Embracing God’s Truth in a Hostile Culture (Part 1 of 2)

Christians hope is not the same thing as an optimist. Think things will always turn out okay that's not really true what is happened to the church over the 2000 years of history where charge of martyrs and confessors that's right rear hand he's our guest today on Focus on the Family to share some really powerful stories of Christians who serve God and persecution that you hope you'll stay with us as we discuss how believers can live faithfully in a hostile culture by John Fuller and your hostess Focus on the Family president Jim Daly John it's so humbling to hear some of the hardships Christians were not only right now, but over the centuries and I've had the privilege to travel for focus when I did the international work. I think I went to about 70 countries. I was in the Soviet Union when Gorbachev was taken hostage. You were there that day we were there for four or five days we can get out of the country but we went down and we are with the defecting tank commanders and it was a really interesting time as an American to watch a country kind of evolved out of communism and into something probably also totalitarian but it always catches my interest to talk about how does the church behave in this context, and there are some wonderful lessons to learn from history and I'm excited to talk with our guest today because he has done some amazing interviews around the world, but primarily there in the East Block to identify communism and socialism totalitarianism. What does it look like what does it smell like and what we need to be looking out for is the church in America and the other loan applications for us today. Coming out of the work that Rod Greer did for his book live not by lies and manual for Christian dissidents were so glad to have them here is a journalist and has written a number of other books but this one lived not by lies as I can be the foundation for our conversation today, just click the link in the show notes or call one 800 the letter a in the word family to get your copy Rod that welcome to Focus on the Family, it's great to be here junk that's really good to have you here because I love cultural observers in Oz Guinness does that you're doing that as I mentioned you interviewed dozens of believers who suffered for their faith under communism, and these are mature Christians in my experience, these are not the milquetoast Christians that the apostle Paul was talking about. These are people that are committed, they have in some cases given their lives for the faith and for the expression of freedom. What did you take away from your conversations with them. While that's first of all, humility. I'm blessed we are all blessed to have grown up in the United States, with the blessing of religious liberty and to go over there that want talk to Christians and I went to Russia. I went to Poland to hungry, Czech Republic, Slovakia, to talk to Christians who had had to pay a real price. The loss of liberty. In some cases even torture the gospel. It made me realize first of all how blessed we have been in America but also it made me realize that we have so much to learn from them and to be honest with you. The reason I got over there in the first place was because back in 2015. I think it was.

I got a phone call from an American physician who was really frantic. He told me that his mother who had spent four years and I checked prison in the 1950s because she refused to stop going to church. She immigrated to America. In his letter. Most of her life, but she sits on the things I see happening in America today remind me of what I escaped from. I thought that was really alarmist but I made a point, Jim. Every time I would travel and I would meet people who had grown up in the Soviet Union or the Soviet bloc and it come to America in the Cold War. Just ask them for the things you sing today does it remind you what you left behind. Every single one of them said yes if you talk to them long enough they get angry that American Christians won't take them seriously well and I think it's important for us to know what that looks like what are they expressing that we should be concerned about. I mean, some people were so blinded.

We don't even see it right in front of us. They've had the experience of seeing a government take control of people's liberties and squash them, and I think that's the right question.

What are they seeing their sing cancel culture, going everywhere there seeing people having to be afraid for their jobs for their livelihoods and for that reputation afraid to speak their mind exactly that point yet, except that they get on the wrong side of the ideology and what's interesting about this. Jim is it's not just coming from the government may not, at this point. Even primarily be coming from the government it's coming for the fact that the left has taken over all of the major institutions of American society started at the universities in the media, and now it's expanded to big business to sports to lots of medicine. Even the US military. We call it woke. This is a softer form of the totalitarianism they left behind. And these people these émigrés. These precious people who came to this country looking for freedom there warning us if you don't step out of your complacent comfortable zone and speak out now and make a preparation for what's coming, it's gonna be too late. It Rod, I have had some taste of this when I traveled as I mentioned being in the Soviet Union. I also went to Cuba when Fidel Castro was still in power. I went with Dave Drabek he a former major league baseball pitcher and he did a clinic and we talk to people, then to China. In those contexts. One of the things that is an early indicator of a problem is when we have to speak in code, you know, we stopped speaking her mind. We start saying what we gotta say it differently because somebody may be offended by what we say and I think that's an early indicator of a problem, absolutely. I was in Russia on the national day of remembrance for the victims of political violence. I went out to the national monument which is a field called the topo field south of Moscow where the KGB in a 14 month period in the 1930s massacred 25,000 people on that field today.

It is the national monument to remember them while I was there I was looking at poster to help me orient myself to the site. An older Russian man came up and asked me what are you doing here.

He asked my translator and translator explained to him that I was working on this book about what I call soft totalitarianism and that the translator said people in America are losing their jobs now because I get on the wrong side of this ideology that old Russian who was there to pray for his family members who were murdered there. He said that's always the first sign when people have to fear for their jobs because of their on the wrong side of the ruling ideology right. It forces you to pick livelihood versus your convictions and I mean the founding of America was not built with that premise built with the eye idea that you can express yourself freely, especially in the religious area right exactly you know one thing to Jim that blinds us Americans to to what's actually happening able.

First of all, it's what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said people outside of Russia think that what happened there could never happen in our country, but in fact it could happen at any country on earth under the right circumstances and not the second aspect of blinds people is when we think of totalitarianism. We think of the Gulag's we think of the secret police. We think of bread lines all the stuff that's from the Cold War.

We think of George Orwell's 1984. What we don't have that today.

So how can this be totalitarianism. This is a new form of totalitarianism that's taking power through softer means by marching through the institutions and not terrifying people and making them fear in order to conform, but rather telling them like look, if you want to have a good life. A good middle-class life to advance in incorporate the corporate world, etc., then you need to sign onto this ideology and if not, you'll be on the outside so many of us Americans don't understand what it means to suffer for the faith. And so we find ways to rationalize our cooperation with Caesar. In this way yeah it's the truth. Rod, one of the difficulties.

If you watch the news or just have a conversation at work, something like that this concept.

It's the title of your book live not by lies which is a line from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's hard for people, especially if I could just say us average people to comprehend what is true right now because even in the expression of news.

You've got left-leaning news yet right-leaning news and you can't say this is a hand write everything we can agree that this is the hand I'm holding my hand up for the audio listeners, but I mean that. It's that absurd right now and so to get to the point, live not by lies. I guess the first thing you have to do is define what is true.

This is one of the core problems that we face today and this is one of the things I learned from the Christians who suffered under communism.

They said that you have got to make a stand. In truth, you got to know what you believe and stand there and defend it because one of the things the totalitarians will do is try to confuse you and make you think the truth is totally relative if you can't stand firmly on truth uncompromisingly on truth, then you're not going to make it through what they throw at you and that this is something that so many normal people think that we can just get past it. If we just vote the right people and if I can give you one quick example what you probably know Ryan T. Anderson, the head of the ethics and Public policy Center in Washington very brave warrior for traditional values and for the traditional family vibrator book a couple of years ago called when Harry became Sally. It's a response to the transgender moment. Ryan is a very faithful Catholic, but he's also incredibly respectful and careful scholar. This is on good book that challenges transgender ideology earlier in 2021 Amazon very quietly decided to stop selling the book right. Why they said that we won't sell books anymore that construe transgender prism as a mental disability or mental illness. Well you know what that's their right to do so in our free country bookseller shouldn't have to sell anything he doesn't want to self I would note though that Mein Kampf.

Hitler's book, you can still buy that through Amazon, the knee, that doesn't make booksellers have the right to do this, but here's the thing. Amazon control so much of the retail book market in the United States that if it decides it is no longer going to sell a certain kind of book. Those books will not get published because no publisher can afford to do this so we have here a case of a corporate actor using its liberties in the public square to remove from the public square.

Discussion about an important issue like transgender prism. This is the way that the soft totalitarianism is taking place have to change laws the government hasn't gotten involved here. The when you have places like booksellers, publishers, media corporations, etc. deciding within their rights. The constitutional rights to abandon liberalism classical liberalism. This is what you get, searcher, and that's why we prefer people to do exactly were you saying that the resource through Focus on the Family you know were not paying shareholders. All that goes back in the ministry and you should get rods book writer from Fauquier. It's called live not by lies and manual for Christian dissidents and you can get your copy when you click the link in the episode notes Rod let's go back to that idea of live not by lies. The title your book. The quote of Alexander Solzhenitsyn you have illustration in your book. I think by hovels during Chris Rozier described that and what does it communicate own Vaclav Havel was a dissident in the same Arab Solzhenitsyn. He later became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia and he in a 1977 essay called the power of the powerless. He talked about how people who had no political power could nevertheless step out and affect change and this is a principle that Solzhenitsyn started out with in his essay live not by lies, but Hubble really explored it in the event of the parable of the greengrocer. He said imagine that you have someone who sells fruits and vegetables in a communist city. All the businesses in town have to hang up the sign in the window workers of the world unite the Marxist slogan.

Nobody believes it, but they hang that sign there chose to avoid trouble. What happens says hovel if the greengrocer one day, says you know what, I'm not going to live by this line, the more he takes the sign down.

Well, the secret police will come take him away they will seize his business. He will be forced to be a janitor or something his family won't be able to travel his kids won't be able to get into good colleges, etc. he will pay a price. What is he gaining says hovel. He has shown that if you are willing to suffer for your convictions then you don't have to live by lies that conforming to the system is not inevitable are those who prepared to suffer and when other people see that he has been willing to live by his convictions and suffer for them.

They'll be drawn to that. And eventually this will overturn the government but are goal here is not to I think spin people into negativity and what I want to do with at least some of the time we have left is talk about what God would expect of us. What we as Christians should do to preserve these liberties and to fight for the things that are right at any balance all that well. I wonder assure your listeners your viewers that this is a hopeful book. It's a scary book because the things that the people who endured communism. The Christians who endured communism. Things are talking about a pretty scary we not seen that in this country before and they are convinced and I am to that it is coming in one way or the other what they say is do not lose hope that for Christian's hope is not the same thing as optimism and optimist thinks things will always turn out okay that's not really true. Let me look at what is happened to the church over the 2000 years of history where charge of martyrs and confessors, but a Crip for Christian hope is that if you suffer faithfully for Jesus Christ and you're willing to take whatever the world throws out at you, then you will triumph the Lord will try out through your sacrifice and these people I talked over there.

Not one of them. Jim expected to live to see the end of communism. They resisted it because their believers because it was the right thing to do and yet the Lord surprised them. I think we need to be thinking that way but we can't think past the fact that we Christians in America are going to be called to suffer and this is the key that the dissidents in Eastern Europe told me that got them through this I thought to this one Baptist pastor in Russia. I remember your receptor was his name were standing on the street corner in Moscow in early November snow starting to fall and he looked at me in the eye and said go back to America and tell the church if you're not prepared to suffer for our Lord Jesus Christ, you're not going to make it through what's coming. That is the key message of this book. People don't want to hear that were going to have to suffer, but this has been the story of the Christian church since the very beginning. It is the story of our brothers and sisters in Christ in Muslim countries today in China and other nations.

Why should we think that the cup is going to pass us by. If we suffer faithfully. The Lord will bless us immoderately.

I'm convinced of that. I agree and I think we cannot lose who we are in Christ to fight that battle with and maintain that identity in Christ through the battle. In fact from that. I think there was a three-part admonishment for the church to pursue which receive judgment and describe the three.

This was his and simple method of preparing the church for the clock of edges.

This man was a Catholic priest doing work against the Nazis in his native Zagreb in 1943 he got a note that the Gestapo was coming form. So he escaped to his mother's home country, Slovakia and began teaching the Catholic University. There he told his students. The good news is the Germans are going to lose this war. Bad news is the Soviets are going to be ruling this country when it's over, and the first thing the going to do is persecute the church.

We have to get ready so he began building the small prayer groups, mostly of young people to come together to pray and to ask God to show them what to do and then to decide how they can build a network. So the church can survive persecution his own bishops in that country chastised them they said this is hogwash father, it's never going to happen here, but that priesthood study communism because he wanted to be a missionary in the Soviet Union. He knew exactly what was going to happen and he kept working.

Sure enough, 1948 when the Iron Curtain fell over that country. The first thing they did was go after the churches. The fact that there was an underground church in Slovakia for the 40 years of communism is due to the fact that father Clark of H and his followers did not listen to the bishops who said all it's all gonna be fine, but they read the signs of the times and they acted. He said that when groups would come together for prayer and study he would call on them to see which is to say, look around you at the world around you and figure out what are the challenges facing the church.

What is true is true, what is true what is false to judge which is to say to talk among yourselves about how we can understand what's happening in light of Scripture in light of what our faith teaches us, and then to act is to decide on a plan of action don't just make this a discussion group, but come out there with the plan to go do something something practical that will strengthen the church and make it resilient through what's to come. This is a simple plan that any Christian group can follow any prayer group can follow any Sunday school can follow what you need to come together and not be afraid to say what you really are seeing because it's important in the left doesn't want us to talk about this. They want us to be lulled into complacency. Unfortunately, there a lot of people on our side in the church who wants to be lulled complacency to put these Christians in the Soviet bloc. Former Soviet bloc. They want to set complacency is our deadly enemy wrote in that vein against what you just shared. I'm thinking about maybe a small group that meets and does what you said there there sitting together on a regular basis is seeing judging acting. What does that look like practically in today's world.

Well, you know I am an eastern Orthodox Christian.

One of the things I learned from talking to these people is that in prison and in the Gulag. Denominational differences fell aside all of those brothers and sisters in Christ, help each other and prayed for each other and I think the that's one thing that we have to do now without giving up our denominational distinctives, but we need to reach out across denominational lines and find brothers and sisters in Christ who see the crisis willing to come together. We need to do things like establishing churches funds to support families when the breadwinner loses their job because they've taken a stand for Christ in a corporation that fires them, for they need to be encouraged in a practical material way that if they take the stand there church family has their back materially. Little things like that are things we need. We also need to form these networks of communication that when I was in Europe earlier this year I gave a talk about that too on an international group of Christians who see what's coming and they want to get down these networks of communication in place now before the persecution starts and what I think when you hear this, there's going to be cut to responses some people may be kind of excited to live in a time when God is on the move and we have to be bold for the Lord and others like you said that our friends in the East Bloc observed the shrink back. They don't want the confrontation of the conflict. Why do you think after talking to all these people did the dissidents what got them through that persecution. What was the end result when they would all say that their faith gotten through it and that's true, but I think that the core part of their faith. They got them through it was that they all had a theology of suffering.

They knew on faith that their suffering meant something that it wasn't just meaningless that they offered their sacrifices to the Lord and they knew because they knew there church history, that they may be called to be martyrs for Christ, but that the Lord brings good out of that they were willing to suffered death in this world before apostatized. So I like to tell people when I talk about this book and about my previous book, the Benedict option. I say that we need to prepare ourselves as Christians to live like Shadrach me shack it Abednego did in in captivity in Babylon.

They serve the king living in that world, but they also knew who they were, to the point that when they were asked to bow down before the false idol. They were prepared to die rather than betray the Lord that way. That's the same mentality that got these Christians of the Communist bloc through all the torture and persecution their suffering had meaning they were joining Jesus on the cross right when one of the difficult concepts. Here is the idea that this life is temporary, that this isn't the life were passport holders of heaven. As Christians, not of the United States or of this world had a heavy encourage people to think of the bigger picture here that rolling a die at some point in this life, but for Christians it's the step into eternal life with the father trying but what why do we as Christians even struggle understanding the long-term future of eternity versus temporary offender Jim if it's that we don't know enough about the experiences of the early church in the age of martyrdom.

We don't know enough about the experiences of Christians today in the 21st century like the Chinese people your mentioning like the Christians of the near East have been so viciously persecuted.

We should be asking ourselves why is it that a couple years ago on that beach in Libya when Isis beheaded 24 Egyptian Christians, any one of those Christians could have saved his life by renouncing Christianity and accepting Islam, but all of them knew that to do that would be apostatized to go to hell. They knew that it was an honor to suffer even death for the Lord and they now back in their home culture in Egypt.

The churches recognize them as martyrs as people to be emulated. I think in an America we tend to be so present focus that where we don't even pay attention to the experience of the church in centuries past or in other countries now and so suffering doesn't make sense to us. It does make sense to these people that because they know that this is ordinary Christianity in history. I say one more thing the pastor Richard Rembrandt who was a Lutheran who suffered in the Romanian Gulag. He wrote a book called torture for Christ that many of your listeners might know. He said that everybody when they become a Christian.

They think they would be able to withstand anything for Christ. But you only know who's the real disciple when it comes time to suffer. Jesus calls disciples but the difference between the admirer and the disciple comes when the secret police knock on your door to take you away. We have got to prepare ourselves. Now we the American church to be disciples because we're not going to know if are really disciples or were mere admirers until we have to suffer for our confession of faith ride as recloser. I just want to say to the support group of Focus on the Family. One of the proudest things I think we ever did her focus quietly.

I mean I know him and assure this on the radio now, but when those martyrs were beheaded on that beach, the Lord put on my heart the reason they were there was to make money to help their families back home. Finish their house put a roof on their house whatever it may have been, and we have an office in Cairo and semiotic.

Who is the man who runs that effort there for us and I called and I said what you think it would cost to help them and I made about six phone calls to the donor community and we are able to raise enough money to finish the homes for those people that were martyred in downtown MNS is one of the best things I think focus is ever done as you have hearing that got away. We need to do it. That's the kind of solidarity that we need solidarity of the Gulag solidarity and suffering are brothers and sisters in Christ. As you mentioned in these other lands.

They understand that we in America are facing immense spiritual danger because were so soft yet so good ride.

Thank you for this. We want to continue. So let's come back next time.

Keep the conversation going.

You got me into a mess now emotionally but I do so appreciate what your clarion call is about in your wonderful book even though it's tough live, not by lies. It's like you are hitting the very cultural pulse of what we need to know, and I'm grateful that you've written.

And thank you thank you brothers thank you for having me on and let me remind you, the listener that we exist to be a resource to focus on families news website, the daily Citizen covers current events from a Christian worldview and you can find out more and sign up to receive the daily headlines in your inbox by clicking the link in the episode notes and please get this great book by Rod and teach your kids to walk in God's truth is we discussed today that you can commit to a monthly pledge for a one-time gift to support the ministry here will send a copy of live not by lies to you as our way of saying thank you for partnering with us in joining or supporting as we equip the next generation to be faithful followers of Christ donate and get your copy of runs book when you call 800 K and the word family 800-232-6459 or stop by the episode on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family I'm John Fuller inviting him back once again. Continue the conversation and help you and your family thrive in Christ you now nearly 60% of American adults don't have a will in place big number and having a well can leave a heavy burden for family left behind if you need a well but don't know where to begin.

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