What Will You Do In the Time of Testing?
Richard Wurmbrand Warns What Might Be Coming For The West
What follows was taken (lightly edited) from the ministry newsletter (pictured) of Michael Wurmbrand, the son of the late Richard Wurmbrand. Look for the audio version of this post on the next episode in the Prison Pulpit series of the China Compass podcast.
Christians do not look at man as he is, but at what he will be tomorrow.
Magdalene was a loose woman and Saul of Tarsus, a persecutor, but they had in themselves the seed of future saints. Judas Iscariot was a disciple of Jesus Christ who had forsaken everything for him and even performed miracles, but he was to become a traitor in the end.
You are a Christian, but what will you become?
Some Christians remain faithful unto death. Others, when they hear the Word of God, receive it with joy, but they have no root and in time of temptation fall away. (Lk. 8:13)
What will you do in the time of testing?
We have not received our faith only for good times; we are not allowed to forsake it under the worst ordeals.
A pastor who escaped Cuba after spending 6 years in jails described how many other Baptist ministers had been in prison for more than 10 years. The Communists offered pastor Gonzales Peno the possibility of being paroled. He refused, saying, "Prison is the field in which the Lord commanded me to work, I will stay." Brother Peno chooses suffering because he feels that in prison he can be more useful.
A lawyer in Cuba, George Carro, was jailed because he undertook to defend Christians. He said, "Christians are doomed always to sit in prison because if they read aloud the first sentence of the Bible, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth', they have already committed a political crime by opposing the ideology of the Communist regime."
Many Christians face imprisonment because they disseminate hand-written religious literature among young people. You, readers in the Free World, have printed literature. How much do you disseminate in order to make Christ known and beloved? What kind of faith do you possess?
Life gives you ordeals in the free world, too. Will you face them bravely for Christ's sake, or will you fall away from the faith? Very soon, Christians of the Free World might be submitted to the same tests as our brethren in the Red Camp, because some Western countries, democratic for the moment, are sliding quickly toward a Communist take-over.
We have to free ourselves from the false notion that Communists are against Capitalists. Why should they? Capitalists help them fulfill their plans with billions of dollars worth of business, of loans and goods and equipment. Communists are only anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-truth, and anti-love. Many capitalists are their allies. This is what makes a Communist and atheist takeover so easy. Communists nibble away one piece of the Free World after another. Strange that while the democratic rights of traitors, spies and terrorists have to be respected, the freedom of the world does not.
We are tested and have our trials every day.
Do we remain faithful to them or do we renounce our faith?
What will we do if we pass through the refining fires of Communist persecution?