Grace for All, Even "Fred"

I was wrong.  I mean specifically that I was wrong yesterday.  Otherwise that statement is too true too often.  But yesterday I said I remembered only 6 people from my high school graduating class.  Actually it is seven.  I strained my brain and remembered someone I thought I would never forget.  We’ll call him Fred.  Fred was a bully.  Somehow he found me in the hall almost every day and reminded me of what was going to happen to me every night after school.  It helped insure my invisibility after school.

Three years after graduation Fred finally caught up with me.  I was in a mechanic’s shop getting my car worked on.  Fred came in the door and saw me.  He picked up a piece of iron pipe leaning by the door and holding it in his hand like a police baton and pounding it in his other hand he came across the garage toward me.  When he got right to me and I knew I was dead, he put out his hand and said, “Hi, Dave, (nobody calls me ‘Dave’, but I thought I would let it pass) good to see you.” 

I shook his hand.  “Good to see you too, Fred.”  Maybe I lied a little.  “You’re looking good.”  Then, because I am awkward and can’t talk to people very well, I said very bluntly, “You seemed to have changed.” 

“Yes, I have,” he said.  “I am in the Navy and someone told me about Jesus and now I am a Christian.”  Suddenly I stopped thinking he was going to hit me with the iron pipe.  Also, at that exact moment, a commercial came on the radio playing in the shop.  It was for an evangelistic crusade specifically targeting young adults.  Fred had been a faithful witness at just the right time.  I was instantly convinced that I should go to that crusade and I did.  It was there that I was saved two days later. 

Fred was a faithful witness.  The evangelistic team was a faithful witness.  They were both following the pattern of Jesus Christ whose name in Revelation 1:5 is “The Faithful Witness”.  Jesus gave witness to the Father’s love.  The disciples gave witness to salvation in the finished work of Jesus Christ.  Their witness was to bear fruit for God’s glory and for all eternity.  Their witness was to reap the harvest.  Al­ex­ce­nah Thom­as gave us the wonderful hymn, “Bring Them In”.  It is not sung enough anymore.  “Who’ll go and help this Shepherd kind, help Him the wand’ring ones to find? Who’ll bring the lost ones to the fold, where they’ll be sheltered from the cold? Bring them in, bring them in, bring them in from the fields of sin; bring them in, bring them in, bring the wand’ring ones to Jesus.”

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