Day 4 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.
Acts 8:4
The Pony Express ran for eighteen months, from April of 1860 until October of 1861, and in that time it carried mail about nineteen hundred miles between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. It took around ten days. What makes it worth knowing is how it was done. There were a hundred and eighty four stations strung along the route. A rider changed horses every ten or fifteen miles and handed the mail off entirely after seventy five or a hundred. Nobody rode the whole way. Not one of those riders ever saw both ends of the route. Each man knew his own stretch of ground, rode it hard, and gave the bag to the next man. The letter crossed a continent, and no single person carried it.
Luke tells us how the gospel first spread past Jerusalem, and it was not the plan anybody would have drawn. Persecution broke out, the church scattered, and they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word. Look at who that was. The verse just before says the apostles stayed in Jerusalem. So the people who went everywhere preaching were not the apostles. They were the ordinary members of that church, running for their lives, telling people about Christ as they went.
They preached from wherever they landed. A rented room, a market stall, a roadside, a new job in a strange town. None of them were handed the whole territory and none of them were asked for it. They were asked for the stretch of ground in front of them, which was usually just the next person who would sit still long enough to listen.
That is still the shape of it. You are not responsible for the island. You are responsible for your stretch. The neighbor two doors down. The guy you have worked beside for six years. The family member who only talks to you. Waiting to be useful to everybody is the most comfortable way there is to be useful to nobody, because the whole route never gets assigned and so nothing ever starts. Name the one person who is on your stretch of road right now, and this week say something to them. The next rider is not your problem. Yours is.
Growth principle: The gospel has always moved by ordinary people carrying it the stretch in front of them.
Take it with you: Name the one person on your stretch of road and say something to them this week, instead of waiting to reach everyone.
Pause and pray: Lord, I have been waiting for a bigger part than You have given me. Show me the person in front of me, and give me the words and the nerve to speak this week. Amen.
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