Everyone has a gift

Excerpted from Victorious Faith by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, VOM’s founder.

Let your life be one of service.

Do not say that you have no spiritual power or qualifications. A boy gave to Jesus five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus multiplied them. But what if the boy had had nothing? Such a possibility does not exist.

In the Bible, the word “zero” or its mathematical symbol “0” never occurs. The Bible is constructed mathematically. Every letter of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets correspond with a figure. Every word has a numerical value.

My son has written his thesis at the Lutheran University of Paris on the subject of mathematics in the Bible. But the Bible contains neither the word “zero” nor the size for it “0,” which is especially significant when you realize that the Chaldean ancestors of the Jews already had the zero written as a circle. The very word “zero” comes from the Chaldean zer.

Nobody is a zero before God. Nobody is without some gift. Your gift is sometimes the humility to believe that you have none.

Victorious Faith is a collection of stories, anecdotes and insights that sustained Pastor Wurmbrand while he was imprisoned in a Romanian Communist prison. You can order your own copy here.

Being an everyday Christian

You do not have to try to lead a heroic Christian life. It is futile to try to be a hero as it is futile to try to be an elephant. Most heroes are average individuals who are placed in extreme circumstances. Very few of us have the stuff of which great saints and martyrs are made.

It is good for Christians to know that in the Roman, medieval, Nazi and Communist persecution, the majority of Christians were not ready to suffer and die for their faith. Perhaps only a minority faced torture and death with courage. But the others were also Christians. God saw how sorry they were for their weakness and how eagerly they returned to faith when the immediate danger had passed.

It is a miracle that Jesus can make at least some sheep lie down in green pastures (Psalm 32:2). Normally, a sheep does not lie down. It will graze for hours, even if it is not hungry. How can you lie down with so much green grass around? How can you renounce the world when it offers you so many pleasures?

But among the saints are reckoned not only a St. Anthonie or a St. Paphnutius, or others who have been canonized, or those who have died in prison for their faith. An average Christian life is also a Christian life. An everyday Christian is also a saint.

This passage is excerpted from Victorious Faith by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, VOM’s founder. Victorious Faith is a collection of stories, anecdotes and insights that sustained Pastor Wurmbrand while he was imprisoned in a Romanian Communist prison.