JESUS
THE REFUGEE

Topics: Dependence on God; Hearing God; Holy Spirit; Inspiration; Jesus Christ; Preaching; Suffering

References: John 14:26; Acts 1:8; Hebrews 4:14–16

In Croatia I was asked to speak to a church gathering for about two hundred newly arrived refugees. Refugees from this area of the world are mostly women, because the men are dead or in camp or fighting.

This group of Muslims, Croats, and a few Serbs had fled to a seminary on the border of a battered Croatian town. The town was still in danger of sniper fire and bombing, but the church had escaped because there were apartment buildings between it and the guns. Attackers had tried to fire shells over the apartment buildings to the seminary, but they had failed, so the seminary became the refugee receiving and feeding place.

We worked all day visiting the refugees. At night we held a service in a huge, old church. I didn’t know what to say. Everything I had prepared seemed totally inadequate, so I put my notes away and prayed, “God, give me something they can identify with.”

I told the women about Jesus, who as a baby became a refugee. He was hunted by soldiers, and his parents had to flee to Egypt at night, leaving everything behind. I continued telling them about Jesus’ life, and when I got to the cross, I said, “He hung there naked, not like pictures tell you.” They knew what that meant. Some of them had been stripped naked and tortured.

At the end of the message, I said, “All these things have happened to you. You are homeless. You have had to flee. You have suffered unjustly. But you didn’t have a choice. He had a choice. He knew all this would happen to him, but he still came.” And then I told them why.

Many of the women knelt down, put their hands up, and wept. I said, “He’s the only one who really understands. I cannot possibly understand, but he can. He’s the suffering God. You can give your pain to him.”

—Jill Briscoe, “Keeping the Adventure in Ministry,” Leadership (Summer 1996)