By John Noble
Published by St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1959
A Mission to Fulfill
During the decade I spent in communist prisons and labor camps I saw many terrible things. I also saw some glorious ones, things more heartening than any other news I bring out of the Soviet Union…. I found God for myself through personal conversion and, even more significantly for the world at large, I met many others who had had a similar experience. I discovered that the Christian religion is surviving communist persecution in East Germany and in Soviet Russia itself.
I found that secret worship services were held and converts won for Christ even in Vorkuta itself, one of the slave-labor camps in the Soviet Arctic.
Having learned to speak and understand Russian, I found myself in close contact with Russian engineers and workers, and realized that there is deep interest in the Christian religion among both groups. In spite of their forty-year exposure to official atheism, or perhaps because of it, they hunger for the spiritual values they have been denied. This evidence I am able to bring back to the free world, and through it the glorious tidings of a faith that cannot be killed.
I have seen Christianity under the most terrible persecution it has suffered since the days of Nero, and I have seen abundant proof that faith in Christ, the Saviour, is still alive in Russia today in the very places where the Communists have tried hardest to stamp it out, the concentration camps. It is triumphant testimony I have to give concerning the Church behind Barbed Wire, and I am convinced it was God’s will that I be a member of that persecuted Church for several years in order to testify that God is with it and is sustaining it.
The fact that I survived all I had been exposed to, and was enabled to return to America in good health, before the drastic sentence imposed by a Moscow court had run its full course, is proof to me that God was with me, that there was a purpose in my survival which, as I look back upon the successive phases of my prison experiences, seems nothing less than miraculous. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for His mercy. Click here to read more of this story, courtesy of Kjos Ministries
