Well, I've decided I'm going to stop concluding these by telling you what I'm going to do the next week, because I've changed my mind on two out of the last five. I said I was going to do George Whitfield, but we've done a lot of English people, so I thought I would broaden it up. And tonight, we're going to do Samuel Lamb, who was the pastor of Dama Zan Evangelical Church in Guangzhou, China, formerly known as Canton. If you read the book I'm going to recommend about Samuel Lamb, called A Bold as a Lamb, begins with a Chinese party member, young party member, an intellectual, who has met some Christians. He's a little alarmed by this, but they persuade him to go to church. And they take him down this street, Damazon, in Canton, China. The street is too narrow for cars. And so there's bicycles. I didn't have room for it, but I had a picture. of the church parking lot. It was about 50 bicycles on top of each other. And he's getting quizzical. These are small tenement houses. But as they get closer, he starts to hear singing, and he wasn't used to singing, unison, joyful singing. They're singing hymns, the same hymns that we sing, by the way. And as he goes there, he walks up to this. This is it right there, 35 Dama Zan in Canton, China. As he gets there, he finds that the stairwells, it's actually a three-story tenement building. a home, the lamb's home, and there are people lining both sides of the stairwell. And there are people sitting on the landings. There are people sitting above. They actually have basically gutted the house to make it an effective church. It's a kind of a balcony thing. As a result, Samuel Lamb slept on a cot, because that was what they needed after they removed the bedroom, and he finds the hundreds of people in there, and a lot of it's students. He was a professor, and a lot of young, some of the students he recognized, and people met him with joy, and they welcomed him, and then a small-aged man stepped forward after singing in prayers and he began preaching God's Word. Well, this is a snapshot of the house church movement of our brothers and sisters in China, Samuel Lam being one of the better known. He's born in Macau in 1924 and he's from a Chinese missionary family, the results of missionaries. His grandfather was a Christian. His parents were both Christian. In fact, when I was at 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, we had a Chinese elder. who's a professor of piano at the Curtis Institute. And I remember one time I said to him, so Sam, did you become a Christian here? He said, well, my great, great grandfather was made an elder of the Presbyterian Church in 1885 in China. So I'm from a Christian family. Well, Samuel Lamb was from a Christian family. He grew up in Macau, although he moved around a lot because his father was a preacher. I'm pretty sure they were, I couldn't find it exactly, but they seemed to have been Christian Missionary Alliance, which was partly why he has a high view of the sovereignty of God. And so he is born a Christian. His name is given Lam Hin Gau. Him means given to or dedicated to. Gau means Lamb of God. He doesn't get his name Samuel, they're Baptists, until he's baptized at about 11. Then he's given a Christian name Samuel. But there's a strong sense from his parents, it's very much the Samuel of the Bible story. They really wanted to dedicate this child for the service of the Lord. And he grew up under a strong influence from American missionaries. That's in part because his father was separated from them for many years. And this was not because their father didn't care. It's because they were starving. And he had to take a job somewhere while he was preaching. And this is kind of very common. and his very godly mother had a strong sense of vision for him, and she was a very wise, fervent Christian woman, and he was very close to the English missionaries. He spoke English fluently, and he was an extraordinarily gifted pianist. He was a classical concert pianist who loved the Beethoven sonatas, Chopin, all of those sorts of things. He had some formative influences in his life, beginning as a very little boy. At the time, they were living in a very rural area, and he became very sick. He was always a sickly child. He was small. He was very sickly. And he was diagnosed with diphtheria. And they took him to the missionary hospital, and the doctor says, there's nothing I can do for him. He is going to die. In fact, the only thing they suggested was to do a tracheotomy. When their first course of action is a tracheotomy, you're bad. Well, the parents decided that since he was going to die, they were going to take him home. They took him back to the village, and one of the elders in the church in the village said, well, let's not fail to pray for him. And they held the kind of prayer meeting we're going to learn about in 2 Chronicles 20. The men and the women and the little children, they got together. And in the morning, when the doctor visited, mainly to give condolences to the family, he found young Samuel Lamb sitting up completely well and eating breakfast. It was a miracle, the kind of thing that we are told to expect, the very things we read about in the Bible. He found himself in Hong Kong in his mid-teenage years. And for the first time, he's raised in a poor, rural, fervently Christian community, and then he goes to Hong Kong. one of the great glamorous cities of the world, and the Kowloon Harbor, and all of these things. And his heart, and he's wrestling with the pull of the world. And he's a very brilliant young man. He's a very gifted pianist. And that was a good experience for him. And he actually had some crisis moments. Now, I've often said to people, you can't know what it's like until you can taste it. You haven't really renounced the world and what it offers to you unless you taste it in your mouth. He got to that point. One formative experience in this time was his mother lived with the children, this is kind of common for Hong Kong, on the Chinese side of the bay, and he would take a ferry over to Queens College, a Christian college in Hong Kong. He was on the ferry as a 17-year-old when the Japanese dive bombers started attacking in December 1941. They began attacking Hong Kong. And the ferryman turns to the passengers and says, which way do you want me to go? Back to China or forward to Hong Kong? Well, the majority of them were from Hong Kong. And so they said, go to Hong Kong. And he's this 17-year-old boy. So he's stranded in Hong Kong for the Japanese invasion. And he's there a couple of months. After the Japanese conquer it, they start the ferry service again. He can go home. And I don't have time to recount them, but there's a number of experiences he has where he really learns the power of prayer. How often it is that the Lord will use formative trying circumstances early in someone's life to develop conviction and confidence in the Lord. This was true of Samuel Lamb. So he questioned whether to be a church musician or to preach the gospel. And he did not want to preach the gospel because he found that to be very daunting. He didn't think he would be very good at it. But what happened was he was back in Canton, now he's 18 years old, He's back in Canton, Guangzhou, and they're attending a Methodist church, which has an evangelical preacher. But one of the problems with a Methodist church is they have bishops and they're notorious. The congregation doesn't pick their pastor. This is true even today. Congregation doesn't pick their pastor. The bishop picks the pastor, and they have a process of rotating the pastors around. So you only get a pastor for about three years, lest the pastor should be too influential. And so the pastor leaves and a liberal pastor comes in and Samuel Lamb starts arguing with him. And so they basically throw him out of the... I don't know if he quit or they fired him. But a group of Christians begins meeting and he is asked to preach. His biography goes in some detail. Most of us have been there where he preaches his first sermon and it's a horrific experience for him. But his mother says to him, son, it's not about eloquence. It's about earnest proclamation of God's word. And he had done, particularly when he was in Hong Kong, he had done, and he was raised to do a lot of Bible memorization work. In fact, one of the things with Samuel Lamb is the Bible memory work that his mother had him do and how that's going to help him in life. So these are his early, that's his wedding, by the way. It's kind of grainy photos, but you know, it is what it is. Well, he, so he starts pastoring this church after World War II. And now you have, of course, now that the Japanese are gone, you have the civil war between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalists and the communists. And when the communists win that, the persecution against the Christians starts. It really, starting about 1950, the persecution becomes very extreme, very severe. And one of the things, there were all these American and British missionaries who had a huge impact. We'll probably do Hudson Taylor sometime and his pioneering missionary work in China. They were all driven out by the Western missionaries. And at the time, many Western missionaries thought they were going to lose everything. We have, you know, we have a hundred years invested in China, but the communists are going to stamp it out. Well, they certainly gave it a good try. And particularly in northern China, which apparently is the more nationalistic part of the country, there was very severe, deadly persecution. Christians being burned alive and those sorts of things. Well, down in the southern area, in Canton, he begins pastoring. Right when he gets that opportunity, he gets a high-paying job offering him to be professor of piano at a Christian college. And so he's got to make a decision. And he's been, so he left this church when he was 18, started preaching and they basically start a house church. And then just as it starts going, he gets offered a position and he decides he's going to be a preacher. He's going to stay. And it was his, it was his loyalty to Christ and to the people. Well, he's immediately pressured to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which is the official registered Christian church of China. Even today, there is a big divide between the house church movement and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. And even the house church pastors will admit there are many three-self pastors who are very faithful, but it's the state-run church in a communist country. And there were then particularly, it's interesting, there were restrictions on which books of the Bible you could preach in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. You couldn't preach Genesis. Isn't that interesting? Why? Because the doctrine of creation was against the evolutionary dogma of the Communist Party. You couldn't preach Revelation because it's a philosophy of history that, dare we say, is not the same as the Communist philosophy of history. So you can have a kind of pietistic Christianity But you can't have the real thing. Well, he wasn't about to do that. But the free self patriotic church gave you was freedom from persecution. That's what it gave you. But he is not going to accept that. Neither is his church. By 1955, the church grows over 100 people meeting at that house. And it became clear that he was a marked man. It's kind of a long story, but he'd been to Beijing, and he'd met with Wing Mang Dao, the great leader of that generation who had recently been arrested. He was a known associate of Ming Wang Dao, and that is partly why he was arrested. And he noticed people looking at him in the street. He noticed people in the congregation who were visitors and were taking notes. And actually, he had a sense, he and his wife, by the way, he married a very extraordinarily godly woman, that he was likely to be arrested. She actually packed him clothing to keep at the church. On Sunday, that week, he preached the last 10 verses of Hebrews 11, which is about being chased into caves and sawn into. Of them, the world was not worthy. The whole church was praying. And then on Wednesday night, what did they do on Wednesday night? On Wednesday night, they had a church dinner, prayer meeting, and Bible class. That sounds familiar? I have to say, one of the takeaways when you read the Chinese church is that they're practicing the same religion we're practicing. They have the same pattern of church life that we have here. When I think of when you read, you know, he's in a certain situation and he thought of a certain Bible verse, it's the Bible verse that we tend to think of. Because they really are an extension of our church history. And they really are practicing the same pattern of Christianity we are. Well, sure enough, after prayer meeting, two government officials and some men from the Three-Self Patriotic Movement come. They finger him, they play the Judas, and he is arrested. He has his first arrest. That's a Chinese prison. He's charged with anti-revolutionary activities. Now, then and now, by the way, I saw some things from Z just recently, the exact same thing. The charge was being made that if you were a Christian, you were a pro-imperial lackey of America and Britain. and that you were being funded by the CIA and you're spreading anti-revolutionary doctrines, i.e. the gospel. And so, and it was a very nationalistic. Today, it's even a very racial angle that Xi is pushing on China. Actually, it's interesting that the president of China just last week told his people to denounce America as we're a white supremacist nation. And back then, that was the charge, anti-revolutionary. pro-imperial activities because you're a Christian. He tells about his first night in jail, you know, and he'd known it was coming. Last year I met with a man who runs an underground seminary in a different place in China from the seminary I'm associated with, and I asked him afterwards, I said, what's the likelihood of you getting arrested in the next year? He said, 100%. 95%? Something like that. Well, he knew that was him, but he says, you know, the first time they led me off in handcuffs for a shame-based society like China, he goes, I was feeling low. And they throw him in a dark cell, and he's struggling with his faith, and he's praying, and he hears singing from elsewhere. And this is going to be a familiar theme for the underground church. What they would do is they would sing. And you think of Paul and Silas and Philippians 16, and he says, you know, that's what I thought of. And he starts inculcating, here he is, 1955, he's in a Chinese prison with Mao Zedong, you know, and all this stuff, and he starts praising the Lord and singing. It becomes a major feature of his time. Well, it's a normal drill. They start interrogating him over and over. They submit him to re-education. And they physically wear them down. On one occasion, he was so tired, they came to him and said, we have a confession for you to read. He goes, I'm not guilty of anything. I'm not guilty of these things. I'm not an anti-revolutionist. I don't really care. I'm not a pro-imperialist at all. I'm not going to do it. They said, well, just read it aloud and see if you understand it. Well, he was just worn out. They recorded him, of course. And then they took an edited version of that recording and they broadcast it, because it was a big deal in Canton. So the three self-patriots... Here's the problem with Christians who collaborate with the tyrannical government. You just can't help but playing the role of Judas, because it's what you signed up for. So the Three-Self Church in Canton holds a big meeting to denounce Samuel Lamb, who's in jail, and they start bringing in false witnesses, and it's not lost on him. And he starts talking about, you know, Paul says in Philippians, it is given to us not only to have salvation, but to suffer together with Jesus. And he says, as false witnesses are coming forth, making accusations against him, and things he didn't, and what they're doing, they have a guy sitting in the sermon, at one point he's preaching on Ezekiel, and he preaches on Meshach and Tubal, he mentions Russia, so they accuse him of anti-Russian conspiracy, because he's preaching Ezekiel on the end times. He relies on Bible memory. In fact, for his first prison experience, he goes, my biggest regret is I didn't memorize more of the Bible. He relied on hymns. You think of the blessing of knowing hymns and of having evangelical hymns in your mind and heart. And he discovers the presence. He said he felt in a very tangible way the presence of Christ with him through the Holy Spirit. Now, one thing he learns, he learns to witness with discretion, because if you're in a Chinese prison in 1955, you don't just start witnessing, you don't ask the EE questions to your guards, because they shoot you. And literally, I mean, people are getting pulled out and shot all the time. And so he develops a strategy that his goal is to exhibit such peace and joy, which he was experiencing through the Holy Spirit. And when people would ask him about that, and they would come, they knew he was a Christian. You must be a Christian. Then he would witness the gospel to them because he had to manage, on the one hand, you know, a stewardship of his life. not recklessly throwing his life away. And it becomes a big issue for him over the years about the balance between being bold and prudent, but not being too prudent. So that's the point. He begins praying for individual people, which is the key to evangelism, to start praying for opportunities. He prays for opportunities. He seeks to live a godly, joyful life in his prison, and that provides him witnessing opportunities. After 18 months, no hearing, no court case, he's released. He doesn't know why, he gets out. So he goes back, that's Samuel Lamb. And while he was gone, the house church kept meeting. This is a similar pattern. I read recently, I don't know if you heard about Covenant Reign. Early Reign Covenant Church is the largest church in China that has just, in the last year, has been severe. Oh, the pastor's been arrested, sent to a hard labor camp. This was last year. The wife's been sent to a hard labor camp. Their little children have been taken from them to be raised by communists. And I read just this week that what the congregation is doing as they meet is they're going through the shorter catechism and the Heidelberg catechism. Because they don't have a pastor. Their pastor's in jail, and so they're using the Heidelberg catechism and the shorter catechism. I'm always reminded of a certain seminary professor of mine who told me, that told us that the Westminster Confession is totally irrelevant outside of American circles. The exact opposite is the case. Well, they were meeting for prayer and Bible study together, and they were praying for their pastor. And, oh, by the way, at that meeting, there were a couple people in his church. There was one humble guy. The Chinese came to him and says, we want you to give evidence against your pastor. Well, my pastor is not guilty. You're going to say he is. You're going to say he said this, this, and that. Well, that would be lying. I'm a Christian. I can't lie. So they throw him in jail for anti-patriotic activities. So members of the church have been, three members of the church have been in prison for not falsely accusing their pastor. So they let him out and he goes back to preaching. Now the thing that happens is, I mean, he's kind of become a celebrity this way. And people start coming to church now. And he starts preaching with a new authority. You know why? Because he's paid the price. And he's seen, he's experienced the power of Christ in his own life. And this is one of the reasons why what Tertullian said is true, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. There is an authenticity when suffering Christians stand firm in the Lord, maintain a gracious, joyful life, and preach the gospel. And this is when the church starts growing. Now, he starts authoring pamphlets because he's into this site. We've got all these new converts, a lot of them young, not all young. And they need to basically write a pamphlet on the true God, a pamphlet on the Lord is coming soon. These are now classics of the house church movement. And he'd saved enough money, he was dirt poor, he had a mimeograph machine. So he's cranking them out, you know, he and his wife are back there mimeographing them and cutting them off and stapling them together. The Holy Spirit and the Christian, is the Bible true? And for a number of years, not just him, but all across China, there was comparative freedom in the middle years of the 1950s. Well, there's a lot of stuff I'm skipping, but at one point he's summoned to, and they're aware of the general threat. But at one point he's summoned to like a regional gathering of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and he goes, probably foolishly, and they put pressure on him and he agrees to bring his church into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. And the argument was this, and it would be a powerful argument. Look, you can preach the Bible. We'll give you no restrictions on preaching. Preach whatever you want, and we'll keep you from being persecuted. Don't you want to evangelize people? Don't you want to have the freedom to preach the gospel? Don't you want to be able to have a church building? So he agrees to do it. Two years later, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement turns him into the authorities. It turns out in the legal structure of China, I didn't know this until today actually, At least then, charges had to be made from the lowest level, and it was your work commune. It's communism. So your whole local organization's your work commune, and you had to be part of a work commune. The whole reason they got them to go with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was so that they would be as work commune, so that they could press better charges that would land them in prison longer. It had been a setup all along. Welcome to the world. He's denounced, and in 1958, he is arrested. The liberals in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement hated him, of course. Well, here's the charge. You were granted freedom, but you persisted in disobeying the law. You are charged with being an anti-revolutionary and a pro-imperialist. That was the thing. And here's where detailed charges are made, particularly, you know, imagine today if someone were to sit in our sanctuary and just kind of take note, oh, they have the goods on me. I mean, you know, Twitter would certainly cut me off if they did that. And by the way, on the current trajectory, this is what's going to happen in America. You do realize, I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm saying on the current trajectory, the very logic, hate speech, you know, we have to reeducate you as national media people are saying, the very things being proposed, I'm not saying they're going to happen, but it is the current trajectory, is the very thing our brothers and sisters face in China. And they, of course, went after the church leaders. Well, he refused in his trial, he refused to confess his guilt to false charges. And so he's convicted and sentenced to 20 years hard labor. That's his sentence. 20 years hard labor. He serves that sentence. 1959, he arrives in an agricultural camp. He's a very frail, he's physically weak. And of course, they prey on that. They're mocking him and even the other Convicts or Markie walking him. It's back. He's got a he's got a you know pickaxe, and he's doing his best And he he was like his first day was a bad day in his life. You know he's the concert pianist all right and He's dying out there, but he resolves it. He thinks of, you know, Paul in Colossians 3, do your work unto the Lord, not as to men, but unto the Lord. And he resolves that his duty, God having sovereignly placed him there, was to do his best, and he resolves that he will give it his 100% best, the manual labor that they give every day. One of the difficult jobs they give him was They were planting tobacco. It was a tobacco farm. It was a mass tobacco place. And he was to plow the fields, and then they gave him buckets of manure, human manure. And he had to carry the buckets up, and he gives a graphic description of what it was like to pick the bucket up. He was supposed to carry two. He could only carry one, so there's a problem with that. He gets there, and he says, you know, the first time I stuck my hand in, and pulled it out. He said, that was, you know, a tough moment in my life. And so he is really suffering for the gospel. But out of reverence for the Lord, he does his best. Now, the worst part is, after a day of backbreaking labor, there's a two to three hour re-educational session at night. And look what the agenda is, communism, evolution, and atheism. Sound like a country near you? I think it's simply the evolution. You know, those promoters of evolution. This is the doctrine of these totalitarian regimes. Communism, evolution, and atheism. And he's trying to maintain a low profile, but he has a hard time doing it. I have here one time, the only other Christian with him at the time was a Roman Catholic priest who proved not to be a Christian, and who very early on denounced his faith. And at that same meeting, they got him and it's threatening. And they said, now you will make a denunciation. Well, he had prayed. He knew this was coming, so he prayed. What verse would you pray? He prayed James 1.5. That's what he prayed. If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask the Lord and he will give him wisdom. And so he decides his strategy is he's going to denounce liberal Christianity. So he gets up and goes, you know, there are, I'm, I'm, I'm ready to get my denunciation. There are so-called Christians who are not Christians and, and they don't lead godly lives and they treat people badly and they don't believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. They don't believe in the deity of Jesus. They don't believe in the miracles. And I denounce them. They're like, Oh, that was great. I don't know what he's talking about. You know, that was great. All right. You're he's off the hook for six months off that one. And this is what he's going through. Uh, His greatest wish was a Bible. He relied, he had worked on Bible, and he did fine. You would hope this would be the case. I mean, he would, I can imagine doing the very same thing, lying on his cot at night, trying to remember all the books of the Bible. And the only book he couldn't remember a verse from was Obadiah, but then he remembered he'd preached a sermon on Obadiah, and it was amazing how the Bible did come back to him. And he had memorized large portions of Romans, Ephesians, and the Gospel of John, and that served him particularly well. He did find that his memory of the Bible grew stronger as he prayed about it. And again, he would witness, his witnessing strategy was to lead a godly, loving, obedient, he would work as hard as he could, and the guards came to respect that. They really saw he was giving 110%, although he was their worst worker in some respects. and then to have opportunity. If someone asked him, he would then witness to him, and he would pray for that. Well, his breakthrough comes about two years there, and he's already got the respect of the establishment, and the barber gets released. Now, this goes back when he's a boy. When he first went to Hong Kong, he was at an English-speaking school where he was the poor boy. and you had all these English kids, and you had all these Chinese-English kids who were wealthy, and he was trying to fit in, and his device for fitting in was he cut the kid's hair. And he learned, and he worked at it to get good at it, and the thing that allowed him to be part of the group as an older boy was hair cutting. So the head of the camp goes, we need a hair cutter. And he goes, I know how to cut hair. And he does, and they're like, okay, now I think the hair standards, where's the loopers, I don't think your daughter would approve of this, you know. But he's better than anybody else, and so he, now this was the job of all jobs, and it's God's answer to his prayers. Because now he gets more or less one-on-one opportunities with people. And he had a barber shop, but he would also go out to the work sites and cut their hair. And his thing was he would hum hymns while he was cutting, not sing them, he would hum. And by the way, all the hymns that they mentioned are in our hymnal. A lot of, where's Verlin, a lot of Fanny Crosby. How you can be a Christian and not love Fanny Crosby, I don't know. Ask Verlin. Jesus our blessed Redeemer. So he's literally cutting hair. And people will go, are you a Christian or something? And he builds a church. And he's able to disciple them. He'll get about 10 to 15 minutes alone with people. And then he'll give them Bible verses. Okay, I want you to memorize and put into practice this Bible verse, and when you come back in two weeks for your next haircut, we're going to talk about it. And the Lord allows him, as he's trusting the Lord in this terrible situation, to start a church. Now, one day he's doing that, and the guy there is another pastor. And they're like, oh my word, you're another pastor. And they're talking, and the other guy reveals he has a copy of the New Testament. There's a whole story behind it. That's the Chinese New Testament. And so he says, can I borrow it? And he got some paper, because he's now part of the administration. So he's now a staff clerk. Those people, they can get anything they want. He's got paper and writing materials. So at night, he's furiously copying the New Testament so he can have the whole thing. And he's caught. Because he's caught, the Bible is confiscated. All of his notes are confiscated. and he is sentenced to a coal mine where he spends the next 15 years. So you're like, this guy's already suffered. No, no, no, no, no. It's just started. He's going to spend the next 15 years in a coal mine. These are Chinese prison laborers going into a coal mine. There's not a lot to say about that period of his life. You know, he himself makes the connection between Jonah and the whale, and the misery of it, and there were huge numbers of suicides there, that a lot of people were dying from it. The thing that helped him, he was small, and that helped him because he didn't have to stoop over where the other ones did. and a re-education intensified, but he would not renounce Christ. Again, he continues, there's a lot of stories about him continuing, so what does he do? He says, I'm going to pray, I'm going to read my mind the Bible verses, I'm going to sing hymns in my heart. I'm going to do my level best. I'm going to see..." And he talks about the presence. He said, I did. I had the joy of the Lord. I had Christ with me. And one of his big testimonies is, you just can't know what that's like until you've been there. I mean, I think it's probably true. And so, well, he gets promoted for this. And they put him in charge of a railway car, you know, a coal mine, a coupling station. And this gives him opportunities to do what he'd done before. It's just dark now. In fact, he discovered that the darkness was actually helpful because the guards don't go deep down into the... And he actually had more opportunities for evangelism. Well, 15 years. Finally, the day comes when he is going to be released. And they call him in, and they say, you're about to be released, but you can't go back to Canton. Oh, no, because we know what you're going to do. And we can't trust you, and you're a danger to the state. So you're going to go to Shanghai. He actually was just happy to get out of jail. I mean, 20 years of hard labor, and he had connections in Shanghai. But he hurts his back right before this. And he's talking to the camp doctor. And the camp doctor says, so you're being released. So where are they sending you? Well, I want to go home to Canton, but they won't send me there. They're sending me to Shanghai. But look, I'll take it. Next day, he gets his release papers and he's going home to Canton. He can only surmise that the Lord used that unbelieving communist man to show kindness to him. He gets home in time to be with his aged mother. And literally, it's kind of a whole story of him walking down the street, 20 years, hard labor, and he looks different. And it looks about the same, but he's trying to remember things. And there's his home, 35, you know, at the church, at a church house. There's no church meeting there now. And he goes up and his mother is dying and she recognizes him and a little boy comes in and it's his grandson. And he says, is this the grandpa who we've been praying for all these years? Where is my wife? His wife had died the year before. He said that was the bitterest thing for him. His wife had died the year before. Well, it'd be easy to say he immediately came back filled with the Holy Spirit and defied the authorities, but that is not the way it works. He's going to lay low. He gets a job teaching English and, you know, and he lacks confidence 20 years. And he thinks he's had suffered intellectual degradation. He really doesn't think he can do it anymore. And he's afraid to do it. But you know what happens? People start hearing about him and they've been praying for him for 20 years. And it's only six months before he, you know, he just can't not do it. The church demands that he come and they pray for him and he comes back. His sister confronts him and says, you cannot do it. Do you dare preach again? He says, the people are showing courage. I will go because I must. Now this is another guy whose name I forget. But one of his burdens was, he says, you know, I need those seven pamphlets I wrote. Because that was really like my A-grade material, and it would really help me, and I'll use those for my ministry. But the communists had ransacked and stolen everything. This was an old man who had buried his six feet below his house. And they dug up his basement looking for stuff, but they didn't go six feet back. And these are three of the seven pamphlets he wrote, had written. And when those were given to him, he took that as a sign and an encouragement that the Lord wanted him to preach again. Ah, this is a picture of his sanctuary. That's the sanctuary. That's him preaching. Quickly, his church grows to 1,500 members. Five services on a Sunday with every seat, every...they're sitting on each other's laps. I will point out he did not preach short sermons. I just do want to put that out there. He would hand out mimeographed notes and they would be seven pages, single spaces, mimeographed notes. He became, in the years that followed, he became a real believer, and his experiences taught him this, he was a believer in Christian literature. And he became, in the next 20 years, one of the main distributors with the U.S. missions agencies. And he was nationally, he was hugely prominent. In fact, Wang Mingdao came to see him and said, I'm told I'm number one most wanted Christian in China after having got out of hard labor. I'm told you're number two. Well, I'm going to die soon, so you're going to get promoted. You're going to be number one. And you got to have some fun with it. And so, you know, this gives him authority. It gives him spiritual stature, both existentially, just spiritual power. and also in the esteem of people. So here's the police. This is so typical. The police come to him to say, what you're doing is illegal. This is an unregistered church. You must immediately close it to the public. I can't do that. This is God's work. I wish to be a law-abiding citizen. I urge my people to do the same, but I can't stop this work for it's the work of God. Well, then you will bear the consequences. Lamb, I just spent 20 years in prison for preaching the gospel of Jesus. I'm prepared to do it again. And they just let, what'd he do? They just left him alone. I mean, you know, he had so much spiritual authenticity and power and integrity that the local authorities, Lamb died in 2013, 30,000 Christians attended his funeral. In 2018, his church was shut down. But that's not the end. We don't know. I mean, what's going on in China now, it's as bad as it has ever been over there. And they shut down that church, but we can trust that the same God who oversaw them and blessed them will continue to do so. Here's some saying from Samuel Lamb. I love this one. They said, what has suffering taught you? That grumbling does not help. He had a high view of the sovereignty of God, and he often speaks about that and says, look, God is sovereignly played, God is a good, loving, faithful, wise God. You know what? Just grumbling about the manure. The hardest blow to him was the death of his wife, because, you know, he'd so long to see her, and he'd missed 20 years of her life. Grumbling does not help. We must be prepared to suffer. Now, these are words for us, and it's easy for us to say this, but Don't you feel, I mean, I can think of them in 1955 saying, we know it's coming. Well, they had Mao Zedong. I mean, I grant that. But we are getting closer to a time when any reasonable Christian would go, you know, the current trajectory, you know, they talk about what will the church do if we lose our tax-exempt status? keep tithing, I think is what we'll do, right? We'll just keep doing the Lord's work. The American church is going to experience a winnowing. The Chinese church experienced a winnowing. I would say that the worldly cultural accommodating megachurch is not likely to do well. But we should have a confidence should that day come, and we need to be wise. Do Bible memorization work now. We must be prepared for the fact that we may be arrested. Because I was sent to prison, I already prepared a bag with some clothes, shoes, and a toothbrush. When I had to go to the... And by the way, I can't tell it all. They're constantly dragging him before the police. It's the same official asking the same questions. He's trying to be respectful. What's the answer to that? The same as the last seven times. That's what they do. The people I know in China in the last year, church members have been harassed. That's the first signs. Church members and the pastor gets called in for interrogation. That's before they act. But then he said, more persecution, more growth. If you meet a Chinese house church Christian, that's not flippancy. That's not boasting. It's the reality. And he says, Christian faith is most precious when we experience it under testing. The primary purpose of prayer is not for gaining wealth, comfort, security. Faith and prayer are to make us true followers of our Lord who suffered as the greatest example of purpose in life. their commitment to Jesus, to personal discipleship to Jesus and to the Word of God. Well, here's the book that is my main resource, Bold as a Lamb, Ken Anderson. It's an older book, but it's a terrific book, a great example of missionary biography. Well, I will say this. The thing I kept thinking the most as I was reading this material is those are the verses we would appeal to. Those are the prayers we would pray. and God was faithful for them, God will be faithful to us. Father in heaven, we thank you for Samuel Lamb and his life and witness, and for our brothers and sisters in China, and we pray for them as they're suffering. Oh, Lord, I pray for the pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church and his wife and their children and those dear Christians. We pray for the suffering house church movement all over China, and I pray, Father, that you would do what we know you're doing, what you have done throughout this whole episode. as you are responding to their faith and suffering with the power of your Holy Spirit. Father, we do pray that you would cause this evil, evil regime to relent. I pray that our own nation would take a more strident role towards this evil, wicked regime. But Father, you are the Savior of your people. Be all-sufficient for your glory. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.