Which Bible verse gives you strength?
Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, author of Tortured For Christ, spent 14 years in Communist prisons because of his faith. He shared this story.
I have told in the West how Christians were tied to crosses for four days and four nights. The crosses were put on the floor and other prisoners were tortured and made to fulfill their bodily necessities upon the faces and the bodies of the crucified ones. I have since been asked: “Which Bible verse helped and strengthened you in those circumstances?”
This seems like a good question—especially since Wurmbrand had memorized the entire new testament. With all that scripture at his disposal, which verses gave him strength? His answer is revealing.
My answer is: “NO Bible verse was of any help.” It is sheer cant and religious hypocrisy to say, “This Bible verse strengthens me, or that Bible verse helps me.” Bible verses alone are not meant to help. We knew Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want… though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death “
Such an answer assaults our ears. How could he belittle the power of God’s Word, the scriptures? We wonder if he lost his moorings because of the evil he endured. But he explains.
When you pass through suffering you realize that it was never meant by God that Psalm 23 should strengthen you. It is the Lord who can strengthen you, not the Psalm which speaks of Him so doing. It is not enough to have the Psalm. You must have the One about whom the Psalm speaks. We also knew the verse: “My Grace is sufficient for thee.” But the verse is not sufficient. It is the Grace, which is sufficient and not the verse.
And before we can fully digest his words, he presses the point further, speaking as one who bears the scars of evil upon his body.
Pastors and zealous witnesses who are handling the Word as a calling from God are in danger of giving holy words more value than they really have. Holy words are only the means to arrive at the reality expressed by them. If you are united with the Reality, the Lord Almighty, evil loses its power over you; it cannot break the Lord Almighty. If you only have the words of the Lord Almighty you can be very easily broken.
From Preparing for the Underground Church.
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Pastor Richard Wurmbrand (March 24, 1909 – February 17, 2001) was a Romanian evangelical minister and a Jew who spent fourteen years in Communist imprisonment and torture in his homeland of Romania. He was one of Romania’s most widely known Jewish Believer leaders, authors, and educators. In 1945, when the Communists seized Romania and attempted to control the churches for their purposes, Richard Wurmbrand immediately began an effective “underground” ministry to his enslaved people and the invading Russian soldiers. He was eventually arrested in 1948. Richard spent three years in solitary confinement, seeing no one but his Communist torturers.
His wife, Sabina Oster Wurmbrand (July 10 1913 – August 20 2000), also Jewish, was a slave laborer for three years. Due to Pastor Richard Wurmbrand’s international stature as a Messianic Jewish leader, diplomats of foreign embassies asked the Communist government about his safety. They were told he had fled Romania. Secret police, posing as released fellow prisoners, told his wife of attending his burial in the prison cemetery. Pastor Wurmbrand was released in a general amnesty in 1964. Realizing the great danger of a third imprisonment, Christians in Norway negotiated with the Communist authorities for his release from Romania. The “going price” for a prisoner was $1,900. Their price for Wurmbrand was $10,000. In May 1966, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand testified in Washington before the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee and stripped to the waist and showed 18 deep torture wounds covering his body. His story was carried across the world newspapers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Excerpted fromhttp://richardwurmbrandbio.info.
