Emphasis Preaching Journal

When the Communist government of Romania cracked down on Christians in the 1950s and 1960s, Reverend Richard Wurmbrand lived out the words of Jesus, who warned his disciples of the indignities they would suffer. First-century flogging has been replaced with twentieth-century red-hot pokers used to burn holes in human flesh. Wurmbrand bared his upper torso before a Senate subcommittee to show more than a dozen such reminders of hostility against the Body of Christ. Wurmbrand gave testimony of how Christian prisoners were driven mad by silence in their solitary cells and then made to witness the torture of a cat until they themselves screamed out with denials of Christ and renounced their own family members just to get them to stop. After more than a decade of imprisonment, when he was told that Christianity was dead, Wurmbrand resolved to himself, "If Christianity is dead, I will sit at its tomb and will weep until it arises again, just as Mary Magdalene sat at the tomb of Jesus and wept until Jesus showed himself." [Source: Hearing before Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, May 6, 1966; US Government Printing Office]
-- Molldrem