Thursday 7 August, 2008

World
UK
Sport

By Charles Gardner

As the controversial Beijing Games finally gets off the starting blocks this week – on a date evidently picked for its extraordinary 08-08-08 sequence – host nation China will be reminded of an earlier Olympian who made a significant impact on their country.

For the biography^* of Eric Liddell, the ‘Flying Scotsman’ who heroically won a 400-metres gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics despite refusing to run his best event – the 100m – because the heat was held on a Sunday, is being published in Mandarin to coincide with the Games.
Liddell, whose inspiring story was told in the award-winning 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, later returned to China where he was born to missionary parents and where he gave the best years of his life for the cause of the Christian gospel.

And the tough life he chose became even more challenging during the war when he found himself in a Japanese prison camp where he died aged 43 of a brain tumour, probably hastened by overwork and malnourishment.

Also a fine rugby player who won seven caps for Scotland, Liddell believed that running on Sunday would dishonour Christ as it was then widely respected as ‘the Lord’s Day’ – and there is a particularly moving moment in the film when, as he made his way to the starting blocks of the 400m final, an American masseur slipped him a piece of paper with a quotation from the Bible: “Those who honour me, I will honour.”

Running with the piece of paper in his hand, he not only won the race, but broke the existing world record with a time of 47.6 seconds.
However, instead of ‘cashing in’ on his sporting success, he exchanged the glory of earthly fame for the obscurity of serving Christ away from the limelight in far-off China. And his supreme sacrifice will no doubt have made a significant contribution to the massive subsequent growth of the church in China as a result.

When Chairman Mao’s Communist soldiers took over just a few years after Liddell’s death, the small but vibrant Chinese church looked in peril. And when the bloody and brutal ‘Cultural Revolution’ raised its ugly head in the sixties, many thought the church wouldn’t survive. But when the shackles of oppression eased enough to let in a ray of light, the story of the Chinese church miracle gradually came to be known. Far from being crushed and extinguished, it was alive and well, numbering millions upon millions.

Estimates now put the figure of born-again Christians in China at up to 100 million, possibly more, some ten per cent of its population and almost twice as many people now living in Britain.
The full extent cannot easily be measured as most of them meet ‘underground’ (in secret) because they are still oppressed and persecuted. Though the authorities would have us believe that tolerance towards Christians is now exercised, this is only if you belong to the official state-approved Three-Self Church, which has had to compromise its beliefs to enjoy such a protected position.

As our athletes warm up for the Games, Chinese Christians are having to get baptised in icy underground water away from the prying eyes of the police while others are beaten, tortured and imprisoned.
Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church because he knew that all the forces of evil would be unable to crush believers like this – or to snuff out the fiery passion of missionaries like Eric Liddell.

Photo: http://www.bigfoto.com/