Loving Prisoners

Do you read the Voice of the Martyrs publications? Do you read Foxe's Book of Martyrs? Do you have regular times of prayer for the persecuted church? Do you personally know anyone who has suffered for the faith? When I was in seminary, one of my classmates was a man from Eritrea who had been imprisoned in a shipping container with no air conditioning, set out in the hot sun and separated from his family for two years. This was all at the behest of the communist government of Eritrea, and it was done to him because of his faith. Such things have not stopped. Radical Hindus burn churches in Northern India. Sudan is a failed state and Nigeria is a borderline failed state where rogue militias burn Christian villages and slaughter their inhabitants with impunity. Israel persecutes Christians in Bethlehem, Gaza, and beyond. You all know this. I know it. And yet most of the time, it makes no difference to us. We'd prefer to forget it. It contradicts our most cherished beliefs about our own personal peace and prosperity. Those people had the terrible luck to live in those terrible places. Thank God we don't have to endure what they have to endure. Thank you, God, that I am not a Russian, not a Chinaman, not a brown person far away. Amen. Service is over.

No! The Hebrew writer, in our text this morning, forbids us from looking away. He specifically tells us to remember the prisoners just like we are in prison with them ourselves. He goes further and tells us to remember all the sufferers because we too are in the body.