I love reading books about people's lives. I love reading the Bible about peoples lives and Jesus' life. I love learning. like, LOVE learning(that is, if its something i want to learn about!) and I'm realizing that I need to spend soo much more time learning and studying God's word.
As well as just reading. and learning from other people who have experienced God in their lives.
So for the past like year (yes i read like 5 books at once which then takes me forever to finish) i have been reading The Heavenly Man. I picked it up again yesterday, and read for about 2-3 hours. I love this book. I highly suggest it to ALL OF YOU! It's about this man, Yun, and His life and His desire and longing and love for God. He is in prison for a lot of His life. He fasted for 74 days in prison, was humiliated and tortured beyond anything we here in America can even imagine. and yet amidst it all, He stayed faithful to Jesus. He remembered Jesus' sufferings, and He had joy. He reached thousands of inmates and guards in these Chinese prisons. God's story through Him is incredible, and scriptures that He recited just come alive in a new way.
But at one time in his life, He is out of prison and is working with all the house churches in China. He is realizing that so many of them are not unified. They are not the way they used to be where they all relied on God and all sought God. Now, they were all starting to believe different theologies, and not being willing to work with other believers because they believed in different things (like women preaching, or different denominations). they were being separated because of all the resources and influence of other people's beliefs. they were taking their eyes off of God and onto themselves. They were zealous for God, but not in the right knowledge of God.
For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Romans 10:2
Yun noticed this, and vowed that it had to change. That it was not biblical. It was not the way Jesus lived. Yun sought out people, and prayed to God earnestly for this. For unity among the hosue churches and people. He started discipling the people in his own church. He reached out to other leaders in other churches that he knew, and soon enough they all were broken and realized that their eyes needed to be on Jesus and not on all the different types of beliefs. But on one belief, and that belief being Jesus Christ!
God put this on Brother Yun's heart in 1994. and He hasn't stopped with him or in China. Ever since JEsus' life and the church of Acts. God has been calling His children to be unified. We just so often miss it. We are to fixed on ourselves. or what other people are telling us. We have so many resources out there in the Christian world, telling us what's right and what's wrong in the church. all these different beliefs on how to live for Jesus. But what happened to just simply believing and living the word of God!?! We are all called to be unified. To be a community. To love each other. Why are we so focused on ourselves?! and so focused on other people believing differently than us?! If we all believe in the same God, same Jesus, we are one. We can settle the differences, rather then let them turn into bitterness. There is love.
Unity keeps love and keeps the focus on One being.
My prayer is that all our eyes are opened, and that we choose to love and to be united and that "our hearts will be conquered by God's love!"
"They found that their theological differences centered upon issues that weren't essential to the faith." Brother Yun.
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. Acts 4:32
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