Bible Text: Romans 11:33 | Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | The following is a true story told by Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the 1930’s, Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and all believers in the former Soviet Union. Millions of Bibles were confiscated and multitudes of believers were sent to the gulags. In Stavropol, Russia, this order was carried out with a vengeance.

A few years ago, CoMission ministry, which Campus Crusade for Christ sponsors, sent a team to Stavropol. When their team had difficulties 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 days.

One member finally got up the courage to ask the officials if the Bibles were still there and could be removed and distributed again to the people of Stavropol. The answer was “Yes”!

The next day the team returned with a truck and several Russian people to help load the Bibles. One helper was a young man, who was a skeptical, hostile, agnostic collegian who had come only for the day’s wages.

As they were loading the Bibles, a 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 quietly take a Bible. What he had found shook him to the core.

Inside the first page of the Bible he had picked up was the handwritten signature of his own grandmother! Out of the many thousands of Bibles still left in the warehouse, he had stolen the one belonging to his grandmother. She had no doubt prayed for him and for her city, and her prayers had followed him. Now this young man’s life had been transformed by the very Bible that his grandmother found so dear.

The Bible itself says, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and his ways past finding out” (Romans 11:33).