Richard Wurmbrand, some pithy sentences

 Anything by Richard Wurmbrand is worth reading. He is best known for his book, ‘Tortured For Christ’, the account of his fourteen years in communist prisons in Rumania.

 There is much more though to Wurmbrand than just a man who can speak about his suffering for Christ. He has many sources to turn to when he wants to illustrate his teaching. He was a Jew and atheist living in communist Rumania, which for years had been Orthodox. Then he became a Protestant Christian. He was also extremely well read. You can read about his life here –

 https://sternfieldthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/04/richard-wumbrandt.html

 Here I want to appreciate some of the gems in a less well-known book Wurmbrand wrote called, ‘Little Notes Which Like Each Other.’ It was his first book that was not about communism or the suffering he had endured.

 As the cover says, his only subject is Christ. It is not a conventional book. There are no chapters, just a sequence of paragraphs, some short some long, giving the reader a pithy perspective on some aspect of Christ or the Christian life.

 Below are some extracts that I thought were worth noting down.

  It is the Lord who tells you, ‘Come unto me’ I do not call you to come to him. The sacred words are ‘Come to Me’.

 To come to God is just another way of saying to come to yourself, to your real being, to the One whose image and likeness you bear, to the only real ‘I’.

 Christianity has changed many times during the centuries. All of them (the different forms) are vehicles of the one Christ, who never changes. He says, ‘Come to Me!’

 The first recommendation I give to you is this: ‘Let everybody in the world go his way; let churches…and you, answering only for your own soul, come to Jesus! Look neither to the right nor to the left, do not look behind, do not care about what others say! You come to Jesus!’

 Heaven is the narrowest place in the universe. It has place only for One. Only those will enter into heaven who have become one with Him.’

 If you do not receive Jesus, you commit spiritual suicide

 We, all of us, decide our future habitation by receiving or refusing Christ

 Those who refuse Him will have to suffer in hell.

 You will never be you, the radiant being, made in God’s image, if you do not come to Jesus.

 Your coming to yourself will be identical with your coming to Christ

 You are reluctant? You say that religion is irrelevant? I fully agree with you. The question is only how relevant relevancy is…Arise! Do not stop at the beggarly things which are ‘relevant!’ Do not busy yourself only with trivia. Seek the ultimate reality. Seek God!’.

 Dante says in his Divina Comedia, ‘Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost. This is the experience of all thinking men.

 He (Jesus) does not teach us to consider the founders of other religions as being His competitors or His enemies. In Solomon’s Song (1:7) the other religious bodies are called flocks of the companions – not rivals – of Jesus.

 The Gospel is the only religious book in the world which expresses the truth together with doubts about the same truth. Therefore, it is truth.

 You might say ‘But I am a man of science. I cannot believe in all kinds of miracles such as the virgin birth…Nobody has called you to come to the virgin birth. You are called to come to Jesus Christ. Come!

 We call you to Jesus Christ not because He is good, but because for you He became sin. In this sense, Jesus is not above you, He is below you…you do not have the difficulty of climbing, but the ease of descending.

 Jesus has taken upon Himself the murder of millions…Jesus has taken upon Himself the sexual impurity of millions of men. So with lies, and with all other sin.

 There has never been greater murderer, thief, robber, or liar than Jesus Christ…not in the sense that He committee these offences, but that in a more profound way, He took them upon Himself. They are His! It is easy to come to Jesus.

 I once had a vision. I saw myself descending into a very low valley. I had believed heaven to be above us. A beautiful female angel…explained that because many could not reach heaven, which was originally very high, the heavenly had descended below any lowness.

 You are uneasy, ‘If I accept Jesus, I have to accept the Bible too. And it has been proven to be full of many errors. I can assure you that it is full of ‘errors’. Nature, reality appear in our mind as incoherent. The Bible is errorless just because it reflects this incoherence.

 I call you to Jesus because He can make you a saint, and the world needs saints.

 Your relationship with Him will be complex. He will be very diverse…but you will have JESUS.

 God does not pay at the end of the week, but, in the end, He pays

 Come to Jesus, even if you have a heart too proud to acknowledge that you have been mistaken. To forgive is His profession.

 If you cannot pray, just leave it and come to Jesus without prayer. He forgives. He knows what will be the result.

 You have sins and they are red like scarlet…But the white of purity is at your disposal…Jesus is the light of the world. You can have Him. Only thus can you become righteous. Everything else is cant.

 He (Jesus) seeks somebody in great need and nobody is in greater need than a sinner.

 Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘Every one of us is guilty of everything before everyone.’

 Do not seek the cause of your innate sinfulness! It is told in the story of Adam and Eve. Accept the fact that you are a sinner. There is a purpose in your sinfulness. And there is the possibility of being saved from sin. Jesus offers salvation.

 Sin is part of being human

 It is a part of sinful human nature to seek a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong…God the creator became man and He tells us, ‘I take full responsibility for everything that happens in my creation…Instead of seeking other scapegoats, put all your sins upon me!’

 He (God) loves you in the supreme sense of the word ‘love’ which is to want someone even if having him (or her) means death

 Do not worry about whether hell is eternal in the absolute sense of the word or whether it might end after a very long period of torment. It is an idle question.

 Jesus saves from anxiety. You know that God is love, and you do not have to worry. If Jesus is the head, let Him think!’

 You do not have to worry even about your mistakes…Joseph made the mistake of telling his brothers his dreams…This mistake resulted in Joseph becoming ruler of Egypt. A Christian can have confidence even in his mistakes.

 Jesus is a very complex being. To come to Jesus means to come to the saving Jesus, to the suffering Jesus, to the fighting Jesus, to the crowned Jesus, to the whole Jesus, and through Him to God.

 If you do not see God, it does not mean that God does not exist. It might mean you are blind.

 What is He? The French have a saying, ‘’Un Dieu defini est un Dieu fini’ (A defined God is a finished God.’

 You are meant only to believe in Him (God), not to dissect Him

 Those who do not seek God in suffering men will not find Him

 At the Last Judgment nobody will be asked how much he suffered but only how much he loved.

 A Christian never submits to his enemies. I knew a Christian in a solitary cell where was room only for three steps to and fro. He never made three steps but only two. He – not his jailors – decided what he had to do.

 As you grow old, you do not have to ask yourself what you will do in your old age, but what God will do with your old age.

 To die does not mean to disappear. It means to leave through one door and enter another.

 When called out of his cell to be executed, he (Bonhoeffer) uttered these words: ‘This is the end: the beginning of life.’

 Never trust your own judgment in matters of faith. Christ has instituted the church as a fellowship which should establish the rules of behaviour according to the Word of God.

 The true teacher says about many things, ‘I do not know’.

 The motto of St John Chrysostom was ‘Glory to God for all things’. After being dragged by soldiers through the winter snow, he died in a little wayside church. His last words while lying on the cold stone floor were, ‘Glory to God for all things.’

 He (William Wilberforce) left us this teaching: ‘No inner feelings ought to be taken as a demonstration of the Sprit being in any man, but only the change of disposition and conduct.’

 Small Christians are also Christians

 Christians are never in a hurry. You recognize those who are eternal by the fact that they take their time.

 One of the rules of the Bible in moral matters is contained in Ecclesiastes 7:16: ‘Be not righteous over much.’

 A teacher once asked his class: ‘What is religion?’ A child gave this answer: ‘It is the set of things which are forbidden’ Flee such a religion as you would flee from a rattlesnake.

 Be a saint, but – for the sake of those around you – be a human saint

 Do not struggle to amend the unalterable tendencies of your own nature. Just yield to Jesus. Do not compose your life. Let Jesus compose it

 When you read about evil in me and are certain of it, do not wonder. Accept sin as a fact in Wurmbrand’s life, too, and praise God who had pity on such a sinner.

 Accept yourself with your contradictions

 You will surely overcome evil, but sometimes you have to take it slowly

 (The Christian) always cast his nets on the right side, which in the Bible symbolizes the side of clemency. You catch more fish with meekness than with harshness.

 One thing is sure: Lenin loved mankind. He loved it so much that he would have been able to kill all men for the good of mankind, because mankind was for him an abstraction

 Believe in Christ and love. This is enough. Do not accept any extras – dogmas, rituals, rules, conditions attached by different organisations – as or primary importance.

 We have to bring the good news about Christ to other people. What reception we will get is not our business.

 An English sergeant stationed in Egypt tells this incident about himself: ‘We gave that fellow (a Christian) an awful time…Before getting into bed, he went down on his knees to pray. My boots were heavy with wet mud and I let him have one on each side of the head. He just went on with his prayers. Next morning I found those boots beautifully polished and standing by the side of my bed. That was his reply to me, and it broke my heart. I was saved that day.

 Do not criticize the Bible, but let yourself be criticized by it.

 I mistrust stories that hold together in every detail. They are artificially construed. Believe in the Bible because the stories do not match.

 Beware of bigotry! Rabindranath Tagore said rightly, ‘Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in the hand with a grip that kills it.

 Stick to prayer…Only make your prayer a radical decision between you and God

 Unanswered prayer does not exist

 Let your life be one of service

 Never complain about your cross

 Suffering is sacred. Never squander as muh as the smallest crumb of it.

 Overwork is a drug for the disappointed and revolutions are the worst opium for the people.

 It is a utopian dream to plan a good social state for unrighteous men.

 Learn to distinguish between the true church and the institutions which only bear the name…The biography of Constantine the Great is horrible.

 Never allow yourself to be discouraged by things you see in church.

 Cling always to one sure fact: Jesus rose from the dead. He is alive.

 In Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov the Great Inquisitor summoned Jesus before him…To all the insolence an cruelty of the Great Inquisitor Jesus never answered a word…When the Great Inquisitor had finished, Jesus kissed him. That was all.

 I have told you the word of God. It will help you if you listen to it.