I was soul winning with my partner last week and ran across a lady whose testimony of conversion went to a night when she knelt alone to receive Jesus Christ as her Savior in front of her television set after Billy Graham preached the gospel. That reminded me of a chain I had read about years ago that needed to be accurized.

158 years ago, a seventeen year old boy named Dwight, born to an alcoholic father, left home to seek employment at his uncle’s shoe store in Boston. His uncle required all of his employees to attend Mount Vernon Congregational Church. Dwight was disinterested but obedient. Fourteen months later, a faithful Sunday School teacher named Ed Kimball who had been encouraging Dwight along stopped by Holton’s Shoe Store during a business day and lead Dwight to Jesus Christ. Dwight would go on to become the famous evangelist DL Moody and see almost a million people come to Christ under his ministry.

Twenty-five years later, in 1879, a Lake Forest College ministerial student named J. Wilbur Chapman attended a Moody meeting in Chicago where the great evangelist counseled him to an assurance of his salvation from John 5:24. Chapman later became a friend and in 1893 joined Moody’s evangelistic crusades as a fellow preacher and hymn writer (One Day, Our Great Savior, ‘Tis Jesus, etc.).

Chapman hired a professional baseball player turned evangelistic assistant named Billy Sunday in 1893. Sunday had been saved only 5 or 6 years prior under the street preaching of Pacific Garden Mission evangelist Harry Monroe and turned down a lucrative contract with the Philadelphia Phillies to take an $83 per month job with the YMCA as a personal worker. Chapman hired Sunday as an “advance man” for his crusades and tutored him in his preaching: a very different style with the same straight-forward gospel message.

Billy Sunday held an evangelistic crusade in Charlotte, NC in 1924 from which a Christian businessman’s prayer group was begun. Ten years later, the Christian Businessmen’s Club brought the fiery, Billy-Sunday-styled Mordecai Hamm to town for a crusade. Hamm was a pastor’s son and an eighth generation preacher known for his sin-fighting, no-holds-barred preaching. In that crusade of November 1934, sixteen year old Billy Graham left the choir loft and walked the aisle of a packed, 5,000 seat, temporary tabernacle on Pecan Avenue to accept Christ as his personal savior, along with 6,400 other North Carolinians before the crusade was finished.

Graham would leave his family’s, Charlotte, dairy farm to preach to over 2.2 billion souls by way of radio and television and is attributed with 3.2 million conversions. One of those was a dear, elderly, lady in Roseburg, Oregon named Lura, whose door I knocked last week and who attended our church last Sunday.

Stop and think about it Christian. Look at all of the links in the chain God used to bring the gospel to this dear, little lady...and there are many more than we know about. A Sunday School teacher (Kimball) led a shoe salesman (Moody) to Christ, who brought a college student (Chapman) to assurance, who hired a YMCA personal worker (Sunday), who spawned a prayer group (Christian Businessman’s Club), that organized a crusade and invited a fiery preacher (Hamm), who reached a teenager (Graham) with the gospel, who preached televised gospel sermons that convicted a woman (Lura) all alone in her house, that sat in our church last week. That’s at least eight links we know about over 150 years. Do you think each of those soul winners could foresee it?

The next time you get discouraged and feel that your efforts are pointless and unproductive, remind yourself that we will not know until heaven what became of the bread we cast upon the waters and that the gospel never returns void.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.

NEVER QUIT