We absolutely need God

This is a text of Sabine Wurmbrand, this great missionary personality who spent all her life to accomplish good deeds in the Spirit of the Ressusrection of our Lord.


Dear brothers and sisters,

I was a slave worker in a Romanian prison camp and worked at building a huge canal with thousands of women. We were sad, but we had among us a young Jewish lady who was a doctor. She was sadder than all the others. Nobody could speak with her.

One day I was on my straw mattress. Near me was this Jewish doctor, and I tried to comfort her sad heart. I said, "You, as Jewish lady, should not be in despair. For God has promised to our forefather, Abraham, that the Jewish people will have a bright future. They will be like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky."

She lifted up her beautiful, sad eyes, tears ran down her cheeks. She said, "Surely, like the sand on the seashore, trodden under the feet of everyone as we are trodden here under the feet of the prison guards… Don’t speak to me any more about your God."

She went away. Nobody could speak with her. A few days after this, I awoke one morning deathly sick. So in order not to die in this cell, I was thrown in a van of the police and taken to another prison that they called the hospital. Many dying women were there – two or even three in a small bed – everyone waiting to be taken out to the nearby cemetery.

There we were. In the evening the director of the prison entered. Together with about ten of his officers. He looked around among the dying women. We looked like ghosts. (Remember thousands like them, your sisters, are in prisons and slave labor camps today in dictatorial countries like China, Vietnam, North Korea.)

He looked around at the dying women and delivered a speech : "Now you see? We have all the power. We prevailed. We are stronger than your God. We have doctors and we don’t need your God any more, your Christ. In here, in our hospital, you are not meant even to mention the name of God or Christ".

A big silence followed. Nobody dared to answer nor did any of the women even have strength to speak. But the Holy Spirit was there. He gave me strength. He gave the right words. I said, "Mr. Officer, as long as death and sickness will be on earth and you see how near death we all are together, we absolutely need God. We need Jesus Christ the Son of God, the only giver of life."

The director went into a rage and answered. I answered him back. When he didn’t know any more what to say, he went out and banged the door. The women were so happy. It was the most beautiful event, which had happened in their sad prison life. On the beds of happiness they embraced each other because someone had stood up to this brute.

Early the next morning when it was still dark, a guard entered with a list of three names – women who were fit to go back to work. The first of the three names was mine, although I was dying. No question about going. I was thrown again into the van and brought back to the prison cell.

When the prisoners saw me, they started to cry. They banged at the door calling for help. Nobody came. The next morning when the thousand were gathered in order to be taken to the field, I had to go with them. The other prisoners took me on their arms, walking miles and miles. Who could ever describe what it meant – marching, hungry, sick, marching to the fields day by day, surrounded by the many prison guards with their rifles, surrounded by big dogs. Only seeing them, your heart would freeze.

So the weak women walked, having also to carry me on their arms. When we arrived, they had to put me down on the ground. Nobody was allowed to stand near me.

Everyone had to work. There I was. Many of the Christians worked and wept, being convinced that they had put me there in my grave forever.

While nobody was allowed to come near me, in a second, Jesus stood before me. He had passed the guards. Jesus touched my dying body and in the evening, when the thousands of prisoners were brought to the prison cell, I was with them. Like a fire, it spread all over the prison.

Late in the evening, when I was on my straw mattress, on the concrete, this Jewish lady doctor came. She confessed that, in seeing such a miraculous healing, she acknowledged now her belief in the Messiah who had touched my body and had healed me.

An American army officer in World War II told his men : "The enemy troops are in front of us, in our back, to the right and to the left. We are totally surrounded. This time the enemy cannot escape!"

The opportunity to help cannot be exhausted. People in desperate need surround us. Let us forget forever the sins that the Lord has forgiven. Let us forget our human heart in its despair. But let us also not forget what we need to remember : our beloved Lord Jesus Christ! Thanks for all your hard efforts in behalf of our persecuted family in dictatorial countries.

Yours in Christ,

Sabina Wurmbrand

Easter, Message from the director

Dear friends and benefactors,

We just came back from Cuba and we were suprised by the enormous needs of the Cuban people.

These men and women, happy and talented, lack everything. We gave joy to the communities that we visited.

We left 5 huge boxes full of gifts. More than 350 children have new glasses provided by us. M

ore than 100 families have received clothing, and money in the form of medicines and vitamins.

Help us to continue our projects in that so poor country.

Yours, in the service of our Lord,

Rev. Radu Roscanu, director of the Mission

Walk in the Spirit

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

"Walk in the Spirit..." (Galatians 5:16).

I am sorry I would have liked to paint the beautiful shining faces of Christians in Communist jail. Their faces shone, and it was quite an achievement for the glory of God to shine on the face of a Christian in Communist jails. We did not wash (I had not washed in three years), but the glory of God can shine even from behind a crust of dirt. They had triumphant smiles on their faces.

I know about Christians who were released from Communist prisons. I was one who was stopped several times on the street by passers by asking, "Sir, what is it in you? You look like such a happy man. What is the source of your happiness’?" I told them that I came from many years in Communist jails.

They could not understand this because they could not think beyond the difficulties of their own lives. They had not learned to walk in the Spirit and to experience the presence of God. So many would think, "If only you knew what a life I have - a husband who batters me, a wife who nags, children who break my heart - there are so many things." There are many material difficulties, tempests in your soul. I know these difficulties exist.

Horev was a Russian Christian who was in jail for many years. His father died in the same jail. Horev wrote in a letter, which he smuggled out from prison, that he was placed in a cell with common criminals. What they did to Christians is unimaginable.

The criminals beat Horev until lie fell unconscious. When he came to, he heard them talking among themselves, "We should grease some rope and hang him tonight." The others refused, because that was too complicated. They had better cut his throat and then place the bloody knife in his hand so it would look like suicide. That was the talk among them. You could believe it, because they did these things.

Then, walking in the Spirit, Horev envisioned another world for himself and said, "How beautiful it will be after they have cut my throat." He saw the angels receiving him, taking him in their arms to bring him to the bosom of Abraham. He saw himself encountering the martyrs of old. He enjoyed these things. He slept the whole night very quietly.

The next day, the criminals again beat him, and in the evening they talked about killing him. Horev said to himself, "But my father has died in this place. What an honor for me, and what a joy for my father, that I was not afraid and that I walked in his footsteps and will see Jesus." In thinking about this world that he envisioned for himself, he slept again quietly. It continued on like this until the eighteenth day, when he was moved from that jail. What he wrote is so beautiful: "I had to leave the cell. The criminal who had intended to cut my throat came to me, shook my hand, and said, "Truly, there is something supernatural in you.""

What in the world does a criminal know about the supernatural? Horev was a page of the Bible, "an epistle of Christ ...written not with ink, but by the Spirit of the Living God" (2 Corinthians 3:3). The criminal knew from Horev, not from the Bible, that Horev belongs to another. He has a divine nature. "There must be a God," the criminal said. "Every time we spoke about you, you were asleep and we did not think that you heard us. You kept your eyes closed. Why did you not jump at us? How could you sleep quietly and peacefully? Only one who really believes in eternal life can do this."

The criminal continued, "When you were taken for walk in the prison yard, you could have reported to the guard about us and requested to be placed in another cell. That is what is usually done, but you never did it. Why’? Why did you come back? Why did you not seek help with any man except with your God? Why did you pray on your knees every morning and every evening? You knew that we could kill you, as we have killed so many. Why did you give yourself quietly every day into our hands’? This is incomprehensible for us. Really, you have something supernatural in you." Once again he shook Horev’s hand and that is how they parted.

Horev did not live in this world.

We all expect that Jesus will come again and rapture us to heaven. No one will be raptured, I can assure you, if Christ hasn't raptured his heart already. No one will be in heaven if he is not in heaven already, if he does not live here in an entirely different world than the material world that surrounds us.

So whatever your circumstances - which initial be terrible for some of you - don't live this life. Live the new life, the eternal life, the timeless life, to which we are called by Jesus.

We were in prison cells with believers sentenced to death. As often as the door was unlocked, the prisoner did not know if he would be taken to a bath, to an interrogation or to be shot. Yet there was such a peace. There was no difference for him because lie knew he had eternal life.

I belong to the family of God. I have the nature of God. Because I also have the nature of a man, I know I may live sixty or eighty years. Since I have the nature of God, who in the world can kill me? Men can change only my outward form, but I will live in other circumstances.

We saw this peace - the peace of those who understood that godly nature - and I plead with you for this. You have your difficulties. You have your crosses. Trust in the God who makes faces to shine and know that in Him you have eternal life.

Sincerely,

Pastor Richard Wurmbrand

Value every verse of the Gospel

“Then He struck the men of Beth Shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord” (1 Samuel 6:19)



Beloved brothers and sisters,

If you have read the story in 1 Samuel 6, you will know that the inhabitants of the town of Beth Shemesh in Israel had been given a wonderful blessing from God – a very valuable emblem of their faith, the ark of the covenant.

The Jews had, first of all, spiritual blessings. Those in Beth Shemesh could have from the ark also material blessings because the law obliged the Jews to make a pilgrimage three times a year to the ark of the covenant. Imagine hundreds of thousands of tourists in a little town. However, the inhabitants of Beth Shemesh did not appreciate this blessing. They wrongly handled the ark. It was meant to be kept with very great reverence, but they peeked into it to find out its secrets, which angered God and brought His punishment. They had to send the ark to another town, Kirjath Jearim.

Many men have exceptional blessings from God and don't value them. I have been in the town of Kimberley, in South Africa, which is the diamond capital of the world. More diamonds are mined there than anywhere else on earth. The town's museum documents that more than a hundred years ago a very poor man found the first diamond. Hw saw a big glittering stone. He gave it to his son as a toy, because he did not know its value. This child passed the stone to another child, then to a third, until it eventually arrived in the hands of the British Governor, who gave $ 10,000 for it. You can imagine what the value of this diamond would be today. The one who found the first diamond died as a beggar. The family did not have enough for the burial. He did not appreciate the jewel that he had.

That is the story of the town of Beth Shemesh. It had great privileges from God and great opportunities, but it forfeited them.

I wonder if we in the free world are not the same. We have such wonderful blessings from God, but we don't always value them. We are not thankful at times, and, therefore, we might lose the privileges.

For example, we have a Gospel. We can have as many Gospels as we like. We can hear it preached in churches. We can read it. But we don't realize this huge privilege.

More than a billion people are living under communism. They can not have a Gospel. They love the Word of God, as we do, and they can not have it. In Red China the Communists confiscated Gospels, hymnbooks, and whatever other Christian books they found. In the town of Chungking, they made a big bonfire and burned all these Gospels. They compelled the Christians to attend the burning of their holy books. Now Gospels don’t burn easily because they are thick and the oxygen cannot pass easily through the pages. It took quite some time for the Gospels to burn. Profiting from a moment of inattention by the Communists, a Christian thrust his hand into the fire and quickly, just at random, snatched one page of the Bible out of the fire. He could not choose the one page he snatched. The church in the town of Chungking gathered every Sunday and each week read the same page of the Bible. They lived for two years on one page of the Bible.

It is said about John Wesley that he preached again and again on one verse, “You must be born again”. One who had heard him preaching ten times, twenty times, got annoyed and said, “But Mr. Wesley, there are thousands of verses in the Bible… Why do you always preach about this one verse? Wesley replied, “Because you must be born again.”

So one verse of the Bible, of the Gospel, is of great value. The Chungking believers had several verses of the Bible -–a whole page. They read this page repeatedly. After two years they smuggled out a slip of paper, a small letter, to Christians in the West through Hong-Kong. They wrote in this letter, “Dear brethren, don't strive to become better Christians. Strive only to be the kind of Christians whom Christ meant us to be – Christ-like Christians.” This letter went directly to my heart, and I determined to do everything possible to find out what page of the Bible they had.

I learned that they had Matthew 16. They gathered again and again to hear the assurance of Jesus. You are Peter and on this rock I, Jesus Christ – not your bishops, pastors, deacons, evangelists – will build – not the Catholic Church, nor the Anglican Church, nor the Protestant Church, - will build My Church, and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it.

The church lived on one page of the Gospel. How much they valued it! They went to prison and to death for teaching from this one page. We have 1,200 pages of the Bible. How grateful we should be to God! How careful we should be! Does my Chinese brother have a Bible? The North-Korean people do not have many. The Bible is a rarity in the Communist camp and the Muslim country. We have it.

Those in Beth Shemesh had the ark of the covenant with blessings that could have been poured upon them. They did not know to value it, to handle it rightly, and so they lost everything.

How much do we value every verse of the Gospel?

Yours in Christ,

Richard Wurmbrand

Wood Overlaid With Gold

“He (Moses) put the gold altar in the tabernacle of meeting in front of the veil” (Exodus 40:26)

Beloved brothere and sisters,

It is written that Moses put the golden altar, on which incense was burned, in the tabernacle of meeting. Was this altar gold^ The Bible calls it a gold altar. But, if we look at Exodus 30:1,3, we have a surprise. There God tells Moses, @You shall make an altar to burn incense on; you shall make it of acacia wood…and you shall make for it a molding of gold all around.

So it was a wooden altar with a little bit of gold on it, God calls it the golden altar.

We ask ourselves often, how does God look upon me^ There is so much wickedness in me. We sometimes have thoughts that are so evil, hell would be ashamed of them. We also have bad deeds. We are wooden, but God asks Himself, Is this wood overlaid with gold? If it is overlaid with a little bit of gold, He will not call it a wooden altar overlaid with gold, but a golden altar.

We have Christ, the whole Christ, living in us. God sees us as being Christians through and through, children of God, because Christ is in our hearts.

We continue to broadcast the gospel to China. We receive very few responses. Years ago, one listener smuggled an interesting letter through Hong Kong. He said the following: “I was in the Red Guard. I was a teenager. I did not believe in God, in any heaven, in any hell, in any Savior, nothing at all. Just playing with the radio, I accidentally tuned into your transmissions. I was interested. I tuned in again and again. Now I believe in Christ. But I have two questions. The first one: Does God receive anybody from Red China? In your broadcasts you speak about the church; but with us, it is so that God is in heaven, we are in Red China and we have almost no churches. Can God accept somebody without a church? Is a church absolutely necessary?” The poor lad did not know how many churches he had. Those who love Christ are in the one church universal.

Then he asked a second question: “Would you please teach me to pray? You start every radio program with a prayer. I would like to pray, but I don’t know how.”

He who has never been in a church, who does not know the Lord’s Prayer, who has never heard a liturgy, says what he imagines prayer to be. You can be a doctor in theology and you would not know about prayer, but this former Communist knows. He says, "“ imagine that prayer means to speak the whole day so that after everything you say, you might be able to add Amen."”What a beautiful definition of prayer.

This manner of praying we have learned from a Chinese Communist who has heard perhaps three or four times a short broadcast telling him what the gospel is. We don’t know anything more about this Chinese man. He is uninstructed in matters of God. It is wood, but it is wood overlaid with a little bit of gold. He guessed from a few broadcasts what the Bible is about. A yearning after a church. A yearning after speaking to God in a manner that is pleasing to Him. God calls such a bit of wood, overlaid with a little bit of gold, a golden altar.

I remember speaking with a Russian officer about Christ. Everything I told him was new to him. They learned in school that religion is an invention of the American imperialists, that it is all stupid, and that the Bible is not true. When I told him the story, he listened attentively and said; “Sir, the story is not entirely new to me. On an autumn afternoon I watched through the window of my apartment and I saw in the garden the big branches of a tree. I said to myself, “These same branches will be full with leaves, flowers, and afterwards with fruit. ‘I spit on the earth and the earth rewards me by giving me wheat and flowers. I throw black coal into the fire and the fire changes this black coal into white and beautiful flames. I love the person or thing – I don’t know who or what it is – that fills bare branches with fruits. You can spit upon Him and He will love you, and reward you with the perfume of flowers. I love the One to whom you can come and He can change this soul into a beautiful white, burning flame. I thank you very much that you have told me His name, Jesus Christ. I did not know the name, but I had a sentiment that such a Being existed.”

He did not know much. It was a wooden altar. His life might have been wrong, but God observed in him that there was something golden, a seeking of the highest, a seeking after God. Because of this, God rewarded him. He brought him into touch with men who knew God, so he could become His child.

There are sometimes such beginnings in men which we would consider to be a trifle, not worth mentioning, but which are highly valuable with God. You might have only the small beginnings of a Christian life, but God values it very much. We are frail. We are human. We are weak. All that remains seems to be wood, but God who sees the heart knows how to find the hidden gold.

Yours in Christ,

Richard Wurmbrand

If your heart

If your heart has been softened either by repentance before God or by learning the boundless love of God towards you, do not be proud with those whose hearts are still hard. Remember how long your heart was hard and incorrigible.

Seven brothers were ill in one hospital. One recovered from his illness and got up and rushed to serve his other brothers with brotherly love, to speed their recovery.

Be like this brother. Consider all men to be your brothers, and sick brothers at that. And if you come to feel that God has given you better health than others, know that it is given through mercy, so in health you may serve your frailer brothers.

Bishop Nikolai

Sunday Tropar and Sunday Kontak

Sunday Tropar
By your cross, you destroyed death! You opened paradise to the thief! You changed the weeping of the ointment bearing women to joy! And charged them to proclaim to your apostles that you arose, O Christ God, granting great mercy to the world!

Sunday Kontak
The dominion of death can no longer hold men captive, for Christ descended, shattering and destroying its powers! Hades is bound. The prophets together rejoice, for the Savior stood before them and said to those who believe: O you faithful! Come out to resurrection!