We'll just take this time before our noon break, and we hope to look again in the book of Acts, and trust that it will be a time of encouragement to all of us. We'll be looking at Acts chapter nine, so you might open your Bibles there now. Constantly I hear as I move amongst God's people the lament that many of the assemblies seem to entertain, that that they have serious needs and serious deficiencies, that if they only had these things, it would move the work of the Lord ahead. And sometimes that may be true. I don't know. I'm not with them long enough to really assess that. But the sorts of things they often mention is that we need better leaders, better leaders. And yet I sense, and the time I spend with them, I hear very little prayer for the leaders they have. I don't hear them holding up their elders to the throne and asking God to put a hedge around them and bless them and keep them true to the Word of God and protect their families and save their children and all of these things. And yes, we could all be blessed by better leaders. Sometimes we're thinking in terms of bionic people, super bionic people, just people a cut above the rest. And we rely on people when we need to rely upon the Word of God and the Son of God. It's a sobering thought, though, that leaders in the local church cannot raise the spiritual level of God's people above the level that they themselves have experienced with the Lord Jesus. Sometimes we hear that, well, what we need is more talented people, more gifted people. It was Robert Murray McShane who said, it's not so much great talent that God blesses, but a great likeness to Jesus Christ. And what we need is people meeting with the Lord who are like the Lord Jesus. And what a blessed thing it is to come across individuals who reflect the Lord Jesus. Oh, to reflect His grace, causing the world to see love that will grow, though others shall know, Jesus revealed in me. We need people who reflect the Lord Jesus. And McShane said, God values holiness and humility. above talent every time. So these are some of the things that we hear about. And I believe what we often need are more people in the pews just like you and me who are committed to the Word of God and the God of the Word who are intense and persistent and faithful in their personal lives and that's reflected in the ministry of the local church. As I thought about this, I thought about a book I read. I was blessed by reading the life story of William Carey. William Carey wasn't a bionic believer. He wasn't a great leader. He wasn't a super talented person. In seventeen eighty-three, Carey was a cobbler. He said, I'm not willing to be called a shoemaker because I am just a cobbler. He became a Baptist pastor. He had no formal education of any kind. He had no theological education of any kind. but he felt that God had put his hand upon him and was sending him out into God's work. And this predated, this predated what we call the missionary era that we are familiar with. And he thought of India, and he especially, even without an education, thought that God could use him in Bible translation into the many dialects of the people of India. So he told his moderator at the ministerial association meeting where he was meeting, and he said, told him his burden. And this man looked at Carrie and of his simplicity and of his humbleness and of lack of education and many other things. And he said, Carrie, sit down. When God wants to save the heathen, he'll do it without your help and without mine. But Carrie was determined to serve the Lord. He was a persistent, plotting person. And he was determined to go anyway, and he prepared himself for ten long years. And then in seventeen ninety-three, he sailed to India with his wife and family to begin what we now call the modern missionary movement. Now, when you read the story of Kari, it's easy to have a short synopsis which looks glorious and glamorous and powerful, but he had endured terrible, terrible opposition there. His wife was mentally ill much of the time and was a real hindrance to his full exploitation of his passion for the Lord to Indians who needed to know Christ. And she died over there without being able to be any help to him. And he tried to raise his children and minister the word of God without the help of his wife. But his biography records these words. As the ship left the dockside, He called out to a small congregation standing on the pier. I will go down into the earth and mine precious souls, but you at home must hold the ropes. What God's work needs today is not bionic believers or super special leaders. What God's word needs is rope holders, just ordinary folk like you and I who are willing to hold the ropes. For forty-four years, despite these horrendous obstacles, he founded schools, universities, churches, publishing houses, and many other things. And by hand-operated presses, he printed over two hundred thousand Bibles and countless portions of the Bible in over forty dialects, which opened up the possibility of the reading of the Word of God, the three hundred million people. Because Kerry was a persistent person. and a plotter. At the end of his life, he was asked what was the secret of his success, his reply, put on my tombstone. Kerry was a plotter. And then he added, I have plotted while forty-four years others have held the ropes. That's the secret. That's the answer. That's the opportunity that you and I have to be faithful to Jesus Christ. We may not be known hundred yards beyond our home. We may not be known to any magazine or any publishing house or any biographical production company, but we're known to God and He values every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ who knows Him and loves Him and worships Him and is recognized not by the world, but His deeds are known and His heart is known in heaven. So I want you to turn to Acts chapter nine for one of the most unusual verses in the book of Acts. Chapter nine is taken up with Saul's conversion. He loved to talk about his conversion, and he does so three times in the Scriptures. And each one adds a little flavor and a little excitement, a little blessing as we read about this man who loved to tell others how he came to Jesus Christ. And it was a very interesting and rocky reception he had by God's people. And we read in verse twenty-two, but Saul increased the more in strength and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ. Imagine Saul of Tarsus, who were hauling men and women to prison and was responsible for the death of Stephen. He was the one who lied and connived so that false witnesses would convict Stephen and he would be stoned to death And when we read about the life of Stephen, you wonder such a godly man full of power and of the Holy Spirit, Acts chapter six says, and who so reflected the Lord Jesus that he died with the same spirit as Jesus. And Saul was responsible for that. That God could reach and save that man is a miracle of grace. And it's a miracle of grace that God saved us. When will we ever get over the blessing and the worship of the fact that I, a guilty hell-deserving sinners, and touched by God's hand, and his blood has cleansed me from sin. He's made me a saint in an air of God, and soon we're going to be with him in eternity. What wonder, what love, and what grace. But I think of Saul in this light, and we read that now he's proving that the one whom he blasphemed and was responsible for the oppression of God's people, that this is the very Christ. Now we come to verse twenty-three. What we need to remember is between verse twenty-two and twenty-three, there is an interval of several years. So we don't read continuously. And after that, it doesn't say that after having made this confession that Jesus is the Christ and witnessing to the authenticity of his salvation, that after that moment, then many days were fulfilled. It said many days. We need to know that there's a period of time, at least three years in there. And after that many days were fulfilled, the Jews took counsel to kill him. Paul was off, probably in Arabia, probably God building into his life and speaking to his heart many of the things that spilled from his soul that are recorded in the thirteen epistles that he wrote. And it says the Jews took counsel to kill him because he had returned to Damascus. They had never forgot the treachery they thought he had perpetrated when he turned from defending Judaism and then embraced the Lord Jesus. They took counsel to kill him. But their laying await was known of Saul, and they watched the gates day and night to kill him. Then the disciples took him by night and led him down by the wall in a basket. Not just a little write-off in part of Scripture, but a very important thing that Paul never forgot. Turn to Second Corinthians chapter eleven. Second Corinthians chapter eleven is this unbelievable account of Paul boasting about his weakness. And he's talking throughout the whole of chapter eleven of the things that happened to him. And he just sort of lists them. By this time he's halfway through his earthly ministry and he already has been shipwrecked three times. Imagine the apostle Paul on a ship and it's wrecked and he's swimming and he catches a piece of the wreckage. And he says, I floated around the day and night in the Aegean scene. I just had my arm around a piece of board, but God preserved me. Now, this was only halfway through his ministry. And he's confronted by boasters. He's confronted by Judaizers who are saying, Paul, you're a nobody. You claim to be an apostle. You claim to be an apostle. But we see you as just a short, humpbacked, hook-nosed Jew. That's all you are. And it's true that when you write us letters, they're impressive. You see, he had written at church at Corinth four letters. We have only two of them in the canon of Scripture. We have his second and fourth letters. But the internal evidence of those letters tells us the one that preceded our first Corinthians and one that preceded our, followed our second Corinthians. So here's what he's doing. They're saying to him, when we see you, you not only look ugly, but your hands, when you come to minister to us as an apostle of Jesus Christ, you don't even get your hands clean. You claim it's because you're making tents through the day and the dye of those goat hair tents just won't come off your hands. And they were looking for bionic leaders and outstanding leaders and impressive leaders. And Paul says, well, you're boasting of yourself, but I want to boast in my weakness. And he outlines his weakness. And then he says, he thinks of something that will tell him that he's a weak man. Verse thirty-one of two Corinthians chapter eleven, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed forevermore, know us that I'm not lying. I'm a weak person. In Damascus, the governor, under Aretus the king, kept the city of the Damascusians with a garrison designed to apprehend me. He's thinking right back to Acts chapter nine, verse twenty-five. And through a window in a basket, I was let down by the wall and escaped their hands. This is how he boasts about his weakness. Have you ever thought about that little verse, Acts nine, twenty-five? I don't want to say anything complicated about it. I just want to encourage you that God values the faithful rope holders. Four simple observations about this verse. Then the disciples took them by night and let them down by the wall in a basket. There are two main words in Greek for baskets. One is the basket that a housewife might take to the market. a little basket in which she'd put the bread and the produce and things that she would buy there and bring it home. The word that's used in both these scriptures is a large basket, which was a fish basket. When you go to Israel today in certain parts, you'll see them still using these baskets in which they loaded the fish. One thing I noticed when I picked one of those up to assess its size was the smell it had. You can't get the smell of fish out of the basket. And really Paul was saying, God is willing to use people like me and he's willing to use other people who are faithful and are plotters and our rope holders. And the essence of my humility is not that I am special, but I'm just a person who was let down from a wall in a time of need in a stinking fish basket. That's what he's wanting to know. So the rope holders, let's look at them. We're not going to talk about Paul anymore. But he's a very important part in the book of Acts from chapter twelve on. But we're going to look at the people we forget. We forget the people in our assemblies and the people who meet with us as God's people who are plotters and work holders, rope holders. And we need to understand that God values them immensely. So who were the rope holders? Who were they? Do you think Ananias was there? Ananias had a very special but tenuous relationship to the Apostle Paul. He was the one that had to go in and greet Paul on behalf of the brothers who weren't brave enough to go in and greet him and believe that God had done a work of grace in his life. And they just knew that they were on his hit list, so why should anyone step into the room and believe him when he said, I'm a believer in Jesus Christ. I'm completely changed. And so Ananias went in and reached out his hand and said, Brother Paul, I don't think Paul ever got over the fact that he was welcomed to the family of God by a man who he intended to kill. And there was Ananias. Surely he was one of these rope holders. I don't know whether Philip was there or Barnabas because he was the kind that might show up to be an encourager and a strengthener and an exhorter. What about Jude from Straight Street? I can think of a lot that I would think might just make it there to help Paul in this predicament. We really don't know, but you can fill in anybody you want. You can think of some dear saint in your local assembly who have given the opportunity would have been on the wall of Damascus and would have been letting Paul down with the ropes. These men were risking their lives on this mission. If they had been caught, they would have been murdered. They were defying the authorities who were seeking Saul or anybody associated with them. They were faithful to a man that said he was saved and then disappeared for three years and came back and was immediately a risk to the whole body of the faithful in Damascus. And so they were faithful. They played an essential part in launching the great Apostle Paul in his worldwide ministry. Who were these people? Where do we look in the Bible? Give me the chapter and give me the verse, and I will underline it in red in my Bible, but their names are not known to Scripture. There's no monument. We raise monuments to inconsequential people all over the world, and plaques are unveiled. but you can go nowhere in the world in the near Middle East and you won't find a monument listing the names of these rope holders. You'll never find them. Their names are not known to Scripture or to the church or they're not recorded anywhere. There's no shrine in their honor, but they are known to God. They're known to God. One of the great blessings is for me to think that when I go around and fellowship with great joy with simple people who belong to Jesus Christ, they are very special people and every one of them are known to God. They can be lying in a nursing home. I used to visit one of the members of our assembly in a nursing home, and she was eighty-six, and she couldn't serve in any way to help the assembly in the way that we tend to think is help. But every time I would go, she would smile and praise the Lord, and she'd say, Paul, I always pray for you. And I have a prayer list that takes me two and a half hours to go over, and I go over it three times a day. And I say, oh, there's a rope holder. There's a person. I don't know if my wife remembers to pray for me, although she does all the time. I don't know whether my brethren are praying for me when I'm down here in Iowa. I really believe they are. But I know that most of the believers I know, I'm not on their mind at this particular time. But I know that old Mrs. Scott was praying for me every day, three times. I know that the Lord Jesus is interceding for me at the right hand of the Father. I know that God the Holy Spirit is involved as somebody who helps the infirmity I have in prayer and takes the great desires of my heart that I cannot articulate in an acceptable manner to the Father. But the Holy Spirit knows my heart. He knows the heart of the Father. And he speaks to him on my behalf. So along with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was old Mrs. Scott, and she was somebody who prayed. And so there's a lot of small people that are just ignored, who are crucial rope holders and plotters and effective partners with our faithful God in the ministry which he's doing on earth. God still values the people or a cup of cold water people. He doesn't forget them. He's still the God who... who is very impressed by the two mites which are put in the temple treasury. He's still very much interested and appreciates the prayer from the closet. Somebody who can close the closet and men don't see, but they're in communication with the living God. We need more cold water cup people. We need more people who know what it is to give out of their riches, even if their riches are very small and they give them to the Lord. We need people who knew what it is. to go into closets and close the door and pray fervently for the work of God in both worship and evangelism. God who is faithful will someday openly reward and say, well done, thou good and faithful servant. When we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we're going to have some big surprises. Some of the names that are in neon lights and some of the ones who have several biographies written about them and And some who have mass appeal on television and radio and the printed word, we're going to expect to be lined up in the front row. But I believe that the judgment seat of Christ is going to be populated in the front rows by people who are faithful. Just nobody's in the world, but very important to the Lord. And with the gifts and abilities and passion that God has given them, they've been faithful in the time that God has left them on earth. So the rope holders, it's very important to think about who they really are. Who are the rope holders in your assembly? Do you ever think about that? Do you ever think about the people that are buried in the bowels of your assembly building who are Sunday school teachers? Can you name five of them? If in an assembly the size of the one I'm blessed to be with, there are a lot of Sunday school teachers, but they're buried in the bowels of that building Sunday after Sunday. after Sunday. My wife taught Sunday school consecutively for fifty years and she counted that the greatest privilege that God ever gave her. And she'd asked me to join her at our table and she would go over the names of every girl in her class and we'd just pray for them. And God gave her passion for dear teenage girls who needed to know Jesus. But I never heard the assembly ever mention those names of those girls. I never heard them actually mention the names of the Sunday school teachers. Now, the assembly now does so. What they do is they give us every quarter a paper that will fit in your Bible and it lists every Sunday school teacher, every class they teach, those who help them and supervise them and organize and facilitate them. and who their prayer partners are. And each one of us are asked to keep it in our Bibles, and every day as we open our Bibles in our family altar, we ask God to come in powerfully into the lives of those teachers. About every quarter, they bring them up to the attention, and they're on the pulpit of our assembly. And the elders don't let what the modern church is doing rob us of some of the most precious things that happened in the Old and New Testament. You remember David when he was anointed king just as a fuzzy-cheeked young fellow in the presence of his brothers who hated him, and Samuel laid his hands upon him and identified him before those men that this is God's anointed, and it caused them to think differently. And so when the battle was going bad or they were angry against them as they were, they had to remember that God had said, this is my man for my work in this time. In the New Testament, Acts chapter six, you remember the prototypes of deacons? There were those men of whom Stephen was one, men full of the Holy Ghost and of the Spirit and of power. And the whole church agreed that they were the people. And the leaders who were actually the apostles at that time, they put their hands upon them and identified them as the people God wanted for that work at that time. Now, we steer clear of that with a passion. It makes us shudder. But in our assembly, they bring those dedicated, committed Sunday school teachers and their facilitators and the superintendents of the three Sunday schools. And they bring them up and the whole assembly joins and prayer for them that God will just anoint them with a passion for souls and equip them to be effective in the salvation of boys and girls. And then one or two of the elders will just put their hands upon their shoulder and commit them to the glory. and say to the congregation, we have confidence in them, pray for them, and tell the Lord that they need his supernatural power. Well, there are lots of rope holders in our midst, and Sunday school teachers and boys clubs and Awana club leaders are just some. But then there are other kinds of rope holders in our assemblies. I think of parents. I think of parents. like Moses' mother, Jacobed, and like Timothy's mother and grandmother, Lois and Eunice, and like Samuel's mother, Hannah. What would they have been without parents like that? Many of you are parents, but God is counting on you to be a rope holder. We have no real business in being involved in a public way, and I say this advisedly, in the advancement of God's kingdom if we're not committed with passion and with intense devotion. to the salvation of our boys and girls, and that God would sanctify them by His truth and make them effective for Jesus Christ. Does that sound too harsh? It bothers me with a passion when some of my spiritual heroes are people that I actually revere. One of them is Dr. A. W. Tozer. And when I give handouts in ministry to help people follow the text, I often quote A.W. Tozer. A.W. Tozer is a man anointed by God, he had five children and none of them came to Jesus Christ. A lot of our missionaries are struggling away in the outermost parts of the world and some of our full-time workers are doing the same and their priorities are wrong. First of all, they need to know that their children and their family and their spouses are their number one spiritual responsibility. And if that was so, our families would be different and our marriages would be different. And I never knew a day in my life as an unsafe person when there wasn't an open door in our home in which my mother and father were praying for me that God would save us. And it had a powerful effect on my life. They would cry to God with tears that the Spirit of God would be powerful in my life, my twin brother's life, and my sister's life, and that they would come to faith in Jesus Christ. They had a passion, a passion for prayer. And I believe that we need prayer warriors, beginning with our families and for single people and older people and grandmas and grandpas and others that we need to commit ourselves in a special way to be a rope holder for families and for parents and that they would come to the Lord Jesus. They are the rope holders that need to be recognized and supported. There's a special way in which elders are rope holders and If you've never been an elder, you have no idea. You can't know the stress and sleepless nights that can come and the feelings of an inadequacy and the size of a task and the commitment of time and the criticism endured and the cost of being an elder. We need to pray with a passion for them that God would protect them and bless them and protect their families and keep them in a close relationship to Jesus Christ. My father was not only a preacher of the gospel, but an elder in a local church and a self-supporting teacher of the Word of God. And he used to come home from elders' meetings. I remember it before I was saved, and he had an ulcer, which in no small measure, I believe, had a lot to do with the meeting he just came from. And he would come home holding his stomach, and he would crawl into bed. And I remember my mother a lot of times saying, James, how did you sleep last night? He said, I slept like a baby. Always said the same thing. And then I understood that babies sleep a little and then they cry a little. And I remember my dad just crying to God that he would help him to be faithful and a rope holder as one of those responsible for a small group of God's people. I want to ask you, are you a rope holder? And I've only given you a couple of examples of what they may be, but we need to be committed. Are you a rope holder for anybody? anybody in your local assembly? Is there anybody God has placed upon your heart, and you've committed to be faithful, and to pray, and to encourage, and to stimulate, and to nourish, and to strengthen? Is there anybody, or are we all just observers? We're standing outside the wall, and we're watching what's going on, and in the darkness of that night, we're kind of surprised to see behind the moon, with the walls of the city shut, three or four or five men walking along the top of the wall. And that's unusual at night, but it's more unusual to see them carrying a big basket and several coils of rope and this bent and stooped little man actually climbing into the basket and being let down by the ropes until it reaches ground. We're not there helping that problem. We are just observing it and wondering what it all means. And there's a lot of us in the body of Christ are just sitting around being observers of what God is doing. And God asks you to matter whether you're a ninety-eight-year-old grandma, whether you're a sixteen-year-old, recently saved a young person, or anything in between, to be plotters and faithful and committed people and hold the rope for the work that God has promised to do. Well, the second thing is they held the ropes at night. Everything seems more difficult at night, doesn't it? Everything was more dangerous at night there, and sometimes it is now. So the things that are safe in the day are often dangerous at night. I remember when I was a real doctor, I used to just whistle my way through a busy day's practice and had a smile on my face, but when I climbed into bed and the phone rang at three o'clock in the morning, I did not have the same spirit. And under my breath, I'd say, oh, no, not Mrs. Jones again. And I'd have to climb out of bed, and my mouth tasted like I had swallowed poison, and my hair looked like I had combed it with my shoe, and I'd reluctantly get into my car, and I'd go down to deliver her baby. I can't remember a baby I ever delivered during the day, but I can remember every one I delivered at night. And they would say some funny things. The minute the baby was delivered, they would say, how much does he weigh? I said, look at, I haven't got his feet out yet. Just give me a chance. And Mrs. Jones, it's four in the morning. You're asking stupid questions. And then they'd say, well, how long is he? And I'd say to all Vince, how much I stretch his leg. You pick the number. And I can remember all of this at night. But, you know, Peter was like that. He walked on water during the day, but he was a coward at night. It's very hard to hold the ropes at night. But it's easy when everything is going all right, isn't it? It's easy to be part of a local church when things are going all right. But when the night time comes to your assembly, God's counting on you to be involved as an encourager and a prayer warrior and a strengthener and a worshiper. He's counting on you. So do not be sitting on the sideline. The local church is not a war. It's a fight. You don't sit in the stands and just comment negatively about what's going on. You lay hold of God that He'll intervene and do great things through simple people like you and me. And so we need to know that they held the ropes at night when it was danger. Why be faithful at night? The Lord Jesus was faithful at night. When the darkness enclosed him, And the wrath of God was poured upon him. And the Holy One who knew no sin was made sin for us. He'd bear my sin in his own body on the tree at night. And I must tell you, I disagree with those who say he could have called ten thousand angels and was out of there. That's why we don't take our theology from the hymn book. For in the eternal councils of the triune God in the eternity past, He was committed at that time to enter our time and space and go to the cross, and he knew what it was going to mean to bear my sin in his own body on the tree. He could not come down, but in the darkness of those hours when the Father put the wrath of the sin of the whole world upon him, he was faithful. And that's why we're here today to praise and worship him. And if we thought about that, the lovely meeting we had this morning would have more passion. And our hearts would be broken and there'd be tears in our eyes. And we think of the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus when it was nighttime. But it's human to come down. The third thing I want to mention to you is that they held the ropes until their basket touched the ground. Why hold the ropes until your basket touches the ground? Number one, because you may be the only one holding the ropes, you may be the only one. You may be praying for a young person in your local Sunday school who doesn't know Christ, or you may be praying for a young person who's having struggles in their life. And you need to remember that you may be the only person who's praying, so hold the ropes until their basket touches the ground. You may be the only person who has access to them. You may be the only person who is strengthened and gifted by God to meet their needs. And you need to know that the only one that they're following is you. You have an authentic life and they're following you. Every Christian should have three people in their life. One is somebody who is a new Christian, who is younger in the faith in you. And you need to recognize that sometimes their journey is tough. It's uphill. And you need to run with them and encourage them. You need to look in your assembly and find somebody who is following Christ, but they need you because they're following you." George Moore, the Irish playwright and poet. He rates in one of his books something that was very insightful to me. He talks about the time during the Irish famine when unemployment was nil and people were dying and he said the Irish who used to sing, there was no singing anymore. But then it was announced that there was a project to build a road somewhere, and they got involved in building the road. And he said, they sang again, they sang again, and their voices were raised to heaven. He said, it was like the old times because they were working. But then they found out. They were found out that this was a make-work project, and this road led to nowhere. And he says, they stopped singing because it's hard to build roads that lead to nowhere. When people are following you, make sure you're leading them to Jesus Christ. Make sure that your modeling of Christ is authentic. Make sure you get close to God before they get close to you. And so there are people that are younger than us that need to have us to follow and we ought to be discipling them. And then there's people our own age that we need to be accountable for. And two, it really bothers me with a passion that a lot of us are accountable to nobody. And I can wander around the country and if it wasn't for my elders calling me home from time to time and just gently asking me where I am with the Lord and how I am with my family and do I have difficulties with any of God's people here or there anywhere and they hold me accountable but most of us aren't. And our missionaries are out wandering the fields of the world and they're not accountable. And a lot of us are just so lone stars but we need to have people who are accountable. And I have a brother I meet with. He's in the assembly seven miles down the road. And we meet every Tuesday, if it's possible, once a month. And we have breakfast together, and he asks me the hard questions. Sometimes he says, Paul, you've got egg on your tie. Sometimes it's literally true. I usually get a plane when it ends up looking like this. But he said, I only tell you that because I love you. We need to be accountable and have somebody like that. We need to have older people who are modeling Jesus and their authentic life is an inspiration to us and they care for us. What an impression it was on me when I was first saved that a twenty-four-year-old man took me under his care. And he had a wife and a family and a very busy business, but he had time. He'd phone me on a Saturday morning and say, are you free? I'm going somewhere. I'm going to buy some lumber from my deck, but I'd love you to come. and just spend time together and we'll have lunch together. And all the time he was pumping the Word of God into my life and modeling authentic Christianity. Why are we sitting on the sidelines as we're upholding to do? And our assemblies would be revolutionized if we caught a vision of what God is willing to do with every one of us here if we'll just commit what we have to Jesus Christ. I think of this. I think of my second oldest son, Brian. He came home one day in his final year of high school, and he said, Mom, Dad, there's two kids in my class, a boy and a girl, their brother and sister, and their dad has taken off to live with another woman, and their mother is now in Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital, and I don't think she's ever going to come out. He says, we're sitting here at supper, and we've got... cooked food and you've made cookies, Mom, and I can smell them almost down the street and I'm enjoying all these things. They have nothing like that. And as soon as we're finished supper, we're going to open the Bible, we're going to talk about it, we're going to pray. And they've never known that. Mom, we've got to get those kids into our home. We just have to. They had a burden for them. And so they came. What a delight it was to fulfill those little simple things. And then... Then he left for Israel where he studied for a number of years. But just before he left, something happened. I was working in the hospital over a Saturday night and I tore home, got a shower and brushed my teeth and grabbed my Bible and drove up a through way about twenty miles to an assembly where I was ministering the word that morning. And I flipped on the radio and it talked about on this very road that there was a serious accident during the night and that some young people were killed. And they gave the names of these two young people. They were killed that night. And so within a mile I came to the scene. The telephone pole was down. There was debris that had been swept off the road. But I knew that these two young people were in eternity and I didn't know whether they knew the Lord Jesus. Well, Eunice was tidying up Brian's desk shortly after that. And she pulled out this piece of paper that he had written before he had gone. And here's what he said. Safe inside my tidy room within its silent space. I sit in my complacency. No care is on my face. My TV and my stereo, they fill my every need. My library is richly stocked with books and things to read. Outside this sacred shrine of calm, each morning I am hurled only to return again, untouched by a dying world. The stillness of this little room has just been swept away, for as I sat in careless calm, I learned my friends were killed today. In shame I write inside my room a self-condemning list of times I fail to share your love and of opportunities missed. My smugness has been blown away by winds of shock and dread. Will now my books reverse your plan, my TV raise the dead? Some creatures made in love by you placed on this earth to dwell because of this one's selfishness may well now be in hell. Or would that they had one more chance than I were in their place, so they might search and find your love and know your love and grace. Shake me, stir me, wake me, Lord. This dying world to see, remove my cold complacency. For sinners burden me. Why do you hold the ropes until the basket touches the ground? Because you may be the only one holding. the ropes. And finally, you never know who's in your basket. You never know. They didn't know this was the great apostle Paul. They just know that he was a vagabond killer of God's people who now claim to be a servant of Jesus Christ. And then he'd gone away for three years and they really didn't know much about him. He came back claiming that God had spoken to his heart and he was to speak to the world. They didn't know that he was going to reach all of the then known world, and they didn't know he was going to be the writer of thirteen books of inspired scripture. They didn't know he was going to be a church planter to the Gentiles. They knew nothing about his future. They only knew his past. And when you're rope holding, God may not tell you about their future, but you may know all about their past. Why is it we feel so difficult to get the past behind it? It's true when God forgives us, He forgives our sins completely, but He hasn't promised to remove the scars. And we look at the scars in people, but I'm so happy personally that God that I love and serve and loves me with a passion is the God of the second chance. I failed Him so many times. But all the time I've had some of my brethren who've loved me in Jesus Christ and they knew my failures. And they knew God had forgiven them, but they could see not the future, but they committed me to the Lord. We need to get a soft and tender heart for God's people. Let's get the edge off our condemnation and our aloofness to God's people. We need to be able to go to every one of God's people in this room and be able to look him in the face and our hearts are beating with their hearts and we're able to tell him that God has forgiven me and he's forgiven you and embrace each other and say, I love you in Jesus Christ and I'll commit to pray for God's continual work and it would change our assemblies completely. And instead of shooting ourselves in the foot, the enemy would be out there and he's the devil and he loves it when we are like that. But they didn't know his future. You never know who's in your basket. There was a Sunday school teacher by the name of Edward Kimball. And Edward Kimball had this ragtag little group of boys in a Sunday school class and there was one who was exceedingly difficult and fractious and rebellious. And he had such a passion for this boy who seemed to have no future except eternal judgment that this little boy was working in a shoe store by the time he was fifteen. Didn't have a father and mother caring for him. And Edward Kimball couldn't get through to him on Sunday, but every day of the week he dashed down to the shoe store with his Bible in his hand and wait for an opportunity to see if that boy would have five minutes on his lunch hour. We could slip in and just share a word of God's love and concern for him. And one day the opportunity arose again, and he slipped in and opened his Bible. He only had the chance to read John three sixteen, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. And at that moment, God the Holy Spirit convicted that boy, and he was ushered into his eternal salvation. Now, you don't know Edward Kimball, do you? But he was a rope holder who held the ropes until that boy in his basket touched ground. Because that boy was D.L. Moodle.