Someone encountered following happening recently. The company where he was working hired a Jewish employee recently. This person claimed that he could not work on Saturdays because it was a Sabbath. So he thought to himself, “It will not work here. There will be no way they will allow this.” This is because when he started to work there and told them that he could not work on Sunday because he was a Christian, he was told, “I don’t care.” He thought the Jewish employee would be treated same but the same manager told others that this new employee should be allowed to take off Saturdays since his religion forbade working on that day. As he thought about it, he realized that the company had been considerate of employees of other faith such as Islam and Hindu, but not Christians.
You may even mistakenly think that US is not a Christian country anymore when considering many persecutions Christians endure in this country. Muslims are allowed to take off for their prayer time and is considered a right for them to wear hejab. But Christian high school students are forbidden to have a prayer meeting, and there was a case of shooting death against someone trying to share Gospel.
In Korean, the persecution against Christianity is not just a recent event. There are organized groups opposing Christians and when you read all the negative posting on may websites, sometimes it makes your spine shiver. A leader of such group classified Christianity as superstition and claimed that it did not belong in the society. It was regretful to me and raised a question in me as I thought that “if he only knew about Jesus just a little that he would not say this.” Where does such hate come from? In Korea, about 70% of all the social work programs or donations to the relief agencies come from Christians, and I question where these extreme negative reactions come from.
There may be many reasons, but the biggest reason is that Churches or Christians are viewed as a group of people not practicing love for others, but portrayed as very selfish or profit-driven group. There may be cases of individual mistakes that fuel this, but by praying for a temple to shut down or to look down on other religion, or certain churches creating damage a local region without any apologies, these lead to a viewpoint that Christian groups are self-serving instead of others.
Another reason that causes this is when we share Gospel. When we act from a sense of superiority to share the Gospel by telling them simply that “if you do not believe in Jesus, you will go to hell,” instead of looking for suffering people who do not know Jesus to serve them to share God’s love with them so that they will come to know God naturally; this results in the viewpoint of others that Christians are rude and just trying to expand their own power. This causes me to think that one needs to have some type of qualification before starting to share the Gospel. Instead of giving a piece of paper to a stranger that says, “Believe to gain heaven, refuse to go to hell,” we need to love and serve others to gain a right to say, “I think you need God in your life.”
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