Tortured for Christ by Wurmbrand Richard

Author:Wurmbrand, Richard [Wurmbrand, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Living Sacrifice Book Company
Published: 2010-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

I suffer in the West more than I did in Communist lands.

My suffering consists first of all in the longing after the unspeakable beauties of the Underground Church, the Church that fulfills the old Latin saying, Nudisnudum Christi sequi (naked, follow the naked Christ).

In captive nations, the Son of Man and those who are His have nowhere to lay their heads. Many Christians there don’t build houses for themselves. To what good? They will be confiscated at their first arrest. Just the fact that you have a new house can be a greater motive for you to be imprisoned, be­cause the others wish to take your house. There you don’t bury your father, neither do you say farewell to your family before following Christ. Who is your mother, your brother, your sister? You are, in this respect, like Jesus. Mother and brother are for you only those who fulfill the will of God. As for the natural ties, can they count anymore when it is a frequent occurrence that the bride denounces the bridegroom, children their parents, wives their husbands? It is more and more only the spiritual connection that remains.

The Underground Church is a poor and suffering church, but it has few lukewarm members.

A religious service in the Underground Church is like one nineteen hundred years ago in the Early Church. The preacher knows no elaborate theology. He knows no homiletic, as Peter did not know it. Every professor of theology would have given Peter a poor grade for his sermon on the day of Pentecost. The Bible verses are not well known in many countries, be­cause Bibles are not permitted. Besides, the preacher has most likely been in prison for years without a Bible. When they express their faith in a Father, it means much because there is a drama be­hind this assertion. In prison they have daily asked this almighty Father for bread and have received instead cabbage with un­men­tionable filth. Nevertheless, they believe God to be the loving Father. They are like Job who said that he would believe in God even if He would slay him. They are like Jesus who called God “Father,” even when He was seemingly forsaken on the cross.

Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Under­ground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches.

I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying.

Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West:

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains

—can prove to you that there are characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.

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