Greetings, dear ones.
It’s presently 12:19pm here in New York. I slept like a log and rose quite late. They kind of wore me out late yesterday afternoon on into the late evening. After attending church together, we went to Bristol Mountain Ski Resort and did a round of skiing. I definitely got a workout—a delightful workout.
I came across a typo in the READ THE NEW TESTAMENT IN A YEAR PLAN sheet. For today it should be Acts 17:16-34—not 16-40. My bad. Now I need to remember to edit my file.
Wow! It’s no longer 12:19pm—but now nearly 8pm.
Have a good evening. Blessings. Ray.
There is no doubt in my mind that Billy Graham was used by God as a dedicated, gifted, and faithful communicator of the Biblical Gospel. He was instrumental in winning thousands to faith in Christ. Nevertheless, with all those positive factors working for him, he still didn’t win them all—nor could he. That’s the observation I wrote in my Bible at the end of this reading as it relates to the evangelistic ministry of the Apostle Paul. While he was tremendously used by God to win many to faith in Christ, he didn’t win them all. Of course, there are many out there who are eager to challenge and ridicule the whole idea of winning any at all. “What difference does it make anyway? After all, statistics still show that evangelical Christians still represent only a small percentage of the world’s population. Why all the fuss? Why can’t you people just learn to CO-EXIST, and leave people alone to believe the way they want to believe?”
You have probably heard this little story before—but this seems like a good place to tell it again. A young boy came onto the scene of an exceptionally low tide while visiting the ocean coast. It was a hot summer day. The receding waters caused what seemed like millions of starfish to face certain death—removed from their marine environment and now exposed to the sun’s heat. The boy was overwhelmed with a compassion to do something. He chose to busy himself with gathering as many as he could in one arm-load at a time and tossing them out into deeper water where they would more likely survive. While engaged with this emergency activity, a passerby was amused enough to approach and ask the boy what he thought he was doing. “I’m saving starfish from dying in the sun.” The amused critic responded, “Well—as you can see, there are way more starfish on this beach than you could ever rescue. I’m sure you are well-intentioned, but what you’re doing here can hardly make much of a difference in view of the size of the task.” The boy paused briefly, but then promptly picked up another starfish and tossed it out into the water and said, “I bet it’ll make a lot of difference to that one!”
So it was with Paul in Athens—as well as along his entire missionary trail. He didn’t win them all—but he did win some. And so it is today.