The following is an article I wrote last year after reading stories of some of the persecuted Christians around the world- the purpose of the article is to challenge modern Western Christians with a model of real faith.
What Sort of Faith?
I have written a number of articles over the past year concerning the nature of truth, and how we as Christians ought to view God’s Word and the Christian religion. The quest for truth is a complex, never-ending and extremely challenging calling that all Christians must recognize, and so it is very important that we who have this luxury of the academic study of God’s Word in peaceful countries should readily avail ourselves of such opportunities joyfully and wholeheartedly.
But what of those who are in other countries around the world, countries whose cultures and mindsets are hostile to Christianity? What of the Chinese Christians who cannot even legally worship and who suffer constant persecution in the form of arrest, torture and even murder for their work in spreading the Word? We talk constantly in the Western world about sending missionaries to other countries. We embark on mission trips to countries in order to bring both physical help and God’s Word, and to embrace the culture clash that tears us out of the comfort zone of our everyday life in a country blessed with so much. And yet, when it comes to our own faith- as we pass the days in multi-million dollar institutions of higher education that constantly fill and challenge our minds with knowledge of God’s creation- many of us would as soon prevaricate and back away from the absolute truth of God’s Word as stand up for it to our relatively benevolent interrogators.
When it comes down to it, most of us don’t even have to be interrogated to surrender our commitment to Christ. Many of us have been drawn to churches that have swallowed the humanistic individualism of the Western culture hook, line and sinker. The prevailing mindset of individualism and subjective spirituality in the Western world - within which it is confessed that any person who so much as hints at devotion to any divine creature is a good spiritual person – has so thoroughly blinded the once-faithful Christians that many of us really aren’t even sure whether the Bible is the true Word of God. Western culture has spoken into Christians’ open ears the lies of humanity bent on glorifying itself, and we as Christians more blessed with physical blessings than any others in the world have turned from God and accepted those follies of men as our own.
The disparity of our faith when compared to our brothers in dire situations all over the world is utterly reprehensible. We in our “enlightened” spirituality, so tolerant of all viewpoints false and perverse, seek to travel to foreign lands thinking to educate the barbarian in the ways of good Christianity, and yet we have already traded such Christian faith as is good and true for the nonsense of a trivialized culture that stumbles after wind and takes up each new doctrine as a golden prize, only to leave it aside soon after as a rusted plaything. Surrounded by a culture epitomizing the proverbial house built on shifting sands, we have chosen to build our house in the same manner instead of building upon the solid and unchanging rock foundation of God’s Truth.
No wonder the world laughs at our faith! On the one hand in countries where death and humiliation and torture are accepted dangers to zealous Christians, the Word of God is sought out in humility and joy. It is there, where the line between life and death for those who worship the True God is most apparent, that the fire for the Lord burns brightest. It is where men must hide their Bibles and those who teach are routinely arrested and killed simply because of their beliefs that the real conviction of God’s Power and Truth reside in the hearts of men. What a humiliation, then, that we “enlightened”, blessed, and gifted individuals- being raised in peaceful, immensely wealthy countries where any religion can be practiced openly and safely- should reject and challenge the authority of God’s Word, and proclaim truth in sermons of our own devising. While men and women and children throughout the world die for the True Faith we devise new heresies and shortcuts for Christians. We market ourselves to an indifferent people in the hopes that those already overfilled and sick by a truly self-glorifying culture will think our way of life and worship is more fun than theirs. We soften our words and hide God’s judgment in songs of happiness and salvation that requires no obedience so that a world already turned inward on its own desires will identify Jesus as some sort of nonjudgmental buddy. And it is shameful.
I was reading excerpts from the second volume of “Jesus Freaks”, a series of books telling the stories of martyrs in other countries, and came across an especially convicting passage. This passage tells the story of Pastor Li De Xian who has suffered repeated arrests and torture for his preaching of the Word- he was arrested 15 times just between October of 2000 and May of 2001. Despite the persecution, however, Li De Xian continues to teach and fully expects future persecution, saying “We just follow [Christ]. There are many thorns, but we are just injured a little on our feet. This suffering is very little.” Most convicting, however, was the comment his wife, Zhao Xia, made: “Don’t feel sorry for us,” Zhao Xia says of their lifestyle. “At least we are constantly reminded that we are in a spiritual war. We know for whom we are fighting. We know who the enemy is. And we are fighting. Perhaps we should pray for you Christians outside of China. In your leisure, in your affluence, in your freedom, sometimes you no longer realize that you are in spiritual warfare.”
We as Christians who are so surrounded by blessings that we cannot even begin to count them must take to heart the stories of the martyrs. More than that, however, we must realize what their mission is. They are not out there preaching Christ in order to make people feel good about their lives. They aren’t out there to be culturally relevant- in fact they’re being purposefully counter-cultural in proclaiming God’s Word. As Jesus said in Matthew 10, “All people will hate you because you follow Me, but those people who keep their faith until the end will be saved.” They certainly aren’t risking their lives in order to market a God who calls us to worship at our own convenience, always gives us what we want, and is guaranteed to make us feel good about ourselves. They preach, and they suffer, and they die to spread the message of a God who gave us life and offered salvation to a world that rejects Him in its very nature. They bring a message of One God, Three in One, using the whole and complete True Word of God given to us in the Bible.
We Western Christians can only pray to achieve such a zeal for the faith in our lifetime of luxury.
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This is beautifully written, and marvelously articulates the sad state that the western church is falling into at a rapid and alarming rate. The one thing that is my consolation is that there are people that are holding on. Perhaps the increasing desecration of the church will cause more people to really look at the dirt that is collecting inside of every church sanctuary in North America.
ReplyDeleteThere is something to be said for persecution. I have felt for quite a while that perhaps the best thing that could happen to the western church is persecution-forcing a genuineness upon the congregations of North America.