What Exploits Will Christians Do Under Persecution?

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of six articles about persecution by WCFS graduate, missionary, and current WCFS project manager Tim Shell. They are adapted from a message series he presented earlier this year. You can watch this message on the WCFS YouTube Channel. It is titled “The Greatest Exploit: Loving the Unlovely.”

The probability of Christians in the US experiencing persecution is increasing daily and has perhaps already begun with the first step of eliminating the voice of believers from society.

If current trends continue, the Christian living today may well experience physical persecution within their lifetime. So, how should we then live? This second article in this series offers considerations on Christian persecution drawing both on Scripture and on stories of more recent believers who lived through persecution and overcame it by faith.

Our first article considered how Christians living under persecution will do the exploits described in Daniel 11:32, “But the people that know their God will be strong and do exploits.”

We described:

• The life of Sung Do, a believer who lived out his faith under persecution for many years by hearing and obeying the voice of God to him by the Holy Spirit.

• how we can do likewise only by hearing and obeying the “still small voice” of our Good Shepherd, Jesus, to our hearts and minds.

This article will explore what, precisely, the exploits are that believers who follow Jesus will do.

Exploits? What Exploits?

Do you want to do exploits with God? I do. Exploits refers to the unexpected, unusual or surprising victories of God's people over their enemies based on their faith in God and God showing Himself strong on their behalf. The stories of the Bible are stories of exploits. We call them heroes of the faith because they overcame by believing in God and being willing to take on dangerous risks with great courage while being alone, or in the minority. Human acts are deemed heroic when they result in the salvation of others from calamity. Vast, deep thankfulness is the resulting social atmosphere, expressed in song or dance, praising God and the newly minted heroes. This is the pattern we see with Moses at the Red Sea in Exodus 15, or with the women of Israel singing about David defeating Goliath in I Samuel 18.

Exploits are the direct result of hearing the Shepherd's voice and following His instructions. They are defined in Webster's 1828 Dictionary as: “a deed or act; more especially, a heroic act; a deed of renown; a great or noble achievement.” We should explore the characteristics of these Christian exploits prophesied by Daniel. What kind of acts will believers under persecution be found doing? What, precisely? While the exact details of future exploits remain to be seen, it is possible to describe them in general; exploits will involve lovingly doing difficult things for the sake of others, things that many turn away from because the challenge can be overwhelming or cost them too much. We can determine the essence of exploits with an if, and, and, then statement.

If as the Bible says, “My sheep hear my voice and follow me”,

and that voice today is heard primarily through the ministry of the Holy Spirit whose role is to:

• lead us to Christ,

• remind us of what Christ said,

• reveal what He meant,

and the primary command of Christ is for us to love each other as He loved us, including our enemies,

then, the exploits God leads us to do will be sacrificial acts of love toward others which result in their deliverance.

Doing Exploits Means Loving People

Our exploits will mimic those in the life of Jesus who laid down His life for others. The nature of the exploits will be...loving people! This may or may not include our own personal deliverance from the circumstances we save others from. We may die and lose our physical life in saving others or we may be forced to abandon the “life” that we had lined up for ourselves. It will be a laying down of our life for others, with a giving attitude, not a getting attitude. Does that surprise us? It's what Jesus did. Does it sadden us? Should we be sad when God leads us into a season of dying to prepare us for a new season of living? We can't help people till we are willing to die for them.

If we want to do exploits the Spirit of God will lead us to love people. It's that simple, and it will cost us something. We will have to choose to make sacrifices for the people God asks us to care for. This is not easy because people are not easy to love. Were you? Was it easy for God to love you to the point where you turned to Him, or was God frustrated by your sheep like behavior constantly turning the wrong way? Did you come to God because you naturally tended to go that way or was the opposite true? He sought you, right?

If exploits involve loving people and people are not easy to love, then we are in for a hard time. A rewarding time, yes, but a difficult time. People are not lovely when God starts working on them. Were you? As God transformed you into the image of Jesus Christ you became lovely, but did you start that way? No, neither did I. We were loved into loveliness.

Doing exploits means loving unlovely people into loveliness, but we tend to avoid the unlovely and gravitate to the lovely. This was the magnetic attraction of Jesus: He loved everyone in their most unlovely state. People gravitate to love like moths to a flame. But what was it like for Jesus being around all those unlovely people with their unlovely attitudes and actions all the time? Well, it was grievous! Scripture says He was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3) Why was that? It was grief to be constantly immersed in our human unloveliness. We must be ready to taste that grief if we are to do exploits.

Doing exploits means treating people better than they deserve, which means showing mercy. It means becoming merciful like God. Oceans of mercy are required to undo the wreck of humanity. If everyone got what they deserved none of us would be left. We will have to reach the point where we love mercy and love showing mercy. Sometimes God has to change our attitude toward people before we can do exploits. Once God had to change my attitude about the people He called me to serve: the people of Korea. Permit me to describe how it happened at a roof top encounter just like Peter's.

The Rooftop Encounter

Dennis Pethers is a faithful evangelist from England who was disappointed to notice that many believers don't practice evangelism. “But why?”, he wondered. He discovered that the weak link in evangelizing a population was most often the negative attitude toward the local people by the local believers responsible for evangelizing them. This is quite common. Believers are often offended by those God calls them to serve and may grow to dislike them. They are even tempted to hate or despise them.

Dennis considered the story in Act 10 of Peter on the rooftop waiting for lunch to be served. Peter's attitude as a Jew toward the Gentiles was negative; he considered them unclean and outside of the salvation God had for the Jews through the Messiah. Did Peter feel superior to them? On that rooftop that day, God changed Peter's mind in a few moments. Dennis liked the work God did in Peter and wanted God to do it for others too. He began inviting Christians to meet at high places overlooking their towns or cities and there he would conduct a very simple ministry he named, “Rooftop Encounters.” He would briefly discuss the story of Peter in Acts 10, and how God changed Peter's mind. Then he would ask everyone to get alone and quiet before the Lord and ask Him to reveal to them these things:

• “Show me how You see the people I am looking down at all around me.”

• “Show me if I have any prejudice in my heart toward the people You have called me to serve, like Peter did.”

• “Show me if my attitudes are getting in the way of reaching them.”

In October 2018 I was invited to a Rooftop Encounter, up in the Lotte Tower in Seoul, Korea, by Brother John Whaley who serves by leading Rooftop Encounters around the world. We went high up to the observation floor at evening together with other pastors and missionaries and looked all around the city, 360 degrees, as the sun was setting. John challenged us to pray and search our hearts just as Dennis would remind us to. I had grown up in the United States without any prejudice toward black people or other races, so I had no hesitation to pray those prayers as I walked around. No sooner did I pray than my thoughts began racing, I had to sit down and write. I wrote four pages in my journal! God revealed to me that I was prejudiced toward the rich South Koreans. Boom! I could see it clearly in myself, there was real evidence that it was so. God showed me! Me? Prejudiced?

It is said that the only thing worse than hatred is indifference. This is when we don't care about something to the point that we cease to consider it or keep it in mind. I realized that from my youth, my personality and the circumstances of my life had so wired my brain that I cared deeply about the poor and was indifferent to the rich. I had been trying my best for fifteen years to help the people of Korea, but I focused so much helping poor Koreans in the north that I was oblivious to the needs of rich Koreans in the south. “What needs in the south? They have everything!”, I thought. Indifferently, I only saw need in the north. I was willing to lay down my life for Koreans in the north, of course, but not those in the south! Why? What for?

God showed me something very clearly that day. He said, “Your love for Koreans in the north is your own emotional love which is very limited. Go live among them for two weeks and your love will be exhausted, you will have nothing left. You need My love for the people of Korea, both north and south.” I repented of my prejudice that day and agreed with God and asked Him to give me His love for all the people of Korea, and He has!

That Rooftop Encounter was a transformational moment for me just like Peter's roof top meeting with God was for him in Acts 10. I see the people of Korea all the same now regardless of which side of the border they live on. Since then, I talk to Koreans from both sides to ask questions and listen. Could you believe that I have found just as great a need for Jesus in the south as in the north? You say, “Tim, do you mean you thought there were people here on planet earth that didn't need Jesus?” Yes, I guess I did. I figured Koreans in the south had everything they needed because they were well off and prosperous so I completely overlooked them.

But God showed me how difficult and miserable the lives of the rich in the south are, to the point where many commit suicide every year. South Korea has the fastest internet and the worst porn addictions in Asia. Families are broken apart; children rarely see their parents due to school and work schedules. Young people are under such pressure to succeed that they don't have the time, money or energy to build marriage relationships, so the birth rate is now the lowest ever recorded. In 2020 the total fertility rate of South Korea was .84, the lowest in the world. [1] Koreans in the south have stopped multiplying. Those from the north said they couldn't believe those in the south committed suicide so much. Even when they were hungry and starving up north, they helped each other and never thought of killing themselves, even as bad as it was.

How could there be such a stark difference in circumstances between north and south but exactly the same need for Christ?

The Amusement Park and The Dung Hill

Our family visit with close Korean friends in the south in 2019 was a great blessing. We lived in their rural village for about three months and were kept well supplied with rice and fresh Korean kimchi which we love to eat. One day a friend offered to take us to an amusement park and pay our way, we thought, “Why not?” This park was crowded with Korean people waiting to take a cable car up a mountain and ride back down a winding roadway on small coasting scooters as fast as they dared to go. We waited in line over an hour for our first ride, but the line got shorter and shorter for our second and third rides. It was a fun time for sure.

The next day I was reading the news about North Korea and noticed an article describing the stark need for fertilizer for their crop land. The people were all required to donate a certain quota of their waste each year to the common cause and those who failed to do so were penalized. But the quota was too much for the average person to produce, so there they were, stealing each other’s dung hills to avoid the fine.

It was such a contrast to try out an expensive playground in the south one day and then hear of such privation in the north the next. Most of us would assume the greatest needs are in the north, not in the south, but that depends on how needs are defined. I saw a big difference, but God doesn't. People are people regardless of their circumstances and all need to be loved, all need Jesus. Do we really want to do exploits? What will it be like?

Sung Do and the Unlovely Villagers

Consider another example of exploits from days gone by in North Korea in These Are the Generations by Eric Foley (pgs. 18-22). This true story from North Korea tells of a man, Sung Do, there loving people, people who were difficult to lead and to get along with, but he loved them well and in the end many turned to God in faith:

“They called him “Jesus Freak”, (yes, this was literally his nickname), even into his old age.

I don't know that my grandfather ever really wanted to hear God's voice, since usually when he did, it was a sign that something very bad was about to happen, and my grandfather would need to comport himself in a way exactly the opposite of what common sense and the actions of sensible men would dictate. Like the time shortly after God used him to save the church. He was humble, but I imagine he must have been at least inwardly gratified that the run-in with the Japanese had turned out so well. So when that ear-splitting voice boomed out his name once again, I wonder if he winced just a little bit.

And when the voice said, “If you don't want the people in your town to die, leave the village and go to work”, it certainly left him in an awkward spot. Go to work? He asked God for more details because he wasn't sure what to do. But the more details he received, the less comforted he became. “Go and ask every villager, Christian and non, to give you everything they own”, the voice instructed him, “Mention nothing about God in the process. Take whatever is given to a faraway place, invest it. Then return to the village in forty days.”

It must have been humbling for him to go door-to-door to make this request. Of course, some villagers scoffed at him and ridiculed him, but you might be surprised how few. After all, even though everyone – Christian and non – called him “Jesus Freak”, they could not doubt his courage and skill and favor with God in the face of the Japanese invaders. And I am sure God softened the hearts of many to send my grandfather off with a modest supply of money. There were even some whose crops had failed who entrusted him with everything they had left.

Nearly forty days after my grandfather left town, the Mafia came. They swooped down into the village from the surrounding mountains. They came like locusts and robbed everything and everyone. As my grandmother said, (she and the rest of our family were still there, after all), they didn't even leave so much as a baby chick behind.

The villagers couldn't help but notice that the day after the Mafia left town was the day my grandfather was due to return. But he didn't show up.

So the next day, a villager came to my grandmother's house and began haranguing her angrily about the whole situation. He actually grabbed her and beat her head against the wall repeatedly.

The other villagers weren't much better. They were in the poorest of conditions. Many were starving due to the crop failures that had occurred even before the bandits arrived. So to my grandmother's credit, she went door-to-door and shared her remaining food with each family, encouraging them to be patient for my grandfather's return. Some were touched and said they would wait, even if it meant they would die before he returned. But others still complained.

Finally, after giving away all her food and not eating at all for days, she became weak and lost hope. Forty-three days after Grandfather had left, my grandmother decided she would kill herself if he did not return that day. With this resolution firmly in mind, she led the children down to the dock.

My grandfather always wore a white scarf around his neck. At dawn, while my grandmother and her children were waiting, the sun was rising. A boat was approaching, but she could not make out who was aboard because of the glare. But then she could make out a figure on deck who was wearing something white, and she remembered his scarf. Then she saw the figure waving a white scarf at her. She took off a piece of her clothing and waved back. It was him!

As the ship approached, she and her children started dancing and crying. She wanted to go summon her neighbors, but she couldn't. She was starving and not able to walk more.

He had been gone for forty-three days. Some old and young had also gathered there at the dock that day; my grandfather was their only hope. My grandmother says that they had come to see if there was anything to eat and, if not, they planned to die there too. She said that by the time Grandfather's ship tied up at the dock, the port looked like a white sand beach because of how many people had assembled there.

With such a crowd present and pressing in on them, there was not time for personal greetings or any exchange of information between them. Someone had to address this eager, hungry crowd, and my grandmother, empowered by this blessed and very fortunate turn of events, appointed herself for the task.

She stood on top of the ship and faced the villagers who had recently been so hostile to her. The first things she said was that she wouldn't give out any of the food from the ship because they had been so cruel and violent. She chided them for not trusting her and her husband or considering that he might have encountered some unavoidable and entirely understandable delay. She pointed out that the ship was overflowing with food but that the food would not be distributed due to the hard heartedness of those who had for example, put her head through a wall. Everyone sobbed and asked for forgiveness. She went on to remind them that she had never deceived the villagers but only sacrificed herself and her own food for them.

Then, my grandfather tapped her gently on the shoulder and said, “Wait. Let me talk to them.” He turned to the crowd and began to address them, saying that his was the work of ministry, leading people to God. Not to make money, he assured them but to promote obedience to God because, after all, God was the One who had asked him to save the village in the first place. He explained to everyone that he was a Christian and he knew that what he was sharing would be hard for non-Christians to understand. So he pointed out to them that if he had not left for business, the money the villagers had given him would have been taken by the robbers. This gave him confidence that it was God who had sent him away to save the villagers, and so the obvious thing for everyone to do would be to believe in God. He told them that God had enabled him to make so much money that the villagers would have enough to eat for the next several years. All the believers and even the non-believers nodded approvingly as they listened to him.

Then he asked for those who had trusted him and given money to stand on one side. He announced that each of these investors would receive one hundred times more than what they had given him. One hundred times!

The others were ashamed of themselves and began to beg my grandfather to save them too. They chanted together, “Save us! Save us! Save us! My grandfather said he would only trust those who had helped him, but he emphasized that God had surely asked him to leave in order to save the whole village. So he asked the remaining villagers, “Will you now believe in God?” They answered, “Yes! Yes! We believe in God!” They didn't sound like starving people as they waved their hands and cheered at the top of their lungs.

What happened next surprised everyone. Grandfather provided everyone with exactly the same amount of food, whether they had supported him or not. And that is how everyone in the village started going to church.”

Notice in this story how God's instructions to Grandfather Sung Do made no sense at all; it was against all common sense. Notice how he had to trust God in the face of the unknown and impossible. Yet notice the love of God in that He warned the one man who was listening and willing to obey. These are the exploits of God and His people for others.

Are You Ready to Do Exploits?

Are you still sure you want to do exploits? Do you want to do things that seem crazy to other people? Do you want to be the one that God picks to warn others and help them escape calamity? Do you really want to love people the way God loves people? Do you want to see them like He sees them?

What if the people God calls you to love, serve and save begin to oppose and resist you like the villagers did to Sung Do, or like the children of Israel did to Moses, or as they rejected Jesus? What if the unlovely do unlovely things to you like the villagers Sung Do loved?

People are called sheep in the Bible for a reason, it is difficult to get them to go the right way, they are always wandering off the right path and have to be turned back again and again. If that's what it takes, who still wants to do exploits?

I do.

Note: Stay tuned for further articles in the WCFS Persecution Series. The next article, Persecution III – Adopting of the Values of Jesus Christ, will deal with the changes of attitude and values that will be required of believers in order to adopt the heart and values of Jesus Christ for overcoming persecution.

[1]http://carnegieendowment.org/2021/06/29/demographics-and-future-of-south-korea-84817