Through All Our Days

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our gospel reading for this morning opens up with the eleven remaining disciples standing on a hillside in Galilee. Jesus has just risen from the dead and this is their last moment together before he returns to the Father. Matthew tells us that when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Both things at once. Worship and doubt, side by side on the same hillside. He doesn’t tell us who doubted. He doesn’t say how many doubted. But, and here is something important to note, Matthew lets us know that Jesus came to all of them — the worshipers and the doubters alike — and gave them the same impossible mission and the same unbreakable promise. He tells them they are being sent to the whole world, to every tribe and every people. He tells them to baptize and to teach. And then, before he goes, he leaves them with a promise. Not a guarantee of success, a promise. “I am with you always,” he tells them. “To the end of the age.”  The Greek is pasas tas hemeras – through all the days. Jesus will be with them through all the days. Not some of the days. Not just the good ones. All of them. The question I want to ponder this morning is – what does this promise mean and can we count on it?

Last week, I read an article in the WSJ about a remarkable man – Ezra Jin – perhaps you saw it.¹ In 1989, Ezra Jin was a young student at Peking University studying geophysics. He was part of a generation of young Chinese who really believed that things were about to change, that is until the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and crushed their hopes. In the wreckage of that moment, Jin found his way into a small community of Chinese Christians. He later said that he noticed something different about these people. They had a home they could return to, he said. They knew that God loved them.

Jin found faith in this small community and later attended seminary. Eventually he made his way to Fuller Theological Seminary in California and earned his doctorate. Then, in 2007, he returned to Beijing and started a church. He called it Zion. From a congregation of about twenty people, Zion grew to over 1,500 worshipers and more than 20 ministers, many gathering in a former nightclub in the heart of Beijing. For a while, the Chinese government looked the other way.

But when Xi Jinping (She-Jin-ping) consolidated power, that changed. Authorities demanded that Zion install two dozen surveillance cameras inside the church so the government could monitor its members. Jin said no. He told them they were welcome to come to any service they wanted, but there would be no cameras in the church. The pressure came from every direction after that. Police flew drones over the homes of the church’s preachers to intimidate their families. Jin’s personal assets were frozen. He was banned from leaving the country. His wife and children fled to the United States. In June of 2018, Jin flew to join them. He was safe. His family was around him. But he didn’t stay. Shortly thereafter, he got back on the plane and returned to Beijing.

Within months of his return, the raids came. Police cars surrounded the church on a Sunday afternoon. The congregation was told it was over. The logo was scratched off the wall. The door was sealed. And yet, the following Sunday, Zion’s people downloaded the sermon for the day on their phones and walked the streets around their boarded-up church, listening as they walked in a silent protest. They called themselves walking worshipers.

Despite the government’s best efforts, the church did not die. Quite the opposite, it grew. Jin and his team moved everything online. Zoom services. Living room gatherings in dozens of cities across China. He called it Church 3.0. What the regime intended as a way to kill the church became a thriving network of Christian communities. By 2025, Zion had become a sprawling network of more than 5,000 members across 40 cities and roughly 100 congregations. Before his arrest last October, one of his fellow pastors asked Jin directly — what happens if the worst comes? What if they arrest all of you? Jin said, “Hallelujah. A new wave of revival will follow,” he said. “The world hated Jesus before it hated us.” He called that heartbreaking. He also called it a privilege.

A couple of months after the 2018 crackdowns on Zion, the church published a video on YouTube of Zion’s pastors gathered together to sing a song. The song they chose was set to the last poem Dietrich Bonhoeffer ever wrote while he was sitting in a Nazi prison cell, weeks before they executed him in December of 1944. It was part of a letter to his fiancée. The refrain these Chinese pastors sang, in the wreckage of their shuttered church, was this: By kindly powers wonderfully harbored, we boldly live in hope, so come what may. For God is near in evening and in morning, and surely, He is with us each new day.

Pasas tas hemeras – Jesus said – “through all the days”. These beleaguered, persecuted Chinese Christians knew this promise. But they didn’t just know it, they lived it. They clung to it. It’s what held them together.

Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity; the love of God given to the church.  It is the power that transformed the frightened, cowardly disciples, who deserted Jesus when he was arrested, into the twelve apostles who suffered imprisonment, torture, even death to spread the good news about the risen Christ. More pointedly, it is the power given to each of us at baptism that can make us into better people than we could ever become on our own. Ezra Jin, his fellow pastors, and all the members of his church have been living in the Spirit. How else could they find the will, the courage to hold together and stand up to the most powerful totalitarian regime on earth.

And here is what I want you to understand. When Jesus says, “I am with you always,” – “through all the days”, he does not simply mean that his teachings will live on, that his memory will live on, that his example with live on. He means something far more intimate and far more potent than that. He means I will be in your heart and soul, if you want me there. I will be in you, moving through you, holding you steady when everything around you is shifting. His promise to be with us is the promise of power. Not necessarily power over our circumstances. Power within them.

We live in a hard moment. A frightening moment in many ways. A moment that is asking a great deal of people who are trying to do the right thing, trying to tell the truth, trying to hold on to what matters. And the temptation in a moment like this is to feel alone in it, to feel that the darkness is larger than anything we have to bring against it. But it isn’t.

Because the one who walks with us through all the days is not walking beside us as a sympathetic companion. He is moving within us as a living force. He is breathing courage into us when our own courage has run out. Grounding us when everything around us is shifting.

Jesus says, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” I am with you always, so do not be afraid. I am with you always, so go ahead and speak the truth. I am with you always, so be brave. I am with you always, so do not lose hope. I am with you always, so know that there is real good in the world. I am with you always, so when all is said and done, God’s will will be done. I am with you always, so keep the faith.

This is what Ezra Jin in his prison cell knows, what Bonhoeffer knew as he faced execution. This is what those walking worshipers knew as they moved through the streets of Beijing with a sermon in their ears. The presence of Christ is not a comfort offered from a safe distance. It is a living force from within. And it is available to all of us, if we want it – through all our days. Amen.

^1″China Is Throwing Christians in Jail, but This Pastor Refuses to Back Down”, Brian Spegele, Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2026.