There was joy and jubilation in the room of the dying when we arrived at the heart of God.
“In the room of the dying we never saw a Bible, but that was no problem, we knew a lot of it by heart. We were unimaginably hungry, getting one slice of bread a week. I began to forget more and more...of the Bible, even books I had written. One evening I vaguely remembered I was a Lutheran pastor but I’d forgotten who Luther was. Being near to death, it was so hard to pray, impossible to concentrate, so I thought ‘I’ll just say the Our Father’. But I couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer. All was gone. It was so sad. But I remembered it was our Father’s prayer who rules heaven, so my prayer was, over and over, ‘I love You, Father’, then, over and over, ‘Jesus, I love You’, but with many melodies, like all the different tones of the Hebrew language. But so near to death even four words became hard to say. But we in the room of the dying were left with the thought that inspired the Word! I had forgotten the words but we had reached the heart of God. And there was joy and jubilation in the room of the dying when we arrived at the heart of God.”1
We marvel at this. Just the fact that men ‘unimaginably hungry’ could concentrate on anything except their hunger is a marvel. I love to imagine our Lord listening and Himself marveling...responding, sending the grace of jubilation into that misery. Is there anyone, thinking ahead to the greatest grief or crisis you might face, who would not also yearn to be able to ‘arrive at the heart of God’, to experience perfect, total oneness with God…certainly that’s an ultimate goal of prayer. What those men did not pray about, about the problem…about their hunger, pain, grief, or cold…is their first lesson for us. They concentrated only on the solution.
We marvel at this. Just the fact that men ‘unimaginably hungry’ could concentrate on anything except their hunger is a marvel. I love to imagine our Lord listening and Himself marveling...responding, sending the grace of jubilation into that misery. Is there anyone, thinking ahead to the greatest grief or crisis you might face, who would not also yearn to be able to ‘arrive at the heart of God’, to experience perfect, total oneness with God…certainly that’s an ultimate goal of prayer. What those men did not pray about, about the problem…about their hunger, pain, grief, or cold…is their first lesson for us. They concentrated only on the solution.
When you pray you’ll meet God’s angels,
even God, Himself.
even God, Himself.
King David, likewise, when in similar anguish…his own son, after stealing his kingdom and his wife, was searching for him to kill him…also, not once in his prayer, recorded in Psalm 63, mentioned the circumstances. Instead, not unlike over and over exclaiming with varying tones and numbers of syllables the words, ‘Jesus’ and ‘I’ and ‘love’ and ‘You’, he strived with every fiber of his being towards God and His provision. ‘Oh, God’, he cried, ‘You are my God. Early will I seek You. My soul thirsts for You. My flesh longs for You.’ His soul, his mind and emotions, thirsting for God we can comprehend, but how can ones flesh…skin and bones…long for anything? All the parts of his being, including his very flesh, were longing for God. To reach in prayer that degree of urgency and fervency…your flesh longing for God…guarantees you will experience something only God can do; what He did for those in the room of the dying, for David, restoring his serenity; and with great gratitude I testify what he’s done for me…distress, fear, guilt being lifted off like a blanket by the Hand of God, replaced, miraculously, by peace and joy. Father Galeriu explains theologically this miracle. “What is accomplished is a communion with the ultimate reality of our existence, that is with God, who is absolute existence with no beginning or end, and then I feel as if I’m in a participative existence with the absolute, eternal, infinite reality.”
In fewer words, later in the interview, he made the same point. “When you pray, enter your little room, your heart, you’ll meet God’s angels, even God, Himself.”
In fewer words, later in the interview, he made the same point. “When you pray, enter your little room, your heart, you’ll meet God’s angels, even God, Himself.”
I enter the Trinity, God’s reality, and participate with eternal reality.
Father Boila agrees absolutely with this exalted estimation of the potential of prayer. “I am Christ’s brother so I have everything. I enter the Trinity, God’s reality, and participate with eternal reality.”
The gift of the interior life is unspeakable and can’t be imitated.
Bela Balog’s survival of an impossible situation, he credits to his “deep fellowship with heaven that worked in me faith in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and made me realize that the gift of the interior life is unspeakable and can’t be imitated,” then admonished us that “this world has moved the importance onto exterior things and pushed the little room of prayer to the side. Emptiness is felt by anyone who doesn’t enter this little room with a closed door. There is no other way to have this precious experience and testimony.”
Pastor Wurmbrand was the first prisoner ever to leave, alive, the room of the dying. Father Langa shared a cell with him shortly after his release. “He was like a skeleton, like skin thrown over a skeleton. He was beaten, tortured, famished. Everyone was listening closely to him, of course, but he was so weak he could hardly breathe. He was answering everybody’s questions very kindly, but it was very difficult. He was a model of living in unity with Christ. He was so weak that only his soul was alive in him and his body was like a shadow following his soul. He was proving to me how a living spirit can carry a dead body. Wurmbrand was a mummy but having a living spirit carrying this mummy.”
Your existence must be an adoration in prayer. Your behavior must be an estate of prayer.
Your existence must be an adoration in prayer. Your behavior must be an estate of prayer.
These truths we are hearing, forged in the crucible of unimaginable pain and sorrow, have been proven valid by the harshest tests, providing for us precious testimonies…even from the room of the dying…by those who passed these tests having given first priority, contrary to all of materialism’s persuasions, to the ‘unspeakable gift of the interior life’…while around them those with no, or weak faith, withered from emptiness. And today? Still, ‘there’s no other way.’ To our question, ‘What can we do to rescue our youth who are assailed on so many sides with so many temptations and false promises?’, Father Galeriu answered, “What we should do is go deeper in prayer into ourselves to that ontological memory as the psalmist says, ‘Deep calls to deep.’” Pastor Visky offers practical advice for those who wish to answer that call. “But it isn’t enough just to pray, your existence must be an adoration in prayer. Your behavior, your conduct, must be an estate of prayer. As blood constantly circulates, giving life and health to the body, that’s what our prayer life should be for our soul.”
Jesus made basically the same point when He said in Matthew 5:23 that if you are quarreling with your brother don’t bother to worship, it will be unacceptable. ‘First, be reconciled to your brother’. Those whose existence and prayer life are as Jesus and Pastor Visky say they should be, becomes obvious in a crisis. Among the passengers of two Boeing 747’s, when in 1976 they collided on the ground in the Canary Islands in aviation’s worst disaster, there were only a few…most either froze in panic or started cursing. Norman Williams was among the few. After pastoring two churches he had become a successful business man, “but prayer,” he writes in ‘Terror At Tenerife’, “continued being a living thing with me. Not just in church, but in business and any place I went. Devotion to the Lord remained a vital reality, and would prove one day to save my life.” As ‘searing flames enveloped him’ his spontaneous reaction was to cry out, “‘In the name of Jesus, through Your shed blood, I stand upon Your Word’. Immediately the Spirit of God was so strong. It was as if a blanket of peace was thrown over me. I was in the midst of a fiery bomb yet I knew all was well. I did not move in panic. I did not move in fear…You might say I did not move at all. But that I was moved. The Spirit of God was moving me, directing me. Again I shouted, ‘I stand upon Your Word! I stand upon your Word!’ Each time I proclaimed those words new hope and strength surged through me…I knew my insulation from death was due to my prayers. I said it again, ‘I stand upon Your Word! I stand upon Your Word! New strength!’” Mr. Williams walked through explosions and hurtling metal, through a hole in the fuselage to the end of a wing, jumped thirty feet to the ground…and walked away. He concludes, “I have had some marvelous spiritual experiences throughout my life, but I have never sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit as I did in that indescribable fury.”2
The Salvation of Draghici
After eight and-a-half years in prison Pastor Wurmbrand was released, and reunited with his beloved Sabina. Amazingly, it wasn’t long before he began praying. “‘Lord, if you know men in prison I can help, whose souls I can save, then send me back and I’ll bear it willingly’. After Sabina began adding her, at first, hesitating, ‘Amens’, within her grew an inner joy that came from knowing that soon we’d be serving Christ more fully.”3 Back in prison Wurmbrand’s first cell mate was a man named Draghici, one of Romania’s most evil men, one of the chief architects of the infamous Pitesti re-education program. Only someone who had received so much grace could have offered so much of it to such a man. After twelve days and nights of presenting him the Gospel, Draghici repented and is today in heaven. Pastor Wurmbrand rejoiced that his prayer to be used by God was so quickly answered. He was fulfilled by giving.
The Salvation of ‘Crazy Vasile’
Vasile earned the name, ‘Crazy Vasile’, because he was constantly fighting with the other prisoners. Sandor told us: “There were hundreds of us, all frozen and hungry, but every day Vasile fought with somebody. I watched him and shook my head and said, ‘What a terrible man.’” Vasile seemed to be trying to get himself killed. He would steal food from starving cell mates. The natural reaction of all the prisoners to such a trouble maker, including Sandor, was resentment and anger. The situation would have developed in the predictable Satan pleasing direction of mayhem and murder except for one thing...the presence of a Christian who ‘lived the beauty of receiving from Divinity’. “But in that moment Jesus told me, ‘You, too, just have words of accusation. Can’t you pray for him?’ ‘You are right, Lord. I won’t do it again, but I’ll pray for him.’” Sandor’s capacity to receive correction from God enabled him to transcend the natural reactions of his selfish nature and transform them, through obedience to the correction received, into spiritual reactions. He then began committing the act of selfless love of praying for a very difficult person.
“One morning Vasile told me, ‘I won’t stop till I kill those who sent me here, but I have these terrible thoughts to kill people who did me no wrong...and even, Father, I had the thought to kill you.’” “We may bind on earth”, Jesus tells us, “Whatever has already been bound in heaven”.4 Sandor’s spiritual warfare, his enforcing of Christ’s victory over Satan, his ‘binding’ of the demonic spirits of hatred controlling Vasile, was taking affect. Vasile had come to feel that the ideas that were leading to his violence were ‘terrible thoughts’. His impulse to kill a priest must have tormented him. Why else would he confess it to Sandor? The translation of the first Beatitude in the Message version of the New Testament is, ‘You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.’ That’s exactly where God, the master chess player, with His co-creator on the scene, had arranged for Vasile to be.
“And one day I was talking to somebody about God and Vasile came up behind me and said, ‘I hate this man, he can’t speak about anything except God.’” A violent man who fights every day with someone, who tells you he’s thought of killing you, who comes up behind you and tells you he hates you, would invariably be considered your enemy. But miraculously, because Sandor’s ‘existence was an estate of prayer’ through which he received directions from God, he was prepared to love him. His immediate, spontaneous response, because he had become identified, through prayer, with God’s interests in Vasile, and because his prayers had softened his heart towards him, was to give him grace. “‘Now look, Vasile, it’s good you have come to me because I know Jesus, the One Who delivers.’” It’s wonderful to think of the juxtaposition of those two lines of dialogue: ‘I hate this man. He can’t speak about anything except God.’ ‘Now look, Vasile, it’s good you have come to me because I know Jesus…’
Jesus made basically the same point when He said in Matthew 5:23 that if you are quarreling with your brother don’t bother to worship, it will be unacceptable. ‘First, be reconciled to your brother’. Those whose existence and prayer life are as Jesus and Pastor Visky say they should be, becomes obvious in a crisis. Among the passengers of two Boeing 747’s, when in 1976 they collided on the ground in the Canary Islands in aviation’s worst disaster, there were only a few…most either froze in panic or started cursing. Norman Williams was among the few. After pastoring two churches he had become a successful business man, “but prayer,” he writes in ‘Terror At Tenerife’, “continued being a living thing with me. Not just in church, but in business and any place I went. Devotion to the Lord remained a vital reality, and would prove one day to save my life.” As ‘searing flames enveloped him’ his spontaneous reaction was to cry out, “‘In the name of Jesus, through Your shed blood, I stand upon Your Word’. Immediately the Spirit of God was so strong. It was as if a blanket of peace was thrown over me. I was in the midst of a fiery bomb yet I knew all was well. I did not move in panic. I did not move in fear…You might say I did not move at all. But that I was moved. The Spirit of God was moving me, directing me. Again I shouted, ‘I stand upon Your Word! I stand upon your Word!’ Each time I proclaimed those words new hope and strength surged through me…I knew my insulation from death was due to my prayers. I said it again, ‘I stand upon Your Word! I stand upon Your Word! New strength!’” Mr. Williams walked through explosions and hurtling metal, through a hole in the fuselage to the end of a wing, jumped thirty feet to the ground…and walked away. He concludes, “I have had some marvelous spiritual experiences throughout my life, but I have never sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit as I did in that indescribable fury.”2
The Salvation of Draghici
After eight and-a-half years in prison Pastor Wurmbrand was released, and reunited with his beloved Sabina. Amazingly, it wasn’t long before he began praying. “‘Lord, if you know men in prison I can help, whose souls I can save, then send me back and I’ll bear it willingly’. After Sabina began adding her, at first, hesitating, ‘Amens’, within her grew an inner joy that came from knowing that soon we’d be serving Christ more fully.”3 Back in prison Wurmbrand’s first cell mate was a man named Draghici, one of Romania’s most evil men, one of the chief architects of the infamous Pitesti re-education program. Only someone who had received so much grace could have offered so much of it to such a man. After twelve days and nights of presenting him the Gospel, Draghici repented and is today in heaven. Pastor Wurmbrand rejoiced that his prayer to be used by God was so quickly answered. He was fulfilled by giving.
The Salvation of ‘Crazy Vasile’
Vasile earned the name, ‘Crazy Vasile’, because he was constantly fighting with the other prisoners. Sandor told us: “There were hundreds of us, all frozen and hungry, but every day Vasile fought with somebody. I watched him and shook my head and said, ‘What a terrible man.’” Vasile seemed to be trying to get himself killed. He would steal food from starving cell mates. The natural reaction of all the prisoners to such a trouble maker, including Sandor, was resentment and anger. The situation would have developed in the predictable Satan pleasing direction of mayhem and murder except for one thing...the presence of a Christian who ‘lived the beauty of receiving from Divinity’. “But in that moment Jesus told me, ‘You, too, just have words of accusation. Can’t you pray for him?’ ‘You are right, Lord. I won’t do it again, but I’ll pray for him.’” Sandor’s capacity to receive correction from God enabled him to transcend the natural reactions of his selfish nature and transform them, through obedience to the correction received, into spiritual reactions. He then began committing the act of selfless love of praying for a very difficult person.
“One morning Vasile told me, ‘I won’t stop till I kill those who sent me here, but I have these terrible thoughts to kill people who did me no wrong...and even, Father, I had the thought to kill you.’” “We may bind on earth”, Jesus tells us, “Whatever has already been bound in heaven”.4 Sandor’s spiritual warfare, his enforcing of Christ’s victory over Satan, his ‘binding’ of the demonic spirits of hatred controlling Vasile, was taking affect. Vasile had come to feel that the ideas that were leading to his violence were ‘terrible thoughts’. His impulse to kill a priest must have tormented him. Why else would he confess it to Sandor? The translation of the first Beatitude in the Message version of the New Testament is, ‘You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.’ That’s exactly where God, the master chess player, with His co-creator on the scene, had arranged for Vasile to be.
“And one day I was talking to somebody about God and Vasile came up behind me and said, ‘I hate this man, he can’t speak about anything except God.’” A violent man who fights every day with someone, who tells you he’s thought of killing you, who comes up behind you and tells you he hates you, would invariably be considered your enemy. But miraculously, because Sandor’s ‘existence was an estate of prayer’ through which he received directions from God, he was prepared to love him. His immediate, spontaneous response, because he had become identified, through prayer, with God’s interests in Vasile, and because his prayers had softened his heart towards him, was to give him grace. “‘Now look, Vasile, it’s good you have come to me because I know Jesus, the One Who delivers.’” It’s wonderful to think of the juxtaposition of those two lines of dialogue: ‘I hate this man. He can’t speak about anything except God.’ ‘Now look, Vasile, it’s good you have come to me because I know Jesus…’
But I know Jesus who delivers, so I’ll pray for you. But what happens? In the morning he came to me, ‘Father, I never slept so well in my life.’
Precisely what God needed Vasile to receive from His co-creator at that crucial moment to propel Vasile towards his final surrender to Him is what Sandor gave him...he offered grace...a dramatic demonstration of the love of God. And He needed for Vasile to hear wisdom and truth. “‘And the reason you can’t escape those thoughts is because demons don’t have a body and they want to satisfy their desires through you. But I know Jesus who delivers, so I’ll pray for you. But you must give your life to Him’. And I was amazed that he didn’t wait for me to pray but made the sign of the Cross and said, ‘Lord Jesus, receive me a sinful one in the Name of the Father and the Son and The Holy Spirit.’ ‘Look, Jesus heard this and received you. But if demons wake you and torment you tonight, wake me and we’ll pray.’ But what happens? In the morning he came to me, ‘Father, I never slept so well in my life.’ A few days later I asked him how he was. ‘My heart is full with Jesus’”. Vasile’s brokenness, his crying out to God, amazed Father Sandor. He hadn’t realized all that his co-creator, the Creator of the universe, had been doing in the unseen world, and in Vasile’s heart, as he prayed for him. His collaboration with God in the bestowing of this greatest of gifts brought Sandor deep fulfillment, but it was only the beginning of his giving. He knew we are called not only to preach the Gospel but to make disciples. “Now, Vasile, you have to learn more about Jesus, and I will help you to learn more about Him every day.”
In his book, ‘Destined For The Throne’5, Paul Billheimer brilliantly develops the thesis that what God did, ask Sandor to pray, He did so because He has voluntarily restricted his intervention into human affairs to His responses to our prayers because they are a part of His training program to prepare us for ruling and reigning with Christ as His co-regents following the marriage supper of the Lamb. Sandor’s training included his battle with demonic spirits oppressing Vasile. Part of Bilheimer’s thesis, which seems impossible to refute, is that Satan, who was defeated completely at the Cross, and could have been cast then into the Lake of Fire, has been allowed temporarily to remain and ‘wage guerrilla warfare’ to provide us with the opposition we need in our training program for eternity.
Grace As Teacher
Paul wrote in Titus 2:11&12, ‘The grace of God appeared teaching us to deny ungodliness and live righteously’. Vasile is a perfect example of this principle. The undeserved gift he received of a cleansed conscience, ‘never sleeping so well’, ‘a heart full with Jesus’, taught him to say ‘No’ to the sins that had controlled him just one day before. What no prison rules, rejection by the other prisoners or punishment could accomplish, the grace of God did. It satisfied his heart and gave him the power to live a godly life. God’s grace poured out on Mrs. Visky, loving her as she was when she hadn’t the will to live, filling her heart with unspeakable warmth, was a master teacher…teaching her to say ‘No’ to the ungodliness of despair and unbelief and ‘Yes’ to doing everything in love. What the rules of canons and rituals couldn’t do for Tudose, receiving salvation as a free gift of grace did. It brought him immense satisfaction, teaching him to live a godly life in an evil age. It was seeing God’s infinite grace, through an understanding of the extent of the Trinity’s payment, that filled Elizabeth’s heart with peace, teaching her to triumph while being persecuted. ‘The grace of God appeared teaching us…’
The Salvation of Mr. Clain
Another aspect, of ‘the keys of the Kingdom’ given to us by Jesus, besides the binding of the demonic, is ‘loosing’. He told us: “We may loose (release) on earth what has already been loosed in heaven.”6 We know that ‘no man comes to the Jesus unless the Father draws him.’7 The Holy Spirit is the Father’s agent on earth today. The Father seems to have conditioned His drawing of souls into the kingdom of God, their salvation, on us loosing, through prayer, the Holy Spirit into their lives. Faithfully undertaking this responsibility, according to Billheimer, is another way we grow in the spiritual authority essential for our role in eternity when we will be called to ‘judge even the angels’8 and ‘rule with Christ on His throne.’9 Mr. Clain, an elderly Jewish man, who believed all the Bible said, yet still hadn’t received salvation, needed a Christian to assume this responsibility. Sandor accepted the challenged.
“‘Is it true, Mr. Clain, that you believe all the Bible says? Then what happens?’ And he answered.
‘I don’t know, I can’t pray!’
‘Do you believe that Christ is the One prophesied by the prophets?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you believe that He was conceived by the work of the Holy Spirit, that He is not a child of man, but the Only Begotten Son of God by the work of the Holy Spirit?’
‘Yes, I believe!’
’‘Do you believe He died for your sins, but He rose and now He is in heaven in a glorified body, but, as God, He is among us so that we are not two here but three?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘If you believe all this and witnessed to it in my presence and in His presence, can’t you speak to Him as you speak to me?’
‘No, I can’t’
‘Look, I will pray for you now, but if you have something to tell Him, just tell Him.’
After I finished the prayer I heard the old Jewish man crying: ‘Jesus, Jesus, an infinite peace filled me! Father, what is this?’
‘Do you know what? You are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.’”
If Sandor had not used one of the keys of the Kingdom given to us by Jesus and loosed the Holy Spirit into Mr. Clain’s life, I do not believe salvation that day would not have been his. It is an awesome responsibility to be depended on by God to pray for those unbelievers He puts in our path. Sandor’s great sense of fulfillment came from both seeing scores enter God’s Kingdom through his meeting that responsibility and experiencing his own continual growth in spiritual authority as he remained faithfully laboring in God’s training program of prayer.
In 1977, after writing a letter to Ceausescu, Sandor was taken to police headquarters. “‘Gentlemen, you don’t know how much I prayed for Ceausescu and all the leadership. You probably can’t find another in the country who prays for them so much’. And to the one in charge I said, ‘I’ve prayed for you since you visited me in January’. The lawyer heard this and said, ‘But you didn’t pray for me’. ‘Oh, yes I did! One of my prayers is to bless all I will meet, either those evil or good, those who help me or those, like you, who are my enemy.’ When they left they were at a loss for words.”
Saved by his Sister’s Prayers
Someone was sustaining me and I knew I owed this to my sister.
Constantin Caraman is certain that his sister, Caliopia, saved his life. “The most important thing she did for me when I was in prison was to pray for me. For hours she would pray, so fervently I experienced that someone was sustaining me and I knew I owed this to my sister.” Demonic spirits in those prisons oppressing Caraman were not hidden from God, but they were not bound from heaven till a sixty-five year-old woman exercised her authority to bind them on earth. That ‘someone’ Caraman experienced sustaining him was the Holy Spirit. Not for one second was God unaware of Caraman’s suffering, his hunger and cold, but not until Holy Spirit was loosed on earth through Caliopia’s prayers, was the healing and comfort of Holy Spirit loosed from heaven into Caraman’s cell. God’s power can only be released when His people pray. For hours and hours Caliopia gave sacrificially for her brother in prayer. What greater fulfillment could there be than for her to hear him say, as he often did, ‘I owe her my life?’ Her fulfillment also was the growth in spiritual authority she experienced as she persevered in God’s training program of prayer. “When our house was invaded by the Securitate and we’d be interrogated, she was more courageous than me. She encouraged me very much, always speaking with courage and love.” Caraman considers the greatest benefit provided to the Body of Christ by his years of sacrifice to be the warrior of prayer it inspired Caliopia to become. When we visited them she was over ninety years old and still praying for hours every day.
The Worst Cell Transformed
Imagine the challenge Pastor Vasile Vadan faced when he was put in the cell reserved for the incorrigible prisoners. “They would fight. No one would separate them. One could kill another one. No one would say anything. And I was put there among them!” Imagine his fulfillment from seeing those tormented men find peace of mind through his ministry to them.
“They knew I was not guilty and full of zeal for the Gospel and seeing my joy they would come to talk. ‘Father Vadan, let me tell you why I ended up in here.’ After one shared his problems, I would encourage him from the Bible, pray for him and tell him, ‘Tell God what you’ve told me...pray to Him!’
And tears would come to his eyes...he’d go to his bed and weep. Then another would come. The same thing happened...praying and weeping on his bed. I rejoiced. I prayed with many.
And the guards told
me, ‘What have you done? We tried sticks, beatings, chains...
nothing worked, but
now it’s a model cell!’
And they told me, ‘Mr. Pastor, I don’t know what method you use...each one a different one...but since you came the whole cell has changed! It was hell and now it’s heaven!’
And the guards told me, ‘What have you done? We tried sticks, beatings, chains...nothing worked, but now it’s a model cell!’” But only a few days before, after ninety continuous days of being subjected to interrogations designed to break his will, picture who this joyful, confident minister had been. “I had become so discouraged, so weak, I could hardly walk. I was praying, ‘God, give me a word of encouragement!’” Pastor Vadan is certain he knows what is the root source of his phenomenal recovery and victory. “I had no Bible...there was a famine of the Word in prison, but what I had gathered in my heart, the deposit it had left there, that’s what I had! And with it I fed myself and I fed others.” Now, picture yourself in his place of defeat, ‘so weak I could hardly walk’, then imagine yourself participating in the following ‘divine conversation’ and reaping its emotional and spiritual benefits.
“And the words were there like whispered from somewhere: ‘ ‘Rejoice always, and again I say, rejoice!’
‘But how can I rejoice in here?’
‘Do not be worried.’
‘How can I not...no news about my wife and children?’
And the interrogations became harder and harder. Many times I wouldn’t eat. I was just walking through the cell praying:
‘Lord, give me something!’
Again I received the same verses!
‘What do You want to tell me?’
I had no Bible, no pen, no paper, but I received from Philippians, the fourth chapter:
‘In everything bring your requests to God with thanksgiving!’
And that’s what I did! ‘God, thank you for sending me to prison. Thank you that you know all about me, every hair. I don’t know why I’m here, but thank you for bringing me here. Take my problems. You be my lawyer!’ I began to sing and praise God. They brought food but I didn’t eat. For five days no food, not even any water! I received such joy! I was jumping all around for joy, singing and praising God. At the interrogations they had no power over me...even with a gun at my head threatening me...no power...I was confessing with such power they didn’t know what to do! I was ready for eternity. Then they put me in that cell.” God knew Pastor Vadan would be put in that cell of mayhem. He prepared him with the doctrine of gratitude, knowing that gratitude leads to praise. Vadan responded with the ‘sacrifice of praise’. At first it was a sacrifice, he didn’t feel like praising God. His fervent praise stirred faith, it always does...and into that cell of hate he took the magnet of joy and prayers powerful with faith. There is no question in his mind as to source of his victory. “As long as you are free and healthy, as long as your energy sustains you, gather God’s Word. My advice for everybody is to gather God’s Word in their life. But only if you apply, practice God’s Word, will you be a conqueror.”
Fellowship
Such a sincere fellowship was a taste of heaven.
I answered, ‘Later’…so I prayed...
When I prayed the Lord asked me, ‘If it would have been my coat, would you have done it?’
“One day an old priest, for whom I often sewed socks and coats, with whom I had wonderful fellowship, threw his coat at me and shouted, ‘Sew this!’, like a command...but he was a great man, still I was troubled by his attitude, for it was like an order, so I didn’t want to do it, so I answered, ‘Later!’ But he said, ‘No, do it now!’ So I prayed.” Why did Pastor Visky pray? His irritated response to a rude demand may seem a small thing to us, but hardly a small thing to one whose ‘conduct is an estate of prayer’, whose ‘existence is an adoration in prayer.’ The holiness of God is His absolute moral purity, His total separation forever from sin. The measure of our holiness is the measure of our separation from sin. Pastor Visky, Pastor Wurmbrand said, was the holiest man he met in all his years in prison. Being so separated from sin, his irritation brought upon him immediately ‘the great mercy of God...the gift of shame and penitence.’ Like a weight descending, the gift of shame drove him to his knees.
“So I prayed and the Lord asked me, ‘If it would have been my coat, would you have done it?’ ‘
‘Yes, Lord, of course, I would sew your coat!’
‘Would you do it right now?’
‘Yes, Lord, I would do it now.’
‘Don’t you see? That coat is mine!’
I can’t forget this. This is ‘koinonia’, fellowship, real circulation. When we don’t have this real circulation, Christianity becomes paralyzed. This is the great problem of Christianity, that it is paralyzed.”
Having received from Divinity correction and instruction, Pastor Visky’s natural reactions were transformed into spiritual ones and he didn’t hesitate to offer grace, immediately sewing the priest’s coat and reaping the reward of continued fellowship. If he had resisted correction, or procrastinated in the performance of his work of repentance, the gift of shame would have again descended like a cloud, once more compelling him to pray. When husbands and wives put into practice these eternal principles, their marriages become ‘a taste of heaven’.
Putting the Stick Down
“So I prayed and the Lord asked me, ‘If it would have been my coat, would you have done it?’ ‘
‘Yes, Lord, of course, I would sew your coat!’
‘Would you do it right now?’
‘Yes, Lord, I would do it now.’
‘Don’t you see? That coat is mine!’
I can’t forget this. This is ‘koinonia’, fellowship, real circulation. When we don’t have this real circulation, Christianity becomes paralyzed. This is the great problem of Christianity, that it is paralyzed.”
Having received from Divinity correction and instruction, Pastor Visky’s natural reactions were transformed into spiritual ones and he didn’t hesitate to offer grace, immediately sewing the priest’s coat and reaping the reward of continued fellowship. If he had resisted correction, or procrastinated in the performance of his work of repentance, the gift of shame would have again descended like a cloud, once more compelling him to pray. When husbands and wives put into practice these eternal principles, their marriages become ‘a taste of heaven’.
Putting the Stick Down
During one period of his imprisonment, Pastor Wurmbrand was interrogated by an officer who would regularly beat him. During the breaks, for beating a man can be tiring, Wurmbrand would tell the officer, “I love you, and I pray for you and your family every night”. One day, with the stick raised for a beating, the officer paused and asked, “How is it possible that you can love and pray for one who locks you up and beats you and keeps you away from family for years?”
“I don’t know how”, Wurmbrand answered, “all I know is that when I became a believer I received a new heart full of love. And just as only water can come from a spring, only love can come from a heart of love.”11
The officer replaced the stick on the table and never raised it again against Wurmbrand. The demonic influence in his life, attracted by the repeated sin of beating innocent prisoners, had been bound from heaven when Wurmbrand bound it on earth, and with Holy Spirit loosed into his life, the officer experienced conviction. One of the biggest surprises the world has ever had was the nearly instantaneous implosion of communism in Eastern Europe. To Wurmbrand, who had seen prayer and love cause innumerable ‘sticks to be put down.’ it was hardly a surprise. “We saw guards becoming Christians. They had tanks and rifles. We had prayer. We had love...so we conquered them.”12
“I don’t know how”, Wurmbrand answered, “all I know is that when I became a believer I received a new heart full of love. And just as only water can come from a spring, only love can come from a heart of love.”11
The officer replaced the stick on the table and never raised it again against Wurmbrand. The demonic influence in his life, attracted by the repeated sin of beating innocent prisoners, had been bound from heaven when Wurmbrand bound it on earth, and with Holy Spirit loosed into his life, the officer experienced conviction. One of the biggest surprises the world has ever had was the nearly instantaneous implosion of communism in Eastern Europe. To Wurmbrand, who had seen prayer and love cause innumerable ‘sticks to be put down.’ it was hardly a surprise. “We saw guards becoming Christians. They had tanks and rifles. We had prayer. We had love...so we conquered them.”12
Nor was it a surprise to Father Boila. “Four hundred Greek Catholic priests and hundreds of monks were imprisoned. Many were killed.
We had supernatural
weapons…we were
sure of victory.
weapons…we were
sure of victory.
But we had supernatural weapons and when that exists it doesn’t matter how great are the opponents. We were sure of victory. Those efforts to destroy the church to us seemed ridiculous.” Jesus said in Matthew 14:12 that because He was going to the Father even greater works than He did will we do. “Prayer”, Chambers writes, “doesn’t prepare us for this greater work, it is the greater work”.13
The Greatest Miracle
Michael Bourdeaux, and the Keston Institute which he founded, has collected and disseminated more testimonies and information about persecuted Eastern European Christians that any individual or organization in the world. Of all those whose prayer life he has studied, none has made more of an impact on him than that of Anatoli Levitin, a Russian believer imprisoned for his effective ministry to young people. The following description by Mr. Levitin of his daily devotions when he was kept in an isolation cell, Mr. Bourdeaux calls ‘one of the most impressive passages on prayer which it has ever been my privilege to read.’ In it you will find the full extent of the potential of prayer presented in this chapter.
“The greatest miracle of all is prayer. I have only to turn my thoughts to God and I suddenly feel a force bursting into me; there is new strength in my soul, in my entire being...The basis of my whole spiritual life is the Orthodox liturgy, so while I was in prison I attended it every day in my imagination. At 8:00 in the morning I would begin walking around my cell, repeating its words to myself. I was then inseparably linked to the whole Christian world...At the central point of the liturgy I felt myself standing before the face of the Lord, sensing almost physically His wounded, bleeding body. I would begin praying in my own words, remembering all those near to me, those in prison and those who were free, those still alive and those who had died. More and more names welled up from my memory...The prison walls moved apart and the whole universe became my residence, visible and invisible, the universe for which that wounded, pierced body offered itself as a sacrifice...After this, I experienced an exaltation of spirit all day. I felt purified within. Not only my own prayer helped me, but even more the prayers of many other faithful Christians. I felt it continually, working from a distance, lifting me up as though on wings, giving me living water and the bread of life, peace of soul, rest and love.”14
In the more than two decades that Peggy and I have had the awesome privilege to serve God as missionaries, we have been in several situations that were approaching the outer limits of our endurance. As always in such situations, we notified our spiritual parents, a prayer group that has met weekly for thirty years in Lillian, Alabama. We have known precisely the moment they had begun praying for us. Simultaneously to each other we have said, ‘They’ve begun.’ We literally felt the oppression dissipating, being lifted off like a blanket. Some in that prayer group are now in their late eighties. They continue to give selflessly in prayer to missionaries throughout the world. When we visit them, because they are deeply involved in ‘the greatest miracle, the greater work’ it is obvious we are fellowshipping with very fulfilled brothers and sisters in Christ. They are ordinary people who accomplish great things because they are humble enough to fall on their knees and believe God to do for them and others what they know they cannot do for themselves. They inspire us that there is fulfillment in the Christian life right up to our departure for glory.
The Greatest Miracle
Michael Bourdeaux, and the Keston Institute which he founded, has collected and disseminated more testimonies and information about persecuted Eastern European Christians that any individual or organization in the world. Of all those whose prayer life he has studied, none has made more of an impact on him than that of Anatoli Levitin, a Russian believer imprisoned for his effective ministry to young people. The following description by Mr. Levitin of his daily devotions when he was kept in an isolation cell, Mr. Bourdeaux calls ‘one of the most impressive passages on prayer which it has ever been my privilege to read.’ In it you will find the full extent of the potential of prayer presented in this chapter.
“The greatest miracle of all is prayer. I have only to turn my thoughts to God and I suddenly feel a force bursting into me; there is new strength in my soul, in my entire being...The basis of my whole spiritual life is the Orthodox liturgy, so while I was in prison I attended it every day in my imagination. At 8:00 in the morning I would begin walking around my cell, repeating its words to myself. I was then inseparably linked to the whole Christian world...At the central point of the liturgy I felt myself standing before the face of the Lord, sensing almost physically His wounded, bleeding body. I would begin praying in my own words, remembering all those near to me, those in prison and those who were free, those still alive and those who had died. More and more names welled up from my memory...The prison walls moved apart and the whole universe became my residence, visible and invisible, the universe for which that wounded, pierced body offered itself as a sacrifice...After this, I experienced an exaltation of spirit all day. I felt purified within. Not only my own prayer helped me, but even more the prayers of many other faithful Christians. I felt it continually, working from a distance, lifting me up as though on wings, giving me living water and the bread of life, peace of soul, rest and love.”14
In the more than two decades that Peggy and I have had the awesome privilege to serve God as missionaries, we have been in several situations that were approaching the outer limits of our endurance. As always in such situations, we notified our spiritual parents, a prayer group that has met weekly for thirty years in Lillian, Alabama. We have known precisely the moment they had begun praying for us. Simultaneously to each other we have said, ‘They’ve begun.’ We literally felt the oppression dissipating, being lifted off like a blanket. Some in that prayer group are now in their late eighties. They continue to give selflessly in prayer to missionaries throughout the world. When we visit them, because they are deeply involved in ‘the greatest miracle, the greater work’ it is obvious we are fellowshipping with very fulfilled brothers and sisters in Christ. They are ordinary people who accomplish great things because they are humble enough to fall on their knees and believe God to do for them and others what they know they cannot do for themselves. They inspire us that there is fulfillment in the Christian life right up to our departure for glory.
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