Hey Church!
In addition to wrapping up our series on the book of Isaiah, we also plan to observe a time of prayer for the persecuted Church this Sunday. It may surprise you to learn that the persecution of our spiritual family is one of the biggest human rights crises of our time. The 2021 World Watch list reports the following statistics.*
In just the last year…
- Over 340 million Christians are living in places where they experience high levels of persecution and discrimination.
- 4,761 Christians have been killed for their faith.
- 4,488 churches and other Christian buildings have been attacked.
- 4,277 believers have been detained without trial, arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned.
The estimated population of the United States is currently about 333 million. Now try again to wrap your mind around the idea that 340 million men, women, and children face high levels of persecution every day simply because they claim Jesus as their Savior. We can only try to imagine what anxiety these people must live with, knowing that at any moment they or a loved one may be ripped from their homes and thrown into prison, tortured, raped, enslaved, or executed. In areas that are oppressed by terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram, guns are pointed at the heads of Christians every day with the instructions, “Renounce your Christian faith and convert to Islam, or die.” Children are forced to watch their parents’ beheading, and parents their children’s. Spouses are torn from one another’s arms, never to be seen again. The perpetrators of such evil can be seen smiling and laughing over their victims. What did these people do to warrant such horrendous treatment? They believed in Jesus.
You and I are more abundantly blessed to live in the United States than we can fully appreciate. The fact alone that our nation was founded on the biblical principle that human beings are created equal (in the image of God) and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights is an inheritance worth defending by all means. And yet we must not allow ourselves to grow fat with comfort or bloated with pride such that we take our liberty for granted and fail to give thanks or instill in our children the convictions necessary to preserve such a fragile gift. It can be lost in a moment.
So, this weekend, take time to pray for our Christian family members around the world that endure severe hostility for this, our precious faith. Pray for their persecutors, for the salvation of their souls. And pray for the Church in the United States, that we will repent of our pride, be emboldened by the faith of the martyrs, and fight back against the forces of darkness that seek to silence the voice of Christ’s Church.
Your brother,
Ryan
“There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.