Brother Andrew, the Dutch missionary who made it his life’s work to smuggle Bibles into communist countries, died last week at 94. Born in 1928 by the name Anne van der Bijl in the Netherlands, Brother Andrew spent his formative years under the threat of Nazi rule after the Nazis invaded during World War II. Famine followed soon after and he had to eat tulip bulbs to survive. After the war ended, he joined the Dutch army and became part of a massacring force that attacked an Indonesian village during an uprising. Haunted by what he had seen, Bijl struggled for something to make sense of the horrors he’d witnessed. He read a Bible from him mother after an injury and began attending church on his return to the Netherlands. By the 1950s, he had given his life to Christ. “There wasn’t much faith in my prayer. I just said, ‘Lord if you will show me the way, I will follow you. Amen,’” he recalled.

He became filled with a desire to share the Gospel with others and after reading Revelation 3:2, which says, “Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die,” he felt sure God was calling him to share the Gospel in communist-controlled countries. He founded Open Doors in 1955 with the focus of shining a light on persecuted Christians throughout the world. He began visiting communist Poland and then Czechoslovakia, seeing the need for Bibles in those countries. He took his first smuggling trip in 1957 to Yugoslavia, where he came up with the “Prayer of God’s Smuggler,” praying, “Lord, in my luggage I have Scripture that I want to take to your children across this border. When you were on Earth, you made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind. Do not let the guards see those things you do not want them to see.” The Open Doors website shares one story of a trip to Romania where Brother Andrew, as he came to be known, approached the border with agents thoroughly checking each car, while his car was filled with illegal Bibles. Feeling inspired to leave a few Bibles out where they were visible, Brother Andrew spread a few out as agents came to check his car. Yet, within thirty seconds, the guard waved Brother Andrew on. “I coasted forward, my foot poised above the brake. Nothing happened. I looked out the rear mirror. The guard was waving the next car to a stop, indicating to the driver that he had to get out.”

In 1967, Brother Andrew wrote about his experiences smuggling Bibles in the book, God’s Smuggler. The book brought international attention to the underground church and served as a way to fund Open Doors. Brother Andrew turned his attention toward Muslim countries. His book, Light Force, addressed his focus on Muslim countries and their need to receive the Gospel. “There are no terrorists—only people who need Jesus. As long as we see any person—Muslim, Communist, terrorist—as an enemy, then the love of God cannot flow through us to reach him,” he wrote. His care for members of Hamas rocked many Christian communities, but he saw it as the only way to end cycles of violence. “The best way I can help Israel is by leading her enemies to Jesus Christ,” he wrote.

Brother Andrew summed up his philosophy for life in God’s Smuggler as, “Whenever, wherever, however You want me, I’ll go. And I’ll begin this very minute. Lord, as I stand up from this place, and as I take my first step forward, will You consider this is a step toward complete obedience to You? I’ll call it the step of yes.” He kept true to those words written by the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:7-8: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”