The free church must become involved with the needs of the suffering church.
More Christians are being persecuted today than at any other time in history. In this century, more Christians have been martyred than in all previous centuries combined.
During the Cultural Revolution, the wife of the late John H. Reed., Jr., medical missionary to China, spoke to an interdenominational Bible study class in Richmond, Virginia. Her focus was the suffering church. She brought this terse message from a Chinese believer:
We are walking to Calvary.
Pray for us.
We’ll see you in heaven.
That plea was the impetus for a prayer group in Richmond that now meets regularly to intercede for Christ’s suffering church.
Our group consists of seven “regulars” who are active laywomen from local Presbyterian and Episcopal churches. Most of us also attend the weekly Bible study conducted by Sallie Childrey Reed, who attuned us to the needs of suffering Christians.
Admittedly, prayers of intercession for persecuted Christians are not easy. Assembled in comfortable freedom, with our many Bible translations, it is hard for us to envision people without Bibles on the other side of the world who worship God under cover of darkness. Our open practice and life of faith are far removed from threats of prison, work camps, or unemployment. We risk nothing because of our beliefs.
Yet hundreds of thousands of believers do risk all for Christ. How does our group pray for them?
1. We pray for miracles. Interspersed in the many accounts of persecution we have received from the suffering church are occasional deliverances. Some, like Richard Wurmbrand, Haralan Popov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, miraculously survived prolonged ordeals and were brought to freedom in America.
2. We pray for our country. We ask God to revive us and spare us as a nation so that the American church can continue its work for Christ throughout the world.
3. We pray for specific needs of persecuted Christians. In order to do this we pool information from evangelical and suffering-church periodicals, news releases, and letters from missionaries or pastors.
4. We pray for the distribution of Bibles to persecuted Christians. How inexpressibly sad it is that so many believers who must endure trial are generally without God’s written Word. Here we ask the Holy Spirit to grant effective ways to get the Scriptures to suffering saints who wait.
Our prayers vary from week to week, but typical of our intercession is this one:
Father, for your servants about to be martyred, we ask a Christ-glorifying witness like Stephen’s. For those undergoing torture we ask power not to deny your name.
We remember how you kept former POW Jeremiah Denton from breaking down when, in the midst of torture, you relieved his pain. Savior, send to your suffering body divine intervention.
Knowing our weakness we pray forthose who have fallen, those who mourn false confessions made under brainwashing or threats to family. Lord, heal their broken hearts and tenderly restore them as you once did Simon Peter.
For those alone in prison we ask you to send the Holy Comforter, remembering many are without your Word. Recall to their minds life-sustaining words of Scripture.
For God’s pastors in monitored, registered churches and in the unregistered, underground church, give discernment in hard decisions.
For believers declared “unstable” and placed in psychiatric wards because of their faith, renew your promise that nothing, not even drugs, shall separate them from the love of God.
For children taken from believing parents and placed in communes, may holy angels minister. By your Spirit may these heirs of salvation and their parents be reunited in your heavenly home.
Hopefully, our three years’ intercession for believers under communism and Islam helps suffering Christians. But it has also benefitted us. We have become more realistic about the world in which we live. As American Christians, we have led insulated lives, while all over the world believers are experiencing tribulation. Someday we might also be forced to share their trial.
In Till Armageddon, Billy Graham asks the question: “How do we prepare for the suffering we may have to face as our world moves relentlessly toward a period of intense tribulation?”
Perhaps for pragmatic reasons alone, the free church must become involved with the needs of the suffering church. Perhaps it must learn now how faith survives under pressure so that it may one day be equipped to bear its own cross.
Our little Richmond prayer group has also been rewarded by a sense of fulfillment in intercession that is difficult to explain. Is it that we have, in a small way, participated in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering in prayers for his own?
Or is it that we have come to know, by faith, that through Christ our prayers are helping those who suffer in his name?
Mrs. Cooke is a piano teacher, the wife of a pastor in Richmond, Virginia.
