On Laban, Leah, and Loving Ugly Souls │Sermons in Solitary Confinement (The Prison Pulpit #27)

Welcome to this special episode of the China Compass Podcast, #27 in the weekly “Prison Pulpit” series! I'm your China travel guide, Missionary Ben. You can follow me on X (@chinaadventures) where I post daily reminders to pray for China (http://PrayforChina.us). To learn more about our various ministry endeavors and to get any of the missionary biographies I’ve published, visit www.PrayGiveGo.us!   First, I want to remind everyone why I started this second weekly podcast within China Compass. I wanted to remind people to pray for Pastor Wang Yi (and others like him, as Hebrews 13:3 teaches us) by sharing from his own words and sermons. We kept at it for a dozen weeks or so (Oct and Dec of last year), working through Wang Yi’s pre-arrest letters and declarations.    Next we return to Richard Wurmbrand’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement: I then began an extended series working through Richard Wurmbrand’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement, giving us a glimpse of life from within the walls of persecution from the perspective of a well-known pastor. Richard Wurmbrand was a Romanian Lutheran minister who spent fourteen years in prison (three in solitary confinement) and published ”Tortured for Christ" after his release in the late 1960s. He later founded Voice of the Martyrs, but son Michael does NOT recommend VOM’s ministry today. (Read his “Open Letter” about VOM here: https://www.billionbibles.com/michael-wurmbrand-vom.html)  Michael Wurmbrand now runs his own ministry, and has made most of his father’s books (and formerly unpublished writings) available for free: https://richardwurmbrandfoundation.com/. The last two weeks I took a break from the Sermons in Solitary Confinement series to share a couple excerpts from Richard Wurmband’s longer book of prison stories & meditations, In God's Underground (https://richardwurmbrandfoundation.com/pdfs/IGU-english.pdf), but today we return to the Solitary Confinement Sermons, looking at a shorter one called “Word Made Flesh”, found on pages 65-67 in the original book (scanned to pdf): Sermons in Solitary Confinement.  As I’ve said before, I want to preface this (as Wurmbrand himself did) with the statement that he is sharing these prison sermons “as is”, not editing out certain thoughts that he may have disagreed with later in life, or in more mentally stable moments. Not to say that they are heretical sermons either, but that they are not here presented to be as theologically accurate as possible, but to give us a glimpse into the heart, mind, and solitary cell of a prisoner for Christ.  Here is the text version of this week’s prison sermon:  https://open.substack.com/pub/chinacall/p/on-laban-leah-and-loving-ugly-souls   Follow China Compass Follow or subscribe to China Compass wherever you are listening. You can also email any questions or comments to contact @ PrayforChina . us or send me a DM on X: @chinaadventures. Hebrews 13:3