Revived Conversation: Near Misses

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[00:01:04] This is Troy and Joel, and you are listening to Revived Thoughts.

[00:01:14] Okay, we got another Revived Conversation coming at you today.

[00:01:18] That's right, Revived Conversations.

[00:01:19] Revived Conversations. This is an episode in which Troy and I talk about something in church history that interests us and how it might apply to today's day and age.

[00:01:28] And I'm excited about this one, Troy.

[00:01:31] This is something that I brought up to you and I said, you know, why don't we just talk about, I think it would be neat to do near misses.

[00:01:39] And it's kind of hard to articulate, I guess. So near miss, what are, what are instances, what are interactions throughout church history in which something barely happened or didn't happen?

[00:01:51] You know, whether for the better or for the worse.

[00:01:53] What's an instance where, you know, we see, oh boy, with tens of thousands of people converted, you know, a whole course of history has been changed for the furthering of the kingdom.

[00:02:02] Praise the Lord, because of one man's actions or because, you know, he had this one conversation or because he took this road home instead of this other road or something like, you know, can we trace it back to one instance?

[00:02:15] And then, but the sad truth is there's a negative side to that too.

[00:02:19] You know, what are some wasted potential?

[00:02:21] What are some things where we said, wow, that really could have changed the world, but it was a near miss.

[00:02:27] We, you know, it was a missed opportunity. And imagine what the world would have been if such and such wasn't sick that day or, you know, had was a little bit more bold or, you know, had that conversation.

[00:02:40] What, what chain could have sprung out of that? A little bit of, a little bit of theorizing there, which we don't try to get into too much, but it is kind of fun from time to time in these types of conversations.

[00:02:51] And so we have a couple instances that we thought of that would be kind of fun to chat about.

[00:02:57] Troy, are you excited for this episode?

[00:03:00] I am. And it's funny because as you were just kind of explaining and laying it all out, it really reminds me of our deep dives.

[00:03:05] I feel like when one of the things that makes doing deep dives that we've done several so far, if you have, you'd have to go to Patreon to listen to some of these, but we've done the Salem Witch Trials.

[00:03:15] We've done Joan of Arc, a full episode of her, the full episode on the First Crusade.

[00:03:20] We've done an episode on, three episodes on the history of the church in Ethiopia.

[00:03:25] We've done an episode on the London fire and how that truly changed history.

[00:03:30] And everyone is listening to that one.

[00:03:31] It's funny, it's probably one of the episodes we've had that most people say, that should be a book or a movie.

[00:03:35] Like, I can't believe all of that happened because of one fire.

[00:03:37] And then most recently, we did a two-parter episode on the Taiping Rebellion, where a guy basically became king, a part of China in the middle of the 1800s, and forced everyone to go to church because he thought he was Jesus's brother.

[00:03:50] It's a wild, wild story.

[00:03:53] And so many of those stories, what makes them so wild and why I enjoyed researching them and what made them just, I think, compelling stories, is they're almost all stories of just constant near misses.

[00:04:05] Like, or like, if one thing went wrong in this story, this wouldn't be a story.

[00:04:09] It wouldn't even be an event we hear in history.

[00:04:11] Or if one thing went right, maybe in the case of a couple of them, it wouldn't be a story.

[00:04:15] And we wouldn't even be talking about this.

[00:04:17] But because everything went the way it did, it changed the entire course of history.

[00:04:23] And so it's amazing how often that happens.

[00:04:27] It is.

[00:04:27] And that's, I mean, when you think about it, I guess that is life.

[00:04:30] You know, like, that's how our lives unfold from day to day to day.

[00:04:34] But it's interesting with this perspective because we have the hindsight, 2020 hindsight to look back.

[00:04:41] We can analyze centuries of history.

[00:04:45] It's not like our day-to-day lives where, you know, we get to our deathbed and we think about what could have been different.

[00:04:52] We can kind of look back throughout humanity and see how it's affected the globe on that scale.

[00:04:58] And so I think it's more fascinating than, I don't know.

[00:05:03] I mean, you're right in the fact that it's just small decisions that make up life.

[00:05:07] But when you can see it on such a macro scale like that, it's interesting.

[00:05:13] Yeah, it definitely is.

[00:05:14] All right.

[00:05:14] So where do we want to start?

[00:05:15] What's the first way we're going to go?

[00:05:17] Do you want to go with the negatives?

[00:05:17] Do you want to go or do you want me to go?

[00:05:19] Why don't you start us off?

[00:05:20] Oh.

[00:05:21] All right.

[00:05:21] This is random.

[00:05:23] Good or bad.

[00:05:23] All right.

[00:05:24] Let's do it random.

[00:05:25] So as we were just kind of, as you were laying it out, my very first one that I came to was that Taiping Rebellion.

[00:05:30] So just to shorten a little bit here of a very long, you know, four or five hour story, but a very short moment.

[00:05:39] There's a guy who's going to try and take over China.

[00:05:41] It's going to be a big war.

[00:05:42] It's crazy.

[00:05:42] He thinks he's Jesus's brother.

[00:05:44] And he has a friend that thinks he's the Holy Spirit.

[00:05:47] Here's another friend who thinks he's Paul the Apostle.

[00:05:50] It becomes quite a wild thing.

[00:05:51] But right before, and Joel, I think you probably remember this as well, but right before he's kind of taking off, there's this moment where he runs into an American Baptist missionary who kind of takes him under his wing, is teaching him the ropes about Jesus Christ and kind of getting good at some better theology under his belt.

[00:06:10] And as he's in the process of getting ready to kind of bring him on board as an official member of his church, supposedly, the story goes that one of the pastors said, oh, he doesn't want to be a member of the church because he actually cares about God.

[00:06:23] He's just jealous for money.

[00:06:24] Because supposedly this associate pastor was jealous that this other guy was getting all the attention from the guy.

[00:06:30] And it kind of led to a big back and forth kerfuffle where this guy who ends up taking over parts of China will leave kind of offended and hurt.

[00:06:38] And, you know, I don't know if the story is true exactly that it went that way or not.

[00:06:42] We do know that he became friends with this American Baptist missionary.

[00:06:44] And we do know that he left that church for some kind of personal reason.

[00:06:49] But, man, it really makes you wonder, right, like if that guy had not let his own personal selfish, you know, envy and greed or whatever get in the way, maybe this guy would have gotten some better training, would have gotten the kind of teaching that kept him from going kind of crazy.

[00:07:02] And maybe he wouldn't have led to millions and millions of people, truly millions of people dying, all because one associate pastor got jealous.

[00:07:11] Right.

[00:07:11] It's a near miss here.

[00:07:13] This is the kind of negative one where if only things had gotten better, maybe we wouldn't have seen everything kind of fall apart the way they did.

[00:07:21] Yeah.

[00:07:21] Yeah.

[00:07:22] I mean, I feel like that's convicting just from a personal hoc standpoint to know that, like, the way you live your day, you never know, like, what interaction you have, what grudge or frustration you have could really, you know, offend.

[00:07:39] I mean, think of, like, this is such a horrible comparison.

[00:07:43] But, like, what about Hitler's art teacher, you know?

[00:07:46] Do you think he was ever regretted failing Hitler in art school and, like, he sent him off on the path that he did?

[00:07:54] I don't know if he was a good painter or not.

[00:07:56] I believe it was that he actually didn't get accepted into the art school, too.

[00:08:00] Okay.

[00:08:00] Is that how it was?

[00:08:02] And people have actually kind of, if I, no, I could be wrong on this, so I'm not an art scholar, don't, whatever, right?

[00:08:07] Okay, don't get mad at me here.

[00:08:08] But if I have seen some of the, and people have made the point that what was interesting was Hitler's art itself, and we're not trying to praise Hitler, we don't like Hitler here, but Hitler's art was actually pretty good.

[00:08:18] If you look at it from, like, an impressionist or a more, like, a more traditional art approach.

[00:08:24] But the school that he was trying to go to was all about that surrealism, that kind of awkward-looking Van Gogh art at the time.

[00:08:31] And his art, which was, again, actually quality art, wasn't fitting in with the new age style of art that they were looking for, so they kicked him out.

[00:08:40] And I'm not saying that that meant anything he did was okay or anything.

[00:08:44] Of course, we're not, again, Hitler's very obviously a bad man who did bad things.

[00:08:48] But it's just interesting to think of the perspective that he, in fact, wasn't even bad at art when they kicked him out.

[00:08:54] It just wasn't hip enough.

[00:08:55] It wasn't the new style, new age art, which makes it even more of a tragedy how it unfolds from there.

[00:09:01] Yeah, it would have been different.

[00:09:02] I don't know, I'm sure he would still have been a bad man, but maybe he wouldn't have never had the power that he had in that scenario.

[00:09:10] I don't know.

[00:09:11] We'll never know.

[00:09:12] Okay, I got another negative one for us, Troy.

[00:09:15] Let's do it.

[00:09:16] Regarding the steppe people and the Khan reigning era in Asia, you know, throughout the Middle Ages there.

[00:09:25] And you mean the Mongolians, right?

[00:09:27] The Mongolian Empire here.

[00:09:29] Sure, yeah.

[00:09:30] The Eastern European, like, theater of ministry has always fascinated me because it's always a little bit of a mystery.

[00:09:39] You know, we have these, like, accounts in the 900s of, you know, the first kind of documented missionaries that we know have headed out to Far East Asia, you know, out to where China is.

[00:09:52] And getting there and talking with people and then kind of, like, realizing, like, these people, like, these people know about Jesus.

[00:10:00] Not all of them, but, like, you know, they were thinking that they would literally be the first people that would bring the news of Jesus out this Far East.

[00:10:08] Somebody was out there, you know?

[00:10:09] So there's always, like, these tendrils of, like, mystery around the gospel getting out there to the Far East.

[00:10:16] So no one knows quite how or when or how these things evolved.

[00:10:20] But there were, you know, a very clear point where a lot of people look back to in the 1300s during the Genghis Khan era where it was this huge empire full of hundreds of thousands.

[00:10:34] A fifth of the whole world's population was made up of the Mongolian Empire.

[00:10:39] And I feel like a lot of people are familiar with the Khan era.

[00:10:46] And, you know, they were, the way they approached their conquering and their religions is they were open to all religions.

[00:10:54] They were of the mindset that, hey, you know, like, the more gods we have on our side, the better.

[00:10:59] So you bring your religion into our empire here.

[00:11:02] And, you know, maybe we'll have better luck on our conquering and such.

[00:11:07] And so it wasn't one where they forced other religions on people.

[00:11:11] And there was a moment in which Khan was interacting with some explorers.

[00:11:16] And they were telling him about God and Christianity.

[00:11:19] And he was very excited.

[00:11:21] And he says, hey, this is fascinating stuff.

[00:11:25] It's great stuff.

[00:11:25] Send me your missionaries.

[00:11:27] Send me people from the West to tell me about Christianity, to tell our people about Christianity, to bring it on board.

[00:11:33] And so they went back and they told the people that they want missionaries out east, that the leader of a fifth of the world's population wants to explore Christianity.

[00:11:44] And the pope did not take this very seriously.

[00:11:48] Famously sent two missionaries.

[00:11:49] It doesn't appear neither one of them actually made it out to Genghis Khan.

[00:11:53] There are kind of reports of other missionaries that went.

[00:11:57] It does appear to maybe have audiences at one point or the other conversations.

[00:12:02] But nothing that took root or established any type of Christianity in the east.

[00:12:09] It does make you wonder, like, what if through some miraculous journey and through some miraculous working of the spirit,

[00:12:17] that Genghis Khan or, you know, the leaders of the Mongolian Empire were converted to Christianity and led their empire.

[00:12:26] Imagine all of Asia right now being a primarily Christian part of the globe.

[00:12:31] It's very different than what we think of currently.

[00:12:33] And it wasn't that far away, you know?

[00:12:35] Like, with one failed conversation, that could have, that, you know, God could have used that to change the trajectory of what Christianity looks like in the east.

[00:12:45] And it didn't go that way.

[00:12:47] And as a result, the east is a pretty rough place when it comes to religions and such.

[00:12:53] They're very scattered.

[00:12:54] They're very, you know better than I do, Troy, about the state of religion.

[00:12:58] Well, I don't know why you would say I know more about that, Joel.

[00:13:01] I mean, I have lived in China, Cambodia, and I do currently reside in Indonesia.

[00:13:06] But don't let that.

[00:13:07] Okay, that was pretty prideful.

[00:13:08] That's pretty arrogant.

[00:13:08] But I think this, to me, is one of the saddest moments in all of church history and should be just a wake-up call.

[00:13:15] When you have a people group, a people group saying, send us your missionaries, send us your people, and we don't send them.

[00:13:21] What a horrible thing.

[00:13:23] What the church should have done is said, 100, we'll double it.

[00:13:26] We're going to send you 200.

[00:13:27] We're going to get you as many Bibles as possible.

[00:13:30] We're going to do everything we can because there are now millions of people open to the gospel.

[00:13:34] And instead, the Mongolian Empire will end up eventually going Islamic.

[00:13:38] Now, Joel and I were doing some research on this, and there was apparently a great debate that happened in the year 1254 in Kublai Khan's court where he does have a Christian kind of debate with Buddhists and Islam over what's the right way to go.

[00:13:50] So Christianity was tolerated in the empire.

[00:13:53] But then on the backside of that, there was also, I believe, a letter exchange between Genghis Khan and the pope where basically the pope was trying to correct Genghis Khan on some things.

[00:14:05] Like, you don't know who I am.

[00:14:06] I'm the pope.

[00:14:07] And Genghis Khan was like, I had a Nestorian Christian mom for a mom, so I actually know a lot more about Christianity than whatever you think pope.

[00:14:15] So, again, this whole issue was not dealt with very well on the church's side of things.

[00:14:21] And on the opposite side of it, the Mongolians weren't always nice to Christians.

[00:14:25] The first group of people they conquered were the Nestorian Christians within the Mongolian Empire and the steppes.

[00:14:31] Like, those tribes were the first ones they kind of destroyed.

[00:14:33] But they also destroyed many Islamic cities before they officially kind of went down that Islamic route.

[00:14:38] So, again, it's a messy situation.

[00:14:41] History often is.

[00:14:42] But from the church's perspective, what would have been different if 100 people had shown up ready to share the gospel or 200 people had showed up?

[00:14:49] You know, how different would history be if all of these places, instead of having a giant Islamic empire across Asia or just even a non-Christian, if it was all Christian?

[00:14:59] It really, like you said, it really makes you think.

[00:15:01] And it actually reminded me while you were telling me that story of our story on Ethiopia.

[00:15:05] Because how did Ethiopia become a Christian kingdom within Africa, surrounded on one side by Islam and on the other side by pagans and stayed that way for a very long time?

[00:15:15] And even the reformers would tell the Catholic church, they'd say, hey, you guys say you're the only Christian game in town.

[00:15:20] But what do you say about Ethiopia, which has been Christian for all this time?

[00:15:24] And the way that happened was two children were traveling with their uncle and they left the boat, it seems.

[00:15:31] Everyone on the boat got killed for some reason.

[00:15:33] The Ethiopians killed them while they were still the Axum Empire that killed everybody on the boat.

[00:15:37] But the two boys weren't on the boat and they were about 12 and 14 and they didn't know what to do with them.

[00:15:43] And they made them slaves.

[00:15:44] And those slaves eventually made their way to the emperor of Ethiopia because they were highly educated and they didn't seem like the kind of slaves that should be working farms.

[00:15:52] And that emperor kind of lets them be Christians in the kingdom and then he dies.

[00:15:56] And the queen of that kingdom has a one-year-old son for the next emperor.

[00:16:00] She's like, you two boys, if you please stay here.

[00:16:03] At this point, they're men.

[00:16:04] They have no obligation under the new emperor.

[00:16:06] But they say, if you please stay here, help me raise my son.

[00:16:08] He'll get killed if we leave him alone.

[00:16:11] Like, all these people want the throne, but if you're here to protect him for the next 17 years until he's an adult, I know he'll be okay.

[00:16:16] Those guys said yes.

[00:16:18] Eventually, they got to leave when the emperor became an adult.

[00:16:21] They went and got trained, came back to Ethiopia, and converted the emperor and several other people to Christ, which began a Christian kingdom in Africa.

[00:16:28] And all of that started because of some big coincidence, you know, big near-miss moments, right?

[00:16:33] If they had been killed on that boat with the other people or if they had not been brought to the emperor or if the emperor hadn't died and been replaced by a baby.

[00:16:40] You know, all these things had to work out exactly the way they did for Ethiopia to get Christianity ahead of every single person before it.

[00:16:47] And how many people came to Christ because of that Christian kingdom down there in Africa that we'll meet in heaven someday?

[00:16:53] We wouldn't know if it weren't for all of those things.

[00:16:56] I mean, you think about just the number of—you have to roll—if you're rolling a dice, right?

[00:17:00] You have to roll six, like, eight times to get all those things to work out perfectly.

[00:17:04] If you are truly materialist, right?

[00:17:07] But if you're a Christian, you look at that and you go, man, look at the way God orchestrated all of those things in a positive direction for Christianity to come to the kingdom.

[00:17:16] In that case, in Ethiopia's case, they weren't asking for Christianity, but God orchestrated it so his people could go there.

[00:17:22] And the sad part is about the Catholic one in the Mongolian sense.

[00:17:26] They were asking for Christianity, and they didn't send the people.

[00:17:30] It's not the only time, though.

[00:17:31] If you're sitting there and you're listening and you're going, oh, that's something the Catholics do.

[00:17:33] It would never happen today.

[00:17:34] Well, that's actually not true.

[00:17:36] And the end of World War II, the Japanese were actually asking for Christianity for a short spell where they were like, hey, you know, we've lost this war.

[00:17:46] The people themselves are ripe for Christianity.

[00:17:48] And they were kind of like, bring missionaries to help rebuild it, and we'll let you share the faith.

[00:17:52] And the word really never got out.

[00:17:54] Like, they told the military, like, send us Christians.

[00:17:56] We're interested.

[00:17:58] But the military didn't really ever get the word back to the American people, and the American people never really got that call to go.

[00:18:04] And so, sadly, nobody—I mean, a few people showed up, but not really the numbers that would have probably made a difference for Japan.

[00:18:11] And today, Japan is one of the hardest mission fields in the world.

[00:18:14] It's just known for being very westernized in the sense of their education, in the sense of the way they live life.

[00:18:20] But they also just—they don't see a need for Christianity because they have everything they need for the most part,

[00:18:26] even though it is also considered a place with a very high suicide rate.

[00:18:29] So if you're sitting there listening and going, oh, well, the Catholics messed it up.

[00:18:32] Protestants wouldn't have.

[00:18:33] Well, you know, that's not exactly true.

[00:18:35] It happens more than just once through history.

[00:18:47] What about some positive interactions here?

[00:18:50] I'm thinking, you know, my brain always comes back to Constantine.

[00:18:53] And I think it's strange because I don't really like—he doesn't seem like a good person, you know?

[00:18:58] Like, he's not someone I would have wanted to have been around or lived during.

[00:19:03] But he did make great strides in establishing Christianity throughout the Mediterranean and Europe

[00:19:11] and, you know, essentially, by extension, the whole world in a way that was looking very bad for Christians.

[00:19:17] You had, you know, 300 years of some pretty bad empires that were really trying their best to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth.

[00:19:28] You have Nero.

[00:19:29] You have the empire that came before Constantine that were burning Christians and Bibles, you know, as fast as they could do it.

[00:19:36] And that's—I mean, especially so early in Christianity's formation, it looks scary.

[00:19:44] If you're reading throughout history chronologically and you're, you know, you're coming up in the late 200s, early 300s,

[00:19:49] you're getting real worried about the state of how Christianity is going to survive this.

[00:19:55] And then Constantine comes on the scene and totally flips the book for what that meant for Christianity.

[00:20:02] Troy, why don't you elaborate a little bit more in case our listeners aren't entirely familiar with that setup?

[00:20:08] Yeah, Constantine gets a bad rap, but personally, I—look, I'm not saying he was a theologian,

[00:20:12] but he also—he was an emperor of Rome and he wasn't expected to be.

[00:20:15] He seemed to have Arian leanings, but when the Nicene Council put out that we're going to go Nicene,

[00:20:21] he—as far as I can tell, he went with the council and said,

[00:20:23] the council said it, let's do it.

[00:20:25] And he had some weird beliefs, like he waited till nearly the end of his life to get baptized

[00:20:29] so that he'd be perfect when he was going to die.

[00:20:31] And he wasn't the only one to do that.

[00:20:32] So again, I wouldn't go to him as my church's pastor.

[00:20:35] But in terms of being a Christian, if you were alive in the year 280 and then you were still alive in the year 350,

[00:20:41] you probably really appreciated Constantine because he took what was once, you know,

[00:20:45] the most persecuted religion in the Roman Empire and he swung it over to a tolerated,

[00:20:51] in fact, approved of and promoted religion that was now getting rid of all of these cults

[00:20:55] that have been springing up and causing problems within your faith.

[00:20:58] So, you know, he gets a bad rap, but I don't—compare him to who?

[00:21:03] Like, what are the Roman emperors that did a really good job before him that were supposed—

[00:21:08] you know what I'm saying?

[00:21:08] Like, you gotta grade people on the curve at the time.

[00:21:10] And at the time, there aren't really any better Christian Roman emperors before Constantine.

[00:21:15] And I don't know that there were really that many better ones after him either.

[00:21:19] And I should say, this is all because he had a dream.

[00:21:23] So there's one dream that changed the course of history.

[00:21:26] And what's interesting is his—I would argue that his dream was actually—

[00:21:31] look, you may say, I don't believe that God communicates the dream,

[00:21:34] so I don't believe this dream happened.

[00:21:35] He was doing it for political measures or maybe this and that.

[00:21:38] If you read secular historians, of course, they don't accept the idea that God could communicate

[00:21:42] through a dream like that.

[00:21:43] So they have every—it's political pandering.

[00:21:46] He did it to manipulate his people to fight hard, blah, blah, blah.

[00:21:48] Okay, maybe.

[00:21:50] It's possible.

[00:21:51] I wasn't there, so it's possible.

[00:21:53] But I at least accept the idea that God can change things in history.

[00:21:56] So maybe it is possible, Constantine had a dream.

[00:21:58] But what I think is important is that the guy before Constantine, Emperor Diocletian,

[00:22:04] also had a dream or at least a vision.

[00:22:06] He went to the emperor—he went to the—not the witch doctors.

[00:22:10] I did this—wait, what are the names of those people who ran the Greek court?

[00:22:13] The oracles, the seers, the vision, the people that bring you visions, that talk to the—again,

[00:22:18] the pagan god, Zeus and all those people.

[00:22:20] And he went to them, and he basically asked them for a vision of what he should do as emperor.

[00:22:24] And he was told—Diocletian was told, the empire is going to fall.

[00:22:28] The empire is dirty.

[00:22:29] It's unclean.

[00:22:30] It's no good.

[00:22:31] And he was kind of like, well, what do I do to fix it?

[00:22:33] And they said, the empire is unclean because Christians have festered within the Roman Empire.

[00:22:38] You've got to get rid of the Christians.

[00:22:39] They're causing all the problems.

[00:22:41] And so he then unleashes one of the worst persecutions on the church up until that point.

[00:22:46] I mean, he really caused a lot of people to die and be martyred because he was trying to follow

[00:22:51] that dream, that vision that he was given by the oracles and the seers to fix Rome.

[00:22:56] When he dies, the next emperor that takes over the stage, Constantine,

[00:23:01] then gets his own vision from our god.

[00:23:03] At least that's what he says.

[00:23:05] And he turns the empire Christian.

[00:23:06] I look at that and I go, wow, that's kind of this—there's just this cool battle of the visions

[00:23:10] and dreams happening here where one god had his chance to try to wipe out the Christians

[00:23:15] and then the other didn't.

[00:23:16] Now, of course, I don't believe there are other gods, but I do believe in the devil.

[00:23:19] And, you know, who knows what really happened?

[00:23:21] Maybe it's all made up.

[00:23:22] Maybe these Romans just made up stories about visions to control and manipulate their people.

[00:23:26] But regardless, it was a good thing that that happened the way it did for the Christians

[00:23:30] of that time because they were getting killed and it was a horrible thing.

[00:23:33] And then suddenly they had the chance to write down their theology out in the open.

[00:23:37] And we've had how many of those people from that era on?

[00:23:41] And I'll tell you this, it's a lot easier to find sermons from the people who live from

[00:23:45] the 4th and 5th century than it is to find sermons from the people in the 2nd and 3rd century

[00:23:50] because one group of those people are being persecuted out of existence.

[00:23:53] And, you know, it's real—I mean, they're growing, but it's hard to get their stuff out

[00:23:57] in the open and the other group isn't.

[00:24:00] And so, in my experience, I think what happened there was a pretty good thing for the world.

[00:24:04] If I can throw another near-miss story, it's kind of a small one, but it's a small one that

[00:24:11] has a big impact.

[00:24:12] And it's the story of a conversion.

[00:24:15] And there's actually a few of these we've covered on our show, but I think of this one

[00:24:18] always.

[00:24:19] It's the moment where this young man, he's about—I don't know, I think he's like 14 or 15

[00:24:23] years old.

[00:24:23] He was a little sick, so he didn't go to church with his family.

[00:24:26] He wasn't a Christian, but he'd still go to church at that time in London.

[00:24:29] And he goes—he tries to get to his family's church where they normally go to church, but

[00:24:33] he couldn't get there because it was a very bad blizzard that day.

[00:24:36] And so, instead, he turned into the nearest chapel that he could, kind of on the road.

[00:24:40] And when he turns in, he gets and sits down, and he finds out the pastor of that church

[00:24:44] isn't even there that day.

[00:24:45] There's only a few people in the room.

[00:24:46] It's not even a big church, but even for the small church that it is, there's less people

[00:24:51] than normal because the blizzard's terrible.

[00:24:52] And again, the blizzard's so bad, the pastor isn't there.

[00:24:55] But an elder gets up.

[00:24:56] He doesn't have any notes prepared beforehand, but he just decides to preach off the cuff.

[00:25:00] It's not church without some preaching.

[00:25:02] So he gives what is probably a 12-minute sermon, and he calls the people of that room

[00:25:07] to come to Christ.

[00:25:07] He looks specifically at this boy, and he calls him, you need to know Jesus.

[00:25:11] He's very specific.

[00:25:12] And that person does.

[00:25:14] For some reason, even though this young man had been going to church with his family for

[00:25:18] years, it was this message during this moment where he was converted to Christ.

[00:25:22] And that young man ends up bringing thousands of people to Christ, and we still read his

[00:25:27] sermons today because that young man, if you don't already know the story, is Charles Spurgeon.

[00:25:32] And we don't know the name of the guy who brought him to Christ.

[00:25:34] We don't even really know much about that place at all, though I did have somebody one

[00:25:38] time on Twitter when I was sharing this story said, I actually have been to that church,

[00:25:41] and I know where it is.

[00:25:42] I was like, oh, that's cool, you know where it is.

[00:25:43] So we do know the church, apparently.

[00:25:46] But we don't know even the name of that elder who did it.

[00:25:49] But what he did changed the church forever, right?

[00:25:53] Like he was able to—the Lord used him to bring another person to Christ that had a

[00:25:57] huge impact.

[00:25:59] John Newton, same thing, preaching to a young man, preaching to a small church—or not

[00:26:03] a small church, but his church, and there was a young man attending.

[00:26:06] Years later, that young man would come back, and that young man would be William Wilberforce,

[00:26:09] who will help get rid of Christianity in the British Empire alongside John Newton.

[00:26:14] You know, there's just all these little things where you don't know who you're sharing the

[00:26:18] faith with.

[00:26:18] And by the way, 200 years before that, in Britain, not just Charles Spurgeon got kind of the

[00:26:23] gospel saved by a person we don't know, but John Owen, the famous Christian theologian,

[00:26:28] Puritan, same thing.

[00:26:29] He went to go hear a famous speaker speak, but the famous speaker's carriage or something

[00:26:32] broke down.

[00:26:33] He couldn't speak.

[00:26:33] And so someone else kind of ran on stage and shared the gospel instead, and it just so happened

[00:26:38] to be that was the person that brought John Owen to Christ and not the other.

[00:26:41] And John Owen was always angry at himself for not finding out what that guy's name was.

[00:26:45] So just these little actions, right?

[00:26:48] They're tiny moments.

[00:26:49] You don't know if your own moments, right, might end up changing people for God.

[00:26:55] We always think of the pastor who's sharing the gospel with 20,000 people on a big stage.

[00:26:59] That's the way things are changed.

[00:27:01] Or maybe the missionary like Hudson Taylor out in the deep of some country.

[00:27:05] But sometimes it's just the person sharing the gospel in that moment, and God has the

[00:27:10] right person in that room that needed to hear it.

[00:27:11] I thought that was pretty encouraging.

[00:27:13] I think that's pretty neat.

[00:27:14] You know, I feel like that's something good for people to hear these days, people that

[00:27:18] aren't necessarily good preachers or, you know, like, I don't know.

[00:27:23] God can always use you in ways that you don't expect, and in ways you might not even

[00:27:26] really ever fully see fulfilled in your lifetime.

[00:27:30] Or, you know, it's okay.

[00:27:33] God calls us to be faithful, and that's all we can do.

[00:27:36] So that's all I got, Troy.

[00:27:37] Do you have anything else?

[00:27:39] Well, I can go, I mean, I can give you several more near-miss stories.

[00:27:43] I mean, our entire London Fire episode is because one baker may have, his daughter,

[00:27:49] may have left a oven on, probably, when she went to go use the bathroom in the middle

[00:27:54] of the night, lit a candle, set it next to the oven, went to bed, forget to blow it out,

[00:27:57] and set London on fire, burnt 90% of London down, and literally unveiled a Catholic plot

[00:28:04] to take over.

[00:28:05] Well, not actually.

[00:28:06] There was no Catholic plot.

[00:28:06] Oh, wait.

[00:28:07] Actually, there was.

[00:28:08] The king of England was going to be Catholic.

[00:28:10] I mean, it's a wild up-and-down story that we do, like, a two- or three-hour episode on.

[00:28:14] You can go find in the feed from last summer that we put out.

[00:28:16] That's a near-miss because if that one fire hadn't gone off, probably none of that story

[00:28:21] would have happened, which is just absolutely, it is a wild story.

[00:28:25] I actually tell that story to my students, and every year, they're always at the end,

[00:28:29] so, like, who started the fire?

[00:28:30] Because I don't tell them who started the fire until the very end.

[00:28:33] I'm like, oh, it's just a baker's oven daughter by accident.

[00:28:36] And they're always like, what?

[00:28:37] All of that happened because of one baker's daughter?

[00:28:39] Yeah, all of that happened because of one baker's daughter who didn't blow out a candle.

[00:28:44] I mean, like, there are just so many moments like that.

[00:28:47] Some of them are good, and they're, you know, the Charles Spurgeon sharing, you know,

[00:28:51] sharing the faith kind of moment.

[00:28:52] Some of them are kind of funky.

[00:28:53] Like, there's a famous Methodist that we shared, Thomas Cook.

[00:28:58] He was going to Canada to share the gospel with people there.

[00:29:01] There were a bunch of tribes and stuff.

[00:29:04] He wanted to share the gospel.

[00:29:05] He gets a team ready.

[00:29:06] They sit on the boat.

[00:29:07] And I don't know if they run into a storm or what.

[00:29:09] But anyway, when they finally reach land, they are not in Canada.

[00:29:14] They are in the Bahamas, which personally, I feel like there were signs.

[00:29:19] Like, right?

[00:29:20] I feel like there had to have been some.

[00:29:22] Look, I'm not a weather mapper, okay?

[00:29:23] I don't know what it was like to sail back then.

[00:29:25] But I just imagine there had to have been some signs at some point where you're like,

[00:29:28] this isn't Canada.

[00:29:30] It's not cold and miserable.

[00:29:32] It's pleasant, and there are beaches.

[00:29:34] Like, there had to have been some signs.

[00:29:35] And then when, but when he gets there, he goes, well, I guess God wanted us in the Bahamas

[00:29:40] and not in Canada.

[00:29:41] So they do like a run through of the Caribbean and share the gospel with a bunch of people

[00:29:45] there for like six months because they're like, well, the Lord wouldn't have redirected

[00:29:48] the boat here if he didn't want us here.

[00:29:49] And I just think that is so cool.

[00:29:51] Like, imagine a, you know, imagine a summer missionary team.

[00:29:54] It's like, we're going to go to Honduras, and then suddenly the plane lands, and they're in

[00:29:57] Kenya, and they go, well, God must want us here instead.

[00:30:00] I mean, you know what?

[00:30:01] We can't even imagine something like that happening today.

[00:30:03] But I just think that's pretty cool.

[00:30:06] Very cool.

[00:30:07] Very cool.

[00:30:08] Okay, I think that's going to do it for today's episode of Revive Conversations.

[00:30:12] Audience member, if you want to suggest a Revive Conversations, if you say, hey, this is a

[00:30:17] neat topic, talk about this.

[00:30:18] I want to talk to you.

[00:30:19] Here's some thoughts I have about this.

[00:30:20] Email us, revivethoughts at gmail.com.

[00:30:24] We would love to chat about what you guys find interesting as well.

[00:30:28] So don't hesitate to write in.

[00:30:32] And then, you have anything to challenge?

[00:30:34] I want to challenge the audience.

[00:30:36] Give us something controversial.

[00:30:38] Give us something that will get us unhappy emails.

[00:30:42] All right?

[00:30:42] We're not trying to cost her the pot, but I'm saying, give us something.

[00:30:44] Troy and I don't always agree on these.

[00:30:45] We disagree.

[00:30:46] We definitely don't.

[00:30:47] Go listen to our Church History Conference revived conversation where we definitely did

[00:30:51] not agree on that one.

[00:30:52] Not in a bad way.

[00:30:53] We're friends.

[00:30:53] But I mean, like, you know, it was a disagreement episode.

[00:30:56] But send us something like that.

[00:30:57] We'd love to have like a debate using Church History.

[00:31:00] We find there are so many podcasts and shows that can just break down theology and the Bible

[00:31:06] really well.

[00:31:07] But the Lord has blessed us with the, we hope, the ability to break down Church History for

[00:31:11] you and how it can be relevant to your life today.

[00:31:13] And we want you to obviously go to the Bible and get that good theology too.

[00:31:17] But we also think Church History can also help us better understand some of those things

[00:31:22] and certainly can help encourage or convict us in how we live our lives.

[00:31:26] So that's what we hope to do.

[00:31:27] So send us some topic ideas and feel free to go a little controversial.

[00:31:31] We'll see what we can do for you.

[00:31:33] This is Troy and Joel, and this is Revived Thoughts.