What We Value So Little

My leisure reading recently has been focused on the burgeoning house church movement in China which continues to grow exponentially. To give you some idea of the amazing growth of the illegal churches in China, the best estimates we have today are that there are over 80 million Christians attending illegal house churches in apartments, basements, caves, and barns all over China. When the Communists took over in 1949, there were an estimated two to three million Christians in all of China after over a hundred years of Western missionaries attempting to gain a small foothold in that nation. It is amazing to see the growth of the church now that it is forbidden by the government to attend anything other than one of the government run and controlled Three Self Patriotic Churches.

If you want to get a sense of the spectacular growth and nature of the house churches, I recommend David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing which chronicles the history of Christianity in China and its amazing growth in the last half century and really the last twenty years. A book which I am currently reading is called The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun, an autobiography of Brother Yun and coauthored by Paul Hattaway. It is an inspiring testament to the reality of God in our times and an amazing account of someone who has lived a sacrifical life and cares nothing for the material things of this world. Brother Yun, whose full name is Liu Zhenying, has been imprisoned three times for significant amounts of time and arrested over 30 times in all for his faith. He has been tortured, starved, shocked with electric batons, beaten for days on end, and made to crawl through the excrement of his fellow inmates. Yet nothing has been able to stifle his faith in God, nor that of his fellow Christians all over China. They are a church that has bled and suffered just as Christ did. Aikman argues in Jesus in Beijing that the Christian church in China is doing to the People's Republic of China what the Christian church did almost two thousand years ago when a dozen revolutionaries and a handful of friends overthrew the mightiest empire the world has ever known, not through political agitation or counterinsurgency, but by appealing to the world through demonstrating the suffering of Christ in their own willingness to lay down their lives quit literally even unto death.

Brother Yun writes on page 214 of his book: "The path of following the Lord Jesus Christ is not an easy one. Along the way lies suffering and hardship, but nothing experience will ever compare to the suffering Christ endured for us on the cross. I have a problem with the 'prosperity' teaching prevalent today, which tells us if we follow the Lord we'll be safe and comfortable. This is completely contrary to Scripture as well as our experiences in China...To follow God is a call not only to live for him, but to die for him also. 'If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.' Romans 14:8." These are the words of a man who has put his life on the line for his Redeemer over and over again.

If you want to follow the lives of persecuted Christians in China or in other parts of the world, I recommend bookmarking this website: www.prisoneralert.com, where you can read about Brothers and Sisters in Christ who are imprisoned all over the world and being beaten for their faith in Christ which we enjoy so easily.