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Christians you should knowLives to encourage youCHRISTIANS YOU SHOULD KNOW Many ordinary Christians have very little knowledge of church history or the great things God has done in the past through humble men and women. This is especially true if Christians are not great readers. If that is the case with you, here is the ideal remedy. At the invitation of Stuart Olyott, from 1992 to 2000 Don Stephens did a monthly ten-minute slot in an evening service at Belvidere Road Church, Liverpool, on ‘Christians who should be known by all Christians’. This MP3 provides the live audio recordings of all those excellent little talks. These pint-sized biographies go all the way from Polycarp, who knew the apostle John, through to Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984. Here we find the stories of great men and women like John Calvin and Frances Ridley Havergal, mixed with perhaps lesser known but equally astonishing Christians like Allen Gardiner and Winifred Davies. If you have read Don’s book War and Grace, you will find some old friends from the two World Wars among the Christian brothers and sisters mentioned here. I was fascinated to hear the story of hymn writer Fanny Crosby, who was only four foot nine, never weighed more than seven stone, was blind, learned the guitar which hardened the ends of her fingers so she couldn’t read Braille, but lived a long life and insisted on living to serve the poor of New York. Don has a pleasant voice and he always tries to draw one main lesson from which we can learn to take away with us for our own Christian lives. To be a Christian these days is to swim against the tide. These short biographies will provide an excellent support and stimulation to our faith. These stories tell us, ‘See what God has done!’ And this encourages us to believe, ‘What might God yet do!’ John Benton© Evangelicals Now - May 2008 |