Recently I had the privilege to travel to Laos and to meet Christians there who face persecution. One of the brothers we met with is an evangelist who leads people to Christ almost every day. He has seen numerous people miraculously healed through the power of God, and many overcome drug addiction with God’s help. He told us that his cel phone rings regularly with people who say, “I need help.”

The following is excerpted from a letter written by German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and circulated to a hundred or so of his former students during World War II:

“I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

The following is excerpted from a letter written by German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and circulated to a hundred or so of his former students during World War II:

The text of today's post is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, taken from a sermon he preached while serving as pastor of two German-speaking congregations in England prior to World War II. Bonhoeffer would eventually return to Germany, where he was both a pastor and an active worker against the Nazis. His life on earth ended when he was hanged in Flossenburg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945. But as this sermon excerpt shows, Bonhoeffer had been thinking about death and what it means for a Christian for quite some time:

My wife was with me on the trip to China several years ago when we met a house church Christian named Sister Tong, who you see in this picture. At that time, she had been free from prison just a few weeks after serving six months for hosting an “illegal” church meeting in her home.

After 10 days in solitary confinement, Hussein was taken back to the main prison. The paperwork they gave him said he was a “blasphemer of the Holies,” an apostate. One of the guards, seeing the charge, told Hussein, “Only God can help you in here.”

Still blindfolded, Hussein was taken inside a building; he couldn’t tell if it was a house or a business. He was led down four steps just inside the door, and then after 15 feet there were more stairs. He was going to a basement. He heard men speaking Kurdish, a language he didn’t know. Looking down past the edge of his blindfold, he could see that the floor was made of tiles. Hussein was taken to the manager of solitary confinement; he was placed in a cell and the blindfold and handcuffs were finally removed. They gave him a gray jumpsuit to put on and took his clothes. The cell was a 10’ by 6’ room, with no bed or toilet or sink. On one wall were two floodlights, and one of them was always on.

Hussein and his ministry partner had gathered in an apartment belonging to a Christian in a Kurdish area of Iran. The man who lived in the apartment had also invited 10 young Kurdish, Muslim women to come hear about Jesus. The previous week, the believers had received a secret shipment of 500 New Testaments, which were stacked in three large boxes in one of the apartment’s bedrooms.

When a Christian brother we'll call "Bilal" died last spring in a small Nepali city, it was important to his family that his body be buried. For Nepali Christians, burial is not only a way to dispose of a body but also an "Ebenezer" (1 Sam. 7:12), a permanent landmark of a person's faith and God's faithfulness. But in Nepal, where 75 percent of the people are Hindus, cremation is the expected ritual following a death.