The Heavenly Man (23 page)

Next I progressed to the X-ray machine for the customs check. As I placed my carry-on bag on the scanner I noticed an officer speaking into his walkie-talkie while staring straight at me. I walked forward and collected my bag, and the officer didn’t say a word. Again, by the hand of God, I was allowed to pass!

In the waiting area I called a brother on a public telephone to let him know I’d made it through. Within a few minutes I boarded the aircraft, the door was locked, and the Air China jet pulled away from the gate. Soon I was airborne! A torrent of joy and thanksgiving welled up inside me. As soon as the wheels lifted off the tarmac I couldn’t help singing out loud,

All the passengers in front of me turned around and stared at me, wondering who this madman was who’d been let onto the plane!

I left China for the first time in my life, that I might bring glory to the King of Kings before many peoples and nations.

During the long flight I thought back over my life and thanked God for his boundless grace. I know that I am the least part of the body of Christ in China. I am nothing. It’s certainly not because of any special skills or abilities that God chose me to be his ambassador to the nations. It was only by his mysterious, undeserved grace.

About ten hours later my plane touched down in Frankfurt, Germany, and I proceeded to the immigration desk.

When I got to the front of the line the German officer looked at my passport. Immediately he raised his eyebrows and a stern look came across his face. He spoke to me but I couldn’t understand, so I just stood there and smiled. He motioned for me to stand to the side.

Three other officers came to inspect my passport. They knew it wasn’t mine. They shook their heads, and said in threatening voices, “No! No!”

At that moment a Scripture came into my mind,
“The righteous are as bold as a lion.” Proverbs 28:1.
With the fire of God in my heart I stared at the main officer with a look of judgment in my eyes. The officer looked at me, stamped my passport, handed it back, and motioned for me to go!

It was only by the grace of God.

I was in Germany! As I sat in a vehicle taking me to a pastor’s house, the Holy Spirit powerfully spoke these words to my heart, “In the same way that I brought you out of prison, and out of China, I will bring one hundred thousand of my children out of China to be my witnesses throughout Asia.”

Two days later I phoned Deling and my children in China, and told them the Lord had safely delivered me to Germany. Deling’s first question was, “When will you be back?” I told her I felt like Jesus when Joseph and Mary took him to Egypt as a baby. Only the Lord knew when I would be back. Deling and I made a solemn covenant before the Lord that if it looked as if I wouldn’t be returning to China within two years then we would ask the Lord to miraculously bring my family out of China to be with me.

Two weeks after my arrival a Christian friend took me to a refugee detention centre in the city of Hamburg. The officers there were very surprised to hear my story and transferred me to another refugee centre in eastern Germany.

Because I didn’t have any identification at all I couldn’t prove who I was. Government officials came with a Chinese translator and asked me many questions about my past, my arrests, and how I had escaped from prison. I answered their questions absolutely truthfully, but they didn’t believe me and their manner was very rude. The translator even told me to stop telling such fantastic lies, as it was harming my application! He said no Chinese person had been granted refugee status by the German government for more than two years.

By this time news had reached some German Christians that I had left China and was in their country. Some of these dear brothers had ministered with us in China before. They came to the refugee centre with copies of newspaper articles with my name on them, published after my arrest in March. The German brothers also showed photos of themselves with me in China, to prove they’d known me before I came to Germany. They signed statements and backed me up as much as they could. It seems the German Embassy in Beijing was also asked to investigate my claims. They soon discovered who I was.

At the detention centre I was given a full physical checkup. They saw my body still bore the scars from my tortures in China. I was told I either had tuberculosis or lung cancer, and that I would have to go to hospital to recover. I had lived with lung problems for more than ten years, ever since the guards had stamped on my chest in prison.

The detention centre was a very basic facility, but it was far better than prison in China! We were allowed to travel outside during the daytime, although we weren’t allowed to travel a distance of more than fifty kilometres from the centre.

I spent 69 days in the hospital, and a further three months in the detention centre while my application for refugee status was being considered.

* * *

DELING
: After Yun’s miraculous prison escape, the whole country seemed to be searching for him. It was very tense. The church leaders told him he couldn’t train workers or lead meetings because the risk was just too great for the believers. The PSB were close on his trail and everyone he had contact with was put in great danger.

For a month after Yun’s escape we hid in Wuhan City in Hubei Province, but the people who were hiding us were so fearful they couldn’t sleep at night.

We relocated to Shandong Province, but after staying there for a little while we discovered the host family also could not sleep. They were too worried about their safety and the consequences if Yun was caught in their home. We cried out to God, “Lord, how can we serve you? Everywhere we go people are on edge and are unable to sleep.”

God seemed to be saying that Yun might possibly leave China and go to the West. We prayed about it for more than a month to find out if it was God’s will. Finally the Lord confirmed to us that this was indeed his plan. We laid a fleece before the Lord, “Father, if it is your will for Yun to leave China, we pray you will help him leave without any problems whatsoever.”

In Beijing, Yun miraculously boarded an aircraft and left China. We all knew this had been completely in God’s will.

* * *

YUN
: More than two years later, at a meeting in Finland, I shared the testimony of my prison escape and how the Lord enabled me to leave China.

Afterwards a Christian businessman came up and told my translator and me something remarkable, which made me realize how merciful God had been on the day I left Beijing.

The Finnish brother said, “I work for a certain telecommunications security company. Several years ago we won the contract to install state-of-the-art voice recognition software at various border points around China, including at Beijing Airport.

“Using hidden microphones, these programmes allow officials to quickly match the voice of suspicious passengers against a computerized database containing the voice patterns of wanted criminals. You can be certain your voice was in their database, because so many recordings have been made of you preaching.

“If you had opened your mouth that day in Beijing Airport and said anything, you would surely have been arrested on the spot.”

I thanked the Lord for his wisdom and mercy, when he told me, “When you enter the customs hall at the airport, say
only what I instruct you to say.” He hadn’t prompted me to say anything to the officials, so I didn’t say a word.

It always pays to obey the Lord!

* * *

My dear Brother Xu had told me to escape while we were in prison in 1997, and now he remained behind bars while I was in the West.

God worked a great miracle for Brother Xu. Many people believed he would receive the death sentence, and in fact a few months after our arrest it was erroneously reported in newspapers around the world that he had been executed.

At the trial Brother Xu refused to defend himself or answer any charges, claiming that the “trial” was little more than an artificial act to legitimize a pre-arranged verdict. He was given a ten-year sentence. For an unknown reason it was later reduced to three years, and he was released in May 2000. We know this was nothing short of a great miracle and blessing from the Lord.

During his three years in prison, Brother Xu experienced much torture and affliction. The prison officials even handcuffed his wrists to each side of an iron gate in such a way that when the gate was pulled open he was stretched up off the ground in a crucifix position, causing his internal organs to be agonizingly stretched.

His torturers would then relax the gate, giving Xu a moment’s relief, before again pulling the gate open. They repeated this process again and again, causing my dear brother to say later, “I came to know how Jesus must have felt on the cross.”

In May 2000 I was in the United States on a speaking trip. I knew the day Brother Xu was to be released and wanted to
surprise him. Security around Brother Xu in prison had been so tight that he had no idea what had happened to me after I escaped in 1997. For three years he didn’t know if I had been killed, captured, or remained free.

Just minutes after he walked free I called Brother Xu on his co-worker’s mobile phone. Xu’s deep, rich voice answered. “Dear Brother Xu,” I excitedly exclaimed, “This is your old cell mate Brother Yun! I’m calling you from America! God has taken me out of China by his mighty hand!”

Brother Xu, with overwhelming joy in his voice, shouted, “Hallelujah! God has sent you out of China so the Chinese and Western churches can co-operate for the gospel. You will be a witness of the Lord’s mighty work in China!”

We shouted and talked excitedly, trying to catch up in a few minutes with the three missing years since we last saw each other’s face.

In the early years I viewed Brother Xu as my father in the faith. I looked up to him as a great leader of China’s church. I still look up to him of course, but in recent years I’ve come to view Brother Xu as my dear brother in the faith. Outside my own family, Brother Xu is my dearest friend and co-worker in the work of the gospel.

Although China is a long, long way from Jerusalem, it’s one of history’s remarkable facts that the Holy Land has been connected to China by road for more than two millennia.

Some old accounts even suggest the gospel may have first entered China down this road just a few decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Seven centuries ago the famous explorer Marco Polo came to China along the same highway. This key trading route allowed herbs and spices, treasures, new religions, and invading armies to flow in and out of China. At the other end, Jerusalem acted as a hub from where products dispersed into Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The European aristocracy was amazed when they first imported a most remarkable creature from China – the silk-worm. It lent its name to this rugged route – popularly known as the Silk Road.

Today, the nations along the ancient Silk Road are the most unevangelized in the whole world. The three biggest religious strongholds that have refused to yield to the advance of the gospel – Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism – have their heart here. More than 90% of the remaining unreached people groups in the world live along the Silk Road and in the nations surrounding China. Two billion of the earth’s
inhabitants live and die in this area, completely oblivious to the Good News that Jesus died for their sins and is the only way to heaven!

In the 1920s God first led a group called the “Jesus Family” to take the gospel on foot all the way from China to Jerusalem. They called the initiative “Back to Jerusalem”. Other Chinese church groups received similar visions to start missionary movements that would impact many nations in Asia and the Middle East.

Founded in 1921 in Shandong Province by a Christian named Jing Dianying, the Jesus Family believed members should sell all their possessions and distribute their wealth among the other family members. The five-word slogan of the Jesus Family encapsulated their commitment to Christ and their pattern of frugal living: “Sacrifice, abandonment, poverty, suffering, death.”

They targeted towns and villages, preaching the gospel as they walked from one place to another. Their example of communal living and the Jesus Family’s deep Christian love amazed many onlookers. It attracted those searching for answers to life as well as those who were homeless, destitute and despised. Many blind people and beggars joined the Jesus Family and found eternal life in Christ.

As they continued to grow, the Jesus Family suffered terrible hardships. Often when this mobile community entered a new town the entire population came out to beat, scorn and humiliate them. The opposition didn’t deter them, however, and when they preached the gospel there always seemed to be a few people who were willing to forsake all that they had to follow Jesus.

By the late 1940s there were some 20,000 Chinese believers enlisted in more than 100 different Jesus Family groups throughout China.

Several groups believed God had called them to take the gospel back to Jerusalem on foot, preaching and establishing the kingdom of God in all the territories along the way. After thousands of miles and many years of travel, a band of faithful preachers reached the border town of Kashgar in the Xinjiang Region of north-west China.

* * *

In the autumn of 1995 I was speaking at a house church gathering in central China. The Lord had given me a deep desire to be part of his plan to send many Chinese Christians as missionaries into Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim lands. I encouraged the believers to seek God for a worldwide vision. I challenged them not only to continue in their present ministries, but to expand their horizons to include the unreached nations surrounding China.

With tears in my eyes I sang a song I had learned from an old book about the Back to Jerusalem Movement:

While I was singing, I noticed an old man in the congregation who was visibly moved. He was weeping and could hardly contain himself. I had no idea who he was, and thought my preaching must have been really powerful to cause such a response! The old brother, crowned with white hair and a white beard, slowly walked to the front of the room and asked to speak. A respectful hush fell over the audience.

He said, “I am Simon Zhao, a servant of the Lord. Forty-eight years ago my co-workers and I wrote the words you just sang. All my co-workers were martyred for the name of Jesus.”

He continued, “I was one of the leaders of the Back to Jerusalem Band. We marched across China on foot, proclaiming the gospel in every town and village we passed through.

“Finally in 1950, after many years of hardship, we reached the border town of Kashgar in Xinjiang Province. We stopped for a while and applied for visas to enter the Soviet Union. We were nervous and excited at the same time at what lay ahead!

“Before we ever had a chance to leave China, the
Communist armies under Chairman Mao took control of Xinjiang. They immediately sealed the borders and implemented their strong-armed style of rule.

“All the leaders of our movement were arrested. Five of us were sentenced to forty-five years in prison with hard labour. All the other leaders died in prison long ago. I’m the only one who survived…. For the sake of the vision to take the gospel back to Jerusalem, I spent 31 years in prison for the Lord.”

We were all stunned. We sat there with our mouths wide open and tears running down our cheeks, dripping onto the floor.

I asked Simon Zhao, the man of God, “Uncle, will you please tell us more?”

He continued, “When the Lord called us to this vision, I’d been married just four months. My beautiful bride had just found out she was pregnant! We were both arrested and imprisoned. Life in the prison was difficult and my wife suffered a miscarriage.”

He wiped away his tears before continuing, “At that time the Communists killed many missionaries and their Chinese converts. In the early months of my imprisonment in 1950 I saw my beloved wife twice from afar, through the iron bars on my window. Then I never saw her again. By the time I was released many years later my precious bride was already long dead.”

We all wept loudly. We felt that we were standing on holy ground in the presence of the Lord.

I asked Uncle Simon, “When you were released from prison, did you still have this Back to Jerusalem vision in your heart?”

He responded to my question by singing for us,

After Uncle Zhao rested for a while, I asked him again, “Uncle, do you still have this vision in your heart?”

He continued to sing,

He spoke in a faltering voice, “Every evening for decades in the labour camp I faced toward the west, in the direction
of Jerusalem, and cried out to the Lord, ‘Oh God, I’ll never be able to reach Jerusalem on foot. Our vision has perished. Heavenly Father, I pray you will raise up a new generation of Christians in China who are willing to lay down their lives to take the gospel all the way back to where it started in Jerusalem.’”

I held his hand and assured him, “The vision God gave you has not died! We will carry on the vision!”

We brought comfort to the heart of Uncle Zhao. He stood up, blessed us with his holy hands, and encouraged us from Luke 24:46–48,
“This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

He exhorted us, “You must recognize the way of the cross is the call to shed blood. You must take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Muslim countries, then all the way back to Jerusalem. Turn your eyes to the west!”

That meeting was a pivotal point in my life. I felt as if God passed a flaming baton from this dear old man of God to the house churches, giving us the responsibility to complete the vision.

The Lord had already placed the Back to Jerusalem vision in my heart, but after meeting Simon Zhao it became the primary focus of my life. I came to understand clearly that the destiny for the house churches of China is to pull down the world’s last remaining spiritual giants: the house of Buddha, the house of Mohammed, and the house of Hinduism, and to proclaim the glorious gospel to all nations before the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ!

You need to understand that when we speak about “Back to Jerusalem” we’re not saying that Jerusalem is the main goal. We are not planning to rush there for a big conference!
Jerusalem was the starting point for the gospel two thousand years ago, and we believe it will circle the whole world and return to its starting point. Our aim is not merely to evangelize the city of Jerusalem, but the thousands of unreached people groups, towns and villages located between China and Jerusalem.

The vision for Back to Jerusalem is now the primary goal of all the house church leaders in the Sinim Fellowship. This is not one project we have among many. This is the main thrust and focus of all our activities. We talk about it over breakfast, lunch and dinner. We pray unceasingly, asking God to raise up labourers and remove all obstacles. We dream about it in our sleep.

A few years ago the Sinim leaders prayed about their involvement in the Back to Jerusalem mission. We then came together and each house church network revealed the number of missionaries they were committed to train and send overseas. When we added the number of workers together it totalled 100,000. That means we intend to send 100,000 missionaries outside China in the coming years!

A closer examination of history reveals there were actually three main “silk roads” leaving China. The one starting in Xian and heading through Central Asia and the heart of the Islamic world is the best known one. The second major trading route went through Tibet, across the Himalayas to Bhutan and Nepal, then towards Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, connecting up with the main highway to Jerusalem. The third Silk Road went through south-west China, where the majority of unreached minority groups live today. It headed south into Vietnam and then westward into countries like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma) and India. This route went deep into the heart of today’s Buddhist and Hindu worlds.

After we considered these facts the church leaders decided God was calling us to follow these three main directions with the gospel. The Holy Spirit had already called certain networks to focus on specific areas. For example, one network had many missionary families already working in Tibetan areas. It was natural for them to lead the thrust into the Tibetan Buddhist world. Another network for years had the burden to reach the minority groups in south-west China. Most of these tribes spill across borders into countries like Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). That network assumed the responsibility of taking the gospel “back to Jerusalem” via the southern route.

We are not ignorant of the fact that these nations don’t welcome the gospel! We’re well aware that countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia will not take kindly to preachers in their land!

We also understand that in order to send missionaries they will need to be equipped, trained with language and cultural skills, and supported so they can fight for the Lord with maximum effectiveness. Today there are hundreds of Christians inside China learning foreign languages such as Arabic and English, in preparation for missionary service outside China.

We have also come to understand that the past thirty years of suffering, persecution and torture for the house churches in China were all part of God’s training for us. The Lord has perfectly fitted us to go as missionaries to the Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu worlds.