The 40-Day Feast: Feast on God's WordSample

In 1896 a young evangelist named Henry Allen Ironside left his position with the Salvation Army in Los Angeles to begin a new outreach ministry in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Though only twenty years old at the time, Henry had been preaching the good news up and down the coast of California since he was a mere sixteen.

One Sunday afternoon while he was out on a walk, Henry heard the familiar brass of the Salvation Army band playing nearby. On the corner of Market and Grant Avenue, he found his old friends ministering to a crowd of over three hundred men and women. When the captain of the group recognized Henry, she asked him to share his testimony.

Among the crowd that day was an educated man who handed Henry his business card after his short message was through. On the front of the card was the man’s name, and on the back was this invitation: “Sir, I challenge you to debate with me the question of ‘Agnosticism versus Christianity’ in the Academy of Science Hall next Sunday afternoon at four o’clock.”1

After reading the card aloud, Ironside gave both the man and the crowd a compelling response, where he later documented the scene in his memoir, Random Reminiscences from Fifty Years of Ministry. He remembers asking the man to bring with him two people whose lives had been transformed by hearing the message of agnosticism. Henry himself promised to bring with him one hundred men and women whose lives had been transformed by Christianity.

At that point the captain of the Salvation Army band promised to lead the procession into the hall, playing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The agnostic man quickly brushed them off and walked away.

Nothing else on this earth can transform a sinner to a saint but the power of Jesus at work in a life. I hope that you’ve experienced such a miracle transformation yourself. Maybe you could have been among the one hundred to accompany Ironside into the hall as a walking, talking billboard of the transforming power of Christ. Perhaps you could have sung the lyrics to the famous hymn, “Amazing Grace,” with tears streaming down your face and the whole Salvation Army band backing you up, because you too were once “a wretch,” but now you are a beautiful testimony of a life transformed by faith in Christ!

God did a work in our lives the moment we first believed, but if we’re honest, we all know that we’re still works in progress. While salvation is received in a moment, learning to live saved takes a lifetime of moments spent in God’s refining Word. The Bible tells us how to be saved, then instructs us how to live saved. This is what it means to be sanctified—­set apart as holy and wholly different. Of course, our sanctification doesn’t happen naturally, only supernaturally, which is why Jesus boldly prayed to the Father on our behalf, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17 ESV). God’s Word is where our transformation takes place.

Savior, Your Word has the power to both save me and to teach me how to live saved! Sanctify me in the truth. Your Word is truth. I pray in the transforming name of Jesus, Amen.