Tortured for Christ

by Richard Wurmbrand

How could I live without knowing this Christ!” It was the first time that I saw someone so joyful in Christ.

As there are many who believe they are Christians and in reality are not, we found that among the Russians there are many who believe they are atheists, but in reality they are not.

It is such a tragedy that Russia and its peoples are very hungry for the Word of God, yet many have seemingly written them off.

I learned from them. As they allowed no place for Jesus in their hearts, I decided I would leave not the smallest place for Satan in mine.

He came from a place where beings are not for or against, but where everyone and everything are understood, looked upon with pity and compassion, and loved with fire.

If a member of the congregation sinned, I would weep for hours.

A great part of my family was murdered. It was in my own house that their murderer was converted. It was also the most suitable place.

We must give up routine work. It is written, “Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully” (Jeremiah 48:10). The Church must wage a frontal, spiritual attack on the principalities in captive na­tions. Wars are won only by offensive, never by defensive, strategy.

A man really believes not what he recites in his creed, but only the things he is ready to die for. The Christians of the Underground Church have proved that they are ready to die for their faith.

As in the book of Daniel when the three young men who were put in the furnace did not smell like fire upon being delivered from it, so the Christians who have been in Com­mu­nist prisons don’t smell like bitterness against the Communists.

A flower, if you bruise it under your feet, rewards you by giving you its perfume. Likewise Christians, tortured by the Com­mu­nists, rewarded their torturers by love.

By not loving the Communists and those from other captive nations, and by doing nothing to win them for Christ (under the pretext that they are not al­lowed to do so, as if the first Christians asked permission from Nero to spread the gospel),

Many Western rulers are brainwashed and do not even wish to overthrow such rulers. They have said so frequently. They wish that drug addiction, gangsterism, cancer, and tuberculosis would disappear, but not evil systems such as communism, which has claimed far more victims than all these together.

There have always been good and bad pastors and preachers. But now, for the first time in Church history, the Central Com­mittee of an avowed atheistic Party, which has as its declared purpose the uprooting of religion, decides who leads the Church. To lead it for what purpose? Surely, to help in the uprooting of religion. Lenin wrote: “Every religious idea, every idea of God—even flirting with the idea of God—is unutterable vileness of the most dangerous kind, contagion of the most abominable kind. Mil­lions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence, and physical contagion are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God.”