8 Lessons We Can Learn from the Church in China
2nd Lesson: Faithfulness in keeping the Word of God
Tract by Asia Outreach
I don’t mean just owning a Bible, or reading the Bible – but keeping the Word of God. Having a Bible in your home, reading it from time to time, and living by the Word are quite different matters.
Let me share this testimony of Professor Lim, a conductor with a Hong Kong Philharmonic orchestra. He is one of the finest violinists in Asia. Lim returned to China from Indonesia in the 1950s in response to China’s call to overseas Chinese to return to their motherland to help build a new nation. Lim dedicated himself to train China’s young musicians. But during the Cultural Revolution, Professor Lim was arrested by the Red Guards, some of whom were his very own students. He said that they had actually put his fingers on the steps of a concrete staircase and threatened to crush them with bricks. Reasons? He played pieces by Bach and Beethoven; therefore he was an anti-revolutionary. Only the intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai saved him, Lim later discovered. The Red Guards did not break his fingers, but they broke one of his knee-caps. Now he walks with a limp. At the time of that Revolution, Professor Lim was classified as a ‘ninth class parasite of society, an enemy of the masses.’ He had to be ‘re-educated.’
Lim told us, “For months, I was dragged daily to a public square. There I was made to kneel down with my hands behind my back. For the whole day people passing me would come to slap me, kick me and to reform me, spit on me. That was to re-educate and to reform me.”
“I lost track of time. And I lost track of events. All I can remember was that every day I was dragged out to be slapped, kicked and beaten. One day someone came up and as he pretended to hit me, he passed a piece of paper into my hands. That night when I returned to my dungeon, I unrolled the little ball of paper. It had been torn out from the white border of a newspaper, and on it were written the words of Psalm 23.
Those words reminded me of my faith in Jesus Christ. As a young boy in Indonesia, I went to a Chinese Church Sunday School and I remember giving my heart to Jesus. Now years later in that dungeon, I read the words over and over again, and I desperately memorized them. The next day when I was dragged out again, I had that piece of paper in my hands. It kept reminding me of the Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over…
“Somehow I didn’t feel the pain and tiredness as much.” Lim told of the reality of the Word of God, “I actually sensed an abiding presence of my Lord right there in the public square. I enjoyed holy communion with my Jesus. That portion of Scripture sustained me during those traumatic years.”
After the Cultural Revolution, Lim applied altogether 20 times to come to Hong Kong. Finally he was permitted to leave China. What about now? How is Professor Lim treating the Bible today? “I am ashamed,” he said. “In the free world, we have the Bible. Sometimes when we feel like it, we read it. Inside the Bamboo Curtain, even when the Christians don’t have the printed Bible, they live by the Word of God.”
