IRVINE, CA (ANS) -- I wasn’t sure what to expect when I agreed to interview Brother Yun, the Chinese Christian whose book, The Heavenly Man, has been a worldwide bestseller.
Dan Wooding with Bishara Awad, president of the Bethlehem Bible College and Brother Yun at the studios of Safe Worlds IPTV
I have to say that, as a former critic of Brother Yun, a.k.a. Liu Zhenying (born 1958), an exiled Chinese Christian house church leader, evangelist, and proponent of the Back To Jerusalem movement, I was more than a little concerned that he might be upset at me for my previous comments about him.
But that was soon allayed when he arrived at the studios of Safe Worlds IPTV in Irvine, California, for the interview. A huge smile on his face, he came bounding in and threw his arms around me and hugged me like a long-lost brother.
I immediately warmed to Brother Yun and his loving personality as I launched into the interview, conducted via a translator from Finland called Brother Ren.
I began by thanking him for coming to the studios and his face again lit up like a lamp and he shouted, “Praise the Lord.”
Brother Yun began to sharing about his early life in the Southern part of Henan Province among the simple farmers and pheasants of Liu Lao Zhuang, Nanyang County.
“The reason I became a believer in Jesus Christ was because the western missionaries were obedient and they brought the gospel of Jesus to my home area,” he said. “My mother received the Gospel through the western missionaries in the nineteen-forties, but then the communists took power in China and they expelled all the missionaries.
“During the early years of the revolution, all the pastors were thrown to prison, all the Bibles were burned and all the church buildings everything was destroyed. But there was no way that they could bind and stop the Word of God to work in the hearts of my people.
“In 1978, the leader Mao Zedong, very boldly proclaimed that ‘we have moved Christianity to the history museums.’ But Mao Zedong and his wife were wrong. They were mistaken. When you go to China today you will find Mao Zedong in the history museum, but Jesus is working in the hearts of millions of people in China.”
I then asked Brother Yun how he became a Christian.
“I became as a believer in Jesus Christ during the last years of revolution at that time when Mao Zedong said he had ‘moved Christianity to the history museums.’ It was because of a miracle that I came to faith in Jesus.
“At that time, my mother did not dare to confess to anymore that she was a believer in Jesus, but in the middle of all this, God suddenly allowed my father to become sick and he contracted terminal cancer. One night, my mother was so upset that she decided to commit suicide by hanging herself and just when she was about to do that, she suddenly heard the voice of the Holy Spirit calling to her, ‘Come back home. Come back home. Jesus loves you.’ My mother pulled down the rope that was hanging from the ceiling and then she kneeled by the chair and reconciled her life with Jesus.
“After that, for the first time, she came to us children after midnight and said, ‘There is hope for my family. We have to call upon the name of Jesus.’ That was the first time in my life I heard the name of Jesus. My mother had never told us anything about Jesus before this. And so, with this simple understanding, we started to call upon the name of Jesus, a name that is above all the other names. It has greater power than cancer and within one week my father was completely healed and restored from terminal cancer.”
Dan Wooding with Brother Yun and his translator, Brother RenBrother Yun went on to say through his translator, “My salvation was very simple. My mother could not teach us a lot about the Christian faith, but she said that Jesus had come with ‘grace and truth’ and these were two things she was teaching us. Because of this great miracle that occurred in my family, we all became believers in Jesus. Our relatives came to visit our home after about a week and one after another, they also knelt and said that Jesus was alive and they also became believers in Jesus.
“The Bible says that ‘the ways of the Lord and the thoughts of the Lord are so much higher than our ways’ and less than a year later, when I was seventeen years old, late one evening I heard Jesus calling me and saying, ‘Brother, stand up and be my witness to the west and the south.’ That was my first meeting with Jesus. The amazing thing is the first one who opposed my idea to become a witness for Jesus was my own mother.
“In tears, I talked to my mother and told her, ‘Jesus has called me tonight to be his witness.’ I was sharing this with my mother and she told me that reason she was opposing me was, ‘I'm an old believer. If Jesus wanted to speak to somebody in this house, He would first speak to me.’ But I could not be disobedient to this heavenly calling and so from this time until today, I have tried to be obedient to witness to Jesus in west and south.”
I then asked Brother Yun what were the circumstances of his first arrest.
“Less than a year after I started to preach the Gospel and many miracles started to happen, hundreds of people came to faith and, of course, the authorities began to recognize that something is going on, and they posted a reward for my capture as a contra-revolutionary,” he said. “Once a person starts to proclaim that Jesus is alive and that He's the Son of God in atheistic, communist China during those years just after the revolution, you became immediately a threat to the leadership.
“The first time I was arrested was when I was seventeen years old and together with my mother, we were bound together and led around the village in a procession. Still, I was able for almost ten years, to share the gospel but then, in early nineteen-eighties, there was a tremendous hunting going on in China and they wanted to catch the Christians and I was caught. But I have my own interpretation about this I had been almost ten years in fulltime ministry I was exhausted and worn out burnt out. So God prepared me a Chinese style vacation to go and rest.
“I didn't end up in a prison because I had committed any crime; it was just my faithfulness to the Gospel and He gave me the mercy and the grace to endure it. I spent four years in the prison the first time. That first imprisonment became very important for my life. During a period I was going through a torture in prison, I heard a voice. As a contra-revolutionary, you only had two options; you were either sentenced to life imprisonment or to be executed. That was a totally impossible situation. Can you imagine in that situation? I had lost my hope for survival, but then Jesus came to me and He said, ‘My child, I know everything you are going through right now. See I'm going to open a door for you that no man is able to shut.’ Just the fact that I'm sitting here today is proof that Jesus is real and He is alive.”
I then asked Brother Yun, whose new book, Living Water, edited by Paul Hattaway, how he got his name.
“In China, I've always been called Brother Yun,” he explained. “This name, Brother Yun in Chinese, means ‘a cloud’ and it comes from book of Hebrews chapter twelve and verse one where it talks about the ‘cloud of witnesses surrounding us.’ But I received the name, the Heavenly Man, from the Holy Spirit and this happened in a situation when I'd started a discipleship training seminar and, in the middle of that seminar, the Holy Spirit spoke to me about sharing with the people how important it is to be always ready to die for Jesus. I really saw a vision with my inner eyes that one day China's name is going to be changed. It's going to be called the ‘Village of the Gospel.’ He told me in order to achieve this in China; he wanted to send messengers of the gospel to every village, town and city in China.
“We were coming to the close of this training session and were commissioning these young evangelists and pioneer workers and missionaries to go to different parts of China, when suddenly the authorities surrounded the farm house where we were meeting and I and my team were captured. I had been training these people like I always do about five important points of the life of a disciple, a true follower of Jesus. I said that ‘if you want to be a truly disciple of Jesus you have to be a person of prayer.’ And then, ‘always to be ready, no matter what the circumstances, to witness about Jesus.’ And, number three, ‘always be ready to be thrown to prison and suffer for the name of Jesus and if needs be, be ready to die for the cause of the Gospel.’ And number five, because of the special situations in China, I also taught that you have to ‘train up yourself to escape for the Gospel so you can continue your ministry.’”
Brother Yun said that the arrest took place in the middle of winter and the police captain began beating him and ripping off his clothes.
“He started to question me, asking, ‘Who are you and what are you
Cover of Living Waterdoing here? Where do you live?’ I was on my own and I had prepared what I should say, but then the Holy Spirit gave me the words and I proclaimed boldly, ‘I'm the Heavenly Man and I live in the Village of Gospel.’”
Brother Yun then said that the bemused police officer couldn’t understand what he was saying and asked him, “Where in China is the Village of the Gospel?” and so Brother Yun said he boldly told him that one day every village in China would carry that name.”
The policeman then asked for the name of his father and he replied, “Filled with Grace” and he then said his mother’s name was “Faith, Hope and Love.” He went on to say that his older brother’s name was “He’s coming back.”
Not surprisingly, the police officer decided that Brother Yun had lost his mind, was dangerous for society, and so he threw him in jail.
I was startled when Brother Yun then began singing a song that he had in prison.
He then told me, “Just because they said that I was a ‘crazy man,’ I really started to behave like one, but I was being crazy for Jesus. I didn’t care about what they thought, and I continued singing, praising God and praying aloud. You know, you have two possibilities when you are in that situation: you have to make up your mind about whether you are going to complain or feel sorry about being in prison, or you can say, ‘I'm going to praise Jesus from morning to evening when I am in a prison. I'm going to thank him for this grace that He's giving to me.’
“It took several weeks before they could put my face to the wanted poster that had been appearing in all the police station across the country. One of the policemen told him, ‘You aren't any Heavenly Man, you are that preacher we've been looking for many years and now we've finally got you.”
Brother Yun went on to say, “As a pastor, when you are captured in China even today, one of the first decisions you have to do is to decide whether you are going to betray anybody or not because that's what they want you to do to. They want you to become a Judas who will give names and locations to them. I decided that I'd rather die for Jesus than give them even one name which they were asking.
“I then decided that I was going to face this storm by not eating of drinking. It was quite strange because actually the Holy Spirit, when I was fasting in prison reminded me how much Jesus was willing to pay a price for our deliverance and how much the disciples suffered and how most of them died for the Gospel.
“I remember once, when they came with all these torture instruments, they said, ‘Today, you have to decide whether you want to remain alive or you are going to die in our hands today.’ And then they started to torture me by taking hold of my hands and they pushed them on the floor. Then they started to squeeze, one after the other, extremely thick needles under each one of my fingers. After few minutes of this terrible pain, my spirit left my body. Then I returned back and I was in the middle of this horrible pain and I could not take it any more, so I prayed, ‘Jesus, I cannot take this pain any more. Give me a possibility to die for you I want to come home and leave behind this pain.’
“I came to learn a very important lesson at that point because, if God has a purpose and plan for your life, you can not easily die away from it. And again Jesus came to me at that lowest point of my life when I thought I was going to die and he said, ‘My child, I know everything you are going through right now.’ And in a fraction of a second, my eyes were opened and I saw how the gates of the prison were opened for me and one after another, I walked out to freedom.
“I had Bible in my hands and soon I was witnessing about Jesus to thousands of people in meetings outside of prison. Eventually, I was standing up in front of white people and black people and different colors of people, and witnessing about how great Jesus is.”
Sadly, we ran out of time for this interview, and so if you want to know more about the story of Brother Yun, you will have to read his two books, The Heavenly Man and Living Water.
I have to say that my opinion of Brother Yun has changed completely after meeting with him and I pray that God will continue to use him as he traverses the world sharing his story and bringing attention to the plight of China’s Christians.
All I can do is echo what Brother Yun said at the end of the interview: “Hallelujah!”
Dan Wooding with Bishara Awad, president of the Bethlehem Bible College and Brother Yun at the studios of Safe Worlds IPTV
I have to say that, as a former critic of Brother Yun, a.k.a. Liu Zhenying (born 1958), an exiled Chinese Christian house church leader, evangelist, and proponent of the Back To Jerusalem movement, I was more than a little concerned that he might be upset at me for my previous comments about him.
But that was soon allayed when he arrived at the studios of Safe Worlds IPTV in Irvine, California, for the interview. A huge smile on his face, he came bounding in and threw his arms around me and hugged me like a long-lost brother.
I immediately warmed to Brother Yun and his loving personality as I launched into the interview, conducted via a translator from Finland called Brother Ren.
I began by thanking him for coming to the studios and his face again lit up like a lamp and he shouted, “Praise the Lord.”
Brother Yun began to sharing about his early life in the Southern part of Henan Province among the simple farmers and pheasants of Liu Lao Zhuang, Nanyang County.
“The reason I became a believer in Jesus Christ was because the western missionaries were obedient and they brought the gospel of Jesus to my home area,” he said. “My mother received the Gospel through the western missionaries in the nineteen-forties, but then the communists took power in China and they expelled all the missionaries.
“During the early years of the revolution, all the pastors were thrown to prison, all the Bibles were burned and all the church buildings everything was destroyed. But there was no way that they could bind and stop the Word of God to work in the hearts of my people.
“In 1978, the leader Mao Zedong, very boldly proclaimed that ‘we have moved Christianity to the history museums.’ But Mao Zedong and his wife were wrong. They were mistaken. When you go to China today you will find Mao Zedong in the history museum, but Jesus is working in the hearts of millions of people in China.”
I then asked Brother Yun how he became a Christian.
“I became as a believer in Jesus Christ during the last years of revolution at that time when Mao Zedong said he had ‘moved Christianity to the history museums.’ It was because of a miracle that I came to faith in Jesus.
“At that time, my mother did not dare to confess to anymore that she was a believer in Jesus, but in the middle of all this, God suddenly allowed my father to become sick and he contracted terminal cancer. One night, my mother was so upset that she decided to commit suicide by hanging herself and just when she was about to do that, she suddenly heard the voice of the Holy Spirit calling to her, ‘Come back home. Come back home. Jesus loves you.’ My mother pulled down the rope that was hanging from the ceiling and then she kneeled by the chair and reconciled her life with Jesus.
“After that, for the first time, she came to us children after midnight and said, ‘There is hope for my family. We have to call upon the name of Jesus.’ That was the first time in my life I heard the name of Jesus. My mother had never told us anything about Jesus before this. And so, with this simple understanding, we started to call upon the name of Jesus, a name that is above all the other names. It has greater power than cancer and within one week my father was completely healed and restored from terminal cancer.”
Dan Wooding with Brother Yun and his translator, Brother RenBrother Yun went on to say through his translator, “My salvation was very simple. My mother could not teach us a lot about the Christian faith, but she said that Jesus had come with ‘grace and truth’ and these were two things she was teaching us. Because of this great miracle that occurred in my family, we all became believers in Jesus. Our relatives came to visit our home after about a week and one after another, they also knelt and said that Jesus was alive and they also became believers in Jesus.
“The Bible says that ‘the ways of the Lord and the thoughts of the Lord are so much higher than our ways’ and less than a year later, when I was seventeen years old, late one evening I heard Jesus calling me and saying, ‘Brother, stand up and be my witness to the west and the south.’ That was my first meeting with Jesus. The amazing thing is the first one who opposed my idea to become a witness for Jesus was my own mother.
“In tears, I talked to my mother and told her, ‘Jesus has called me tonight to be his witness.’ I was sharing this with my mother and she told me that reason she was opposing me was, ‘I'm an old believer. If Jesus wanted to speak to somebody in this house, He would first speak to me.’ But I could not be disobedient to this heavenly calling and so from this time until today, I have tried to be obedient to witness to Jesus in west and south.”
I then asked Brother Yun what were the circumstances of his first arrest.
“Less than a year after I started to preach the Gospel and many miracles started to happen, hundreds of people came to faith and, of course, the authorities began to recognize that something is going on, and they posted a reward for my capture as a contra-revolutionary,” he said. “Once a person starts to proclaim that Jesus is alive and that He's the Son of God in atheistic, communist China during those years just after the revolution, you became immediately a threat to the leadership.
“The first time I was arrested was when I was seventeen years old and together with my mother, we were bound together and led around the village in a procession. Still, I was able for almost ten years, to share the gospel but then, in early nineteen-eighties, there was a tremendous hunting going on in China and they wanted to catch the Christians and I was caught. But I have my own interpretation about this I had been almost ten years in fulltime ministry I was exhausted and worn out burnt out. So God prepared me a Chinese style vacation to go and rest.
“I didn't end up in a prison because I had committed any crime; it was just my faithfulness to the Gospel and He gave me the mercy and the grace to endure it. I spent four years in the prison the first time. That first imprisonment became very important for my life. During a period I was going through a torture in prison, I heard a voice. As a contra-revolutionary, you only had two options; you were either sentenced to life imprisonment or to be executed. That was a totally impossible situation. Can you imagine in that situation? I had lost my hope for survival, but then Jesus came to me and He said, ‘My child, I know everything you are going through right now. See I'm going to open a door for you that no man is able to shut.’ Just the fact that I'm sitting here today is proof that Jesus is real and He is alive.”
I then asked Brother Yun, whose new book, Living Water, edited by Paul Hattaway, how he got his name.
“In China, I've always been called Brother Yun,” he explained. “This name, Brother Yun in Chinese, means ‘a cloud’ and it comes from book of Hebrews chapter twelve and verse one where it talks about the ‘cloud of witnesses surrounding us.’ But I received the name, the Heavenly Man, from the Holy Spirit and this happened in a situation when I'd started a discipleship training seminar and, in the middle of that seminar, the Holy Spirit spoke to me about sharing with the people how important it is to be always ready to die for Jesus. I really saw a vision with my inner eyes that one day China's name is going to be changed. It's going to be called the ‘Village of the Gospel.’ He told me in order to achieve this in China; he wanted to send messengers of the gospel to every village, town and city in China.
“We were coming to the close of this training session and were commissioning these young evangelists and pioneer workers and missionaries to go to different parts of China, when suddenly the authorities surrounded the farm house where we were meeting and I and my team were captured. I had been training these people like I always do about five important points of the life of a disciple, a true follower of Jesus. I said that ‘if you want to be a truly disciple of Jesus you have to be a person of prayer.’ And then, ‘always to be ready, no matter what the circumstances, to witness about Jesus.’ And, number three, ‘always be ready to be thrown to prison and suffer for the name of Jesus and if needs be, be ready to die for the cause of the Gospel.’ And number five, because of the special situations in China, I also taught that you have to ‘train up yourself to escape for the Gospel so you can continue your ministry.’”
Brother Yun said that the arrest took place in the middle of winter and the police captain began beating him and ripping off his clothes.
“He started to question me, asking, ‘Who are you and what are you
Cover of Living Waterdoing here? Where do you live?’ I was on my own and I had prepared what I should say, but then the Holy Spirit gave me the words and I proclaimed boldly, ‘I'm the Heavenly Man and I live in the Village of Gospel.’”
Brother Yun then said that the bemused police officer couldn’t understand what he was saying and asked him, “Where in China is the Village of the Gospel?” and so Brother Yun said he boldly told him that one day every village in China would carry that name.”
The policeman then asked for the name of his father and he replied, “Filled with Grace” and he then said his mother’s name was “Faith, Hope and Love.” He went on to say that his older brother’s name was “He’s coming back.”
Not surprisingly, the police officer decided that Brother Yun had lost his mind, was dangerous for society, and so he threw him in jail.
I was startled when Brother Yun then began singing a song that he had in prison.
He then told me, “Just because they said that I was a ‘crazy man,’ I really started to behave like one, but I was being crazy for Jesus. I didn’t care about what they thought, and I continued singing, praising God and praying aloud. You know, you have two possibilities when you are in that situation: you have to make up your mind about whether you are going to complain or feel sorry about being in prison, or you can say, ‘I'm going to praise Jesus from morning to evening when I am in a prison. I'm going to thank him for this grace that He's giving to me.’
“It took several weeks before they could put my face to the wanted poster that had been appearing in all the police station across the country. One of the policemen told him, ‘You aren't any Heavenly Man, you are that preacher we've been looking for many years and now we've finally got you.”
Brother Yun went on to say, “As a pastor, when you are captured in China even today, one of the first decisions you have to do is to decide whether you are going to betray anybody or not because that's what they want you to do to. They want you to become a Judas who will give names and locations to them. I decided that I'd rather die for Jesus than give them even one name which they were asking.
“I then decided that I was going to face this storm by not eating of drinking. It was quite strange because actually the Holy Spirit, when I was fasting in prison reminded me how much Jesus was willing to pay a price for our deliverance and how much the disciples suffered and how most of them died for the Gospel.
“I remember once, when they came with all these torture instruments, they said, ‘Today, you have to decide whether you want to remain alive or you are going to die in our hands today.’ And then they started to torture me by taking hold of my hands and they pushed them on the floor. Then they started to squeeze, one after the other, extremely thick needles under each one of my fingers. After few minutes of this terrible pain, my spirit left my body. Then I returned back and I was in the middle of this horrible pain and I could not take it any more, so I prayed, ‘Jesus, I cannot take this pain any more. Give me a possibility to die for you I want to come home and leave behind this pain.’
“I came to learn a very important lesson at that point because, if God has a purpose and plan for your life, you can not easily die away from it. And again Jesus came to me at that lowest point of my life when I thought I was going to die and he said, ‘My child, I know everything you are going through right now.’ And in a fraction of a second, my eyes were opened and I saw how the gates of the prison were opened for me and one after another, I walked out to freedom.
“I had Bible in my hands and soon I was witnessing about Jesus to thousands of people in meetings outside of prison. Eventually, I was standing up in front of white people and black people and different colors of people, and witnessing about how great Jesus is.”
Sadly, we ran out of time for this interview, and so if you want to know more about the story of Brother Yun, you will have to read his two books, The Heavenly Man and Living Water.
I have to say that my opinion of Brother Yun has changed completely after meeting with him and I pray that God will continue to use him as he traverses the world sharing his story and bringing attention to the plight of China’s Christians.
All I can do is echo what Brother Yun said at the end of the interview: “Hallelujah!”
1 comment:
i met bro yun during our YWAM conference in thailand.he was one of our main speakers.i was so encouraged by his testimony for Jesus.
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