Some years ago, when we were in Hong Kong, we received a phone call from my cousin, who said, "Tangdi," — a very close cousin, who is an assistant professor in the Hunan Institute of Education. He was accompanying a foreign professor who had visited his institution in Hunan and was bringing him to Hong Kong. He took him up to the border with Hong Kong, and then from Shenzhen, he phoned me. This was the first time I heard his voice, the first time I talked with him in something like 40 years.
He said, "I'm in Shenzhen. Could you come to visit me, because I can't come across to Hong Kong, but it would be relatively easy for you to come and visit me in Shenzhen, and I'll wait here for you." I said, "Well, it's a pleasure to meet you again after such a long time." We knew each other when we were quite small. He was about 10 years old, and I was 11 years old, but this was the last time we met. So 40 years later to meet again — I said that would be a pleasure. I said, "There's one problem though. How are we going to recognize one another?" I mean, we don't look the same as when we were 11 years old or 10 years old. And I had no picture of him. This had been all that time we had been in China. I had no idea what he looked like, and actually, he had no idea what I looked like either.
So now comes the question: it's good to meet, but how do we know who we are looking for? He said, "Well, I'll wait for you at the railway station, the station from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, because there's another station from Shenzhen to other places in China. I'll wait at the number one ticket window." I said, "Okay, I suppose there won't be too big a crowd at number one ticket window." I had not been to the railway station, so I had not the vaguest idea about that station. And apparently, he had never been there either. He simply assumed that there was a number one ticket window.
We went up to Shenzhen, got off the train, Helen and myself. Of course, we were looking for a number one ticket window. There was a number one ticket window, but there was nobody there. So we thought, what happened here? What's the problem? Well, the problem was quite simple. He was not allowed to enter that station. That station was only for people who are foreigners or Hong Kong residents with their Hong Kong IDs or whatever passes they had. Chinese citizens could not enter this railway station without proper visas and whatnot.
So now it became a huge problem. We don't even know what each other looks like. Some time had been spent since we only discovered that it was not a mistake that he wasn't at the window — it was that he couldn't enter the station. So we began to move out of the station. We walked out, and there was a sea of people. "Ren shan, ren hai." All surrounding the station and up from the gate outwards. I thought maybe he would be standing here. The gate is not a gate — it's a whole wide thing going out. I was looking at all those faces. I couldn't recognize anybody. We were wondering what we were supposed to do here, and time was going by. It was getting longer and longer.
Finally I said to Helen, "Now you just stand here and don't move, because otherwise I can't find you either, and I'll end up looking for two people instead of one. Just stand on this spot and don't move. I will go forth." She said, "How are you going to find him?" I said, "Well, I'm just going to turn into a missile — a God-guided missile."
Here is an amazing thing. I just turned myself over to the Lord and said, "You know where he is in this whole place. I have not a clue where he is, and I don't even know what I'm looking for." This is not a question of looking for a needle in a haystack, because you know what a needle looks like. But if you are looking for someone in a crowd and you don't even know what he looks like, how do you do this? I have to depend on him. He knows what George looks like — that's the English name of my cousin. I don't. I don't even know how tall he is, because if he is very tall, at least I can sort of look for some very tall person. If he is very short, I can look for someone short. If he is average height, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I didn't know whether he wears glasses or no glasses, what kind of clothes he wears. How do you find somebody like that? It's just impossible. But my God knows.
So now I said, "Lord, here I am. I just turn over my life completely now, and I'm tuning in. You just guide me onto the target." Do you believe that can be done? We believe in guided missiles. But what about we ourselves letting God lead us to where we don't even know, to whom we don't even know? All I got was a name. I know his name. That was about all I knew.
Then I turned around and looked out there and said, "Lord, where do I go?" There was a big road going away to the right, and another road to the left. I have to know right from the start: do I go left, do I go right? Where do I go? The Lord said, "Left." You say, "How do you know that?" As you learn through a long experience to tune in to the Lord, you have this inner moving, this quiet instruction from the Spirit. The Old Testament puts it this way: "You will hear a voice behind you saying, 'This is the way, walk in it.'" Well, I'm taking it absolutely literally now. That voice — behind, or rather within — is saying, "Left." I go left.
How far? I keep walking left, and walk on until I get further instructions. "Moving along right, turn right along here," so I walk along right some distance. Then the Lord says, "Left." I walk left. By this time, I've walked a couple of blocks already through crowds and crowds of people. I don't know exactly what all these crowds of people were doing — were they all trying to go to the Hong Kong station, or were they just gathering there for some reason? But in China, you get used to seeing crowds. You don't know why they are there, but everywhere there are crowds and crowds of people, and you wonder, does nobody have anything to do, or is this part of their life that they're all just walking around on the street somehow?
Anyway, after walking a couple of blocks, the Lord said to me, "Turn left." I turn left. "Keep walking." So I keep walking through the crowds until I come up to a wall — well, a kind of wall. This wall has a step on it about this high, and there's a space and then the wall goes up behind there. He said, "Look up." I looked up and I saw somebody standing there. There were actually quite a number of people standing. I don't know what they were all standing on the wall for, but I guess that's the way life is over there.
I looked up and saw somebody there, and the Lord said, "That's him." I didn't have a clue. He was looking around, right over my head, of course, because he was standing high up there. I presume he was scanning the crowd to look for somebody that he thought might be me. But in the end, he didn't even know what he was looking for either. So I looked up and said, "Are you George?" He looked down and said, "Oh, you must be Eric." I said, "That's right."
Isn't that marvelous? Isn't that marvelous? That we, mere lonely human beings, can communicate with the eternal God in such a thing as this. I'm sure there is absolutely no human way to explain something like this or to explain it away. If you can listen, if you learn to be sensitive to God, to his voice, to his leading — how amazing, how marvelous that we can walk with the living God. I have told this to co-workers. I don't think I have told this in public. In fact, I told it to the co-workers in George's presence. Of course, Helen also was amazed when I came back with George and she wondered how I did find him. I said, "This is how the Lord led me as a spiritual guided missile right onto the target, and God doesn't miss." That is the marvelous thing.
Think about it. Think about it in whichever way you like and you can see there is no way to escape the fact that it is so real to walk with God. I've often said that in God's mercy, in all these years and having learned to be completely sensitive to his mind and to his will, the wonder of walking with God never ceases to amaze me from day to day, even down to very small things.
Like in Sydney, they asked me to go for a short break, to take a day off, because I had programs every day nonstop. Even small things like that — my habit is, "Where do you want me to go, Lord?" The Lord guides me. I went for a break at a place called Singleton Bay at the suggestion of Pastor James, so it's about three hours' drive from Sydney. We drove up north all the time, listening for the Lord, as it becomes a habit of mine to tune in. We left because I was busy with many other things, and then by three o'clock we pulled out of Sydney. It was about 6:30 when we were up north, very near Singleton Bay, and driving along the roads. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed some motel there. I tuned in to the Lord and the Lord said, "That's the one, just go there." There wasn't much to see; it was just a very small hotel by the roadside.
We turned around and went into this hotel. Actually, in Newcastle, we stopped at the waterfront and there we saw a Holiday Inn, so I thought, well, I asked Helen, just for the fun of it, "Let's find out how much Holiday Inn costs, just to get an idea of the prices in Australia." They said, "Standard room, $185." I said, "Well, let's move on, let's find something else." Then we went to this little hotel, and this lady showed Helen the room, and Helen said, "Oh, it's a very nice room, very pleasant," in a kind of little garden in front, and all around behind it, which we couldn't see, was a whole golf course. You could walk on the golf course, stroll anywhere you liked. It was a very nice place, very quiet, and we got the room for $65, where we stayed for the two nights. Always learning to walk with God, always listening to him.
Now, by using this illustration, I want to come to the main topic, and first of all begin with an important definition of what it is to be a Christian. What I told you just now — did you think it was very extraordinary? Do you think that this is something that must be recorded as a miracle? I think it is very ordinary. The Christian life is to be lived in this way. Now, we don't every day have to look for somebody that we don't know, so we do not need to function in this particular way. That's why I use the other example — very ordinary: which hotel to stay at? Do you want to decide, or do you let him decide? I would like him to tell me where I'm going to stay for the night. You might choose another place. You just say, "I think this is okay," and go there. Do you ever ask him? You want to be in the center of his will, because that is what a Christian is.
I would like to ask you: how do you live your life? What is the definition of a Christian? It is remarkable that up to this day, even to tell a person how to become a Christian or to define what a Christian is, is a problem. How do you define what a Christian is? The Catholic Church considers that the way to be a Christian, to be saved, is to be a member of the Catholic Church. So as long as you're a member of the Catholic Church, then you are within the church and therefore you will be saved. The Reformation disagreed with that and came up with the doctrine of justification by faith. This one becomes much harder to understand. "Justification" is a very long word, and most people don't even know what that means. If we simplify it just to mean that you are forgiven by faith, or you are declared righteous by faith, one could do that too. But then we have the next problem: what exactly is faith?
You say, "Believe." Believe what? "Believe that Jesus died for you," and so it goes on. Faith becomes a question in itself. But you can believe all of this without actually, according to Scripture, being a Christian at all, as I shall show in a moment. Another way — Campus Crusade uses — is how do you tell people how to become a Christian, and what is a Christian? Well, you say the four spiritual laws, things like repentance and so forth, and Jesus must be king in your life, and so on. All very good. There is truth in all of these definitions. The problem is that none of them are actually based on one clear scriptural principle — apart from justification by faith, which occurs only about two times in the New Testament.
As I look at the Scripture — and this is the central purpose of today's message — the clearest biblical definition of what it is to be a Christian is that he is a person who walks with God. Think of it carefully. On that definition, there will be no mistakes, there will be nothing unclear, there will be nothing unscriptural, but a hundred percent based on the Bible. In our church we speak of discipleship because that's what the Bible calls a Christian — a disciple. But again, people don't know what "disciple" means. In Chinese they say "men tu" — also not clear what that means. Basically, of course, a disciple is somebody who follows Jesus. To follow Jesus means to walk with him.
When Jesus chose his twelve apostles and the seventy others, he chose them that they might be with him — being with him, meaning to walk with him, to go where he goes, to follow as he leads. In fact, it's very interesting: in John chapter 6, verse 66, it says that when some of the disciples heard Jesus' teaching about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, they were so offended that they no more walked with him. They did not walk with him anymore. Notice — "walk with him." A disciple was one who was walking with him, but eventually they didn't walk with him anymore because they were offended by his teaching. The disciple is the person who walks with Jesus.
I would like every person here to be absolutely clear about this point, because there are many people who think they are Christians and they are not, in the biblical sense; who think that they are believers and they are not, in the biblical sense; who think they are disciples as in "disciples church" but they are not. They are not following Jesus. They are not walking with him.
I always like to check things textually in the Scriptures. I will not go through the mass of evidence, but looking at the Hebrew in the Old Testament, I see that the word "walk" occurs in 1,349 verses. Many of these instances — not all, but many — refer to walking in a spiritual sense, not physically walking, though many of those also refer to physical walking, just as I was physically walking with the Lord looking for my cousin. There was a physical and spiritual element combined together in this walking. Sometimes the word "walk" in the Old Testament is lost because of the translation — the word is translated as something else. For example, in Exodus chapter 33, verse 14, it says, "My presence" — literally "my face" in the Hebrew — "will walk with you and give you rest." In English it's translated as "will be with you" or something like that. In Exodus 13:21, the Lord walked before them in a column of fire. The Lord walked before them — that's what the Hebrew says. The English might say something like "the Lord went before them." Isaiah 45:2: "I will walk before you" — again the English says "I will go before you" — "and level the mountains." What a wonderful verse: all the hindrances in front of you, I will level them, because I will go forward in front of you; you follow behind me.
In the Greek we find a similar thing. The word "walk" is used many, many times. All you have to do is use what is called a concordance, where you can see how frequently and where those words are used. We have the same situation: the word "walk" is used many times and is again translated by different English words. But even in places like Galatians 5:16, for example, it says, "Walk in the Spirit" — that is, walk in fellowship with the Spirit. That is the Christian life.
Now let me talk about this experience I had, and I'm going to conclude quickly: walking with God in ten steps, which will cover biblical doctrine from Genesis to Revelation — a very ambitious project in ten steps. I didn't try to deliberately make it ten steps, but when I had put the material together, I found that it came out to ten steps, and each of these ten steps could be studied as a full session in itself. In other words, I could preach one or more messages on any one of these ten steps. But I will just put it in a nutshell in ten simple steps — or rather, stated simply, though the subject itself is not simple.
The first step in walking with God is the powerful realization that God is real, that God lives. One of the major questions of philosophy is about the existence of God: how do you prove the existence of God? Well, I'm not concerned about proving the existence of God. I walk with him every day. I know he lives, because you can't walk with a dead person. A dead person cannot guide me to my cousin. I couldn't find him in all that crowd, but no dead person could get me there. But the living Lord — because he lives, he can tell me, "Go to the left. There are two roads — you take this one. Now turn to the right. Now turn to the left. Go straight forward. Turn left again and walk straight. Keep going." And I said, "There's a wall in front." "Walk straight to the wall." And when I got to the wall, "Look up." Right on target. If I had gone even slightly to the right, I would have called the wrong person, because there were other people standing there up on the wall. You have to be right on target. The first step, then, is that you walk with the wonderful living God. That is the privilege. And the step I'm bringing is because if God is not real, there's nobody to walk with. You can't walk with your imagination — or you can walk with your imagination, but it will take you nowhere. When you walk with God, you don't have to be struggling with the question, "Is God real or is he not?" If you are still struggling with that question, that means you have not even started step one. You still don't know whether God is real, because you haven't even started walking with him.
Quickly to the second point. Now we come into what is called biblical theology. I'll deal with biblical and theological points together. This is the question, or the fact, of creation: what was man created for? I'm going right back to Genesis now. The first step was before Genesis — what must be assumed before Genesis: the reality of the living God. Now we can talk about creation, because God is the one who created it, and we now know that he is real. What is the purpose of creating man? That has to do with the question: what's the purpose of your life? What are you living for? Do you know why you were created? Do you know why you are alive precisely now, in this 21st century? Are you here by accident? Do you live your life daily by accident? Are you studying the subject you study by some kind of accident? Did you find the job by accident? Or is there a purpose and a plan?
Creation tells us God created us, and he created us so that we can walk with him. That's the purpose. I don't find a job by accident. I go to where I go because the Lord leads me there. Then I know I am here because he wants me here. The purpose of my life is to live with him. The purpose of all mankind — why God created mankind — was that they walk with him. That is why the flood came: because they failed the very purpose for which they were created. If you fail the purpose for which you are created, what will happen to you? If a person makes a rocket and wants to fire it off and it fails its purpose, what does he do? That rocket will blow up, or it will be just discarded, scrapped, and something new will be made that functions properly. God's purpose must be fulfilled in our lives.
Quickly to the next point. The next point, of course, deals with the problem of alienation. You cannot walk with God if you are alienated from him. "Alienated" means he is an alien to you. You don't know him; he doesn't know you as one of his children. He knows you exist, but you are not his child. This problem of alienation is also back in Genesis. Adam sinned, we sinned, and we have been cut off from God. If you are a non-Christian, of course, when you are listening to what I am saying, you say, "Well, how can that be? Even if God is real and he created me for himself, the fact is I am out of touch with him. I cannot communicate with him, much less walk with him. You can hear his voice? You are sensitive to his moving? I don't feel a thing. You see things but spiritually I am blind. You hear things but I am deaf." Why? Because you are alienated. That is what the biblical teaching is about.
It is really interesting if you understand the symbolism of the Bible. If you look at the account in Genesis, you will notice that God walked in the garden. Remember that account? He walked in the garden. And where was Adam? Adam and Eve were hiding. They were not walking with God. What is clear as you look at the account is that Adam and Eve had not even begun to walk with God. God walked in the garden, not because he wanted some fresh air. God didn't walk in the garden because he wanted to taste a little bit of fruit. What do you think he went to walk in the garden for? He walked in the garden because he wanted Adam and Eve to walk with him. But what were they doing? They were hiding from him. Evidently he had always walked with them on previous occasions, because this is not the one and only time that God walked in the garden. But they never walked with him. The problem of alienation started already with Adam's not walking with God, and once you sin, you don't walk with God. You are too afraid to walk with him, and there is too much distance between God and yourself. This problem of alienation is the one that has to be overcome.
This takes us to the fourth point, and the fourth point is the coming of Jesus. What is the need for his coming? It was precisely to remove the alienation caused by sin. Now this principle of alienation is in effect at all times; it is a permanent principle. Maybe you found it a bit tiring when brother Keith, for example, in the communion kept saying that if you sin, don't take the elements. He kept reminding people to confess their sins, and you said, "This is getting very tiring. When can we get on with this?" But he was implementing this principle of alienation: that if you have anything — any kind of disobedience, any self, anything that you did — even selfishness, as our sister shared with us — the point is that that tendency will result in alienation from God. The distance between you and God will be there and will get wider. So this must be dealt with, whatever it is. Last week I maintained that sin is not just one act of doing this or one act of doing that. The root of all sin is always in us, namely our self-centeredness, our determination to go our own way. "I want this, I want that." You all know Bing Crosby's well-known song, don't you? "I did it my way." Exactly. That sums it all up. And how enticing, how attractive to us, because we are self-centered, and that is what God has to change in us if we are going to walk with him. So you make your choice: you want to do it "my way" like Bing Crosby — and where is this poor man going to end up? Or you do it God's way.
Here we come to the fifth point, which is the message of Christ and the call of faith. Faith — I have to be very short, very concise about this — but faith is something we must understand very, very clearly, if we are not going to end up doing it "my way" and ending up like all those who went down in the flood or in the judgment, all those who will be condemned to eternity in hell, where you can keep singing "I did it my way" and enjoy the heat while you are singing that song.
There is a very important statement in James. Notice, I'm not giving a lot of verses; I'm not doing a Bible study here with you. But James says something very important. He says this: "You believe in God? Good, very nice. And so does the devil." You believe that God created mankind? Very good — he did. James says the devil believes that too. Everything you believe, the devil also believes. And is the devil saved? No. That is something very important that James says to us. Don't think because your belief is pure and valid and right and true and so on, that that enables you to be saved. That's why I said it's so dangerous to say "believe in Jesus and you'll be saved." The devil also believes in Jesus, in the same way that you believe that he died for our sins — not for the devil, because the Bible tells us, of course, that he did not die for angels. He came for us poor little human beings. He came to die for us, and the devil believes that. He knows Jesus came to die for you and me. He fully believes that. You believe that Jesus rose from the dead — the devil knows that too, and that doesn't make him feel good, because he knows that Jesus, having risen from the dead, will come again for us and he will reign and he will judge the nations, and he will judge Satan too. Believing doesn't make him happy, but he does believe because he knows it's true.
So having pure faith, excellent faith, believing all the right things, isn't going to save you at all. That's something you must clearly grasp, my dear brothers and sisters. It's absolutely essential. Don't say, "Well, disciples church teaching is accurate," or "my Baptist church teaching is accurate," or "my whatever church — Presbyterian, whatever." It doesn't matter. You can have the most accurate faith in the world and it's not going to save you. The devil is not saved because he did it his way, exactly like Bing Crosby did, and like the rest of the world, and all of us did before we came to know God. I wish somebody had told Bing Crosby something about God, and then he might not have been so keen to do it his way, because then he would know what will be the end of that road. You walk your way and you will take the consequences. The whole point about walking with God is doing his will. That's what it is. That means that you can believe everything to be true, but if you do not walk with God, then my hands are clear of your blood. I'm not responsible for what happens to you after this, because you heard the message about walking with God and you didn't want to walk with him. That's your responsibility.
The sixth thing is: to walk with God means that you are united with him. I mean, I'm not walking with another person if that person is walking five steps away from me, or even five miles away from me. Walking with God means walking together. This word "together" is the key word in any walking. That means there is a togetherness, because there is something which unites the two of us so that we are walking together. This is precisely what happens in baptism. Where does the beginning of this walk happen? It begins, as the Bible teaches, at baptism. That is the significance of baptism. Today you heard an announcement about baptism — respond only if you want to be united to walk with God together with him. If you want to be together, fine. If you want to go your way, don't even think about baptism.
This togetherness is the beauty of walking with God: in full harmony, fellowship, sweetness. In that togetherness, of course, what happens is that you experience one another. That's why you find that so few Christians have much experience of God, or any experience of God, because they don't walk with him. How great a loss that is. So baptism is where the walk with God begins, for as Romans 6 says, we are united with him in baptism. We are united with him in his death — that means in dying with him, my way is gone, myself is no more in charge of my life. I have no "my way" anymore. Now it is all his way. And thus, as Amos the prophet says in chapter 3, verse 3: "How can two walk together unless they be agreed?" They must be one will, and we can then walk in harmony. Those of you who are married know very well how much trouble different wills bring. Even among friends: you have your will, I have mine, each one wants to do it "my way," and soon you can see what will happen. You all do it your way, each one does it his way — the husband does it his way, the wife does it her way — what's going to happen to that marriage? There's no togetherness anymore. The marriage falls apart, like most marriages do. Most marriages today in first world countries will collapse — two thirds of them collapse, and some collapse within a few months of marriage, some even within a few days, because there is no togetherness. One insists on his way, the other insists on her way, and there is disaster.
The seventh step of this whole process of walking with God is that in walking, of course, there is movement. That means the Christian life is dynamic. It is not static; it moves. There is mobility. In my case, there is so much mobility that I don't even know where I can call home. As the Lord Jesus said, "Birds have nests and foxes have holes, the Son of Man has nowhere to call his home." Why? Because he's on the move all the time. Look at Acts and you will see — on the move. The Apostle Paul in Acts is moving all the time. Move! If your life is static, stuck in the mud, going nowhere, you don't know what moving is; you don't know what walking with God is.
There is a certain kind of moving which doesn't belong to walking with God, and that is going around in a circle. When you walk with God, you don't go around in circles. It's when you don't walk with God that you might be moving, but your moving is circular. Just like those in the wilderness: they wandered around in circles for 40 years until they all perished in the wilderness. So many Christians — their life is nothing more than a circle. It's a circle that goes from home to office, office to supermarket, supermarket back home, and next morning off to office, supermarket, home. The rest of your life is this circular movement. Do you dare to walk with God? Do you dare to listen where he might say to you, "All right, enough of the circular stuff. Are you walking with me? If so, I'm going to tell you where to go"? Would you like to hear that? "No, no, I'm happy to go around in circles for the rest of my life." Well, then there is no walking with God. What does Romans chapter 8 say? "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the children of God." Led by something — that means walking with him. Only those who walk with God, led by God, are the children of God. Measure your life by that standard and see whether you are truly a Christian or not.
We are quickly finishing the eighth point here, which is that we cannot walk in our own strength. This is not something we accomplish. I used that illustration about finding my cousin just to show that it was something impossible for me to do. But the whole walk with God is something impossible for men, because we don't have the strength or the wisdom to know how to walk in his way. Actually, this brings in the meaning of the communion. That's why I said that we bring in biblical and theological things together. This is the meaning of the communion. The previous point is the dynamic movement under the leading of the Holy Spirit. Now in this point, we need constantly to draw strength. The one who walks with God needs his strength, and the communion represents precisely these facts.
First of all, we need his life. You can't walk if you don't have life. He has life; we don't have life. But he gives us his life. "He that eats my body and drinks my blood" — that represents life. We are drawing his life into us, and in the taking of the communion, we are simply acknowledging the fact that the entire spiritual life depends on his life. We take it into ourselves. Drinking is an internalizing of his life, and eating his body — that is, his person — means that we draw our strength from him and our dependence upon him is permanent. We are always dependent upon him. Otherwise we take the communion and we haven't got a clue what we are doing. If you are not walking with God, by the way, then you see how wide is this definition — you are not even a Christian, not a disciple by biblical standards, and maybe you shouldn't even be touching the communion. That's something you should consider carefully.
# Walking with God in Ten Steps (Continued)
Why would you need the communion? Why do you need to drink his blood if you're not walking with him? Why do you need to eat his flesh? Why do you need that strength — what, to live your own way? In this case, the communion is being misused. Little wonder the Lord cannot bless your life or the church. These are stern words, but I'm speaking to you in love. You choose to walk with God, then you can take that communion with joy. Why? Because then you are drawing his life in that very symbolic act of eating and drinking.
Now to the ninth point. Walking with God is walking with Jesus, is walking with the one who was crucified, in whose hands the nail prints are still there and will be there forever. If you look in Revelation, it says, "I saw a lamb as it had been slain." That is to say, the marks of his death were on him and will be there forever. Whenever we see Jesus again, we are going to see those ugly-looking nail prints in his hands and his feet, and a great big hole that was pierced into his side and into his heart. And the thorns — the skin would not look too nice, but underneath that crown that he wears, if he lifts it up, you will see thorns all over his brow, the marks where those thorns pierced his forehead and all around his head. You are walking with the crucified.
The apostle Paul says, "I determined to know nothing among you," he says to the Corinthians, "except Jesus and him crucified." Because without his crucifixion, I wouldn't have been able to walk with him at all. I would have no salvation. The alienation between God and myself stands. I cannot walk with him. I cannot know him. I cannot receive life from him. It is the way of the cross. So, you don't like the way of the cross? Then you can sing, "I did it my way." But if you want eternal life in Christ, you do it his way. And his way is the way of the cross. "Take up your cross and follow me."
Let me tell you about this sister, suffering year after year, 20 years of hard labor and imprisonment. I'll just give you one or two accounts, because it challenged my life constantly. Here was somebody who had walked with Jesus, and walked with Jesus all the way to the cross and beyond. She was arrested because she preached the gospel. That was her only crime. She had a special ministry of preaching the gospel among university students, but she would preach to anyone. That was the area of ministry she was designated for. For that, one day, after the liberation, as it was called, she was arrested in 1958. She spent the next long while in prison before she was sent to a labor camp.
They tried to make her deny her faith. They tried everything, because if they could make a church leader deny the faith, it would break the confidence and the faith of all the other Christians. So the strategy was: break this leader. In fact, they tried to break every leader they could, and that's why most of them spent more than 20 years in hard labor. Some of them they managed to break and some they didn't. She was one of those they couldn't.
She went into prison at the height of her life, the prime of her life. She was in her early 40s — young, good-looking, energetic, intelligent. She came out 20 years later: her health broken, her hair gone white, a wrinkled old lady. They had robbed her of the best years of her life. She came out seriously ill with heart disease, serious heart trouble, several times to the point of death. They finally released her only because she was near death with her heart trouble. They released her so that she wouldn't die in prison.
But I recall the account when they first took her in. The constant joy she had — there was no fear, no anxiety. There was simply this constant awareness of God, constantly fellowshipping with God. No prison, no prison walls, no hard labor camp could stop her from communing with her Lord. One of the things that those people who were arrested feared was handcuffs. I never knew that handcuffs were so terrifying as they are used in China. Did you know that? Sometimes you see the police just put handcuffs on and take a person off and he seems comfortable enough. But from several testimonies I have read, one of the most dreaded punishments was the use of handcuffs on prisoners.
At the beginning, when she came in, she was asked to confess. She refused. They put the handcuffs on the table and said, "Will you confess?" She said no. So she stretched out her hands and they cuffed her. Three days the handcuffs remained. Now try to eat with your handcuffs on. See if you can comb your hair with your handcuffs on, wash your face. A little bit difficult to do the normal things with your hands cuffed together.
Three days later, they called her back in and said, "Well now, are you ready to confess and to deny the faith?" She said, "No, I'm not going to do that." They said, "Okay." So they took off the handcuffs and cuffed her behind her back. Are you trying to do anything with handcuffs behind your back? How do you eat, for example, with your hands behind your back? How do you do anything? How do you wash your face? They kept those handcuffs on her for 40 days, trying to break her determination.
She said she could hear down the corridor some woman crying out, "Please take off these handcuffs. I'm ready to confess." And she said, "Lord, give me strength that I will never disgrace your name and never deny you because of the handcuffs." How do you sleep with handcuffs on? Never mind eat or anything else. How do you sleep with your hands cuffed behind your back? She described that she had to kneel down on one knee and then on both knees, and then more or less flop forward on her face in order to sleep. You can't turn left or right because you're cuffed in that way, so you have to sleep with your neck twisted to one side.
And you know what? She slept like a log. Her whole body was so relaxed, and she was so thankful to the Lord, and she said, "Yes, Lord, I really thank you that I have the privilege now to have the fellowship of your sufferings, to endure a little bit. I need these handcuffs. I'm too proud. I have too many faults. Thank you for the handcuffs." She was thanking the Lord for the handcuffs. All the other prisoners, who didn't have handcuffs on, were wretched as anybody in prison would be. She was the one who was so joyful, smiling the whole time.
Maybe the police, the cadre, got so angry and said, "You know, there isn't even time enough for people with handcuffs on to cry, and you are laughing?" She said, "Oh, am I laughing?" She wasn't consciously smiling. But then she realized, because the joy in her heart was so great — in spite of the extreme pain and discomfort — the joy was so great that she was smiling, and she couldn't get the smile off her face. I thought to myself, "Lord, could I endure this? I wonder." Here is this weak little woman, but stronger than steel, because she was walking with God.
After 40 days, her hair was all matted and messy and dirty and smelly. She was completely unable to wash herself, so she was a complete mess. Boils were coming up, so that pus was running out around her face, around her forehead. After 40 days, they called her back in and said, "Look at you. You don't even look like a human being anymore. Does your Jesus want you? Look at that. Why can't he help you? Why can't he set you free? Why can't he take the handcuffs off you? He hasn't done anything for you, has he?"
Then she simply said these words from Job: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." The cadre was aghast. Even if my God kills me — never mind the handcuffs — if he is pleased to kill me, I will trust him. He said, "Okay. Now we're going to put another kind of handcuff on you. These are the heavy ones." I've heard from testimonies that these are absolutely agonizing. They are heavy and tight. They lock very tight and pull the two arms very tight together so that you're virtually paralyzed. When they put those handcuffs on her, she said she felt her whole body shaking because of the sheer pain of those handcuffs and the agony of this instrument of torture. Almost nobody could stand that for even a few minutes, never mind hours.
How long were those handcuffs on her? Another one and a half months. She had been handcuffed in total for three months. At first she said the pain was unbearable. She was shivering with the pain and she cried out to the Lord. Then the Lord took away the pain instantly. She said suddenly she felt warm, so comfortable, as though she was actually in a hot sauna. She felt very, very comfortable. That was amazing.
She went back, still full of joy. She said, "Lord, what about my hair?" And the Lord said, "What about it?" Well, the Lord showed her a way she could comb her hair with her hands cuffed behind her back. I wish she had described in the book how she did it, because with all my imagination, I can't imagine how you can comb your hair with your hands tightly cuffed behind your back. She discovered a way to do it. She wanted to look presentable for the Lord, wanted to look nice for the Lord in prison. She succeeded in combing her hair and even putting a band around it.
When the prison guard came in, he sternly asked who combed her hair for her, because to do anything for a prisoner is a punishable offense. She said to the guard, "I did it myself. Nobody did it for me." He said, "I don't believe this." She said, "All right, then you stand here and I'll demonstrate it for you." And she combed her hair with her handcuffs on and put the band on, right in front of him. He stood there absolutely aghast.
She learned to do everything with her handcuffs on, whether it be washing clothes or anything else. I would like to ask her to come and give us a demonstration if she's still around. How do you do these things? Maybe next time if I get handcuffed, I'll know how to do it — I got some lessons in advance. It is truly remarkable how she wanted to glorify the Lord and how the Lord removed even the pain of those handcuffs from her, so that she regarded it as sheer joy.
After three months in the cuffs, they determined to take the handcuffs off her. They called her into another room and said, "We're going to remove the handcuffs." She said, "No, I don't want the handcuffs removed." They said, "We're going to take off the handcuffs for three days and let you consider, and then I'll put them back again." She said, "You can save yourself the trouble. I've already thought about it. I don't need three days. Just leave the handcuffs on." They had never met such a prisoner before — somebody who walks with God. It's just unbelievable, this is extraordinary.
As I said last week, the whole problem with people in those last days, which are the days of Noah, as it will be in the days of the Son of Man, is simply their ordinariness — "yam yam sik sik," as we say in Cantonese. It's an ordinariness. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but just very ordinary. Here is somebody extraordinary, and the communists could not understand this.
Just about every person in her cell was converted by looking at her life. She was not allowed to preach, but they looked at her life, and one after the other came to the Lord. She would use the time when they were allowed to wash dishes to whisper the gospel one after another to all these prisoners in the cell. They all came to the Lord. They saw that life, the joy, the unbreakable spirit of somebody who walks with her God.
She didn't choose an easy life. She didn't even want the handcuffs to come off. But it was they who determined that they were going to take them off whether she wanted them or not, because it wasn't doing anything and she was simply glorying in it. Eventually they took them off by force. Most people would be very happy to have the handcuffs taken off. They had to hold her still because she refused to have the handcuffs removed, and hold her still while somebody took the handcuffs off.
After the handcuffs came off, she discovered that she was in absolute agony, because all the muscles had been held in that position for so long. Her hands had become paralyzed and could no longer be used because of the lack of circulation for so long. She suddenly discovered that she couldn't do anything with her hands anymore. They were completely useless. She cried out to the Lord and said, "Lord, how can I honor you in the hard labor camp if I can't do anything with my hands?"
You know what she determined to do? She said, "You put me in hard labor, I will be the best worker in the hard labor camp that ever walked in this labor camp." This person is completely extraordinary. She didn't see it as a punishment; she saw it as a challenge to live for God, to walk with her God, right through the labor camp. She ate the prison food, which was normally just some coarse rice, and she said she ate it as though it was a banquet, with thanksgiving and praise. With a little bit of salted vegetables in there, she ate it with thanksgiving: "It tastes so good. Thank you, Lord. It's wonderful." What an unconquerable person this was.
She asked that the Lord would heal her hands so that she could work, and the Lord granted her this very thing and healed her hands. If other people had to pick tea leaves from the tea tree and they picked 20 pounds, she determined to pick 40 pounds. So unique. Everywhere she shone as light in the darkness of the prison. How does that make your life feel? Well, I could go on for a long time with this story, but I have to stop here. This is the ninth point I wanted to illustrate, because it's a very important point: walking the road of the cross when we walk with God, and walking it with joy, so that the cross becomes glory, the prison camp becomes a challenge to shine for God.
The last point, the tenth point, and we must close. This sums up the future. Have you noticed what happens to so many who walk with God? The first one mentioned, back in Genesis chapter 5, was Enoch: Enoch walked with God, and what happened to him? He was raptured. He was taken up. Enoch and Noah walked with God. It's very interesting: in a sense, Noah was also taken up. As the flood waters came down, the ark went up. And Elijah — what happened to him? He walked with God, and he was taken away up to the Lord. Jesus, above all, as man, walked with his Father, walked with God. He said, "I do nothing of my own will. Everything I see the Father doing, whatever he tells me to say, I say. Whatever he tells me to do, I do." What happened to Jesus? He was taken up. He ascended upward. Raptured.
What will happen to those who walk with God when Jesus comes? They will be raptured. They will be caught up. The rapture in the last days is not something unique. It happens several times to those who walk with God. There is a glorious future. We walk with God horizontally now, and he takes us up vertically to himself. That's where the walk will end: in his presence, with joy and with glory.
Our time is gone, and so I must close here. May the Lord grant that you will now know the challenge, the call, the joy, the privilege, the meaning of walking with God. Let us close in prayer.