Deliverance comes through endurance

Series: Why Should I Encounter Persecuted Christians?

I need to encounter persecuted Christians to remember that deliverance comes through endurance.

Christian testimonies tend to be dominated by those who experience wonderful deliverances - testimonies of healing from cancer or stories of deliverance from debt or from loveless marriages.
There are books galore about those who have these experiences.
Even when it comes to reporting on persecuted Christians, the same emphasis comes through. We read of pastors who escaped the gunfire of guerillas, of Chinese house church leaders released from the grip of a deadly fever, of border guards with eyes miraculously blinded to the haul of Bibles sitting in plain view on the back seat of a vehicle.
Yet it has to be said that deliverance stories, though they tend to grab the headlines, are not the norm.
A dear old Christian in Beijing used to say to me: "Remember, for every deliverance story you hear, there are a hundred endurance stories."
He was right.
The story of the persecuted church is primarily one of endurance. It has been since New Testament times.
Paul warns: "Only those who endure with Christ will reign with him" (2 Timothy 2:12). And this is surely right - after all, the things we are "delivered" from come back to take us.
If Jesus had been delivered from the pain of the cross and miraculously released, we would not be delivered from our sins. So he endured suffering and death so that a deeper, greater deliverance could take place.

Auntie Mabel
I never saw this principle better illustrated than in the story of an old woman doctor in Beijing, known throughout the world as "Auntie Mabel".
Auntie Mabel was well known for her bright Christian witness. She never married in order to look after a sick brother. Her family was wealthy and lived in a large house in central Beijing.
All that changed abruptly in 1949. Her large house marked her out as one of the landlord class.
She was evicted from her house and forced to live in a garden shed, with just a stove, two deck chairs and an old bed.
Her Christian convictions meant she was an object of suspicion, and so when the Cultural Revolution broke out, she was stripped of her doctor's post and sent to work shoveling sand in a work gang.
But the final indignity was when the Red Guards - teenagers who were given power to direct the Revolution - began to visit her, beating her up, parading her in the streets and forcing her to wear a placard with her crimes written on them.
So thorough were the Red Guards that they erected a large sign outside her house declaring her a pariah because she had distributed "imperialistic literature in praise of the Four Olds," which means she had given out Bibles in the "mistaken" belief that religion is helpful.
For those Red Guards, there was only one god allowed, and that was Mao, and only one "Bible" allowed: his Little Red Book.
Mabel descended into hell. Shunned by neighbours, victimized daily by her work gang and beaten up regularly by the Red Guards, she came back one night into her little shed and said to God: "I've had enough."
She reasoned: "I'm in my 60s now, I've lived a good life, and God will not mind me coming to heaven early."
So she took a large chopper, held it over her wrists and issued one last prayer before bringing it down: "Lord, if this is wrong, help me."
She never brought the chopper down. She put it away. She sat down, burst into tears, and endured another eight years of the beatings, isolation and victimization.
She said: "Somehow God gave me the strength to endure, but I never knew how."
Many years later, she knew why.

Influence in high places
In the late 70s, after Mao died and Deng returned to power, China began to put the excesses of the Cultural Revolution behind it. The hated Red Guards were disbanded, and the little Red Book fell into disuse.
But Mabel was not restored to her house. However, she began to receive a stream of visitors. To her astonishment, these visitors were all rather high-ranking members of the Communist Party.
Even more astonishingly, they asked her for Bibles.
"Why come to me? Out of all the people in Beijing, why do you come to the house of a 70-year-old woman?" she would ask.
And each would answer the same: "Well, during the Cultural Revolution, there was a large sign outside your house full of your crimes.
"One of them was that you had distributed Bibles. So I'm just here on the chance that you might have some left."
Amazingly that sign which made her life such a misery became the means of a new ministry. It kept people away from her during the Cultural Revolution, but after she had endured, it drew them to her.
Mabel was able to contact a Western mission who smuggled Bibles to her. She became a vital supplier, the first conduit of scriptures into China's capital.
A number of high-ranking members of the Communist Party in China today owe their faith to her endurance.
She reflected, "It's been nice to know why. It helps my faith. But it was hard. Every day was hard. I can't say I saw Jesus, or even felt him close most of the time. I just got the strength to keep going, and that was enough."
God can deliver us by transforming a situation, but more often he delivers by giving us the strength to endure the situation.
That way, others are transformed as well as ourselves.

Other articles in this series:

• Achievement or Sacrifice?
• Stop Complaining
• Our Debt to Spiritual Ancestors
• Hope for Hard Times
• The Battle for Religious Freedom Never Ends
• Seeing the Bible through Persecuted Eyes
• Death Loses its Sting
• The Power of Song
• Simple Faith
• Key Ingredients in Hospitality
• The Beauty of Mystery
• Awakening to Struggle
• Obstacles to Instruments
• God is Not Safe
• Imperfect People Do God's Will