Breaking Free
515 Torture
Wisdom From The Underground Church.
Excerpted and adapted from: Preparing For the Underground Church: Richard Wurmbrand Voice of the Martyrs SE Frank Phillips Boulevard, Bartlesville OK 74003 (918) 337-8015
You
may yet live to see the Church forced to hide as it has in many centuries and
lands that let the forces of evil gain a foothold in the land. There have been
more martyrs for Christ in this century than all other centuries put together.
"The Church Underground is the Church of one-third of the world, men who
never thought before they would have to belong to it." Richard Wurmbrand,
author of Tortured For Christ shares some of his secrets of aggressive survival
in preparing for suffering and persecution:
(1) You will not be a member of the
Underground Church unless you know how to suffer. You can have the mightiest
faith, but if you are not prepared to suffer you will be taken by the police.
You will get two slaps and you will declare anything. Preparation for suffering
is one of the essentials . A Christian does not panic if put in prison ..
prison is a new place to witness for Christ. For a pastor, prison is a new
parish .. with no income but great opportunities. Morse code is part of this
training ... through this you can preach the Gospel to those on your right and
on your left. ... Do not fear the prison. Look on it as a new assignment from
God.
(2) Truth about the Truth. How much each
can suffer depends on how much we are bound up to a cause, how dear to us and
how much it means to you. Gifted preachers and writers of Christian books have
become traitors. Everything depends on whether we have remained in the sphere
of words or if we are merged with Divine reality. God is the Truth. The Bible
is the truth about the Truth. Theology is the truth about the truth about the
Truth. . The Truth is God alone.
Words,
theologies, exposition: None of these is of any help in time of suffering. It
is only the Truth Himself Who is of help. When you pass through suffering you
realize 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 .. It is not
enough to have the Psalm. You must have the One about Whom the Psalm speaks. ..
Holy words are only the means to arrive at the Reality expressed by them. If
you only have the words of the Lord, you can very easily be broken. If you are
united with the Reality, the Lord Almighty, evil loses its power over you; it
cannot break the Lord Almighty.
(3) Spiritual Exercises: Preparation for
underground work is deep spiritualization. As we peel an onion, God must peel
from use what are mere words, sensations of enjoyment in religion, to arrive at
the reality of our faith. ... We not only have our prayer, but moments of
meditation and contemplation. We can read of those sawn asunder, burned at
stakes, thrown to wild beasts, but we must also visualize them. My last Sunday
School class before I left for Romania I took not to a church, but a zoo.
Before the cage of lions I told them: "Your forefathers in faith were
thrown before such wild beasts for their faith. Know that you also will suffer.
You will not be thrown to lions, but you will have to suffer at the hands of
men who will be much worse than lions. Decide here and now if you wish to
pledge allegiance to Christ."
In
prison you lose everything. Nobody resists who has not renounced the pleasures
of life beforehand. The Christian who prepares himself for this now will not
suffer the loss in prison. Do not allow doubts about the essential doctrines of
the Bible. Every theological or philosophical doubt makes you a potential
traitor. Don't live with doubt; seek a solution.
Tests
Of Torture: Torture has a moment of explosion and the torturer waits for this
critical moment. Learn how to conquer doubts and to think thoroughly. There is
always one moment of crisis when you are ready to write or say the name ...you
have been tortured so much nothing counts any more. The fact that I should not
have pain also does not count. Draw this last conclusion at the moment of
crisis; it gives you an intense inner joy. You will feel Christ with you in
that decisive moment. Jailers today are trained and refined in awareness of
crisis. If they cannot get anything from you in that moment then they abandon
torturing; they know its continuation will be useless. Read Foxes Book of
Martyrs; learn how others overcame the moment of crisis.
It
is important to understand what Jesus said "Take no thought for the
morrow..". It seems impossible to bear long years of prison. You are not
asked to bear it all at once. Do not bear even one day at a time - bear one
hour at a time. One hour of pain everybody can bear. What amplifies pain is the
memory that I have been beaten and tortured so many times and tomorrow they
will take me again. Tomorrow I or they may not be alive. At first torture is a
terrible shock and pain; it does not continue to be so. . You forget - you
become absolutely indifferent to everything. This is the critical moment when
you need to breathe rightly.
Practice
breathing right - it is one of the means of resisting torture. Try once to
quarrel with someone while breathing quietly, rhythmically and deeply. You will
find you cannot. Under torture, breathe as a traitor cannot. The oxygenation
gives a resistance to the whole body which balances your reaction and gives you
a poised attitude.
An
underground worker should know not only with his head but to his fingertips
that he belongs to a Body which has been flogged for 2,000 years, a mocked body,
a body spat upon and one crowned with many thorns with nails driven into hands
and into feet. I will never think of Jesus Christ as only having been crucified
2,000 years ago. The sufferings of Jesus in His mystical Body must become a
reality with me.
LOVE
CHRIST MORE THAN YOUR FAMILY. Your
heart may break, but your answer should be "I love God." Learn to be
silent. A Christian is a man who speaks little but with great weight. In the
Underground Church every superfluous word can do harm. If you have believed in
the past you are blessed. I do not know how sound the theology is, but we did
not live on theology at the time. We lived on past memories. The Bible teaches
we should "bless the Lord and not forget His past blessings".
Remember the past even if you pass through the dark night of the soul. Deal
with solitude by traveling the world in prayer. READ THE BIBLE from memory.
Every night I composed a sermon and delivered it; I memorized three hundred and
fifty of them. I composed books, poems, jokes. Your mind must be continually
exercised. It must be alert, it must think."
Excerpted and adapted from: Preparing For the Underground Church: Richard
Wurmbrand Voice of the Martyrs SE Frank Phillips Boulevard, Bartlesville OK 74003
(918) 337-8015