Corrie Ten Boom - I Stand at the Door and Knock: Meditations by the Author of The Hiding Place

ALSO OF INTEREST

Reflections of God's Glory by Corrie ten Boom

Messages of God's Abundance by Corrie ten Boom

The Five Silent Years of Corrie ten Boom

by Pamela Rosewell Moore

I Stand at the Door and Knock
ePub Format
Copyright 2008 by Stichting Trans World Radio Voor Nederland en Belgie

This title is also available in a Zondervan downloadable
audio edition. Visit www.zondervan.fm.

This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook.
Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks.

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Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

ISBN 0-310-30903-4

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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Interior design by Michelle Espinoza

FOREWORD

P retend for a moment that you are sitting beside your radio in your quaint home in the Netherlands in 1966. It has now been more than two decades since the German occupation of your homeland in World War II. Yet the scars of those dark days are still evident all around you. Many mothers and fathers lost their sons in battle. Many Jewsgrandparents, parents, and even childrenwho played a prominent part in the life of the country were literally exterminated en masse during the Holocaust occurring under Adolf Hitler's reign. And many Jewish sympathizersthose who believed in standing against wrong no matter what the costwere interred in concentration camps and lost their lives as they stood and chose to suffer alongside their Jewish friends and neighbors.

Such was the plight of the Ten Boom family of Haarlem, the Netherlands. A devoutly Christian family, they harbored, fed, and cared for Jews in their home who would have otherwise been destined for the concentration camps. Their story is chronicled in one of the bestselling Christian books of our time, The Hiding Placereferring to the secret place where the Ten Booms hid Jews, a story that went on to become a major motion picture.

On February 28, 1944, the lives of the Ten Boom family changed forever. On that day, Corrie, her watchmaker father, her older sister, Betsie, and thirty-five other people were arrested for not disclosing the whereabouts of six Jews hidden in a secret room attached to her bedroom. Corrie's father died within ten days of his arrest, while Corrie and Betsie were imprisoned and subjected to the atrocities of the Ravensbrck concentration camp in Germany. Corrie survived the experience, her release from Ravensbrck later determined to be due to a clerical error shortly before all women her age were to be executed. Betsie, however, died at Ravensbrck.

Perhaps the greatest scars resulting from the Holocaust were the scars of bitterness and unforgiveness that destroyed many more lives. Corrie struggled with these same feelings herself. Yet through God's amazing work in her life, she became a worldwide symbol of reconciliation, forgiveness, and the ultimate hope found in Christ as she wrote nine books, spoke in more than sixty countries, and produced five films as part of her ministry to lost and hurting peoplea ministry that didn't begin until she was in her fifties. When lists have been compiled of the greatest Christians of the twentieth century, Corrie's name is commonly included and often near the top.

That's her voice now, you say to yourself as you turn on your radio and hear Corrie's unmistakable voice speaking in her native Dutch. You're now hearing some of the first devotional messages by Corrie that were commonly aired to the Netherlands from 1966 through the early 1970s by Trans World Radio (www.twr.org), the world's most far-reaching international Christian radio broadcasting ministry.

In fact, the book you are now holding will most likely be the final chapter in the four decades that Corrie's ministry and that of TWR have been inextricably interwoven. It represents the third and final book in a series of Corrie's lost devotional messages that she broadcast over TWR, following Reflections of God's Glory (1999) and Messages of God's Abundance (2002), both books also published by Zondervan. How this book came about is a story in itself.

In 1996, on my way back from meetings in eastern Europe, I made my first stopover at TWR's office in the Netherlands, then located in Voorthuizen. One of the reasons for my visit was curiosity over some written scripts of Corrie ten Boom's radio messages that one of my colleagues had told me about. As I inquired about these Dutch scripts, I was astounded to discover that no one in the office thought they had ever been translated into English before and published, although some of them had been published in Dutch. This began a six-year odyssey of translating various radio messages and then doing extensive research to determine if they had been published elsewhereresulting in the publishing of the first two books featuring twenty-four and twenty-six messages, respectively.

We thought we were throughbut God had another plan! I was contacted late last year by Zondervan expressing interest in publishing a new compendium version of the two books and inquiring as to whether we had any more materials that had not been included earlier that could be added to the new volume.

I was quite sure that we had no more new materials, as all of the written scripts were the result of an exhaustive search over a decade ago. I decided, however, to inquire of our staff in the Netherlands, especially TWR missionary Claire Rothrock, without whose faithful and tireless work these three books would not have been possible. A few days later, I received an excited phone call from Claire. It appeared she had found some new materialsnot just a few, but many! While all along we had assumed that our audio archives were a duplication of the written scripts, Claire discovered that there were in fact forty new messages for which no written scripts existed.

As I was doing a final edit on these messages, what impressed me once again is what I would call the profound simplicity of Corrie's words. It is a job truly to be approached as if walking on holy groundso anointed was the ministry that God gave to Corrie. Now you too can put yourself into the shoes of that postWorld War II radio listener in the Netherlands. We have transcribed and translated these materials just as Corrie wrote themwhich is why you will read occasional references to radio or to the listener within these pages.

Concidentally, the timing of the publication of this book also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Corrie's death. (Corrie died on April 15, 1983, the day of her ninety-first birthday.) Yet I think you will find, as I did in editing this book, that while much history has been written in the last forty years, Corrie's spiritual insights and vivid illustrations remain timelessly refreshing and astoundingly relevant for our times and for how they address the spiritual condition of man. The words that God gave this amazing woman continue to speak powerfully and piercingly into our lives, and TWR and Zondervan are pleased to once again bring alive these words to a new generation.