LORD, MAY I NEVER GRUMBLE AGAIN
Andy Crouch, a preeminent cultural thinker said , “In the early church up until the year 300A.D. when Constantine got a hold of it, the number one conversation the church would have when they came together was, “How do we nobly endure suffering for the sake of the gospel?” Andy went on to say he believed in America we have lost our capacity to have that conversation because we focus so much on our comforts. KABOOM TO MY SOUL!
Wayne Cordeiro, faculty member at the Seminary I attended, shared an experience he had on a trip to China to train leaders. 22 Christians from the Hunan Province took a 13-hour train ride to attend the leadership training held at a 700-square-foot hotel room. Out of the 22 Christians present, 18 had been imprisoned for their faith, the pastor revealed. “If we get caught what will happen to me?” Cordeiro began by asking. “Well, you will get deported in 24 hours, and we will go to prison for three years,” the Chinese Christians responded. Wayne asked how many people these 22 pastors had in their churches combined. Answer... about 20 million.
After beginning his lesson, the pastor realized he only had 15 Bibles to pass around, so seven people went without. “I said, 'turn to 2 Peter 1, we are going to read it.' Just then one lady handed hers to the person next to her, and I thought ‘hmm interesting,'” he recalled. As the Christians began reading, he quickly realized why she had given her Bible away: she had memorized the whole book. “When it was done, I went over to her at a break and said, ‘You recited the whole chapter,’” he said. She replied, “In prison, you have much time in prison.”
“Don’t they confiscate the Bible?” he asked. She said that while any Christian material is indeed confiscated, people smuggle in scripture written on paper and hide it from the prison guards. “That’s why we memorize it as fast as we can because even though they can take the paper away, they can’t take what’s hidden in your heart,” she explained. Following the three-day training session, one Chinese Christian man asked Cordeiro, “Could you pray that one day we could just be like you?”
“I looked at him and said, ‘I will not do that,’” he replied. “You guys road a train 13 hours to get here. In my country, if you have to drive more than an hour, people won’t come.”
“You sat on a wooden floor for three days. In my country, if people have to sit for more than 40 minutes they leave. You sat here for not only three days on a hard wooden floor, in my country if it’s not padded pews and air conditioning, people will not come back. “I will not pray that you become like us, but I will pray that we become just like you,” he concluded. China has seen explosive growth in the number of believers over the last several decades. Estimates have even suggested that China is on track to have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030. KABOOM #2 TO MY SOUL.
LORD, MAY I NEVER GRUMBLE AGAIN!
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