Today's encouragement comes from Acts 11:18, where we read these words:
"When they heard these things they became silent; and they glorified God, saying, 'Then God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life.' "The giving of the gospel and the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles was such a dra-matic event in redemptive history that some of the people who were brought up in the Old Covenant way found it almost impossible to believe it could hap-pen. But, once the ultimate Jew (Peter) told his fellow-Jewish Christians what God had done among the Gentiles, the believing Jews also rejoiced.
Let us never slight the Lord's power to redeem sinners. We may look at someone, or some group of people, and think, "God would never [or even could never] save them." The fact that many Gentiles entered the church in the first century is a great encouragement to us with regard to what the Lord can do among people today (in the twenty-first century).
[Puritan quote of the day: "All the heathen have had some religion, because they had some conscience to trouble them.” —Thomas Shepard, in, "The Sin-cere Convert"]
