The London Missionary Society recorded the story of one of its missionaries, who got captured by a bandit in a forest in Sicily. The bandit was disgusted to discover the missionary’s only possession was a box of books; so he ordered the missionary to burn them. The missionary, however, asked if he could read a portion of each before burning it, and the bandit agreed. The first bit he read was the 23rd psalm, then the story of the Good Samaritan, then part of the Sermon on the Mount. At the end of each reading the bandit decided to keep that particular book because he liked he’d heard. The end result was that he took the lot.
Years later, that same missionary returned to Sicily and met that bandit again, only this time he was the minister of a church, transformed by what he read in those books, each of which, of course, was a Bible. Its message still has the power to transform