Day: 30

Pastor Kevin

Pastor Kevin was on the way to a Sunday morning service at his church when he received a call. His church was under attack by radical Islamists. The gunmen attacked from the back of the church, spraying bullets indiscriminately into the congregation. Six were killed, twice as many were injured, and almost all were left permanently traumatized by the attack.

Kevin survived because he had delegated the Sunday school teaching to his associate pastor who, along with five others, went home to heaven that day. Today, if you visit his church, you will still see blood stains in the concrete of his once-peaceful church.

“The blood’s refused to go away. We’ve washed it… stain removers, everything. This has refused to go away until this day,” Pastor Kevin said.

Incredibly, Kevin is still preaching and his followers still studying the Word of God at that same church.

Ninety-nine percent of pastors would have retired or moved from that battleground to find a safer way to make a living, but pastor Kevin’s persecution and near-death experience led him to a place where he was truly free.

“[After the attack] God inserted into me a spirit of courage,” He told ICC. “After your church gets shot up, you don’t fear anymore and you stop caring [about the danger]. We have been through a lot, but we don’t fear anymore… There is nothing human beings can do to you.”

Amazing, right?

Weaned

Look at Kevin’s last sentence, “we don’t fear anymore… There is nothing human beings can do to you.” and think about it. I’ve heard this same sentiment uttered in numerous ways from many persecuted pastors around the world. It usually follows trauma, like being imprisoned, tortured, or beaten within an inch of their life.

Satan and his agents use fear and pain in an attempt to break the will and spirit of the believer, killing off what God is doing through them.

It definitely works, at least initially, on most people but often, only to a point. In some, all the brutality has the opposite effect.

God works in them and uses the pain to turn them into something truly special.

All the beatings or torture set them free from attachment to this world and they transcend fear and threat of loss. Their growth and transformation into a spiritual giant could not have happened without their greatest pain and struggle.

Pain: A Catalyst

As I’ve watched the persecuted and the martyr I’ve come to see that pain is often our professor, or even better, our cure. Now if pain is the cure, then what is our disease?

I would say the Bible shows us that our core problem revolves around two areas, self-sufficiency and idolatry. These normal human traits are two deadly spiritual cancers that plague humans.

Even worse, you are already infected with them! Right now, Satan is working to spread these diseases throughout your spiritual body to strangle the spiritual life out of you.

Self Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency masks our true level of soul-sickness and our desperate need for God.

We are broken. Truly and completely broken and yet, this is hidden from us. I’m not speaking to the lost here, but to you Christian. The full reality of our brokenness only comes with time. Soon after I came to Christ, I was so relieved because I finally wouldn’t have to struggle with sin anymore! I thought I had graduated!

Well, you already know how that worked out!

The truth is, the longer I’m a Christian, the more clarity and I have in regards to my depravity. As a friend recently told me. “Luckily, God doesn’t show us our total depravity at the beginning of our journey or we would give up!”

Our blindness and self-sufficiency are similar to a person dying of cancer running around telling everyone they are healthy as a horse.

We actually have the cure to the cancer of self-sufficiency within us. It is the living spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit that lives within you if you are truly a Christian.

“God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Colossians 1:27. (ESV)

Christ living within you is your hope in this life and the next.

The only problem is our self-reliance leaves Him imprisoned within us. If I’m self-reliant then I won’t live off of what was planted in me. I will instead seek to build up and live off my own internal resources.

Venus Fly Trap

Idols work differently. They are God-substitutes that temporarily quench our thirst for the living water that flows from the Spirit within us.

We desperately long for life and most of our life is spent in a futile race for it down blind alleys. We long for it and see its promise in money, marriage, drugs, alcohol, relationship, success, and hundreds of other things that can bring temporary satisfaction but never quench our ever-present thirst for living water.

The world and its idols act as a cosmic Venus spy trap that emits the color and aroma of life. They draw us in but they all end in death because they are God-substitutes and keep us from the real source of life.

Your Death, God’s Plan

So self-sufficiency blinds us to our need and keeps us from really going deep with God while idolatry works to divert us from feeding on the great source of life that exists within us, the Holy Spirit.

They work together to keep us weak unless there is persecution or great pain in your life.

Witness Lee articulated the same concern in his book, The Crucified Christ, which I quoted in the introduction of LWotM:

The biggest problem we have today is that Christians don’t have any wounds or scars, marks of death, or experiences of the cross.

Those experiences of death, in my field, persecution, accelerates a Christian’s growth and takes them to the deep end of the pool of Christianity.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, you probably won’t experience persecution and could be robbed of the ultimate pay-off of persecution. That is the incredible growth and closeness to the Lord that accompanies persecution.

The good news is God has a plan to rescue even without persecution.

The bad news is it involves your death!