Sermon Illustrations on Martyrs

Jesus Cannot Be Hid

Luke 8:16

Joel Gregory, in his sermon, “He Cannot Be Hid,” does more than briefly allude to Diocletian's unsuccessful attempts to stamp out the gospel of Christ. He describes them:

“In one wave after another that continued until A.D. 298, it looked as if Emperor Diocletian, the last persecuting emperor, was going to destroy the Christian faith from the earth. When you look at Euseat Alexandria, North Africa, cut their tongues out, boiled them in oil, and threw them into the sea. In the Roman Coliseum, they threw Christians to the lions. Diocletian imprisoned the preachers, murdered the Christians, and took their books and burned them to ashes. In fact, he erected a column in the city of Rome, and on that column was written in Latin Extincta Nomina Christianorum. It proclaimed in triumph the name of Christ extinct. But a strange thing happened. Diocletian divided his empire up, and the fellow who came after him in A.D. 312 looked up and said there at Milvian Bridge, 'I see something strange in the sky.’ It was the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, and next to it the words, 'Under this sign, conquer.’ Whatever you think about Constantine and his conversion, I'll tell you this: Jesus cannot be hid.”

Martyrs of China

Dr. Eleanor Chestnut, an orphan girl from Waterloo, Iowa, is an example. An orphan raised by a poor aunt in the backwoods of Missouri, she scrimped and starved to get through Park College, dressing in castoffs from the missionary barrel. Determined to be a medical missionary, she lived in an attic and ate mostly oatmeal while attending medical school in Chicago. To earn money she nursed the aged. She was nurse to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his final illness.

After studies at Moody Bible Institute, Dr. Chestnut was appointed by the then American Presbyterian Board to China in 1893. She started a hospital in Lien-chou, Kwangsi, the province adjoining Hongkong. She lived on $1.50 a month so that the rest of her salary could be used to buy bricks. Her Board learned what she was spending on bricks and insisted on repaying her. She refused the sum offered, saying, “It will spoil all my fun.”

While building was under construction, she performed surgery in her athroom. One operation involved the amputation of a coolie's leg. The surgery was successful, except that the flaps of skin did not grow together. Eventually this problem was solved and the man was able to walk with crutches.

Someone noticed that Dr Chestnut was limping. When asked why she responded, “Oh, it's nothing.” One of the nurses revealed the truth. The doctor had taken skin from her own leg for immediate transplant to the one whom nurses called “a good-for-nothing coolie” using only a local anesthetic.

When the Boxer uprising began Dr. Chestnut was one of the last missionaries to leave. She returned the following spring. On October 28, 1905, she and other missionaries were busy at the hospital when an anti-foreign mob attacked. She slipped out to ask for protection from Chinese authorities, and might have escaped had she not returned to help her fellow-workers. Her last act was to tear strips from her dress to bandage a wound in the forehead of a boy in the crowd. She was killed along with Rev. and Mrs. John Peale and two other missionaries.

Thomas Hauker

Thomas Hauker was a sixteenth-century English martyr who proved that Jesus supplies the strength needed by Christians who trust in Him. Mr. Hauker was sentenced to be burned to death because of his belief in the gospel of Christ. Many faithful Christians went to the place of his burning. They asked Mr. Hauker to give them a sign if God's grace was sufficient during the fire. Perhaps they feared that they, too, might be called upon to suffer for Jesus someday.

Mr. Hauker was tied to a stake and pieces of wood around him were set on fire. He prayed for awhile, but fell silent as he grew weaker. He was still for a long while, and his friends thought he was dead. But suddenly, Mr. Hauker raised his hands over his head and joyfully clapped them three times, signifying to all that Jesus had given him the strength to suffer for His name.

Mr. Hauker's story is recorded in a book written in the 1500s by John Foxe, Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

11,111 Heads

According to Dr. E. R. Bull, a Methodist missionary to the Ryuku Islands of Japan, a huge grave has been discovered on the Island of Amakusa, where a marker states that the heads of 11,111 Christians are buried there. The date of the grave is 1637, in which year the Japanese government ordered all Christians exterminated, and the inscription above this grave states that 11,111 Christians were killed, and that their bodies were buried separately.

The purpose in this was that the missionaries who had brought Christianity to Japan had preached the resurrection of the body, and the Japanese rulers supposed that by separating the heads from the rest of the bodies in burial, there could be no possibility of the Christians coming forth from their graves.

—Selected

Pray For the Persecutors: the Faith of the Cambodian Martyrs

Acts 22:4

In the late 1970s, Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot oversaw the deaths of about 2 million people in Cambodia. Not surprisingly, Pol Pot’s red hordes were especially merciless in their persecution of Christians.

Now, thirty years after the fact, the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal is set to begin. The surviving victims of that unspeakably evil communist regime have waited nearly a generation for justice.

Unfortunately, that justice may never come. “Real justice,” says Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, “means ... making decisions ... based on evidence, not politics.” And sadly, according to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, politics and allegations of corruption and misuse of funds have already compromised the tribunal’s integrity in the eyes of many.

Nonetheless, while the scandals surrounding the tribunal garner headlines, a much more amazing story is emerging — and it involves the murderous persecutors of Christianity.

One of the major Cambodian officials cited for crimes against humanity is named Duch. He directed the “notorious S21 prison, where some 14,000 people are thought to have been tortured before being sent to their deaths in the killing fields outside Phnom Penh.” Unlike other former Cambodian leaders, Duch has actually admitted his part in the killings of nearly one-quarter of Cambodia’s population. He has spent the last eight years in a military prison.

“I have done very bad things in my life,” Duch told RELIGION TODAY back in 1999. “Now it is time to bear the consequences for my actions.” You see, before Duch surrendered to authorities, he surrendered to Christ. And he was not alone.

Ninety percent of Cambodia’s Christians may have been slaughtered during the reign of Pol Pot, but as human rights advocate Kristin Wright reported, more than 2,000 Khmer Rouge who once followed Pol Pot now follow Christ! Many of them converted after encountering the faith of those they murdered.

“It is a testimony,” says Wright, “to the courageous lives of Christians like [one Cambodian named] Haim, who used their final words to witness to Khmer Rouge soldiers before being dumped in a mass grave.” And now, years after nearly being exterminated, Christianity is growing in Cambodia, despite the new government’s clamp-down on non-Buddhist religious activities.

It is a modern-day realization of what ancient Church father Tertullian proclaimed: The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

And around the world today, the blood of Christian martyrs is flowing as never before. We have talked on “BreakPoint” many times about the savage persecution of Christians in many Muslim countries, in China, and in ancient Christian homelands in Iraq. That is why I am asking you and your church to participate in the annual Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church this November 11.

And as you pray for the persecuted Church, pray for the persecutors as well, that they, like the Apostle Paul and the former Khmer Rouge militants, will embrace the One whose followers they persecuted.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20866]