I attended a prayer vigil for Pastor Saeed Abedini this past Friday at the State Capitol Building in Lansing. It was one of 500 vigils held in 35 countries around the world, commemorating the two year anniversary of when Pastor Saeed was incarcerated in an Iranian prison where he is tortured for his Christian faith.
Saeed is an American citizen with a wife and two children:
Most American Christians take it for granted that we have freedom of religion and freedom from religious persecution in our country. I know I have my entire life. We know people in the Bible were martyred for their faith and we hear of occasional stories from around the world, but these typically don’t move the meter of our awareness much. Things are a bit different today though. You hear about ISIS persecuting and killing Christians (and others) in the Middle East regularly. Facebook and Twitter have been abuzz with the Arabic letter for “N” on people’s profile pics. Daily news of ISIS beheadings and threats fill the pages of our newspapers and our news telecasts. For many Americans, there is a genuine fear that ISIS terrorists will begin their acts of violence in the United States any day, as exemplified by the story of a reporter dressing up like an ISIS member and walking across the Mexico-United States border with a machete, ISIS flag, and fake severed head in hand, in an effort to show how easy it is for ISIS to enter our country.
Persecution no longer feels like something that only happens in a land far away. The good news in this is that it raises our awareness of our brothers and sisters in Christ who are being persecuted in the Middle East and other places globally, as we realize this actually could happen to us. What would it be like to be taken from your spouse and children and brutally beaten and tortured in prison because of your faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior? What would it be like for your spouse and children? Hebrews 13:3, speaking about Christians who are imprisoned and persecuted because of their faith, says: Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
On Friday at the prayer vigil for Pastor Saeed, I felt like I had the opportunity to live out this verse for the first time. It honestly was the first time I’d experienced a personal touch to someone imprisoned for their faith in Jesus. And that touch was very moving. During the vigil, a letter Pastor Saeed wrote to his daughter for her 8th birthday was read aloud. Below is a video where you can view Saeed’s wife Naghmeh read the letter aloud. You can also view it here. After you read or listen to the letter, please consider praying for Saeed and his family and signing the petition for the United States government and the United Nations to act to pressure Iran’s government to free Saeed, an American citizen illegally imprisoned (illegal by Iran’s own laws) for committing no crime:
- Sign the petition to free Saeed at: http://beheardproject.com/saeed
- To keep updated on what is happening, you can heck in with the ACLJ website : http://aclj.org
- Naghmeh’s most recent interview on CBN : http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/
world/2014/September/A- Painful-Reality-The-Long- Battle-to-Free-Saeed/#. VCWKiB3P4Es.facebook
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Noah, great job bringing Saeed’s story upfront. He represents many thousands of brothers and sisters in prison now only because they hold Jesus as Lord. Shoot, there are thousands of brothers and sisters in North Korean prison camps today. . . prison camps for life that they will never leave.
Not sure if your body marks/remembers IDOP, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church in early November, but there is no better way to have that personal touch than bearing these brothers and sisters in prayer. Not just for that day but an ongoing bearing. . . no greater blessing than to be one with them in this way. No greater joy inside than when grace happens to them if you have carried them in prayer. There’s a website PrisonerAlert.com where you can see some of them, read their stories and write to them in prison in their own language.
Their circumstances are hard but they know the Lord, he’s real to/in them. . . you can see Christ in them and they will minister to you as you follow Jesus. Church here would do well and find life embracing brothers and sisters who are persecuted in this world. As Heb 13:3 says at the end, “…since you also are in the body.”
Still keep this from Saeed’s letter released last Easter:
“Sometimes we want to experience the Glory and resurrection with Jesus without experiencing death with Him. We do not realize that unless we pass through the path of death with Christ, we are not able to experience resurrection with Christ. We want to have a good and successful marriage, career, education and family life (which is also God’s desire and plan for our life). But we forget that in order to experience the Resurrection and Glory of Christ we first have to experience death with Christ and to die to ourselves and selfish desires.”
If you want to see Jesus in a living way in a brother who was a prisoner in the same Iranian prison as Saeed as well as see Jesus’ power in Dan’s guards and the Iranian courtroom he testified in, watch this video. . . best 9 minutes you’ll see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnpCR_aeXgU
I had never heard of the IDOP, thanks so much for bringing that to my attention Alan. And also thank you for the Voice of the Martyrs DVD you sent me. I will definitely show some of that on Nov 9th and use that day as an opportunity to lead our congregation to honor Hebrews 13:3 “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” as we pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world.
Good on you that Crossroads will join in prayer with the body worldwide. Church can truly be one in fellowship with brothers and sisters who risk all for Jesus. The crazy thing about IDOP is that it came about because of a non Christian. An editor for the Wall Street Journal, Michael Horowitz, heard about an Ethiopian pastor named about Getaneh who had been tortured for being a Christian. At his own expense he had him brought to the US for medical care, and he had Pastor Getaneh stay in his D.C. home with his wife and him. He says this about Getaneh:
“There is a man who lives with us who is the embodiment of Christian faith, and I’m in awe of it. He is from the Ethiopian Evangelical Church where he is the senior pastor. He is trying to get asylum into the United States and is meeting every possible roadblock you can imagine. Here is a man who has been jailed over 25 times for his faith. He’s been tortured. On one occasion, he was hanged upside down with hot oil poured on his feet. This is a man of abiding faith who will be tortured again and murdered if he is sent back to Ethiopia.”
He found it incredible that the US government would not acknowledge that there was persecution of Christians in Ethiopia. And as a Jew, he was even more amazed that the church did not speak up for Christians who were being persecuted for their faith. In 1995, he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “New Intolerance between Crescent and Cross,” bringing to light stories of Christians persecuted for their faith. It generated little response. Some Christian leaders even said that there was little or no persecution. He then wrote to over 100 prominent church mission boards saying,
“If I had written a story about anti-Semitism, I would have been overwhelmed with support from the Christian community. But when Christian persecution was involved, the Christian community seemed tongue-tied and embarrassed.”
Afterward, A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times wrote a column about the apathy,
“A few clergymen and their religious organizations try to arouse congregations. But astonishingly few, compared not only with the spread of the persecution, but what could be done to fight it, if the political, religious, business and press leaders of the world had the will and courage. If I were a Christian, I would complain that Christian leaders, political, religious and business, around the world have failed in their obligations to fight oppression of their co-religionists. I am complaining anyway.”
From the concern for persecuted Christians by nonbelievers who chose to speak up and stir the conscience of Christians has come IDOP, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, as well as the International Religious Freedom Act and other federal government laws and agencies dedicated to Religious Liberty around the world. Hoping the few quotes above and a little history makes things richer and deeper.
One other quote from a Muslim on the lack of support for the persecuted Church among Christians:
“The one thing we Muslims can absolutely rely upon is that whereas the tiniest thing kicks off in Gaza or the West Bank there are protests in Muslim cities all the way from Jakarta to Timbuktu, in the case of persecuted Christian minorities- horrendous machete attacks take place in Nigeria, Christians in Iraq are burned out of their houses, Christians in Pakistan or stoned or attacked on the slightest pretext, Christians in Palestine suffer under Israeli occupation – in all cases what we will hear is just a whimper. . . the two fundamental, cardinal sins that persecuted Christian minorities have committed for this powerful, white, establishment Church in this country is not being white and not being wealthy. They’re poor and they don’t matter. And we can rely on that in the Muslim community. We can rely on the fact that to the great majority of people, this issue is not sufficiently important. They may grieve about it, they need pray about it, but they’re certainly not going to upset their powerful self interest as a result of this.”
– Sheikh Dr Muhammed Al-Hussaini, Lecturer in Islamic Studies in the UK
Great resource if you’re looking for stories of brothers and sisters going through persecution/trials that need prayer now: iCommitToPray.com. There’s a pic and a story, and you can post prayers that are delivered to the brother or sister when they’re visited.
Two other news sites:
MorningstarNews.org
WorldWatchMonitor.org
Both are current and accurate and help.
Pastor Saeed’s letter from Iran. . . Christmas is for seeing Christ in His people
Rajai Shahr Prison 2014
Merry Christmas!
These days are very cold here. My small space beside the window is without glass making most nights unbearable to sleep. The treatment by fellow prisoners is also quite cold and at times hostile. Some of my fellow prisoners don’t like me because I am a convert and a pastor. They look at me with shame as someone who has betrayed his former religion. The guards can’t even stand the paper cross that I have made and hung next to me as a sign of my faith and in anticipation of celebrating my Savior’s birth. They have threatened me and forced me to remove it. This is the first Christmas that I am completely without my family; all of my family is presently outside of the country. These conditions have made this upcoming Christmas season very hard, cold and shattering for me. It appears that I am alone with no one left beside me.
These cold and brittle conditions have made me wonder why God chose the hardest time of the year to become flesh and why He came to the earth in the weakest human condition (as a baby). Why did God choose the hardest place to be born in the cold weather? Why did God choose to be born in a manger in a stable, which is very cold, filthy and unsanitary with an unpleasant smell? Why did the birth have to be in such a way that it was not only hard physically, but also socially? It must have brought such shame for Mary and her fiancé that she was pregnant before marriage in the religious society of that time.
Dear sisters and brothers, the fact of the Gospel is that it is not only the story of Jesus, but it is the key of how we are to live and serve like Jesus. Today we like Him should come out of our safe comfort zone in order to proclaim the Word of Life and Salvation though faith in Jesus Christ and the penalty of sin that He paid on the cross and to proclaim His resurrection. We should be able to tolerate the cold, the difficulties and the shame in order to serve God. We should be able to enter into the pain of the cold dark world. Then we are able to give the fiery love of Christ to the cold wintery manger of those who are spiritually dead. It might be necessary to come out of the comfort of our lives and leave the loving embrace of our family to enter the manger of the lives of others, such as it has been for me for the third consecutive Christmas. It may be that we will be called fools and traitors and face many difficulties, but we should crucify our will and wishes even more until the world hears and tastes the true meaning of Christmas.
Christmas means that God came so that He would enter your hearts today and transform your lives and to replace your pain with indescribable joy.
Christmas is the manifestation of the radiant brightness of the Glory of God in the birth of a child named Emmanuel, which means God is with us.
Christmas is the day that the heat of the life-giving fire of God’s love shone in the dark cold wintry frozen hearts and burst forth in this deadly wicked world.
The same way that the heat from the earth’s core melts the hard stones in itself and produces lava, the fiery love of God, Jesus Christ, through the virgin Mary’s womb came to earth on Christmas to melt the hard heart of sin and wickedness of the world and removes them from our life. In the same process, the work of the Holy Spirit is a fiery rain of God’s Holiness and Mercy that flows into our body, soul and spirit and brings the light of Christ into us and through us making this dark, cold, wintry world into radiant burning brightness. He is turning our world into a world full of peace, joy, and love that is so different than the dark, cold, and wintry world that we used to live in. Hallelujah!
So this Christmas let the lava-like love of Christ enter into the depth of your heart and make you fiery, ready to pay any cost in order to bring the same lava love to the cold world around you, transforming them with the true message of Christmas.
Pastor Saeed Abedini
Soaking in the lava love of Christ
that’s powerful!!