Brother Yun (Liu Zhenying)

Before

He was born in 1958 into crushing poverty in a village in Henan Province, and came of age during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution — a time when owning a Bible could mean prison and Christians were hunted and despised. His family had nothing and no hope: his father was dying, wasting away from illness, and the household was sliding toward ruin. Then his mother, in desperation, recalled words she had heard long before — that there was a Jesus who heals — and the family knelt together and cried out to him. His father recovered. For the teenage boy it was an earthquake: the God of heaven was real, and near, and good. He was set ablaze with love for a Christ he barely knew, and seized by one overwhelming desire — to possess the one thing the believers spoke of but almost no one in his region had: a Bible of his very own.

The Turning Point

An old preacher told the boy that God gives his word to those who hunger for it, and pray, and weep. So Yun took him at his word — literally. With a desperation that frightened his family, he began to fast and pray for a Bible, refusing food, weeping and crying out to God day after day, for a hundred days. To those around him it looked like madness. Then, in the dark before dawn, in answer to that hunger, the gift came: traveling believers placed a Bible in his hands, the first he had ever held. He wept over it and would not let it go. He devoured the book by night, by candlelight and under his blanket, memorizing whole books of Scripture — the Gospels, Acts, the letters — until the words were written on his heart where no government could confiscate them. From that moment his life had a single, unbending purpose: to carry the gospel out of his village and across China, to people who had never heard the name of Jesus, whatever it might cost him. Still only a teenager, he began to preach — and in a land that hunted preachers, the cost came swiftly and savagely.

After

For decades Yun was hunted, arrested, and brutally tortured for helping to lead China's vast underground house-church movement. He was beaten until he could not walk, shocked with electric batons, and starved; in one prison he fasted from both food and water for seventy-four days, a fast doctors said no one could survive. His most famous moment came when, his legs shattered from torture, he was told by God to walk out — and he simply rose and walked through gate after gate of a maximum-security prison while the guards looked on as though blind, an escape he never claimed for himself but credited wholly to God. His story, told in the bestselling testimony The Heavenly Man, has stirred believers around the world, confronting the comfortable Western church with the cost — and the joy — of following Jesus, and putting a human face on China's suffering, fast-multiplying church.

In Their Words

“The Lord does not always take us out of our suffering, but He walks with us through it — and it is there, in the fire, that we come to know Him most deeply.”— Brother Yun (Liu Zhenying)