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Brother Andrew ("God's Smuggler"--that faithful servant of the persecuted, suffering body of Christ worldwide) once told me a story from his Bible-smuggling days prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union. He told this story in response to a question about, What is the church?" The story went something like this:
"I was led by the spirit to pack 700 bibles in my Volkswagen in Holland and head 4,000 kilometers to the East to Moscow. Not having a regular 'contact' in mind for this particular delivery, I drove straight to the token 'church' the communists allowed in the heart of Moscow. As the evening progressed in this meeting peppered with KGB agents and communist informers, the Lord highlighted one man sitting by himself in the back of the meeting. He was looking down toward the floor with his head in his hands. Approaching him after the meeting, I introduced myself. I found that his name was Ivan
"'What brings you here tonight, Brother Ivan?' I asked my new-found brother in Christ.
"'Oh,' responded Ivan, in somewhat of a dejected-sounding manner, 'I thought I heard the Lord's voice some days ago, telling me to drive 4,000 kilometers from my home in Siberia. You see, Brother Andrew, I am a part of a church family of 600 members, and we have only one Bible in the entire congregation! I thought I heard the Lord tell me to come here to find Bibles for our church, but now I am beginning to wonder if I know how to hear God's voice at all!'
"I responded with: 'Brother Ivan, have I got a surprise for you!' Whereupon, I reached down and pulled a Russian translation of the Bible out of my left sock! As I dropped that Bible into Ivan's lap, I reached down again and pulled yet another Bible out of my right sock! Then, I drew two Bibles from my back pants pockets, two from my front, and two from my vest pockets! As the Bible's began to pile up on Ivan's lap, Ivan cried out in the shock of belief: 'Brother Andrew, I'm rich!!!' (One such Bible was worth a year's wage on the black market, but you can be assured that Ivan was referring here to spiritual wealth!)
'Not as rich as you'll be when I take you to my car and deliver the rest of 700 Bibles to you!' I whispered. "So, what is the church? When the Holy Spirit sends one person from 4,000 kilometers to the west, and another person from 4,000 kilometers to the east, and the two meet by divine ordination at a time and place of the Spirit's coordination to conduct kingdom business, there you have the church! Whenever two or three are gathered together in the name of Jesus, there you have the church, with Jesus Christ right there in your midst!"
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Who believes that believers today can be directed by teh Spirit as the brother in this story was?
-- Anonymous, September 05, 2000