Beyond Paris Olympics: Even in the largely Christian West, persecution comes with the territory

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

– 2 Timothy 3:12

The Paris Olympics go out of their way to mock Christianity with a disgusting drag- and -debauchery-filled recreation of The Last Supper.

A coach loses his job for taking a knee in prayer after games.

Praying protesters are taken from outside abortion clinics to inside prisons.

A father of seven is awakened in his home in the early morning and taken away by a federal SWAT team, slapped with a federal crime for having the temerity to push a pro-abortion fanatic away from his son at a pro-life demonstration.

Churches and pro-life centers are vandalized and firebombed as Roe v. Wade is overturned. No one is brought to justice.

These are only a few of the milder forms of Christian persecution taking place around the world today, albeit in the supposedly enlightened, historically Christian West.

One supposes we shouldn’t be surprised, since Jesus Himself was crucified and his disciples later slaughtered. But we should nonetheless be alarmed – as well as engaged and energized in defense of the redeeming Christian faith.

It is, indeed, a faith that saves, again and again and again. The startling book When Faith is Forbidden – 40 Days on the Frontlines With Persecuted Christians tells tale after tale of today’s missionaries and converts to Christianity plying and finding their earthly salvation.

Such as an Iranian the book identifies only as Hussein who, on the cusp of a depression- and drug-inspired suicide is introduced by friends to the saving grace of Jesus.

“When he prayed to Jesus and asked Him to take control of his life and to take all his pain, something amazing happened,” writes the author, Todd Nettleton. “Instantly he felt lighter. Hussein told me that he felt ‘unexplainable happiness’ after praying to receive Christ.”

Devout Christians know this story quite well. They’ve experienced it themselves. They continue to share the same joy and peace with the uninitiated. Yet secular societies deride and scorn Christianity and, tragically, Christians the world over continue to be imprisoned and butchered in Christ’s name.

But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.— 1 Peter 4:13-14

Nettleton meets and introduces us to Christians in North Korea, China, the Mideast and elsewhere who are physically attacked and thrown in prison simply for not adhering to the dominant religion or not denying Christ. In many cases, mere possession of the Bible is a high crime.

• In India, a pastor named Peter Paul and his family were attacked by a mob of some 150 Muslims angry that he’d given New Testaments to his students. They beat him mercilessly and ransacked his family’s home, but it was he who was arrested and jailed for almost a week – and his family was evicted from their home.

Still, when asked how to pray for him, Peter Paul instead asks for prayers for his parents and his ministry.

“Persecution is not an accident. It’s the expectation,” he says.

• As one of Tajikistan’s criminal underworld’s leaders, Sergei Bessarab spent 18 years in prison, where – after years of prayer by a fellow inmate during his last term – he converted to Christianity in the Muslim stronghold.

It was his conversion to Christianity – not his many years of crime – that got him killed upon his release. One night after starting the city’s only Christian church in his home, three bullets ripped through the front room window, killing him – for spreading the message of redemption in Christ that saved him from a life of crime.

• With some amount of persuasion, evangelical Australian tourist John Short managed to get his personal Bible into North Korea – but when he stashed copies of gospel tracts outside a Buddhist temple for someone to find, he was detained and interrogated for all of 13 days. Authorities even sent agents to his Hong Kong office and to his boyhood home in Australia.

• A year prior, a woman had been killed in Mosul for distributing Bibles. And one of Christian pastor Hakim’s two fellow pastors there had been killed by Sunni radicals, while the other fled to Europe for safety. And it was only eight days before meeting with Nettleton that Hakim himself had been shot three times by three men looking “for the Christian.”

Hakim’s Muslim doctors found it a miracle that the bullets missed his vital organs.

• In China, a Christian gathering must be registered so authorities can control its time, place and host – and keep minors away from it, goodness knows. So, Nettleton eagerly asked a nun about the six months she spent in prison for hosting an unregistered church meeting.

“When Sister Tong heard my question from the translator, her face lit up with what I can only call a heavenly smile,” Nettleton writes.

“Oh yes. That was a wonderful time,” she told him.

Even the worldly Nettleton was taken aback. But it turns out Sister Tong felt closer to Jesus than ever while in prison, and was able to bring other inmates to Christ.

• Houmayoun was a Muslim and a hopeless Iranian addict before Jesus came to him in a dream one night – “and when Houmayoun woke up his addiction was gone.” For converting to Christianity and for his subsequent heretical discipleship to save other addicts in Iran, he was imprisoned for three years. His wife and son were likewise imprisoned for a time before the family moved to Turkey – where he ministered not only there, but remotely in Iran.

It so happens that, back in Iran, they put the former addict Hussein in prison as well for his Christian ministry, after raiding the Bible study in his home. After a series of small, isolated, dank cells flooded with light and splashed with water to prevent him from sleeping, authorities made the mistake of putting him in the lion’s den: the prison’s inmate-run death row, where a guard predicted he’d swiftly be killed.

It was a mistake putting him there because, in a series of miracles, the inmates actually warmed to him and raised him up above themselves. Once released, Hussein continued his Christian ministry in Iran.

“I think one of two things will happen,” he told Nettleton. “They will either kill me, or there will be another miraculous event like these.

“Which one of those is bad?”