He who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
Matthew 13:23.
In the 1930’s a colporteur had been able to sell a Bible in a remote village in Poland. When he returned there three years later, he was pleased to discover that no less than two hundred people had found living faith in Christ through reading that Bible.
As they had only one example available, they hit upon the idea of removing the binding and carefully splitting the book into several sections. These were then distributed among the inhabitants, so that gradually everyone profited from the different parts. At a meeting with these believers the colporteur suggested that each one should say one or more verses from memory. One of them then stood up and asked, “Have we understood you correctly? Do you mean verses or chapters?”
To the colporteur’s surprise it turned out that they had not learnt individual verses by heart, but many chapters, and even entire books. Some remembered a gospel, others a section of the Psalms or of Genesis. Altogether the two hundred believers could recite practically the whole Bible between them. And that was a good thing, for the original Bible was meanwhile so dilapidated from daily usage and being passed from house to house, that it was barely legible. There the seed of the Word of God had landed on good ground and produced rich fruit for God.
Image: By Jojojoe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10188441