My team trained into Romania as undercover missionaries. The strict communist government forbade contraband—Bibles in particular—from entering the country. But each team member took one anyway. I placed my Bible in the bottom of my sleeping bag, then rolled the bag up tight and stuck it down in my pack. We sat pensively as inspectors questioned us at the border. They poked around, but seeing no threat stamped our passports and sent us on.

My fellow college students and I represented no threat. But those hidden Bibles carried seeds of destruction for communist ideology. We gave each one to a different pastor we met in secretive mountain camps. I watched grown men weep when they held a complete Bible for the first time (they possessed only a few pages of a Bible, or handwritten copies of various passages).

I grasped the privilege of unfettered access to the scriptures. Entire governments committed vast resources to eradicating Bibles, while fervent believers endured great personal risk to get one. I’ve never taken a Bible for granted since.

Two thousand years previously, Paul reminded a young pastor that God’s word is not chained.

Communists tried to chain the scriptures throughout Eastern Europe because of the inherent danger to their authority found in the book. Give people free access to the Bible and God replaces the primacy of ideology or state or even self.

Don’t hinder the scriptures—unchain them.

On my shelf sits an embarrassment of riches—multiple Bibles in various translations and styles. I allow my own chains to bind, like busyness, or scrolling my phone, or my desire for entertainment, or laziness, or whispers from the enemy telling me to get to it later. I’m tempted to layer on chains.

But only when I unchain God’s word do I unchain the rest of my life, and that’s worth the risks it brings.

2 Timothy 2 in reading the Bible cover to cover in 2022

Photo by Thomas Kinto