Sweet Persecution: A 30-Day Devotional With Reflections from the Persecuted Church

Challenging, Inspiring Devotional Focuses on the Persecuted Church

Through the work of human rights groups, international ministries, and countless churches, you have probably sensed the growing awareness of the global suffering being forced on Christians throughout the world. While many believers in the West are rededicating themselves to prayer for persecuted Christians and churches around the world, you may be at a loss for how to pray and what to pray about. Sweet Persecution is a 30-day devotional with reflections on the suffering church that will summon you to remember the difficult daily reality of being a Christian in much of the world and instruct you on the many prayer needs as well.

An ideal book for bible studies, prayer groups, congregations and your own devotions, Sweet Persecution is a powerful way to prepare for the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church held on the first Sundy in November each year.

The thirty hard-hitting vignettes have been collected from the ministry of Open Doors with Brother Andrew and provide a touch-point for your prayers, reminding you of the urgent needs of churches in countries hostile to the Gospel. Each of the devotions includes a selected biblical passage and concludes with observations to help stimulate your personal meditation or group discussion.

Born in 1945 and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Ron Brackin entered the seminary at the University of Notre Dame in 1963, immediantly after his high school graduation.

He lasted three months. That short stint set the tone for the next two decades.

In and out of college, in and out of the military, in and out of one job after another. Grocery clerk, stockboy, bingo caller, used car salesman, nightclub comedian, carnival joint operator, even a bag man for a couple of small-time hustlers.

Drugs and alcohol came too. Then a series of cults.

For years, Ron smoked pot, drank beer, and went from one bad marriage to another, and chanted mantras underneath pyramids.

In 1980, not very long after a failed suicide attempt, God caught up with him and turned his seedy world upside and inside out.

The drugs, alcohol, and profanity slipped away almost unnoticed. Cigarettes took a little longer. For the first weeks after a former drug customer led him to Christ, Ron's nose rarely came out of the Bible. He slept a few hours and went right back to it, amazed at what he read.

Over the past two decades, God has continued to remold and retool Ron Brackin. He has restored everything the devil store... and much, much more.

Ron has worked with many ministries since then and turned his typewriter to the Lord's work.

At 50, Ron realized that he had been writing for other people all the time and took a shot at writing fiction. The result was a mystery novella featuring Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery of the Bank of England robbery as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days.

That was followed by a series of Bible studies called A Biblical Companion to the Classics. The first volume, published in 1998, is called The Gospel According to Dickens to be followed by The Gospel According to Shakespeare, currently in progress.

Sweet Persecution was written in the wake of a round-the-world trip with an Open Doors team to minister to persecuted Christians in the underground church. Ron recognized that the Western church has little or no theology of suffering.

"We're told that everything will be wonderful after we go up to the altar," he says, "and when that doesn't happen, we think something is wrong. But suffering comes with the territory, and persecution is part of salvation. I wrote the devotional with the hope of setting some people free, believers who are frustrated and frightened. I want them to understand that suffering and persecution are okay. In fact, they're normal. And that Jesus didn't promise to deliver us from them; He promised to accompany us through them."

Ron and his wife, Annie, live in Texas where they home school their four children.

size : 4.8 x 6.8