The Faith of the Fathers w/ Karl Gessler
The Faith of the Fathers w/ Karl Gessler
In Prison With Tina Peters: Faith, Persecution, and Integrity in the Modern Western World
We explore the reality of Christian persecution in the West, reminding listeners that those who seek to live godly lives will face challenges for their faith. Through stories of real-life persecution, we highlight the importance of standing firm in conviction and the significance of supporting those who suffer for their beliefs.
• Discussing the expectation of persecution as part of the Christian walk
• Sharing compelling stories of individual persecution experiences
• Highlighting the case of Tina Peters and her unjust imprisonment
• Examining the subtleties of persecution in the West
• Encouraging listeners to remember and advocate for the persecuted
• Reflections on the opportunity for ministry amid trials
• Emphasizing the need for inner strength and resilience in faith
• Calling for deeper reflection on personal faith in the face of adversity
• Ending with a poignant prayer for persecuted Christians worldwide
Should you, as a Christian in the West, expect to be persecuted for your faith, and what does that even mean? What are we talking about? What does it look like? The Apostle Paul said that all those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So according to that, we should expect to be persecuted. But what does that look like?
Speaker 1:I have met people they're friends of mine who have been persecuted for their faith, and what that has looked like for them in one case. He said in that moment he wanted to die and he cried out to Jesus to save him or to take him to take his life, to take him to be with him, and instead what Jesus did was appeared to him and gave him grace to endure it. He actually was filled with joy in that moment. He said he saw a vision of Jesus and he was filled with so much joy he began laughing while they were torturing him. This was in a Muslim country and those who were torturing him were persecuting him because he had baptized new believers who had been former Muslims, and they were astounded that he was laughing. They pulled them up, they slapped him across the face and they said why are you laughing? And he was able to share the gospel with them. That's what persecution looked like in East Africa.
Speaker 1:In North Korea, many Christians are put in prison camps, in death camps. If you share your faith in North Korea, your life expectancy is extremely short I think it was something like three months. There are millions of Christians imprisoned, many in China, in the Middle East. Some of them are persecuted by family members, some of them are persecuted by the government, and to be persecuted for your faith means simply that you are attacked, vilified, punished for your allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Apostle Paul says that we should expect to be persecuted for our faith. Many Christians in the West have not even considered the subject of persecution, and that is to our loss, because if you don't have a faith that knows how to survive in persecution, it's questionable whether or not you have a faith at all. Your faith must be tested, and the Apostle Paul said that all those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But what does that look like here in the West?
Speaker 1:Today? I want to share with you excerpts of an interview that my friend David Clements did with Tina Peters. Tina Peters is a Christian and she is sitting in prison right now in the state of Colorado because she's a Christian. Now some watching this today will say, no, she's a political prisoner. But the reason she's a political prisoner is because she did what was right. She walked in her integrity and did what was right no matter the cost. That's why following Jesus brings persecution and it's also why many Christians in the West have not considered it. They have not considered the possibility of being persecuted because we haven't thought about Christianity this way.
Speaker 1:Jesus didn't say pray this prayer so that when you die you can know you are going to heaven. He said come and follow me. Following Jesus is an active thing and it comes with an agenda. He said to pray in this way. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So following Jesus means enacting, cooperating with bringing about the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom of God being enacted in Tina Peter's life required that she walk in integrity, and her walking in integrity got her in prison.
Speaker 1:So my friend, david Clements went to visit her. David is a former prosecuting attorney and he's been involved in the defense of many people who have been targeted by our government because they stood up for what was true. They stood up on principled issues, and so he's been a champion for them, a voice for the voiceless, something the scriptures tell us to be a defender of the widows and the orphans. James says that pure and undefiled religion is this to visit widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Many times in our politically correct churches, caring for the poor has meant supporting welfare institutes that have done nothing except cause more harm. They're not actually helping the poor, and when it comes to those who are truly ostracized, truly abandoned, truly abused, the church says nothing. Thankfully, david Clements has done something and has brought this woman's story to attention.
Speaker 1:This is Tina Peters. She is sitting in prison because in a previous election, she preserved the records that she believed, rightly, were being erased by the machines that recorded the records. I'm saying this carefully because of YouTube, because she preserved the truth of what happened in that election. She was prosecuted by those who wanted the lie to persist. Tina Peters is a woman in her 60s who has no criminal record. Her son is a Marine in the armed forces and now she sits in prison serving a nine-year sentence. Donald Trump was not able to pardon her because she was convicted of a state crime, and she was convicted in a kangaroo court. Many of the star witnesses were not allowed to testify. The whole thing was rigged against her, much like Jesus's illegal court hearing on the night that he was betrayed.
Speaker 1:For the Christians who know enough about persecution to know that it happens, many still don't understand the subtleties of how it happens. Here in this country, we believe the media when they call someone a criminal, such as Tina Peters, but many of us, sadly and to our shame, do not think about it deeply enough to recognize who is truly a criminal, and I'm guilty of this as well. Christians in other countries are often locked away based upon trumped up charges of espionage or giving away government secrets or being a threat to national security, and the reality is what they were doing was something like printing a Bible or sharing the gospel in public, or leading a church or baptizing somebody. These are seen as acts of treachery by the government and they prosecute them, but for the sake of how they look to the rest of the world, they invent crimes to make it look more justifiable for arresting this person.
Speaker 1:Christians in the West are not good at subtlety. Richard Wurmbrand, who spent 14 years in communist prisons, including multiple years underground in solitary confinement, barely keeping his sanity, said that the church in the West is easily duped, that Americans are particularly vulnerable to being gullible, and this persists today, sadly. So I want you to see what it looks like for Christians in the West to be persecuted, and those who have chosen to live a godly life. You know what I'm talking about. Family has ostracized you. Maybe you lost your job, maybe you got blacklisted, maybe you got ridiculed and mocked, but very few of us, thankfully, have been persecuted by our government, but Tina Peters has been, and I want us to meet her right now. David Clements recently went to visit Tina Peters, and I want to show you excerpts of this interview with her, which I believe was done on a cell phone, which is why the audio quality maybe isn't the best.
Speaker 2:Just to check in with you all and tell you all what's on her heart. So, Tina, just give us an update.
Speaker 3:Well, the only thing that keeps me going are you guys out there. You know it's been some pretty dark days. I'll be honest, you know I never, ever thought and I'm sure you out there have never thought about being locked up in a small cell. Especially, you know a lot of these women here. Probably all of them have done something to deserve being here. You know either drugs or other offenses, but when you're locked up and you're innocent and you're locked up for doing the right thing, you know it's hard. It's really hard because I don't have anything in common with the people here.
Speaker 1:I want to mention three things here. First of all, hebrews 13, 3 says to remember those who are persecuted as if you are persecuted with them, and those who suffer in the flesh because you are also in the body. If you were in prison, how often would you think about the fact that you're in prison? The answer is every day You'd wake up and you'd know you're in prison. You would think about it. The scriptures say that we are to remember those who are being persecuted as if we are being persecuted with them. So that's part of the reason I'm sharing this video with you today. You need to know about Tina Peters and the thousands, actually millions, of Christians around the world she represents. Secondly, when you look at this cell that Tina is living in and you think of how difficult that is, as an American, we know what it's like to have freedom, where we can get in our car, we can go wherever we want, we can go shopping. We have all these options. We have all this liberty to do so many different things. To be confined to a single room like that would be very difficult, particularly for an American, but I want you to know that in places like China, christians share a cell with so many people and the floor is dirt. Many times the floor is a dirt floor and there are so many people in there. They're packed in so tightly that they cannot sleep unless they all organize and kind of sit on each other, leaning on each other, and they together fall asleep leaning on each other because there's no room to sit down or lie down. That's how they are treated many times in other parts of the world. So as we listen to Tina share her story, I want you to understand that in many places around the world it is much, much worse and ask yourself this what would I be doing? How would my faith survive in those circumstances? Is Jesus big enough? Is the truth of the gospel true enough to make me joyful in those circumstances? That is a question well worth exploring if you want to have a real faith. Thirdly, tina Peters says that she doesn't have anything in common with these women and that I hope she will change her perspective on that.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I realized as I went to do jail ministry was that the people inside the prison are not different than the people outside, than most of the people outside the prison. The difference is that they got caught. Sometimes there's very little difference between the police officers and the prisoners, and the difference is who got caught or who your connections are. This is also true for us as Christians, if we grew up in a Christian home. Many times we're tempted to be prideful, to think that we're better and more important than the person next to us because we've lived a squeaky clean life.
Speaker 1:But the reality is we are blessed to live a good life. It doesn't mean that we are more valued or loved by God. We are blessed because we were given the tools, we were given the knowledge. We were given a Bible. Because we were given the tools, we were given the knowledge. We were given a Bible, we were given instruction, we were given an example so that we were able to make good choices. The people sitting in prison did not have that.
Speaker 1:We are a product of the choices, not only that we make, but those who are made before us. We inherit what our parents choose for us in many ways, and so my prayer for Tina is that she will see this as an opportunity to minister in the prison, because when you do prison ministry, you're given maybe an hour, two hours to go in to try to share the gospel with someone, but God has given her an assignment inside the prison 24-7. I pray, tina, that the Lord will help you to see that he's given you an opportunity right now to minister to those in prison constantly, and I'm not in any way diminishing the suffering that she's going through or looking down on her desire to get out. I would want to get out, but while you're there, embrace it as a God-given mission. Let them use you for revival in that prison.
Speaker 2:I just got back from DC for the Hardin Press Conference for the J6ers. You've kind of been integrated into the J6 community because everything that you're fighting for is really the same stuff that they have, but you've been convicted of state charges. So we're all praying for a miracle, not quite knowing how this is going to unfold. But if you could send a message to Donald Trump, what would your wishes be?
Speaker 3:Yes, Well, as you know, every Friday on my show I'm always dedicated to the J6 community. Friday on my show, always dedicated to the J6 community, and Mickey Woodhoff, ashley Babbitt's mom, is a dear friend, the other ladies with her Freedom Corner. I've been there and it's a really special place. These people are standing out there. They were standing out there just this past week and every night for over 700 days in the snow, in the rain, in the freezing out, faithfully, and so you know it's people like them that are standing up for people like us.
Speaker 1:That really means a lot. Let me say again here some people are going to say that this is a political imprisonment, but this is about standing up for what's right, which is your God-given duty before God. It's about standing up for the truth, and she did it because of her faith, not because of her political affiliation. She did it because she believed that this was the right thing to do, that the truth was worth standing up for. Jesus said I am the way and the truth and the life. The truth is Jesus, even if it's part of an election system. Jesus cares about the truth. The truth matters and we are supposed to stand in the truth. Every Christian should understand that, though I'm afraid many do not.
Speaker 3:But I would say to President Trump we're standing up for you, the election records that I preserved. I'm the only one in Colorado and maybe across the United States that preserved the 2020 election records. All the rest of them in this state were erased. If not for doing the images the before and after image of before the trusted bill I don't even like to call it that we would not have those records. There's more clerks. There's more election officials that want to stand up for transparent, free, fair elections. It needs to be fixed. We're risking it all to make sure that every single person in this not just the United States, but around the world because we know that Venezuela was affected by this Brazil, many, many nations. This is going on in Serbia. The judge would not allow us to put in the emails from Serbia linking me and what was going on with what we found. We need to implement change before the midterms, because governors will be elected during that time and other legislators, but get me out.
Speaker 2:I just want you know that we aren't forgetting about you. We do love you, and if you had a message to send to just the Americans, somebody ask me what I do in my cell and really it's just the thoughts of getting out.
Speaker 3:You can't acclimate to this life.
Speaker 1:I want to pause it right there. One I want to point out just how important it is for someone in prison to know that they are remembered, and one of the things that we do as a church, and that I learned to do through the Voice of the Martyrs, is write letters to persecuted Christians. Honestly, I need to do it more than I do. It is a very important act, and when we have done this to other political prisoners many who are Christians here in the United States of America the responses that we've gotten back are quick oftentimes and very grateful, just to know that we haven't forgotten them, because that's one of the lies that Satan will tell those who are in prison is that you're alone, you're forgotten, you're abandoned. Give up, give up, give up. As a matter of fact, richard Wurmbrand said that in his 14 years in prison, part of what the communists did because he was in Romania this was communist Romania what they did was they put loudspeakers on in the prison cells that just said all day long Christianity is stupid, christianity is stupid, christianity is stupid. Give up, give up, give up, give up. It was literal brainwashing, just repeated lies. That is how the enemy works and that's how he tries to destroy people, to break down their faith while they are suffering. So when we write letters, when we pray for them and let them know they're not forgotten, it reinforces in them. You are standing for something that's worthy of standing. You are doing something in the world that's very important. Your stand will help other people stand and your collapsing will cause other people to collapse, so it encourages them to stand firm.
Speaker 1:Also, she talks about how she's meditating on how to get out, which I do. Again, I'm not trying to belittle this in any way. That is certainly understandable, but Brother Yun, who's a pastor from China who spent eight years enduring all sorts of torture in communist prisons in China, said that those who try to avoid persecution fail. Those who try to survive do better, but those who thrive are the ones who embrace it. And so, as we think about what would we do, the truth is we would be like Tina she's never been in jail before. I've never been in jail before.
Speaker 1:If I was in there, I'm sure that I would wrestle with just wanting to get out. But if you can change your mind which is what repentance is it's changing our mind from a lie to the truth that you know. You're only in prison because God allowed it. It doesn't mean that God wanted you to go there in the sense of like he doesn't want you to be treated unjustly, he doesn't want you to suffer unjustly, but he allows it, just like he allowed Jesus to go to the cross, because he wants us to learn to be like him, which is to be full of self-giving love.
Speaker 1:So, as long as God has you in prison, embrace it. As long as God has you enduring suffering, embrace it as a calling, not just something to survive, but something to embrace, and then you will thrive. This is what I try to do. None of us know what we're going to be like until we are tested. But we are all tested in many ways, in subtle ways and in varying degrees throughout life. And when we learn to embrace trials as God sent to refine us, then we will thrive.
Speaker 3:You can never give up, you can never give in, you can never back down. I would say stand up, ask God what it is that he's called you to do in this lifetime and be about doing it and stand for something. I appreciate you all so much. I'm very grateful for the banners, for the letters. I thank you all so much, I'm so grateful.
Speaker 1:And we are grateful for you, tina Peters, and we will not forget you. So, lord, we just bless Tina and all your children. She represents right now those who are enduring persecution from family, those who have lost their jobs because they did what was right, those who refuse to cheat in the numbers. We bless them today, lord. Let them know that they're not forgotten. Let them know that somebody is praying for them.
Speaker 1:Lord, we do pray for justice. We pray for vindication, that Tina Peters and those like her will be vindicated and will be released. But we also pray that they would embrace this moment and that they would bear fruit in what Satan intended for evil, use for good in their lives. Thank you, lord, that those who bear fruit. Jesus, you said you would prune us so that we might bear more fruit. So thank you for the pruning that's happening in Tina right now and those like her who are enduring suffering. We ask, lord, that they would produce so much fruit. The devil would regret the day he attacked them, and so we bless our brothers and sisters in North Korea, in China, in Iran, throughout the Middle East, in places in Mexico.
Speaker 1:Lord in little islands we don't know about. Lord in basements we don't know about in closets. We don't know about where your children are being abused, tortured, punished because they serve you, lord. We bless them today with hope. We bless them with encouragement, holy Spirit, we ask that you would let them know that they are not forgotten today. If you would like to write to Tina Peters, the address to writing to her is in the show description and I encourage you to take a minute to write to her and just tell her that you haven't forgotten her. Don't attack the government, don't try to do too much in your letter. Just let her know she's not forgotten. I hope this has encouraged you and helped you in some way. If it has, leave a fire emoji, leave a comment below and if you'd like to support my ministry, the links for that are always in the show notes. We'll talk to you again soon, god bless.