God Of The Persecuted: What The Lives Of Persecuted Believers Teach Us About The Nature Of God, Part I: Why We Don’t Venerate The Persecuted

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Pastor Foley

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Some people have a stack of unread books on their nightstand. I have a post-it list of books I would like to write on mine. This is not because I have so much to say but rather, as any credible author will tell you, because I see so much that I want to learn corporately with you and other believers, and that is what writing books forces us to do.

This blog post title, then, is a placeholder for a book-length treatment I would like to write after I complete my doctoral thesis, as it is a book that I believe very much needs to be written. I believe there are many excellent books already written about the lives of persecuted believers, and, no doubt, many more excellent books will be written about them until the full number of our fellow slaves and siblings are martyred.

But if we are not exceedingly careful, no matter how many volumes are written, we may miss the point of each page.

If a martyr story is to serve the purpose for which it is intended, then it will always and emphatically point beyond itself to Christ, whose life and love is re-presented in the martyrdom. If the martyr story does that, then there are two reactions it ought not to produce:

  1. “I don’t know if I could endure like that if I were persecuted.”
  2. “This story has really inspired me to be more serious about my Christian life.”

The reason a martyr story ought not to produce these reactions is because it obscures the very truth that God intends to make plain through the martyr story, namely:

God is the giver of every good gift. In every circumstance in our lives he provides what is needed for us to accomplish his perfect purpose for us and for the world. Circumstances of great pain and physical anguish are not exceptions. He provides there, too–even more lavishly.

In other words, the proper reaction to a martyr story is reassurance that God will supply our every need in Christ Jesus in every circumstance. It builds faith, not admiration. It buttresses the belief that when you as a believer face persecution, God will supply the grace commensurate to overcome it. What is needed is not your personal fortitude but rather your simple childlike faith. To say “I don’t know if I could endure persecution” is to say something about God and not something about ourselves. And what is said is not humble but, rather, faithless.

In the same way, martyr stories ought not to cause us to “get serious” about our Christian life, as if they are designed as a kind of curative to carefree and flippant Christian living. We don’t need martyr stories for that purpose, and, in fact, Jesus said that even testimony of someone coming back from the dead can’t fix that problem. Instead, martyr stories call the faithful farther forward, cross in tow. The message of such stories is: The God who has been faithful to you thus far will be faithful to sustain you to the end of the age, even should such come to you at the point of an ISIS halberd. So, advance.

In my years of interacting with persecuted believers, I cannot recall one who said to me, “If my story can inspire even one brother or sister to get serious about their faith or prepare more fully for persecution before it comes, then it will be worth it. I sure wish someone had warned me to take my Christian life more seriously before this happened.” First of all, I think that is a decidedly Western sentiment, which may explain why we Westerners are currently under-represented in the martyr count in comparison to our overall numbers. But even more importantly, what it overlooks is that persecuted believers and martyrs are rarely paragons of virtue distinguished by super-human prayer lives or valiant track records of self-sacrifice. They are surprisingly ordinary people, with feet whose clay quotient differs very little from our own. What they are are people who have received from God what was needed for the day, just as God has given unto us this day our daily bread. It is a different sort of bread that is needed on the day of persecution, but not a different sort of believer.

This is not to eschew the importance of training for the heavenly contest. It is, however, to clarify the kind of training that is called for; namely, not Marine-tough discipleship obstacle courses designed to leather up our holy hides but rather more reflexive and childlike responses of faith and trust in God given more promptly in the face of ever more harrowing life circumstances. We prepare for persecution and martyrdom by simplifying our faith, not by adding anything to it. And that is both harder and easier than it sounds.

If you say to authentic believers in the midst of persecution “You are an inspiration to me,” inevitably they will respond by deflecting your praise to the God who has supplied them even more in their persecution than he did in their prosperity. Good martyr stories ought to do the same. They ought to draw our eyes upward, cause us to relax and say, “Nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, I can advance toward the cross.”

That is why we don’t venerate martyrs. To venerate a martyr–or to admire them, or to praise them, or to only be inspired by them–is to raise up the recipient of the gift rather than the giver. It is a category error of the most egregious degree because it may cause us to walk away from what we read with exactly and precisely the wrong conclusion:

I could never do that.

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What Happens When A Christian Is Imprisoned – Part 2?

Posted on February 5, 2015 by tdillmuth

wurmbrand, man and his workLast week I wrote about the witness that Christians often have with other prisoners while in jail. But as I was reading more in Richard Wurmbrand: The Man And His Work, by Merv Knight, I found that their witness goes much further.

In fact, it often goes to the deepest, darkest corners of the prison itself . . . to the evil men who are administering the torture, cruel punishments and even death.

Rev. Wurmbrand tells the story of an interaction he had with one prison guard who eventually came to saving faith.  The prison guard said,

“Mr. Wurmbrand (he had not called me “Mr” before), how is it that you love me?  I would never love someone who put me in prison and beat me up.  How can you fulfil such a commandment of Christ?”

I answered, “I am not fulfilling a commandment by loving my enemies; Jesus has given me a new character, the main feature of which is love.  Just as only water can flow out of a bottle of water, and only milk out of a bottle of milk, so only love can flow out of a loving heart.” ( pg. 42)

And this is only one of the many stories that Rev. Wurmbrand tells about his captors coming to Christ.

It reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s own story, that after he had been stripped of his garments, beaten with rods, thrown into prison and feet fastened with stocks, he had the grace necessary to pray, sing hymns and comfort the jailor after an earthquake.  Paul said,

“Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”  And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas.  Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:28-30)

In my own interactions with Christian friends, I’ve seen anger, outrage and downright hatred for the groups that are publicly killing people from different religious/political affiliations.  One of my friends ended his Facebook rant with these words, “Send em all to hell!!!”

While I can certainly understand his sentiment, it stands in sharp contrast to the many Christians who are a witness to their enemies.

Now, you might feel that it is right for someone like Rev. Richard Wurmbrand to love his enemies, but that it is different for us Christians in the Western world.  We are called to do something else . . . like maybe administer justice, organize protests . . . or something like that.

But remember what Rev. Richard Wurmbrand himself asked us to do in his book Tortured for Christ.  He said,

Western Christians can help us by praying for the persecutors that they may be saved. Such a prayer may seem naive. We prayed for the Communists and they tortured us the next day even worse than before the prayer. But the prayer of the Lord in Jerusalem was also “naive.” They crucified Him after this prayer. But only a few days later, they beat their breasts and five thousand were converted in one day. (Tortured for Christ, 73).

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How It’s Possible To Have More Christian Persecution…And Fewer Martyrs

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Pastor Foley

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The words “persecution” and “martyrdom” are used almost interchangeably today, as if they were synonymous, or at least two sides of the coin of egregious violations of religious liberty. As the popular calculus goes, a rising tide of violence against Christians produces a growing number of martyrs.

But the calculus overlooks one fundamental truth:

Persecution does not produce martyrs. God does.

And he does so through specific training in discipleship, which historically the church has called “training in the heavenly contest.”

If murder is premeditated, martyrdom is more so. It may, in fact, require a lifetime of premeditated training and still not come to fruition; early Christians counted it a privilege to be martyred, and many had to be restrained from courting death. Circumstances can’t make a martyr; individual will can’t make a martyr. Only God can.

But chance favors the prepared disciple.

Jesus describes discipleship as taking up one’s own cross daily not because he is using the cross as a metaphor for degree of difficulty but because martyrdom differs from other acts of discipleship in degree, not kind. Just as each act of discipleship–from sharing your bread to opening your home to visiting to healing–requires apprenticed training, so does martyrdom. This is why the church has carefully preserved and transmitted the stories of its martyrs: They are training texts.

And the story of Jesus’ own martyrdom takes up the largest portion of each of the gospels. In each it is described in minute detail. That is because as Alice Dailey explains in her seminal The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution,

Traditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ’s suffering and death; the more closely the victim’s narrative replicates the Christological model, the more leigible the martyrdom.

Christ’s death is salvific; the death of the martyr is not. But as Dailey notes, the death of the martyr is intended as a re-presentation of the death of Christ. Therefore, the act of martyrdom is undertaken with great intentionality and preparation. One does not become a martyr by accident or circumstance any more than one becomes an Olympic athlete by wandering into the stadium. One trains, daily, often for a lifetime. In the words of Tertullian,

You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God acts the part of superintendent, in which the Holy Ghost is your trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory everlasting. Therefore your master, Jesus Christ, who anointed you with his spirit, and led you forth into the arena, has seen it good, before the day of conflict, to take you from a condition more pleasant in itself, and imposed on you a harder treatment, that your strength may be the greater.

When I speak at conferences about North Korean underground believers, Western Christians will often say to me, “I don’t know if I’d be ready to lay down my life if we experienced persecution in our country.” That perspective says more about our mis-apprehension of the role and responsibility of the disciple than it does about the blessings of religious freedom. We don’t know if we’d be ready because we aren’t aware of the training regimen. We aren’t aware of the training regimen because we aren’t expecting to be led forth into the arena. Our eyes are on the world around us rather than on the word, where Jesus says,

But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.

And again,

But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap.

We don’t train for martyrdom because we expect persecution to come to our country. We train for martyrdom for our whole lives because Jesus told us to.

So when we read,

From imprisonment to torture to beheadings, more Christians worldwide live in fear for their lives than at any time in the modern era.

That’s the message from Open Doors USA, which released its annual World Watch List on Wednesday (Jan. 7). Christian persecution reached historic levels in 2014, with approximately 100 million Christians around the world facing possible dire consequences for merely practicing their religion, according to the report. If current trends persist, many believe 2015 could be even worse.

we remember that living in fear of death is not preparation for martyrdom, no matter how much violence is mixed in. And dying while practicing one’s religion is not martyrdom, but ordinary Christian faithfulness, the kind about which Jesus said,

So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”

So when Pope Francis said last week,

[T]he martyrs of today…are witnesses to Jesus Christ, and they are persecuted and killed because they are Christians. Those who persecute them make no distinction between the religious communities to which they belong. They are Christians and for that they are persecuted,

he is omitting the crucial historical purpose of martyrdom: The intentional re-presentation of the death of Christ. Christ was not killed because he was a Christian merely practicing his faith.

Because our churches around the world no longer train believers for the heavenly contest, we are alarmed, undone, and saddened by the violence perpetrated against Christians. Our brothers and sisters are killed while they are merely practicing our faith. And we live in fear that the same fate might befall us.

Fear + merely practicing the faith + anti-Christian violence ≠ Martyrdom.

But it is the equation for how it is possible to have more Christian persecution than at any other point in human history and yet still produce fewer martyrs.

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