Encouragement for your week

I sometimes become discouraged about the world in which we live.  We have the best resources in the history of mankind to distribute bad news.  We are daily bombarded with stories of corruption, decay, and rot of society.  It seems that evil is so pervasive and powerful that ministry is all but impossible. We wistfully long for the golden age of the church, whenever that was, and wish that the world were a little more receptive to the gospel. 

But the growth of the church in the first century was a glorious move of God.  When the day of Pentecost dawned it has been estimated that in Palestine there was only one follower of Christ for every 3 million people.  Over the next forty years, the church grew at an average rate of 40% a year, every year.  Within two generations it had reached across the Mediterranean basin and mission efforts had gone from Spain to India.  It might be tempting to think that the ancient world was a more moral and noble world than our own.

I came across a quote from the noted historian Alfred Edersheim:

“Absolute right in Rome did not exist, might had become right.  The social relations exhibited, if possible, an even deeper corruption.  The sanctity of marriage had ceased, female dissipation and general dissoluteness lead at last to an almost entire cessation of marriage.  Abortion and the exposure and murder of newly born children were common and tolerated.  Un-natural vices which even the greatest philosophers practiced if not advocated obtained proportions which defied description.”

Almost sounds like he is describing the early twenty-first century.  So as you recover from Sunday, if you are feeling discouraged, remember we may be just around the corner from a glorious move of God.