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.
Augustine was a gifted teacher who had spent years chasing pleasure and wrestling with his sin. He later wrote about stealing pears as a youth just for the thrill of doing what was forbidden. One afternoon, troubled and anxious, he was walking in a garden when he heard a child’s sing-song voice repeating, “Take up and read.” Nearby lay a collection of Paul’s letters he had been reading. He picked it up and read the first thing his eyes fell on, Romans 13:13-14, which says to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and stop feeding the flesh. He later wrote that instantly “all the darkness of doubt vanished away.” One verse, read at the right moment, changed a life that changed church history.
Walter Scott was an early preacher in the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. Studying Acts 2:38, he taught that people respond to God by believing, repenting, and being baptized, and that God responds with forgiveness of sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and eternal life. He made it simple enough to count on one hand, and generations of Disciples learned it as the five-finger exercise. On November 18, 1827, he preached on Matthew 16:16, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Scott later called that sermon the one that restored the ancient gospel. Over the next three years his preaching on Ohio’s Western Reserve brought more than 3,000 converts. Most had been outside the church entirely. Keep the gospel clear enough to share.
Mary Slessor grew up in Scotland and sailed for Calabar in West Africa in 1876. In that region twins were often feared and killed, and Slessor became a champion baby-saver. One of the first twins she rescued, Jane, lived with her for more than thirty years. She once said, “I am ready to go anywhere, provided it be forward.” She then moved inland to the Okoyong, a region where missionaries had found no welcome. She admitted that she often had a lump in her throat and that her courage threatened to fly away. She went anyway. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with God while your knees are shaking.
Around the 1988 Olympics, sprinter Gail Devers was running slowly and getting sicker. She lost weight, lost hair, had headaches and skin sores, and at one point weighed just 79 pounds. She told her coach she wanted to quit, but he would not let her resign and said they would figure it out. After years of visiting doctors, she learned in 1990 that she had Graves’ disease. The radiation treatment left painful blisters on her feet, and she says doctors came close to amputating them. Two years later, in Barcelona, she won the Olympic 100 meters in a photo finish thought to be the closest ever. A coach who refuses to give up on you can be a picture of the God who never does.
