I was in Iraq for eight remarkable days last month, and in Part II of this report I’ll tell you how I was privileged to help make Middle-East history. But there was one day, August 21, 2017, our second day on the job, that has since taken on a life of its own. In fact, it was a drama that nearly took several of our lives. And for that reason, it forms a fiery preamble to our historic mission.

We were in Kurdistan, Iraq’s largely autonomous northern province, at the invitation of the regional government. Their Interior Minister/Defense Minister had invited us to interview Christian leaders in Kurdistan and the adjoining Nineveh Plain, and based upon those leaders’ desires, to help the Kurdish government compose clear constitutional guarantees and protections for Christians and other religious minorities, should Kurdistan declare independence from Iraq.

Although our assignment to interview the Christian leaders began on Sunday, August 20th (see Part II), all 13 of our delegation were eager for our Monday day trip to Qaraqosh, a predominantly Christian town on the Nineveh Plain, just across the provincial border from Kurdistan, and thus under Baghdad’s military control. We had originally planned to go to Mosul, recently liberated from ISIS and just 15 miles further on, but due to a recent rash of kidnappings, were advised to stop at Qaraqosh, once a city of 70,000 Christians, but now home to only about 10,000 souls brave enough to return and start rebuilding.

We left the Kurdish capital of Erbil on Monday morning in a diplomatic convoy of four black Land Cruisers, flanked front and back by camouflaged trucks carrying a total of 20 Peshmerga soldiers, members of Kurdistan’s famed army who, outside of Israel, constitute perhaps the finest military force in the Middle East. In fact, although Iran is trying to claim credit, it was the courageous Peshmerga who this summer liberated Mosul and routed ISIS from the area.

An hour after leaving our hotel, and having passed through a couple of checkpoints, we pulled up to the Nineveh Plain border and stopped at the last guard booth to show our papers. Everything seemed routine and I pulled out my oversized iPhone to capture the moment from my backseat perch in the convoy’s lead SUV.

We hadn’t been stopped more than a minute when the Iraqi police, in their blue-tinted fatigues, failed to notice a young man in civilian clothing slipping past them and heading for the lead Peshmerga truck. Only after he ripped open a tan door and grabbed at a soldier did they move into action. And suddenly the whole world seemed to shift into high gear. Within 30 seconds the troublemaker was surrounded by armed Peshmerga and Iraqi police who shoved him away from the truck and began subduing him. But the scuffle had not gone unnoticed. In fact, it apparently had followed someone’s plan.

“They are a militia armed by Iraq,” our government host in the passenger seat in front of me would tell us a few minutes later. “But they are loyal to the Ayatollah of Iran. They hate our soldiers and someone has tipped them off that we were coming.”

I stopped videoing and lowered my phone as another man in civilian clothing—then another and another—ran past us toting automatic rifles. All at once, armed civilians were everywhere, screaming and waving weapons they didn’t look qualified to carry. Then, not more than 40 feet in front of us, someone raised a rifle skyward and—bapbap bapbapbap—fired off a volley of what sounded like a dozen rapid shots straight into the air. Another rifle—bap bap—more shots.

Now armed men were running from everywhere and surrounding our convoy. I started counting. There were easily a hundred of them, and although some wore no shoes, they all bore guns. A small Toyota pickup pulled near the booth and stopped about 30 feet in front of us and to our right. Within half a minute, a 50-caliber machine gun sat, perched and ready, on the roof of its cab. Punches were thrown at the Peshmerga, but in accordance with their orders from our hosts, none fought back. More shouting. More shots fired into the air.

“Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm,” I prayed as I crouched down in the seat and our driver began following the troops’ lead to inch into a super-slow U-turn. My backseat partner, Pastor Mark Borrows from western Canada, and I would repeat that prayer for the next 45 minutes. “Keep them calm.”

You always wondered if you’d be brave, I told myself, as I looked through dark tinted glass at a militiaman standing no more than three feet from me with his gun at the ready. Ever since you were a kid, you’ve wondered if you’d have the courage to die for the name of Jesus. Well…what’s it going to be?

The U-turn complete, I looked up from praying and saw another pickup truck with a mounted machine gun, then just past him a huge black vehicle sporting a rocket launcher with a barrel that looked to be the size of a hurricane’s eye.

“Keep them calm.”

More volleys. More screaming. A rifle butt to the eye socket of one of our soldiers, but he sat, stoic. He and his Peshmerga brothers were under orders to hold both fists and fire unless one of our SUVs became a target.

In the passenger seat in front of me, our government guide was on the phone with the Defense Minister. “Help is on the way,” he assured us. Then I noticed the stubby Uzi submachine gun he had pulled out of his satchel. It was resting on the drink holder between the front seats, its barrel pointed back at me.

“Uh, would you point that forward, please?” I whispered, and then resumed my one-line petition. “Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm.”

More shots, probably a hundred or more, and more screaming and shoving and rifle-butting.

40 minutes that felt like 40 days in this wilderness had passed now, and suddenly we were creeping forward and being waved past the rocket launcher by a man who, for the moment at least, appeared to have some authority. A few seconds later, we were picking up speed and barreling back towards Erbil.

“I feel so stupid,” said Mark, my Canadian comrade. “All I could think the whole time we were praying was, how is my wife going to get my body bag all the way back to Alberta?“.

“If they’d started firing, about 500 letter-sized envelopes would’ve sufficed,” I tried to joke, but we were both too amped up to laugh.

An hour later, we were back in Erbil and headed for the hotel cafe. My closest brush with death in 49 years of ministry was over, but my pulse hadn’t gotten the memo. I looked at my Apple Watch, which had registered a range from 100-133 beats per minute for the past hour, and still showed no sign of slowing.

“The normal reaction would be to try and forget the trauma of this, right?” I asked Mark, who nodded in agreement as we took a table. “But let’s not do that. Let’s make ourselves remember, because this is what our brothers in Christ here have to live with every day of their lives. We can’t forget. We mustn’t forget”

It was about then that I realized the answer to my earlier self-examination. Would I really, after all these decades of professing Christ, have the courage to face a bullet for the name of Jesus?

“I know now, Mark,” I said. “I was ready to do it. If that guy with the rifle had ripped open my door and shoved me against the side of our SUV, I knew Jesus’ name would be the last word I spoke on this earth.”

My heart still pounds when I remember, but I don’t mind. Because now I know. I know.

There’s no point in hinting around. Studying the Bible isn’t optional, but most Christians find it taxing to establish a routine. Consequently, they either restrict their time in God’s Word to some little promise book, or they just put it off altogether. Naturally, the promise book is good, but it no more substitutes for serious reading than a donut and coffee take the place of a balanced meal. How can the Holy Spirit guide us into “all truth” if we just consider truth a snack food?

We’re a generation that has grown up on websites, magazines, tv, movies and 12-minute YouTube shows, so we find it difficult to read more than a chapter or two in a sitting … or a week … or a month. Frankly, a lot of us just won’t read anything unless it’s published twelve times a year in color or easy to find on Google. But don’t be depressed. There are understandable reasons why you don’t read your Bible like you should. If you’re the typical Christian:

• You read the Scriptures for “spiritual guidance” rather than practical instruction.
• No matter how much you read, you just don’t understand a lot of it.
• You have no idea how much Bible knowledge is “enough,” so you’re defeated right out of the gate.

The important thing is to get into Scripture as a manual for living, not just to find “proof-texts” for defending your faith. So, to that end here are six rules—I don’t really like the word “rules,” but we’ll use it—that will help you to see the Scriptures as the practical guide it was meant to be.

Rule Number One: Read the Bible like today’s news

The Bible is intended to give you practical information that concerns the real world. Quit looking to achieve some inner glow; this is news you can use! For example, the Fifth Commandment says to “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). You can meditate all day long on that verse, searching for warm fuzzies of enlightenment and inspiration. But it is actually an important, practical commandment, with a wonderful promise attached for those who obey it, and a cold, hard warning implied for those who don’t. Read it again. It simply shows that a long and blessed life begins with honoring those who gave you life. Enjoying the future begins with respect for the past. It could just as easilyhave been phrased, “Do unto your parents as you someday would have your children do unto you.” The flip-side? The man who fails to honor his parents will likely also fail to teach his children to do the same. That’s just misery on a lay-away plan.

Rule Number Two: Read the Bible by the authors’ division points

Forget the chapter and verse partitions the translators later added. These scholars often started or ended passages in odd places. For example, Ephesians 5:22 through 6:9 is a complete section about families, which easily could be considered its own chapter. Read it that way, and you’ll see what I mean. Several newer editions of the Bible have dealt with this problem by grouping verses into naturally flowing paragraphs. Get one.

Rule Number Three: Look for Jesus in every book

Always be open to the big picture—life in Christ—when you read God’s Word. Don’t let yourself get lost in Exodus or numbed by Numbers. They were written to reveal to you His character, and to establish you in His ways. The overarching theme of the Bible is God’s covenantal relationship with man. This means that even those musty old laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy ultimately were written as practical instruction on Christian living. The apostle Paul was confident enough of this fact to claim that a passage about oxen was really a lesson to Christians about proper payment for services rendered.

For it is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest. (1 Corinthians 9:9-10; see also 1 Timothy 5:17-18 regarding Paul’s claim that good pastors deserve bigger salaries.)

Never forget what Paul knew so well: The Old Testament is all about the New Covenant.

Rule Number Four: Don’t “claim” every scripture you read

Don’t individualize every scripture you read. The Bible was written to a people, not a person. So many Christians get tripped up trying to individually appropriate promises that were written to God’s people as a community. For example, Joe Christian sees God’s promise in Deuteronomy 28:13 to make His people “the head, not the tail,” and takes it as God’s will that a promotion is inevitable at work. Then, after he’s been laid off, he’s not only worried about his financial future, but he’s also plagued with accusations that his faith must be defective.

In truth, that Scripture, like so many others, was written as a promise of corporate blessing for corporate obedience to God’s commandments. In other words, when faithfulness becomes a social trend, blessing multiplies. Likewise, when disobedience is the cultural rule of thumb, widespread suffering is sure to follow (often even afflicting the few good people who may live among the wicked majority). Psalm 150 says to praise God with stringed instruments, flute, and trumpet, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to take lessons. It simply means somebody should.

As you study, keep in mind that you’re one member in a whole body. You’ll never understand every word, any more than you can fulfill every prophecy or claim every blessing. Which leads us to our last rule …

Rule Number Five: Don’t try to walk in light you haven’t seen

Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Just be confident in what you do know, and honest when you don’t. Don’t be afraid to say, “I’m stumped,” when you’re stumped. And keep reading.

Remember, only God knows how much knowledge is “enough,” because the answer is always changing as you grow. The “path of the just” is getting brighter and brighter like the rising sun, as the Holy Spirit transforms us day by day. Sure, the world could use a few more good theologians. But a mail clerk who can intelligently comment on the Ten Commandments is as valuable to the cause of Christ as any wise man hunched over a Hebrew manuscript in some light-deprived library.

Rule Number Six: Who you know is more important than what you know

None of the first five rules count if you don’t grasp this one: Who you know is ultimately more important than what you know. Abraham’s rock-solid faith was stated this way: “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able…” It wasn’t what Abraham believed but whom he believed.

Ditto Mary and Martha. The last few verses of Luke 10 show Jesus and his disciples arriving unannounced at the home of Mary, Martha and his good friend, Lazarus. Naturally, Martha wanted to be a good hostess, so she got up and started busying herself with serving Jesus (the most fitting use of that term ever). Meanwhile, Mary just sat at his feet listening to him talk.

Martha accused her sister of being lazy, and I have to admit, the first time I read that passage I took Martha’s side. There was work to be done, and Mary just wanted to start a “bless me” club. Of course, I quickly realized that this position put me on the opposite side of Jesus—never a good thing when you’re in professional ministry.

Then it hit me: Martha was so busy serving Jesus that she didn’t have time for him. And neither I.

Bottom line: Don’t be so busy being a student of the word that you forget to enjoy being a child of God.

On the first Saturday in June, 2007, one of my heroes, Jon Karner, was laid to rest in a verdant cemetery outside tiny Milaca, Minnesota. I met Jon in 1980, on a street corner in the USSR. He was Jaanus Karner back then, a leader in the underground church in the Soviet republic of Estonia. We were there to deliver some sorely needed supplies from supporters in the West.

Jaanus was a semi-anonymous legend in the West, and I had seen his black and white photograph hundreds of times. Now, standing there in the flesh, tall and strong with a coal black beard Samson might have envied, I somehow saw him still in black and white. Mind you, contrast was good in the USSR, a lifeless land whose grayness of spirit seemed to drain even the natural world of every shade in the spectrum.

In a nation where many men preferred the blurry haze of drunkenness to the stark clarity of belief, Jaanus’ faith framed him in a sharp black and white. He not only engaged in the dangerous practice of youth ministry at Tallinn Methodist Church, but enthusiastically embraced the highly illegal vocation of evangelism. If, as was often said, Estonia was the Soviet Union’s “window on the West,” this man was a rope dangling from it. More goods got in and news got out because of him than virtually anyone else in the Christian underground. Want to meet with Christian leaders in Kiev? Jaanus knew them. Need contacts in Moscow, Leningrad, or way down in Armenia? He could put you in touch.

Living in black and white was challenging but good in the Kingdom of Gray. From Tallinn to Tashkent, Kiev to Kamchatka, the Evil Empire’s vast steppes wore a trench coat of gloom. Charcoal clouds dotted gray skies that loomed over gray buildings on gray streets. The pallor of the people was equally sunless, especially their eyes—fogged over windows into hopeless souls. Strobe Talbott had once described Leonid Brezhnev and his Kremlin cohorts as “old men with faces the color of sidewalks.” He was right. Even the elite, incapable of either passion nor embarrassment, could not muster a pink blush. Yes, black and white was good, even necessary, because it kept one from drowning in the murk.

But it was also dangerous. Jaanus had already been kicked out of university and consigned to a series of menial jobs. The KGB had ransacked his home more than once in the middle of the night, searching for Bibles and incriminating documents, yet never finding them because, he said, God warned him every time that they were coming.

“Those agents always drive Volgas,” he once told me. “And the click of that particular car door outside my house will awaken me from a dead sleep.”

No wonder his older son, thirty-six year old David, told me the day of his father’s interment that he had clear memories of those episodes from the age of three. Having the front door smashed in at 2 a.m. by thugs in dark suits would do that to a toddler.

I still remember Labor Day weekend of 1983. It was David’s 12th birthday, and Jaanus wanted me to attend his party in Tallinn, before I flew back to America on September 2nd.

“You can’t walk straight to the pick-up point,” he said. “When you leave the hotel, walk around Old Town for a few minutes like you’re sightseeing. Then wait by the bus stop near Maripooiste Church. Use your peripheral vision to watch for Tani’s red Lada. He’ll stop about 50 feet down the sidewalk from you. When the back door opens, get in and lie down.”

I followed Jaanus’ instructions and eventually arrived at Tani’s rickety front gate, whereupon I was whisked furtively into the house with my head down. David and his little brother, Stefan, were playing with Tani’s kids in the living room, oblivious to the ridiculous intrigues that somehow cast a little boy’s birthday party as a threat to the State.

We hadn’t been there for fifteen minutes when Jaanus pulled me into the hallway and cranked up a big, tube radio his friends kept handy to defeat electronic eavesdroppers. Then, cupping his hands over my ears, he said in his staccato accent, “This is probably the last time I’ll ever see you.”

I jerked away to look my friend in the eye and rebuke him, but he pulled me close again to explain.

“The KGB took me in a few weeks ago and told me that it’s already been decided in Moscow. I will be taken to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years hard labor in Siberia. They said they would give me a little time to prepare my family to live without me.”

I was stunned. Nobody tried under Soviet law was ever found innocent, because that would reveal an imperfection in their prosecutorial system. The noble State only ever arrested the guilty. I also knew that ten years in the gulag was a virtual death sentence.

I flew home the next day with Jaanus’ words a death knell in my ears. I hated the Soviet system. It was 100 percent evil and 100 percent stupid. And the KGB—how utterly cruel they were. “We’ll give you a few weeks before we come for you,” the arrogant Colonel Timusk had said, toying with this good man’s life like a cat bats around a wounded mouse.

But somewhere over the Atlantic everything changed. I had been at a worship conference in California the week prior to making this trip to Estonia, and on the last night of that event some fifty senior pastors had surrounded me onstage to pray for my ministry and safe return.

It was during that prayer, in the auditorium at Pasadena City College, that I had seen a—a vision, on the white facade that fronted that venue’s massive balcony. I wasn’t feeling particularly spiritual, mind you, and although I believed in visions, I had never considered myself a worthy candidate for one.

I saw Red Square. Right there, in living color, on the wall was Moscow’s Red Square, the gigantic brick plaza where soldiers goose-stepped and ballistic missiles rolled by in May Day parades, while the old men of the Kremlin stood atop Lenin’s tomb and waved to the throngs below who so despised them.

But now I saw dancers instead of soldiers, and banners instead of rockets, and tens of thousands of people worshiping the God that Marx had hated. “That’s ridiculous,” I thought at once. “If that ever happened there would be no Soviet Union. It’s just my stupid imagination.”

Suddenly, ten days later at 37,000 feet above the ocean, it wasn’t so crazy anymore. “Read Numbers 13,” a voice inside me said. I grabbed my Bible and quickly turned to a section of the Scriptures I usually avoided, because of all those boring “so-and-so begat so-and-so” passages. I usually turned to Numbers only when sleeping pills failed to work.

It was the story of Moses, sending 12 spies into the Promised Land. Ten of the men had returned, utterly horrified by the giants they had seen. But two, Joshua and Caleb, had come home full of faith. “We can take the land!” they reported, waxing eloquent about the bounty they had seen. It was as though God’s promise to them had turned Canaan’s giants into grasshoppers. And, of course, later on these two faithful men did indeed lead their nation to possess the Promised Land.

“What are you going to believe?” the Voice asked me. “Are you going to believe the big Soviet giant, or the picture I showed you on the wall in California?”

Then and there I knew that the mighty Soviet Union was going to fall as surely and resoundingly as the walls of Jericho. For the next eight years I blabbed that good news in churches all over America, and whispered it in living rooms and hallways in the USSR. And for eight years Christians on both sides of the Iron Curtain looked as me as though I were crazy. Then it happened.

“I suppose this makes you a prophet,” they said after 1991. “Nope,” I always replied. “I’m just an informed tourist.”

As for Jaanus, he never went to prison. Instead, just three a half months after we had parted so sadly in Tallinn, he and his family took up residence in Redondo Beach, California. A serendipitous contact with U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz had secured their release, which included a complete bypass of the KGB, who normally had to sign all exit visas. When agents broke in the door yet again in mid-December, the house on Looga Street was as empty as their legal case. As for the KGB Colonel who had taunted my friend so mercilessly, he was “retired” in 1991 when that spy agency was dismantled, and spent the rest of his life as a low-wage bouncer at a local bar.

Meanwhile, Annie, Jaanus’ sweet wife, passed away in 1992. David grew up to become a race car driver, and Steven went to work for the City of Los Angeles. Jaanus became an American citizen named Jon, and helped establish a broad presence for Christian television in the former Soviet Union.

In 1994 he married the lovely Elizabeth and “immigrated” once more, this time to central Minnesota, where he spent the last thirteen years of his life on a quiet honeymoon, he and his bride frequently returning to his beloved Tallinn.

The cemetery just west of Milaca was bright green on that day in June nearly ten years ago. And it was made greener still by a peaceful rain that cleansed the earth in preparation for Jon Karner’s saintly body. We read the Scriptures, prayed a prayer, sang Amazing Grace, and said some words. Then we all just stood in the shade of a stately oak and silently listened to the birds singing.

They sang in color.