God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

I bombarded the man with questions—where had this been printed, who published it, where had they bought it—but he knew the answers to none of them.

We had heard that there were ministers in Russia who did not have Bibles of their own. But this was the first time we had seen it with our own eyes.

My heart broke. Here was this important man, the spiritual leader of a thousand souls, who did not own a copy of the Bible.

A Bible he did not have to return at the end of the service. A Bible to pick up whenever he wanted. A Bible to read and to love.

Mr. Whetstra looked at me sadly. “After all this time, you ask that?” he said.

I began to get his sense of urgency about finding another man who would give himself with us—full time, without salary, without reservation.

Rolf came back open-mouthed and utterly convinced.

I had learned to count on the Lord for toothpaste and shaving cream. But when it came to such a staggering sum as fifteen thousand dollars, I had trouble believing that the same principle held.

“It should be Yours to do with as You will,” we started praying together every evening. “And yet we know we really don’t feel this way, Lord. If You want us to sell the house for the Bibles, You will have to work a small miracle in our hearts to make us willing.”

We stopped asking for willingness and just asked God to make us willing to be willing to sell the house.

‘We don’t know where we’re going—’”

—but we’re going there together.’”

How faithful God is, how utterly trustworthy, how good beyond imagining! He asks for so little in order to give us so much.

our own happiness was the world’s best argument against bachelorhood.

Bible could buy a cow now in the country districts. Six hundred and fifty cows—this cargo represented a sizable smuggling operation in cash value alone.

“Why are we worried!” Rolf said suddenly. “This is God’s work! He’ll make a way for us.”

China had probably been the scene of more missionary effort than any other country. What had become of the devotion of so many men and women? Were the congregations they had founded still functioning? Were they suffering persecution? Were they meeting in secret? If they still existed, were they as hungry for Bibles as the churches in Eastern Europe?

Now usually I enjoy it when people tell me a missionary adventure is impossible, because this allows me to experience God’s way of dealing with impossibilities.

Now there was no possibility of my getting into China by my own cleverness. I believed that the desire to go to China had come from God; I would leave the means to Him too.

I began to pray the Prayer of Victory, binding any force that could prevent me from going where God willed, proclaiming the fact that Christ had been victorious once for all over any power opposed to the rule of God.

Resolutely I closed my ears to his merriment.

For those three days I fasted and prayed almost continually.

Before. My great disadvantage, of course, was that I had no mental picture of Before. I was a rank newcomer to this complex land, with no real points of comparison.

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

knew from personal experience how powerful a tool the Bible could be in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

To minister to the Chinese today, God needed Chinese hands and voices.

It was our aim to revisit each Communist land at least once a year and ideally far more often.

Ideally, too, we would go in pairs, having found that this was so much better than a single ministry.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t find volunteers—almost every time one of us spoke someone offered himself for our work. The problem was to know whether or not...

Priests and ministers are classed as nonproductive members of society.

As we had in Eastern Europe, we urged our listeners to reconsider the role of a Christian when his country is in trouble. Is it to run, or is it to stand?

Life in Cuba in 1965 was not easy. But perhaps God had had His reasons for putting them in this place at this time. Perhaps they were to be His arms and legs and His healing hands in this situation, without whom He would have no representative in this land.

This small nation, from time immemorial the battleground of other countries’ quarrels, dominated now by Turkey, now by Italy, had—probably for the first time in its history—a government concerned with Albania’s own interests.

We tried never to send the same two partners to the same country on consecutive trips.

“Remember,” I said, “that these people getting caught are depending on their own cleverness. Their motives are probably another disadvantage. Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are . . . so weak that you must depend totally upon the Spirit of God. . . .”

Yet how could I ask them to leave their good positions to take up work that had no salary, that was dangerous, that meant long separations, unless I was absolutely certain the Lord Himself had caused our paths to cross?

The system gives us a chance to spend concentrated time with one individual, teaching him what we have learned about the life of faith. It gives us a new prayer partner, after the actual physical connection is broken. But the greatest and most unexpected benefit has been the spawning of groups similar to our own in other countries.

We have stopped short of being an organization; we are an organism instead, a living and spontaneous association of individuals who know one another intimately, care for each other deeply, and feel the kind of respect one for another that makes rules and bylaws unnecessary.

A group is the right size, I would guess, when each member can pray every day for every other member, individually and by name, interceding for his personal needs as we...

We insist on only two things from the men and women we accept as part-timers. We insist that each have a personal experience with Christ and learn to work in the full power of His Spirit. And we stress the importance of a positive ministry among the Communists. 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.

Wilhelm has used up his first automobile and has been given a second by the same Dutch friends. With it he began a team missionary work of his own, traveling into Poland and Czechoslovakia to hold youth meetings with members of his East German groups.

And this, to me, is the most exciting new development of all: the emergence of a ministry to the Christians of one Iron Curtain country by the Christians of another.

These behind-the-Curtain missionaries lack money for travel, and this we can help to supply, but the rest of their task—freedom of travel within the Communist bloc and freedom to hold meetings and exchange letters—is infinitely easier than for us coming in from outside.

But God is never defeated. Though He may be opposed, attacked, resisted, still the ultimate outcome can never be in doubt. Every day we see fresh proof that indeed all things—even evil ones—work together for those who are called by His name.

Smuggling in a carload is risky business, but most border checks would say nothing to a single copy in the local language (obtainable from the Bible societies) among a traveler’s personal effects.

We don’t know where we’re going but—” “But we’re glad we’re going there together.”

He has lived in the same home for more than forty years and works in a separate office space behind the house and spacious garden.

“If we don’t go to Muslims with the love of Christ, they will come to us with guns and bombs.”

I read the Qur’an before I read the Bible—that

There was no plan, no vision, certainly no thought about leading a worldwide organization.