Corrie ten Boom knew what it was to suffer deprivation, to have to do without so many of life’s luxuries and even its necessities. Arrested and sent to a concentration camp for her role in sheltering Jews from the Nazis, she spent almost a year in confinement and suffered the loss of her father and sister. But her faith remained intact and unmoved.
It was in those days of such trial that she relied upon the riches she had accumulated through a lifetime of following Jesus. From the time she was a child, she had read God’s Word and set its truths deep into her mind and heart. Now, as she suffered, she could call those truths to mind, meditate on them, and trust in them. “Gather the riches of God’s promises,” she wrote later. “Nobody can take away from you those texts from the bible which you have learned by heart.”
While the German army could take every one of her possessions from her, they could not take those truths. When she had nothing else to sustain her, she had the rich promises of God. And so can you, if only you will learn them by heart.
