Outlive Your Life_ You Were Made to Make a Difference - Max Lucado [24]
CHAPTER 8
Persecution:
Prepare for It; Resist It
The priests, the captain of the temple,
and the Sadducees came upon them.
—ACTS 4:1
On April 18, 2007, three Christians in Turkey were killed for their beliefs. Necati Aydin was one of them. He was a thirty-five-year-old pastor in the city of Malatya.
He nearly didn’t go to his office that morning. He’d been traveling for ten days and his wife, Semse, wanted him to stay home and rest. She fed breakfast to their two children, Elisha and Esther, and took them to school. Upon returning, she walked softly so as not to awaken her husband. Even so, he stirred, squinted, opened his arms, and admitted his weariness. “I don’t want to get up today.”
But he did. There was much work to do. Only 0.2 percent of the mainly Muslim nation follows Jesus. Ironic. The land once knew the sandal prints of the apostle Paul and provided a stage for the first churches. But today? Turkish Christ worshippers number less than 153,000 in a nation of 76 million.1 People such as Necati live to change that. He pulled his weary body out of bed and got ready for the day.
As Semse remembers and retells the events of that morning, she pauses between sentences. Her round cheeks flush with pink. Dark hair sweeps in a wave across her forehead. Until this point she’s been able to contain the emotion. She described the attack, the cruelty, and the harshness of sudden widowhood without tears. But at this sentence, they press through. “My dear husband walked out the door at eleven. I was waiting for him to get on the elevator. There he smiled at me one last time, but I didn’t know that was the last smile. That’s what I’ll always remember . . .”
She sighs and looks away as if seeing a face only she can see. Then back. “This is a painful thing for me because I miss his smile . . . because the sun doesn’t rise when he doesn’t smile . . .”
Semse looks down and permits a soft sob but only one. “It’s a bitter cup, and we have to drink of it every day.”
By the time Necati reached the office, his two colleagues had already received visitors: five young men who had expressed an interest in the Christian faith. But the inquisitors brought more than questions. They brought guns, bread knives, ropes, and towels.
The attackers brandished their weapons and told Necati to pray the Islamic prayer of conversion: “There is no God except Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
When Necati refused, the torture began. For an agonizing hour the assailants bound, interrogated, and cut the Christians. Finally, with the police pounding on the door, they sliced the throats of the victims. The last word heard from the office was the cry of an unswerving Christian: “Messiah! Messiah!”2
Such stories have a way of silencing us. This morning’s traffic jam is no longer worth the mention. While I might see myself—for a microsecond—as a man of faith, I ponder the martyrs of Malatya and wonder, Would I make the sacrifice? Would I cry out, “Messiah! Messiah!”? Would I give up my life? Why, some days I don’t want to give up my parking spot.
The Turkish pastors could have lived. With their simple confession of Allah, knives would have been lowered and lives spared. Semse would have her husband, and Elisha and Esther would have their father. Necati could have gone home to his family. He chose, instead, to speak up for Christ.
What would you have done?
The question is more than academic. Persecution comes. Three-fourths of Christians live in the third world, often in anti-Christian environments. More Chinese take part in Sunday worship than the entirety of western Europeans. Lebanon is 39 percent Christian; Sudan, 5 percent; Egypt, about 10 percent.3 Many of these saints worship at