For World Focus Week this year, we are focusing on the underground church: those believers around the world who risk everything to follow Jesus, and often, willingly pay the ultimate price. In recent months, God has opened my eyes to His ground-shaking work in the darkest areas of the world and I have been utterly challenged by story after story of mountainous faith. Like author Nik Ripken in his book, The Insanity of God, (now available in the library!) I just want to sit at these believer’s feet and hear how God has moved, shaped and sustained them. My faith, quite honestly, seems lukewarm and shallow by comparison.
One thing I have learned, even from a distance, is that persecution increases your dependence on God and thus intensifies your experience of God. I want to pray and hear the Holy Spirit like a persecuted brother. I want to share Christ with the urgency and passion of a persecuted sister. We, in the Western church, have so much to learn, even as we have so much to give.
I want to recommend a video that has been like a song stuck in my head since I saw it two months ago. I encourage you to watch it with an open mind and heart, willing to be sharpened by a pastor in the Middle East who has lived in both our world and theirs, willing to ask if there is something lacking in your own journey of faith, willing to listen to the God who calls us all into something radical…