I’m not sure if I can convey how amazing this story is to me. It’s based in a book I read a couple of years ago about a Chinese man named Liu Zhenying, or as his Christian friends called him, Brother Yun. Back when I was just a kid, naive to the whole world, this man found Jesus and was so impacted by it that he began to consume the Bible, the Word of God. This was back when people buried their Bibles in their yards because if they were caught with them they would go to jail. He managed to get a hold of one through miraculous circumstances and he read it all the time. He memorized large portions of it over and over. It transformed him.
I can’t remember at what point the house churches began in China, but they were certainly illegal. If anyone was caught preaching the Word of God, they were taken from their families and put in prison. Brother Yun was one of those preachers. He was on the run quite a bit, going from house church to house church, but eventually got caught preaching and endured the most brutal suffering I’ve ever heard. I can’t begin to tell you how horrible the persecution was from the Chinese government. I just remember asking myself that if enduring the brutality of suffering that he endured, if that’s what it meant to be a Christian, could I still do it – could I still ‘sign up’?
It was brutal. I remember a scene in the book where he was arrested during a very cold night in Northern China. They had handcuffed his wrists to the ceiling of police transport vehicle and it was so cold that he said it felt like the handcuffs cut right to the bone. Then the police started beating him over and over with their electric batons until he nearly passed out from the pain. He was then put in prison where he was beaten and tortured over and over. The book is full of these stories that cover the better part of his life in China. Yet through all the torturous pain and suffering, Brother Yun’s faith never faltered. In fact it only grew stronger.
He finally escaped a maximum security prison in China and fled the country. I won’t spoil the details of how he did, but it required nothing short of God’s intervention to make it happen. And now, I see this video at CBN that documents how these house churches, that were illegal for so long in China, are now coming out in the open, with government assistance no less. This is nothing short of the power of God and gives me great hope that one day China will be a Christian nation, a free nation, treating all people with love and compassion, they way Christ would have them. And it also gives me great hope that the powers that seek to destroy Christianity, even in this country, will only cause it to flourish even more:
I HIGHLY recommend this book to all of my readers, even those who don’t believe in God. The name of the book is The Heavenly Man – The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun. You can find it here at Amazon. ORDER IT! It will change your life.