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Inspiring, I was much impacted.

- tania lourenco (3 months ago)

About the Book


"God's Law of Attraction" by Patricia King explores how individuals can align themselves with God's principles to attract blessings, abundance, and favor into their lives. Through faith, prayer, and obedience to God's laws, readers can experience the fullness of God's promises and live a purposeful and fulfilling life.

Brother Yun

Brother Yun Brother Yun was born in February 1958 in the province of Henan. His original name was Liu Zhenying (ćˆ˜æŒŻè„). Brother Yun became a believer at the age of 16. Soon after he became a Christian, God called him to be His witness in the west and south. As he was obedient to the calling, he eventually became a witness of Christ not just in the western and southern parts of China, but throughout China and in the nations beyond China as well. Brother Yun was born into a poor family. His family’s financial situation took a turn for the worst when his father became ill with an asthmatic condition that led to lung cancer eventually. His life got worse when he became a Christian as he suffered severe trials and persecutions. In the midst of suffering for the Lord, however, he experienced miracle after miracle, which helped to strengthen his faith. HOW BROTHER YUN BECAME A BELIEVER In 1974, Brother Yun’s father became ill with lung cancer. His mother, who had been a Christian for many years but had become spiritually cold after the expulsion of Western missionaries during the Cultural Revolution, felt a deep sense of desperation because if her husband had died then, it would leave the family in dire straits. She thought of committing suicide. One evening, as she was lying in bed, she heard a voice saying to her that Jesus loved her. In tears and in repentance, she rededicated her life to God and gathered her family to pray for her husband. The next morning, her husband got better and as a result, everyone in the family, including Brother Yun, put their faith in God. HIS HUNGER FOR THE WORD OF GOD Brother Yun was 16 when he became a Christian. Soon after, he started hungering for the Word of God. However, his family did not have a Bible. He began asking his mother who Jesus was. In response, his mother would tell him that Jesus was the Son of God and that He had recorded all His teachings in the Bible. Brother Yun wanted a Bible and his mother recalled that there was a man in another village who had one. So she brought him to see the man. The man was too afraid to show Brother Yun his Bible. So he suggested to the latter that he could pray and ask God for one. Brother Yun decided to fast and pray for a Bible. For the next 100 days, he ate only one bowl of steamed rice everyday. One day at 4am, after fasting for 100 days, he saw a vision. In the vision, he was walking up a steep hill and trying to push a heavy cart at the same time. He was heading towards a village where he intended to beg for food for his family. He struggled greatly as he continued his climb uphill. The cart was about to roll back and fall on him when he saw three men walking down the hill in the opposite direction. One of them was a kind old man and he was pulling a large cart of fresh bread. When the old man saw Brother Yun, he asked him if he was hungry. He said ‘yes’ and started crying. The old man then took a red bag of bread from his cart and asked his two servants to give it to Brother Yun. As he put the bread into his mouth, it immediately turned into a Bible. Upon waking up, Brother Yun began to search for the Bible. His search, however, was in vain. All of a sudden, he heard a faint knock on the door and someone was calling out his name. Immediately, he recognised the voice – it was the same voice he had heard in the vision. He quickly opened the door and standing before him were the two servants he had seen in the vision. One of them held a red bag in his hand. In this red bag was a Bible. It was later that Brother Yun found out the names of the two men. One was Brother Wang while the other was Brother Sung. They were sent by an evangelist to give Brother Yun the Bible. The evangelist, who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution and had nearly died while being tortured, had received a vision from God. In the vision, God showed him Brother Yun’s house and the location of his village. He was asked to give his Bible to Brother Yun. However, he did not obey God until three months later. Brother Yun began to devour the Word of God. Even though he could hardly read, this did not deter him at all. When he had finished reading the entire Bible, he started to memorise one chapter per day. In 28 days, he had memorised the Gospel of Matthew. Then he went on to memorise the Book of Acts and so forth. OBEDIENT TO THE CALL OF GOD One morning at 4am, Brother Yun had a dream. In the dream, God asked him to be His witness in the west and south. In the same dream, he saw a young man from the south coming to his house. And so at daybreak, he told his mother to expect the young man’s visit and to ask him to wait for him. Then he sat off to a village he had never heard of in the west. The people in this village had been praying for him to visit as they had heard about how he had prayed for a Bible and got it. When the meeting at the village concluded and Brother Yun got ready to leave, the villagers refused to let him go. So he stayed on and recited to them the first twelve chapters from the Book of Acts. After that, the villagers finally let him go. From the village to his house, it could take up to 2 hours to walk. Because he did not want to make the young man from the south wait too long, he decided to run home. All of a sudden, he found himself entering his village without any apparent time lapse. What should have taken him a few hours took him just a few moments. It was as if God had supernaturally transported him back to his village. PERSECUTIONS AND MIRACLES IN HIS LIFE Brother Yun was arrested by security police numerous times and was thrown into prison three times for sharing the gospel in communist China. When Brother Yun was arrested the first time, he was only 17 years old. At that time, he was ministering at a meeting far away from home. After he was caught, he was thrown into a freezing cold prison cell. There was no heat in the cell and his winter coat had been thrown into the snow by the security police who had caught him. He began to sing Psalm 150 aloud. The more he sang, the more he was filled with joy. Gradually, his frozen hands and feet regained feeling and he no longer felt cold. During his first imprisonment in Nanyang, Brother Yun felt that God wanted him to fast without food and water until he could see his family again. This fast lasted 74 days, which was humanly impossible but yet was made possible because he chose to obey God. During those times when Brother Yun was in the hands of government officials, he was repeatedly beaten and tortured with electric batons. He was also kicked and trampled upon. Furthermore, he had needles being jabbed underneath his fingernails. Once, Brother Yun was paraded through the streets with a red cross tied behind him for half a day. When night fell, he was locked and left alone inside a large interrogation room. The wooden cross was taken off his back but his hands were still tied up. All of a sudden, the rope that was used to tie his hands snapped by itself. He immediately walked out of the interrogation room and walked through the courtyard in the midst of onlookers. Nobody stopped him or said anything to him. It was as if God had blinded their eyes and they did not even recognise who he was. Because the front gate was locked, the only way Brother Yun could get out was to climb over an eight-foot high cement wall. He climbed up as much as he could manage. Then he looked over the wall and saw that there was a ten-foot wide open tank directly below. Suddenly, he felt as if someone had lifted him up and thrown him over. He was thrown so far that he did not land in the tank. Brother Yun’s 3rd imprisonment was a very dark period in his life as the prison guards in the maximum security prison were determined to prevent his escape. So they beat his legs to cripple him permanently. They had him beaten up everyday, even in his crippled state. One day, God instructed him to escape from the prison. This was confirmed by a brother-in-Christ. Thus, on May 5, 1997, he miraculously walked past dozens of prison guards and out of the maximum security prison. It was as if he had become invisible to the guards. He did not realise that his legs had been miraculously healed until later. Throughout all the horrendous and painful experiences that Brother Yun went through, the word of the Lord kept coming to him, encouraging him and strengthening his faith. BROTHER YUN’S MINISTRY Brother Yun eventually escaped China and sought asylum in Germany in 2001. Since then, he has been continuing his ministry from there and has spoken to congregations internationally. He has founded “Back to Jerusalem” Movement and has been sending missionaries out from China to share the gospel in the least-reached nations. Brother Yun’s life and ministry have impacted many lives. Thousands of people have become Christians through his ministry. It is thus inevitable that fellow Christians have allowed themselves to be used as instruments of wickedness to attack his reputation. The co-author of The Heavenly Man, Paul Hattaway has aptly put it this way, “Many of the great Christian leaders throughout history have been the subject of brutal attacks from other Christians.” AFTERTHOUGHT Brother Yun’s childlike faith and his prompt obedience to God’s call are exemplary. It is incredible that he has remained faithful to God despite the tremendous suffering and persecutions he has gone through.

For Anyone Happy Without God

“I know you don’t believe me, but I do not need Christianity to be happy. I am happier than most Christians I know.” Looking up from his coffee, he smiled and assured me, “I am glad you found happiness in Jesus, but I am quite content without him. I have found my path to happiness, and I am glad you have found a different one. We stand at the same end, it would appear.” I did not know what to say. I knew how to share the Joy of the world to the discontent, the miserable, the downcast, but I stood perplexed at this man who told me, in no uncertain terms, “I do not need Christ to be happy.” Wasn’t his heart restless until it found its rest in him? He assured me it wasn’t. Didn’t he have a God-shaped hole in his heart? He swore that he didn’t. And what was more, he truly seemed to be, as far as I could tell, happy. I knew Jesus was a Comfort for those who mourned, a Light to those in darkness, a North Star to those who wandered the world without hope. I didn’t know what he was to those happy enough in their own way. Can Unbelievers Be Truly Happy? I wish I could go back and talk with this man. Instead of trying to convince him, for hours on end, of his unhappiness, all so I could then share Christ with him, I wish I would have spoken the way Paul did when he addressed those he found in Lystra. He [God] did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness. (Acts 14:17) Paul did not address the downtrodden, the depressed, the poor in spirit. Here, he addressed those who ate, drank, and when tomorrow came, died. Those with food and happiness enough not to alert them to their spiritual starvation. To such as these, Paul did not start by handing out prescriptions for happiness they didn’t feel they needed. He knew he spoke to a people that I was unfamiliar with: the happy heathen. Paul says that God satisfied their hearts with food and gladness. Gladness. The only other place in the New Testament where this word appears is in Luke’s citation of another well-known verse: “You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence” (Acts 2:28; citing Psalm 16:11). In Psalm 16, God’s Fatherly presence to his children gives one kind of heart-gladness (a full, everlasting, permanent kind), but his food and common-grace-goodness bestows another. Both are real. God Makes His Enemies Smile God allows his enemies to smile. Have you wondered at this? God allows those who ignore him, reject him, despise his glory, and belittle his name to breathe his air, feast on his food, swim in his waters, hike in his forests, ski on his mountains, laugh, sing, and dance on his lands. He has not yet evicted them. He has not taken back his bread from their plates nor his air from their lungs. Rather — and note the benevolence of the God of the universe — he “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). No good and perfect gift comes down from any other hand but his (James 1:17). He is an abundantly gracious God, even to his enemies. The God constantly sneered at and ignored “makes his sun rise on the evil.” Almighty God “sends rain . . . on the unjust” who despise his glory (Matthew 5:45). This kindness makes angels sing of his mercy and patience. Gifts Without Gratitude The man that I spoke with took these gifts from God, enjoyed them, and refused to say thank you. Man is the only creature other than fallen angels to pay God back so basely. God opens his hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:16). He opens his hand to eagles in their treetops, to antelope on the plains, to fish in the sea and flowers of the field. They declare his glory and groan for his return (Romans 8:19–23). But men and devils do not. Devils contemplate the return of God saying, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29). And men look their fellow men in the eye and say they have no need of Christ; indeed, who is Christ that he should be obeyed? God opens his hand to this creature — best positioned to return to him gratefulness and love — and he will not bother to look up. He does not honor him, nor does he return him thanks (Romans 1:21). I wish I would have shared with this man how his reasons for happiness — family, friends, health, good food, good drink, good sports — were not just “how things were.” I wish I would have bid him to consider how God watches him, day in and day out, parade about with his gifts while discounting his person. What Our Pleasures Testify Instead of telling him that I was sure he is really unhappy somewhere deep down, or trying to debate him as to whether he feels his God-sized hole (which he still has), what should I have told him? I should have explored all his reasons for happiness, and then told him plainly that these were all gifts from God meant to lead him to God. And that, furthermore, his failure to do so was already a serious crime that must be atoned for, and thus he must be led to Christ, God’s greatest gift to the world. Sin, not just his psychological experience of joy, gave Jesus utmost relevance to him. He had a sin problem, if not a felt joy problem. He stood not only a branch withering apart from the Vine; he stood a branch prepared for the fire (John 15:6). Paul told the happy heathens that God had not left himself without witness to both his existence and his goodness. And what was this witness’s testimony? Repent. “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4). Beautiful families whisper, repent. Enjoyable careers urge, repent. Sunsets in vacation selfies cry, repent. All of these declare that God is good, benevolent, and patient with his enemies, and that he calls them to turn away from sin and to forgiveness found in Christ. Word to Happy Heathen If I could go back to talk with this man, I might say something like the following. The Christian faith is not merely about man’s happiness, although God gives more joy than you can now imagine. Christianity addresses how sinful men, women, and children can be reconciled to their Creator and live happy lives for his glory. God has placed good gifts to summon you to see God’s ultimate gift: his Son, Jesus Christ. He came to save a people he didn’t have to save. To live a life we couldn’t live. To die the death we deserved to die. And to rise, summoning all everywhere to turn away from their sin, and trust in his finished work on the cross for sinners. The smartphone in your pocket has everything to do with this God. The music massaging your ears, the colors jumping before your eyes, the gladness of heart and the love you feel are kindnesses from God with one message upon their lips: “Repent and believe.” Instead of justifying a life apart from God, substituting the gifts for the Giver, the gifts of great joy are given to lead to the Giver. His multi-varied kindnesses, his overwhelming patience, his forbearance give room for faith. Even now he beckons. Even now he invites. Come, heed the message in every good gift of God’s perfect gift — Jesus Christ — and live. Article by Greg Morse Staff writer, desiringGod.org

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