In May 2018, a 22-year-old undocumented migrant from Mali was walking down a Paris street when he saw a crowd staring up at a four-year-old boy dangling from a fourth-floor balcony. Mamoudou Gassama had every reason to keep his head down and avoid attention. Instead he ran across the road and pulled himself up the outside of the building, balcony to balcony, and lifted the crying child to safety. He later said, “I just climbed up and thank God, God helped me. The more I climbed the more I had the courage to climb up higher.” President Macron gave him a medal for courage and said he would be made a French citizen. Courage grows as you take the next step.
In September 1944, while she was pregnant, Danish rider Lis Hartel developed polio. For a while she could not walk at all. She learned to walk again with braces, but she stayed partially paralyzed below her knees. Still, she kept riding. In 1952 women were allowed to compete in Olympic dressage for the first time, and Hartel went to Helsinki. She had to be helped on and off her horse, yet she won the silver medal behind Sweden’s Henri Saint Cyr. At the victory ceremony, the gold medalist helped her climb up onto the podium. Four years later the same two riders finished first and second again. Strength is wonderful, but so is the champion who reaches down and lifts a rival up beside him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a brilliant young German pastor and theologian. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer warned against what he called cheap grace. He wrote that cheap grace is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” He did not just write it. He resisted, and he was arrested and imprisoned. He was moved from Tegel prison to Buchenwald and then to Flossenburg. On April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with six other resisters. Grace is free, but it was never cheap. It cost Jesus His life, and following Him still calls for our whole lives.
In 1523 William Tyndale asked the bishop of London for permission to translate the New Testament into English. The bishop said no. Tyndale realized the work would not be welcome anywhere in England, so he left. In 1525 in the city of Worms, his New Testament came off the press, the first translation from Greek into English. Copies were smuggled into England. Church and government leaders were furious, and they bought up copies to get them off the streets. Ironically, that money helped fund Tyndale’s next work. He was finally betrayed, and on October 6, 1536, he was executed. John Foxe said he cried out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” He did not curse his enemies. He prayed for them.
When Charles II took the throne, the freedom to worship outside the Church of England ended. By January 1661, preacher John Bunyan was in the county jail. The hardest part was being separated from his wife and four children. He wrote that it felt like “the pulling the flesh from my bones.” He made shoelaces to help support his family. He could have walked out any time by promising not to preach. He refused, telling the magistrates he would rather stay in prison until moss grew on his eyelids than fail to do what God commanded. He stayed about twelve years. During that time he wrote, and from 1667 to 1672 he likely worked mostly on The Pilgrim’s Progress. God used a prison cell to bless millions.
