A few days before he died John Wesley wrote a letter to William Wilberforce on the subject of the slave trade in which he said that American slavery “was the vilest that ever saw the sun.” In Though the Mountains Shake, Amy Carmichael thought that if Wesley had known of the sex slavery of temple prostitution where baby girls are married to the gods and which had been going on for centuries he would have pronounced it the “vilest that ever saw the sun.” My comment here is that all slavery everywhere in all centuries has included sex slavery. In addition to the evil of slavery there is that added evil of the rape of children and adults. It is going on today in many nations. Northern Uganda is one example. Prostitution in most countries is slavery. The women are owned by their pimps. Japan sent Korean women to be prostitutes for their army. The Russian revolution in 1917 sent the wives of 10,000 Russian Army officers to be women for the Russian Army on the Eastern Front. England stopped their slave trade. The Civil War stopped slavery here in the U.S. But sex slavery is still endemic in the world. It is like the war on terror, there is no front. The front is everywhere.
As you read through the book of Acts, look at every conversion, and see what happened right before it: what was said, who said it. The situations are the same today. A long time ago, my duty in the Officer’s Christian Fellowship was the east coast of the United States. I went to an officer’s office at Fort Lee, VA, and stayed overnight, then I went on to Norfolk and Fort Bragg. Forty years later, I was no longer on the staff of OCF, but I had to go to Denver. While I was in Denver, I checked in at the OCF offices. There was the same Air Force officer I had met in Fort Lee, retired now, a colonel. I had stayed in his house when he was a first lieutenant. He asked me, “Do you know what happened when you stayed overnight?” I said, “No, I just remember staying in your home.” He said, “You led the next-door neighbor to Christ.” I had no memory of it. Ten years after that, I was speaking at a banquet at the Hotel Salisbury, and who was th...
Comments