This Dime Saved My Soul

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My grandmother was raised in an abusive household and she was raised not knowing her Savior at all. When she was 14 years old, she had gotten a job working in mechanic’s shop and she was working on the car one day when the radio came on and it was set to a Christian radio station. Just so happened that that day they were carrying the latest episode of the Lutheran Hour. And as my grandma worked on the car, she heard the message of the gospel for the very first time. In her mind, up to that point, God was an angry thing. God was a nebulous thing, and God was a thing that had nothing to do with her life, which was miserable and poor and dangerous here on Earth. But over the course of that show, the Holy Spirit worked on her heart. When it returned to the regularly scheduled program after that, there was a little advertisement for a Bible study where they said, This Bible study program takes six months, it costs a dime to participate, but if you don’t have a dime, you know, send us a letter anyway. We’ll see what we can do.

Well, my grandma was exceedingly poor. She did not have a dime to spend on this Bible study program, but she was interested. And so she sent the letter and somebody at the radio station ponied up the dime so that grandma could take the Bible study program. She took it the whole way through the six months. They sent her a pin at the end of it. The pin is still in my family. She came to faith. She married a Christian man. They had six children. All those children were Christians. Two of those children became pastors. She has like 36 grandchildren and one of them ended up becoming a… well, Bethany professor and a seminary professor. And so many Christians, generations of faith, resulted from that radio broadcast. I cannot wait to get to heaven and meet the guy who ponied up the dime that saved my soul.

Christians have a different way of viewing the message that we share. Most of the time when you say something or when you do something, it has an impact on the people around you right at that moment, we have a special message. We have a message where the impact goes on and on through multiple generations, across centuries, across millennia. We have faith because of work that took place in Ephesus. We have faith because of work that took place in Wittenberg. The community of Christians, the Fellowship of the Invisible Church is one that links us together unbelievably closely. Despite differences of miles and differences of time. This makes pretty good sense.

The message of the gospel is something that has the power to transform lives. It changes how we live to know that we don’t need to fear death. Death rightly holds every terror for us. We are afraid of it for good reasons, and God sent his Son to take that fear away. He confronted all of the evil of death, the pain, the punishment, and he bore it on the cross. He instead gave us what he had: eternal life in heaven as princes there. He gave us his inheritance of the eternal lands above.

While you enjoy your faith, never fail to forget what it could mean for other people and their lives here on Earth and their lives in eternity.