Day 1 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Romans 10:13
There is one kind of blood that almost any person on earth can safely receive. Type O negative carries none of the markers that make one person’s blood turn on another’s, so it can go into a patient nobody has had time to test. That is why a trauma room keeps it in the cooler. A car comes off the highway at two in the morning, there is no name yet, no chart, no history, and no minutes to spare. Nobody stands over the table asking who this person is or whether they deserve what is about to be given. They hang the bag that works for everybody. The one on the table does not have to qualify for it. They do not have to be the right sort of person. They only have to receive it.
Paul did not invent the promise in verse 13. He lifted it out of the prophet Joel, and the word he kept is the one worth slowing down over. Whosoever. Not whosoever is already close. Not whosoever was raised in it. The verse just before takes away the one dividing line that mattered most in Paul’s world, there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, and then says the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
Rich unto all. That is a strange way to speak of God toward people who bring Him nothing, and it is exactly the point. The offer is not cut to fit the person. A man who has wasted forty years and a child who has wasted none call on the same name and are saved by the same blood. Paul understood that better than anyone else writing in the New Testament. He had hunted down believers before the Lord saved him, and he still called himself the chief of sinners.
Which means the list you keep is not God’s list. Most of us have one. It is never written down anywhere and we would deny having it, but we could name the people on it in about four seconds. The coworker who has heard it all already. The relative who got hard about it years ago. The neighbor who is perfectly pleasant and completely uninterested. Somewhere along the way we quietly decided those conversations were finished, and we never said so out loud, not even to ourselves. God has not excluded them. He is rich unto all that call upon him, and that includes the ones you stopped expecting anything from. Take one name off that list today and start praying for them again.
Growth principle: God has excluded no one, so we have no right to quietly exclude anyone either.
Take it with you: Name one person you had stopped expecting God to save, and begin praying for them again today.
Pause and pray: Lord, I have quietly written people off that You have never written off. Forgive me. Put their names back on my heart this week, and give me one open door to say something. Amen.
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