October 22
“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications…be made for all men…For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior; who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:1-4). During the English Keswick Week of 1925, Irish evangelist W.P. Nicholson was preaching the gospel in the Market Square. In the audience one night was a missionary on furlough from West Africa. To a man standing beside him, he spoke a word of invitation; the only reply he received was a severe blow on the face. That night, this man’s conversion was earnestly prayed...
Read MoreOctober 21
How important is consistent Christian testimony to effective gospel witness. In Chartist times (a Victorian era workplace reform movement), people often labored in little hovels for a mere pittance. W. Y. Fullerton tells of a Christian in the market town of Kettering, England, who worked his knitting machine in a little lean-to behind a grocer’s shop. He didn’t earn enough to buy sufficient food for his family. Each morning he came, a hungry man, and had to walk down between piles of the food his body longed to have. The shop keeper noticed he walked with clenched fists, muttering to...
Read MoreOctober 20
At meetings being held in the north of England, Lionel Fletcher noticed a rough-looking man showing the ravages of sin on his face. He was the first to rise at the end and rush to the preacher. The story poured out in sobs. His son had trusted Christ shortly before. His father was the worse for drink when Charlie told him he’d been saved. Grabbing his belt, the man began to lash his son, and did so each night he dared attend the meetings. One bitter night, finding his son hiding in the pigsty for warmth, he dragged him out and threw him in the coal cellar, all the while hearing Charlie...
Read MoreOctober 19
“What do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Cor 4:7). C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: “Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or your moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given to you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you would not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child...
Read MoreOctober 18
Edward Studd, after making a fortune in the tea business in India, returned to England to raise his family in a life of lavish excess, living for the world that is soon to be burned. But in 1875, that changed when their father was saved under the preaching of D.L. Moody. The three eldest boys, C.T., Kynaston and George, had been brought up in a religious environment that was, as C.T. later wrote, “a Sunday thing, like one’s Sunday clothes, to be put away on Monday morning.” But now Edward Studd was “a real live play-the-game Christian.” Within a year, all three were saved. The Studd boys...
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