One Life

MY TESTIMONY AND CALLING
By Rev. Michael Young-Suk Oh

My father’s name was not always Sung Kyu Oh. As a child growing up under the Japanese occupation of Korea, he was told by the Japanese Imperial Army that his name was to be Hideo Matsuyama, a Japanese name. He was forced to only use his Japanese name and speak only Japanese. If he spoke Korean or used his Korean name, he would be beaten. Despite these experiences, my father does not harbor resentment towards the Japanese people that he had been taught to hate. This is only because of the rich and deep Christian tradition of my father’s family.

I am the 5th generation Christian on my father’s side. My life is part of a legacy of faith that started with my grandfather’s grandmother who was among the first Koreans to respond to the Gospel back in the 1800’s. Despite this tradition, my youth was marked by self-centeredness, vain ambition, insecurity, and a rebellious heart. Everything came easily to me – whether athletics, music, academics, or other – and I quickly rose to the top of whatever arena I entered. Eventually however, I became overwhelmed with a tremendous fear of failure. Having reached the top, I knew there was only one way to go – down. This handicapped my life for much of high school and prevented me from achieving much, either for myself or for anyone else.

The Lord used this fear, as well as my desperate search and need to love and be loved unconditionally, to bring me to true faith by the end of my high school years. The change was transformative, and for the first time in my life I had a passion to use the gifts that the Lord had given to me fully without fear and wholly for His glory.

After spending much of my college years ministering to those around me, I began to pray more and more about serving in the mission field. It was a “call,” but it was neither mystical nor something that I had to strain to “hear.” Instead it was a Biblical call and volitional response, a personal desire and decision to obey what I read in the Scriptures about the command for the church of Jesus Christ to take up the responsibility of actively participating in the building of God’s Kingdom unto the ends of the earth. As Oswald J. Smith said:

We talk of the second coming; half the world has never heard of the first.

Despite God’s continued and faithful sanctification of my life, the fear of failure continued to be a factor in my life so that I lived my life afraid to take chances. It was not until shortly before going to seminary that the Lord brought me freedom from these fears through, of all things, a Hollywood movie – Searching for Bobby Fisher. From that moment on, my every decision and the trajectory of my life changed radically from basing decisions on moving towards physical, financial, emotional, and spiritual comfort to seeking to seize every possible opportunity to bring God the greatest possible glory in every area of this one life that the Lord has given me – physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually. In doing so I knew that I would be truly following in the footsteps of Christ whose life was the very antithesis of comfort-seeking but was instead characterized by sacrifice.

This newfound freedom allowed me to live life without fear once I began to understand that in God’s economy and under His sovereignty, there is no such thing as “risk.” What is the worst that can happen – my death? Even then we will simply enter into glory. And so the Lord continued to lead me down the path that has brought me to this day. I remember the impact that Jim Elliot’s quote had on my life at that time:

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.

As I studied at Harvard about some of the atrocities committed against Koreans and other Asians during the years of Japanese imperialism, there was a constant temptation towards anger or even hatred. Had I dealt with those issues strictly in the flesh, my soul would have descended into the mud and mire. Instead the Lord allowed me to view and understand these things in light of His grace and my own former enmity in my relationship with God before Christ. The fire of my anger was transformed and fed into a passionate love for the Japanese.

Previously while serving as a short-term church-planting missionary in Japan during 1998-1999, my constant curiosity and prayer was to discover what the greatest need was for the Japanese church and what ministry could most effectively contribute towards the reaching of Japan. It was from that search that the Lord led me to this project to establish Christ Bible Seminary (CBS). I returned to complete graduate work in Japanese studies at Harvard University and PhD work in Educational Leadership and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in preparation for leading the CBS project.

The challenge before us is great. It is a path that I would never have chosen had I never known Christ in salvation and sanctification. The human “risks” are real, as is the “impossibility” of this project. But two quotes from Hudson Taylor speak to my heart about such ridiculous difficulty:

How often do we attempt work for God to the limit of our incompetency rather than to the limit of God’s omnipotency?

I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God; first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.
William Carey said, “Expect great things from God. Attempt a great thing for God,” and that is exactly what we are trying to do. As a historian and anthropologist, the outlook for spiritual revival through the Gospel in Japan, considered by some as the most difficult mission field in the world, is bleak. As a theologian however, I am entirely optimistic and certain of seeing Japan come to know the Lord as a nation. Because the redeemed in Revelation are from “Every tribe, language, people, and nation,” I have a Biblical confidence that the Japanese, who have never known a time in their history where the church was strong, sizable, and multiplying, will have a day when it will finally be reached by the Gospel.

I used to think that if I had three lives I would spend one as a missionary doing what I do, another as a businessman using my gifts as a sender investing all that the Lord would prosper in my hands for God’s Kingdom work around the world, and another as a politician to influence within the realms of government. Knowing what I now know about the mission field – a battlefield with only a scattered few advancing into enemy territory ridiculously outnumbered but not unarmed with the sword of the Word of God at their side – I now realize that would God grant me three lives, I would spend all three doing what I now do. I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s.