“Grandma, look at what I found!” The young North Korean girl was so excited. She was holding something she had never seen before. The grandmother looked at it with her failing eyes but could not make out the details. So she called the girl’s mother. “Please come tell me what this child has found.”The elderly woman’s daughter entered the room and took the item from her mother’s wrinkled hand. Her daughter began to reads the words printed on the well-constructed plastic balloon. “The Lord Jesus loves you. Your brothers and sisters have not forgotten you. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”
The grandmother exclaimed, “It’s Scripture! They’ve sent us Bible verses on a balloon! Please keep reading.”
The plastic balloon held words of encouragement for the three generations of North Koreans. It contained a message from Christians in the West and over six hundred Bible verses taking the reader from the creation, to the cross, to the second coming of Jesus Christ. In the last decade, over one hundred thousand of these “Scripture balloons” have been floated into North Korea.
The ministry of The Voice of the Martyrs found a unique way to reach these oppressed people with the Word of God and the gospel. It says in Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Like the balloons in this story, God longs to float encouraging Scriptures across our minds and hearts just when we need them most. However, he cannot bring to mind Scriptures that were never there in the first place. Ironically, though we live in a free society, we often act as if we were in a restricted nation like North Korea without access to God’s Word. Our Bible reading is sporadic and seldom—as if we did not have a copy of Scripture at all. Perhaps it is time to ask God to “float” his Word across the borders of your closed mind. Carve time in your schedule for Bible reading each day, and ask him to renew a desire for his Word.
