God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

“Lord,” I said, “I need to know if I can trust You in practical things. I thank You for letting me earn the fees for the first semester. I ask You now to supply the rest of them. If I have to be so much as a day late in paying, I shall know that I am supposed to go back to the chocolate factory.”

As I watched those men and women struggling literally to get close to the Word, my hand closed over the Dutch Bible in my coat jacket. How much for granted I had always taken my right to own this Book.

That night I promised God that as often as I could lay my hands on a Bible, I would bring it to these children of His behind the wall that men had built. How I would buy the Bibles, how I would get them in, I didn’t know. I only knew that I would bring them—here to Yugoslavia, and to Czechoslovakia, and to every other country where God opened the door long enough for me to slip through.

It is never safe to call a church a puppet—no matter how dead, no matter how subservient and temporizing it may appear on the surface. It is called by God’s name, it has God’s eye upon it, at any moment He may sweep the surface away with the purifying wind of His Spirit.

many had only one ambition: to get out of Rumania altogether. Oddly though, the more devoted a Christian, the more likely he was to stay put.

In the years of living this life of faith, I have never known God’s care to fail.

Funny how long it took us to learn the simple fact that God really is a Father, as displeased with a cramped, miserly attitude of lack as with its opposite failing of acquisitiveness.

Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.

If a man seems to be harboring personal resentments against a certain government, or if he has more to say about the evils of Communism than the goodness of God, then we suspect that he is a soldier poorly armed for the battle before us.

But God is never defeated. Though He may be opposed, attacked, resisted, still the ultimate outcome can never be in doubt.

“We don’t know what lies ahead. Remember? We don’t know where we’re going but—” “But we’re glad we’re going there together.”