“The world is deathly ill. The Great Physician has already signed the death certificate. Yet there is still a great work for Christians to do. They are to be streams of living water, channels of mercy to those who are still in the world. It is possible for them to do this because they are overcomers. Christians are ambassadors for Christ. They are representatives from Heaven to this dying world. And because of our presence here, things will change.” Corrie ten Boom — 1974
Even the most toxic environment can be the place where God’s presence shines brightest. If we are to represent Him, we must see Him plainly, let our goals match His, listen to His voice, and do what He tells us. God should not be expected to think like we do; we need to learn to think like He does.
People constantly attempted to draw Jesus into worldly thinking, using logic that ran counter to God’s heart. He often disappointed them, even once rejecting a plan to make Him king (John 6:15). Jesus knew He was already King, and His purpose was to bring men and women into God’s Kingdom. But the Kingdom of Heaven is unlike the kingdoms of this world. The ways and methods and schemes of man are often opposed to the ‘mind of Christ.’
God wants us to operate with the attitude, purpose, and practices of the Son. In 1944, after months of courageously hiding Jews in their Dutch home, the ten Boom family was arrested by Nazi occupiers. After an offer to be released if he agreed to stop his ‘disobedience,’ the eighty-four-year-old father, Casper ten Boom, said, “If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.” He was arrested and died ten days later.
Two of his daughters, Betsie and Corrie, were first imprisoned in Holland, then were moved to the Ravensbrook concentration camp in Germany. The presence of Christ in these sisters changed the atmosphere of the cold, lice-infected, overcrowded death camp. The Holy Spirit brings God’s priorities. Betsy and Corrie realized that to be messengers of the Gospel, they needed to be followers of the Master. They learned to give thanks in all circumstances, to forgive their enemies, to pray for those who mistreated them, and to remember that every soul is eternal — created by God who loves perfectly. Betsy died in Ravensbrook, but Corrie was ‘accidentally’ released before the end of the war. For nearly forty years following, she was a bold witness who kept declaring that there is no darkness so great that Jesus cannot overcome.
Here’s an excerpt from “The Hiding Place”:
As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the Word of God. ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or peril, or sword?… Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loves us.’
I would look around as Betsy read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors… It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute – poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not ‘we shall be.’ We are! Life in Ravensbrook took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
(“The Hiding Place” by Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, A Bantam Book published by arrangement with Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, pp 194-195)