By Their Blood (Christian Martyrs From The Twentieth Century And Beyond) Order Printed Copy

Author: James & Marti Hefley
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About the Book

"By Their Blood" by James and Marti Hefley provides a compelling and powerful account of Christian martyrs from the twentieth century and beyond. The book highlights the stories of individuals who sacrificed their lives for their faith and serves as a poignant reminder of the persecution faced by Christians around the world. Through vivid storytelling and thorough research, the authors honor the memory of these brave individuals and inspire readers to stand firm in their own beliefs.

John Owen

John Owen’s life was incredibly difficult. Born in 1616 and dying in 1683, Owen lived through the deaths of his first wife and all of his children, several of whom died in very early childhood. He supported his last surviving daughter when her marriage broke down. He contributed to a political revolution, watched it fail, saw the monarchy restored and wreak a terrible revenge on republicans, and lived in and around London during the persecution that followed. For twenty years he would have seen the decapitated heads of his friends on display around the city. He died fearing that the dissenting churches had largely abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity and justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone; and, with Charles II about to be replaced by his openly Catholic brother James, believing that the English Reformation was almost over. Owen was one of the most published writers in the seventeenth century. He published around 8 million words. These writings included books on theology and spirituality, politics and economics, and ranged in length from the largest commentary ever published on the epistle to the Hebrews to a short Latin poem that has never been reprinted. For not all of Owen’s works have been kept in print. The most widely circulating nineteenth-century edition, most of which is published by the Banner of Truth, did not include Owen’s sermon manuscripts that are kept in various English libraries, nor the book for children that Owen published in 1652. Owen was one of England’s earliest children’s authors. The catechisms that Owen published (1645) outlined what he expected children in his congregation to know. These catechisms were published before the Westminster Assembly published its better-known examples. But Owen’s catechisms are in many ways simpler. The Primer (1652), which Owen prepared after the death of several of his children during the years of poor harvests and disease at the end of the 1640s, showed what Owen expected of an ideal Christian home. Its routine would be built around Bible reading and prayer, he believed, and his little book included sample prayers that children could learn to pray in mornings, evenings, and at meals. Owen argued that those who led church services should take account of the needs of children. Services that were too long, he believed, did no one any good. Adult believers should not need written prayers, he believed, and these should be banned from public worship. But children were different and needed all the help they could get. Owen enjoyed many warm friendships. His social network included many of the most famous writers in seventeenth-century England. Among his friends and rivals were John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Bunyan, and Lucy Hutchinson. Owen fell out with Milton and became the subject of one of his sonnets. Owen helped Marvell publish one of his most controversial political pamphlets. He encouraged his publisher, Nathanial Ponder, to publish Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And he appears to have supported Lucy Hutchinson during her move into London, when she attended and took notes upon his preaching and translated large parts of his Theologoumena Pantodapa (1661)—a translation of which has been published with the title Biblical Theology. Owen’s letters reveal his kindness and care as a pastor, especially to mothers grieving their children’s death. Owen was deeply political. He preached to Members of Parliament on the day after the execution of Charles I, and pinned his hopes for the reformation of church and society on their efforts to transform England into a protestant republic. During the 1650s, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, Owen served on important committees that sought to establish a religious foundation for the new regime. But he grew dismayed by the ways in which the Cromwell family, and the administration they led, seemed to turn away from godly values. In 1658, he worked with leading army officers to create a crisis that, he likely hoped, would call the regime back to its earlier ideals. It failed, and instead created the crisis that was resolved by the restoration of the monarchy, the return of Charles II, and the persecution of dissenters that followed. During the Restoration, Owen kept his head down, and, as persecution slackened in the later 1660s, published pamphlets that argued that dissenters were the economic lifeblood of the English nation. But he was chastened by his attempts at political intervention and came increasingly to realize that his focus should be on things eternal. Owen often changed his mind. As his developing attitudes to political intervention suggest, Owen committed himself to some beliefs and behaviors that he came to regret. In his early years, he changed his churchmanship from Presbyterianism to Congregationalism. He innovated as a Congregationalist, installing as a co-elder and preacher a man who would not be ordained for several years. He argued for the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, though it is not clear that he ever persuaded any of his congregations to practice it. He thought carefully about the end times and came to believe that, in the latter days, a large number of Jewish people would be converted to Christianity and would return to live in the Promised Land. He dismissed a great deal of discussion about the millennium, but became convinced that the binding of Satan had yet to be achieved. Owen changed his mind because he kept on studying the Bible. Owen was biblical, through and through, and depended just as much on the Holy Spirit. He certainly believed in a learned ministry–after all, he had taught theology at Oxford and done his best to promote godliness within the student body. But he also trusted the Holy Spirit to guide ordinary Christians in small group Bible studies that did not need to be policed by a formally trained expert. Aside from his own Bible study, which advanced on the serious scholarship represented by the three thousand titles that were included in the catalog of his library published soon after his death, Owen encouraged church members to meet together to study Scripture in private. Owen trusted the Bible and the work of the Spirit after writing about both. Owen was not a philosophically-driven, rationalist theologian. His writing abounds in biblical citations. It is molded and contoured by biblical revelation. But he warned that Christians could approach their study of the Bible with absolutely no spiritual advantage to themselves. Christians who approached the study of the Bible without absolute dependence upon the Spirit who inspired and preserved it would gain no more benefit than Jewish readers did from their Scriptures, he argued. Christians should never choose between entire dependence upon the Bible and the Spirit. Owen believed that the goal of the Christian life was knowing God. Before Owen, no one had ever shown clearly how Christians relate to each person of the Trinity. Owen described the goal of the gospel as revealing the love of the Father, who sent the Son as a redeemer of his people, who would be indwelt, provided with gifts, and united together by the Spirit. Owen’s Communion with God is among his most celebrated achievements—and no wonder. It is the exhalation of his devotion to Father, Son, and Spirit, and the discovery of the limitless love of God. Owen is much easier to read than many people imagine. There is a mystique to Owen—a widespread feeling that his books are too difficult and best left to expert theologians. But Owen’s greatest books were written as sermons for an audience of teenagers. Publishers have begun to modernize Owen’s language in new editions of his works. Now more than ever, it’s time to pick up Owen and find his encouragement for the Christian life.

how to redeem a wasted life

A flower that never bloomed, fruit that never ripened, a womb that never bore, an egg that never hatched: a wasted life. Perhaps little time remains to say and do what you’ve left unsaid and undone. Perhaps you grimace to look back on a life mostly spent and wonder, “What have I done?” or, “Where did it go?” This is the bed you made; so many petals have already fallen. You are left gripping the thorny stems of memories you wish replayed so differently in your mind. You may now, like never before, regret investing your life in a world that now threatens so soon to evict you. Perhaps children, if you have them, now spurn you. Perhaps it’s too late to tell your mother you’re sorry. Perhaps the better life that you expected just around the corner never came. Years wasted by some combination of bad circumstances, bad company, and bad choices, your sand has fallen down the hourglass — what was it all for? No one wants to waste his life — but what if you fear that you have? The thief who died next to Jesus on the cross, and lived a most ravaged and pitiful life two thousand years ago, stands out like a flower grown between cracks in the pavement, showing how, even on life’s final page, even in its final lines, a wasted life can be redeemed. His Final Page What an eerie sensation it must have been to wake up that morning knowing that today would be his last. Unlike most, who do not know precisely when the cold fingers of death will seize them, he knew that within just a few hours he would be dead . His body would be dispossessed, his frame left vacant. His hands would never again clasp the oars of a fishing boat, his eyes would not see the sun fall behind the curtain of the horizon, his voice would no longer be heard in the land of the living. “If you have wasted your life, know that another life exists. There are more pages.” Soon, he would be gone . No more would the birds wake him with their songs, nor the breeze greet him on early mornings. No more would he playfully argue with his mother about her Scriptures — tomorrow did not exist for him. The rays streaming into his prison held no warmth. As for man his days are like grass; he flourishes like the flower of the field. The wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. The childhood lyrics sang involuntarily in his mind. It was no gentle wind that would soon pass over him, but a Roman tornado. The brutes had sentenced him to a most horrific end, one that made his mother cough up her food: crucifixion. He shuddered to recollect the sights of grown men, naked, squirming as bait on a hook outside of the city for all to see. Bloody, screaming, crying, groaning — he would be one of them . One of Three Of the whips and chains and mockery that escorted him to that dreadful hill, his own conscience joined as an invisible, but not unskilled, torturer. He always thought he would amend his ways eventually. But eventually never came. Now, as he trudged up the hill as a sport for cruel men, a still small voice within reminded him that he now dwelt in a land devoid of second chances. On this day, there were no more do-overs. No time to make things right. The branches would not reattach. The sentence could not be reversed. The shattered vase would not be restored. This world was being pried from his hands. Only hours remained, surely the worst of his already pitiful existence. He would beg for death in the end. As bloodstained nails invaded his wrists, shock waves of pain he had never known overwhelmed him. His mind spasmed at the flood of hurt only to reawaken as the other two nails impaled him. He could scarcely remember being lifted up from the ground but for the earth-shaking, body-convulsing thud as the cross fell in place. Two others erected nearby. Before again submerging below the streams of consciousness, he caught himself wondering why so many stood around them. See Him Through a Wasted Life Many eyes stared at him. He hated each pair. Why did his wretched death have to be attended by such a crowd? Luckily, he was not the main object of their mockery. He played backup in this savage dirge. Who was this man they hated so? Of course, it had to be the same day. The man who walked around stirring up the Pharisees, pretending to be the Messiah hung next to him. Some destination for a Messiah. Escaping the crowd’s displeasure, he joined in deriding him. Maybe it was what he heard from his enemies: “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” (Luke 23:35). Wait, even his enemies admit that he in fact saved others? Could he really be the Christ of God, his Chosen One? If he saved others, could he save me? Maybe it was what he saw. From the throng of weeping women trailing behind him up Golgotha, to a crowd gathering to see whether he would actually save himself, to his enemies surrounding him to hurl assaults at him: Who is this man? A sign above his head, inscribed in three languages read, “This is the King of the Jews” (Luke 23:38). Could he really be? Maybe it was the supernatural event surrounding his death. Three hours of darkness at midday (Matthew 27:45)? What can explain this blackening of the sun? Who is this that even the greater light leaves his throne and turns to flee at his death? Maybe it was what he heard from Jesus himself. As men mocked and tormented him, laughing and insulting him, he met their derision with prayer: “Father, forgive them , for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). He had been cursing the crowd, but this man — with nails in his flesh — prayed for their forgiveness. Who is this man calling God “Father” — even from these awful heights? Could I possibly be an answer to this King’s prayer? Can I be forgiven of my many sins and wasted life? With Final Breaths He knew everything had changed in his inner man when he heard himself spending the last of his fleeting strength to make the world his enemy on this man’s behalf. The third criminal railed, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (Luke 23:39). Before he could think, his soul objected: “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly , for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong ” (Luke 23:40–41). He was guilty, but not this man . He was rightfully condemned, but not this man. He was worthy of death, but not this man. “Only those can die well who perish in peace in the shadow of his cross.” He who wasted millions of breaths throughout his life came to gasp with his final few, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). And from the dying King to his unworthy servant came words to overwhelm his wasted existence: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). At the punctuation of this most miserable existence, he at last found the reason for his life: Jesus Christ. In the Shadow of the Cross Have you wasted your life? Are you on the verge of wasting it? Follow this once wretched man to the Savior. Whether you have been a horrible steward of your faculties through sin or through thoughtlessness, run to him who will even now welcome you. He prays for the forgiveness of his enemies. The moment you believe upon Jesus, angels will shout and rejoice over, yes, even you and your new life in him (Luke 15:7). If you have wasted your life, know that another life exists. There are more pages. Though nothing but regret follows you into glory, you will have lived better than the unbelieving kings and celebrities of this world if you repent of your sin and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. He is Life itself, and only those can die well who, like this penitent thief, perish in peace in the shadow of his cross.