Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Corrie ten Boom.
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker’s daughter who became known around the world for her courage during World War II and for her message of forgiveness. She and her family hid Jews from the Nazis in their home in Haarlem, and in February 1944 the entire household was arrested. Corrie survived the concentration camps, but her father, sister Betsie, brother, and nephew did not.
After the war, Corrie spent the rest of her life traveling throughout the world, sharing the Gospel and telling the story of what God had done in her life. By the time she spoke at a Camp Farthest Out in Tennessee in 1971, she had already traveled to dozens of countries.
Forgiveness was one of the central themes of her ministry. Corrie did not present forgiveness as something she had mastered through her own strength. She spoke honestly about the hatred and resentment she sometimes felt and about her dependence on Christ to give her the ability to forgive.
Corrie ten Boom was born in Amsterdam on April 15, 1892, and grew up in Haarlem in the family’s home and watch shop at Barteljorisstraat 19. She learned the watchmaking trade alongside her father and remained closely connected to her family throughout her early life. She often spoke about the faith she had learned as a child. She dated her own conversion to the age of five. “When I was five years old, I asked Jesus to come into my heart. And he came.” Her father’s watchmaking business also gave her an illustration she used when talking about faith:
“When my faith doesn’t work, I don’t try to repair it. I sent it back to the manufacturer, Jesus, the author, the finisher of my faith.” During the German occupation of the Netherlands, the ten Boom family opened their home to Jewish people who were in danger. A hidden room was constructed in the house, and several people were sheltered there. On February 28, 1944, the family was betrayed and arrested. Corrie’s father, Casper ten Boom, was eighty-four years old. He died in prison only ten days later.
Corrie and her sister Betsie were eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Betsie died there in December 1944. Corrie later described some of the most painful experiences of her imprisonment, including being forced to stand naked during searches. She told how difficult it was for her to endure and how her sister helped her look beyond her circumstances to Christ. “I said to Betsy, my sister, I cannot bear this.” Then Corrie remembered the crucifixion: “And then suddenly it was as if I saw Jesus at the cross. And the Bible says they took his garments, he hanged there naked, and he hanged there for me.”
Looking to Christ gave her the strength to endure her own suffering. “Looking unto Jesus suffering, I got power to bear my own suffering.” Before Betsie died, she told Corrie that when they were released, Corrie was to travel throughout the world and tell people about Jesus wherever God sent her. Betsie died, and Corrie followed through on what she believed God had asked her to do. One of the most difficult places for Corrie to return to was Germany. Yet Germany was exactly where she was sent to preach. She eventually developed friendships there, including with people who had once been her guards. “My greatest friends live there.”
One of Corrie’s most memorable stories of forgiveness took place in Berlin after the war.
A man approached her and asked whether she remembered him. She did. He had been one of the guards at the concentration camp and had treated Corrie and Betsie cruelly. Corrie did not pretend that forgiving him was easy. When she remembered what he had done, she felt hatred. “Oh, I felt hatred instead of love.” The man told her that he had become a Christian and had prayed for an opportunity to ask one of his former victims for forgiveness. Corrie knew she could not manufacture forgiveness through her own willpower. Instead, she prayed for God’s love to fill her heart.
“I said, thank you, Father, that your love is in my heart through the Holy Spirit who is given to me. And I felt it.” Then she reached out her hand. “And I said, brother, give me your hand. I forgive you everything.” She described the experience as feeling God’s love flowing through her. “It was as if I felt God’s love stream through my arm. It was a great experience.” Corrie also had to deal with the man who had betrayed her family. He had approached her asking for six hundred guilders to help his wife, but he was actually working as a Gestapo informer.
When Corrie learned what he had done, she was filled with hatred.
“And when I heard that that man had betrayed me, there came a hatred in my heart. I had given him the last of my money.” She came to recognize that hatred as something she needed to confess to God. “But I knew from the Bible that hatred is murder in God’s eyes.” She said that she confessed her hatred and that God not only forgave her but cleansed her from it. After the war, Corrie learned that the man had been sentenced to death. She wrote to him before his execution in a letter she later described in The Betrayer Forgiven Before His Execution.
Corrie did not minimize what his betrayal had cost her family. “What you have done has meant the death of my father, my brother, his son, and my sister.” She also acknowledged the suffering she and her surviving sister had endured. “My other sister and I have suffered very much, I in three prisons, but we have forgiven you. And that is because Jesus is in our hearts.” She enclosed a New Testament with passages about salvation underlined. According to Corrie’s account, the man wrote back that if such forgiveness was possible, there was hope for him. He was executed a week later, but Corrie believed that he had been reconciled to God.
“And God had used me, who had hated him, to bring him to the Lord. That is one of the great miracles of my life.” Corrie discovered that forgiving her enemies was not the only kind of forgiveness she needed to learn. She also struggled to forgive some fellow Christians and coworkers who had treated her badly. She prayed:
“Lord, you have given me the miracle that I can love the murderers of my family. Now, Lord, you can give me the miracle that I forgive my fellow Christian workers.” The problem was that she had kept a record of what they had done. Writer John Sherrill asked her whether she had their sins “black on white.” He reminded her that God had forgiven her sins completely, while she was still keeping a written record of the sins of others. Corrie decided that she needed to let those records go. “I can tell you, before I went to bed that evening, I burned all the black on whites.”
That experience became an important part of the message she shared with others. She was honest about the difficulty of forgiveness, but she always brought the answer back to Christ. “And you say, I can’t. That I can understand. I can’t either. But Jesus can.” When Corrie spoke at the Tennessee Camp Farthest Out in 1971, she asked the campers to pray for her hearing.
“I asked if they would pray for my ears. Because I was a little deaf.” The hearing problem had begun to interfere with her ministry, so the campers prayed for her, and one of the men laid hands on her ears. Something else happened as well. Corrie had been having difficulty walking straight for about a year, and a doctor had attributed the problem to her age. After the prayer, she noticed that she could walk normally again. “But what happened now, I certainly can walk straight.” She connected the two experiences herself: “And now I understand, now my ears are healed, now I also can walk straight.”
Corrie’s messages were filled with simple illustrations that made spiritual truths easy to understand. She often spoke about worry, describing it as carrying tomorrow’s burden with today’s strength. In Worry Is a Rag in the Flashlight, she used one of the memorable illustrations that became characteristic of her teaching.
“Worry is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength.” She also used the illustration of a glove when explaining the work of the Holy Spirit. “My friends, you and I are nothing but gloves. And the Holy Spirit is the hand.” She would then turn the question around: “Have you the Holy Spirit? Has the Holy Spirit you?”
Corrie did not spend her time arguing with people about different views of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. She said that she herself had received the experience about eighteen years earlier and emphasized that it was the work of Jesus rather than something people could manufacture. “It is the Lord Jesus who gives the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And we have not to make advertisement or propaganda for it.”
By the time Corrie reached the Tennessee Camp Farthest Out in 1971, she had become an internationally known speaker. Her book The Hiding Place, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, would be published later that year and would introduce her story to an even wider audience. In 1978, Corrie suffered the first of three strokes. The strokes eventually left her unable to travel or continue her public ministry. Corrie ten Boom died on April 15, 1983—her ninety-first birthday. The words on her grave are a fitting summary of the faith she spent her life proclaiming: Jesus is Victor.
*Note:
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