Customer Reviews

The Pastor's Wife

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When I was 14, I met Sabina Wurmbrand when she and her husband came to my church. There were flocks of people around but she looked through them and came to me and smiled her wonderful sweet smile and said "You will be a wonderful woman of God." Her book is just like that. It breaks through the crowd and clamor of life and brings you to a place where God is personal and real. The story is vivid in its detail of what she and the other women experienced and how they dealt with them. It is the story of a miraculous life and worth reading!

Sabina Wurmbrand is often overshadowed by her famous husband, Richard, who is a great man of God. This book is a tale of her suffering and perseverance in an atheist society. I read this book when I was sixteen, but did not fully appreciate it until I reread it in my twenties. She is a wonderful woman and model of the love and forgiveness of God. I would suggest this book to anybody, even non-Christians. She loved in impossible situations and was truly a woman after God's own heart.

Sabina Wurmbrand's book, The Pastor's Wife should be read by every believer. She suffered so much under the communists and Nazi's and never held on to any bitterness but only loved back like her Messiah. Knowing Sabina in her older years changed my life forever. It is because of her encouraging me to "take an orphan in" over and over again led us to adopt our daughter from China. Her strength and humility are woven throughout this book. I could not put this book down... I also encourage you to read this with "In God's Underground" written by her dear husband Pastor Richard Wurmbrand.
Mother to Estee Li Li

Sabina Wurmbrand lived an incredible and at times incredibly hard life. This is the story of a Rumanian woman facing persecution and her own sinful human nature by relying on her deep faith. I found the autobiography dark yet uplifting. Christian readers who want to read only happy "sugar-coated" books may want to avoid this one but then again maybe they should read it because it shows how high a price keeping the faith sometimes requires. People who still believe Communism was a positive thing should read this book, even many communists suffered under their own system. Overall, a great book!

I traveled in Romania with our church distributing Bibles in 1993, so that country has long been in my heart. I found the church in Romania to be alive and strong, and its members knew so much that we, in our comfortable churches in America have never learned-how to really love and trust God. The people had little in the way of life's comforts in 1993- my middle-class life in America in comparison was very rich; the orphans I visited in a boys home haunted me until I adopted from Kazakh and now from Latvian orphanages, but I will never forget them. This book will rock you out of complacency, and cure you, at least temporarily, of feeling sorry for yourself or blaming God for not doing what you want Him to do for you. God bless the Romanian Christians. Jacqueline Smith

I write this review out of some small sense of bewilderment, having noticed that there seems to be a stark difference between books about suffering Christians written in Europe and the US, and those written by Orientals. The book itself was well-written, succinct, and incredibly honest, although I suspect there were many brutal indignities that Mrs. Wurmbrand and her family suffered during their years in communist Rumania which she chose to keep private. My heart broke to read how cruel humans can be to one another, though I know it well from first-hand experience in a country where persecution is also used against believers, and I have lived through much of it myself.

The Wurmbrands and their fellow believers suffered terribly, first under the hands of ruthless Nazi Germans, then later under the hands of the godless Communist Russians. I greatly appreciated her forthrightness about her and Richard's struggles and their real thoughts as they were enduring their many burdens. Yet, it pains me that the person, the reality of the Holy Spirit -- the Great Comforter and the Ever Present Help in times of trouble -- does not seem to be the primary focus of this book. The focus is on the human element of the Wurmbrand's lives. Wurmbrand writes of her fear, her sorrow, her physical pain (and I commend her honesty), but even as she devotes one line here and there to mentioning that God did many miracles for her and her friends, she only delves into a couple of them spread throughout the book. It doesn't seem to be her foundational purpose in writing to convey the goodness and faithful nature of the Living God. She does mention these things, but they seem to be more added to her narrative as more of an afterthought, rather than THE central element around which the rest of her story revolves. The Spirit-filled life of peace that passes understanding seems to be missing entirely. No mention of when Jesus spoke to her, laid an impression on her heart, or gave her dreams and visions to warn and sustain her, although she does mention that her son had many dreams.

After they fled Europe, the Wurmbrands started a ministry to the persecuted church called Voice of the Martyrs. I have read so many of their publications, but I discovered the same thing in each of these: no mention of the Spirit-filled life with the abiding presence of Jesus for comfort and sustaining, and yes, miraculous provision in the face of humanly impossible circumstances. I wondered how this could be, when I compared it to other books written by persecuted Christians who convey their sufferings very differently. Ah, now that I have read the biography of one of VOM's founders I understand!

Yes, read this book for an accurate look at the tactics and schemes of a regime which intends to stamp out the remembrance of Jesus/Yeshua -- and learn from these things as we believers in the West will very soon be under the thumb of a regime which will use some of the same tactics against us. Nevertheless, if you want to read stories of brutally persecuted Christians where the central focus is the Savior -- his goodness, his faithfulness, his daily abiding presence, his overwhelming power to dramatically change and transform a person -- this is not the book. For that kind of focus, I recommend two other books: The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun and Paul Hattaway and If I Perish by Esther Ahn Kim.

The Wurmbrands lived lives of powerful testimony in their faithfulness to the Savior, and I honor them for this. I so deeply wish that I could have met them. Yet, I believe that our Savior beckons each of us believers to something more than the Wurmbrands apparently experienced (based on their own writings) -- a more intimate walk with Him and a powerful Spiritual indwelling of His Holy Spirit that will empower and carry each of us through impossible times.

This story is one of my very favorite ones! The honest expressions of Sabrina Wurmbrand were very impacting. I would highly recommend reading this true story of suffering in the Lord & the victories that could only have been wrought thru Christ!

I've never heard of such suffering in my life.
She had a lot of wisdom, and I appreciated her take on hard questions.

I've never heard of suffering like she went through. I got a lot of wisdom reading about her responses to others in prison.