Excerpts from When Iron Gates Yield -- Geoffrey Bull's testimony about God's victory in the midst of persecution, torture and brainwashing in China.
The Triumph of Truth
"If you believe Him for forgiveness, you must believe Him for deliverance. He Who saves us from the guilt of sin can deliver us from the power of sin ... He can cut the chains that bind him to his former master ... He purchases us that He might possess us ....
If we want deliverance from the power of indwelling sin, we must rely in simplicity upon His Word, accepting without question what God says to us about it. We must still move in faith. ...
The aim of the Lord involves two things: the praise of God and the perfecting of the believer, that is to say His glory and our glorification. ...
He is prepared, for His glory and our good, to go all lengths with us. In occupying our vision with Christ, He seeks to show us what He desires our likeness to become. In this way, the more we behold Him the more we are prepared to endure that we might be conformed to His beauty ...
When a person who believes God is put through harrowing experiences, God waits, as it were, to see whether that person will consider Him worthy of his trust to the bitter end. His glory in that circumstance is linked up with that man's faith. When faith triumphs in the sufficiency of God's grace, then God is glorified in the world ...
The entrustment (by God) of trial and discipline is one therefore of highest honour (to us). He [let's us] see whether in the darkest hour we will really respond to Him who is invisible, more than to all the visible terror about us; to see whether we will love Him more than life and count His joy more to be grasped at than the moment's excitement of an apparent security."
* * *