wishing you & your loved ones a blessed Christmas Day –

* Merry Christmas * 

***

one solitary life

by James Allan Francis

Let us turn now to the story. A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life. He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army. He never has a family of his own. He never owns a home. He never goes to college. He never travels two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He gathers a little group of friends about him and teaches them his way of life. While still a young man the tide of popular feeling turns against him. The band of followers forsakes him. One denies him; another betrays him. He is turned over to his enemies. He goes through the mockery of a trial; he is nailed on a cross between two thieves, and when dead is laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend. Those are the facts of his human life. He rises from the dead. Today we look back across nineteen hundred years and ask, What kind of a trail has he left across the centuries? When we try to sum up his influence, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned are absolutely picayune in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary life. … He has changed the moral climate of the world, and he is changing it now, and will continue to do so until the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. I ask you to pause a moment and think of this thing which Christians believe. We are talking about great adventures. I remind you that there must be a great adventure in faith before there can be a great adventure in action. No man has ever done a great thing until he has first believed a great thing.

-:-:-:-

From:
THE REAL JESUS AND OTHER SERMONS by James Allan Francis.
Philadelphia: The Judson Press. © 1926. “Arise, Sir Knight!” p. 123-24.

This quote, or some version similar to it, has been shared many times over the years. This particular version is suppose to be the original. It was apparently presented by Mr. Francis, at the First Baptist Church in Los Angeles, California, to the National Baptist Young Peoples’ Union convention on July 11, 1926. Click here if you would like to learn more behind the quote.
link: http://www.sjvls.org/bens/bf007sl.htm#fn3

Advertisement