What Can We Learn from the Persecuted Church?- A Conversation with Jeff King

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am joined today by Jeff King. He is the president of Persecution.org and the author of The Whisper, Lessons of Renewal Whispered from the Prisons of the Persecuted Church. It's a 30-day devotional. And so I'm excited to talk with you with Jeff today. And Jeff, welcome to the podcast. Oh, it's great to be with you. Hey, man. So let's just dive in. I mean, what led you to write on a 30-day devotional on lessons from the persecuted church? Well, okay, how far shall I go back? I was born. I'm going to give you some of this. Actually, I'll give you a little context. Let me give you some background. It will kind of lead up to it. And I'll kind of take you through my journey of career-wise, et cetera. And it all ties together. So I grew up in the D.C. area in an agnostic, atheist family. And we were taught that Christians were ignorant, backward people. And I just said, okay. That's my dad. He got his doctorate at Yale. And that's how I was trained. So that's how I thought. And then about 12 years old, I just realized there's a God. And I know he's out there. I just have this hunger to find him. Don't ask me why, except, you know, he is. And so I find a Bible on our bookshelves. And it's from a Bible lit course my dad took in college. So I start reading it. It's a Schofield Bible. And I'm a self-learner, so you can learn a lot. So two things happened at that time. James, I jokingly say I discovered the two great B's of life. And one was the Bible and the other one was beer, unfortunately. So my brother got me drunk for the first time in sixth grade. And so from that point on, there were the two big B's in my life, beer and the Bible. And they each took an increasing hold on my life. And so I didn't know any Christians. I just was, you know, God was chasing me. I'm chasing him, reading, reading. And I get into college, and at that point, I'm really starting to get hungry. And sin has taken its toll. And I've lived fast and hard, and I'm like, man, there is just no meaning in this life. I don't get it. And that's, you know, the Lord says, you know, when you search for me with your whole heart, then you'll find me. And so I'm in my senior year, and this is really where it starts to accelerate. And I say, you know, I can't find God. I know he's in the Bible. I've been reading the Bible for 10 years on my own. I'm going to read the whole thing through in six months, and then I'll find him. So I look up Schofield Bible, how many chapters in the Bible divided six months. Okay, 10 chapters a day. So on the one hand, I'm the guy who might throw a grain alcohol party in the dorm. And then people are seeing me read a Bible every night for 10 chapters. And this is, this doesn't fit, right? And they're like, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm a Christian. And I just cringe when I say to this day, because I'm like, I wasn't. I don't, I just know a Christian is someone who loves God. That's all I know. And I love God. And I'm trying to find him. So anyways, uh, next thing I know I'm running into Christians everywhere and they're sharing the gospel and I'm, I'm going from one bar to another one night and I see some Christians on the street and they're witnessing and I walk up to them and I said, do you, do you mind if I listen? And of course they're pretty excited. Somebody who actually wants to listen. And they're all witnessing to the drunks on Friday and Saturday night. And uh, so they say, Oh yeah. And uh, and how about if you pray this prayer with us? And I'm like, I've prayed that prayer a bunch of times. Nothing. It doesn't do anything, but I'll pray if you want. And I pray, nothing happens. So again, Hey, I'm, I'm looking for a church that teaches what's in the Bible. Do you know where one is? And they're like, we go to one. And I'm like, well, tell me where it is and I'll go. And they're like, no, no, no. We're going to take you. And I, that didn't make any sense to me at all. Why are these people so friendly? So anyways, long story short, I started going to church church with them. And then two weeks later I get radically saved. Um, now I'm in my second, a last semester of college. I'm in finance. I finished with my degree and I go into a corporate banking and uh, I'm in executive training program. And then I realized, you know, at this program, you're not in banking back then you weren't going to make a lot of money for a while until you rose up the ranks. And so then I went into financial sales. I went into mortgage banking and I kind of made some money and then made more money. And then one month I made twice what other guys were making a year. I made in a month and I was like, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm like, I don't care. It just, it's never going to satisfy me. I just saw it. And I got a calling into ministry and the Lord made it abundantly clear at a certain point that I was supposed to go into campus crusade for Christ. I go into campus, a campus crusade, now crew. And basically I'm running around the world. I'm doing all kinds of stuff, but if you had to, had to center it, it was all kind of around closed country evangelism, a lot of it. And, um, and so you have to raise your own financial support at the end of that time. Um, I am running out of financial support. Now Lord had promised me he would take care of it. All of a sudden nothing's happening. I started off poor with crusade and I got a lot more poor. And, uh, and, and then I'm like, oh my gosh. And then I finally realized I'm, I'm headed out of here. I don't, and, but he's not telling me anything. And, uh, so I'm out in California one night or one week for meetings. And during the night I have a dream. So everything I'm about to tell you is a dream. And I'm talking to an imaginary businessman and in my dream. And I'm talking to him on the phone and then I decided to go by his office. So I go by his office and he lives in, he's has his office in a home and it's this prototypical silver spring home where I'm from. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. And I pull up and all those guys are out standing outside the house. And I'm like, where's bill? They say bill's gone. I said, well, where is he? They said, he's dead. I said, no, he's not. I was just talking to him. This is all the dream. No, he's not. Yes, he is. They get all agitated in the dream. They say, I'm telling you, he's dead. He dropped dead. We're really scared. Do you want to run the business? Oh my gosh. I don't know. So that's the dream. I wake up and that dream is no more different than any other, but I wake up and a supporter and an old friend had called me. I'm out in California. I'd call her right back. And she says, Jeff, my husband and I are connected with this organization. Their founder just dropped dead. And all I can think is you're the guy that's supposed to run this thing. Are you interested? I'm like, you know, James, we're all stumbling around in life trying to find the answer where, you know, where's the next step, right? Right. So with my spiritual gift of discernment, I was able to figure out that I was supposed to go into international Christian concern. And, but the only thing, James, you can't call up to the board and say, hey, I had a dream. You were supposed to hire me. That doesn't work well. Right. Yeah. That tends to go over poorly. Yeah. That tends to go over poorly and you're going to, you know, get yourself out of a job. So you have to wait around in the theater. But anyways, so I land, they finally hire me and I'm in there. And in these early days of crusade, very clear, uh, whisper from the Lord over and over. I want you to learn the lessons of the persecuted and the martyrs. The lessons are of tremendous value. And I want, I want you to, to share them. They're not just for you. And if, if I had to package that message up, this isn't what he said, but it's listen, learn, and shout. And I said, all right, you know, I'm a fast study. Here we go. So, um, what am I supposed to, what am I supposed

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It's not a gift you'd ever want. It's not one you'd ever give to people, but it is a gift because it breaks down our self-reliance, our natural self-strength, and so then we cling to the Lord and then his power can flow through us. So that is a gift. It's like, oh my gosh, wow. And I said, what would the church be without persecution? And they said, without persecution, the church would be a mile wide and an inch deep. They didn't use that phrase, but that's what they said. And they said, you'd have speakers that are good speakers and famous communicators running around from church to church speaking, but who don't really have an anointing and they don't know the power of the Lord, but they would be popular and they'd be running around speaking. And again, I think, are you guys schooling me? I said, do you know anything about the church in America? And these are simple agrarian pastors that are, no, they're not educated, they have no idea. I was like, wow, that's convicting. And then the last one, and this was the doozy. And you know, I asked him, what's your biggest worry? And they said, our biggest worry is that the guys, the pastors we're mentoring, the guys that are coming up under us, they said, we're mentoring these guys, but they haven't been hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered like we were. That's our biggest worry. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. That really started to rattle around my brain, those three things. And especially this persecution is a gift. And I go back and over the course of 10 years, I'm just watching, watching, and I'm seeing and learning so much. And I start to try to write my second book. And that's when kind of, I'm a verbal processor. So when I have to try to output it verbally, it starts to become more clear. And I saw this thing. I saw that our biggest problem, you know, as Christians, we often think maybe it's sin. And even though that can be a big problem, but that's kind of, that's the baby steps though, to getting off the big sin problems of your life. And our biggest problem is that we're self-dependent and we're self-fueled. It's going back to what they said, that it's a gift because it breaks our dependence. And then his power can flow through us. And so that's when I started, that's when I wrote my second book, The Last Words of the Martyrs. And then the second one is a variation on a theme, and it's the lessons of the persecuted. And, but it's all embedded into stories. It's a devotional, 30-day devotional. And James, it's a funny thing, and I'll try to wrap up on this, but I always wondered, I'm like, why, Father, did you call me to persecution? Because at heart, I'm an evangelist and I'm a guy that wants to call people to revival. That's, that's my deep bones. Right. And I was like, what am I doing in persecution? If it's the job you've given me, I'll do it. I'm just curious. But where else do you see these people who are so deep, deep, deep in their faith from suffering and have transcended the normal Christian life and have learned these deep lessons? And that's what I saw. I was like, it's universal because now they go to prison for persecution. So that's not us. Not yet. I mean, we're on a trajectory, but we'll see. But all of us, James, you'll relate to this. We've all been in our own prisons and that can be anxiety and career and marriage and anxiety. And so we all are spending time in prison and we've been sentenced to prisons, but we don't have the strength to endure our sentences. And so that's why we look to the persecuted because they've been through the long darkness. They found the candle in the long journey through the dark. They found the hidden manna. So that's why, that's my background. That's why I wrote this thing. And it's kind of everything I write about, I kind of tend to write about over and over again, but it's this deep connection between suffering and growth. It's interesting. I mean, so I work with DL Moody Center, and a few years back, we met with a lot of New England pastors. New England is a very different context from where I normally live. So I work remotely. I live in central Illinois. Some people would call it Southern Illinois, but central Illinois near St. Louis. But when you go to New England, those churches there, they're very, what I call them was the embattled and faithful churches of New England. Right. They're really struggling under again, not persecution of the sort that you've seen, but a much harder culture, a much more antagonistic culture to the gospel. And I think as we were, you know, working through and trying to figure out, okay, what is growth? What does discipleship really look like? How do we frame this problem? And it was, eventually it came out. It was like, well, what if we thought about discipling people such that when we are persecuted as Christians are around the world, we're prepared like that level of growth, that level of discipleship. And I don't think that that would have emerged, that answer would have emerged in central Illinois or even up, you know, where I am in Midwest, like this wouldn't have emerged. Like, but they have enough of a sense of, yeah, we don't have it anywhere near as easy as the folks in other parts of the country. Yeah. And this is just more difficult. They had enough of a sense of it that they were gesturing toward this sort of like persecution idea. And I think it's a really powerful, powerful understanding of what we're supposed to be doing as disciples. We are supposed to be preparing for the harder times. And to your point, I think the dependency conversation is one that we don't have enough. And I'm not sure we'd know exactly what to do if we could figure it out, you know? Like, how do you, how do you disconnect from everything that we've got access to in America? And so maybe talk through that a little bit. Like, as you've listened to the persecuted church, you know, obviously, you know, to their point, you don't want that. It's not a gift you want to give, right? And it's not a gift you want to get. Yeah. But how do we, how do you see us needing to go about preparing for this sort of different dependent life? Yeah. What I've seen is that what the Lord is taking the persecuted through, he's taking us through. So we're, you know, they're getting their doctorate, you know, and maybe we're in kindergarten in terms of suffering. I'm not even always sure that's correct because in persecution, it's absolutely correct. But we all suffer deeply. You know, those guys are tortured. So again, I don't want to minimize because it's incredible. But, you know, people going through divorce or the death of a loved one or a son or daughter. Oh, gosh. You know, we're all in prison at times, right? Yeah. The Lord is trying to do something. And in fact, what I've come to see is that he can't get us to where we need to go without the pain. And I talk about this a lot because I've seen it a lot with the persecuted. And I have one of my best buddies, a 40-year friend. He just got the diagnosis no one wants. And at first it's like, oh, it's the big C. And I was like, oh, my gosh, they did a biopsy. You're all right. It's not. It's a false alarm. And then it was like, no, it's a double false alarm. Not only do you have cancer, you have about the worst kind. There's no chemo for it. It's extremely deadly. And, you know, this guy was always a deep Christian. But there's no comparison, James, with what's emerged from him, what's coming out of him in the last 60, 90 days. It's just unbelievable. And he's very articulate. So he writes about this. And I was urging him to write because it's so deep, the things he's saying. And it reflects everything I see in the persecuted church. But we can't get to where the Lord wants us to go. He has a vision for us. And our vision is way too small, but he has a vision for us. And we can't get to it without the suffering because of this. A lot of it is just this self-dependence on the one hand. It's the self-reliance. We can't help it. And we're pampered here and we run from suffering. But the suffering, again,

It breaks us down, it breaks that reliance down, and then we endure, we are sentenced to a prison term that we can't endure. And then we have to cry out, and then he has to flow. When we call out in desperation and hunger, he answers that. Not always, but he will answer that and his power starts to flow. And so that's the one half of it. The other half is that we are only too happy to live off our idols. And hardly any of us know that we're doing it, me included. Most of our life, we're going through and we're living off our own strength. We're living off an idol, and an idol is anything you live for or try to live through. And so whether those things are power, money, security, fame, whatever your thing is, that's your idol. And we don't trade them in willingly. We will trade them in slowly with time and maturity. We see the stupidity of them. We see the vacuousness of them. They just can't give us life, and we see it over time. But you go into crisis and you will trade those things because you've got to have life again. And so there's this thing that I call the treasure transfer. He's always trying to get you to trade in your false treasure. And that's where the persecutor, that's for us. And so it's going to happen. So when we're in crisis, that's the thing. We stop, though, and we say this, and this is an incredibly powerful thing that I saw among the persecuted. I saw so many people who were in prison. But this is my radical prescription. So if you are in deep suffering, the first thing you do is you say, Father, is this an assignment? And if it's an assignment, and this is the hard one, you reach out and you close the cell door. You close it shut from the inside and you say, Father, I'm here for as long as it takes. What are you trying to teach me? If there's something you're doing, I want to learn and I want to be transformed, and I'm about your business. Because then we see this is what real life, what real Christianity is about. So it will come. So the pain will come. It doesn't matter if it's from persecution or just life. But you should decide now and think about what shall I do with it? Where do I go? What do I do? As I hear you talk, a couple of things come to my mind. Number one, I think the image of people going through persecution is just a really powerful one. We can identify with it as brothers and sisters in Christ recognizing that this could very well be us at some point, but also seeing that sort of suffering mirrored back in our own lives. And again, not to trivialize what they're going through or to equate the two, but to understand that the underlying dynamic is such that in both instances, what God is really trying to do is break our dependence on those other idols to push us to learn. That's number one. And I think the second one, and this is something I just ran across again in my more recent Bible studies, Ezekiel 36. God is sort of prophesying against Israel, but in verse 27, he talks about the problem that he's going to solve. He's going to put his spirit within Israel. And as he puts that spirit, yeah, he puts that spirit within Israel. And then he says, and it will cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. The problem God is always trying to solve is we're not walking according to his statutes and his rules. We're not walking with him. And his spirit is given to us that we might learn to walk with him. Obedience becomes that strategy for living in the world. And I don't think many of us grasp it like that. You know, we don't really get it that obedience is better. It's the smartest move we can make in any given situation at any given time. And instead, we do tend to sort of farm out our obedience, use it when it's convenient or when it seems to fit here or there. But I think the power of that persecution sort of image is there's no other choice. You're in it. You're left without your own options. And so you are completely dependent. The only thing you have left to be is obedient. Is that a fair way to characterize it? Yeah, boy, I think that's excellent. And I think that's what you're pointing out, too. We're always, you know, as church people, we're always so willing to focus on the outside and the outward obedience and, you know, or with our kids, you know, to follow the law. But what did you say? You said that the Lord is so intent in our holiness. He's so that is so important to him. And yet, where is it supposed to come from? It's supposed to come from a heart. And this heart is reflecting back. We've taken on his heart and his sensitivity. And when we're filled with his Spirit, that happens. And when we wander away, we can grow cold and not very serious. But you put those two together. And, you know, as Christians, we always seem to go to one extreme or the other. It's just all law or all grace. And, you know, it's truth and grace. This is the embodiment. This is the Messiah and who he was. And we're supposed to live that out. So I just couldn't agree more the importance of that. Yeah, I mean, it's just I think it is a powerful message for the American church, particularly as we go through this. But I will say, Jeff, I really appreciate the way you're approaching it. It's not a sort of wagging your finger at the American church saying, see, you should be this or you should be that. It's a look, let's recognize that what's happening to these folks is happening in each one of our lives in some sort of micro, you know, some iteration of what's happening to them is also happening to us. And the goal is not to punish us for something. The goal is to teach us to knock off the rough edges and to get us to a point where God can really and truly use us. I mean, I love that approach to this. Yeah, and there's absolutely no judgment because who can be with judgment because all we have to do is look inside, right? We're just so hopeless. I'm hopeless. Oh, my gosh. And and yet you see it. And we're always, I think, willing to misinterpret what the Lord's doing as a spanking and as judgment. And we get that. That's scriptural. We do get spanked. We do get stupid. We do get spanked. But so often I think you can look back in your life and you see it and it's he's trying to bring us to life. He's trying to bring us to a deeper life. He's trying to heal us. He's trying to just get us away from our sleepwalking and to be free. And it sure doesn't feel good what it takes because the pain is the way my buddy going back to him. He brought up the character of Eustace in the Dawn Treader, the voyage of the Dawn Treader, who turned into a dragon. And what do you have to do? He has to lose his scales. Well, there's no easy way to lose those scales. You have to go through the fire. And he said, that's it. He says, we won't do it on our own. We don't have the strength to truly, you know, buffet ourselves. So it's I've had a couple of people on in past episodes where we talked about lament and the our probably our unwillingness or our lack of familiarity is probably the best way to say it with lament in America. And I think, you know, as you're talking, it sort of leads me to a conclusion that, you know, lament does require an articulation or an admittance of our dependency on God. If we're going to be crying out to him in a lament fashion, right, like a lament, we part of our problem may very well be that we don't want to admit that we're dependent on him. Right. Somehow it's better if we can just bear under it, not ask for help and not, you know, not say, OK, God, this is like I actually need you for this one. You know, like we just don't like to do that. And so I'm wondering. Yeah, I'm kind of wondering, like, what are your thoughts, you know, from a practical perspective in the church in the United States, what would you say? You know, how do we cultivate this sense of, I don't know, not necessarily dependency, but how do we begin to view the hard things in our lives, you know, just practically as the work of God that is seeking to refine us more closely into the image of Christ? Like, what is that? What are some of the things that you see we're not doing that maybe we need to do or vice versa? Yeah, I'm going to back into this, I think, through telling a story. Francis Chan wrote the foreword to my second book and he told this story about during the Afghanistan war days. And I don't it's a somewhat obscure story, but do you remember some Korean medical people and doctors that were captured and held for ransom? I do, yes. Very vaguely, right? Yeah, it's a very obscure story. So, but there were a group of, I don't, let's call them 11 South Koreans. And these were believers and they were in there doing good works, medical personnel, and the Taliban captures them and they said, we're going to, we're going to put you to death. And they're looking for a ransom to be paid. And they wanted millions of dollars. And they said, you know, when your government doesn't pay,

Okay, we're going to start killing you guys off one by one. And so two of the brothers started arguing who would go first. And one was a pastor and said, look, this is my job. I'm the shepherd. I need to go first. And the other brother, who was older, said, no, I'm the oldest brother. I need to go first. And they're tussling back and forth about who's going to give their life first. The other guys don't have to die. And I think the pastor won out and he was the first one killed. And I think there may have been another killed. Maybe that was it. And then soon there was a deal made in the background and they were released. And they all had a regathering in Seoul a few months later and they were gathered together. It's a curious thing because they all longed for those days when they were on death row in Afghanistan. And on the one hand, you might say, gosh, that makes no sense. On the other hand, intuitively, you're like, if you've been through some life, you're like, no, I do get it. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I had years ago, I had a broken engagement, most painful thing. Oh my gosh, I've ever been through. And at the height or the depth of my suffering, I found that exact same thing. And it's a bit schizophrenic because you're in so much pain. You just want it to stop. On the other hand, I didn't want it to stop because I knew I would never be so close to the Lord. And that was, you know, when you're broken, when you're completely broken and dying of thirst and, you know, he's the host. And so I knew that. So I would say this is that I don't know if there's any way to get there except to do it. We just don't like suffering. We can tend to be somewhat of a silly people, I think, as Americans, and our lives have been so blessed. So but I think anybody with a bent towards maturity and a bent towards growth and self-development, you know, we'll get the we'll get the concepts, obviously, that we're talking about. And then, and in the end, I think what you see is that the suffering, it's not a destination. It's a door. It's a door to transformation. And that's the that's the important thing to say. He's really this not punishment and we're going to go through this stuff, but he's trying to take you somewhere and you're going to be something you can't get to on your own. And you're going to be so thankful for it, though, because you're gonna be more beautiful. You're gonna be more stately. You're gonna be have greater depth and greater meaning and a greater connection with him. It's all the stuff you really want, but we won't pay the price on our own. But it's suffering is not a destination. It's a door to transformation. It's I mean, I think that's a really great. It's a great story. And it does intuitively make sense that as you're going through this with other people, that that's a place you'd like to get back to. I think, you know, as you were talking there and you're thinking about this sort of collective difficulty that these guys were going through, my mind sort of goes to something like Lent. Right. You know, we we had at some point these things built into our church calendars where we were to do sort of a self-imposed sense of suffering in some level. Yes. And I think part of my concern has been that even fasting, right, something that, you know, yeah, it's difficult to go without food. Right. But I think we've sort of lost even the sense of how difficult fasting would have been, let's say, in Jesus's day, you know, because the food preparation process was much longer. And so you're not just gaining your meal times back. You're actually gaining a lot more time during that day. You're giving up so much more so much more time. Right. To devote then to the Lord, to prayer, to study, to whatever. Right. You're giving you're gaining back a lot of your day in addition to not eating. And I think for us, these become a little easier almost like we we don't give up the amount of time that that people in the past did. And so even our spiritual disciplines, even the coordination that we're practicing, the way we've sort of given up the church calendar, we're giving up a lot of these things, these practices that could actually help us get a sense of suffering, help us get a sense of of what it means to give away. And so one of the things I've really been thinking about is just how do you do fasting differently? You know, could it be that instead of, you know, my breakfast, which takes about two minutes to make? Right. Thanks to modern technology and packaged foods and all that kind of fun stuff. What if I decided, well, it's not just gonna be breakfast. I'm going to allocate, you know, X amount of hours to this and I'm actually going to chew into the other parts of my day that are usually pretty important to me. But I'm just going to take a broader fast, a bigger time and allow that sort of tension to sit there and and really just sort of live within it. It's almost like we, you know, some of those practices, I think, have that sort of self-imposed tension built into them. Yeah. Right. But we because life has just gotten easier and easier and things have gotten more efficient. They're not anywhere near as tense as they used to be. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. And and forgive me, I chuckled when you brought this up because a picture came to mind. I knew where you're going. And I'm just thinking about these practices versus so much of what's happened to the modern church. And think about the seeker service and the dumbing down. Yeah. And that we do show now. We put on a show and you're like, oh, my gosh. Yeah. And, you know, the the practices that the Orthodox still hold and the Catholics, it's like, you know, I know you're familiar with. There's been somewhat of a movement to bring back some of the traditions that as the evangelicals, we said, you know, they're they're foolishness. They're not there. There's no real deep meaning to it. But I think there is in the practice and the buffeting our bodies and the disciplining of our souls. And I think we need it. Above all, fasting is a great one. I used to do it a lot and I really should get back to it. But I think there's great value in it. And it's somewhat of the cure for just the nature of who we are as Americans. Yeah. I mean, some of this, one of the books that I would say really prompted me to start thinking more about persecution and the persecuted church around the world is actually written by a Catholic, William Cavanaugh. He wrote a book called Torture and Eucharist, and he he deals with Christians under the Pinochet regime in Chile. Wow. And he actually talks about how the Eucharist allowed the church to reclaim the body, the body of Christ from the Pinochet regime, which was doing sort of like random kidnappings and torture of just pulling people off the streets. So they were feeling like they had no ownership of themselves. But the Eucharist gave them back this community. And I remember after reading it, just sitting back and going, we don't really none of the churches I've ever been to have had that. You know, we don't have a Eucharist. We have the Lord's Supper anyway. Right. You know, just the Catholic Protestant difference. But even if you just think it through, it's like, well, you've randomly passed a plate around some of the churches I've been to. You eat it as soon as you get it. You drink it as soon as you get it. Others, you might wait for everybody to do it, but it's not much of a ritual. It's just it's sort of like, yeah, just do it. It's fine. It's it's Sunday. That's why we're doing it. And they read, you know, First Corinthians and that's all good. But I do think that those rituals are really profound for us. They are. And we're we're losing something by not doing them. How do you see that? Like, do you see in in these persecuted countries, how does the church practice differently? Like, are there differences in the way that obviously they don't practice openly in some countries, but even where you're seeing some specific Christians being persecuted, the church is still can still practice openly. Am I correct about that? Yeah, there's a whole spectrum. Yeah. But maybe to answer, I kind of go back to what you were talking about before, where it's just there's there's it's a little bit like the grace and law thing. So the practices are definitely important. And I I think you're truly on to something. I think we should revisit that as evangelicals. But when I look around the world, I just think there there were two churches nationally that I would go to where it was striking. And I would describe it this way, that you would walk into these, you know, rickety little house churches. And I'll give you one of them. One of them is Cuba. And so when I say a house church, you're talking about a lot of times it's just a shack. Yeah. Somebody rents a house. It's got a dirt floor and the pews are made of sticks almost real rickety stuff and so shabby. But I would walk through there. So I went to I remember I visited one and the people had been in there praying for a couple hours and they've been praying for four days. And it's like walking through a curtain of the Holy Spirit. It's just invisible and you walk in. And you and

Heart and where's the desire because it was that deep chasing after the Lord. They were devoting a lot of their time, like you said, I'm going to devote more of my time instead of prepping, I'm going to spend more time with him and chasing. And that was what brought the presence. And what I see with the Lord is, my perception now as looking at the scriptures is that he is a succor for that feeling where we're crying out to him, where we're hungry and crying out for him. And he's a lover, and he comes and he responds. Now, we've all had those dry periods where we cry out and there's nothing. But in general, you see it in the scriptures that he responds to that. That hunger is really something, and that's where he meets us. So I would say it's the practices, but even more so that heart position and then living out that heart position where it's backed up into your life as you're... Let me ask you a serious question. 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That was my first mission trip ever, was Cuba. And I will say I can resonate with exactly what you're talking about. We met in a church that wasn't even quite done yet. It was basically just four brick walls, no roof. And it was easily, I mean, you're shoulder to shoulder with people in this building, and we worshiped for hours. Probably one of the most vibrant worship services I've ever had. No mics, no stereo speakers, no lights, no nothing. I mean, I think it could have started raining. We weren't going anywhere. It was fantastic. And so I agree with you. Yeah, the heart's definitely got to be there. I think it's just sort of amazing to think about how the churches around the world are handling themselves, what it is that they're doing. And almost, I guess where I'm sort of led to, and maybe you'll agree with this, maybe you won't, but feel free not to. It almost feels like what God is wanting us to do is obey him to a fault. Like, to get to that point where we really look pretty stupid when we're doing it. You know what I mean? Like, Paul's statement of there's wisdom in the eyes of the world, and then God's wisdom is foolishness in the eyes of the world. How is it that we start to look foolish in our obedience? And it sounds like, you know, that's what I hear you describing when you talk about the church in Cuba. Like, praying for two days is something that's so out of context for me. You know, like, I mean, even just organizationally, like, I can't even imagine getting my team together and saying, you know, here's the agenda. We're going to pray for two days straight. Yeah, we're going to actually go somewhere and pray for two days. I think they'd respond to it, but I don't know that I'd ever do it. It's not the first thought that comes to mind. You know what I mean? It's just a different mentality. It is. And it's just that, you know, as you know, it's so different there because so much has been taken from them. For one, all Cubans then, even more so for the Christians. You get penalized. If this is going to be your life, then your job is going to go nowhere if you have a job. Your kids aren't going to college. So they've already bought in hook, line, and sinker, and they've already said, I'm going to pay any price. But I think that's the heart position. It's just like, I've got to be done with lesser things. I'm done with playing around. And, you know, some of this, too, comes, it just maybe comes kind of with the fervency of the new zealot believer, but also over time, you know, where you just see there's no answers, and we're all so hopeless. And God help you if you think money is an answer in this life, you know? It brings you fun, whatever, or popularity or any of the other stupid things we chase, and even family. I'm not equating that on the same level, but it's like, there's only one thing that truly, truly deeply satisfies, and it's the thing we desperately long for and we will look long and far and everywhere else but, but it's the presence of the Holy Spirit. And we just really have to have continually a refreshment in our hearts to say, okay, I'm off. I've got to get back all on. And he's the only thing. He's the only thing that'll satisfy me. And why is it that we constantly wander? We just can't help it. I'm like, I'm the dumbest of all creatures. I can't figure myself out. Well, you know, that reference to the family, it points me always back to Matthew 10. You know, Jesus tells his disciples, he's going to send them out to the lost sheep of Israel. And he says, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of the men. And at the end of that passage, he says, you know, brother will turn against brother. Child will turn against parent. And you'd think about how strong we usually think those ties are and how weak they are in comparison to the unity that we have in Christ. And I mean, that speaks, I think, to their ability to satisfy. It speaks to that ability. Like they are still temporal relationships. They're weak tie when we look at the unity that we can actually have in Christ and find in Christ. And so everything still points us right back to, you know, Jesus and to really living out our faith with a radical sort of sense of reckless abandon almost, you know, just throwing ourselves at God. Yeah. And what else did Jesus say? He said that if you're not willing to give up mother, brother, and sister, you're not ready to be my disciple. You want a radical statement. And he's like, I have got to reign supreme. You're not even ready for me. And, you know, we just think of our easy believism would be the other end of the spectrum on that. But it's like, you know, he wants that treasure transfer. He wants you to trade everything in and you'll have to do it over and over and over again in life. So, Jeff, I mean, last thought here, we're getting close to time, but last thought, I mean, where do you see, if you were going to speak to the American church right now, why should they pay attention to persecuted believers? Yeah, I think it's because they're just pointing us to home. The persecuted believer that we can often think of them as, you know, they're in rags. They live a shabby existence on a certain level. But these are our very, very wealthy cousins. They're not our poor relations in West Virginia. These are very wealthy cousins that are so much more educated than we are and have so much to teach us. And they are good for your soul and you will learn and you will grow. And if there is one other thing I would say, here's a hobby horse, James. I always want to ride. I just look at the dilemma we're in as a church, as church broad, and I just think, you know, what is, what are the last thing Jesus said? What was our prime directive? It's like to go out and bring the dead to life. And I just think, you know, we're so willing to look at our problems politically, but if we would just obey and say, first of all, out of a heart position where we have the answer and all around us are the dead and dying, even if they're hostile, it doesn't matter. But in our churches, we are not training people for evangelism for the most part, you know, and even those that have an outward focus usually aren't. But it's like we've got to train people practically and then to model it and take them out and evangelize and then bring people, bring them back to disciple, to go out and find people to disciple them and bring them to the Lord. I just think, my gosh, until we do this, we're just going to keep shrinking and becoming more and more irrelevant. And it's just because we just haven't, we've forgotten the prime directive, forgive that phrase, but it's the way I think of it. I think it's a really important point. And it's funny how, you know, I have a lot of conversations now for the podcast, but it's funny how they sometimes just start to circle and converge on one another. Because, I mean, the last several interviews I've done, we've ended up talking about discipleship and go and make disciples. And one of the things that I've noticed lately is that that's so tied into Jesus's authority. And so when you talk about, you know, trading your treasure for the other treasure, you're like trading treasure for treasure.

It's like what we're really doing when we're going out and making disciples is we're convincing other people to live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We're convincing them to forsake all other allegiances and come in and learn what it looks like to be loyal to Christ. And it's just such a, it's an important thing that we're supposed to be doing. And I'm with you, I think oftentimes we're just not doing it quite as fervently as we probably should be. Yeah, amen. And again, I'm not even pointing fingers because I'm a terrible disciple or I'm an evangelist. And I have back in crusade days, it was interesting because I would go out with a buddy and I'm the evangelist, so I would go, I'm going to win them to Christ and I'd be like, let's go get some more. And he's like, what about George? We just saw him come to Christ. Yeah, anyways, you take care of him. I'm going to go play. So I always, I'm like, man, I wish I could disciple people, but anyways, we need to do both. Totally get it, man. Well, Jeff, this has been awesome. Folks, check out Persecuted Persecution. I'm sorry, I can't speak now. Check out International Christian Concerns website at persecution.org and also check out The Whisperer, Lessons of Renewal Whispered from the Prisons of the Persecuted Church. Is this on Amazon, Jeff? Yeah, have you heard of it before, Amazon? It's on the bookstore. You know, somebody's mentioned it to me a couple of times. That's what they said. They said you could find it there. You can find it on Amazon.com. And I'll also link to it in the show notes, folks. So if you forget these websites, you'll be able to find them just down in the show notes. And Jeff, it is wonderful talking with you, man. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. God bless. Take care. I'll see you all next time on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. No matter what you're going through, you are not alone. Sis, if you've experienced pain in your father-daughter relationship, I want you to know that you are loved and seen. I'm Kia Stevens, host of the Hope for Women with Father Wounds podcast. And I created my show to help you exchange your father wounds for the love of God the Father. Join me for encouragement, wisdom, and scripture. Just search Hope for Women with Father Wounds on lifeaudio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.