Gratefully now we do an about face…away from the diabolical and towards the heavenly. If reading about the diabolical has been painful, you can imagine what studying it, analyzing it, and writing about it has been. And much more important than what communist persecution of Christians has taught us about the kingdom of darkness is the revelations it provides about the Kingdom of Light…revelations, first of all, about the King.
Why the children…why are they in the concentration camp?’
She refused to eat. She had no desire to survive.
This photo taken in prison shows her very ill; you can see unhappiness in her face and realize she is a prisoner. She was so worried about the children she became sick and was ready to die.She refused to eat. She had no desire to survive.” Mrs. Visky fell into death. Many gathered for the expected funeral. Her heartbeat could not be detected. Death was expected at any moment. All the children were gathered at the foot of her bed. “Suddenly”, Mrs. Visky writes, “I felt the Lord and His Presence; even in my death ridden body I could feel His life. An unspeakable warmth and unending joy, so smooth and quiet had filled my heart. He had covered my shivering body with His mantle of love and after so many struggles I could rest in His Rest.”1
God’s power flowed into her body and she was healed. She experienced the essence of God’s life…how it must feel to be near God…an iota of how God, Himself, feels…what all those in heaven will experience in His Presence for eternity…warmth so exquisitely wonderful, and so unlike any emotion she had ever felt, she could only call it unspeakable...it defied description...and joy unending…not an emotional high, not Mrs. Visky’s joy, but His joy, unending, eternal joy, ‘joy so smooth and quiet’...it entered a heart all but dead, leaving her covered with His mantle of love.
…since that day she has
done everything in love.
Mrs. Visky, it would seem, came as close as anyone can to experiencing a perfect manifestation of God. Of course, the apostle John did, when he fell as a dead man before the Risen Christ...whose ‘eyes blazed like fire, with a voice like the sound of rushing waters’, and Isaiah did, seeing the Lord ‘seated on a throne, high and exalted, whose train filled the temple’, and Moses did, when ‘the Lord caused all His goodness to pass in front of Him’, but how did they feel in God’s presence? We don’t get too many details. Can we not, without adding to Scripture, safely pencil in ‘unending joy’, ‘unspeakable warmth’, ‘covered with His mantle of love’?
From then on the difficult situations Mrs. Visky faced were robbed of much of their power to dismay her. Fery told us: “When she returned from the brink of death, we recognized our mother again. Ever since that day she has done everything in love.” There are different degrees of experiencing God...hers was one of the most powerful. The invisible God became the essence of her life and everything, on a regular basis, regardless of the situation, was done in love. Nothing could be a bigger threat to Satan’s kingdom. There’s enough here for a hundred meditations and a hundred songs…of poems of warmth and unending joy, of hearts being filled and mantles of love.
Feel and see what the children saw
Huddled together at the foot of the bed
What shouts or praise or tears or awe
To watch their mother return from the dead
To know of a sadness too deep to describe
Exchanged for His life…and right by her side
Were the children with tears prepared for the night
Receiving new tears of utter delight
No credit to man, no doctor or pill
Could resurrect a terminal ill
The invisible God invaded her soul
Transcending death, making her whole.
Experiencing those ultimate manifestations of God’s qualities became an altar to which Mrs. Visky often returned. Has not Holy Spirit also preserved them for us? Can you not also, precious believer, as you envision our Lord as unending joy, unspeakable warmth, a mantle of love, quiet and smooth, find your love relationship with Him growing deeper and deeper still? Likewise, on the threshold of death, is where Pastor Wurmbrand experienced the invisible God. “We were unimaginably hungry…we were weak as skeletons. The Lord’s Prayer was much too long for us. We could not concentrate long enough to say it. My prayer, repeated again and again was, ‘Jesus, I love you’. And then one glorious day I got an answer from Jesus: ‘You love me? Now I will show you how I love you.’ At once I felt a flame in my heart which burned like the coronal streamers of the sun. The disciples on the way from Emmaus said their hearts burned when Jesus spoke with them. So it was with me. I knew the love of the One who gave His life on the Cross for all.”2
From then on the difficult situations Mrs. Visky faced were robbed of much of their power to dismay her. Fery told us: “When she returned from the brink of death, we recognized our mother again. Ever since that day she has done everything in love.” There are different degrees of experiencing God...hers was one of the most powerful. The invisible God became the essence of her life and everything, on a regular basis, regardless of the situation, was done in love. Nothing could be a bigger threat to Satan’s kingdom. There’s enough here for a hundred meditations and a hundred songs…of poems of warmth and unending joy, of hearts being filled and mantles of love.
Feel and see what the children saw
Huddled together at the foot of the bed
What shouts or praise or tears or awe
To watch their mother return from the dead
To know of a sadness too deep to describe
Exchanged for His life…and right by her side
Were the children with tears prepared for the night
Receiving new tears of utter delight
No credit to man, no doctor or pill
Could resurrect a terminal ill
The invisible God invaded her soul
Transcending death, making her whole.
Experiencing those ultimate manifestations of God’s qualities became an altar to which Mrs. Visky often returned. Has not Holy Spirit also preserved them for us? Can you not also, precious believer, as you envision our Lord as unending joy, unspeakable warmth, a mantle of love, quiet and smooth, find your love relationship with Him growing deeper and deeper still? Likewise, on the threshold of death, is where Pastor Wurmbrand experienced the invisible God. “We were unimaginably hungry…we were weak as skeletons. The Lord’s Prayer was much too long for us. We could not concentrate long enough to say it. My prayer, repeated again and again was, ‘Jesus, I love you’. And then one glorious day I got an answer from Jesus: ‘You love me? Now I will show you how I love you.’ At once I felt a flame in my heart which burned like the coronal streamers of the sun. The disciples on the way from Emmaus said their hearts burned when Jesus spoke with them. So it was with me. I knew the love of the One who gave His life on the Cross for all.”2
I felt a flame in
my heart which burned
like the coronal
streamers of the sun.
my heart which burned
like the coronal
streamers of the sun.
Angels, who behold the face of God, must stand in awe to see such beauty and strength in such as these, who see Him only through the eyes of faith. How they must hold their breath, yearning for an assignment to minister to them. Have you seen video footage of the spiraling corkscrews of exploding gases on the surface of the sun...the coronal streamers? What but a heart injected with an exploding flame of love could wrench the attention of a starving man, robbed even of mind and memory, off his pain and anguish and onto the invisible God?
Who clings to love when love appears blind
(Unimaginable hunger...forced starvation)
And curses so easily come to the mind
(‘Oh God, where are You?’)
And tells Him, ‘I love You, Jesus I do!’
(Angels gasp)
When all that is seen denies this is true
(Dying friends, near skeletons before his eyes)
Sees wonderful miracles…time after time
(‘Now I will show you how I love you.’)
Who clings to love when love appears blind
(Over and over, ‘Jesus, I love You!’)
This manifestation of the quintessence of God, was it, also, preserved and presented to us so that our attention, too, could move from our worries to the wonder of His Being? Can we hear in our mind’s eye the heavenly choirs that sang in that cell? “Another night a great throng of angels approached my bed. As they came near they sang a song of spiritual love. I could not believe the guards did not hear this wonderful, celestial music, so real it was to me.”3
I, too, received the incomparable privilege of being allowed to hear the heavenly choir. Alone at night in my house in Key West, Florida in 1976, I heard what sounded like hundreds, mostly women, had surrounded the house, singing the most beautiful music I’d ever heard…waves upon waves of overlapping voices. I went outside and there was no one there. I went back in and heard it again. I’d never opened the Bible or prayed in my life, but I knew what I’d heard. The next day my best friend was killed…he was murdered, and whoever did it (they never caught him) left clues at the scene of the crime that implicated me. I was held in a single cell, the prime suspect of my best friend’s murder. After ten days of passing lie detector tests they let me go, but until that moment I didn’t know if I was facing life in prison or the electric chair. God knew I would face that terrible ordeal... knew that the ministry from the heavenly choir, which is beauty beyond beauty, is what I would need to sustain me. And God had other purposes in mind…in that cell I learned to pray…of necessity, either that or panic. The first prayer of my life, repeated over and over and over, was ‘Oh…God…I… need…You…now!’ And as I prayed a peace descended into that cell. I left that jail on a quest…to find this God who I now knew existed and who I knew was available. The day after my release God gave me Peggy, who was on the same quest. We’ve been together almost every day ever since.
Who clings to love when love appears blind
(Unimaginable hunger...forced starvation)
And curses so easily come to the mind
(‘Oh God, where are You?’)
And tells Him, ‘I love You, Jesus I do!’
(Angels gasp)
When all that is seen denies this is true
(Dying friends, near skeletons before his eyes)
Sees wonderful miracles…time after time
(‘Now I will show you how I love you.’)
Who clings to love when love appears blind
(Over and over, ‘Jesus, I love You!’)
This manifestation of the quintessence of God, was it, also, preserved and presented to us so that our attention, too, could move from our worries to the wonder of His Being? Can we hear in our mind’s eye the heavenly choirs that sang in that cell? “Another night a great throng of angels approached my bed. As they came near they sang a song of spiritual love. I could not believe the guards did not hear this wonderful, celestial music, so real it was to me.”3
I, too, received the incomparable privilege of being allowed to hear the heavenly choir. Alone at night in my house in Key West, Florida in 1976, I heard what sounded like hundreds, mostly women, had surrounded the house, singing the most beautiful music I’d ever heard…waves upon waves of overlapping voices. I went outside and there was no one there. I went back in and heard it again. I’d never opened the Bible or prayed in my life, but I knew what I’d heard. The next day my best friend was killed…he was murdered, and whoever did it (they never caught him) left clues at the scene of the crime that implicated me. I was held in a single cell, the prime suspect of my best friend’s murder. After ten days of passing lie detector tests they let me go, but until that moment I didn’t know if I was facing life in prison or the electric chair. God knew I would face that terrible ordeal... knew that the ministry from the heavenly choir, which is beauty beyond beauty, is what I would need to sustain me. And God had other purposes in mind…in that cell I learned to pray…of necessity, either that or panic. The first prayer of my life, repeated over and over and over, was ‘Oh…God…I… need…You…now!’ And as I prayed a peace descended into that cell. I left that jail on a quest…to find this God who I now knew existed and who I knew was available. The day after my release God gave me Peggy, who was on the same quest. We’ve been together almost every day ever since.
Somehow Jesus appeared before me.
I felt something like lightning coming into my bones.
I felt something like lightning coming into my bones.
Joseph Ton had committed the treasonable offense of writing and sending a letter to Ceausescu, co-signed by twenty-five other pastors, demanding freedom for the Church. The Securitate were determined to break him. After six months of ‘interrogation’, brainwashing, he reached the limit of his endurance. “It happened one day when I had the deepest crisis of my life…two days later I couldn’t even stand up. Saturday morning, in my fellowship with God, somehow Jesus appeared before me and I felt something like lightning and I felt strength coming into my bones and feet. At the investigation on Monday the officer was shocked, ‘Who visited you on the weekend, Mr. Ton? You’re not the same person who left here on Friday!’ ‘No one visited me, sir. The Lord Jesus Christ visited me!’”
Lightning…something like lightning?
But I thought You were warmth and quiet and smooth?
Oh yes, You explode like coronal flame
You’re both the Lion of Judah
And The Lamb that was slain.
Something was missing which
I couldn’t find in everything I did.
Constantine Tudose, who spent three years hiding in the mountains and seven years in prison for the crime of preaching the Gospel, had been thwarted from receiving salvation by false doctrine. “In my area, Moldavia, the Word was preached...but not clear enough. I’d done all my church requested: rituals, canons, trips to monasteries.” Ask ten people how you get to heaven and most will tell you that’s how...by being good enough. Tudose’s good works he learned in the Orthodox Church, but just about every denomination has their own list...mandatory church attendance at least once a week, confession at least once a year, baptism as an infant...or as an adult...making the sign of the Cross. But there was a crucial thing which Tudose knew...something that changed his life and destiny forever. “My soul was burning, desiring to know the Lord, but I couldn’t find in my soul what I was looking for. I was comforted, content in what I was doing: prayers, canons, fasts, trips to monasteries and to assemblies, but I could see something was missing which I couldn’t find in everything I did.”
Even though he’d done all the good works his church required, this religion of duty and obligation left him unfulfilled. He knew something was missing. The tragedy is that so few others in his church did...and this tragedy is not limited to Romania. One of the most frightening things I ever heard was this statement by Reverend Billy Graham: “Three out of four persons attending American churches are not saved and are heading towards eternal damnation.” If this is only partially true, this is a tragedy of immense proportions. It means that millions, who believe they are Christians, but aren’t, have abandoned their search for God. Sitting in church believing they are saved is exactly where Satan would want them.
Looking back at his pre-salvation life Tudose realizes that what had been missing was the evidence of salvation, what he would have experienced if Holy Spirit had been exerting His influence on his inner being, what Paul called ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. “I’d been doing all the good works others were doing...canons, prayers, good works...but about fruits of the Spirit, this new life, or about the wonderful things God revealed to us through Jesus Christ, I had no idea.” If the ‘fruit of the Spirit’...love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness...longsuffering, the ability to suffer long with joy...if these are in short supply in your life then perhaps this new life, ‘the wonderful things revealed to us through Jesus Christ’, have not yet become yours. Tudose shows us the secret for finding this ‘pearl of great price’. “After eight years of such searching...having all the time a Bible with me…I had it with me during the war and everywhere...I was reading it but I didn’t have the assurance I was saved! I was always crying before the Lord asking: ‘Lord, if I die now what will happen with me, where will I go?’ I was afraid of death. When I would think of death I would be broken. One night I was alone at home and I cried and wept before the Lord, ‘If salvation is how people say it is, then You died in vain!’ I can’t tell you what I had to live that night, that heart-rending crying.”
This searching and burning desire for God is what Jesus constantly worked to awaken...it’s what made Him such a threat to the Pharisees. To earn heaven they’d developed a program, like the one sold to Tudose, of duties and good works, and now this radical rabbi appears stirring up hunger for a relationship with the living God...exhorting everyone to ‘keep on asking and keep on seeking and keep on knocking’. Jesus knew if He could awaken the heart’s real thirst it would be that longing God has put into every heart for communion and fellowship and intimacy with Him...a longing for that life for which we were originally created, in His image, to live. Christianity’s real message is for those who have a great hunger for life as it was meant to be. Tudose persevered till he found it. “One day I met in a group of people someone who knew the Lord. He was preaching The Word very accurately, but I saw it wasn’t the same Word preached in my church...about salvation by grace. I couldn’t understand what He was preaching. Suddenly, the room was filled with a bright and white light which I’d never seen before. It was 9:30 in the morning, the 15th of September, 1945. I’d just returned from the war on leave. The sun rays coming through the window weren’t visible anymore in that beautiful light! I had such a joy and peace and serenity in my heart and mind as I’d never had before. I stood still...the brother continued to talk...no one heard or saw anything but me. I lived it alone.”
Even though he’d done all the good works his church required, this religion of duty and obligation left him unfulfilled. He knew something was missing. The tragedy is that so few others in his church did...and this tragedy is not limited to Romania. One of the most frightening things I ever heard was this statement by Reverend Billy Graham: “Three out of four persons attending American churches are not saved and are heading towards eternal damnation.” If this is only partially true, this is a tragedy of immense proportions. It means that millions, who believe they are Christians, but aren’t, have abandoned their search for God. Sitting in church believing they are saved is exactly where Satan would want them.
Looking back at his pre-salvation life Tudose realizes that what had been missing was the evidence of salvation, what he would have experienced if Holy Spirit had been exerting His influence on his inner being, what Paul called ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. “I’d been doing all the good works others were doing...canons, prayers, good works...but about fruits of the Spirit, this new life, or about the wonderful things God revealed to us through Jesus Christ, I had no idea.” If the ‘fruit of the Spirit’...love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness...longsuffering, the ability to suffer long with joy...if these are in short supply in your life then perhaps this new life, ‘the wonderful things revealed to us through Jesus Christ’, have not yet become yours. Tudose shows us the secret for finding this ‘pearl of great price’. “After eight years of such searching...having all the time a Bible with me…I had it with me during the war and everywhere...I was reading it but I didn’t have the assurance I was saved! I was always crying before the Lord asking: ‘Lord, if I die now what will happen with me, where will I go?’ I was afraid of death. When I would think of death I would be broken. One night I was alone at home and I cried and wept before the Lord, ‘If salvation is how people say it is, then You died in vain!’ I can’t tell you what I had to live that night, that heart-rending crying.”
This searching and burning desire for God is what Jesus constantly worked to awaken...it’s what made Him such a threat to the Pharisees. To earn heaven they’d developed a program, like the one sold to Tudose, of duties and good works, and now this radical rabbi appears stirring up hunger for a relationship with the living God...exhorting everyone to ‘keep on asking and keep on seeking and keep on knocking’. Jesus knew if He could awaken the heart’s real thirst it would be that longing God has put into every heart for communion and fellowship and intimacy with Him...a longing for that life for which we were originally created, in His image, to live. Christianity’s real message is for those who have a great hunger for life as it was meant to be. Tudose persevered till he found it. “One day I met in a group of people someone who knew the Lord. He was preaching The Word very accurately, but I saw it wasn’t the same Word preached in my church...about salvation by grace. I couldn’t understand what He was preaching. Suddenly, the room was filled with a bright and white light which I’d never seen before. It was 9:30 in the morning, the 15th of September, 1945. I’d just returned from the war on leave. The sun rays coming through the window weren’t visible anymore in that beautiful light! I had such a joy and peace and serenity in my heart and mind as I’d never had before. I stood still...the brother continued to talk...no one heard or saw anything but me. I lived it alone.”
He was preaching about salvation by grace. Suddenly the room was filled with a bright and white light.
Saved by Grace
“Seek me”, God said through Jeremiah, “and you shall find Me when you seek Me”, as Tudose did, “with all your heart.”4 Eight years of desperate searching and God, Who is light, manifested Himself to Tudose as pure, white, dazzling light, providing illumination for his mind and the gift of understanding. “Then I started to listen to what the preacher was saying and it was so clear to me, so logical that I asked myself: ‘How is it possible, a few minutes ago I couldn’t understand anything and now it’s so clear?’” What became ‘so clear, so logical’ to Tudose is that what the preacher was saying was the truth…that salvation must be received as a gift of grace, not as a reward for any good works he had done. Bela Balog experienced an identical conversion. “I was set apart for God just as Paul was. I was converted on the sixth of December, 1950. This was for me a great privilege. God gave me this grace. My conversion was just like Paul’s…when from the law I was led to grace. This is such a beautiful experience that man remains speechless.”
“Seek me”, God said through Jeremiah, “and you shall find Me when you seek Me”, as Tudose did, “with all your heart.”4 Eight years of desperate searching and God, Who is light, manifested Himself to Tudose as pure, white, dazzling light, providing illumination for his mind and the gift of understanding. “Then I started to listen to what the preacher was saying and it was so clear to me, so logical that I asked myself: ‘How is it possible, a few minutes ago I couldn’t understand anything and now it’s so clear?’” What became ‘so clear, so logical’ to Tudose is that what the preacher was saying was the truth…that salvation must be received as a gift of grace, not as a reward for any good works he had done. Bela Balog experienced an identical conversion. “I was set apart for God just as Paul was. I was converted on the sixth of December, 1950. This was for me a great privilege. God gave me this grace. My conversion was just like Paul’s…when from the law I was led to grace. This is such a beautiful experience that man remains speechless.”
From the law
I was led to grace.
I was led to grace.
The Apostle Paul, who had been Saul the Pharisee, was converted from believing he was righteous in God’s sight because of his superhuman effort to keep all of the six hundred laws spelled out by the priesthood, to believing simply, “I am what I am by the grace of God.”5 Only those who have experienced a similar liberation can appreciate why Bela remains to this day ‘speechless with appreciation’. Peggy can. She was brought up in a religion that taught her heaven had to be earned through what are called ‘works of salvation’…such as baptism as an infant; attending church at least once a week; confession, at least once a year. She was taught from early childhood that if she broke one of these ‘laws’, such as missing a Sunday service, and died before she had confessed the ‘sin’ to a priest and done her ‘penance’, she would go to hell. When she learned that salvation is a free gift and was released from this terrible bondage, her appreciation, also, ‘left her speechless’. But it was years before she could enter a church of this particular denomination without a sense of dread and fear descending upon her. Paul’s great concern for the Galatian church, his reason for writing to them, was that they had reverted to relying on a part of the law, submitting to circumcision, believing that through it they would find favor with God. ‘No!’, Paul wrote, ‘it is grace that saved you, not anything you did…obeying the law can save no man. If you are trusting in your own efforts for salvation you have fallen from grace…the power of God’s grace is no longer operating in your life. I want more than anything that Christ be formed in you. Conforming to an outward standard does nothing to achieve this. Only trust in Christ’s Finished Work does!’6
Tudose’s appreciation at learning that salvation is ‘by grace through faith’ was so deep he felt he was ‘dying for joy’. “Then I took the Bible home and reading from it the first words I read, I was amazed. Everything was so clear, like somebody was near me, in fact it was The Lord Himself explaining to me word by word. What a miracle! I had moments when I couldn’t read more than five or six verses without feeling like I was dying for joy, reading about salvation, the way God loved us and redeemed us, the way He blessed us...I had never lived anything like this before. I can’t express in words the joy and hope the Lord gave me...it is difficult to express what He is, what He did and does.” No longer was Tudose focused on what he did...the ‘canons, rituals, trips to monasteries’. From then on his focus was on what the Lord did, what He is and does…how ‘He loved us, blessed us, redeemed us’. He, and all who are released from the law to grace, go from doing things for God and trying to be better, to letting God do things for them, letting God change them. Tudose was released from creating God in his own image, the image of boss and taskmaster, to letting God create him in His image…in the image Mrs. Visky discovered, the image of unspeakable joy and unconditional love.
The Word of God
In two parables, ‘The Friend at Midnight’ and ‘The Unjust Judge’, Jesus taught the necessity of perseverance in the formation of character. God, seeing Tudose’s great perseverance and complete sincerity, must have known He could trust him with such an astounding vision. Its effect, its intended affect, besides redirecting Tudose away from doing things for God to letting God do things for him, was to direct him, not towards supernatural experiences, but towards the supernatural Word of God. To us, Tudose mentioned that phenomenal event only once but he never stopped exclaiming about the Bible. “When I read the Scriptures, this Word for me is gold of gold! I find no defect in all of Scripture! Everything which is written, the Scriptures say, is written for our teaching. It is God’s Word, which deserves to be obeyed in all its profundity and beauty. We may read many books, they are beautiful, some would say, but not one can replace the Scriptures. If all the books would disappear, for me it means nothing has been lost. I have the Bible and in it I have everything... Where do we see His image? Here! It is God’s Word! It is a wonder from beginning to end. In each page and in each word I see Jesus, the unseen God! And my heart is full of joy.”
…this Word for me is gold of gold!
…it is God’s Word, quick and powerful.
…it is God’s Word, quick and powerful.
This awareness of the Bible’s tremendous power, that ‘in it I have everything’, that ‘in each word can be found Jesus’ is not unknown to Satan. Why else would possessing one in Albania, when it was the world’s most thoroughly atheistic, most thoroughly satanically controlled country, be a capital offense if this were not true? Tudose sees Him who is invisible in each page, in every word of the Bible. Satan does too...and if he can’t literally destroy the Bible, as he worked to do in Eastern Europe, then he can promote liberal re-interpretations of key doctrines...of hell, of the virgin birth, of salvation by grace. He can even promote editions that eliminate mention of The Blood of Christ.
Having Scriptures explained to him word by word by God, Tudose came to understand that the Bible is, indeed, literally, the Word of God, an extension of God’s Mind. “Salvation, redemption, adoption, inheritance, being together with Christ and so on...all that the Scriptures say, all the promises of God, I have them! Why do I have them? For all of them are in the Scriptures and for me the Scriptures are not a book...for me the Scriptures are a being...it is God’s Word, quick and powerful.” That’s the key: ‘The Scriptures are a being...it is God’s Word, quick and powerful.’ ‘My Words are Spirit and they are Life’ is how Jesus said it. There is an absolute oneness between God and His Word. It is nothing less than the creator of the universe speaking to us. All experiences...those remarkable visions we’ve read about in this chapter included...remain rooted in time, but God’s Word is timeless. ‘Yes’, the Apostle Peter wrote, ‘we saw the Transfiguration and heard God speak, but that experience, though thrilling, was still only temporary…we have something better, the words of the prophets’.7 Only the Word of God transcends all time. “Heaven and earth will pass away”, Jesus said, “but my Words abide forever.”8
I am a midget writing about giants and will limit personal testimonies to very few…this one about the only, thus far, vision of my life. During our first mission assignment in a village of Black Carib Indians in Central America, I had witnessed and preached to, and been rejected by, just about everyone in the village. Telling them they must turn their backs on their witchcraft had made us very unpopular…and I had a lot of time on my hands. Our assignment for the month, for ourselves and the church leaders, was to practice meditating on a scripture…and I decided to persevere. For many hours a day for a week, with all of my concentration and sincerity, I meditated on John 7:37: “On the last and greatest day of the feast Jesus stood up and cried out, he who is thirsty let him come to me and drink and he who believes in (trusts in, follows and abides in) Me, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.” At dawn on the seventh day I received what I knew to be a vision...it had a quality about it completely different than a dream. I saw myself with what appeared to be a waterfall of shimmering diamonds flowing upwards out of my head. I asked ‘What is that?’, and a beautiful voice, which I believed to be Jesus’, answered: ‘Those are the rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit, flowing out of you.’ ‘Why can’t I see them?’ ‘Because you look at yourself with natural eyes but I see you with spiritual eyes.’
I went downstairs…climbed down from the loft in our bamboo house on the edge of the sea...where Peggy and our daughter continued to sleep, and I watched my hand...my brain hadn’t decided to do it...take from the book shelf a not-yet-read book by Watchman Nee...and I watched my hand open it to a chapter dealing exclusively with John 7:37. In the chapter Nee proposed that the entire New Testament ministry of the Word was based on that scripture…that under the Old Covenant the ministers, the prophets, were natural men in whom the Holy Spirit did not dwell, but who would speak for God occasionally when the Holy Spirit came upon them.
But under the New Covenant, Nee pointed out, God is doing something completely different. The Holy Spirit has been put into each believer and, Nee writes, John 7:37 teaches that ‘he who believes in (trusts in, follows and abides in) Me’, does so by taking His Word...taking The Cross, Heaven, Hell, Jeremiah’s prophesies, Josiah’s revival…and by meditating upon these events and places, taking them into their innermost parts and combining them with their deepest emotions...that when this is done, the Holy Spirit, ‘rivers of living water’ will be released when we speak and preach about them. The main reason, he believes, for dead churches and impotent witness is that people speak of the Cross, Heaven, hell, the resurrection...without the release of the Holy Spirit because they haven’t done what, he said, Jesus, in John 7:37, was saying we should do.
I believe, because God saw the sincerity and perseverance of a young missionary, meditating flat on his face hour after hour, taking the Word of God very seriously, he blessed him with a vision...and directed him to that particular chapter in Nee’s book. What has never left me is that God’s Word is alive in some deeply incomprehensible way....that it is, indeed, ‘a being, quick and powerful’, that Jesus’ statement: ‘My words are spirit and they are life’, is literally true. Somehow, I entered through the window of that scripture to the unseen reality it opens to.
Windows to the Real World
‘Windows to the unseen world, the true, real world’ is an unusual, but, I believe, brilliant operational definition of the Scriptures. It describes their potential, what can be accomplished through them, and inspires us to afford them the great respect they deserve. This certainly describes Richard Wurmbrand’s attitude towards the Bible. Though ill and starving, he valued it more than a life-saving drug. “Avram Radonovici smuggled (into prison) the Gospel of John in his body cast. I held it in my hands as if it were a live bird. We had seen no books for years. No life-saving drug could have been more precious!”9
The phenomenal ability of those we interviewed to transcend terrible conditions for very long periods of time, even their very survival, depended much upon the part God’s Word played in their lives. Bela Balog received strength from it in ways even he couldn’t understand. “Every Word of God is like a light that lights up the whole world. God strengthens us in mysterious ways by His Word. I knew I’d be going to prison and prepared beforehand. I started to learn passages from the Scriptures, then every day in prison I would ask for a passage or a verse and every day God would give me the portion for that day. When I was sent to the collective the great Word that encouraged me was from Romans chapter 5, particularly that ‘hope never fails.’
”God strengthens us in mysterious ways by His Word. Every day God would give me the portion for that day."
The ‘great Word’ Bela received, the ‘window’ that enabled him to see his persecution from God’s perspective, was Paul’s statement: “We glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope; and hope never fails.” Follow Bela’s thought pattern. The hardships he’s facing, he’s assured through that verse, are increasing his perseverance, which, in turn, is building in him the character of Christ, which, when facing humiliation and slave labor, has the capacity to look for and find God’s provision within the trial. That provision, which those with the character of Christ are able to appropriate, regardless of the situation, will always produce hope. Bela, then, led in his reasoning by the divine logic of that verse, could, as Paul said, ‘rejoice in his tribulations’. This was a ‘great Word’ for him, ‘a window to mind of God’, a ‘light’ that lit up the darkness of his situation and mysteriously strengthened him. It encouraged him greatly with hope, and as long as he had hope he could not be defeated.
Another scripture enabled Bela to transcend the potentially devastating first day’s loss of freedom...the transition from the full and challenging life as a pastor of a large church to the tiny, harsh world of a prison cell. “God led me by His Word through hardships. When I went into prison the first time, being condemned for nine years, put into cell fifty-four in Satu Nou prison, God reminded me that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said we’re to gather treasures in heaven, not on earth. In that cell I experienced those words. I knew God sent me there to gather and experience those treasures.” That Scripture, ‘Store up your treasures in heaven’, he knew, was ‘a window’ opening to a spiritual reality that was more real than his small, dirty cell. Yes, the cell was part of his world, but by no means his entire world. He lived, helped greatly by that scripture, in the fullness of God’s world. Each kindness and comfort he offered, every forgiveness of a tormentor, each soul saved, every prayer...he experienced as a treasure waiting for him in heaven or, even, to be spent in that prison. He ‘gathered’ and ‘experienced’ those treasures. He could feel himself getting richer and richer with eternal riches.
Tudose told us he was ‘dying for joy’ to read of salvation’s blessings. He had seen through them, as if they were windows, to the unseen reality they revealed, then ‘taken them into his innermost parts and combined with his deepest emotions’. Imagine ‘the rivers of living water’ that are released when he speaks and preaches about being transferred out of the kingdom of darkness, declared righteous in God’s eyes, adopted into the family of the King of Kings, being seated with Him in heavenly places, granted access to the Holy of Holies. Even now, many years later, he still equates his deliverance from the kingdom of darkness with the other greatest explosion of joy in his life. “In the evening I went to bring food for the entire colony. The storekeeper, to the side, without the officer observing, gave me a newspaper. I read the article; it was so clear, all political prisoners, even those condemned for ten or twenty years, were about to be set free! I took the newspaper to the colony and gave it to the men to read. In less than ten minutes the whole colony, more than one thousand men, in the court of the prison...you could see only hats thrown towards the sky, shout of joy, some were singing, some were
weeping. It can’t be described in words. So, this is what ‘good news’ means, after years and years of sufferings, pains, sorrow, missing loved ones and so on. Now the day had come when we would be free! It can’t be described in words what it means...this ‘good news’.
…you could see only hats thrown to the sky…shouts of joy, singing, weeping...…this is what ‘good news’ means...
…more than one thousand men…
We should ask ourselves, those of us who know we are saved through the grace of God, do we know this joy? Do we have this happy assurance that slavery is finished...that no longer are we under the power of Satan? Do we have the certainty that we received Christ as Savior into our life...the happy certainty that we have a defender before the Father, as a mediator, The Lord Jesus Christ?”
Tudose provokes us to search our hearts to discover to what degree we may have become familiar with the gift of salvation. How much joy does it really bring me? If God, God Almighty, was so humble as to be incarnated as a man and die for me, shouldn’t that keep me, like Tudose, childlike and in a constant state of wonder and marvel? Shouldn’t my joy, which all of the salvation blessings bring me, also be equal to the explosion of a thousand shouts and a thousand hats thrown in the air at the news that hell had ended and soon I’d be reunited in the arms of love? How I long for it to be.
We have been given much food for rejoicing in this chapter...‘I felt the Lord and His Presence...I could feel His life’. ‘I knew the love of the One Who gave His life for all.’ ‘The room filled with a bright and white light’. Envision God raising a mother of seven who was all but dead. Imagine a flame of fire-like love like the coronal streamers of the sun entering your heart. We have, without question, heard from many who have seen Him Who is invisible...and we certainly see Him more clearly ourselves. Let it lead you into worship:
Oh God, You are a God of unspeakable warmth,
You are a flaming fire of love in my heart,
You are something like lightning in the feet of the lame,
A pure, white light enlightening my mind.
Let these miracles of God’s grace take you into His Word...to other flames and lights and fires…to tongues of fire on Pentecost, eyes like fire of the risen Christ, a light from heaven on the Damascus road, Moses’ face glowing bright, God and the Lamb lighting up Heaven. If you have a TV, keep it off tonight and write a poem or write a song. Take a walk and let the cadence of your steps determine the beat as the words come easy as you walk along:
Oh Lord You are light…and flame and warmth
And lightning like love…and pure white light
You light up my mind…with perfect truth
And I weep for joy…at the sound of Your Word
Falling before…the One Who is Love
We’ve been given glimpses of the infinite mind of God, of his detailed involvement in lives, of the absolute oneness of His Word with His Being…and are staggered and in awe. In the fire of persecution He was there, magnifying the beauty of His saints, causing them to become lights that shine brighter and brighter still.
Tudose provokes us to search our hearts to discover to what degree we may have become familiar with the gift of salvation. How much joy does it really bring me? If God, God Almighty, was so humble as to be incarnated as a man and die for me, shouldn’t that keep me, like Tudose, childlike and in a constant state of wonder and marvel? Shouldn’t my joy, which all of the salvation blessings bring me, also be equal to the explosion of a thousand shouts and a thousand hats thrown in the air at the news that hell had ended and soon I’d be reunited in the arms of love? How I long for it to be.
We have been given much food for rejoicing in this chapter...‘I felt the Lord and His Presence...I could feel His life’. ‘I knew the love of the One Who gave His life for all.’ ‘The room filled with a bright and white light’. Envision God raising a mother of seven who was all but dead. Imagine a flame of fire-like love like the coronal streamers of the sun entering your heart. We have, without question, heard from many who have seen Him Who is invisible...and we certainly see Him more clearly ourselves. Let it lead you into worship:
Oh God, You are a God of unspeakable warmth,
You are a flaming fire of love in my heart,
You are something like lightning in the feet of the lame,
A pure, white light enlightening my mind.
Let these miracles of God’s grace take you into His Word...to other flames and lights and fires…to tongues of fire on Pentecost, eyes like fire of the risen Christ, a light from heaven on the Damascus road, Moses’ face glowing bright, God and the Lamb lighting up Heaven. If you have a TV, keep it off tonight and write a poem or write a song. Take a walk and let the cadence of your steps determine the beat as the words come easy as you walk along:
Oh Lord You are light…and flame and warmth
And lightning like love…and pure white light
You light up my mind…with perfect truth
And I weep for joy…at the sound of Your Word
Falling before…the One Who is Love
We’ve been given glimpses of the infinite mind of God, of his detailed involvement in lives, of the absolute oneness of His Word with His Being…and are staggered and in awe. In the fire of persecution He was there, magnifying the beauty of His saints, causing them to become lights that shine brighter and brighter still.
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