As we always do on Monday, I like to share with you all an inspiring devotion taken from the best selling book Extreme Devotion. My prayer is that reading this devotion will inspire you to pray for the persecuted church.

Shortly after becoming a Christian in 1997, Hezekiah went to what was known locally as the “sanctuary” to receive discipleship and evangelism training. He then returned to his father’s house and was immediately approached by thirty-five relatives and villagers demanding to know why he had converted to Christianity. He told them, “Jesus is the only way I can be saved from my sins and have eternal life.”

“Hurry, get into the closet. Do not make a sound unless you hear my voice. Do you understand?” Rose heard the two small voices of her preschool children say, “Yes, Mommy,” then she bolted out the door and headed toward her daughter’s school, praying that it was not too late.

At the end of World War II, the German soldiers knew the Soviets would take them to a labor camp in Siberia and that many of them would die there. The Soviet army had just taken the city from the Nazis, so when the two soldiers found an opportunity, they ran away from the group. They wandered fearfully through the dark streets of Bucharest, Romania.

Secret Soviet police documents show that in Butovo, a suburb of Moscow, forty-four thousand people were shot in groups of two hundred and buried secretly. One night during the slaughter, Claudia Vasilevna opened her door to a haggard woman who was supposed to be shot for her Christian faith but managed to escape. She begged Claudia to hide her.

Even when Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand was placed in a solitary prison cell devoid of light and sound, he continued to preach to an unseen audience.

Mary was only seventeen when Muslim fanatics raided her village in Lebanon. Mary and her parents were confronted with a grueling choice: “Become a Muslim, or you will be shot.”