What Would You Do?

By: American Decency Staff

   Let’s use our imaginations a moment.

 

Imagine you’re in a bank when all of a sudden a man pulls a gun, fires it in the air and demands the tellers fill his bag with money.

 

The police cars screech to a stop in front of the bank, the cops take cover behind their cruiser doors and point their guns at the bank, and the gunman tells everyone in the bank to get down on the ground.

 

We’ve all seen this played out in our favorite police or detective shows and movies, and depending on the level of suspense they’re going for the robber often tells the police, “If you don’t meet my demands, I’ll shoot a hostage every hour!”

 

Imagine yourself in that situation.

 

Change it up just a little bit, and imagine yourself in a church in Nigeria, surrounded by other worshippers, when a masked terrorist barges in with a gun, demanding you all denounce your faith, or he will shoot a member of your church every 6 minutes.

 

Change up the story just one more time. Put yourself in a massive room with every other believer in the world, when a gunman interrupts your fellowship to make the same demands. Denounce Christ, or one of you dies every 6 minutes.

 

Christian brothers and sisters, that last picture is not a figment of your imagination; it is the story of Christian persecution in 2016.

According to The Center for Studies on New Religions, 90,000 Christians lost their lives in 2016 because of their faith, making Christians the most persecuted religious group in the world.

It’s very easy for us to hear that statistic and walk away with the comprehension that some people in the Middle East or Nigeria or the Sudan are being persecuted, but it’s important that we understand that we share the same mark of faith as those dead Christians.

 

If God in His wisdom put us in those locations, we’d likely be dead too, if we had the courage that they had.

 

As comfortable as we’ve had it here, though we admittedly are starting to feel some tension with our secular culture, our experience is not the norm for believers around the world.

 

In the time it takes you to read this newsletter, how many Christians will be killed?

Are we praying for them? Are we encouraging them? Are we taking inspiration from them in our slight trials of the faith?

 

These people are willing to die for Jesus, are we willing to live for Him? 

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