The first time – and maybe the only time – I heard the song on the radio, I was alone in the car, driving. From the start, a singer I did not know had me hooked.
From the desert to the Jordan
Isa is His name
The one who dwells within their tents
And fills their hearts with praise
As the song continued and the second verse began, I burst into tears.
From the Black Sea to Red Square
Eesus is His name 1
A song to be sung
Looking back all these years later, I suspect that song got airtime when it did because of that second verse.
A week earlier, I had cried all day, on learning that Communist hardliners had launched a coup in the heart of the Soviet Union. Soviet President Gorbachev had been “detained” in Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea. And in Moscow, tanks had occupied Red Square.
For months, I’d prepared to travel to Moscow and Yalta with a team of 58 others. Suddenly, a coup, and threatened civil war, stood in the way.
Then – whiplash! The coup failed three days after it started. And we got word: The trip is still on!
A few days later, I would travel across the world to stand at the two epicenters of the upheaval. And there I sat, sobbing, as the song that filled my car and my heart reminded me who was opening the way.
His name is Jesus, Jesus
He hears us when we call
Christ the Savior of the world
The Lord who loves us all
A story to tell
I did make that trip to the Soviet Union … in the final days of the Soviet Union. My team went out as part of a huge effort to distribute thousands of Bibles.
We arrived in Moscow after a long trip, fraught with detours and delays that threatened to prevent our even reaching the Soviet capital. Then, we learned: The international book fair where we had planned to distribute Bibles had been canceled. Our team leaders scrambled to change plans.
As a result, Russian pastors led us in small groups to different places across the city – street corners, hospital wards, a rehabilitation center, the sidewalk outside a medical building.
One day, then two, we set out in two tour buses, carting boxes filled with Russian-language New Testaments. In place after place, we emptied box after box. In all, we handed out 14,000 Bibles to people stunningly eager to get them.
Today, I know: The book fair could never have offered us what the street corners did. Jesus took us where people lived, suffered, worked and walked. People whose lives I couldn’t have fathomed. People whose world was reeling. People he loved.
The Lord Jesus wanted each of them to know his heart, to hear his invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).
Just as fervently, he wanted us to see each of them – to see how unique, how varied and yet how alike we all are. He wanted us to look into their eyes, and to recognize fellow human beings.
We did not know their language. We had not walked in their shoes. But time and again, the Lord showed us: We could relate to their hearts, if we would open ours.
A message to give
We spent three days in Moscow. The last day that we went out and about, I stepped up onto a box of Bibles in Red Square, to testify,
God has opened the way for us to be here. But much more importantly, he has opened the way for all people to have what we otherwise could not have: God himself living in us …
Jesus Christ is the way. He is the open door.
After those three days, our group divided into two teams to journey to two other parts of the USSR. About half flew to Bishkek, in the Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. The rest of us flew to Yalta, in the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine.
In Yalta and Bishkek, we again walked among the people. There, also, we helped get boxloads of Bibles into the hands of local pastors, who would oversee their distribution. Then, both teams returned to Moscow, before flying home.
From the Black Sea to Red Square
Eesus is His name
In Asia they know that Yesu
Hears every word they pray …His name is Eesus, Yesu
He hears us when we call
Three other posts tell more of the story of that extraordinary trip:
#1 An August coup and a promise of breakthrough: My story – When the 1991 Soviet coup happened, and then unraveled, I knew with every fiber of my being: Almighty God had opened a door that no one could shut.
#2 When getting there is the battle – We knew where God wanted us, but the hindrances just kept coming. Then, so did the breakthroughs.
#3 Extraordinary! Russia, Ukraine, breakthrough, God – Where I was and what I saw the Lord do when the Soviet Congress was dismantling the Soviet Union.
A message that God is love
Today, I realize what God began to do in me the day I sat in my car, weeping for people “from the Black Sea to Red Square” – and the days afterward, when I walked among them.
He began to show me, up close and personal, what my English-language Bibles had been telling me all along.
The beloved words of the beloved disciple who literally heard the heartbeat of God:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Paul’s cry to the Greeks in Athens:
This God made the world and everything in it … He gives life, breath, and everything else to all people. From one person God made all nations who live on earth …
God has done all this, so that we will look for him and reach out and find him. He isn’t far from any of us, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are. (Acts 17:24, 25-28 CEB)
Words that John the beloved wrote in his first epistle:
God is love … And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. (1 John 4:8, 14) 2
John’s later testimony when, physically, he was exiled on an island, but spiritually, he visited heaven.
I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from all nations and provinces and languages, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white, with palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a mighty shout, “Salvation comes from our God upon the throne, and from the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:9-10 TLB)
A story of peace and light
Today, I realize what I probably did not at the time: When God sent me to Russia and Ukraine, he didn’t use me.
Though I grew up hearing, saying, praying, “Lord, use me!” the Lord Jesus doesn’t “use” anyone. He does invite us to see where he is working and to join him there. He does teach us to look at other people through his eyes – and to echo his heart for the world. Including the world on our doorstep.
As we cooperate with him, Spirit-to-spirit, something glorious and humbling happens. People we are seeking to help help us. They teach us.
They may have experienced what we haven’t imagined. They know things we do not. They may show compassion in ways we haven’t learned. They each have unique strengths and gifts.
As we learn to stand eye-to-eye with people we may have been taught to label and look down on, to count the enemy, to fear, the Lord who loves us all gives us grace to lay down our preconceived judgments and to take up his love.3
As we humble ourselves to receive from people who don’t look or think or act just like us – whether or not they know Christ yet, or even want to know him – they can enrich our lives. And God’s more-than-superabundant grace can flow both ways: Through us to them. Through them to us.
A Savior to show
How much greater the potential for connecting deeply, meaningfully, with people from every tribe and tongue and nation who do know Jesus Christ! Our Lord wants us to begin now. By grace, through humility and faith, to learn together what he told and showed his disciple John.
→ Sitting with Jesus in the upper room, John heard Jesus say, repeat, emphasize:
Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. (John 13:34).
That is: Mutually, reciprocally, across all the barriers that this world has constructed, learn to accept each other, honor each other, teach each other, serve each other, spend and be spent for each other.
It’s the one overarching command Christ has given us for relating as his church. What’s more:
- Jesus said it’s the one way “everyone will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35).
- John affirmed, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).4
→ Standing in the Spirit in heaven, John saw wholehearted, multicultural worship around the throne of God. There, every person’s allegiance belongs to Christ alone. And all whose hearts are yielded to the Lord Jesus stand as equals, with no one group claiming special privileges over any others.
Here and now, Jesus is building his church to look like that. He’s connecting people from every culture who are seeking to worship him in spirit and truth, and willing to learn how that looks.
By his grace, through his Spirit,
we learn to worship the Lord
as one people, with one voice –
in all the beauty and variety
that he has bequeathed
to all the peoples of the world.
All of the world’s great peoples
The night Jesus was betrayed, John heard him pray a wonderful prayer that included an astounding statement. Jesus told the Father:
All Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them. (John 17:10 NKJV)
Later, Paul prayed for a church in Asia what God wants to pour out on all his people everywhere:
I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called – his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance. (Eph. 1:18 NLT)
Yes, Lord Jesus, flood us with the wonder of it! Your people are your inheritance! You highly value us! You are glorified in us!
By grace, through faith, may we highly honor you! May we walk worthy of you. And may we see, confess and turn from the oh-so-mistaken ways we tend to define “us.”
For, Lord, you are glorified in every person in any culture who worships you with their lips and their life.
And you are highly honored by the fullness, richness and intrinsic worth of your whole Body.
Nothing is impossible with you, Lord! May our lives testify together to all the world’s peoples:
In any language He is Lord
And worthy of our praise
His name is Jesus, Jesus
He hears us when we call
Christ the Savior of the world
The Lord who loves us all
This post replaces a shorter post, titled, “From the Black Sea to Red Square,” published in 2022 and now retired.
The headings above are excerpted and adapted from another song that has touched my heart – a hymn I loved as a child, titled, “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations” (words and music by H. Ernest Nichol, 1896).
Photo by Shelby Murphy Figueroa on Unsplash
Footnotes
- The lyrics in this post are excerpted from “The Lord Who Loves Us All,” by Scott Wesley Brown, from his 1990 album, Living in the Comfort Zone. ↩︎
- These verses also speak of Jesus as Savior of the world or Savior of all people: John 4:42; John 3:17; 1 Timothy 4:10. ↩︎
- Paul prayed that our love will “more and more overflow in fullness of knowledge and depth of discernment” (Phil. 1:9 CJB). Jesus himself showed us what loving people with his love does, and does not, look like. These two posts explore different aspects of this love: (1) God’s heartbeat: In darkness, betrayal – life. (2) Bucking the system: Shunning, submission, Jesus. ↩︎
- See all of John’s powerful love chapter, 1 John 4. ↩︎
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