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Here is the last post in this series about Rich and Sabina. After their conversion to Christ, Rich and Sabina’s life completely changed as they to embraced His call for them. Rich did become a pastor, and Sabina served faithfully at his side. But their lives would be changed again–this time it happened when the communist party came to power in their country. Rich narrates what happened next:

The campaign to undermine religion developed rapidly. All church funds and estates were nationalised. A Communist Ministry of Cults controlled the priesthood completely, paying salaries and confirming appointments…The next task was to tear apart the Roman and Greek Catholics, of whom there were two and a half million. The Greek Catholics, usually called Uniates, while keeping many traditions of their own (including the right of priests to marry), accepted the Pope’s supremacy. Now they were taken over and forcibly ‘merged’ with the obedient Orthodox Church. Most of the priests, and all of the bishops, who objected to this shotgun wedding were arrested, their dioceses abolished and their property seized. The Roman Catholics, ordered to break with the Vatican, refused; they, too, paid dearly for their resistance. With priests filling the jails and lurid stories of their treatment spreading through the country, the minority religions simply bowed the head and waited to hear their fate.

They did not have long to wait. In 1945 a ‘Congress of Cults’ was called in the Rumanian Parliament building, with 4,000 representatives of the clergy filling the seats. Bishops, priests, pastors, rabbis, mullahs applauded as it was announced that Comrade Stalin (whose vast picture hung on the wall) was patron of the congress–they preferred not to remember that he was at the same time president of the World Atheists’ Organisation. The trembling old Patriarch Nicodim blessed the assembly and the Prime Minister, Groza, opened it. He told us that he was a priest’s son himself, and his lavish promises of support, echoed by other personages who followed him, were appreciatively cheered.

One of the chief Orthodox bishops said in reply that in the past many political rivulets had entered the great river of his church–green, blue, tri-coloured–and he welcomed the prospect that a red one should join it, too. One leader after another, Calvinist, Lutheran, the Chief Rabbi, rose in turn to speak. All expressed willingness to co-operate with the Communists. My wife, beside me, could bear no more. She said, ‘Go and wash this shame from the face of Christ!’

‘If I do, you’ll lose your husband,’ I replied.

‘I don’t need a coward. Go and do it!’ Sabina said.

I asked to speak and they were pleased to invite me to the rostrum: the organisers looked forward to publishing a congratulatory speech next day from Pastor Wurmbrand, of the Swedish Church Mission and the World Council of Churches.

I began with a brief word on Communism. I said it was our duty as priests to glorify God and Christ, not transitory earthly powers, and to support his everlasting kingdom of love against the vanities of the day. As I went on, priests who had sat for hours listening to flattering lies about the Party seemed to awake as from a dream. Someone began to clap. The tension snapped, and applause suddenly broke out, wave after wave, with delegates standing up to cheer. The Minister of the Cults, a former Orthodox priest called Burducea who had been an active Fascist in other times, shouted from the platform that my right to speak was withdrawn. I replied that I had the right from God, and continued. In the end, the microphone was disconnected, but by then the hall was in such uproar that no one could hear anything.

That closed the congress for the day.

If you didn’t already know, the narrator is Richard Wurmbrand, founder of Voice of the Martyrs, who, after this speech, spent 14 years imprisoned by the communist government in Romania. You can read Sabina’s side of the story in her book The Pastor’s Wife.

Their story is another beautiful illustration of people whose ordinary lives God redeemeds, who then are taken up and used by God as they simply seek to be faithful to the God who saved them. If you want to read about the rest of Rich’s life, I recommend the book  these posts were taken from: In God’s Underground.

Here’s part three of Rich and Sabina’s story. In part two we saw Rich meet Christ and be saved. What we find out in this part is that he had already married Sabina. His conversion was the first major incident that rocked their life, and as he recounts below, initially she didn’t take it too well. In the next part of the story (and final post in this series) we’ll see the second life-changer they encountered. (Click here for part 1.)

[My] conversion took place six months after my marriage to Sabina, a girl who had never spared a thought for spiritual things. It was a terrible blow to her. She was young and beautiful, and she had lacked so much in her childhood. She hoped a happier life was beginning, when the man she loved, her partner in pleasure, changed into a devout believer who talked of becoming a pastor. She confessed to me later that she had even thought of suicide.

One Sunday, when I proposed going to evening service, she burst into tears. She said she wanted to see a film.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll go – because I love you.’ We walked from one theatre to another and I chose the film which looked most suggestive. When we left I took her to a café and she ate a cream cake. I said, ‘Now go home to bed. I want to look for a girl and take her to a hotel.’

‘What did you say?’

‘It is plain enough. You go home. I want to find a girl to take to a hotel.’

‘How can you say such things!’

‘But you made me go to the cinema, and you saw what the hero did – why shouldn’t I do the same? If we go tomorrow and the day after to such films…every man becomes what he looks at; but if you want me to be a good husband, come to church with me sometimes.’

She thought about it. Then, quietly, gently she began to come more and more often to church. But she still hankered after the [party] life and when she wanted to go out somewhere, I went too. One evening we went to a drunken party. The air was full of smoke. Couples were dancing and making love openly. Suddenly my wife was disgusted with it all and said, ‘Oh, let’s go! Now!’

I said, ‘Why leave? We’ve only just come.’ We stayed until midnight. Again she wanted to go home, and again I refused. It was the same at 1 a.m. And again at 2 a.m. When I saw she was thoroughly sickened by the whole affair, I agreed to go.

We came out into the cold air. Sabina said: ‘Richard! I’m going straight to the pastor’s house to make him baptize me. It will be like taking a bath after all this filth.’

I laughed and said, ‘You’ve waited so long. You can wait until morning now. Let the poor pastor sleep.’

And so Sabina received Christ as well. Tomorrow we’ll see the way these decisions shaped the rest of their lives…

We continue today with the story of Rich and Sabina, with Rich narrating his time after his marriage when he was recovering from tuberculosis.. (Click here to read part one.) And don’t worry, Sabina will be in the next part…

Although I had read the Bible for its literary interest, my mind closed at the point where the adversaries challenge Christ: ‘Descend from the cross if you are the son of God’; and, instead, He dies. It seemed to prove His foes were right, and yet, I found my thoughts going spontaneously to Christ. I said to myself, ‘I wish I could have met and talked to Him’. Each day my meditation ended with this thought.

There was a woman patient in the sanatorium who was too ill to leave her room, but somehow she heard of me and sent a book about the Brothers Ratisbonne, who founded an order to convert Jews. Others had been praying for me, a Jew, while I wasted my life.

After some months in the sanatorium, I grew slightly better, and went to convalesce in a mountain village. Here I became friendly with an old carpenter, and one day he gave me a Bible. It was no ordinary Bible, as I learnt later: he and his wife had spent hours every day praying over it for me.

I lay on the sofa in my cottage, reading the New Testament, and in the days that passed Christ seemed to me as real as the woman who brought my meals. But not everyone who recognizes Christ is saved; Satan believes, and is not a Christian. I said to Jesus, ‘You’ll never have me for a disciple. I want money, travel, pleasure. I have suffered enough. Yours is the way of the Cross, and even if it is the way of truth as well, I won’t follow it.’ His answer came into my head, like a plea: ‘Come my way! Do not fear the Cross! You will find that it is the greatest of joys.’

I read on, and again tears filled my eyes. I could not help comparing Christ’s life with mine. His outlook was so pure, mine so tainted; His nature so selfless, mine so greedy; His heart so full of love, mine filled with rancor. My old certainties began to crumble in the face of this wisdom and truthfulness. Christ had always appealed to the depths of my heart, to which my conscience had no access, and now I said to myself, ‘If I had a mind like His, I could rely on its conclusions.’ I was like the man in the ancient Chinese story, trudging exhausted under the sun, who came on a great oak and rested in its shade. ‘What a happy chance I found you!’ he said. But the oak replied, ‘It is no chance. I have been waiting for you for 400 years.’ Christ had waited all my life for me. Now we met.

Here’s a very edifying testimony about two young people, Rich and Sabina, who meet, fall in love and marry, and then encounter two major events that change everything for them. Rich narrates their story:

My schooling was poor, but we had many books at home. Before I was ten I had read them all and become as great a skeptic as the Voltaire I admired. Yet religion interested me. I watched the rituals in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and once in a synagogue I saw a man I knew praying for his sick daughter. She died the next day, and I asked the rabbi, ‘What God could refuse such a desperate prayer?’ and he had no answer. I could not believe in an all-powerful being who left so many people to starve and suffer, still less that he had put on earth one man of such goodness and wisdom as Jesus Christ.

I grew up and went into the business world of Bucharest. I did well, and before I was twenty-five I had plenty of money to spend in flashy bars and cabarets and on the girls of ‘Little Paris,’ as they called the capital. I did not care what happened so long as my appetite for fresh sensation was fed. It was a life which many envied, yet it left me in great distress of mind. I knew it to be counterfeit and that I was throwing away like trash something in me that was good and which could be put to use. Although I was sure there was no God, I wished, in my heart, that it was otherwise, that there should be a reason for existing in the universe.

One day I went into a church and stood with other people before a statue of the Virgin. They were praying, and I tried to say with them, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace…’ but I felt quite empty. I said to the image, ‘Really, you are like stone. So many plead, and you have nothing for them.’

After my marriage, I continued to pursue other girls. I went on chasing pleasure, lying, cheating, asking myself no questions, hurting others, until, at twenty-seven, these excesses combined with early privations to bring on tuberculosis. It was at that time a dangerous disease and it seemed for a while that I might die. I was afraid. At a sanatorium in the countryside I rested for the first time in my life. I lay looking out at the trees, and thought about the past. It came back to me like scenes from an agonizing play. My mother wept for me; my wife had wept; so many harmless girls had wept. I had seduced and slandered, mocked and bluffed, all for a sham. I lay there and tears came.

In that sanatorium I prayed for the first time in my life, the prayer of an atheist. I said something like this: ‘God, I know that You do not exist. But if perchance You exist, which I deny – it is for You to reveal Yourself to me; it is not my duty to seek You.’

My whole philosophy had been materialistic until then, but my heart could not be satisfied with it. I believed in theory that man is only matter and that, when he dies, he decomposes into salt and minerals. Yet I had lost my father, and had attended other funerals, and I could never think of the dead except as people. Who can think of his dead child or wife as a heap of minerals? It is always the beloved person who remains in the mind. Can our minds be so mistaken?

My heart was full of contradictions. I had passed hours in noisy places of amusement among half-naked girls and exciting music, but I liked also to take lonely walks through cemeteries, sometimes on winter-days when snow lay heavy on the graves. I said to myself: ‘One day I, too, will be dead and snow will fall on my tomb, while the living will laugh, embrace and enjoy life. I shall be unable to participate in their joys; I shall not even know them. I will simply not exist any more. After a short time, nobody will remember me. So what use is anything?’