Son Of The Underground (The Life Of Issac Liu, Son Of Brother Yun, The Heavenly Man) Order Printed Copy

Author: Isaac Liu & Albrecht Kaul
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About the Book

"Son of the Underground" is the inspiring story of Isaac Liu, the son of Chinese Christian leader Brother Yun. Growing up in a persecuted religious household, Isaac faced numerous challenges and dangers but ultimately found his own faith and calling. The book details his journey through persecution, imprisonment, and redemption, showcasing the power of faith and resilience in the face of adversity.

David Livingstone

"[I am] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary." With four theatrical words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"—words journalist Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advance—David Livingstone became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then went off to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. Berlin Congress spurs African independent churches The whole civilized world wept. They gave him a 21-gun salute and a hero's funeral among the saints in Westminster Abbey. "Brought by faithful hands over land and sea," his tombstone reads, "David Livingstone: missionary, traveler, philanthropist. For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade." He was Mother Teresa, Neil Armstrong, and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one. Highway man At age 25, after a childhood spent working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill, followed by learning in class and on his own, Livingstone was captivated by an appeal for medical missionaries to China. As he trained, however, the door to China was slammed shut by the Opium War. Within six months, he met Robert Moffat, a veteran missionary of southern Africa, who enchanted him with tales of his remote station, glowing in the morning sun with "the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before." For ten years, Livingstone tried to be a conventional missionary in southern Africa. He opened a string of stations in "the regions beyond," where he settled down to station life, teaching school and superintending the garden. After four years of bachelor life, he married his "boss's" daughter, Mary Moffat. From the beginning, Livingstone showed signs of restlessness. After his only convert decided to return to polygamy, Livingstone felt more called than ever to explore. During his first term in South Africa, Livingstone made some of the most prodigious—and most dangerous—explorations of the nineteenth century. His object was to open a "Missionary Road"—"God's Highway," he also called it—1,500 miles north into the interior to bring "Christianity and civilization" to unreached peoples. Explorer for Christ On these early journeys, Livingstone's interpersonal quirks were already apparent. He had the singular inability to get along with other Westerners. He fought with missionaries, fellow explorers, assistants, and (later) his brother Charles. He held grudges for years. He had the temperament of a book-reading loner, emotionally inarticulate except when he exploded with Scottish rage. He held little patience for the attitudes of missionaries with "miserably contracted minds" who had absorbed "the colonial mentality" regarding the natives. When Livingstone spoke out against racial intolerance, white Afrikaners tried to drive him out, burning his station and stealing his animals. He also had problems with the London Missionary Society, who felt that his explorations were distracting him from his missionary work. Throughout his life, however, Livingstone always thought of himself as primarily a missionary, "not a dumpy sort of person with a Bible under his arms, [but someone] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary." Though alienated from the whites, the natives loved his common touch, his rough paternalism, and his curiosity. They also thought he might protect them or supply them with guns. More than most Europeans, Livingstone talked to them with respect, Scottish laird to African chief. Some explorers took as many as 150 porters when they traveled; Livingstone traveled with 30 or fewer. On an epic, three-year trip from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean (reputedly the first by a European) Livingstone was introduced to the 1,700-mile-long Zambezi. The river was also home to Victoria Falls, Livingstone's most awe-inspiring discovery. The scene was "so lovely," he later wrote, that it "must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight." Despite its beauty, the Zambezi was a river of human misery. It linked the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the main suppliers of slaves for Brazil, who in turn sold to Cuba and the United States. Though Livingstone was partially driven by a desire to create a British colony, his primary ambition was to expose the slave trade and cut it off at the source. The strongest weapon in this task, he believed, was Christian commercial civilization. He hoped to replace the "inefficient" slave economy with a capitalist economy: buying and selling goods instead of people. The ill-fated Zambezi expedition After a brief heroic return to England, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to navigate 1,000 miles up the Zambezi in a brass-and-mahogany steamboat to establish a mission near Victoria Falls. The boat was state-of-the-art technology but proved too frail for the expedition. It leaked horribly after repeatedly running aground on sandbars. Livingstone pushed his men beyond human endurance. When they reached a 30-foot waterfall, he waved his hand, as if to wish it away, and said, "That's not supposed to be there." His wife, who had just given birth to her sixth child, died in 1862 beside the river, only one of several lives claimed on the voyage. Two years later, the British government, which had no interest in "forcing steamers up cataracts," recalled Livingstone and his mission party. A year later, he was on his way back to Africa again, this time leading an expedition sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and wealthy friends. "I would not consent to go simply as a geographer," he emphasized, but as biographer Tim Jeal wrote, "It would be hard to judge whether the search for the Nile's source or his desire to expose the slave trade was his dominant motive." The source of the Nile was the great geographical puzzle of the day. But more important to Livingstone was the possibility of proving that the Bible was true by tracing the African roots of Judaism and Christianity. For two years he simply disappeared, without a letter or scrap of information. He reported later that he had been so ill he could not even lift a pen, but he was able to read the Bible straight through four times. Livingstone's disappearance fascinated the public as much as Amelia Earhart's a few generations later. When American journalist Henry Stanley found Livingstone, the news exploded in England and America. Papers carried special editions devoted to the famous meeting. In August 1872, in precarious health, Livingstone shook Stanley's hand and set out on his final journey. When Livingstone had arrived in Africa in 1841, it was as exotic as outer space, called the "Dark Continent" and the "White Man's Graveyard." although the Portuguese, Dutch, and English were pushing into the interior, African maps had blank unexplored areas—no roads, no countries, no landmarks. Livingstone helped redraw the maps, exploring what are now a dozen countries, including South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, and the Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). And he made the West aware of the continuing evil of African slavery, which led to its being eventually outlawed.

iwo jima and the monumental sacrifice

“Some people wonder all their lives if they made a difference,” Ronald Reagan once said. Then he added, “The Marines don’t have that problem.” That was certainly true of the Marines who fought and died on a little island called Iwo Jima seventy years ago now. In the final phase of the war in the Pacific, Iwo Jima was strategic and essential to America and Japan — and it would cost them both dearly. Two out of every three Marines on Iwo Jima were killed or wounded before the Americans took the island. The fierce, heroic struggle was captured in what would become the most famous photograph of the war: Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. Joe Rosenthal’s photograph, like the larger-than-life men he captured on camera, became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Though dedicated to the service and sacrifice of the Marines in all of America’s wars, it is still often referred to simply as the “Iwo Jima Memorial.” It is the tallest bronze statue in the world. The soldier figures are each over thirty feet tall, and the rifles are sixteen feet long. Photographs, to use Lance Morrow’s phrase, “imprison time in a rectangle,” but they can never tell the whole story. Raising the flag on Mount Suribachi wasn’t the moment of victory — a triumphant point between war and peace. Three of the six men who raised the flag on February 23 would be killed in action on Iwo Jima in a battle that would rage on for another month. The flag represented hope when it was raised — it did not represent victory. Worthy Sacrifices The last time I visited the Iwo Jima monument, it was a lovely evening in Arlington. Visitors who walked around the base of the great bronze spoke with hushed voices. Even the selfie-snapping was reserved. The bronze giants basked in the warmth of the last light, and the flag snapped in the wind, much like the first time. It made me feel proud and humble at the same time. From the bluff, I could see across the Potomac the tops of America’s other monuments huddled along the great expanse leading to the Capitol. Marble and bronze — the stuff of enduring memory — worthy of the sacrifices they commemorate. At the time I was at Arlington, Christians were being shot, beheaded, even crucified by the Islamic State, and whole Christian populations were being utterly obliterated in Syria and Iraq. I thought to myself, “Where’s the monument to their sacrifice? What’s left for the generations to follow to remember?” Tragically, all that remains are smoldering ruins, bloodstains, and boot prints, as their killers move on. Sometimes, even less than that remains. In November, a Christian couple in Pakistan were incinerated. Here’s their story. The Barbarians Are Back Debt peonage has long existed in Pakistan, keeping generations of Christians in slavery working in the brick kilns. Once I walked through such a slave colony near Lahore when the master was away in order to hear the workers’ stories. Little children stacked bricks, men tended the massive furnace firing the bricks, and women washed clothes in a stream that doubled as the sewer. It was in this same area last November that two brick workers, Shahzad Masih and his wife Shama, were killed. They were in a debt dispute with their owner, and in order to settle the score, he accused them of blasphemy, of burning pages of the Koran. The blasphemy law in Pakistan is a convenient way of dealing with inconvenient people and usually works like this: kill first, then maybe ask questions later. The setting was readymade for a mob. Bricks were handy for stoning, the legs of the husband and wife were broken so they couldn’t escape, and then they were thrown into the furnace. Shahzad and his wife, who was five months pregnant, were burned to ash. This didn’t happen centuries ago in barbaric times — it happened in November. The barbarians are back. Tragically, the murders of Shahzad and his wife are just more of the same. In the past three years alone, between the work of ISIS and other al-Qaeda franchises, the number of Christians killed or displaced in Iraq and Syria is in the tens of thousands, including hundreds of girls taken as sex slaves for the fighters. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than seven thousand Christians have been killed by Boko Haram and al-Shabaab in the past three years. When We Hear of Persecution It’s understandable that these al-wannabes tend to sound alike — their handiwork certainly tends to look alike. After more than a decade in the new world disorder, they are just names and numbers on the news crawl, accompanied with a blur of blood and bombs, of gun-toting “spiritual leaders” doing selfies on YouTube as they crow about their latest kill. I think of the lines from a Patty Griffin song, “There’s a million sad stories on the side of the road. Strange how we all just got used to the blood.” The unspeakable seems unanswerable; and so we shrug. What can we say? What can we do that would make any difference? As Christians we must not look at persecution as just “bad things happening to good people.” And we shouldn’t look away either. Christian persecution is tied to the very work and nature of the gospel. Here are three truths to remember when we hear of Christian persecution, whether in distant places or when it comes to our own shores. 1. We are vitally linked to our suffering brothers and sisters. “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body” (Hebrews 13:3). This is why we pray, why we speak, and why we hurt alongside suffering Christians — they are family. Through the power of the gospel, our lives are forever bound up in Christ’s life and, therefore, forever bound up with all other believers as well. 2. God is glorified, and his gospel advances, when his people demonstrate trust, love, and grace as they suffer for him. “I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear” (Philippians 1:12–14). Persecution has many outcomes — sometimes they don’t make sense to us. But clearly, one of the outcomes is gospel advance. Saul-the-Persecutor-turned-Paul-the-Preacher was a powerful demonstration of this truth. In our day, he would have been the equivalent of an al-Qaeda commander; so his conversion was the talk of the town. “They only were hearing it said, ‘He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’ And they glorified God because of me” (Galatians 1:23–24). Samuel Zwemer, the apostle to Arabia, with his “Big God, Big Gospel” perspective on the long campaign of Kingdom advance could write, When you read in reports of troubles and opposition, of burning up books, imprisoning colporteurs, and expelling workers, you must not think that the gospel is being defeated. It is conquering. What we see under such circumstances is only the dust in the wake of the ploughman. God is turning the world upside down that it may be right side up when Jesus comes. He that plougheth should plough in hope. We may not be able to see a harvest yet in this country, but furrow after furrow, the soil is getting ready for the seed. 3. Persecution is linked to Christ’s persecution. “God is turning the world upside down that it may be right side up when Jesus comes.” “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:12–13). Suffering that comes for the sake of his name is Christ-like. And so there is, in fact, a monument to Christian sacrifice — it is the cross, in all its blood-stained splendor. Unlike the inspiring flag-raising on Iwo Jima, when the cross was raised, it seemed to symbolize only defeat and death. Yet, secured by Sovereign Love and the empty tomb, Christ’s work was so complete that everyone who comes to him will live forever. This is the reward of the Lamb’s suffering. Only he could heal the hurt of his people, turning their sorrow into song and their death into life.