Introduction: When Faith Is Tested

Some time in the first century, the apostle Peter wrote a letter to Christians scattered across what is now Turkey. They were not famous. Many of them were poor, some were slaves, and all of them were finding out that following Jesus could cost them their friends, their reputations and sometimes far more. Peter did not tell them that their troubles were imaginary, or that they would soon be over. He wrote: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in various trials so that the proven character of your faith—more precious than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:6–7).

Gold is tested by fire: heat it, skim off the rubbish, and what is left is the real thing. Peter’s point was that faith works the same way.

This book is about six people whose faith went through the fire before they were grown up. Some had barely begun to believe when the trouble came; some did not believe at all, and the trouble brought them to God. None of them chose what happened to them. All of them had to choose what to do with it.

Here are the six people you will meet in Tested, the second book of They Were Young:

Patrick, a careless British teenager who was kidnapped by raiders at sixteen, spent six years as a slave herding animals in Ireland, and found God on a cold hillside there.

Josephine Bakhita, a girl from Darfur in Sudan who was stolen from her village as a child and sold again and again, and who, as a young woman in Italy, heard of a Master who was good, and refused to go back to being anyone’s property.

Perpetua, a young mother of about twenty-two in Roman North Africa who kept a diary in prison while her own father begged her to deny Christ and save her life.

The Uganda Martyrs, a group of young men and boys, many of them pages at the court of the king of Buganda in East Africa, who were put to death in the 1880s rather than give up Jesus.

John Newton, a rebellious young sailor who was forced into the navy at eighteen and who, at twenty-two, cried out to God in a storm that nearly sank his ship, but whose story did not end tidily there.

Sundar Singh, a Sikh boy in India who burned a Bible at fifteen because he was so angry with God, and who, a few days later, met the Jesus he had been fighting.

How each chapter works

Each chapter begins with a moment, a decisive scene in that person’s young life, and then pulls back to tell you how they got there and what came after. The rest of the life is told more briefly at the end.

After the story come three short sections. In Their Own Words gives you a few lines the person really said or wrote, with the source. Think It Through offers some questions to wrestle with, alone or with others. Read More on Ochorus points you to the person’s own writing, or their biography, if you want to go further.

One promise about these stories: they are true, and we have tried hard not to add anything to them. We have not invented conversations or made up scenes. Where the old records are silent, or where historians disagree about a date or a detail, we tell you. Some of these people lived so long ago that legends have grown up around them, stories told centuries later that are more famous than the facts. Where that has happened, we say which is which. The real stories are better anyway.

For parents, teachers and youth leaders

These stories are written for readers aged about thirteen to seventeen, and the theme of this book means they go to hard places. They include kidnapping, slavery, imprisonment, persecution and martyrdom, and two of them involve the deaths of young people for their faith. We have handled all of this honestly but without graphic detail. Cruelty is named, not described; slavery and abuse are called what they are, but no story dwells on them.

The chapters work well for discussion, and the Think It Through questions are meant to open conversation rather than settle it. Several raise questions young people really do ask: why God allows suffering, and whether to forgive people who have done terrible things. You do not need to have read the first book in the series, Called, to use this one. Each chapter stands on its own.