Hold Fast the Pattern of Sound Words

Six words I spoke to the church in the spring of 2020. The church doors were closed, the congregation prayed at home, and week after week I came to them through the screen: hold fast to sound teaching, serve one another in love, remember what Christ endured for us, pray for the city where you live.

The recordings of the services were transcribed and set down on paper in the order in which they were spoken. Nothing was added and nothing was taken away: only punctuation was supplied, and what belongs to living speech rather than to a book was removed. Scripture is quoted from the Russian Synodal translation.

Friends prepared this book for my seventieth birthday. The church’s recordings from the years of my pastoral ministry hold many more sermons, and we hope to gather them in a second book.

The printed book is in Russian. English translations of all six words are available on this site.