Aug. 17, 2025

Guest Pastor Vernon Brewer's sermon begins at 27:06 min into the video. The music "Jesus Does", "Thy Word", "Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)", "The Love Of Christ", "The Old Rugged Cross", and "The Doxology" are licensed under CCLI Copyright #2723035 and Streaming Media #22024223 licenses.

Today's powerful sermon, titled "If I Die... - Risking Death to Live for Jesus", took us on a heart-wrenching journey through John 15:18-27, where Pastor Vernon Brewer, a cancer survivor and longtime ministry leader, explored the profound and urgent theme of Christian persecution worldwide. Beginning with an opening prayer asking God to help us point people to Jesus in our daily encounters, the service opened with Christ's own words about how the world's hatred of believers mirrors its hatred of Him, setting the stage for a message that would challenge our comfortable Christianity.

Pastor Brewer, sharing the stories of persecuted believers, surveyed into four core truths about persecution: 

1. It purifies the church by eliminating nominal believers,

2. It unifies the church by removing petty disputes,

3. It strengthens believers who must take daily stands for Christ, and

4. It paradoxically grows the church—as evidenced by China's explosive growth from one million to potentially 130 million Christians despite Communist oppression.

Through gripping personal anecdotes, including his own near-death cancer battle and encounters with persecuted believers like Ping from Vietnam—who declared "I live for Jesus Christ. If I die, I die for Jesus Christ" while being publicly humiliated—and Pastor Samuel Lam from China who spent 20 years in prison camps, Pastor Brewer illustrated how believers worldwide risk everything for their faith.

The theological weight of martyrdom was unpacked through historical examples from Stephen to Polycarp to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, revealing how persecution has been the church's constant companion, with the 20th century seeing more martyrs than the previous nineteen centuries combined. This reality was made devastatingly personal through stories from North Korea, where 70,000 Christians languish in labor camps, families are imprisoned for owning Bibles, and believers are executed simply for their faith—yet the church continues to grow as people choose hope over fear.

His sermon concluded with a passionate call to action rooted in 1 John 3:17 and William Wilberforce's words: "You can choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know." Pastor Brewer challenged the congregation to support persecuted believers through prayer, Bible distribution, church planting training, and financial gifts, reminding them that those suffering in North Korean prison camps are not strangers but family—brothers and sisters in Christ. His message was particularly poignant as it came during a time when American Christians, largely insulated from persecution, struggle to comprehend the reality their global family faces daily.

Pastor Brewer's conversational yet urgent delivery, peppered with self-deprecating humor about his post-cancer weight gain and his son's honest critiques, made this heavy subject both accessible and deeply convicting. His decision to give away his book "If I Die" for free, asking only for donations to persecuted believers, embodied the sacrificial spirit he was calling others to embrace. His sermon left the congregation with both sobering awareness of their persecuted family's suffering and hope that their prayers and support could make an eternal difference, challenging them to move beyond comfortable Christianity to costly discipleship that mirrors the courage of believers willing to die for Jesus Christ.