Because I love your commands more than gold, more than pure gold, and because I consider all your precepts right, I hate every wrong path. (Ps. 119:127–128)
Expanded Passage: Psalm 119:121-128
When the Communists took over China in 1949, they expelled foreign missionaries and persecuted Christian national workers. Evvy Hay Campbell tells of a “Bible lady” who had been working with an American missionary. She was thrown into a prison cell with eleven men, among them murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals. Before her captors realized what was happening and moved her to another cell, she had led all eleven to the Lord.
For thirty years she was imprisoned for her faith. When she was finally released, she asked her Christian friends for a Bible. Holding God’s Word in her hands for the first time in three decades, she pressed it close to her heart and kept repeating, “Precious. Precious. Precious.”
As you read this, a seeker in a former Soviet republic in Central Asia is standing in line to get a Bible from limited supplies shipped from the West. A North Korean family is risking everything to hide a battered New Testament. A Pacific islander is looking in on a Bible translator to ask, “Is it finished yet?” They all agree. God’s Word is precious.
Paul testified to Timothy, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” I’m writing in the margin, “And is more precious than gold.”
Love the Word and live the Word today and every day.
Bob Black is a third-generation Wesleyan minister and professor emeritus of religion at Southern Wesleyan University (SC).
© 2026 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
