don't you open the iron door?" He told brother Sue. Sue looked at him with eyes of fire and said three words, "You must escape."
The next morning, May 5th, 1997, at just before 8:00, the busiest time of day in the prison, when every guard was at his post, Yun shuffled out of his cell on legs that had been black and useless for 6 weeks, carrying a piece of toilet paper around his waist on which he had written scripture verses from the Gospel of John and First Peter.
He reached the first locked iron gate.
At that exact moment, another Christian prisoner named Mushing was being let back in from sweeping the courtyard and the gate swung open. Yun walked through it. The guard escorting Mushing turned his back to answer a ringing telephone.
Yun picked up a broom leaning against the wall so he would appear to belong there and walked down the stairs. At the second floor, a guard sat at his desk, staring directly at the corridor. Yun walked past him. The guard's eyes were open. He looked straight at Yun. He said nothing. He saw nothing. God had blinded his eyes. The first floor gate, normally the most heavily guarded of all, was standing open. There was no one at it.
Yun walked through it and into the courtyard. 30 armed guards were in that courtyard. Not one of them said a word.
He walked past every one of them. He walked through the main gate of the Jung Joe number one maximum security prison which was also inexplicably standing open. He stepped out onto the street. He hailed a taxi. When he finally started cycling through the streets of Jung Joe on a bicycle borrowed from a Christian family, racing to a safe house while the entire city's security apparatus was being mobilized to find him. He suddenly noticed something remarkable. The pain was gone. His legs worked. He was cycling. Mushing later told investigators that when Yun passed him on the third floor, he was walking normally. The prison authorities concluded in their investigation that no human being inside the facility had helped Yun in any way. They were right.
It was entirely the hand of God. The man they called the was healed and gone, and China would never hold him again. That same morning, Deliing held in a separate location, received a vision of Yun sitting before her, free and joyful, telling her to call a meeting. She caught a bus to Chuzhou and went on pure spiritual instinct to the home of a Christian leader she knew.
She arrived hours before Yun did. When he walked in the door and found his wife already there, already knowing he was free, they held each other and sang together from Psalm 126. When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. They had dreamed, and now they were awake. Yun spent months hiding in various safe houses across China, always one step ahead of the most comprehensive manhunt the Police Special Branch (PSB) had ever launched for a Christian leader. The Lord began speaking clearly. It was time to leave China. Time to carry the fire of the Chinese house churches to the nations of the world. But Yun had no passport, no legal identity, and a criminal record that would guarantee arrest the moment he applied for travel documents. A Christian businessman felt God prompt him to give Yun his own passport. When they examined it, the problem was immediately apparent. The man in the photograph was balding, wore glasses, and looked nothing at all like Yun. He was also significantly older.
On September 28th, 1997, Yun stood in a queue at Beijing airport carrying a passport that belonged to someone else whose photograph looked nothing like him, heading for a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. The night before, he had stayed up in prayer, and the Lord had whispered to him one instruction. When you enter the customs hall, say only what I instruct you to say. The customs officer took the passport, looked at the photograph, looked at Yun, and started to laugh. He held the passport up to show the other officers. They all laughed. He took Yun into a side room and said repeatedly, "This isn't you. It looks nothing like you." Other passengers in the queue grew impatient and complained. The officer asked Yun to step aside. Yun said nothing. Every time the officer spoke, Yun simply looked at him with calm, steady eyes and said nothing. He prayed silently and waited.
And then the officer stamped the passport and said, "Go." There is no rational explanation for what happened next. At the X-ray machine, an officer watched Yun with clear suspicion while speaking into a walkie-talkie and then said nothing. On the aircraft, as the wheels lifted off the ground of the nation that had tried to destroy him for 23 years, Yun could not contain himself.
He began singing out loud to the astonishment of every passenger around him, songs of praise to the King who had set him free.
Years later, a Finnish businessman would tell Yun something that made the hairs stand up on every arm in the room. That businessman worked for a telecommunication security company that had installed state-of-the-art voice recognition software at Chinese border points, including Beijing airport. The system used hidden microphones to match passenger voices against a database of wanted criminals.
Yun's voice captured on so many recordings of illegal sermons over the years was certainly in that database. If he had spoken a single word, if he had said "I understand" or "one moment" or even "thank you" to that customs officer, the computer would have identified him instantly and he would have been taken away. The Lord had told him to say only what He was instructed to say. He had been instructed to say nothing. So Yun said nothing. And the voice recognition system listened for him and found only silence.
Yun arrived in Germany and began a new kind of ministry. Carrying the story of the Chinese church to a sleeping western church that had largely forgotten what fire felt like. He traveled with his Scandinavian friend and translator to churches across Europe and North America. And what he found there sometimes broke his heart in a different way than prison had. He saw buildings full of silver and gold, carpets and sound systems and comfortable chairs and congregations that could barely stay awake. He sat in meetings where a thousand church leaders fell on the floor laughing after a comfortable word about God's love. And he remembered his friends dying in labor camps. And he wept not for himself but for the Western church's distance from the cross. He said to them directly and without apology, "You don't need more buildings. You don't need more programs. You need the Word of God that cuts like a sword, and you need the obedience to do what it says." When revival came to China, it resulted in thousands of evangelists sent out to the darkest corners of the nation. When God moves, you move.
But Yun also encountered in the West something that shocked him more than any electric batten ever had. He discovered that Christians could persecute other Christians with words. A journalist he had never met, quoting an unnamed source published an article accusing Yun of fabricating his entire story, the fast, the prison escape, the smashed legs, all of it lies, the article said. It accused him of being a Judas who had betrayed fellow leaders to the authorities. Yun, the man who had refused to say a single incriminating word through years of torture, who had written his determination not to be a Judas in his own blood on the wall of a prison cell. This man was now being called a Judas by someone who had never met him in a widely circulated Christian publication. He said later that this new kind of persecution was no easier than the physical kind, just different. But he forgave from the bottom of his heart.
And within days, signed statements from Brother Su and other Cinnim fellowship elders poured out of China confirming every detail of Yun's story, silencing the accusation.
Meanwhile, his family Deliing and the children had been making their own extraordinary journey. After Yun left China in 1997, they spent nearly 2 years in Myanmar waiting for paperwork to bring them to Germany. When the time finally came to leave, Yun received a warning dream from God. Trouble awaited him at customs checkpoint. Deliing urged him to leave his falsified Burmese ID card with her. He ignored her. He ignored the dream. He walked into the customs hall at Yangon airport and was immediately arrested. He spent 7 months in a Myanmar prison where conditions made his Chinese prisons look comfortable. 100 men to a cell. Prisoners with sentences of 350 years. Sentenced across multiple reincarnations in a Buddhist system that had given up on the concept of redemption. A plague swept through the prison, killing men every night, worms visibly moving under the surface of young skin. He lay unconscious for 5 days. He received a 7-year sentence and told the judge with a steady voice, "'Thank you, your honor, for granting me a 7-year visa to remain in your country." But even there, God sent him. Five young Chinese men from Singapore and Taiwan serving sentences of life plus 50 to 100 years for drug smuggling had heard there was a Chinese Christian pastor in the prison and feigned illnesses to be sent to the hospital where Yun was recovering. They ran to him and he baptized them one by one under a bathroom tap, four of them at once, while a guard stood in the doorway, too stunned to say anything. 12 prisoners in total came to Christ. Men who had nothing left to lose, gave everything they had to Jesus Christ. And the transformation in that cell was so radical that even the guards noticed.
And then on September 18th, 2001, 7 months and 7 days into a 7-year sentence, the German embassy secured Yun's release. He landed in Frankfurt the next morning. On the flight from Bangkok, a fellow passenger handed him several newspapers. He looked at photographs of an aircraft flying into a tall building in New York. He had been sealed away from all news in a Myanmar prison. And so it was on an airplane somewhere over Asia on September 19th, 2001 that the heavenly man learned that the world had been changed forever one week before on September 11th.
On the morning of September 19th, 2001, a man walked through the arrivals hall of Frankfurt airport. He had no possessions of any significance. He had no home of his own, no savings, nothing. But the clothes on his body, and a Bible he had memorized. He had been beaten with electric batons more times than he could count. He had been thrown into septic tanks and had worms crawl out of his skin. He had stood before judges and been sentenced across three separate prison terms to a combined total of more than 13 years. He had survived 74 days without food or water in a Chinese maximum security cell, sustained by nothing but the Presence of GOD. He had walked out of a throughout locked iron gates, past 30 armed guards in the most dramatic prison escape anyone in that facility had ever seen.
Yun stepped out of the arrivals hall and found his wife Deling and Isaac and Yelin and more than a dozen German believers and Reinhard Bonnke the evangelist God had used to bring millions of souls in Africa to Jesus Christ, all there to welcome him. And this man, this broken, scarred, extraordinary vessel of God, went home to his small apartment, knelt with his family on the floor and worshiped.
Yun often said in the years that followed as he carried the back to Jerusalem vision to churches around the world. That the worst suffering he ever endured was not the electric batons or the smashed legs or the 74-day fast. It was the visits from his family while he was in prison.
It was the image of his son Isaac wearing the same clothes at every visit because the family had no money to buy new ones, shoes with holes in them, looking at the floor and saying, 41:26 "Daddy," the teacher told the class, "My father is a dirty criminal who deserves to be in prison." It was holding his children through the iron bars while a guard pulled them away, saying, "If you really loved your children, you wouldn't be here." He said it because he wanted people to understand something. The way of the cross is not a metaphor. It is not a song lyric or a decorative element in a church building. It is the actual literal costly surrender of everything comfortable and safe and familiar on the altar of obedience to God. It costs everything and it produces everything.
Because the man whose father was once dying of cancer in a mud house in a village of 600 farmers, the man whose mother had forgotten most of what she knew of Jesus after years of spiritual isolation. The man who prayed a 100 days on his knees on a stone for a Bible.
That man became by the sovereign grace of God. The authorized representative of the house church movement that by the year 2000 contained 58 million believers in China alone. That movement forged in fire and blood and prison cells and frozen fish ponds, produced a vision to send 100,000 missionaries from China through the Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu worlds all the way back to Jerusalem before the return of Jesus Christ. He was not a seminary graduate. He was not a theologian. He was barely educated. He was a farmer's son from Nanyang County who knelt on a stone and cried out for a Bible. And the God of heaven heard him.
There is one final image worth leaving with you. In the autumn of 1999, years before his escape from China, Yun stood at a grave site in Bergen, Norway, looking at an empty, unmarked lot where the grave of Marie Monsen had been. Marie Monsen (in Chinese: 孟慕貞 or 孟瑪麗; born 1878 in Sandviken, Norway - 1962) was an evangelical Lutheran Norwegian missionary active in North and Central China between 1901 and 1932.
The Norwegian woman who had carried revival fıre into hıs province oT Hunan nearly a century earlier had been left with no headstone. Her grave had been forgotten.
Yun stood there, a man who had been tortured in prisons that woman had never seen. a leader of a church that had grown from nothing into tens of millions because of the seed she had planted. And he felt something rise inside him. He turned to the Norwegian believers with him and told them plainly, "This woman of God must be honored. You have 2 years to build a headstone. If you fail, I will send brothers from China, men who learned stone cutting in prison labor camps where they were sent for preaching the gospel, to build it themselves."
On September 1st, 2001, exactly 100 years to the day since Marie Monsen first set foot in China, more than 300 Norwegian Christians gathered at that Bergen graveyard. A new headstone was unveiled, paid for by the contributions of many churches and believers. It bore her name, her photograph, her Chinese name, and the dates of her ministry. And in the Chinese house churches, when the believers heard the news, they thanked God and wept. The seeds planted in tears are always always harvested in joy.
This is the story of brother Yun, the heavenly man. Not because he was superhuman, but because he served a supernatural God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The God who opens iron gates. The God who heals shattered legs. The God who sustains a man for 74 days on nothing but the bread of his presence. The God who hears a teenage boy praying on a stone in the dark and sends his word wrapped in bread. He is still that God. And the question he asked a generation of house church warriors in the caves of Hunan, he asks you now, will you go?
If the story of brother Yun stirred something in your soul today, then you are exactly the kind of person this channel exists for. There are hundreds more stories like this one. men and women across the centuries who believed God so completely that they walked through fire and came out shining. And every single one of them is waiting to be told right here. If this story moved you, encouraged you, or reminded you of who your God truly is, please take your time, share thisstory with someone whose faith needs a spark today. Every share is a seed. You never know whose life might be set on fire for Christ because you passed this along. Stay with us. The best stories are still to come.
In scripture, believers often point to thousands of promises from God. One common count says there are more than 7,000.
Yet, many of us still wake up not knowing what to do next. Why is that?
Because knowing God has promises is not the same as learning how to pour out our whole heart before him and wait for his direction. The Lord promises guidance to those who trust him, acknowledge him, and seek him. Proverbs 3: verses 5-6 says, "'Trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge HIM, and He shall direct thy paths."
And Psalm 32:8 gives this beautiful assurance. I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go. I will guide thee with mine eye.
So today let us learn the holy secret of telling God everything. Not a polished prayer. Not a rushed prayer. Not a ....( Click here to read on )
