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In the final letter he’d ever write, the apostle Paul told Timothy, his son in the faith, “The Word of God is not bound!” No doubt, the line would have emboldened the young preacher, especially since Paul wrote it from a Roman prison! But how could Paul make such a confident statement?
Well, partly because of stories like this….
After the fall of Communism, a missionary group known as CoMission sent a team to Stavropol. Unaware of the dark history experienced by the Russian city, the team quickly learned how difficult it was to get their hands on Bibles. During the ongoing frustration, someone mentioned a warehouse on the outskirts of town that stored personal property that had been seized under Stalin’s reign of terror. Knowing Bibles had been confiscated, a member of the team bravely approached the personnel at the warehouse to ask whether the Bibles were still there, and if so, could they be redistributed to the people of the city.
The answer was yes to both questions, so the team acquired a truck and enlisted several locals to help move the Bibles. One of the helpers was an unbelieving young man in college who had come only to earn a day’s wage. Soon after the work began, someone noticed that he had disappeared. Upon looking for him, they found him weeping in a corner of the warehouse. He had slipped away, hoping to quietly take a Bible for himself. However, what he found inside the Bible shook him to his core.
On the very first page of the Bible was the handwritten signature of a woman he knew: his own grandmother! Not only had her Bible been confiscated by the local authorities, she’d also been persecuted for her faith. The young man had inadvertently stolen the very Bible that had belonged to a woman who’d spent years praying for him in his unbelief.
The same Word of God that had freed her would do the same for him.
Resource’s Origin:
“An Answered Prayer from Stalin’s Times” by Andrea Wolfe. The Chariot, 1994, page 1.
