Praise the Lord for this new day in His
Kingdom which is eternal and unshakable. Praise the Lord that He has called us
and has sent us into the world to be His witnesses. Whenever I read about
the lives and witness of brave, committed, and courageous Christians around the
corner and around the world I get very encouraged and provoked by the Lord to
honor and serve Him with zeal and devotion. Our daughter Sunita returned from
Israel recently. She met Christians from Israel and the West Bank. She was
telling me the wonderful stories of their faithful witness for Jesus our Lord
under difficult circumstances.
“What a privilege to live for our Lord
and to die for Him as well.”
That’s what Mehdi Dibaj wrote to his son from
his Iranian jail. Raised in a Muslim family, Mehdi Dibaj became a Christian in
the 1950s, later becoming a pastor. In 1983 he was arrested and charged with
apostasy for leaving Islam and becoming a Christian. Imprisoned without a
trial, he was held in solitary confinement for two years and systematically
tortured. He ended up serving almost ten years in prison.
When he
finally came to trial in December 1993, he declared, “I am not only satisfied to
be in prison for the honor of His Holy Name, but am ready to give my life for
the sake of Jesus my Lord.” Soon thereafter he was sentenced to execution. The
sentence would have been carried out except for the intervention of Haik
Hovsepian, the leader of evangelical Christians in Iran. Risking his own life,
Bishop Hovsepian launched an international campaign for the sentence against
Mehdi Dibaj to be overturned. In January 1994 Dibaj was released from prison a
few days before his execution date. Soon after that Bishop Hovsepian
disappeared. Twelve days later his corpse was identified by his son. The body
had been stabbed 26 times.
For the next few months Mehdi Dibaj traveled
across Iran, encouraging fellow believers and preaching the gospel of Jesus. On
June 24, 1994 he was abducted. On July 5, 1994 his body was found in a park in
West Tehran.
Now I quote from an article
called The Church
in Iran:
More Iranians have become Christians after the 1979 both inside Iran and among the Diaspora than at any other time in Iran’s history since the Muslim invasions of the 7th century.Much of this growth has been experienced by the Assemblies of God and the Presbyterian Churches. There has also been a major upsurge of house churches who meet underground. The estimated number of Protestant Christians who meet in buildings is several thousand; nobody knows the exact number of underground Christians, but there are at least ten different networks. Most of these home churches grow by the Gospel spreading through extended families. There is also evidence that there are numerous secret believers throughout the country.
One man dies, another man dies, the gospel
spreads, the church grows.
This is nothing new. Jesus spoke about this in John 12:24 when he said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” One seed is planted, then it dies. From its death, a vast harvest grows.
This is nothing new. Jesus spoke about this in John 12:24 when he said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” One seed is planted, then it dies. From its death, a vast harvest grows.
We all love the
harvest. It’s the dying that gives
us pause. It helps to remember that when Jesus spoke those words, he was
talking about his own death. As Isaiah 53:11
(KJV) says, he shall see the
travail of his soul and be satisfied. Out of his death came forth many “seeds,”
millions and millions of them, sprouting up into eternal life so that twenty
centuries later the worldwide Christian community numbers over two billion.
One man dies. Seeds arise. The Word spreads. Thus the pattern is set for all the
followers of Jesus.
In that same passage our Lord spelled it out
very clearly: “The man who loves his
life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it
for eternal life” (John
12:25). How much do we love our own lives? Pastor Dibaj
answered clearly when he said, “What a privilege to live for our Lord and to die
for Him as well.”
In Christ,
Brown
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