The Gospel–Available to All

Among the stories in the Book of Acts of people who chose to follow Jesus was an Ethiopian man whose story is told in Acts 8:26-39. We do not know his name. He is only known to us as an Ethiopian eunuch who was in charge of the Ethiopian queen’s treasury.

He had gone to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home when the Holy Spirit instructed Philip to go to the desert road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza. This was the lesser of two roads that went from Jerusalem to Gaza. It was the least traveled road because it stayed out of the populated areas. As he did with Philip, sometimes God sends us to the most unexpected people in the most unexpected places to share the Gospel or to minister to people in Jesus’ name.

When Philip came upon this man on the road, the Spirit instructed him to approach the chariot. When Philip did so, he heard the man reading from Isaiah 53 in the Old Testament, and had the opportunity to explain Isaiah’s prophesy about Jesus to the eunuch and to baptize him.

The Ethiopian, although he was a worshiper of God, was not a Jew nor a Samaritan. He was from an important country as the Ethiopia of that day was a much larger region than today’s country of Ethiopia. At that time, Ethiopia was the whole region of the upper Nile River. As the first non-Judean or non-Samaritan to come to Christ that we know of, this man would become important in the expansion of the Gospel outside Judea. God was beginning to direct the church to take the Gospel to everyone, even the unexpected.

One of the early leaders of the Christian church movement in the U.S., demonstrated that kind of out-of-the-box thinking to lead others to Christ. Barton W. Stone preached for a small church at Cane Ridge in Northern Kentucky beginning in 1791. Stone had a conviction for diversity during a time of slavery, and led the Cane Ridge church in becoming an abolitionist church.

The Cane Ridge Meeting House, as it is still known, had a second level. In the early yeas of Stone’s ministry, the church still had some racial separation and black people had to sit in that second level. As a result of a great 1801 revival at Cane Ridge, many of the white men who were slave owners were convicted by the Holy Spirit and Barton Stones’ preaching to set their slaves free. A few years after that, there were black elders and leaders in the Cane Ridge church, and the entire separation between the races was gone. White and black people worshiped alongside each other on both levels of the church.

God used Barton Stone at Cane Ridge in much the same way that he used Philip in Acts 8 — to make the Gospel equally available to all who believe, regardless of skin color, nationality, position, or any of the other distinctions that we make between people. God is still in the business of using the Holy Spirit to unleash the church to turn the world upside down by reaching all people. Won’t you join him in that effort? Let the Spirit unleash you.