The Living Book

“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11).

I was sitting in a tea house in China with a godly pastor in his early 70’s when two workmen passed by carrying a large stone suspended on a heavy chain attached to a pole which bit deep into their shoulders.  Their muscles were taut.  Their jugular veins were extended, and beads of perspiration covered their faces.

Pointing to the two men who carried the heavy piece of rock weighing perhaps 300 pounds, the pastor said, “I used to have to do that as a forced laborer!”  For three years I had been playing a kind of cat-and-mouse game with this man, not completely sure that I trusted this individual who today is a prominent Three-Self Church pastor in China.

Gradually, the story began to unfold, one that I had never heard before.  When Joseph was a young man, the senior pastor of the church he then attended was executed by Communist forces who radically took over the government in 1949.  Not liking what happened, he brashly spoke out against the persecution.  Within days he was arrested, and the people’s court who tried him forced him to sit on a high stool in public, a dunce cap on his head, with a sign on his chest reading, “I am a tool of the Imperialist Running Dogs,” meaning the Americans.

Following that humiliation, he was sentenced to twenty long years of forced labor where he threw railroad ties off a train and carried heavy stones to build dikes and dams in northern China where the bitter cold winters and harsh conditions gradually wore down those who were prisoners.  “I smuggled a little Bible into the camp when I was taken there,” he explained, adding, “Without that Bible I don’t think I could have made it.”

Joseph eventually met fellow Christians who encouraged him and he, in turn, encouraged them.  When he told me of the long years of suffering, I was reminded of the study done by Carl Lawrence of those who had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in China between 1959 and 1969.  Carl found that those who had access to a Bible or had memorized Scripture were the ones who survived spiritually and those who could not nourish themselves on this book were among the 50% who defected and gave up their faith.

Only recently a Chinese believer, now in the Philippines, reminded me of what I said years ago which had so affected her life. “Do you remember,” she asked, “once saying, “If you were arrested for being a Christian, is there enough evidence in your life to convict you?”  Yes, I remembered.  No, I am not the first to have said that, but I also know that unless you have stored this book in your heart, whether it is sickness, imprisonment, or dark times of doubt that confront you, it is hard to survive.

I decry the fact that the Bible is so often neglected in the lives of those who have perhaps a half-dozen or more Bibles in their homes, while it is a precious and highly-valued possession of those whose very lives are compromised by having this book.

If more churches put greater emphasis on this book, encouraging people to read it, study it, memorize it, and make it a heart possession, perhaps more would be better prepared should the day ever come when once again it is illegal to possess the Book.

Eventually Pastor Joseph (not his real name) was released from prison, and quite unexpectedly several years later, he received a phone call on a Saturday night.  It was a government official who said, “Tomorrow we are opening a church and you will be the pastor!  You must use only the Bible, nothing but the Bible.”  And, years later, Pastor Joseph was still serving God nourished and preaching a little book, still called The Holy Bible.

Resource reading: Nehemiah 8.