My Thoughts

Thursday, March 17, 2016

In Nigeria, the murder of Christians has risen 62% in 2015!  Within the last month, another 500 have been murdered!  Who is responsible for this?  Hindus?  Buddhists?  Shintoist? No, it is members of the Muslim faith who are responsible!  Why haven’t we heard about this?  Because, if you mention it, you are accused of Islamophobia.  You are accused of being a racist!  So, like the citizens in Nazi Germany in 1938 to 1945, one pretends the exterminations do not exist and one keeps his mouth shut.

In spite of 1.2 million Christians in the middle East and Northern Africa being driven out of their homes, their church buildings burned, their women raped, their men beaten, young girls being sold as sex slaves, Christian cemeteries being desecrated, historical Christian sites being destroyed, and executions being videoed by ISIS, our government has been silent until this week!  No action, just a flimsy announcement.

There have been acts of terrorism in this country since 2000 and as late as a few months ago, but the news media and our government plays it down and doesn’t see the true picture of what is happening.   The FBI has been able to stop the majority of planned terrorism, but for how long?

Yet, in the most radical nation of Islam, in spite of the danger of being a believer, Iran has a continually growing Christian population.   Believers are forced to keep their religion under wraps. They worship in house churches with a maximum of four to five worshipers.  Although arrest, imprisonment, beatings, and death are the price of Christian worship, the number of believers is growing into the hundreds of thousands!  Open Doors USA, a non-profit Christian group, records about 450,000 Christians in Iran. Others place the number closer to a million.

A house church is four or five people!  If you and I faced what Iranian believers do every day, would we continue to be faithful?  Can you imagine some pious American telling the Iranian believers that they don’t have enough faith or they would publicly take a stand, regardless of the consequences?  Yet, those same individuals don’t have enough faith to roll out of bed on Sunday morning!  Or, can you see some American brother or sister saying, “Why are they so afraid to confess Jesus?  Don’t they know He will not confess them if they don’t confess Him?”  Yet, those accusing individuals refuse to mention Jesus to their neighbors or their co-workers (Matthew 7:1-5; Romans 2:1).

Islam has already reached our shores.  Some communities have been taken over politically by Muslims.  Our government is riddled in high offices with those who wish to replace our Constitution with Sharia.  Yet, the general position taken by our population is a foolishness called blindness.

Yet, in spite of all this madness, God is in control.  If Christianity can grow under the very noses of those who wish to eradicate it in Iran, then that same growth can happen here!  When persecution comes, the  occasional pew warmer may sell out for thirty pieces of silver, but the faith of the real Christian will grow stronger.  If those same conditions existed here which are found in other parts of the world, would you be one of those four or five who meet in a house church?