A True Fairy Tale

What if I told you a story?

Once upon a time, there was a world. This was a pretty young world, as far as worlds go.

In a very small piece of this world, on a dry patch of desert, lived a small, scrappy, scraggly-bearded tribe of warrior-shepherds. They were surrounded by other nations that were bigger and more numerous than they, so their lives were mostly spent in conflict. But in their religion, they believed their God was more powerful than all their enemies' gods put together, so they didn't give up. Their religion had been handed down to them by their wandering sun-bronzed sheep-herding fore-fathers for generations, since the world began. They believed their God promised them victory through a coming leader, so they raised their families and fought their battles all looking forward to the arrival of the promised leader, who would wipe out their worst enemies, and they would inherit the earth.

So what happened next, you ask?

Sure enough, a few hundred years later, their Mighty Leader came. He fought their worst enemies, and became their King. He then told them to go out and make his reign known to the whole world and to spread his kingdom to the four corners of the globe. Victory was theirs, he promised, even if they were few in number now. Someday they would outnumber the stars, and all the scattered enemies would either become allies, or perish. So the people went out to do just that.

Then what happened?

A few thousand years later, they had grown from a few hundred scraggly-bearded shepherds, to cover a third of the entire world. Their holy book was read by the people of hundreds of different languages. The promises of their God were being fulfilled.

What if I told you that this is a true story?

It is. The small tribe of shepherds was Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes of Israel…and us. The promised leader is Jesus Christ, who defeated our worst enemies, freeing us from the bonds of sin, Satan, death, and ourselves. The religion that literally overtook the world in the last 2,000 years is Christianity. Since it began under the stars with Abraham, and before him, it has affected the lives of over 2 billion (2,000,000,000) people today. That is 1/3 of our world today. The book that was originally written in only Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, is now translated into over 2,287 languages around our globe.

So why the long faces today, brothers and sisters? We have a winning track record! Jesus didn’t tell us to disciple the nations in vain. He said the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail against us! In case you didn’t know, gates aren’t used for attacking…they’re used for defending against attack. That means hell is on the defensive! Or at least it should be, if we are about the business of expanding the Kingdom of light into all recesses of the world, instead of hiding in the dark predicting when doomsday will come.

The Kingdom isn’t tied to America, or any nation. It transcends them. Nations rise and fall, but the Kingdom can only grow. Look at history. See where we have come from? Now look to the future, a few thousand years from now. What growth of the Kingdom might we see?

How will you advance it?

“For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” ~Isaiah 11:9