Unknown Nations Podcast

This is the Unknown Nations podcast where we'll be sharing about reaching the nation where Jesus is unknown. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Unknown Nations podcast highlighting what God is doing in the most spiritually dark places in the world. Today, we are talking about how a village stoning transformed an entire Buddhist community. You are gonna be so blessed by this.

My name is Greg Kelley, with Unknown Nations. I'm the CEO where we strive to make the name of Jesus known, and we have to honor serving God by helping reach the most zero access, access, barrier ridden, spiritually antagonistic, spoken word reliant people groups on the planet, giving birth to the church in impossible places. That's what we do at Unknown Nations. And today's story, we'll be sharing about how a daughter's faith in Jesus introduced her entire family, and not only the family, but an entire village to Jesus Christ after receiving the gospel and incredibly dangerous circumstances as an entire mob mobilized and came after her, but her resiliency won the day. And it was this courage and braveness that that the Lord gave her in this amazing story of faith.

But it's not just any story. It's a testament of how life can pierce into the darkest, the darkest of places, friends. That's where we need to go as a body of Christ. There are the darkest places on earth, and it's only the power of the gospel, the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ that is gonna help us penetrate these areas. That's what we do at Unknown Nations.

And to understand this powerful story, we've gotta go back into this remote Buddhist village that I'm gonna take you into. So we're in the country of Myanmar, which is a beautiful area. It's actually an area there's there's tremendous amount of mountains. There's a lot of lush forestry, but at the same time, it's a place that has endured a lot of conflict. Some of the worst wars, have taken place in that part of the world.

Refugee crises have taken place in that part of the world. And so you have this mixture of physical beauty and that that's the thing that always strikes me when I go to these places is your eyes are seeing absolute gorgeous settings, but then the spiritual carnage and the adversity that the especially the followers of Jesus face is is almost indescribable. Today, we're gonna do our best to help you understand that. But Buddhism is deeply ingrained into this area. And those who really step away or deviate from it face fierce persecution.

Now we wouldn't think of that. We hear so much about Islam. We hear about the imams. Right? And we hear about Hinduism and the Hindu priests.

It's not a lot of times that we talk about the Buddhist monks, and associate that with persecution. But that's the reality in some of these places. Again, if you step away, because to be Burmese, which you're in the country of Myanmar, is to be Buddhist. The the upper 80 percentile are Buddhist. There's some Hindus there.

It's a very, very small percentage of followers of Jesus. But this precious young girl, as her her faith I mean, just think about this. In this this hostile environment I'm describing, her faith sparked an entire movement and it started with the word of God, the treasure. God's precious word getting inside of her ignited this movement. But what is Buddhism?

In order to really appreciate what I just said about the power of the Word of God, we have to understand the culture, the climate, the environment, and that is, a Buddhist environment which believes that life is this cycle of suffering and rebirth. So you're on this perpetual cycle, psych of suffering and rebirth, but achieving enlightenment could potentially escape that cycle. So you're you're constantly it's a very works oriented religion. You're trying to do good things. You're trying to care.

And those are those are noble things. Aren't they? I mean, caring for orphans and widows in their distress. In Christianity, we associate with the pure gospel. So doing good works is noble.

But if your only pursuit is I just need to do enough good things to see if I can break out of this cycle. I mean, imagine what if you missed it by one good deed? What what a terrible way to go through your life. That's called religion. And so you're you're you're seeking after this enlightenment, which is essentially a state of inner peace and wisdom.

Now when we talk about Buddhism, maybe you've heard of some famous people. I can think of some Hollywood actors who have recently said, hey, you know, I'm I'm Buddhist and that's my religion and that's my faith and we associate that with this religion of peace. But maybe on a global scale, the most famous Buddhist would probably be the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama is, it's interesting. I I found there's a website for the Dalai Lama, not that I'm advocating or promoting it, but there's literally a website.

He's got a Twitter account. He's got a Instagram account. So he's a modern version of the Dalai Lama, but I think he's like the 15th version of it. And, basically, it's the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibetan Buddhism. And, again, this this is a person who really represents a lot of good things, but he's essentially the manifestation in their mind of complete enlightenment.

So it's at the root of it, and some of these religions that seem, you know, innocence and and seem nonaggressive, there's a lot of danger in that because we either know Jesus or we don't know Jesus. Jesus said I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. No one comes to the father except through me.

And so when you have these other religions, Buddhism is a great example that ultimately they lead you away from Jesus as being the way. It is a false religion. And we have to keep that in mind, when we're thinking about following Jesus and and what that means. But other countries that, were certainly our story today is surrounding Myanmar, but other countries that have large populations of Buddhists and there's about 500,000,000 roughly Buddhists in the world today. You're talking about countries like Japan, you're talking about Vietnam, you're talking about Thailand.

China has many Buddhists, Sri Lanka, Cambodia. India is actually the the place of origin of Buddhism. So it's in that whole kind of Southeast Asia quadrant, of the Eastern Hemisphere where Buddhism really is is has it has its strength. But let's get into our story because it's unbelievable. This is an unbelievable story.

This precious girl, she one day came home with her treasure because one of our indigenous leaders, they had targeted this area. They had reached out to her. She she's hungry for truth. Everybody at the end of the day is after truth. And especially when you're in the this religion like that and she's seeking truth, someone gives her the word of God, said this is truth.

And so she devours this, ends up accepting Jesus into her heart, the power of the Word of God. I love it. And she comes home. She has this amazing testimony, shares it with her her family, her mother, and her father who were devout Buddhists. Now they weren't happy with it, because when you become a follower and leave your religion, it's reflection on the family.

And so they weren't very happy initially, but they could see the change, the genuine change in her. And so they also became followers of Jesus. And once the family becomes followers of Jesus, word begins to spread very quickly. And that's exactly what happens. So when the villagers start to hear about it now that that's game changer.

So now now we're going into a whole different realm and that's where that courage and boldness really need to be ignited. Because if not, you will just get rolled over by the majority. This mob mentality kicks in and it just suffocates you in your infancy of following Jesus. So it took tremendous courage, and they knew that the village was gonna turn on them. And that's that is exactly what happened.

The the leader of the village, he approached them. Now there's a hierarchy in these areas. So you have these Buddhist monks and they kinda become the the judge, jury, and executioner, if you will, of situations. And so they hold the family accountable. And so in this situation, they brought this little girl in front of the whole village.

Imagine the intimidation tactic of that. They bring the whole village together and they put this precious young girl who just becomes a Christian in front of all of them and he starts interrogating her. And he says what God do you follow? He said there it's the God of Muslim. You're you're you're Muslim, you're Hindu, you're Buddhist, or you're Christian.

Which one are you? In front of this whole mob, I mean, just they're ready to erupt. Right? Because changing your religion has dire consequences And the Lord gave her the insight to not respond directly, but to say, I serve the living God. And he went crazy.

He said, no. You're either Muslim, you're Hindu, you're Buddhist, or you're Christian. Which one are you? And again, she said, I serve the living God. And he he just erupted, dismissed the entire crowd.

And that really is what triggered, the beginning of the persecution, because they thought that they were gonna catch her sort of red handed by having her admit to it. And instead, they said, well, now it's our responsibility to hold them accountable. And and the way we'll do that is by stoning them. And so what ended up happening is this monk, he goes to every single family in this community, in this relatively small village, maybe a couple 100 households, and he says, I need participation from everybody. Without exception, there'll be at least one member of your family that will participate.

And and, these truckloads of rocks began to emerge right outside of this home of these new Christians. And they said, you know, what's going on with these? And they said, oh, we're just fixing the road. Well, it was all a plan by the the Buddhist monk to arrange a stoning. And so just a few days later, 400 people, 400 people, a mob gathered around this home and just started bombarding it with rocks.

I saw some of these rocks were the size of footballs. It would have killed the normal person, but God protected this this beautiful family. And the the mob was yelling, you know, what is your Jesus doing now? Is your God saving you now? And the next morning as they went, to this home to sort of retrieve what they thought would be the corpses, these family members walked out.

And they they were hovering over the children. I mean imagine the terror of the children, of every family member as they were just being bombarded for hours with these massive stones and protecting this family. They expected corpses, like I said, but they walked out and they were just kind of in shock. And this family just looked at them and instead of an aggressive reaction, they said, we forgive you. Jesus has forgiven us.

We forgive you. Friend, that is the power of the gospel at work because this family, we would consider them and we would call them baby Christians, and yet they stood against them up. How easy would have been for the father to just open that front door and go hold on. Hold on. Big mistake here.

My daughter, I apologize on her behalf. We actually are we we are Buddhist still. None none of us converted to Christianity. End of stoning. End of it.

But instead they endure that persecution, that trauma, intentionally God's hand was on this whole situation, protects them from the mob, and they come out and they declare their faith in Jesus Christ. Friend, somebody made that happen. Somebody supported Unknown Nations, sent a treasure that went in here in the Burmese language so that this family could begin the process of becoming disciples. A convert would not have survived that situation. It required a disciple.

Someone who understood the Word of God, who had experienced the power of the Holy Spirit. And so that's where you come in. We need you. There there are so many this is one family. I said there's 500,000,000 roughly, Buddhists.

Friends there are millions of Buddhist families that have never heard the gospel message. And it's just a matter of us getting them. We have we have indigenous leaders on the ground in many of these countries I just mentioned. But we need you praying for us. We need your support.

We need you to to ask the Lord what involvement looks like. Because once we come in contact with the idea that Jesus has called us to have an expression of the ends of the earth, a place like this, this village before that young lady, none of them had heard of Jesus. That truly was the ends of the earth. Today, there's churches now. Because of that one family, there's multiple churches that have been established.

Would you consider going to the Unknown Nations website, unknownnations.com, supporting this podcast, giving us a favorable review. We've got our weekly prayer people group featured, that we can text you. We can email you. We wanna connect with you because we want you to be a part of this journey of faith and hope and transformation. It's gonna take all of us.

So we are grateful to bring this story to you, and our intention, every week is to bring you another encouraging story from unknown nations. Thanks for joining us. My name is Greg Kelley. We appreciate you being with us on the Unknown Nations podcast.