Praying for Chinese Victims of COVID-19

The day that sickness broke, I knew it was gone. The night before, I had a temperature of 102.8. Because I was so cold, I covered myself with an extra blanket and went off to sleep. And sleep I did. So much so, that when I woke up, I was sweating profusely. And that’s when I knew that whatever it was…was gone. It reminded me of when I’d get sick as a child and my grandmother would shroud us with blanket after blanket and tell us not to move because the sweat would break the fever. Because I’d woke up dripping with sweat but feeling better then, I knew that when I woke up the next morning that I was healed and from that moment on, I began to regain my strength and am here to tell my story.

Interestingly enough, the same morning is when I found out about the Wuhan outbreak. At the time, there were only 64,000 cases and 1,400 deaths recorded. As soon as I heard about it, I began to weep for my Chinese brothers and sisters in Christ because I didn’t want anybody to feel what I just felt. As I listened to the reports, tears started streaming and before I knew it, I was ugly crying and praying and asking God for a cure. But as I began to pray for their healing, God put it on my heart that their faith wasn’t such that they could believe Him to be healed; only because they (the Chinese) fight against faith. In fact, ‘…the government of China officially espouses state atheism…which opposes religious institutional power and influence in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen.’ 1 That means there could be no room to believe for healing because to do so would require believing that Jesus is the Son of God of whom the majority of the population does not.

According to a 2014 China Family Panel Survey, 74% of Chinese people are either non-religious or practice some sort of Chinese folk religion which includes worshipping regional deities and ancestors, Confucianism, Taoism, or Chinese Buddhism; 16% are Buddhist while .50% practice Islam. That said, only 2.5% of Chinese people believe in Jesus Christ. 3 In a country with over 1.438 billion people, that means only 36 million believe in Jesus and a large percentage of those have to meet secretly (i.e. underground) because of persecution. Therefore, if God wanted to heal them, He couldn’t; simply because they don’t believe that He exists. But did that mean they could never be healed? No! God is a good God and He will do whatever He can to save anyone because remember: God so loved the world (which includes unbelieving Chinese people) that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. The problem is that they don’t believe in Jesus. So are unbelievers destined to die? Here’s the thing. Though the large majority don’t believe in the God of the Bible, they do believe in the healing power of medicine. Therefore, instead of praying and asking God to miraculously heal them, I prayed that He’d provide a vaccine. So why don’t you…

Pray this for me: Heavenly Father...