I teach a women’s bible study and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love those women in that study. They asked to study prayer this year and so I’ve been studying about prayer so I can teach them. There is a sense of inadequacy in approaching this subject, mostly because I realize that I need to know God more and I want to pray much more than I do. I tend to find any excuse for not settling down and pray. But that’s not why I’m writing this blog. Just know that my heart yearns to spend more time with the Savior of my soul. After you read the story, share with me, if you will, your own prayer experiences.
I’m reading this series of lessons by Greg Herrick and he has caused my heart to catch fire toward knowing my God more and spending more time with him. You can find his writings here… https://bible.org/seriespage/knowing-god-and-prayer-part-iii What caught my attention this evening was this amazing story about the Sovereignty of God, which illustrates so perfectly Greg’s premise, and I believe it’s true, is that ‘the more we know our wonderful God, the more we’ll pray.’ Please read this glorious story and be encouraged to pray even more. God is so great and so good to us.
Andrea Wolfe, on staff with the CoMission office in Raleigh, North Carolina tells the following story:
In 1930’s Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and all believers. In Stavropol, Russia, this order was carried out with a vengeance. Thousands of Bibles were confiscated, and multitudes of believers were sent to the gulags—prison camps—where most died for being “enemies of the state.”
The CoMission once sent a team to Stavropol. The city’s history wasn’t known at that time. But when the team was having difficulty getting Bibles shipped from Moscow, someone mentioned the existence of a warehouse outside of town where these confiscated Bibles had been stored since Stalin’s day.
After much prayer by the team, one member finally got up the courage to go to the warehouse and ask the officials if the Bibles were still there. Sure enough, they were. Then the CoMissioners asked if the Bibles could be removed and distributed again to the people of Stavropol. The answer was, “Yes!”
The next day the CoMission team returned with a truck and several Russian people to help load the Bibles. One helper was a young man—a skeptical, hostile agnostic collegian who had come only for the day’s wages. As they were loading Bibles, one team member noticed that the young man had disappeared. Eventually they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping.
He had slipped away hoping to take a Bible for himself. What he found shook him to the core.
The inside page of the Bible he picked up had the handwritten signature of his own grandmother. It had been her personal Bible. Out of the thousands of Bibles still left in that warehouse, he stole the one belonging to his grandmother—a woman persecuted for her faith all her life.
No wonder he was weeping—God was real.18 It was his introduction to the sovereign God of the universe! Remember Jeremiah’s words: “‘Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill both heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord.”
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