Welcome to Rock Harbor Church's channel on Sermon Audio. We hope that this message is a blessing to you and it helps you in your daily walk with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So please settle in and grab your Bibles. Here's our guest speaker with this message. Obviously, Pastor Brandon's not here. I don't know if he announced it or said that he was going away. He's leaving tomorrow for Israel, leading a team over there of people to help Israel in practical ways. And you can pray for him and the team. Some of them, I think Monica's gone with him and Marcy and some of the fellows. Keith is already over there. And I believe Robert, is it Richard? Richard Maldonado, I think, is going over with them, and probably a few others. So pray for them as they go over to help Israel during this time of travail. Now, I am going to finish up something I started with you a long time ago, okay? I don't know if you remember two months ago, I had a couple of Wednesdays to cover for Brandon, and I tried to do a three-part series on China. The third part got cut off. How many of you remember that? The third part got cut off. And I've had a few requests for it. So, even though I think that Israel is the hot topic, and we should be paying attention to Israel and all of the different facets about its history and its politics. I'm going to finish China tonight, with your permission, okay? Now, about China, I want to say that you better not take your eyes off of China. You're distracted by Israel, and rightly so. That's fine. Concentrate on Israel. And by the way, at risk of people staying away or something, I will mention to you that I'm also covering next Wednesday night, and I'll be doing a different topic. I'm going to do the five great lies about Israel, all right? So if you wanna hear about that, you come back next Wednesday, and we will be speaking about Israel the whole time. Now, I was going to say, don't take your eyes off China, because the communists like distractions to distract the world from the mischief which they are doing at times in the world, okay? So you know what is going on in Beijing right now, in the Politburo, and in the thinking and the discussion with Xi? Is this a good time to invade Taiwan, okay? Hey, the world's eyes are on Hamas and Israel, and maybe we could get away with invading Taiwan now. By the way, they have a history of doing that. I'll mention one or two prominent ones. One of the big ones was 1956. Israel helped Britain and France attack Egypt to reopen the Suez Canal. Egypt closed the Suez Canal. Britain and France didn't like it. They said, hey, Israel, you live close. You've got some pretty good stuff there. Why don't you help us attack Egypt? And they did. Now, while that was going on and the world was focused on that, guess what happened? Anybody know? 1956, the communists made a move. It wasn't China. It was the Soviet Union. Who did she move against? No Hungarians here tonight? All right. It was Hungary, okay? Just a little thing about communism, okay? We, after World War II, thought they're behaving so aggressively, we're gonna put together an alliance system called NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation with us and all of our friends, okay, against keeping the Soviets out of Western Europe. They were already in Eastern Europe and Central Europe. We wanted to keep them out of Western Europe. So we made NATO. They said, hey, what's good for you is good for us. We're going to make an alliance system, too, and pretend that we're using it to defend against you guys, NATO, coming to attack us. So they put together the Warsaw Pact. Now, the Warsaw Pact did see some action, but not against NATO, not against any Western country, not against the Americans. The action they saw was in 1956 against Hungary. There was fighting in Budapest. The Hungarians resisted. They had Russians there before, but they'd sort of kicked them out. And the Russians came back in with a vengeance, okay, and occupied Hungary. And then later, in 1968, the Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and East Germany, the soldiers were told they were going on military exercises to the border of Czechoslovakia. And they got down to the border of Czechoslovakia, which had a liberal form of communism. The Soviets didn't like it too much. And in 1968, they rolled into Czechoslovakia and occupied Czechoslovakia. All right? And later on in the early 80s, they were poised to invade Poland, which was giving them a lot of problems. Okay, so watch out for China, because while we're distracted, they may want to do something. Now, I would like to give you the bottom line right up front, okay? And the bottom line is, pray for China. You know, the Soviet Union fell apart in the late 80s. And you know, Ronald Reagan had something to do with it. The Pope at the time had something to do with it. The Polish people had something to do with it, with Lech Wałęsa. If you remember him, he became the first president of Free Poland and the Solidarity Trade Movement against the Russians and the Soviets. And these things happened, but there was no clear explanation for, like, just suddenly, out of the blue, the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990-91. And it was without a lot of fighting. There was a little bit of fighting, but not a lot. And we had nothing to do with it. It was all internal to Russia and Moscow. And I remember they lowered the hammer and sickle flag, okay. Now they didn't get rid of the red star. The red star is on everything Russian. But they got rid of the hammer and sickle and the symbols of communism. And they had a non, I'm not going to call it a free democratic government, but they had a non-communist government. And they still do today. People say, well, they're still communists. No, they're not communists. They're different. They're nationalist Russian now, today, with Putin, okay? He was communist. He doesn't push communism, but he does push Russian nationalism and also mafia operations that, you know, garner in lots of money for the Russian oligarchy, the rulers of Russia. They rule in the name of money. And it fell apart. Now, why did it fall apart? I believe it fell apart because a lot of Christians prayed about the Soviet Union. And so I think, you know what, let's pray for China. And I know China seems like it's awfully strong, like it's going nowhere, it's going to be communist a long time, but so did the Soviet Union. And it just fell apart. And that I think is spiritual warfare. It wasn't us having a big World War III with Russia or the Soviet Union. It was spiritually struggle fell apart. So I challenge you to pray for China. And my bottom line is pray for China. The Chinese Communist government is really bad, okay? We don't realise half of what, how bad it is, okay? And it deserves to be preyed against and the people freed from that communist government. Any government would be better than the government they had now. They used to have a different government. And I mentioned that to you. They used to have the nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek. And our newspaper reporters went over there during and after World War II and they said, Ah, Chiang Kai-shek, we sent him a lot of money. We don't know where it all goes. Maybe he has some of it. Actually, he never did get any of it. He never did get rich. And he said he deals with warlords, you know, warlords in the different provinces of China. And he's, you know, probably corrupt. And probably some of that was true. And then they idealized Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung was like Jesus, okay, of the communist movement. And he was going to reform China and make China wonderful, all right? And so we didn't support Chiang Kai-shek after the war. Mao Tse-tung beat him in a civil war, drove him to Taiwan, okay? And that's what Taiwan still is today. It still is nationalist China. And Mao Tse-tung took over. And he killed 10 million Chinese. Landowners and landlords. You had to kill the landlords, okay, to take the property, to give, to redistribute to the peasants to keep them happy. All right? And then they just killed anybody that differed with them. And they did that on an ongoing basis. Killed millions of people. They immediately attacked us in Korea, okay? We were busy with a nasty little war in Korea against the North Koreans. And they came into it. and drove us back down to the 38th parallel. Now, we did save South Korea, okay? And they propped up North Korea, which became a communist, if you'll pardon the expression, hell hole, okay? It's the worst country in the world to live in, and it's the worst country for Christians. And the Chinese went on, Mao Zedong, the great helmsman, what's a helmsman? Steers a ship, right? through storms, okay. He steered it right onto the rocks in the 1950s with the great leap forward. Put an iron foundry in everybody's backyard, like a barbecue, you know, in the United States. Only you have now in China an iron foundry, okay, to make steel for China, to make China strong. The thing was a gigantic flop and a lot of people starved. In the 1960s, he launched the Cultural Revolution because he thought his Communist Party members were becoming too relaxed. And he wanted them to shape up again and be strict communists and get rid of the luxuries. And so he sicced the Red Guards on the older communists and threw the country into chaos and disorganization for you know, for decades afterwards. He wasn't much of a great helmsman, but he was made into a hero, into a deity, and his picture is everywhere in China today. Now, this is the other China, right? The flag of the Republic of China, which you will never see anywhere because Communist China goes everywhere in the world and says, get rid of that flag. Don't show that flag. We don't want to see that flag. We're going to be very mad at you, very displeased if you show that. And they have tantrums, okay? You know, jump up and down and scream to get their way. And they do this in all the international organisations and everything. So the Republic of China has been kicked out of all of the international, it doesn't go to the Olympics, it's not in the UN, and officially we don't recognise it, we don't have an embassy there, although we do deal with them. And so I said I'm going to show you the flag of the Republic of China a bunch of times here in this presentation. We got as far as seeing some of the cracks in China, and I know that I did some of this before, so I'm going to go quickly through it and get us up to the third part. And China's economy is problematic, and I'm not going to bore you with a lot of economic statistics, but I will say that a planned economy is an impossible economy. Okay? You sit down at home and you calculate how many rolls of toilet paper the country will need in a year. And then you tell the factories to manufacture that many. Okay? Now you say, and just that many. Okay? So now what happens? Well, the toilet paper gets used up. And either you don't have enough, that would be a problem, right? And that's the kind of problem you have under communism. Or you have too much. Because there's no way you're going to calculate exactly how much toilet paper or bubble gum or blue jeans or colour TVs or cars the country needs. You get the picture? But that's central planning. Okay? Central planning is wasteful and extravagant. And it's politically motivated for political reasons. And it doesn't work. What do you have in a free market economy, okay? Not that ours is a free market, but, you know, it's freer than theirs, okay? You have a system where people see, okay, we need more cars. I will build a factory and make more cars. Okay, we got enough cars. I'm going to tool back my production, okay? And keep it in line with demand, all right? And so I'm out here to make money. They're out to make prestige, okay, for communism. And it just never works, okay? And that's the whole secret of the difference between socialism and capitalism. And that's why, you know, you can tell your friends, you may not like capitalism, but it works out. a heck of a lot better than socialism does, at least strict extreme socialism like communism, okay? And so investors are actually beginning to pull out of China. Here's an example of wasteful extravagance. I showed it to you before. Somebody said, hey, such and such a city, this isn't even Beijing, this is just a, you know, Chinese city, needs more apartments. So what do we do? build more apartments. And guess what? The people didn't come for various reasons. And it might be that the stuff was really shoddy construction, okay, really bad plumbing, bad electrical, you know, because the Chinese don't build to sell to people, you know, they build to just place people. And so the result was these buildings are sitting empty in this city because nobody wants to live in them, okay. Another big crack that's emerged, and you've heard about this, so I'll go through it quickly. The one-child policy in the 1970s has produced today a shortage of women, because in China, as in most of the world, they have, you know, sort of a machismo attitude, and the male is supreme, and, you know, so you want a male child. If you're in China, and you're a Chinese couple, and you can only have one child, you want to make sure it's a male child. So they have a lot of abortions of girls and exposure, death by exposure of girls in the countryside. They just disappear. And the result is the men today in China don't have enough women to marry. And they're having to import women from other countries. And they don't like doing that because the Han Chinese are about the most racist people around. Whoops, what did I say? Oh, you've been taught. We're racist, right? Institutionalized racism, right? We've got to fight against it. Institutionalized means that we have organizations that have rules and laws that are racist. We don't, not since the 60s, the Civil Rights Acts, okay? It's all illegal, all right, in this country. Now, could there be people who maybe don't like other ethnic minorities among, you know, our population? Of course, there could be racist individuals, but it's not institutionalized. You want to see institutionalized? Look at Han, China, okay? And so they have just allowed people to have two children. And guess what? The couples don't want to have two children. They're used, 40 years now, they've had one child. They're used to that. And that's all they want to have to take care of. So, so much for social engineering by the Communist Party. It's really a problem to them. They have a big demographic problem. And another problem is associated with demography, since you like demographics so much, you know, population studies, okay? Their population is gradually aging. And I showed you the pyramid, okay? Most pyramids, demographic pyramids are like this. A lot of young people. middle-aged people, and a few old people at the top, right? And society works fairly well like that because the old people get taken care of. There's a lot of people to take care of them. Okay, when the pyramid starts to invert, you don't have so many young people or middle-aged people, and you've got a lot of old people, and the problem becomes what? Who's going to take care of all those old people? All right? And they've got that problem coming. And some other countries, too, to be fair to the Chinese, are in that situation as well, such as Russia and many of the European countries. Okay? And there's your good pyramid, your bad pyramid. And, hey, here's another Republic of China flag, okay, just in case you forgot what it looks like. All right? been one of the biggest killer in history besides, you know, right behind the Black Death, okay? The Black Death killed a third of Europe in the 1300s. And China has killed, now, I'm quoting other people who've, you know, researched this, They think up to 100 million people in the 20th century, China and Russia between them. Just millions and millions of people. We measure accidents and people dying and stuff in hundreds or thousands or dozens. They measure it in millions, okay? Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the war asked Joseph Stalin, How many Ukrainian peasant farmers, kulaks, did you kill during the 30s when you collectivised the farms in Russia? And without even batting an eyelash, Stalin says, oh, one, two, three, probably six million, you know. Kulaks killed. Now, you might wonder, why do the Ukrainians hate the Russians so much? Is it because the Russians invaded them? It's because all of their grandparents were wiped out under Stalin's collectivist regimes. And they don't forget stuff like that because everybody's grandparent was wiped out in the Ukraine. And so the countries, you know, you and I, I think most of us here, all of us here, we don't like communism, right? I don't like communism. But you know what? I've only read about it. I've only read about it. You know who hates communism with a passion? It's the people who lived there and came over here to get away from it. And some of them are deathly afraid that we are falling into some of the same traps of socialism and communism, okay? And they really don't want to see that happen. So they killed people in their millions and in their 10 millions, and they had no problem with that at all. Do you remember what this is? I bet you don't remember the name of this. This is a capital city. What country? Tibet. Notice the mountains in the background? Where is Tibet? In the Himalayan mountains, the highest mountains in the world, right? What's the highest mountain in the world? Mount Everest, 28,000 feet high, right? And what's the second highest? K2. All right. And Brad Pitt went over there and made a movie about this. And what happened was that Tibet was a nice sort of Asian country. Well, I call it nice. Maybe it was nice. Maybe it wasn't. And it's very Buddhist, okay? And they had a Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, and he was worshipped, okay, in their form of Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism. And in the movie, Brad Pitt shows you all this. He visits, he was an actual, he's playing an actual visitor to Tibet in the early 50s. And in 1950, right after they took power in China, Communist China invaded Tibet, okay? And took it over, and eventually the Dalai Lama, who is this spiritual leader, okay? And you see him in the news every once in a while. He's talking about something, and he'll say, you know, I think we need more peace in the world, you know, or something profound like that, okay? And, you know, everybody will say, oh, wow, that's really good. That's really great. the Dalai Lama has spoken, okay? He lives in India now, he fled to India from Tibet, because the communists were gonna get him, okay? And he's still in India today, and he has an alternate government to the communist Tibetan government that's in place, and he kind of makes a few moves and arranges a few people around, and runs his little government in India, for Tibet, to keep alive the fact that Tibet is occupied. Bet you didn't know that. You forgot that, didn't you? A few of you that lived in the 50s might remember the bumper stickers. Do you remember the bumper stickers? Free Tibet, okay? And, you know, that was a big deal. You saw that in protests and things back in those days. And so the Dalai Lama is still there. And do you think the communists appreciate him being in India, being housed in India, sheltered in India? No. That's why India and China are deadly enemies, okay? You thought everybody liked the Chinese, right, communists? But no, they don't. This was the Great Leap, perhaps for backward, not forward. And you see some of these steel foundries in the backyards of Chinese people. Can you imagine? You know, you're going to build like a furnace in the backyard to produce steel with, you know, at your home. And then later, the Cultural Revolution. And you remember we talked about the Red Guards parading through the streets, putting the regular communists and older people in dunce caps and waving Mao Zedong's little red book at them. Okay, and when I did this with you originally, I said, boy, I wish I had one of those red books today. Well, guess what? English. And with his picture on the cover, the great helmsman, Mao Zedong in Chinese. Anybody here read Mandarin? Okay, I'll let you look at it afterwards. And I want to give a shout out to Abby up, I'm not sure if it's up north, she's somewhere, I won't mention the town, watching us online. And when she heard me say, I wish I had one, she sent away and got some and mailed them to me. Abby, thank you very much. I was going to read you a little bit here, okay? I'm going to read you from page 76. I'm not sure that I'm even going to be able to see it. 76, I want you to hear about the United States, how evil you are, okay? You guys are really bad guys. This is words of Mao Zedong, okay? So he wrote all these words and then people paraded them around and tried to get it into their heads and really kind of deified him, okay? And he says this, US imperialism invaded China's territory of Taiwan. We did, we invaded Taiwan. The nationalist Chinese moved to Taiwan, okay? And they fortified it against the communists. They don't want anything to do with the communists, all right? We didn't invade Taiwan. We have a few American advisers and stuff, but we have no big military presence in Taiwan even. We're letting them take care of themselves. And has occupied it for the past nine years. So that would be back in the 60s. A short while ago, it sent its armed forces to invade and occupy Lebanon. We did invade Lebanon. We didn't occupy it. The communists do that. We left after a couple of weeks, okay? We did something in Lebanon, changed something, and then we left. The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China's territory of Taiwan, Lebanon, and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses, nooses, around the neck of US imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses around their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries, and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. That's your aggression, American aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressor remains in these places, the tighter the nooses around their necks will become. So he was big on imperialism, criticizing imperialism, and to a certain extent, if you looked at the overall arch of U.S. history, there has been some streaks of imperialism, okay? Annexing Hawaii, for example, okay? But a lot of it was purchased. The Mexican-American War, you could criticise, okay? Mark Twain criticised it at the time. And we took a big chunk of Mexico, as you know, from the northern end of it. So there's streaks of imperialism, but we don't go around, like in World Wars I and II, We didn't take any territories. We didn't, you know, grab any territories. So I refute the accusation of imperialism on behalf of the U.S. And here they are shaming the older people with the dunce caps. And so very interesting. We've talked about this already, so I'm going to go right on here. People didn't want girls, unfortunately. He'd better be a boy, and good luck to him finding a wife when he grows up. Not enough girls, okay? And if Jesus does not return soon, this horrible government needs to be brought down by prayer, not by bullets, okay? Somebody calculated that they may have killed as many as 400 million girl babies. Numbers like that are beyond our comprehension. Now, I got you ready for something that really is the, in French, the pièce de résistance, the ultimate thing, okay, about communist China that is just so devilish and demonic that you recognize it instantly as being from, you know, hell. But they do a lot of other stuff. They send fentanyl into our country. I was talking to my son who works for the DEA in New Mexico last night, and he said, you know, sometimes the lawyers, the DAs, don't want to prosecute cases because I may find somebody on the street with fentanyl, I take them off the street, and they'll think, he's too small, let him go up, work up the chain. And David's position is, he had 7,000 fentanyl pills on him, and we have posters in our office from Washington that says, one pill kills, okay? to encourage us, and he said, you know, so I'm bringing them in. They don't want to prosecute the little, you know, the small fry, but they still carry thousands of fentanyl pills. And, you know, David's like very upset at his own organization and his own, you know, his own bureaucracy because they haven't, they don't have a sense of the mission, of the urgency of getting this stuff off the streets. Now, you might be a young Christian or a Uyghur, that's a Chinese Muslim, or a follower of Falun Gong, which is a sort of Buddhist meditational group that we talked about. They have a newspaper called the Epic Times, which is pretty good for telling you all about the bad stuff that China does, and for covering the rest of the world. But anyways, you might be one of these young people and arrested for simply going to a meeting. They might detain you for a while, and then one day when you're enjoying your detention, you're picked out of a crowd and hustled off to a hospital into a surgical room in this robe. And I think we mentioned this. Is anybody still eating? Anybody still eating? They get you ready for surgery. Wait, what surgery? I don't need surgery. I'm healthy and young. That's the point. You're healthy and young. And we need you. And so they prep you and they pass you under the anesthesia. And when you wake up, you're missing your major organs and you're dead. Or if you do wake up, you feel them popping your eyeballs out of your head, one after another. They pop out very nicely, you know, very neatly, and you can reuse them, okay? Now. Why do I drag you through this? Because this started in the 70s, 80s for some of the communist old-timers. They wanted a new heart, a new liver, new lungs, and so they did it a few times, they found a few things, but then they found You know, people wanted organs. They needed organs. And some people from other countries would pay money. They would pay a lot of money for a heart. Well, we don't have a heart ready. Hmm, let's think. Oh, there's that Falun Gong character over there, or that Christian character over there. We got him in detention. Bring him over here to the hospital. Let's put them under and rob them of their heart, which, of course, robs them of their life too. And then an industry began and grew up. And right now, it's an industry. They have dedicated hospitals where the doctors cut you up, cut the pieces out of you, and put them into somebody else for a price. And they get a lot of money from this. It's an industry. And I think you would admit with me that it's absolutely demonic, from the pit of hell. such a thing. And so I submit that to you as far as I can see the worst thing that they're doing. And I kid you not, they are not, in the first couple of things I tried to make this point, they are not just a nice country that's different from ours and we want to trade with them and we'll be friendly and everything like that. They don't operate that way. They were the center of the world. They have ancient Dynasties, you know, that were civilized thousands of years ago. I mentioned some of them to you. The Han Dynasty, the Song Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty. Okay, the Manchu Dynasty, which was the last one. And these are, you know, great markers in the history of the world of civilization in China. And they think, they call themselves the Middle Earth. They think it is their due to rule the world, more or less, okay? And if not directly, then indirectly. And so they're, you know, trying to do that. That's their aim, that's their goal. And they see us as an obstacle, and they also see us as something that they don't want their people to see. They don't want their people to see the liberties that we enjoy, okay? Because then they'll want that too. And it has happened on occasion, one famous occasion in particular. So I submit to you that probably in, you know, right now, we shouldn't have anything to do with China, and you should not shop at Walmart, okay? Stop shopping at Walmart immediately, okay? Because as you know, there, stocked up on Chinese goods. No, kidding aside, I mean, I like the cheap Chinese goods as much as you do. I do buy some of them. But if we have a choice, if you can choose to do without or get something else or even pay a few bucks more, avoid buying Chinese, okay, unless it's from Taiwan. All right, and so they've developed this industry. It's out there for profit. Here's the man of the hour, Xi, okay, president of, now for a long time, by the way, after Mao Zedong, there weren't any like really strong dictators of China, but he has emerged in the last 20 years as a strong dictator of China, and he recently even changed their constitution to allow himself to be president for life now, okay? And so he's all, you know, he's all about communism, but he's all about his own personal power as well, okay? Every once in a while, somebody objects, like the Uyghurs, the Muslims in Western China, and they will blow up someplace, some public place in China, even though there's, you know, secret police and a lot of policing and a lot of army around, they still manage to do harm to the communist regime. They do not like the communists. The Uyghurs are Muslim. and the communists are atheists, and the two do not mix. And the Uyghurs are sent to re-education camps to forget their religion and learn communism, and learn to be a good communist. And they don't like that. They hate it. And they hate the handling of the communist Chinese government of their region of China, which is western China, where the Uyghurs live. And you remember these bad boys, okay? And I think you were able to name them all, right, from left. That's Engels, the patron of Marx. He supported Marx as Marx wrote his big, long books about communism. Never worked in a factory in his life, but he knew all about what the workers objected to somehow. In the middle there with the bald head, that's Lenin, okay, who brought communism to Russia. Marx, who lived in the late 1800s, he did not think communism was going to come to Russia. He thought it was going to come to Germany. Why? Because Germany was industrialized. It had workers, okay? And the workers of the world are supposed to unite, said Marx. You have nothing to lose but your Chains, okay, he wrote in 1848. And he thought Germany was going to have the revolution, but Germany fooled him. And he was Russian. And there was a neat trick here. You want to hear a real historical trick. Lenin during World War I, Russia was at war with Germany, okay, and allied to the British and French and us. And he was a Russian revolutionary. They chased him out of the country. He went to Switzerland. He was living high on the hog in Switzerland, having a nice time. And the Germans, late in the war, contacted him, because they were fighting on two fronts, the Western Front and the Eastern Front against Russia. And they contacted Lenin, and they said, how would you like to go back to Russia? And he said, well, yeah, sure, you know, if I don't get shot or something. And he said, well, we would sneak you into the country secretly, and then you do whatever you want to do. And the Germans knew he would try to have a revolution and take Russia out of the war, which would help them immensely, enormously in World War I. And so he said yes. So they sneaked him on a train. They sealed up the train. They took it all the way up to Sweden, Sweden to Finland, Finland to Petro. No, it wasn't Petrograd then. It was St. Petersburg. To St. Petersburg, he gets off in the front of the train, and there's a famous picture of Lenin making a speech to the workers and the soldiers around him. in Leningrad, in St. Petersburg, sorry, you know, starting the revolution, okay, which he brought communism to Russia. And then, of course, Stalin and Mao Zedong. And I want to exhort you to pray for China. Jesus said, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock, and it'll be open to you. We can't knock at home on the table because if we do, three dogs start barking ferociously and running to the front door to bite somebody at the front door. For everyone who asks, receives. Now, I can't make that promise to you, but Jesus did. And he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened, Matthew 7, okay? So there are promises about prayer. And the funny thing is, Jesus didn't give a lot of, you know, theology or directions about prayer. It was more like the Nike swish symbol, just, Do it, okay? And so, you don't know anything about prayer, but you can still pray, and you can pray for China, and you can pray for the Christians in China, and the other victims of Chinese communism, and you can pray that the regime, the government, it might fall apart. It could fall apart, and it might be replaced by something, you know, not terrific, but at least a little better than them. And there is good news that Gordon Chang and I may have shown you, I think shown you the cover of the book, The Coming Collapse of China. Now, I have a reservation about this book. He's on Fox News quite a bit as a news contributor. And he's all about what's wrong with China and why it's not going to work. Now there's only one problem, okay? This book was written in 2001. And he says things like China's not ready for the internet, okay? And he doesn't know about Xi rising to power. So it's a little out of date. But some of the stuff is still, you know, right on. And so I referred to that book. And, you know, it goes along with the general idea that socialistic, communistic regimes, cannot last very long, okay? They'll last maybe 70 or 80 years, and that's the lifetime of a person. And they get so bad, you know, and so tangled up in their economy that sooner or later they fall apart. But I think America needs to wake up to the fact that China would like to do us harm. It is not our friend, okay? They want to come here and dominate our universities, our media, Okay. I told you about Tom Cruise taking the Republic of China flag, that nice red flag with the, you know, sunburst on it, off his flight jacket for the, you know, the Top Gun 2 movie. And there are some other books out there on China, and I've mentioned some of them. What do the Chinese do with the money they make? Well, they pour a lot of it into their military. But I learned something about the Soviet military and their big military parades, and that was a soldier who defected to our side told us that these soldiers here are not good fighters. They don't know anything about fighting. He says all they know about is spit and polish and marching in parades, which is a comforting thought because when you look at them, wow, you say, holy mackerel, I don't want to have to face those guys. But here they are showing off, and here's Gordon Chang. Look him up, read him, talk to him, and he will tell you some of the ways in which China is weak and might even fall apart. Okay, Bully of Asia by Dr. Stephen Mosher, with why China's dream is the new threat to world order. And when China attacks, a warning to America. Colonel Grant Newsham thinks China will attack sooner or later. And then a book, a more historical book about the year 1949, which is when Mao Zedong on the right there took over from Chiang Kai-shek. Okay. Now, I have here a letter to Kim Jong-un, who is the present leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, known to you better as North Korea, okay? And he says in this letter, okay, this person to Kim Jong-un, He says, I am a Christian. I believe in the one supreme God and in salvation only through his son Jesus, who died on the cross for my sins and for the sins of all who confess him and place their trust in him. I am aware of the treatment of Christians in your nation. Now, it's absolutely abominable, okay? I mean, you'd be thrown in prison for having a Bible executed, and sometimes on the spot. Sometimes they just take you out of the house into the town square and execute you there, as an example, to the village, okay? It is horrible, and they've got big concentration camps where they keep half the population at any given time. And they have a sort of a false make-up capital city which, you know, for foreigners to come and visit and ooh and ah, wow, look at that, look at that. But that's all it is. It's just, you know, the city itself of Pyongyang. And there's no prosperity out in the countryside. They starve regularly to death because the government pours its money into, The party, the luxuries for the party. And usually these party leaders, they like the high life. They like whiskey from the west and movies from the west and music from the west. And they entertain themselves with that while the people starve. And they poured into the army, of course, too. I am aware of the treatment of Christians in your nation. I am aware that Christians are tortured, imprisoned, and even executed simply for confessing their belief in God and His Son, Jesus Christ, and for their willingness to share their faith with others, even though your nation's constitution guarantees freedom of religious choice. I am aware that the ideology of your nation, called Juche, was modeled, that's their government religion by the way, after the Holy Bible distorted and forced upon your nation's citizens. I am aware that the three persons of the triune God have been replaced in your ideology with your own family members as the only supreme leaders. There have been three North Korean leaders since 1949, or 45, and it's his father and his grandfather. And that's the new trinity in North Korea. I am aware that when the citizens of your nation seem to act in any way to threaten the stability of your nation's ideology and your own supremacy, they, along with their immediate family members, face an average 15-year sentence in one of your many concentration camps. I am aware that hundreds of thousands of such individuals have been imprisoned in these camps enduring unspeakable atrocities and that few have emerged alive. In the knowledge of the above, I confess that I will do everything in my power to make the truth of the realities of your nation known to the free world. I will do everything in my power to support those who courageously choose to follow Christ and to be his witnesses in the face of such persecution and even death. I will do everything in my power to ensure that the saving message of the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ reaches the citizens of your nation. I will pray that your nation's citizens will be freed from the spiritual bondage that is forced upon them. I confess that I will pray for you, Mr. Kim Jong-un, for your repentance and salvation and for the softening of your heart toward your nation's citizens. I will pray that the evil perpetrated by you and your government in seeking to spiritually enslave your nation's people will cease to exist. Okay, and then Voice of Martyrs invited you to sign it and send it to them or to North Korea and they would send it on for you and see what would happen. And I offer this to you because there's one thing worse than China and that is North Korea. North Korea is even worse than China, okay. It is indescribably horrific, all right? I don't know if they do organ harvesting, but they mistreat their population in so many ways, and it's just horrific. And what I want to say here is this. Who props up that government of North Korea? Who enables them to exist? Because they don't make enough money. They waste it all on themselves and on the armies. And on missile testing, you hear in the news every week they test another missile, they fly it over. Now, part of it is geography is not their fault. They're sort of hemmed in. And Japan is like, you know, in front of them very, like a barrier there. And for them to test a missile, they pretty much have to fly it over Japan. But the Japanese do not appreciate that, okay? And so what I want to say to you here tonight is, if China wasn't bad enough already, okay? It is horribly bad because it props up North Korea. Who do we have to thank for North Korea? We have Stalin and Mao Zedong to thank for North Korea, ever since the 1940s. And North Korea has been a pain in the neck. I don't know if you know it, 1950 they invaded South Korea. We were supposed to be administering South Korea. It triggered a war, a three-year war of the Korea. And it was a kind of a war that went back and forth, kind of ended in a tie, but we saved South Korea, okay? North Korea became worse and worse and worse until today. You can't even describe how bad it is, okay? And who props it up? China does, communist China. I think they do it. to make themselves look better. Oh, if you think we're bad, look at North Korea. It's really, really bad, okay? I wouldn't be surprised. And here's a couple of the statues of the grandfather and the old man, the father, in the middle there. And there's room for a third pedestal. And guess who will go on the third pedestal when his time comes? Kim Jong-un. Gigantic. Now look at the people in front of the statues, okay? This is what they spend their money on in Pyongyang. If you went, you'd be impressed. It's what the Russians would call a Potemkin village. You know what a Potemkin village is? Potemkin was afraid of Catherine the Great, his Tsarina, and she wanted to tour the countryside and see how the peasants were doing. So he set up some Potemkin, he was Potemkin, Potemkin villages where he modeled, you know, put together model villages. And he drove Catherine the Great's carriage through those villages, you know, four or five of them, until she got tired and she could say, well, I guess my people are doing well. You're doing a good job, Potemkin. Great. Good for you. Those were Potemkin villages. And here he is touring his North Korean army. And it looks like sailors over here at the end because they're in black, different uniform, green on the end. And there he is. He's a funny sort of character. They're all kind of a little bit funny. And they like, like I said, like Western entertainment and Western, you know, frivolities. Interestingly enough, they're not really model communists, okay? So thanks for North Korea, Uncle Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong, okay? And, you know, I've said enough about this, all right? Now, here's a church in China. It's an actual church building in China. Now there's two kinds of churches in China. There's the official church, or the three self-help patriotic church, and the underground church, okay? Which one do you think this structure belongs to? Probably the official church because they have a building, okay? Now some underground churches have actually come up above the ground before Xi became really powerful and reinstituted strong persecution of the Christians. Before that happened in the last 10 years or so, Christians did emerge above ground and put crosses up on some of their buildings, excuse me. But since then, they have taken the crosses down, okay? And burned some of the buildings and arrested some of those underground churches that have, you know, come up into recognition. And here's a Christian meeting. All right, now, if this was a three self-help patriotic church, you can be sure that there would be informers in it. If it was an average underground Christian church, there might be, okay, secret agents in it. Can you spot them? No, because you're not supposed to be able to, okay? Otherwise, they wouldn't be secret, would they? Okay, and the elephant in the room is that We have to tell you about a miracle. And I think we've told you about this. The miracle is. In 1949, when the communists took over, they immediately started persecuting the Christians, okay? There were about 10 million Christians. By the way, if you wanna have fun sometime, you know, movies, stuff like that. Did I mention Seven Years in Tibet by Brad Pitt? It's a pretty good take on, you know, what happened in 1950, 51 to Tibet, okay? And the Dalai Lama. It's got a funny scene where Brad Pitt is kneeling to the Dalai Lama, and he's a young boy, he's about a 14-year-old boy. glasses and uh in his tibetan buddhist robes and he's sitting you know cross-legged and he can't believe brad pitt and he has to reach out with his hands and run his fingers through brad pitt's hair okay because brad pitt is Blonde, all right? He's never seen such a thing, all right? The Dalai Lama. Anyways, another movie, back a little bit in history, around 1900, there was a widespread rebellion in China, while it was still imperial China, you know, under the rule of, you know, the emperors, okay? And it was called the Boxer Rebellion. A lot of Christians and Christian missionaries were killed in that thing because the boxers were sort of a martial arts, actually they were more of a philosophical group, going back to China's roots and stuff like this. And this Christianity stuff was really galling them. And when they rebelled, they rebelled against all the foreigners in China that were trying to run China, cut up and divide China. in the early 1900s, and they killed a lot of Christians. And Charlton Heston stars in that movie, and they show you how the embassies of the various European and American governments in Beijing, they all had about 10 to 20 soldiers or marines each, and they put them all together and fortified the whole embassy compound And they held off the boxers for, who thought, by the way, that they would be immune to bullets, found out differently, okay? Fought them off for 55 days until other armies got into China and rescued them, okay? It's a fantastic story, all right? And it's called 55 Days in Peking or something like that. The communists persecuted the Christians right from the beginning. Christianity probably went from around 10 million down to 1 million, okay? And at that point, the missiologists studying this back in our seminaries, back here in Bible schools, lost track of the church in China. It seemed to fade from the screen. It disappeared. And we had every reason to believe that Christianity had died in China. And then in the 70s, when China began to open up and people began to go in China, They found the most amazing things, all surreptitiously, secretly, you know, not out in the open, and that was that people who claimed to be Christians were approaching the Western tourists, and half the Western tourists were not Christians, and they were asking them for Bibles. and saying, you know, we don't have it. And this went on and on. And in fact, what emerged after about five or 10 years of exploration and collecting data, such as you could from closed China, okay, what emerged was there was a gigantic underground monster of a church in China. Now, who did that? Did Mao Zedong do that? No. Did the outside missionaries do that? No. Did us over here, sending Bibles, do that somehow? No. God had to have done it. It's the only accounting for such a phenomenon. You know, if you talk psychologically, if you discourage somebody and give them, what is it called, negative reinforcement, you're going to kill off what you don't want in their life, whatever it is, whatever belief, whatever opinion. And the communists worked at this to kill off Christianity. And instead, what happened was an explosion of Christianity. Now, I got to tell you something. That is one of the underpinnings of my personal faith in God. One of the reasons I believe in God, and I could give you all kinds of philosophical, interesting discussions, you know, from Hugh Ross's books and stuff. But one of the reasons I do believe in God, one is South Korea. And the other one is the underground church in China. Because I don't believe it's explicable in any other way than that the Holy Spirit decided to overrule the Communist Party and grew his own church as the materialistic Western church was waning, okay, and losing leadership in the world, you know, a process of evangelism. God is raising up another force from another country that you would never expect, okay, and there is no denying that it had to be God, and it slaps everybody in the world in the face. Of course, they don't realize it, they don't admit it, but it's a proof of the existence of God. For me, anyways, it's good enough. And the other one, by the way, is Israel, but we'll get into that next week, okay? And so a monster underground church seems to have grown in China. Now, in the 70s, Nixon had opened up China and people started visiting and they found this underground, this vast underground church in China. Now, these guys, these young keen guys, aren't they good looking? They looked like about what, age 20? And they're well-shaven and well-groomed, well-uniformed. China's police, I believe these are police as opposed to soldiers. And they could not keep Jesus from building his church in China. But it didn't come cheap. The CCP has been persecuting Christians ferociously, arresting them, beating them, torturing them, reeducating them, threatening their families. But in the face of all this menace, the Chinese Christians have decided to follow Jesus no matter what the cost. They have firmly decided to lay down their jobs, education, families, even their lives to follow Jesus and put him first in their lives ahead of the CCP. I remember at one of our Voice of Martyrs conferences, one of the staff people talking about traveling in China, and he was on one of their airlines inside China, going from one place to another. And he sits down and the plane takes off. And the lady in the middle seat beside him turns to him and says in broken English, are you a Christian? Like, if you go out on the street and ask anybody, are you a Christian? Maybe half the people might answer yes or a third of them, you know, something like that, right? But she asks him, are you a Christian? He says, well, actually, yes, I am a Christian. She says, oh, good. Well, change seats with me, okay? And then she changed seats with him so she could get beside somebody who wasn't a Christian. And she asked that person if he was a Christian. And then she told him, she says, and my husband's up front doing the same thing. And he's asking people if you're a Christian. And if they weren't a Christian, they told them about Jesus on the plane when they had no choice but to listen. And you wonder, how did Christianity spread? It's because these people put Jesus first at the cost of everything. And I mean, I am no better than the rest of you. I love my luxuries, I love my comforts, I love living in America, you know. And, you know, I don't know what I would give up for Jesus. I hope I would give up everything. But, you know, you don't really know until the test comes. But I am telling you, I am so inspired by some of these people and some of these phenomena. And you need to latch on to some of this stuff. Because in low times, you need to think to yourself, well, Lord, I don't know what you're doing in my life. I'm kind of, you know, depressed today. But boy, you're sure doing something in China or in South Korea. or in Israel, okay, and I know you're out there. I know you're busy with those big, big problems, but you've got to pay attention to me. And we are exhorted by the writer of Hebrews, whoever he was, Paul or somebody else, to remember the prisoners as if chained with them and to help them with Bibles by praying for them. And we need to learn disciple and sacrifice from them. We need to learn from the church overseas, don't we? About discipleship and sacrifice and priorities. Now, they are astonishing, and they're not happy that there are many Christians in China. They want to spread it. And they're not going to let the Communist Party stop them. And the underground church has a movement called the Back to Jerusalem movement. And if you look geographically, Back to Jerusalem from China would be eastwards, right across Asia. And they don't mean literally necessarily to China. They mean Asia, okay? And they aim to evangelize Asia, okay? Which, yeah, needs to be evangelized. And they wanna do it. And they're recruiting thousands of walking evangelists. They're just gonna walk right across the border, okay? Into India or Tibet or, you know, Kazakhstan or someplace, places you can't even name, okay? Uzbekistan, places, Afghanistan has a little border, did you know what China? Has a little tiny neck that goes right up and meets China, okay? And all of these places that are so far away and so strange and foreign to us, they're gonna walk into these countries and spread the gospel. And wow, if they don't, they witness to you in a very simple, direct fashion. No beating around the bush, Christianity has exploded in China because of this approach. And be careful what you say because he's listening to you. And we've talked about this, the Back to Jerusalem movement. So I'll go on. And it may be that God is fed up with the Western church and concluded that they're not going to, we're not going to evangelize the world for him. And we're too materialistic. And he's raising up a serious, committed, Unstoppable force of storm trooper missionaries to assault the strongholds of Satan's power. How do you like that writing? Is that cool or what? The unstoppable force of storm trooper missionaries to assault the strongholds. But I wanna give glory to God and glory to the Holy Spirit who has done this stuff. The glory is to them, and oh my goodness. So don't be discouraged about praying for impossible, hard things like China. Don't be discouraged. God is already at work. He's already doing stuff there. Pray for their Back to Jerusalem movement, okay? And just for your edification, a couple of maps of China so you can see where it is. And this one is interesting because I think it's not written in Russian. I don't know what it's written in. Something else. Does anybody recognize that? Okay. No? All right. That's fine. Now, The CCP has created another monster, which is from Satan, a digital monster whose eyes never cease watching Chinese citizens and whose brain tracks and automatically punishes their infractions. They've instituted a social credit system, okay? You have a social credit score if you live in China. In 2008, China had 350 million surveillance cameras, and today it has 750 million. Now, I have a question about 750 million or even 350 million cameras. What do you think my question is? They have a billion people, 750 million cameras. Put the numbers together. Who's watching? Who's watching on all those cameras? Because they would require 750 million monitors, right? Am I right? Wrong? Maybe you could monitor 10. So let's, you know, do it down to 10. So that's what, 75 million? You still need 75 million monitors, right? So anyways, I don't know how they do that, but maybe they just scare everybody. And they have re-education camps. Would you like to go to a re-education camp? You know, in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, we had a bunch of communist prisoners, Chinese and North Korean prisoners, okay? And we're keeping them, and then we're talking peace to these guys, and we're saying, okay, you give us your prisoners back, our people, and we'll give you your prisoners back. Okay, so they started very, very stingily to swap prisoners with us. And we went to their prisoner pens and asked for, you know, volunteers to go back to China and North Korea. And guess what? They didn't want to go. And it became a huge problem for us because we had to force them back. And some of them were ex-nationalist soldiers who had been drafted into the communist army and gave up as soon as they saw the Americans because they used to be friends with the Americans. Anyways, facial recognition. And so it records everywhere you go, everybody you talk to, and if you talk to unsuitable types and go places that they don't want you to go, they will lower your social index score, and then you'll have a hard time getting a loan, or maybe buying and selling anything, or going to school, or getting into college, or anything like that. Now, any action of faith in China, such as gathering together for worship or discipling of children, crimes. Chinese Christians understand that attending a church service or just visiting a fellow Christian's home can lower their permanent digital record, okay? But I want to remind you, and they believe in this over in China, the Christians do, that surely they may forget, the powers that be may forget, yet I, God, will not forget you. And long before digital recognition, God had said that he inscribed you, that's his followers, on the palms of his hands. So he cannot forget you. And our sorrows and tears are precious to him and he's recorded them in his book. He knows exactly what we've gone through and what we've suffered through. Girls, how would you like to be greeted by that someday at school, okay? A Chinese Christian leader recently said that he disciples the members of his church by telling them, of course the government is watching you. So make sure that what they're seeing is what a true disciple of Christ would be like. And so once again, we're challenged to pray, okay? And I wanna challenge you to pray one minute a day for China for a month, okay? Just very limited so that you can actually do it, okay? And I've been asking you to pray for China, and now we're going to pray for China, but you're gonna help me. You can keep your eyes open on the screen. And let's pray for China's Christians as we are led by this, you know, written prayer, but it'll help us to formulate our thoughts with God, okay? So with me now, okay, our Father in heaven, I can't hear you. Okay, now pray with me, not after me, okay? All right, are you ready? We join with our persecuted Christian family members in China to declare the holiness of your name above every name. Our desire is that your mission, your redemptive purpose, will be accomplished in China, no matter the opposition it faces. Father, we ask that every need of persecuted Chinese Christians will be met, food, housing, friendship, Bibles, that they will be comforted when they are separated from spouses and children by imprisonment for their bold witness. Move in the hearts of mistreated believers so they may reflect Christ's model of forgiveness. May they be ambassadors of your grace to those who try to silence them. Father, as light dispels darkness, cause the light of your gospel truth to dispel all evil and deliver our Chinese Christian brothers and sisters from those who wish them harm. May your kingdom advance and your name be glorified in and through our persecuted Christian family members in Christ. In Jesus' name, amen. Now there's a model prayer that you can borrow from in your minute of prayer for China this next month. Okay, this is what, the 30th of, 29th of November? And so why don't you make a resolution to pray one minute for China right through, say, December, okay? And then you can stop on New Year's Eve, all right? And of course, if you want to continue praying, that's up to you after that. But just as a sort of, you know, try to get started, nudge ourselves off our comfortable base, you know, and out of our comfort zone into praying for China regularly, and in an organized way. All right, may God move in your hearts to challenge you to pray for China. And of course, it goes without saying there's lots of other things to pray for too. But I'm trying in this particular series to draw your attention to China, which is a very particular need Okay, let's see what else I have here. You see, this has been two months since I've done this, and I've forgotten what's in this presentation. And it says here that I want to bring a challenge to you from a young woman named Sarah. Now, Leanda was sitting back there. I don't know. Wave at me, Leanda. She must be just outside schmoozing with her friends. She and I used to go to Voice of Martyr conferences. They were terrific. And hi, there you are. And on a couple of occasions, we saw this little diminutive Chinese young woman speak very quietly. almost in a whisper in not broken English but you know second language English to you know hundreds of people in these conferences and a peculiar thing happened and it was just like the Holy Spirit would fall over these conferences when she began to speak. Now I, you know, I'm not particularly charismatic. I resist, you know, making people into special instruments of God. They can be gifted, but, you know, I don't always think that they're, you know, necessarily anointed for some special thing. But this is the closest that I ever came to something like that, because the whole auditorium would hush. And she would just speak in this very, very quiet voice. And she was just like a little China doll with a sweet, small voice when she began to speak. And her adopted American parents told us that this happened in place after place, and that you could feel the Holy Spirit speaking. And we're going to let her share her story with you tonight. Alonzo, get ready, but not quite, okay? She will not be able to tell you the whole story of her torture. She's gonna tell you one part of it, because it's really not suitable for public consumption. But I'm gonna risk being indelicate to better inform you, to motivate you to pray for China. They don't show this in the video, but she was tortured with a cattle prod. And I will share this much with you, that the result for her was that she was sterilized. She cannot have a family. Now, she escaped from China, she came over here. And she went to Bible school and she met a wonderful Chinese man. And I'm laughing because of where he comes from, okay? And she's from mainland China, from communist China, and she's in Bible school with some other Asian people. She meets this wonderful Chinese man, they fall in love, they wanna get married. And guess where he was from? Taiwan. Taiwan. And so Taiwan supplied a husband for her, okay? And they together, we had the privilege, Leanda and I, of having lunch with her once. And we just sat right across the table and just asked her questions. And we asked her what she wants to do, you know, like after whatever, Bible school. And guess what they were gonna do? I would never have done this in a million years. Nor would you, most of you. She's going back to China. And I said, you've got to be kidding. They're going to be watching for you there. Oh, she said, it's okay. I'll use a different passport. Okay. And she was just very, you know, not worried about it at all. Okay. And her husband from Taiwan, if I was a guy from Taiwan, I wouldn't want to go to mainland communist China. I'd want to go back, take her to Taiwan, you know, But no, they were going back to China. Now that's the kind of commitment that has resulted in this unbelievable miracle in China. And so they did get married, even though they couldn't have a family together. And guess where he came from? And she escaped China, came back here. Guess where he came from? Taiwan. They did get married and we had lunch with them. And she just beams with the love of the Lord and her desire to return to the land of her birth. And we're going to hear from her in her own words. Alonzo, are you there? And we'll have a closing prayer. And then I think we're gonna have time for questions, okay? This is Do Not Fear. I have read this many times. But tonight, I would be very afraid. The soldiers do not ask questions. They do not tell me why or where they are taking me. I am still in my pajamas. I feel humiliated and completely helpless. I have been arrested before. But this is not arrest. And I'm not being brought to the police station. I quickly realized they have more than questions for me. I feel so alone. All I can hear is my heartbeat. And with every beat, the sound grows louder. And I become more afraid. They have a document for me to sign. It is a confession and a statement against my friends. I refuse to sign and silently pray the night will go by quickly. The guard is angry. His face is full of rage. And I become his victim. I try not to give in. But the pain is overbearing. I repeat Bible verses to myself. Blessed are those who are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm beaten on my feet and other places on my body. I scream in pain, wondering if anyone will hear me, if anyone can help me. Would signing the document be so wrong? And if it was, wouldn't God forgive me? When I think the wars is over, my legs are chained and I'm forced to walk. The guards are bored and they pass the night watching me, forcing me to walk back and forth through the night. Alone with my chains, I walk. Time has begun to slow. I begin to wish I have signed the document. I cry out to God to give me strength and wonder how much more I can endure. Hours have passed when I notice the footprints on the floor. They are my footprints and they have been made from walking in the trail of my own blood. I think of Christ and how he was beaten before walking to Golgotha. How he must have also left a trail of his own blood. He also was hated by this world. In a small way, I now suffer for Him. I am not alone. I am with Christ, who walked this path for me. And this gives me the courage to go on. Yes, I've never forgotten that video, even though it's been a few years now. It made quite an impact on us, especially given that we were able to meet her in person and talk to her. And you can see why she has quite an impact on audiences. And I just wanted to say, too, that sometimes she would conclude her talks by saying, now, when you're out shopping at Christmas and you're buying your electric lights for your Christmas tree, Think about those Chinese Christians in prison making the lights for you, okay? And she was able to do that and laugh about it. And I just thought, boy, that's a wonderful attitude. Let's, it's, let me see, let me see what time it is. Okay, it's 7.35, so I'm doing really great for time here. I mean, I got two hours, right, from six till eight. And I rushed you in the beginning there to make sure, and here I am with extra time. We're gonna close in prayer, and then we'll see if you have any questions or comments, okay? It'd be your opportunity to talk. Heavenly Father, we bow in your presence, acknowledging that we are such weak vessels and such bad disciples of Jesus. And Lord, we would like to be more, but we're afraid that we don't have it in us. We ask for your help. And so we thank you for the inspiration from the overseas churches that are persecuted, and these Christians that put Jesus ahead of everything, and are willing to lose everything for his sake. And we just marvel at that, Lord, and we pray inspire us to be more like that power of Jesus and in the name of Jesus, make us all ambassadors for Christ, proud to share the good news with others around us. And help make of us also, inspire us to become warriors of prayer, to bring down the strongholds that Satan has erected And we know you can do it and that you have done it. And we pray that you'll discipline us to bring these places and these peoples to you in prayer and to lift them up and to not forget them and to not forget their chains. And we pray these things and we thank you for every blessing from you in Jesus name, amen. And I often thought that, you know, God might forgive you for not being a red hot disciple of his going out and giving everything for him and spreading the gospel. You know, he might, you know, sort of overlook you not doing that, but God is not going to forgive you for forgetting about the Christians who are doing it. And so take Hebrews 13, chapter 13, verse two, home with you and look it up and highlight it in your Bible and make it part of your regular discipleship with the Lord. And I'm assuming that you all try to read your Bible five minutes a day and to pray for a minute or two before you start your day, okay? If you don't, try it, it's a wonderful habit and it'll bring you all kinds of blessings. Now... Richard Maldonado, is he still here? He was showing me something on his phone about China. Maybe he's gone home to pack, because he's going to Israel tomorrow, and I marveled that he was here tonight. I thought that was really dedicated of him. He was showing me that China has bought all kinds of land in Africa, and that's part of their scheme to take over countries financially. They have something called the Belt and Road Initiative. Have you ever heard of that? If you're a little country in Africa, they'll come build you a road. And then they'll charge you for it. They know you can't pay for it. That means you owe them. You owe them millions of dollars. And then they work that into a debt system that kind of, you know, eventually gives you control, gives them, sorry, control of some kind of control of your country. And they're interested in Africa particularly because of the natural resources. I forget the names of the rare metals that are used in the batteries and solar panels that we are so fond of. You're fond of those things, aren't you? But whatever they're called, several of them come from Africa, and China has been careful to try to get control of the supplies of those rare minerals so that they can sell us, guess what, batteries and solar panels and control the supply of them and force us to buy from them. Is there anything you would like to say or comment or ask a question of? Terry, why don't you tell us about the book about Korea briefly, okay? He shared with me about a really good book on the Korean War and maybe he would share that with you also. I was fortunate enough to pick up a book called The Coldest Winter. And if you don't know anything about the Korean War, I highly recommend it. That was a very cold time when the Korean War started. It takes you through the political aspects of it, how MacArthur did what he did, the mistakes he made. At one point, they were just all the way up to the, I think it's the Yangtze River. And that's when the Red Chinese came into the battle and pushed them all the way down to the bottom of the peninsula before they came back up to the 39th parallel. And it was extremely beneficial to me for having read that book, because I knew so little about the Korean War. Matter of fact, in school, they never even mentioned it to any great degree. But having read that book, right afterwards, the film Gran Torino came out. And Clint Eastwood's portrayal of a veteran from the Korean War was so spot on, and I never would have realized that had I not read that book. So I highly recommend it. It's one where you get to the point where you're turning the pages as fast as you can. It's a long book, but you will come away from it with a great understanding of what the Korean War really was and all of the ramifications of it. It's often called the Forgotten War, and they finally got around to putting a monument up to it in Washington, D.C. to go along with the monuments for World War II and for Vietnam. Yes, Dr. Mensink. David, I have a question over here. Okay, let's take it. Let me see, Pam Reese, is that right? Wow, is that great? You did good, yes. I'm just wondering about the Beatitudes, right? Yeah, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. What is the purpose of that and should we be using it to help the world? Well, I think it's a model for Christians, but you've got to be really careful handling it because, you know, some of the stuff like turning the other cheek and things have been, you know, misinterpreted as you can't offer any resistance to evil. And there are religious groups, you know, some of the Mennonites stuff and stuff. And, you know, they get by and they have tactics they use like witnesses, okay? Come and watch you kill somebody, okay? So then you might not kill the person because they're not gonna resist you. But the turn of the other cheek, for example, is probably person on person. Okay, you get into an altercation with somebody and they don't like you, and suppose they actually slapped you on the cheek. Okay, is it your job to hit them back harder and faster? Well, that's what a lot of movies and fathers on movies would tell you, but Jesus would not say that. I think he would say put up with the pain to minimize the damage to people and to be a witness for him. Well, forgetting is not part of it. You're not asked to forget. You're asked to forgive. Okay? Forgetting is harder to do. And sometimes you cannot do it. It's not up to you. Your brain cells have been fried, okay? But I was gonna say about the Beatitudes, remember Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, he comes to Israel and he offers them the kingdom. And that's what he's doing in the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is his pattern for behavior in his kingdom. And he changes that toward the end of the Gospels. He says to Peter, have you got a sword? Now, I don't think he was encouraging warfare and bloodshed. He was saying something about that, because he also said, you know, those who live by the sword will die by the sword. But he asked Peter, have you got a sword? And Peter says, yes, and Jesus says, that's enough, okay? And they go out with that sword. So, you know, the offering the kingdom to Israel came, you know, he was gonna rule as dictator messiah, and people wouldn't have to worry about crime or people killing each other. it would be taken care of. So they could turn the other cheek, for example. But later on he changed somewhat when he was rejected. And he's a little more, it's just a little bit different. He's not using kingdom ethics at the end of his life for the church necessarily. Now, the church in 2,000 years of history, has, I think, strayed too far into the violence part, you know, and armed resistance and stuff like that, notably the Crusades. Now, there's more to the Crusades than most of you know about. We were actually, the Christians were actually reacting to what had been done already in the Holy Land. So, but they went over and they went, you know, with swords and, you know, bows and arrows and makes good movies, you know. Have you seen the Kingdom of God? with, no, okay, that's a fairly good Crusader movie. And it shows some of the vaneness of the enterprise, trying to go over and conquer. And they did, they conquered small areas of the Holy Land and they held them for up to one or 200 years. And then they vanished back into Islam. I'm not sure that that was worthwhile, you know. But I think there's a time and a place for Christians to support their government. And while, if somebody slaps you on the cheek, while you may turn your cheek, if somebody comes to kill your family or your country, I think you're entitled to take armed resistance to that. And we thank God for the people that are serving in our military services, don't we? Another question? And I won't answer as long. Jacob. Dr. Mensink. Several years ago, I was over at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association campus in Tennessee. I was just told a story about Kim Jong-un. when he was in his teens. Can you hear this clearly? Kim Jong-un. He heard a story about Kim Jong-un. The Billy Graham Evangelist Association told me this. The present dictator of Korea. Yeah, the present dictator. When he was a boy, well, in his late teens, his father sent him to Switzerland for three years to be tutored and learn Western ways. Do you know who his tutor was? Ruth Graham, the wife of Billy Graham. We should pray, this man has heard the gospel, he knows the gospel. God works in weird ways, but we should not give up on North Korea. Yeah, God has a funny sense of humor and he arranges things that are unbelievable, that you would never sort of think about. And often he uses wars, unfortunately, and in the disorders and stuff, you know, sometimes Christians shine and bring light to, you know, dark areas. I know the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. How many of you remember that in the 1980s? Okay, a couple of you do. You know, it was atheistic Russians invading Muslim Afghans. And they were fighting each other. And what happened was the Russians started sending their Christian conscripts to Afghanistan. Okay, Russian Christians who had been drafted into the Russian army were fighting. They went down to Afghanistan. They didn't fight all the time. They had spare time. Sometimes they went around the village. And guess what some of those Russian Christian soldiers did? They started sharing the gospel with Afghans. And I mean, how could you arrange that? You know, you could never dream up that. It would never happen, you know, if we were planning it. And yet God saw that and he just brought about such an incredible thing. And that was just one little example of that kind of stuff. Anybody else? Comments or questions? Over on your right here. To your right. Right here. Oh, I'm sorry. You're on my blind side, okay? That's retina detached. You basically answered my question. question. I was going to bring up the same question the sister said over here about, you know, the right to defend your family, you know, like tourney of the chief, like you said, is a is a one on one situation. But when somebody tries to come in to harm your family, you have you have the right to defend yourself. And, you know, because even in Nehemiah had one, you know, he had a sword in one hand and a tool in the other hand. And he was protecting, you know, people coming into the city while they were building and he was protecting. So when Christ said, you know, put the sword down, he was telling Peter not to get in the way of him going to the cross and dying for the sins of the world, because he already told him to arm yourself. So I was gonna ask that question. Oh, okay, good. Well, I agree with all of that. That's good, saves my voice a little bit. Okay, Emily is prowling the benches there looking for a victim. Okay. If you are out of comments and questions, I might think about releasing you. Okay, from your indoctrination camp here. Seriously, are there any more questions or comments? All right, we've already prayed, so let's be dismissed. Thank the Lord for every good thing from him, and God bless you all tonight, and drive safely. And I'll see you about the five great lies about Israel next week, and bring a friend, okay? Thanks for joining us for another lesson. We hope that this message is a blessing for you and helps you grow towards a more mature understanding of God's word. For more information about our ministry, we invite you to check out our website at rockharborchurch.net. Until next time, remember, keep looking up for our redemption draws near.