"God wants you and the world needs you." This was something that Brother Andrew said whilst with underground at the conference in 2005.

These three Indonesian ladies have been unfairly imprisoned for choosing to follow Jesus by teaching Sunday School. Would we choose to follow Christ if a decision cost us as dearly?

"God wants you and the world needs you." This was something that Brother Andrew said whilst with underground at the conference in 2005. This says everything we need to know. God wants us and the world needs us. so what are we waiting for!?

Hearing the testimonies from the Persecuted Church we are confronted countless times with the challenge that the Gospel is worth living for. Once you find something like that it changes the way you live. This is it, the gauntlet is laid down. dare we pick it up? Dare we surrender our lives into the hands of God that something of eternal significance can be worked through us?

But this isn't about hype and frenzy, getting one another worked up into a holy fervour that becomes muted when confronted by the clamour of school/college/uni/work. The Persecuted Church isn't all excitement and emotion; it isn't the romance that we often believe - reciting the Bible cover to cover from memory and sea-parting faith. It's gritty, deliberate obedience, choosing God's will even it costs them their status, credibility, job, family, freedom. life.

Where did they learn this lesson from; this counter-culture learning? From Jesus Himself who did only what the Father showed Him and spoke only what the Father told Him (see John 5:19 and 8:28). Nowhere is His obedience to the will of the Father made more evident than when in Gethsemane. He knew what suffering was ahead of Him and He prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. YET NOT AS I WILL, BUT AS YOU WILL.' It was a cold, deliberate choice for Jesus to be obedient. And that's where it starts for us. Choice by choice, foregoing what we want for what the Father wants.

Does this mean we all need to rush out, become missionaries to a far off land, sell all our possessions and memorise the Bible? Well, not for most of us. For most us it begins with learning who we are in Christ. It begins with not being afraid to be Christ like. It begins with getting our eyes off ourselves and onto to reaching out to others. It begins with understanding we're part of a Global body and remembering that choosing Christ for some is a matter of life and death - yet they do it and that can inspire us to do it with the choices we have to make in our life.