God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

“Strengthen the things that remain”

“I’ll—I’ll have to pray about that,” I told him. And pray I did, furiously, all through the service.

That evening the church was packed. We all felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. That night scores of persons expressed a willingness to follow Christ, whatever the cost.

We didn’t even dare ask for a show of hands, for fear names would be taken down.

the three hundred new converts left Stara Zagora, fanning out across the Balkin Peninsula, disbursed like the church in Jerusalem, to build fires wherever they landed.

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.

I could not go with them and at the same time move on where I felt God’s spirit calling too.

“Lord,” I went on, “I know that no amount of cleverness on my part can get me through this border search. Dare I ask for a miracle? Let me take some of the Bibles out and leave them in the open where they will be seen. Then, Lord, I cannot possibly be depending on my own stratagems, can I? I will be depending utterly upon You.”

My heart was racing. Not with the excitement of the crossing, but with the excitement of having caught such a spectacular glimpse of God at work.

As soon as I was over the border, I could sense a new degree of police control. At every village, it seemed, there was a police checkpoint.

“Christians speak a kind of universal language.”

“It’s called ‘agape.’”

While the chief weapon against the Church in Bulgaria was the registration requirement, in Rumania the technique was Consolidation. Consolidate denominations, consolidate physical facilities, consolidate the hours of worship.

I felt bad about what must have come across as the ostentation of a rich foreigner—and that made me smile, remembering how we had always been the poorest family in Witte.

It is a token of oneness in the Body of Christ.”

How could I condemn the fear and the suspicion of the president and the secretary when I had never experienced the conditions under which they had to work?

What would happen, I wondered, if we were to converse with each other via the Scriptures?

Oh, we had a wonderful half hour, conversing with each other through the Bible.

the more devoted a Christian, the more likely he was to stay put.

It has come to us that we are forgotten, that nobody is thinking of us, nobody knows our need, nobody prays.”

Joppie arrived on June 4, 1959. He was born at home, as I had been, and I was with Corry the whole time, just as Papa had seen all of us into the world.

The next day I went down to Amsterdam and picked up the money. Mr. Whetstra handed it to me in bills. We signed no papers, made no arrangements about paying it back. Nor did I mention the loan to anyone else. And yet over the next three years, enough money came in above and beyond the needs of the work that we were able to repay the loan in that short period of time. Immediately, mysteriously, as soon as the house was paid for, the flow of excess funds stopped—and it remained dried up until there was need for it again.

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

It was a compromise: I knew that anyone who wanted to could learn who I was.

But I was never tempted for long. Just as the pressures became strongest to stay home, a letter would arrive. It would bear no return address, it would often have been mailed weeks earlier, and sometimes show signs of having been opened.

“Ninety-seven thousand kilometers,” he read aloud. His puzzled frown had not left him. “It’s a good mileage, of course, and yet unless you’ve been over unusually rough terrain. .

A little shamefacedly I admitted that the odometer had long since reached its maximum reading of 99,999 and flipped over the zero mark again; this was the second time it had registered 97,000.

was far too familiar with the way Christ looks after the practical side of the ministry to miss these signs.

“Dear Brother Andrew: This is to be used for your own personal needs. It is not to go into the work! Use it in Christ’s love.”

All donations went into the work unless they were specifically marked otherwise.

Well, I have wished often that I had saved the letter that this good lady shot back. She began by reminding me of the scriptural injunction that the ox grinding the corn must not be kept from enjoying the grain. Did I think God felt less about His human workers? Hadn’t I better examine myself to be sure I was not nursing a Sacrificial Spirit? Wasn’t I claiming to depend upon God, but living as if my needs would be met by my own scrimping? I remember her close. “God will send you what your family needs and what your work needs too. You are a mature Christian, Brother Andrew. Act like one.”

And suddenly I saw that this was part of a whole pattern of poverty into which we had fallen, a dark, brooding, pinched attitude that hardly went with the Christ of the open heart that we were preaching to others.

So we determined to change. We still live frugally, and always shall, partly because both of us were raised that way and wouldn’t know how else to act. But at the same time we are learning to take joy in the physical things that God provides.

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.

I was prepared to do this as long as it seemed to be what God wanted.

It would have to be an unusual fellowship, an organism, really, rather than an organization.

Each of us would be a pioneer, probably not even sharing procedures and techniques, because then we would fall into a pattern that would be too easily recognized and too easily controlled.

was no cleverness or experience of mine that had prevented disaster so far, only the fact that every morning of every trip I consciously placed myself in God’s hands and tried, in so far as possible, not to take a step outside His will.

“Try prayer.”

And there in the dusty bypass we thanked the Lord for having allowed us to make one mistake in order to get us out of another.

doubt if they could understand one word in ten, but they were tremendously complimented that he was making the effort.

Only one of us would be talking at a time; the other would be constantly in prayer, prayer that God’s will be done in each detail of the inspection, prayer for the country we were entering—beginning with these employees at the border.

The seating capacity of the church was about one thousand, and there were closer to two thousand there that morning.

And with no further preliminaries that entire congregation of two thousand began to pray aloud simultaneously. From time to time a single voice would rise above the babble of sound, clear and pleading, while the other voices faded to a background hum. Then the tide of sound would swell again, until again an individual rose to express the thoughts of all. It was an experience that stirred me to the depths of my spirit.

But in a real Christian partnership, one member’s guidance is always submitted to the other’s for correction and confirmation.

For this man was from a little church in Siberia, two thousand miles away, where there were 150 communicants but not a single Bible. One day he had been told in a dream to go to Moscow where he would find a Bible for his church. He resisted the idea at first, he said, for he knew as well as anyone that there were precious few Bibles in Moscow.

“You were told to come eastward for two thousand miles to get a Bible, and we were told to go westward two thousand miles carrying Bibles to churches in Russia. And here we are tonight, recognizing each other the instant we meet.”

“This is simply one arm of the Church looking after the needs of another.”

Owning a Bible for your own personal use was no crime; but commerce in smuggled Bibles was illegal, and it was dangerous to look as if you might be dealing in contraband.

“By next week,” he said, “these Bibles will be in the hands of pastors all over Russia.”