hallelujah Square. Greater vision than Hallelujah Square. You know, I would not change the experiences I've had. You might call some of them bad. They're all learning experiences. But I learned to thank God. I've tried. I've tried to rejoice in whatever state I am. Whatever situation this is the will of God concerning me. You need to adopt that, my friend. Whatever happens, whatever's going on, this is the will of God concerning you. Keep us in your prayers, please keep us in your financial giving and be thankful. Be thankful. Be thankful for what you have. Can you walk? Can you talk? Can you see? Can you hear? We got a lot more going for you than a lot of people do. The address victory today, PO Box 6130, Diamond Head, Mississippi, 39525. That's victory today. PO Box 6130, Diamond Head, Mississippi, 39525. Tell full number 1-800 victory and the website is victorytodayradio.com.