Hi, my name is Jim Garlow, I have the delightful joy of giving leadership to a ministry called Well Versed. One day, I got a horrible phone call. It was the phone call that my brother had been killed in a plane crash. For the first time in my life, I went into shock. We traveled across the nation, I was living on the East Coast, back to the midwest. Living in New Jersey, and traveled back to Kansas where the plane crash had taken place. Our family gathered, and not only was my brother killed, but my first cousin and my brother’s college roommate were killed.
We gathered as families and we went out to the countryside where the plane had crashed in a pasture. We walked out into that pasture, into a little small, burnt area, where the small aircraft had gone down. They had removed virtually everything. But all of a sudden, we found the remains of something that they missed. It was portions, burnt portions, of my brother’s Bible. As we picked it up so carefully, there on the top, it was burned in a triangular shape, and there around it was the burn marks of the verse that remained was the Old Testament scripture that says, “The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of God shall last forever.” We held the tiny piece of paper, we took it back to our home, we kept it on display as people came through to see the paper that was there.
The Word of God lasts forever. That little piece of paper became something we hung on to so tightly that the truth of God’s Word, the truth of heaven, for example, that my brother and my first cousin, and my brother’s college roommate were in fact in heaven, the Word of God lasts forever. And God, in the midst of that tragedy, left a little piece of His Word for us to hold on to. “Grass withers, flowers fade, everything else passes away. But the Word of God – it will last forever.”