Wang Ming Dao - No More A Judas

Wang Ming Dao and his wife, Liu Jingwen

Reverend Wang Ming Dao (王明道) served as the Pastor of Christian Tabernacle, Peking’s largest church. During Communist's persecution, he was thrown into prison because of his testimony and ministry. At the hands of his perpetrators, he was tortured for his faith.

Fearing even greater suffering, Dao recanted his belief in Christ and was released by the authorities. He quickly regretted his decision and was seen walking the streets of the city weeping and mumbling, “I am Judas! I have betrayed my Lord!”

Within a few weeks, he was unable to bear the guilt and shame any longer. He returned to the Communist authorities, confessed his faith in Christ, and asked to be put back in prison.

For the next twenty-seven years, he suffered the abuse of prison life but never again entertained the thought of denying his Lord. When Dao was released at the end of his life, the Chinese church considered him a hero who had given strength and assurance to the many who faced the perpetual threat of persecution and imprisonment.

Enduring faith will experience doubts, struggles, and disappointment. It happened to John the Baptist, to Paul, to Jesus and it will happen to every person who seeks to walk in Christ-like obedience. In times of spiritual crisis, may we be inspired by both the success and failure of people like Wang Ming Dao.

The Vision of His Glory, Anne Graham Lotz, 1996, p. 81

How An Old Farmer Won The Six-Day Race

Cliff Young

The year was 1983. In Australia, the long-distance foot race from Sydney to Melbourne was about to begin, covering 875 kilometers—more than 500 miles! About 150 world-class athletes had entered, for what was planned as a six-day event. So race officials were startled when a 61-year-old man approached and handed them his entry form.

His name was Cliff Young, and his “racing attire” included overalls and galoshes over his—work boots.

At first, they refused to let him enter. So he explained that he’d grown up on a 2,000-acre farm, with thousands of sheep. His family could afford neither horses nor tractors so, when the storms came, his job was to round up the sheep. Sometimes, he said, it would take two or three days of running.

Finally, they let Cliff enter, and the race began. The others quickly left him way behind, shuffling along in his galoshes. But he didn’t know the plan included stopping each night to rest, so he kept going.

By the fifth day, he had caught them all, won the race, and became a national hero. He continued to compete in long-distance races until well up in his seventies. He was an inspiration to millions and a great encourager of younger runners.

In his honor and memory, in 2004, the year after his death at age 81, the organizers of the race where he first gained fame permanently changed its name to the Cliff Young Australian Six Day Race.

What was the key to Cliff Young’s success? It goes by various names: determination, perseverance, persistence, tenacity. It means keeping one’s eye fixed steadfastly on a goal, and not stopping, no matter the difficulties or the obstacles, until that goal is achieved.
Mac Anderson & Bob Kelly

Why Did God Make Me As I Am?”

A happily married woman with two children lost both of them. They were buried in the same grave. After that, she suffered a deep emotional collapse. For years her family fed and cared for her as though she was as weak and helpless as a little child.

One day her aunt, a joyful Christian, took her turn at feeding her. The distraught and despondent woman said, “Auntie, you keep on saying that God loves us. I used to think so too; but if He loves us, why did He make me as I am?”

The aunt kissed her gently, said with the wisdom of years, “Dear, He hasn’t made you yet. He’s making you now!”

“When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply; The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.”

Eddie and Alice Smith

The Fall and Rise of Wang Ming Dao

Pastor Wang Ming Dao

The Fall and Rise of Wang Ming Dao

Georgina Giles

The year was 1949 and the first unified central government for forty years was in power in China. Christian believers were fearful.

At the Peking (Beijing) Christian Tabernacle, the congregation prepared itself for Communist rule. Wang Ming Dao, the pastor, continued to hold tenaciously to Scripture. The Christian, he affirmed, should obey the authorities (Romans 13:1-7 ). But if ordered to go against God’s inspired Word, the Bible, then it was God’s Word that must be observed.

The ‘Three Self’ Movement
Wang Ming Dao knew the greatest threat that confronted the church would come from within. A man called Wu Yaozong, a little known YMCA secretary having strong sympathies with Communism, seized his opportunity.

Over the years many had recognised a prophetic ring in Wang Ming Dao’s words. ‘From a man with a selfish heart’, he had written, ‘any terrible act can emerge. Anyone looking for selfish gain can lie, cheat, practise evil and plot for his self interest. The majority of sins in this world issue from people who are out for selfish gain’.

Wu Yaozong approached Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier. With his and Mao-Tse Tung’s full support, Wu drew up a ‘Christian Manifesto’. This called for the church to sever all ties with Western imperialism and purge itself of everything connected with it. The church must be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. Thus was born the government-sponsored Three Self Patriotic movement (‘TSPM’), and hundreds of thousands of Christians throughout China gave it their support. Wu Yaozong rose rapidly to power.

Adverse Effects

Wang Ming Dao firmly believed in the separation of church and state. He recognised that the aim of the movement was to bring the church under state control.

Besides, the Christian Tabernacle had always been independent of Western aid or connection. There was no need for Wang to join. All his deepest convictions were in conflict with the beliefs propagated by Wu Yaozong and other leaders in the TSPM. Wu wrote in an article: ‘The incarnation, the virgin birth, resurrection, Trinity, last judgement, Second Coming etc., these are irrational and mysterious beliefs which cannot be understood or explained … no matter how hard I try, I cannot accept such beliefs’. Wang Ming Dao steadfastly refused to join the TSPM. He could act in no other way.

Meanwhile the churches that had joined the movement began to feel its adverse effects. The formidable ‘accusation meetings’, already a feature of the Communist secular world were introduced into the church. Pastors who had been linked with foreign missions were isolated, and their congregations encouraged to denounce them.

Another Gospel
All over China, churches were torn apart. The Peking Christian Tabernacle was like an oasis in a spiritual desert, where pure biblical gospel preaching could still be heard.

Wang Ming Dao laboured night and day, setting up his own printing press to continue publication of the Spiritual Food Quarterly. His uncompromising stand on biblical truth strengthened Christians throughout the land.

Between 1951 and 1954, he published many books proclaiming the gospel and speaking out against the modernists. Those who preach the ‘social gospel’, he pointed out, ignore the essential atoning work of Christ for the individual’s eternal salvation and the purifying effect it has in this life. They seek to transform society and establish the ‘kingdom of heaven’ in this world.

But this, taught Wang, was ‘another gospel’ (Galatians 1:9 ). Such people have never put their own trust in Jesus. Men and women need to know the true gospel for their eternal safety and blessing.

Alarm Bells

The TSPM ground its teeth. Its leaders deeply resented the man who was ‘an iron pillar against which the whole land could not prevail’. All they could do was to mount a personal attack on Wang.

In 1954 the TSPM ordered all churches in Beijing to send delegates to an ‘accusation meeting’ against Wang Ming Dao. Leslie Lyall (OMF) writes, ‘it would be difficult to find fault with him, for he practised what he preached: upright, disciplined living’.

Throughout the meeting, Wang did not speak a word. Imprisonment or the death sentence were called for. The congregation sat silent. Many wept. No penalty could be imposed.

So Ming Dao continued to preach. The crowds were larger than ever. The evangelistic meetings in January 1955, says Leslie Lyall, ‘were probably the most fruitful he had ever conducted’.

Then students, as students will, daringly started their ‘Oppose the persecution of Wang Ming Dao’ campaign. It received wide support all over China. Alarm bells began to ring in high places. Their plan to subjugate the church to Communist control was under threat.

Accusation meetings were arranged against Wang Ming Dao across the whole of China. Nevertheless, in two weeks of meetings in the Christian Tabernacle in July 1955, attendance broke all records. Wang’s important article, We, because of Faith, had been published. With powerful logic, he dealt with the arguments of the modernists. He explained how they overturned the Bible and the Christ of the Bible. Was he being uncharitable, he asked, if he called them ‘the party of unbelievers’?

ImprisonedThe Three-Self controlled magazine (the Tianfeng) branded Wang Ming Dao ‘a criminal of the Chinese people, a criminal in the church and a criminal in history’.

On 7 August 1955, Wang preached his last sermon in the church. For thirty years he had laboured tirelessly to show his country where her true hope lay, namely, in the atoning work of Christ and obedience to his Word. His final sermon showed that the TSPM church leaders had betrayed Christ in China.

At midnight the police arrived and Wang was thrown into prison without a conviction. He was parted from his wife and did not realise that she had been imprisoned too.

To the Communists, Wang Ming Dao’s refusal to join the TSPM was a counter-revolutionary act, the very worst of crimes. They could not, of course, understand that he was called by God to summon the church to chastity to Christ.

Wang shared a filthy cell with two other prisoners. From his daily interrogations, Wang was returned to his cell to be taunted with descriptions of torture reserved for preachers, and to be beaten and pressurised by his fellow prisoners to confess his ‘crimes’.

Freedom and Rearrest
The authorities used every device to break down the resistance of this powerful opponent to their scheme. After a year of tremendous pressure, Wang was informed of a wave of arrests of Bible-believing Christians sympathetic to him. Then news came of Jing Wun’s plight. She, too, was in detention, unable to eat the coarse prison food because of her poor health. China’s ‘iron man’ began to weaken. He ‘confessed’ to crimes he had not committed, and agreed to join the TSPM and preach for them. He signed a document stating he was a counter-revolutionary, and he and Jing Wun were freed.

Then began the darkest six months in Wang Ming Dao’s life. The TSPM leaders were elated. They waited eagerly to claim the lifeless jewel that would crown their movement. But with a mind deranged with guilt and sorrow for the denial of his Lord, Wang never did join or preach for the TSPM. With the same tender love the Lord had shown to Peter, Wang was granted time to regain normality by a period of illness.

He informed the government he could not join, Jing Wun affording outstanding support to her husband. Exactly seven months after their release, Wang Ming Dao and Jing Wun were re-arrested.

Restored in Spirit

By the 1960s, Mao Tse Tung’s disastrous policies, along with natural calamities, left millions starving in a terrible famine. All, except high government officers, were affected. Officials at the bottom level were blamed for Mao’s mistakes.

While some ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were released at this time, Wang Ming Dao received the sentence he most dreaded — life imprisonment. Earlier, the Beijing People’s Court had drawn up charges against him. The recorded evidence stated that Wang Ming Dao and his wife had undermined the TSPM set up by Chinese Christians, and had accused the TSPM of committing adultery with the world.

It was now that God met with Wang Ming Dao and restored him to his brightest hour. A scripture he had learned many years before was brought by the Holy Spirit to his remembrance: ‘When I fall I shall arise, when I sit in darkness the Lord will be a light unto me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him until he pleads my cause and executes judgement for me’ (Micah 7:7 ).

One Great Prison
Through the next sixteen and a half years Ming Dao was to suffer solitary confinement, torture, and the horror of five months of daily meetings attempting to force confessions from him.

But the Lord stood by him and gave him the victory through his Word. Never again was he to fall. Though Wang Dao’s voice was silenced, his life still spoke throughout the land.

During this time all China had become one great prison from which there was no escape. The ‘little red book’ of Mao’s teachings was in everyone’s hands. As the Cultural Revolution flourished, everyone spied on his neighbour and almost every family suffered at least one death.

Preaching Again

In Beijing, more than anywhere else, the youthful Red Guards were authorised to terrorise intellectuals. Had Wang Ming Dao still been there, he would have been targeted for death. The ancient city walls were demolished, as things old and beautiful were destroyed to make way for Mao’s new China. Even the TSPM ceased to function.

Gradually it became clear that Mao had failed the nation. His ‘little red book’ was laid aside. God had destroyed the wisdom of the wise (1 Corinthians 1:19 ). In 1976 Mao Tse Tung died, and his revolution died with him.

Prison doors opened, and seventy-nine-year-old Wang Ming Dao, now nearly blind and very deaf, was free again. In his little home in Shanghai, and always mindful of his fall, he began again to preach the Holy Scriptures which are able to make one ‘wise unto salvation’ (2 Timothy 3:15 ). He died in 1991, a radiant witness to his Saviour.

The healthy state of the vast house-church movement in China today, and the breathtaking increase of true Bible-believing Christians there, are not unrelated to the life and work of Wang Ming Dao. He has emerged as the greatest Chinese Christian leader of the twentieth century.

Auntie Deborah Wang - Never Alone

Auntie Deborah and her famous husband, Pastor Wang Ming Dao

By Dr. Harold J. Sala.

Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you. Hebrews 13:5

It is said that behind every great man is a great woman. Unquestionably, that was true of Wang Ming Dao. The woman, Deborah Wang, a frail but vibrant saint, endured what no woman should ever have to face. Her husband, Wang Ming Dao, was one of the unofficial architects of the house church movement in China, and when her husband was sentenced to prison for what the Chinese government termed "anti-revolutionary" activities, his wife followed.

For 20 years, this saintly woman was in prison, facing the bitter cold of northern Chinese winters with thin clothes and insufficient food, but she never complained.

In 1989 I met the Wangs for the first time. I'll never forget the afternoon I sat in the humble little apartment in Shanghai and listened to them recount their experiences. While I deeply admired and venerated Wang Ming Dao, I was drawn to the strength of this saintly woman whose smile came from her heart. As she talked about the years of imprisonment, I asked, "Did you ever lose hope?" (After all, 20 years of separation, with very little news and few letters from the one you loved so deeply, is a long time.) Her eyes spoke far more than her answer as she said, "No, never!"

After the Wangs were released from prison, their home became a refuge for those who needed encouragement and counsel. God only knows how many cups of tea Auntie Wang (as her friends called her) served to weary men and women who traipsed up the stairs to their flat for encouragement and help.

What a woman! Two weeks after her husband passed away, at the age of 91, I again visited Auntie Wang. The ashes of her late husband were in an urn on the table near the chair which Brother Wang had used as a pulpit to share the Word. My son-in-law and I sought to comfort her, quoting some of my favorite passages of Scripture. But it was Auntie Wang who really comforted us. She was in her mid-eighties. Successful surgery a few months before had removed one of the cataracts from her eyes, and few details escaped her. When a small piece of paper fell from my lap, it was she who quickly leaned over to pick it up.

"Auntie Wang," I said, "I will pray that you will not be lonely." Pausing for just a moment she spoke with a clear and resolute tone of voice, "I will not be lonely; I was not lonely before." It was what she didn't say that spoke the loudest. On a previous visit, she told me that she had seen her husband but three times during the twenty years of imprisonment. That one word, "before," said so much. I knew what she was thinking.

Those words rang in my ears when a close friend told how Deborah Wang had developed pneumonia and was taken to a Shanghai hospital. With no rooms available, she was given a temporary bed in a hallway, and there in the early hours of the morning on April 18, 1992, she met Him who had been her stay and companion for so many years. As the leaves of the trees were budding, following the cold of a Shanghai winter, Deborah Wang made her entrance into the presence of the Lord, where a faithful and devoted husband awaited her.

The saddest part to me was that she couldn't be surrounded by friends and flowers when the angel sweetly took her hand and escorted her across the threshold of death. But I am sure of one fact: While she was alone, she was not lonely. She had the promise of her Lord who said, "And surely I am with you, always...." (Matthew 28:20). Deborah Wang experienced that, both in life and in death.
Resource reading: Hebrews 13:1-5



Dr. Harold J. Sala, well known speaker, author and Bible teacher, has served as founder and President of Guidelines International, Inc., since 1963. He is the featured speaker on the daily "Guidelines-A Five Minute Commentary on Living" which is broadcast on over 1000 radio stations around the world and translated in over 15 languages. Author of over 40 books published in various languages and hundreds of publications. Residing in Mission Viejo, California, Harold and his wife, Darlene, have three adult children and eight well-loved grandchildren.

A Brave Soldier of God

“Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” Revelation 2:10

Roy Pontoh, 15 years old, Indonesia, 1999

The teens could tell that the shouts and chanting were getting closer and closer. An older teen nervously looked at his friend. "The Muslims are coming. We’d better hide the kids," he said. Others, following his lead, helped the smaller children find hiding places in the buildings nearby. Then they hid themselves.

It was January and a crowd of mostly Christian children and teenagers had gathered for a Bible camp at the Station Field Complex of Pattimura University on the Island of Ambon, Indonesia. When the camp was over, cars came to take the laughing, rejoicing children back to their homes. But there were not enough cars to hold the young people.

Mecky Sainyakit and three other Christian men had gone to Wakal village to try to ask the military for additional transportation and the provision of security to take the rest home. But they had not yet come back.

What the kids waiting for rides home didn’t know was that on their way to the village, the men were attacked by a Muslim mob, who pulled them from their car and out onto the road. Mecky and one of the other men were stabbed to death, and later their bodies were burned by the mob. The two other men escaped with their lives.

Back at the university crowds of Laskar Jihad fighters and muslim extremists from the surrounding villages started to gather at the gates, so the remaining adults started to hide the youth around the building, then hid themselves and began to pray.

Eventually the mob broke into the buildings armed with machetes, spears, knives and clubs. They found many of the youth and beat them. The girls and women were forced out of the building, but the boys and men were kept inside. Roy Pontoh was singled out and dragged from the group.

He was asked "Who are you?" and replied "I am a soldier (warrior) of Christ" to which he was struck on the arm with a machete. He was asked the same question again and gave the same reply to which he was struck on the other arm. 

A third time he was asked the same question and replied as before. This time Roy was struck on his stomach with the machete and as he died his last words were "Jesus" (some accounts speak of a prior blow to the stomach ripping into Roy's Bible that he was holding).

The mob dragged Roy’s body out and threw it in a ditch. Four days later, his family found it. Even though they were wracked with grief, Roy’s parents stand proud of their son, who stood strong in his faith to the end.

~~
Whoever declares openly – speaking our freely - and confess that he is My worshipper and acknowledge Me before men, the Son of man also will declare and confess and acknowledge him before the angels of God. -Jesus (Luke 12:8 AMP)

LOVE IS "I STILL KNOW WHO SHE IS".

It was a busy morning, approximately 8.30 am, when an elderly gentleman in his eighties arrived to have stitches removed from his thumb. He stated that he was in hurry as he had an appointment at 9.00 am.

I took his vital signs and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would to able to see him. I saw him looked at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I went to evaluate his wound.

On closer examination, it had healed nicely, so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redress his wound.

While taking care of his wound, we began to engage in conversation. I asked him if he had another doctor's appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife.

I then inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for a while and that she was a victim of Alzheimer's Disease.

As we talked, I asked if she would be upset if he was a bit late. He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognized him in five years now.

I was surprised, and asked him, "And you still go every morning, even though she doesn't know who you are?"

He smiled as he patted my hand and said, "She doesn't know me, but I still know who she is." I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose bumps on my arm, and thought, "That is the kind of love I want in my life."

True love is neither physical, nor romantic. True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be , and will not be.