A Time to Stand
by Dr. Steve Elwart
We are fast approaching a time when each of us will have to make some decisions—decisions aboutour life, our relationships, and our worldview
After World War II, the Communist Party assumed control of Romania. Once the Communists came to power, they proceeded to co-opt the Church. They spoke of love and tolerance, but these words masked their true intentions.
Those Christians (including the clergy) who did not have a strong Biblical foundation were easily deceived and many who did were intimidated into silence.
After the takeover, the Romanian Communists convened a congress of four thousand priests, pastors, and ministers of all denominations in their Parliament building with the proceedings being carried in a national radio broadcast. One by one, the ministers got up and had nothing but words of praise for communism and assured the new government of the loyalty of the Christian Church.
One of the pastors scheduled to speak was a man named Richard Wurmbrand. As he listened and waited, his wife Sabina leaned over to him and said, “They are spitting in the face of Christ. Richard, stand up and wash away this shame.”
He said to her, “If I do so, you lose your husband.” She replied, “I don’ twish to have a coward as a husband.”
So Wurmbrand rose and instead of repeating the same thing every other pastor said, he told the assembly how wrong they were and how this flew in the face of Christian doctrine.1 At this point, the broadcast was interrupted and the martyrdom of the Wurmbrands began. Sabina went on to serve eight years in prison while Richard served a total of fourteen years, eight of which were in solitary confinement.
As Richard Wurmbrand said, In solitary confinement, we could not pray as before. We were unimaginably hungry…The Lord’s Prayer was much too long for us—we could not concentrate enough to say it. My only prayer repeated again and again was, “Jesus, I love You.” After he and his wife immigrated to the United States, he was called to testify before the United States Senate, stripping to the waist to reveal the scars of eighteen wounds received from frequent tortures.
A reporter with the Philadelphia Herald said of Wurmbrand’s time in prison, “He stood in the midst of lions, but they could not devour him.”
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