How God Used Mao Tse Tung — Paul Kaufman

The Purpose of the Holy Spirit’s Outpouring

The purpose of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, then, is to produce a tremendous spiritual harvest. And that's what we're seeing in our world today, in the most unlikely spots in the world. Now in China, we are seeing that harvest come to pass at this present moment, in spite of the fact that all of the outside circumstances seem to be mitigating against a spiritual harvest.

Take, for instance, the fact that that is a communist country, run by a Marxist, atheistic government. A government who has no knowledge of God. Take, for instance, the fact that that country is a country where no missionaries have served for thirty-some years.

Where it is impossible to send an evangelistic crusade and yet, in spite of all of the impossibilities, God is giving us a spiritual harvest such as none of us could ever have dreamed of, or none of us had faith to believe for, in all of the days of missionary service.

The Early Protestant Missionary Work in China

Now in order to tell you what God is doing, I have to go a little bit into the background, and so I'm going to have to talk fast. A hundred and fifty years ago, the first Protestant missionary arrived in China, by the name of Robert Morrison.

From that time on, the missionaries, which came from all over the western world to China to preach the gospel, found it very tough going. The reason is very simple. China had been without the gospel through most of its long history.

The modern history of China goes back five thousand years. At the time Christ hung on Calvary's cross, there were more Chinese living in the world than any other kind of people. It was the largest country in the world at that point in time.

Jesus said to the disciples, go into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature. They did not do it. There is no record that any missionary, that any disciple, that any emissary of the cross of Christ reached China until almost seven hundred years after the Great Commission was given.

As a result, the country has been steeped in animism, in spiritism. It's been steeped in humanism through all of those long centuries. So that when the missionary arrived, there were tremendous barriers to the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Communists came to power in 1949. The missionaries were forced out of the country. What had happened as a result of 150 years of missions? More money had been poured, missionary money, into China than any other country in the world.

There should have been. It was the largest country in the world. More missionaries had gone to China than any other country in the world, as there should have been. But what was the result? At the end of 150 years of missions, we were able to count approximately four million Christians among the 450 million peoples of China, and only one million of them were Protestants, and only a small percentage of them could be considered evangelicals, after 150 years of missions.

Not a very great numerical success story, but it was a success story, because God had sent the missionaries to preach the gospel. God had sent the missionaries to translate the Bible into the Chinese language, without which no church can subsist for any period of time.

God had sent the missionaries to sow the seed, to plant the church, and the missionaries were successful in doing that. That's what God sent them to do. In addition to that, the missionaries were successful in training a few nationals for leadership.

That was difficult. There are many reasons for that. It was difficult in China to preach the gospel. So there was only a little, small group of Christians in that land of China after 150 years of missions.

And when the missionaries left the land of China, they said, We didn't prepare the church for this. We didn't know this was going to happen. We didn't believe this would ever happen. And they certainly didn't believe what was yet to happen, when every church would be closed and every Bible would be taken away from the Christians.

They hadn't prepared the church in China for those eventualities. And they left with sad hearts, wondering if the church in China would ever survive. The missionaries faced many obstacles, and I'm going to review them very briefly for you, not as an excuse, but as a fact of history.

The Practical Obstacles to Evangelizing China

The missionaries faced the obstacle of transportation. How do you get from point A to point B to go into all the world and preach the gospel? Not only was it a three, four-month journey to get to China, but once you got into China, sometimes it's a three-month journey to your mission station.

My father in 1907 went to the borders of Tibet. His mission station was 90 days by mule back from the nearest public transportation. How are you going to evangelize the world by mule back? How are you going to take the gospel to the largest nation of the world when one of the favorite means of transportation was the commercial wheelbarrow?

I'm not very old, but I've traveled on commercial wheelbarrows and ox carts and pony carts and horseback and everything else through that vast land of China, and it's as big as the United States. So just taking the gospel was an enormous task because there was no public transportation to speak of, few roads.

Railroads, yes, but they were built by the Germans and maintained by the Chinese. When the schedule said the train would leave at 12 o 'clock, it forgot to tell you whether that was noon or midnight or today or tomorrow.

You never knew. They were not a very reliable means of transportation. There was the problem of languages. There were 300 major languages in China, and when God called you to China as a missionary, you better find out what part of the country he's calling you to because when you spend four to five years learning the language, you're stuck in that particular geographic area.

There was the problem of illiteracy. The average person in China could not read and write. Even when I left China, still only 20 of the people could read and write. It's difficult to establish the church with people who can't read and write.

Not impossible, but very difficult. And how do you develop leadership among the people who can't go to the Bible for their daily bread themselves? There was the problem of the religions of China, which had gotten such a strong foothold during the years that the church failed to take the gospel to the largest nation in the world.

There were enormous problems in the nation of China which made the preaching of the gospel very difficult. And as a result, the hillsides of China are pockmarked with the graves of thousands of missionaries who gave their lives and their wives and their children to preach the gospel in the land of China.

My father is buried there. My sister is buried there. It was an enormous price that was paid to plant the cross in the nation of China. And only a million Christians, after 150 years of mission. But you see, God has a plan.

God’s Sovereign Plan and Nebuchadnezzar’s Testimony

And God's plan is never deferred or deterred or delayed. God's program is always on schedule. Do you remember what Nebuchadnezzar said after he spent his seven years in insanity? Chained like an oxen to the field, he gathered the people together and he said, Folks, I've learned a lesson that I sure didn't know before.

I've learned that God does according to his will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth and none can stay his hand or even ask, What doest thou? And I declare to you, it's still true, my friends, that no one can stay the hand of God.

And certainly many have tried. What happened when the missionaries left China? A communistic, atheistic government took over in the nation of China. A man by the name of Mao Zedong was determined to transform the country of China and make it into what it once had been, one of the greatest nations of the world.

Your ancestors and mine were primitive peoples in Europe. China was the most progressive nation of the world of that day. Mao Zedong was determined to create a new kind of Chinese man. He called it a socialist man.

He described that socialist man in a lecture which he gave in my hometown in Qingdao in North China in 1937 as the man who would live not for himself but for others. That's a noble goal. It sounds very Christian.

And that was his goal, to create a whole nation of people who would live unselfishly, not for themselves but for others. All of the propaganda, all of the education, all of the brainwashing, all of the torture, all of the imprisonment, all of the labor camps, everything, all of his writings that he did and certainly more of his writings were published than any other man in history save the Bible itself.

All of that was aimed at creating a new man. And so Mao Zedong sent his emissaries out over China to declare the new gospel, the gospel of Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought it became known as. Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought, a combination, a signification of some of the concepts of Marxism.

I must remind you that Marxism is the ideology, but communism is only one's interpretation of that ideology. So it differs from every country to the other and with every communist leader of the world.

And so Mao was teaching Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought, the signification of the concepts of Marxism that he felt would fit the nation of China. He sent his emissaries, his missionaries, if you please, out over China to preach the gospel.

Mao Zedong’s Infrastructure and Language Reforms

They came back and said, Sir, I've just ridden for 90 days on the back of a mule to get to a distant village in Tibet to tell them about this new gospel. We'll never get the job done unless we've got some better means of transportation.

Mao Zedong said, I'll fix that. And he put the whole nation of China, millions and millions of people like ants, he gave them picks and shovels and a wicker basket and said, now build roads. And he set them to work building roads all over the nation of China until that land today is crisscrossed with roads where there has never been roads before.

Even up into the mountainous areas of Tibet, there are roads. There are roads up over the roof of the world into Nepal, into Afghanistan. There are roads all over China today. They're in pretty good shape because they haven't been able to afford automobiles or trucks or anything else, but the roads are there.

During 30 years, Mao Zedong built more railroads than was built at that period of time than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, there were reasons for it, to spread his ideology, to be militarily prepared of an attack by the Soviet Union.

But what I want you to realize is that God used Mao Zedong to build those means of transportation across the nation of China. And when he got the roads built, he died. And his philosophy died with him.

The men came back to Chairman Mao and they said, Mr. Mao, we can't spread this gospel over China. Everybody speaks a different language. 300 major dialects, thousands of minor dialects. One village cannot understand the other.

40 miles outside the city of Shanghai, they speak a completely different language. How are we going to evangelize China with the gospel of Marxist-Leninist thought? And Mao Zedong said, we'll change all that.

We'll force everybody in China to learn one language. Now, under a democracy, that's very difficult, as they are trying to do in Canada and other countries. That's very, very difficult. But under a dictatorship, it's fairly simple.

You merely point a gun at a man's head and you say, learn! He doesn't have any choice. And so the people in China were forced to learn one common language. They didn't have to give up their colloquial dialects, but they all had to learn one common language.

Every school, all of the educational system, all the governmental system, all the way through China were taught one common language. Now, the question is, out of the 300, which common language should we teach the people?

Now, that was a very, very important decision. Because naturally, he's going to get opposition from whoever he doesn't choose. And perhaps the wisest decision that Chairman Mao ever made was the decision to select the dialect spoken around the city of Peking, which was not his dialect.

But it's called Mandarin or Putonghua. It became, the Peking dialect became the national language of China. Now, that was a very wise decision because that's the language that I learned as a boy in China.

And now, thanks to Mao Zedong, everybody in China speaks my language or the other way around. And I've been able to travel all over China and speak to people and they all understand me and I understand them.

Isn't that a marvelous provision? But think how much easier it's going to be to preach the gospel in China when everybody speaks one language. We broadcast, that is, Asian Outreach, does 100 times a week in the mainland China.

And thank you, Mao Zedong, we don't have to use 300 languages. We use one language and reach everybody in China. Praise the Lord. Thank you, Mao Zedong. You understand, he was like all men, a tool in the hands of God.

Like Pharaoh before him, like Nero before him, like Pilate before him, he was only a tool in the hands of God to accomplish not Mao's plan but God's plan. Let me say this, that Mao Zedong failed to accomplish a single one of his major goals.

He died a failure and everybody in China today knows it. Secondly, Mao Zedong succeeded in accomplishing everything that God wanted him to accomplish. Kind of frustrating for Mao. But that's what happens when you fight against God.

You can't win. Mao Zedong looked at the situation of the religions of China which were a tremendous obstacle to the spread of the gospel of Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought and he said, We'll wipe those religions out of the country.

We'll destroy all the temples, all the altars. And he sent the young Red Guards out to tear down those shrines and altars and images and to destroy the places of religious worship in the country. I got news for you.

You may be able to destroy Confucianism. You may even be able to destroy Buddhism. You may be able to destroy some forms of animism. But you cannot destroy what God has built. But he sure tried. And to the degree, to the degree that Mao Zedong was successful in destroying the stranglehold which those religions had on the minds and hearts of the Chinese people, to that degree, it makes it that much easier to preach the gospel in the nation of China.

The Cultural Revolution and the Chinese Family

There was the Cultural Revolution, a ten-year span of time which ended in 69, which was the most disastrous period in modern China's history. It was called the Cultural Revolution because Mao wanted to destroy all of the old culture of China so that he could impose upon China a new communist culture.

One of the things he tried to do was to destroy the family in China. The family, the Chinese family and the Jewish family are the two strongest family units in the world. And he tried to destroy the Chinese family units.

Why? Because you can't be loyal to mom and dad and grandpa and grandma and be loyal to me. So he had to try and destroy the Chinese family. I'm here to tell you that he didn't succeed. But he did break the stranglehold which the older generation had upon the young people so that the young people were now able and are now able to do some thinking and deciding for themselves.

That was a divine provision, too, because that was one of the great obstacles to the spread of the gospel in China. If mom and dad said no, there was no question about it. And the Chinese family is a big family.

I mean, there are usually about 4 ,000 people in the Chinese family. It's an extended family. They know all their uncles and aunts by name. For generations, they know them all. First name, second name.

Number one uncle, number two uncle, number three uncle, number five uncle, number six aunts, seven aunts. They know them all. Stranglehold was broken by Mao Zedong, which made it easier for the young people to accept either communism or an alternative to communism.

Literacy, Simplified Chinese, and the Spread of Ideas

There was the problem of illiteracy. Mao Zedong was a partly educated man, a self-educated man. He wound up as a librarian in a university, but really had no university degree. He had read a lot, mostly the writings of Marx and Lenin and so on, which led him into communism.

But he began to write profusely because he could not speak to the Chinese people by radio because his dialect wasn't understood by most of the Chinese people and he himself spoke Mandarin with such a terribly broad accent that it was hopeless.

And so he communicated by the pen and became, number one, the most read writer of our generation. Number two, he became in the Chinese thinking one of the great calligraphers, Chinese character writers in history.

Mao Zedong wrote all of these wonderful things about the future of China and about interpreting Marxism as he thought and what was going to happen to China and what needed to be done in China. He wrote all of these things, gave them to the fellows and said, go on out, spread it all over China.

And they came back and said, sir, it's hopeless. Only 20 of the people can read what you've written. The presses of China had turned out more of Mao's writings at that period of time than the Bible.

It was the only time in modern history that the Bible had been superseded by any other publication, the writings of Mao. Mao said, you mean they can't read it? No. He said, we'll change that. And he began a massive literacy program to change the Chinese language or rather to teach everybody in China to read and write.

And they made dramatic progress for a number of years. It was forced. The farming people didn't want to read and write. After all, you don't have to learn to read and write to farm. We've been doing it for generations.

We've got to be able to read the sun and the moon and the stars. And you've got to know something that grandpa and grandma passed on to you and mom and dad, but you don't have to learn to read and write.

They weren't interested. And 80 percent of the people of China are farmers. And it was difficult to force them to learn to read and write. But they made dramatic progress over a number of years. As I say, once again, under a dictatorship certain things are possible where they're under a democracy would be much more difficult.

But then they came to a plateau and were not able to make any further progress. Mao Zedong said, what's the matter with you fellows? How come you're not getting the job done? They said, we don't know.

We did fine for a few years, but the percentage is not increasing any. So Mao sent his men out to find out why. They decided that the problem was that the Chinese written language, the characters, were too difficult for the average person to learn to read and write.

Not because they were less intelligent, because they were so busy and they were, many of them older, and it was difficult for them to read and write. So Mao said, let's make it simpler so that everybody can learn to read and write.

Now that had been suggested before several times in Chinese history. When I was a boy in China, a scholar had to memorize 40 ,000 Chinese characters. Now every character is a feat of memorization. There is no alphabet.

You don't put them together. Every character is a feat of memorization. 40 ,000. That had been reduced to about 20 ,000. I have a Chinese typewriter in my office in Hong Kong. Do you know how many keys my Chinese typewriter has?

6 ,000 keys. Anybody want to be my secretary? The Chinese language was just so complicated. The written language was the most complicated of any written language on earth. Mao said, we'll simplify it.

Now that had been suggested before, but always the intellectuals would rear up and say, no! It was good enough for our fathers and it's good enough for us. You're not going to simplify it. Of course, they didn't want it simplified.

They didn't want everybody to read and write because that would mean they would no longer have the economic and political hold on the country. Mao said, we're going to teach everybody to read and write.

We're going to simplify it. The intellectuals said, no! Mao put the intellectuals in jail and they went ahead and simplified it. Much simpler under a dictatorship. So with the intellectuals out of the way, they proceeded to simplify it.

Now, I can't explain exactly how it was done for three reasons. Number one, we don't have time. Number two, I don't really know myself. Number three, you're not that interested. But let me give you a little illustration.

Let's imagine that there is a Chinese character that looks like a letter H. Right? There is no such thing. We're just imagining. Now, all Chinese characters are developed on the basis of strokes. One stroke, two strokes, three strokes.

You see, how do you develop a dictionary when there is no alphabet? They told me when I went to Hong Kong that there was no Chinese telephone book because you might start weighing the wrong number. Now, that's not true.

What you do is you look at that particular character which makes up the surname and you count the number of strokes in that character. Right? And then you look in the book under that number. And if you're lucky, you find the character.

Got it? Well, the letter H. One, two, three. Simple character. Now, in order to simplify that character, we reduce the number of strokes to two instead of three. Now, some Chinese characters have up to 47 different strokes in them.

47 of them. And you've got to memorize them all in one character. So Mao said, we'll simplify it. Let's reduce the number of characters from three to two. So you put a character on the blackboard that looks like this.

One stroke this way, one stroke that way. Just remove one stroke. Call the professor from the University of California in and say, Sir, what is that? He'd say, I don't know. Call any Chinese scholar in.

What is that? Boom, boom. Doesn't make any sense at all. By merely removing one stroke, you have created a totally new written form of the language. The older generation can't read it. And the younger generation are educated only with that simplified form and would find it difficult, if not impossible, to read the old form of the language.

Now, that accomplished two things for Mao. First of all, it enabled him to so that more of the people in China could read his writing. And secondly, it gave him a captive audience. And all of the books that had been written in the Chinese language previous to that period of time were inaccessible and understandable to a whole generation of young people.

He had a captive audience. In addition to that, they reduced the number of characters until in China today you can read a daily newspaper with between five and six thousand characters. Why did he do it?

He did it to make it easier for people to read his writings and be converted to the ideology of Marxist, Leninist, Mao Zedong thought. He succeeded. He succeeded in improving the transportation system.

He succeeded in destroying the stranglehold of the religions of China. He succeeded in reducing the stranglehold of the cultural aspects of Chinese society. He succeeded in simplifying the written language of China.

He succeeded in teaching one common language to all the people of China. And then he died because God was through with him. Mao or the Chinese church had been established by Western missionaries in a country whose history was thousands of years older than ours, whose culture was far deeper and broader than our culture is.

Ours is an infant culture. Theirs is an ancient culture. Western missionary came to China at precisely the same time that colonialism was spreading all over the world. The Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, the British, the Americans, the Germans, the Italians, their colonial talons were reaching out all over the world, not the least into the nation of China.

Until as a result, partly of that colonialist influence, China was reduced to one of the poorest countries in the world and had once been one of the most progressive countries in the world. And the missionary had arrived in China at the same period of time and therefore was identified in the minds of the people with this colonialist influence.

A nation where it was important for the church to be a native church became a dependent church, depending on the missionaries for money, depending on the missionaries for leadership, depending on the missionaries for doctrine, depending on the leadership for the cultural adaptations of Christianity.

God saw that that would never do, that there would never be a strong church in China as long as that was there. And the church in China was weak and dependent for the most part. And so God said, we've got to do something about this.

Persecution, Indigenous Leadership, and Dependence on God

And that's when Mao came to power. And the church in China began to suffer, we felt, under the hand of the communists, and indeed they did suffer. Persecution, as has seldom been experienced by any church in history.

Mao Zedong said, we're going to destroy all the religions of China, but particularly Christianity. It is the greatest threat to our way of life and to our beliefs. How are we going to destroy Christianity in China?

I know, he said, we'll get rid of all the missionaries, and that will destroy the church because the church is dependent upon the missionaries. So it was that one of the first things he did was make it impossible for the missionaries to stay into the country.

And Mao thought, that'll destroy the church. And so did many of the Christians. They wept and wailed and said, Lord, what are we going to do without the missionaries? And as they wept and wailed and sought the face of God, God spoke to them one by one and said, I will never leave you.

I will never forsake you. I will supply all your needs according to my riches and glory by Christ Jesus. And the church that had been dependent upon the missionaries learned the hard way how to depend on God, which is what God wanted all along.

Right? Let me tell you something. Anything that makes you pay more is good for you no matter how bad it is. Do I hear any amen? True anyhow. And when the missionaries left, it sure made the church in China pray more.

What are we going to do? And it was when they prayed that they heard the voice of God and realized that God could raise up among them spiritual leaders who could take them in the direction that God wanted them to go.

And the church did not die. Mao looked around and he said, boy, that didn't work. Let's try something else. Missionaries are gone and still the church survives. And I know what we'll do. We'll close all the church buildings.

But first, he said, let's send all the pastors off to prison camps and labor camps. And so every pastor in China was arrested and sent away to labor camp, to prison, martyred, gotten out of the picture somehow.

And the church in China was left without spiritual leaders, without pastors. What does the church do without pastors? The church wailed again and said, God, what are we going to do? We have no pastors, no shepherds, no one to lead us.

These men, most of whom had been trained by the missionaries, were now out of the picture completely. Two things were happening. God began to raise up in the congregation laymen and laywomen and put the stamp of his approval and the seal of his Holy Spirit upon them.

And they became the spiritual leaders of the congregation, all of whom were looking to God instead of looking to man because man wasn't around. Secondly, the pastors and laymen that went off to prison learned one thing, that even in a prison cell in solitary confinement for seven or eight years, God doesn't leave you.

He's there with you all the time. There wasn't anybody else to talk to, so they began to commune with God. I've talked to some of those dear pastors who are out of prison now, who spent 15, 18 years in prison with nobody but God to talk to.

Brother, if you've lived in that kind of a relationship with God, you've got something that I don't have. Now, as I said, the pastors are all in prison, and the Church hasn't died. The next thing we'll do is close all the Church buildings, and He did close every single Church building in China.

Forbid the Christians to worship in any Church that had been constructed with your missionary dollars in mind. Every one was closed. Factories, schools, Communist Party headquarters were now in the Church buildings.

House Churches and the Loss of Church Buildings

During the Cultural Revolution, out of hatred, the young Red Guards climbed on the top of every Church in China and tore the cross from the roof. When I first went back to China, there wasn't a cross to be seen anywhere in the nation of China.

Now the Christians were without a Church. How are we going to worship if we don't have a Church? How are we going to worship if we don't have a Church? But you see, what Mao Zedong didn't know was that the Church isn't the Church.

It's only a building in which the Church meets. And so when there was no Church buildings, the Church said, Where can we meet? They're longing for fellowship, longing for food. Where do we meet? And they said, Let's meet in the home.

And eventually, you see, God got the Church in China back where he wanted it. Among the homes of the people. Where the first Church originally began and where in the Chinese culture it has to be in order to survive.

Mao Zedong looked for a while and he said, Boy, that isn't helping any. Instead of one Church in town, there's a hundred of them. Because everywhere there's a Christian family, there's a Church. What are we going to do?

How are we going to destroy the Christian Church? I know what we'll do. We'll take all their Bibles away from them. After all, the Bibles don't have, the Christians don't have their Bibles, the Church will die, right?

Wrong. You see? Several things happened. One, some people marvelously and miraculously preserved their Bibles. Not very many, but one lady baked her Bible inside of a loaf of bread and when the Red Guards came to find her Bible, she didn't serve them bread and jam, you know.

Another one hid her Bible behind the bricks in the fireplace. I was sitting in church in Shanghai a short time ago and sitting next to me in this church was a middle-aged lady and she had a big old yellow Bible.

And I said, where did you get that Bible? She looked at me and she said, oh, it was my mother's Bible. And I said, didn't the Red Guards get it? No, she said, look, all around the edges of the Bible, you see where the rats have eaten the leather?

She said, my mother hid her Bible up under the eaves of the house and the Red Guards never found it. This is my mother's Bible. She's gone to be with the Lord but I still have my mother's Bible. So miraculously, Bibles were preserved.

In addition to that, the Chinese educational system, as you know, is a rote memorization system. From Confucius' day on, the Chinese have had to memorize everything. Everything. They have the ability to memorize better than any other people that I know in the world.

They memorized the scriptures. Many of them were illiterate but they could recite whole chapters of the Bible. And that's something Mao Zedong couldn't take away from them. I was preaching in Sweden some years ago and a 93-year-old ex-China missionary came up to me and says, Brother Kaufman, let me tell you the story.

She said, in my part of China, the most outstanding evangelist, a Chinese in our part of the country, came to me one day and he said, sister, God has told me to stop preaching. Now I thought he'd got into some weird cult of some kind.

I said, you can't stop preaching. You're the best preacher we've got. He said, yes, God's told me to stop preaching. God's told me that in a few years we're going to have all of our Bibles taken away from us in this country.

The communists have not yet come to power. We're going to have all of our Bibles taken away and God has told me that I'm to commit the next few years of my life to memorizing the entire Bible. This dear old Swedish missionary said in four years he learned the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

I've since met three others who had a similar experience to which the Holy Spirit spoke before the communists came to power and said, you memorize the Bible. In the prison camps, the internment camps, the labor camps, in one particular camp there were a number of pastors, Roman Catholic, Protestants alike and in that kind of a situation all barriers are broken and they became one in Jesus Christ and they became hungry for the Word.

Of course, it was denied them. Finally, in moments when they would pass each other, they'd say, where are we going to get a Bible? Finally, someone said, let's recreate the Bible from memory. Let's appoint Mr. So-and-so as the secretary and you write down all of the verses of the Bible that you can remember and pass them on to him and let's see if we can create the Word of God.

I wonder how big the Bible would be if we tried that here. How far would we get in putting together even the New Testament? And who is to say that that might not happen in our country? My God's Word can never, never be taken away.

God Turns Apparent Evil Toward Good

So poor old Mao, that didn't work either. Everything that Mao tried to do to destroy the Christian church, God used that specific thing to strengthen the Christian church. Very frustrating. Almost feel sorry for Mao.

He tried so hard and everything backfired. You see, isn't it true that when a thing becomes rare, it becomes more valuable? When you've got lots of them, so who cares? But if there's only a few around, everybody wants one.

And when the Bible in China became rare, it became more valuable than it had ever been before. People were saying, news would spread, Mrs. Wong's got a Bible, and late in the night when the communists were in bed, they'd make their way out to Mrs. Wong's house and knock on the door.

They had a candle, piece of paper, and a pencil, and they'd say, Mrs. Wong, can we copy some chapters from your Bible? All night long, by candlelight, they'd copy from her Bible, and before dawn, they'd stick the piece of paper in their gown and rush home saying, hallelujah, I've got God's Word.

I've got God's Word. Let me tell you something. When you write the Bible out by longhand, it gets into your heart like it never does when the preacher preaches it. Poor old Mao. Everything he tried backfired.

Isn't that what the Bible says? The Bible says, all things work together for good to them that love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. Why? Now you and I know that everything is not good, but God's able to make that which isn't good into that which is good.