Just as God inspired fear and awe through his miracles in the Bible, so is He still doing. 

The following originally appeared in The Chariot 2, no. 1.1, under the title “An Answered Prayer from Stalin’s Times” by Andrea Wolfe.  It was included as part of Philip Ryken’s Pastoral Exposition “The Pattern of Sound Words,” in Entrusted With the Gospel, edited by D. A. Carson and published by Crossway.

 Many stories can be told about the freedom of God’s Word to do its work.  Here is just one, from Stavropol, Russia, where in the 1930s Joseph Stalin ordered every Bible in the city to be confiscated.  After the fall of communism, the agency CoMission sent a team to Stavropol.  When they were having difficulty getting enough Bibles shipped from Moscow, one of the locals mention the warehouse outside of town where he had heard that Bibles were stored since the days of Stalin.  So the team borrowed a truck, recruited a couple of workers, and went to unload the Bibles.

One of the men they hired was hostile to the Christian faith, a college skeptic who was there only for the money.  After working for a little while, the man slipped off by himself.  When the found him later, sitting in a corner, he was weeping over a copy of the Scriptures.  The skeptic had picked up a Bible, and when he opened it he saw that is was signed by his own grandmother, who had long prayed for his salvation!  God’s Word cannot be bound; it always does it work in the world, even in the hearts and minds of people who think they do not even want to believe it.