Let me introduce some of the people I know.
There are the three businessmen at church who are also members of Gideons International. One of them is also a faithful deacon–a title meaning he wears many hats at church underneath that one! There’s the lady who volunteers her time with Scarlet Hope, a women-to-women ministry that brings “the Hope and Love of Jesus Christ to women in the sex industry.” Another brother spent his summer as a volunteer-intern at a men’s homeless shelter/addiction recovery center. A dear friend is a professor at a Christian college. He gladly exposes the follies of evolution while boasting of the glories of creation, living out the Gospel academically before his students.
I can think of a few more people.
I know a full-time open-air preacher/missionary who travels throughout the United States openly proclaiming the Gospel on college campuses and wherever people congregate in public and, by contrast, I remember the trembling, nervous saint who courageously “stepped up on the box” and gave her testimony in the middle of New York City. There’s the church pastor in a restricted nation and the senior citizen who risked arrest to bring him Bibles. Then there’s the brother who daily pleads in front of an abortion clinic to women to reconsider the choice they are making and offers other jobs to the clinic staff. There are bloggers I know and thousands I’ve never met, men and women (a lot of women, in fact!) who daily load the internet with encouraging devotional quotes and thoughts for us saints and evangelistic essays to plead with the lost who might stumble upon their sites.
What do they all have in common? For one thing, I doubt anyone will be reading a biography of them 100 years from now. No one has ever asked them for their autographs either. They are all sinners whom God has washed and cleansed to become saints. Out of gratitude for such unmerited mercy they make it the highest priority of their lives to minister in the name of Jesus Christ wherever He has them. They are life-savers and disciple-makers. Givers and doers and pray-ers. I love them all and am blessed to call them friends.
I’m sure you know people like these. Some may live right under your roof. They are home-school moms preparing their children to serve the Lord however and wherever He eventually calls them. They are aged saints who still ‘fund the call’ through their missions giving. And they are godly men who work hard, loving their wives and families more than their titles or paychecks or tee times. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. Christians. Real Christians.
In fact, I hope you are one of them.
And I hope I am too.