Nov 07
4
Persecution’s Fire
Posted by Stephen4
Tags: challenge, church, Sunday, trials and tribulations
Our speaker at church this morning works in Turkey producing video teaching materials for the Christian community. He gave us an on-the-scene account of three Christian martyrs in Turkey, in April this year. From the news report at Christianity Today:
In a gruesome assault against Turkey’s tiny Christian community, five young Muslim Turks entered a Christian publishing office in the southeastern province of Malatya Wednesday and slit the throats of the three Protestant Christians present.
Two of the victims, Necati Aydin, 36, and Ugur Yuksel, 32, were Turkish converts from Islam. The third man, Tilmann Geske, 46, was a German citizen.
The Turkish press reported Thursday that four of the five young men arrested for the murders, all 19 to 20 years of age, admitted during initial interrogations that they were motivated by both “nationalist and religious feelings.”
There was huge national media coverage condemning the attack. The wives of the victims were interviewed on TV, forgiving the perpetrators just as “Jesus, as he hung on the cross, said ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” A powerful Gospel message went out nation-wide as a result of the killings, and many Turkish believers were emboldened to profess their faith. It certainly puts yesterday’s complaints into perspective.
It was a moving message this morning, and I think you really need to listen to it yourself. I’ve provided the appropriate portion here. It’s an MP3 about 26 minutes long, zipped up into a 5.4MB file. Save the link to disk, extract the MP3 from the zip, and listen to it.
