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Tag: Prison
Argentina: Faith flourishes behind bars
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George Chen – In the Garden: 18 years in prison
George Chen – In the garden: 18 years in prison
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George Chen – In the Garden: 18 years in prison
Persecution in 2022
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Around the world, more than 360 million Christians live in places where they experience high levels of persecution, just for following Jesus. That’s 1 in 7 believers.
During the 18 years Chen had spent in prison, when he had often worried that all Christians had been killed or fallen away from the faith, God had caused the three churches he had led to increase from a total of 300 to 5,000 believers!
See Pastor George Chen’s moving labour camp story – In the Garden – YouTube 5 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6dIi6k76MQ – including Chen singing ‘In the Garden’
George Chen 1932-2021
A Tribute by Paul Hattaway
George Chen was the very first Chinese Christian I ever met in my life. In the 1980s I was a new believer in Christ, saved just a few months, when the direction of my life was radically changed after hearing Chen speak at a church in my home country. I knew next to nothing about China at the time and my life was directionless. I had never had a single thought of going to China.
I was speechless after hearing the testimony of this man who spent 18 years in prison for Jesus. He had endured horrific conditions, and had not only survived the ordeal, but had emerged with an unconquerable faith! George Chen’s eyes shone as I spoke with him after the meeting. He encouraged me to unreservedly make myself available to God, and to consider being a “donkey for Jesus” by carrying Bibles across the border from Hong Kong to the spiritually starving Christians in China, who had been without Bibles for three decades.
As recorded in my biography, the Lord miraculously propelled me to China through a series of astonishing events, despite being a teenager with no money to my name. I found myself in China just weeks after that pivotal meeting, and I had also been exposed to a type of Christianity that was completely foreign to most Westerners. I recalled my meeting with George Chen in “An Asian Harvest”:
“His testimony impacted me deeply. in the formative time of my Christian walk. He had spent longer behind bars because of his love for Jesus than I had been alive at that time.
This precious man had learned to appreciate the small blessings of life…. George taught me that the kingdom of God cannot be defeated by evil men or governments. Whatever terrible things Satan and the world can throw at Jesus’ disciples, His purposes will not be thwarted.” …
The Apostle Paul told Timothy, “You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3).
Churches throughout China suffered continual hammer blows throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Satan’s fury was unleashed on them. One Christian who suffered greatly was George Chen (Chinese name: Chen Minying), who endured inhumane treatment at the hands of his persecutors, only to be preserved by the hand of God. He was even given an international ministry after his release from prison.
Chen was born in 1932 to a humble family in Zhejiang Province. The chaos engulfing China at the time caused them to move to Shanghai, where George grew up. After hearing the Gospel he surrendered his life to God, and the Holy Spirit gave him a gift of evangelism.
Chen founded three rural churches with a total of 300 members, most of whom he had personally led to Christ. The believers had a hunger for the Word of God and desired to spread the Gospel, which soon caught the attention of the Communist authorities. Chen was first arrested in 1960 and imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary.
For the first three-and-a-half years, George was one of five inmates crammed into a cell that was so small the men had to lie on their sides, head-to-toe, like sardines in a can. A wooden bucket in the corner of the tiny space served as the toilet for all the men. George was often so hungry that he ate toothpaste to satisfy his cravings. Chen’s wife and son were not allowed to contact him during his incarceration, and for years he was oblivious to the fact that she had died, and his son had been killed by the Communist authorities.
In 1964, Chen was moved inland to a prison labor camp in Anhui Province, where he served a further 14 years.
Inmates at a prison labor camp in China in the 1970s.
After months of backbreaking work, seven days a week, the prison leaders were infuriated that they had been unable to make the evangelist deny his faith in Jesus.
They ordered Chen to perform the worst job in the prison, daily shoveling human excrement to be used as fertilizer. The massive amount of waste produced by 60,000 prisoners flowed into a large cesspool a short distance from the cells. He later recalled the struggle of those long and difficult years, and how he was often troubled by thoughts that God had abandoned him:
“I spent my days deep in human waste, turning it with a shovel to make compost. They thought I would be miserable, but actually I was happy. It smelled so bad that no one came near me, so I could pray and sing aloud all day.
If I was not a Christian I would have died, because the smell was maddening, and the stench terrible. But I enjoyed being alone in the cesspool, so I could pray to our Lord, recite the Scriptures, and sing hymns loudly.”
To counteract the thoughts that he had been forsaken, as he stood deep in human waste every day, George often sung the beautiful words of his favorite hymn, In the Garden:
“I come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses And the voice I hear falling on my ear The Son of God discloses.
“And He walks with me And He talks with me And He tells me I am His own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other has ever known.”
Finally, in 1978, the political situation relaxed a little in China, and Chen was released from prison and placed under house arrest. Eighteen long years had passed.
When he entered prison, the Cultural Revolution had yet to begin, and Mao held complete power. Now, the Cultural Revolution was over, and Mao was in the grave.
George was afraid that nobody would remember who he was. Most of all, he wondered if any of the Christians he had once known were still alive, or if there were any believers left in China at all. With trepidation, he slowly made his way home, not knowing what he would find.
For almost two decades, George Chen had been both burdened and blessed by the memory of his church members. Countless times, as he stood in the excrement pit, he prayed aloud for them, asking the Holy Spirit to sustain their faith and help them to overcome. As he got off the bus in his home area, he failed to recognize many of the buildings or faces of the people he passed.
Then, from behind, came a cry of shock from an elderly woman. “Pastor… is it you?” One of his former church members was still alive! In a typically constrained Chinese manner, the two did not hug, but shook hands as tears rolled down their faces. George was relieved. Now he knew that he was not the only Christian left in China. There were at least two!
Millions of books (including Bibles) were burned during the Cultural Revolution, creating a famine of the Word of God in China.
God is Good
News of the pastor’s return spread throughout the neighborhood like wildfire, and soon the shining faces of many other believers pressed against the windows of a house he was invited to stay in. Many people were beside themselves with both shock and joy. They presumed the pastor had died decades earlier, and not a word had been heard to suggest that he was still alive.
The biggest shock was to come. When George asked one of his old friends if any fellowship of believers had survived, he was told, “Yes! God is good! He has sent His Spirit to breathe on us, and now we have many members. We are so glad that you have returned, because we do not have any Bibles and few of us remember many of the words of Jesus. Please teach us, pastor. Please!”
The Lord Jesus Christ, who promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, had done a great miracle. During the 18 years Chen had spent in prison, when he had often worried that all Christians had been killed or fallen away from the faith, God had caused the three churches to increase from a total of 300 to 5,000 believers!
George was amazed, and he hardly slept that night as he tried to take in everything he had heard. His rejoicing was soon tempered, however, when he was told that his wife had died years earlier, and his young son had been killed. The prison officials had cruelly withheld this information from him.
Chen remained under house arrest until 1981, when he was “rehabilitated” by the government and his criminal records were erased.
Remarkably, for a man whom other Christians had forgotten about and assumed to be dead, God opened the door for George Chen to obtain a passport, and he shared his testimony in church meetings around the world during the late 1980s and 1990s. At each meeting, he invariably took time to thank the Body of Christ for sending missionaries to China in the past.
Chen remarried and spent much of his latter life traveling between his home and southwest China, where he ministered among ethnic minority groups, especially the Lisu people in the high mountains straddling the border with Myanmar. He was much loved, and he often drove a van hundreds of miles to deliver loads of precious Bibles to spiritually hungry Christians.
Although he officially retired in 2012 at the age of 80, George Chen continued to travel to China, where he advised house church leaders in Henan and Yunnan provinces. After many years spent ‘in the garden’ with Jesus Christ, his life shone into many dark places, and had become a sweet fragrance that attracted many souls to the kingdom of God.
Just a few months ago we received this photo of George. He looked fit and healthy, and we remarked that he would probably live to one hundred.
It wasn’t to be, however, and the Lord Jesus Christ finally called His servant home on October 27, 2021, when George Chen died peacefully in his sleep while in Hong Kong.
He was 89 years old.
George Chen in 2021, aged 89
Article edited from: In Memory of George Chen – Forever ‘In the Garden’
Posts on China – from Mission Blogs:
Asia’s Maturing Church (David Wang)
The Spirit told us what to do (Carl Lawrence)
Revival in China (Dennis Balcombe)
House Churches in China (Barbara Nield)
China – New Wave of Revival
Chinese turning to Christianity
Revival breaks out in China’s government approved churches
China: how a mother started a house church movement
China – Life-changing Miracle
China’s next generation: New China, New Church, New World
China: The cross on our shoulders and in our hearts
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The Insanity of God- free online movie
The Insanity of God
With dramatic changes in Afghanistan, thousands of Christians in prison in China and North Korea, murders across North Africa, is God worth it? This free movie explores those stories dramatically.
Free online movie: The Insanity of God
A true story of faith and persecution
Inspiring articles, discounted books, free PDFs
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The Insanity of God:
https://renewaljournal.com/2021/08/21/the-insanity-of-god-free-online-movie/
Renewal Journal – a chronicle of renewal and revival: www.renewaljournal.com
The Insanity of God – book link
The Insanity of God is the personal and lifelong journey of an ordinary couple from rural Kentucky who thought they were going on just your ordinary missionary pilgrimage, but discovered it would be anything but. After spending over six hard years doing relief work in Somalia, and experiencing life where it looked like God had turned away completely and He was clueless about the tragedies of life, the couple had a crisis of faith and left Africa asking God, “Does the gospel work anywhere when it is really a hard place?
Nik recalls that, “God had always been so real to me, to Ruth, and to our boys. But was He enough, for the utter weariness of soul I experienced at that time, in that place, under those circumstances?” It is a question that many have asked and one that, if answered, can lead us to a whole new world of faith.
How does faith survive, let alone flourish in a place like the Middle East? How can Good truly overcome such evil? How do you maintain hope when all is darkness around you? How can we say “greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world” when it may not be visibly true in that place at that time? How does anyone live an abundant, victorious Christian life in our world’s toughest places? Can Christianity even work outside of Western, dressed-up, ordered nations? If so, how?
The Insanity of God tells a story—a remarkable and unique story to be sure, yet at heart a very human story—of the Ripkens’ own spiritual and emotional odyssey. The gripping, narrative account of a personal pilgrimage into some of the toughest places on earth, combined with sobering and insightful stories of the remarkable people of faith Nik and Ruth encountered on their journeys, will serve as a powerful course of revelation, growth, and challenge for anyone who wants to know whether God truly is enough.
See also:
Christian missionary tortured in prison led 40 to Christ
North Korea: Cherishing the book he once feared
North Korean believers meet underground
North Korea: The blessing of forced solitude with God
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Argentina: The amazing transformation at Los Olmos prison
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Christian missionary tortured in prison led 40 to Christ
Christian missionary tortured by ISIS in prison led 40 to Christ
By Mark Ellis
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In his role as the Africa regional director for Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), Jasek went to Sudan to document the persecution of Christians, which was happening in the Nubah Mountains in clashes between the government and rebels.
He was detained by the Sudanese police at Khartoum Airport in December 2015. It seems immigration staff found a duplicate passport Jasek carried for security purposes, which led to his immediate arrest and imprisonment.
“I arrived at this cell at about 1:30 am,” he told VOM. He found the cell overcrowded, with people covering the floor. “They had to squeeze a little bit so they would create some small room for me to lie down on the floor.”
The conditions were sparse. “I had no blanket…two extra T-shirts and one extra pants and a toothbrush, toothpaste and soap; that was all.”
Guards refused him blankets or a mattress, because he was from the Czech Republic and they told him they thought he should be used to cold weather.
At 5:30 am he was awakened by the Islamic call for prayer. All six of his cellmates began praying fervently. “They showed me a place behind them where I was supposed to stand while they were praying. The rule is that me as a Christian, I had to stay behind them so they would not look at me while they are praying.”
After the prayers, they identified themselves as DAESH, the Arabic acronym for ISIS. All his cellmates were ISIS fighters!
“Two days later they started to openly torture me and beat me…I was hit with their fists into my face many times. They called me ‘filthy pig’ or ‘filthy rat.’”
One of the ISIS fighters barked an order: “Filthy pig, come here.”
“I decided at first I would not respond to these rude names and when I did not respond I got hit with a wooden stick they unscrewed from the sweeper that was there to clean the floor.”
Jasek was hit on the head, shoulders and fingers or they kicked him in the stomach and back with their boots. “At that time I was really thinking about the Lord Jesus what He had to go through when He was arrested and they also were beating Him with a wooden stick and were ridiculing Him, slapping Him.
“I became like their slave,” he told VOM. “I was really [made] to wash their clothes, wash all the dishes, clean the toilet with my bare hands. They were just making fun of me. I did not resist.”
“I could clearly see the Lord Jesus and how He suffered for us.”
Then Jesus imparted something to him that was amazing and unexpected, considering the circumstances. “I received a wonderful peace at that time and surprisingly, when I was physically attacked I was experiencing the greatest peace in prison time ever, all these 14-1/2 months.
“I could even pray during these beatings for my family members, I could pray for other fellow prisoners and I was not moved to the point when I used to be before, because I had this peace from the Lord at this time of the physical attacks on my body.
When Jasek began to exalt and and glorify the Lord’s name during his beatings, this made them even more furious. “They decided to torture me even in much worse way.
“Eventually, they decided to do waterboarding to me. It’s a way of torture where a person lays on his back and they cover his mouth and pour water, which gives you the feeling that you are getting drowned.
The Sudanese guards had not intervened to stop Jasek’s torture, because they were intimidated by the ISIS fighters. “It is [thought] that if these Islamists get released they will get revenge on those guards.”
Jasek didn’t have access to a Bible during his captivity, so he meditated on Scriptures he memorized as a young person.
“I was literally asking the Lord that He will keep my mind sound and that I wouldn’t lose my mind through the situation,” Jasek said. “The Holy Spirit kept reminding me some of the verses that I had memorized. This was just enough for me, to give me enough strength everyday to pray,” he told VOM.
He also thought about Jesus’ teaching about loving enemies. He was startled when he heard his abusers weeping late at night when they could not sleep.
“They were crying. They were also missing their family members. They were also crying to God for help,” he recounted. “That allowed me to easily continue to pray for them. I was praying for those fellow prisoners, the interrogators, for the guards, for the prosecutors and for the judge, that the Lord would reveal Himself as the Lord, Savior and God.”
Remarkably, one of the guards intervened to prevent the waterboarding. Jasek said he felt the Lord used the guard to move him out of the cell.
“Later on I told the guard that he saved my life and we became close friends,” Jasek said. “I gave my email address and I started to share the Gospel with him. He was very passionate. I told him that if he ever makes it to Europe, he can stay at my house and we will take care of him.”
Then Jasek was moved to another prison where conditions were even worse.
“We were squeezed in a small room — 15 by 18 feet. There were sometimes 40 of us. That was the situation and I was able to lead 40 Eritrean refugees to Christ,” he said. “It was like new revelation for me. I started to be courageous and openly shared the Gospel with other fellow prisoners. Later on, that resulted in them putting me in solitary confinement again.”
Shortly after being placed in solitary confinement, Czech consular officers were able to bring him a Bible.
“I didn’t have to do anything else but read the Bible all day. I could not read the Bible all day because I could only read when there was enough light, which was about 8 [a.m.] … until 4:30 p.m. I had to stand reading on the bars so that I could have enough light. I was so hungry for Scripture. I read from Genesis to Revelation within three weeks.”
Jasek noted that he gained a profound “new understanding of Scripture.”
He was eventually removed from solitary confinement and moved to a larger prison that can hold about 10,000 people.
“I went from solitary to a cell where there were like 100 people in one cell,” he explained. “We were squeezed. There were 75 beds. Only 75 could have a bed and 25 had to stay on the floor.”
Amazingly, guards at the new prison allowed him and two incarcerated Sudanese pastors to hold worship services.
“The first day I came to the chapel to spend time in Scripture with the Lord. They asked me to preach. I would preach once a week, sometimes twice a week,” Jasek said. “Of course, they were monitoring us and they were reporting what we were teaching about. There were two other pastors from Sudan and we knew that nothing worse could happen to us.”
Preaching in prison allowed Jasek and the other pastors to witness to “people that were hopeless.”
“They were real criminals — murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers. It was such a wonderful time,” Jasek said. “They responded to our teaching. We were just teaching the Gospel. It was so wonderful to see the changed life of those who dedicated their lives to Christ.”
In February 2017, he was granted a presidential pardon and Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir ordered his immediate release. He returned to the Czech Republic on February 26, 2017.
During the time Jasek was interrogated by the jihadis in prison his wife was in a Bible study back home and the leader stopped the study to pray for the “situation that he is right now in.”
“They stopped reading and started to pray for the Lord’s presence over the situation,” Jasek said. “When I came home, I realized that was exactly the time when I was on my knees before the Islamists and they were beating me. But I was experiencing a supernatural peace.”
“I came for four days to Sudan. But I was there 445 days,” Jasek told VOM. “When you think about all the hardships and seeing what the Lord was able to do through us, then what else can we say but the Lord’s ways are much better than our ways.”
“We know from the words of apostle Paul that everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. I felt like I received my life back. I was first threatened to be sentenced to be executed. [Then] later on, life imprisonment. Then, my life was returned back to me. I told the Lord, ‘My life does not belong to me anymore. It belongs to the Lord.’”
To learn more about Voice of the Martyrs go here
Source: God Reports, April 11, 2018
See also
Argentina: The amazing transformation at Los Olmos prison
Argentina: Faith flourishes behind bars
Christian missionary tortured in prison led 40 to Christ
Iran: How two women brought hope in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison
Barnabas Fund www.barnabasfund.org
Voice of the Martyrs www.persecution.com.au
The Open Doors www.opendoors.org.au
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Iran: Two Women brought Hope in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison
Two women brought hope in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison
* 20,000 New Testaments given
* House church for prostitutes
* 259 days in the notorious prison
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Iran: How two women brought hope in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison
Podcast:
Nicky Gumble with Maryam and Marziyeh at Holy Trinity Brompton church, London – a personal interview – 40 min.
Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Born and raised as Muslims, both women grew unsatisfied with the teachings of the Koran and converted to Christianity after personal encounters with Jesus. Though Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, in three years they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen. They’d started two secret house churches, including one for prostitutes – many of them women who had been abandoned by their husbands and had no other way to support themselves and their children.
“We both had the same vision from God for evangelizing Iranian people by distributing Bibles. God showed me how Iran is like a land that needs seed. He told me, ‘I will raise and grow this.’ Maryam also had a dream about this, so we became sure it was God’s will,” explains Marziyeh. “We decided to cover all parts of Tehran. We usually went at night and distributed Bibles into mailboxes. Every day we went shopping or to restaurants and talked to people, often handing them a New Testament. We also started a house church for young people and another for prostitutes. All of this is illegal and dangerous because no one is allowed to talk about any religion except Islam. During this time, we could see God’s miracles every day. We have many stories of how God protected us.”
But finally – perhaps inevitably – in 2009, the two young women were arrested. For some reason in the months before that, they were unable to hand out Bibles, as the Holy Spirit took away their desire to evangelize. “We knew something would happen, that there would be a change in our lives. Only after we got released we heard from one of the security police that they were watching us for two months before arresting us. But they couldn’t prove we were handing people Bibles. We believed it was God’s protection for us.”
“After hours of praying and singing, we felt God’s peace in our hearts.”
The two women were held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured, and executions are swift and sudden.
“Our first night in prison, we both were so scared,” recalls Maryam. “We had no power to speak. The first thing the security police tried was physical torture. They put us in a dark, cold cell and said they would come to torture us. We just hugged each other and said goodbye, thinking it was the last day for us. We began to pray for each other. After hours of praying and singing, we could feel God’s peace in our hearts. But it was not easy. Every day was mental torture. In interrogation they threatened our families, which was even worse than hearing about execution.”
“One day they invited a university professor in to convince us to deny our faith. He told me that if I was one of his family members he wouldn’t wait for the court’s decision – he would have killed me himself,” says Maryam. “We went to something like 10 courts, and in each court the judges would threaten us with execution,” says Marziyeh. “But the hardest part was the execution of other prisoners. I never experienced such a difficult thing. After the execution, there was this spirit of sorrow and death everywhere, and sometimes we couldn’t say anything. Everyone was under pressure.”
But in the face of chilling interrogations and intimidation, something remarkable happened: instead of succumbing to fear, they chose to take the radical – and dangerous – step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them. They found the prison being fertile ground for the gospel.
“Prison was like a church every day. We gathered and prayed.”
“Prison is the place where most people are hopeless,” Marziyeh says. “They all need someone to save them. The prisoners were open to hear about Jesus and many were asking us to pray for them. Before we were imprisoned, we would ask God to show us whoever he chose, and that we would be able to talk to those people. But detention and prison increased those opportunities, since it was like a church every day. We gathered and prayed. It was easier to evangelize because we were already in prison.” “We just tried to love them,” Maryam says. “This had a great affect on most prisoners and even the guards.”
“Prayer was the only thing that helped us, strengthened us,” says Marziyeh. “Sometimes we couldn’t even pray in Farsi, our language. We didn’t even know how. Many times we were praying in tongues. We witnessed power in prayers, especially in difficulties. We could see the miracles of God every day and it made our faith stronger. We didn’t have a Bible with us in prison, but every day we could touch God. We could touch Bible verses inside the prison because we were living them. We learned how to forgive our enemies. We remembered how Jesus forgives our sins and how he suffered for us.”
After international pressure from the United Nations, Amnesty International, and other human rights groups, the women were released. They left Iran to continue ministry through writing and speaking in the United States. In their book ‘Captive in Iran’, Maryam and Marziyeh recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to bring about a miraculous reversal: shining light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything, and showing love to those in despair.
Source: Joel News International 861, May 22, 2013
Leadership Conversations by Nicky Gumbel:
Nicky Gumble with Maryam and Marziyeh at Holy Trinity Brompton church, London – a personal interview – 40 min.
In 2009 in Iran, Maryam and Marziyeh were imprisoned and sentenced to death because of their Christian faith. Maryam and Marziyeh were born into Muslim families but converted to Christianity and began to share the Gospel with those around them. They were arrested in March 2009 after being accused of evangelism and apostasy. After 259 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison they were released. This is their story.
https://www.alpha.org/blog/leadership-conversations-with-nicky-gumbel-podcast-maryam-marziyeh/
Their book of their story. You can read the first 19 pages on Look inside.
There is an ongoing underground revival in the Muslim world. Over the past 20 years more Muslims have found Isa (Jesus) then in all the previous centuries together.
See links:
Iran: where Christianity is growing fastest
Iran – fastest-growing evangelical population
Many Muslims are turning to Christ
Jesus and Muslims: Life in the desert
18,000 Muslim leaders led to Christ in West Africa
Jesus appears to Middle Eastern Muslim for a month
Iman hated Christians until Jesus raised him from the dead
Muslim woman returns from the dead to tell about Jesus
See also
Argentina: The amazing transformation at Los Olmos prison
Prison Revival in Argentina
Christian missionary tortured in prison led 40 to Christ
Iran: How two women brought hope in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison
Remember those in prison
Barnabas Fund www.barnabasfund.org
Voice of the Martyrs www.persecution.com.au
The Open Doors www.opendoors.org.au
Revival PDF books on the Main Page
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BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)
BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)
BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)
BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)
BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)
BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)
BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)
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The Tree
The Tree
This Christian Herald story is included in The Lion of Judah (4) The Death of Jesus and (7) The Lion of Judah in one volume
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A great prison warden, Kenyon Scudder, often told this story of a modern-day miracle. A friend of his happened to be sitting in a railway coach next to a young man who was obviously depressed. Finally the man revealed that he was a convict returning from a distant prison. His imprisonment had brought shame on his family and they had neither visited him nor written often. He hoped, however, that this was only because they were too poor to travel, too uneducated to write. He hoped, despite the evidence, that they had forgiven him.
To make it easy for them, however, he had written them to put up a signal for him when the train passed their little farm on the outskirts of town. If his family had forgiven him they were to put up a white ribbon in the big apple tree near the line. If they didn’t want him back they were to do nothing, and he would stay on the train, go far away, probably become a hobo.
As the train neared his home town his suspense became so great he couldn’t bear to look out the window. His companion changed places with him and said he would watch for the apple tree. In a minute, he put his hand on the young convict’s arm. “There it is,” he whispered, his eyes bright with sudden tears. “It’s all right. The whole tree is white with ribbons” (The Christian Herald, January 1961).
It’s all right. The whole tree is red with blood.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
We celebrate our eternal reunion, forgiven and clean.
This story from The Christian Herald, 1961, precedes the famous 1970s song “Tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree” about a similar story of a man returning home on a bus after three years imprisonment.
Tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
I’m comin’ home, I’ve done my time
Now I’ve got to know what is and isn’t mine
If you received my letter telling you I’d soon be free
Then you’ll know just what to do
If you still want me
If you still want me
Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
It’s been three long years
Do ya still want me (still want me)
If I don’t see a ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
I’ll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
Bus driver, please look for me
’cause I couldn’t bear to see what I might see
I’m really still in prison
And my love, she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon’s what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please
Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
It’s been three long years
Do ya still want me (still want me)
If I don’t see a ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
I’ll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree
[Instrumental Interlude]
Now the whole damned bus is cheerin’
And I can’t believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons ’round the ole oak tree
I’m comin’ home, mmm, mmm
(Tie a ribbon ’round the ole oak tree)
The Christian Herald story is included in The Lion of Judah (4) The Death of Jesus
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