Thank God, I have never had to go to jail yet for my faith or preaching the Gospel, but some have...
“… I suffer trouble as an evildoer, even to the point of chains; but the word of God is not chained.” Paul the Apostle, II Timothy 2:9
Men may chain the messenger of God, but they can never chain His message. The interesting thing about persecution is that, instead of squelching the faith it seeks to destroy, it only serves to fan it further into flame.
When I was just twelve years old, God took me to China supernaturally on my first missionary journey. One of the things that I witnessed while I was there was the indescribable passion that the Chinese Christians had for the Word of God. At that time, Bibles were illegal in China and most Christians did not have a complete Bible of their own. One way they sought to overcome that obstacle was to swap portions of Scripture whenever they met together at their secret worship services. One Christian, for example, would trade his portion from Matthew for the other’s portion from Psalms. Because of the scarcity of Bibles, it was not uncommon for Christians to memorize entire chapters of the Bible.
My mother and I, along with other members of our group, had as a stated goal to smuggle contraband Chinese-language Bibles from Hong Kong (then under British rule) into mainland China. Wrapped in common brown packing paper, our illegal payload was placed carefully among the clothing in our suitcases. I remember strongly the feeling I had as a twelve-year-old boy as I carted my Bibles under the nose of an unwitting Communist guard (complete with machine gun) in the train station. Who knows for sure what would have happened if I had been caught? Thankfully, I never found out!
While in China, I had the privilege of meeting Samuel Lamb, a renowned Chinese pastor with an underground church in the southern city of Guanzhou. Pastor Lamb had been imprisoned in a Communist prison for the “crime” of copying the Bible by hand, for which he received a 10-year sentence. Undaunted, he secretly acquired writing materials and continued creating and circulating Bible manuscripts. At some point, the prison officials discovered what he had been doing, and they sentenced him to an additional sentence of 19 years. That precious man spent 29 years behind bars simply because he wanted his people to know the truth of the Bible.
Why were the Chinese believers willing to take such risks and pay such a terrible price? They understood that the gospel message is not only worth living for, but also worth dying for. They knew that God’s words are life and power. Just like the Apostle Paul, they knew that the gospel “is the power of God.” (Romans 1:16)
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