Brother Andrew on Suffering

Brother Andrew, who heads a ministry called Open Doors and who is most famous for his 1967 book, God’s Smuggler, describes Christ’s call in the mid-1990s like this:

There’s not one door in the world closed where you want to witness for Jesus.… Show me a closed door and I will tell you how you can get in. I won’t however, promise you a way to get out.…

Jesus didn’t say, “Go if the doors are open,” because they weren’t. He didn’t say, “Go if you have an invitation or a red carpet treatment.” He said, “Go,” because people need his Word.…

We need a new approach to missions—an aggressive, experimental, evangelical, no-holds-barred approach … a pioneering spirit…

I’m afraid we’ll have to go through a deep valley of need and threatening situations, blood baths; but we’ll get there.

God will take away what hinders us if we mean business. If we say, “Lord, at any cost...”—and people should never pray that unless they truly want God to take them at their word—he will answer. Which is scary. But we have to go through the process. This is how it has worked in the Bible for the last two thousand years.

So we face potentially hard times, and we have to go through that.… We play church and we play Christianity. And we aren’t even aware we are lukewarm.… We should have to pay a price for our faith. Read 2 Timothy 3:12: “Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” The church has been much purified in countries where there was a lot of pressure.… All I can say is to be ready.21

John Piper, Desiring God (Sisters, Or.: Multnomah Publishers, 2003), 286-87.