Carrying The Cross, Not Responding In Suspicion And Fear, Is The Key To Thwarting Islam’s Plan For Korea

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Pastor Foley

Daniel Dogo Awayi, a pastor in the northern Nigerian city of Potiskum, carries a list of the 83 members of his congregation who were brutally murdered in the last two years by Boko Haram, an Islamic sect that has now been designated a terrorist organization. He tells me that he will be bringing his list to Korea when he comes here in two weeks in the hope of helping Korean Christians wake up to the reality that the rhetoric of Islam is very different than the reality. “You now have 140,000 Muslims in Korea,” says Pastor Awayi. “45,000 are Korean, and that number is growing steadily. Many of these Korean Muslims were formerly Christian. They left the church for the same reason some left the church in my country: The church was not carrying the Cross. You may not believe it now, but one day your pastors may be carrying a list like mine.”

Pastor Awayi explains that Nigerian Christians, like Korean Christians, hear messages of prosperity, success, and comfort and are lulled into a spiritual “sleep” where they do not realize the central place of carrying the cross in the Christian life. They are vulnerable to Islam because Islam promises a religion of peace, reverence, and morality, so it is attractive to Christians who are looking for a deeper spiritual experience than they are finding in today’s churches. But then Islam gradually reveals its true character as a violent, intolerant ideology bent on world conquest. Korea, says Pastor Awayi, is an ideal nation for Islam to take root. “Islam looks for countries that value education, morality, monotheism, and family. They see Korea as the perfect country in Asia for expansion. That is why this year there were more than 100,000 applications from young Muslims to Korean universities. Islam is serious about growing in Korea.”

But Pastor Awayi warns that fear and suspicion of Muslims is not the answer. “The answer,” he says, “is remembering the true heart of Christianity, turning away from our own pursuit of success and comfort to walk Christ’s way of suffering love in the world, and reaching out to Muslims and everyone in suffering love. This is where Islam can be a blessing to us: It can remind us that the cross is the central fact of the Christian life for every Christian.” He remains in northern Nigeria, loving his enemies and doing good to those who murdered his congregation members.

Voice of the Martyrs Korea is hosting Pastor Awayi in Korea, where he will be speaking to our Underground University and Underground Technology students, as well as a number of churches and groups during his week-long visit. On Monday April 4 at 7:30PM he will be speaking at our Voice of the Martyrs headquarters in the Mapo neighborhood of Seoul, in a special event open to the general public where a free will offering will be received to support his ongoing work in Nigeria. A press conference will be held at Voice of the Martyrs headquarters on Thursday March 31 at 10AM to promote the special event and enable reporters to interview Pastor Awayi, as well as Dr. Foley and me. (Pre-registration with VOMK by phone or email is required for attendance at the press conference.)

Pastor Awayi’s visit is part of Voice of the Martyrs’ 2016 Martyr’s Spirit Speakers Series, which brings persecuted Christians from the most closed countries around the world to Korea each month in order to keep the Martyr’s Spirit alive in the Korean Church.

Pastor Awayi and our other guest speakers are Christian leaders from Iran, the Middle East, Nigeria, Eritrea, and other countries, currently paying the price for their faith in the most challenging countries on earth to be a Christian. We are bringing them here to Korea not so they can tell us about the hardships they are facing but so they can teach us that receiving and sharing God’s love is worth any amount of human pain and that such love cannot be stopped by any power on earth, including death. Their way is the only true path to deep and eternal joy. It is the normal Christian life.

A brief biography of Pastor Awayi is shown below, along with the dates and names of the other speakers who will be visiting Korea in the coming months. Reporters interested in attending Pastor Awayi’s press conference should pre-register by contacting Ms. Jeon Woo Lim at 02-2065-0703 or [email protected].

 

Pastor Daniel Dogo Awayi’s Biography

Daniel Dogo Awayi pastors a church in Potiskum, a city in the north of Nigeria, where Christians are under attack. Pastor Awayi’s congregation has shrunk from 400 to 100 members. Many Christians have fled the region, but Pastor Awayi remains. He says, “It is better to be in a dangerous place with God, than in a safe place without Him.”

Pastor Awayi was born in a village called Bayara in Eastern Nigeria. He became a Christian in 1980 and shortly after was baptized.  He was called into the ministry in 1988 after finishing high school. He received his Master of Arts in Theology from ECWA Theological Seminary (JETS) in Nigeria. Pastor Daniel has served in ministry since 1992 and he is ordained in the ECWA denomination. He has served as a teacher and an administrator at a theological training school in Nigeria, he has also served as a pastor in Northern Nigeria, where severe Christian persecution is still taking place. He leads an NGO called the Cup Bearer’s Restoration Foundation, working with the persecuted church in the North to evangelize and disciple Muslim converts as well as to advocate for and encourage the persecuted Christians. Pastor Awayi has been happily married since 1998. He and his wife have four children.

 

Voice of the Martyrs 2016 Martyr’s Spirit Speakers Series

April – Pastor Daniel Dogo Awayi from Nigeria (March 30 ~ April 7)

May – Pastor John Biak from Myanmar (May 6 ~ May 12)

June – Dr. Berhane Asmelash from Eritrea (June 2 ~ June 8)

June – Pastor Dmitry Lazouta from Belarus (June 23 ~ June 27)

July – Pastor Joseph Hovsepian from Iran (July 28 ~ August 3)

September – Taysir Abu Saada from Saudi Arabia and Qatar (September 8 – 15)

October – Yamini Ravindran from Sri Lanka (October 20 ~ October 27)

November – Greg Mussleman from Canada (November 18-December 3)

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Sex-Slave No Longer . . . Now She is a Child of God

Posted on March 7, 2016 by tdillmuth

joy and melissiaOne of the largest areas of impact this year was made through our distribution of MP3 players that were loaded with the dramatized North Korean New Testament.  My wife recently had the privilege of seeing first-hand the impact that these MP3 players (loaded with God’s word) are making among North Koreans. She said . . .

I followed Esther as she led me up the steep hill to Joy’s home. Joy, a North Korean woman, had been sold to a Chinese man when she was only 14 years old. Esther had also been a victim of sex trafficking, but became a Christian after receiving a Bible and an MP3 player through VOM Korea, and now she was discipling other women, like Joy. As we approached, Esther told us that Joy‘s Chinese husband, unlike many of the other Chinese men, is kind to her and so are his parents, who they live with in a small two-room shack.

Joy beamed as we arrived. Since her home is high on the side of a mountain and is not accessible by car, she doesn’t get many visitors. After inviting us to sit down, Joy began to share with us and tears rolled down her face. Before the translator had the chance to tell me what she was saying, I had already made up my mind that she was explaining how hard her life is. To my humbling, I learned that she was crying because she was so thankful that God loved her so much to send workers that had given her a Bible and an MP3 player that was loaded with NK style songs and the dramatized New Testament, and it had changed her life. Joy is especially thankful for the MP3 player because she works long days in the fields of her husband’s elderly parents, harvesting food. She told us that she carries the MP3 player with her throughout the day, to receive the strength and encouragement that God’s word brings.

Her identity is no longer sex-slave with no future, but precious child of God with a new hope and faith. Now, she does not desire to escape her current situation or abandon her husband or son (like so many NK women do who have had children with Chinese men), but hopes that they will also open their hearts to the same faith that she has found. As we left, it was not the dirt floor or the lack of running water that had touched my heart the most, but the fact that all she asked from us was that we pray that God would help her to continue to be faithful each day.

Posted in Making Disciples, North Korea, Visiting and Remembering | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Works Do Not Earn God’s Love, But They Are A Powerful Means By Which We Experience It

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Pastor Foley

Talking about the importance of works in the Christian life typically makes Evangelical Christians break out in a theological rash. As quickly in the conversation as possible they interject with sobriety and gravitas that we are saved by grace, not works. Many share testimonials about how they used to be on the “works treadmill” but now are “learning to just be.”

(When probed a bit more, their “works treadmill” appears to be more a “church treadmill” of committee memberships and congregational events than it does an honest-to-goodness Ephesians 2:10 treadmill of “good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life” where they have been distracted from the essence of their Christian life by spending too much time loving enemies, visiting widows and orphans, and daily taking up their crosses.)

Works, in other words, are regarded as potentially dangerous. Distracting. Like brandy and cigars, some Evangelicals these days are willing to dabble in them with moderation. But works as an essential part of the Christian life makes the Evangelical spider-sense tingle.

Some Evangelical pastors try to split the difference by redefining what works are so that in essence works properly understood become non-works. For example, John Piper, trying to make sense of Christ’s call in John 14:15 to keep his commandments, writes:

Jesus didn’t say, “If you love me, you will keep my moral behavior commandments.” He said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (verse 15). So if you read through the Gospel again, what you find is lots of commandments like: “Receive me” (1:12). “Follow me” (1:43). Get up, crippled man (5:8). Rise from the dead, Lazarus! (11:43). “Believe in the light” (12:36). “Believe in God” (14:1). “Believe me” (14:11). “Abide in me” (15:4). “Ask whatever you wish” (15:7). “Abide in my love” (15:9). “Receive the Holy Spirit” (20:22). These are the commandments that are all over the Gospel of John.

Now how does that confirm the way we have understood love for Jesus in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”? Because if the commandments in the Gospel of John are overwhelmingly receive, believe, ask, abide, then it makes perfect sense that Jesus would say, “If you love me — if you desire me and delight in me and treasure me — then you will receive me, and believe me and abide in me.”

And yet, three times in the same message in which Jesus tells us to keep his commandments he repeats the same commandment–a new commandment. It is not abide, believe, follow, or rise from the dead. 

It is love one another as I have loved you.

In addition to repeating this same new commandment three times, he specifies what will happen when we keep it, ostensibly as we are believing, following, and rising from the dead:

Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them
will be one who loves me;
and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father,
and I shall love him and show myself to him. (John 14:21)

Of course works don’t earn the favor of God. The way Jesus defines them they can’t even be undertaken except as one has experienced how Christ first loved us, since Jesus commands us to do our works as according to that love. They are first his works, and only secondarily our own, as he deigns to permit them to pass through us to others.

And that is why works of faith are means of grace: When we love others as Christ loves us, we of necessity must continuously meditate upon and worshipfully express the love with which he first loved us. And when we do that, how could he not show himself to us?

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