Although his name is largely forgotten more than 200 years after his birth, if your had lived in rural America in the mid to late 1800’s, chances are you would have recognized his name. John Ellison Vassar was one of the most widely known evangelists in the United States. As we encounter him on the dusty pages of history, we see a man who walked in the way of the One who came to seek and save the lost.

As the sails filled with the ocean breeze, and the boards creaked from the waters below him, it was time to go. Whatever lay ahead, whatever the cost, whatever indignities and want that he may experience in trying to reach the impoverished and oppressed African slaves on St. Thomas, Johann Leonhard Dober was willing to endure it all for the sake of the Gospel.

The music for this episode is listed below and was adapted for length under a Creative Commons License

It is impossible to overestimate the impact that one godly Christian can have on another individual’s life. In many respects, the world as we know it today would be very different if one godly housekeeper had not influenced a young son of an English Lord.

Joseph Mohr didn’t know that the lyrics to the little poem he had penned would forever become part of Christmas celebrations, not only in his small Austrian alpine village, but around the world. This gentle song would become the centerpiece of reflection and worship of the Saviour-King, born in a Bethlehem stable.

The music for this episode is listed below and was adapted for length under a Creative Commons License

Most people never realize how near they come to the experience of death. But on a clear moonlit night, the life of a relatively unknown Union soldier was spared, only to find out a decade and a half later that the Great Shepherd had rescued his lamb from the jaws of certain death.

While Jerry was living in the back alley, the shop owners and townspeople wished he would just disappear. He was a misfit, a thief, and all around menace to society. He thought that somehow he had outstretched the bounds of the love of God.

Samson Occom, a prolific pastor, educator, and author, was betrayed, maligned, and exploited most of his life, largely by people who claimed to worship the same God as him. They were supposed to be his brethren, men of the same family of God. Yet in their eyes, he was always seen as something less.

Satan knows the curiosity of man and uses it to distract the human mind from occupying itself with the truth of God, leading it down a path of lies and deceptions. That could have easily been the case with the Wesley family while living at the Epworth Rectory. The unusual events that took place there could have led the them into all kinds of speculations about ghosts, hauntings, and supernatural occurrences. But it didn’t.

The music for this episode is listed below and was adapted for length under a Creative Commons License

He was scared, scared sick. But he could not show it. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do: to be terrified and not show it.

AJ stood firmly planted in rational thinking. If there was a God, he wound up the universe eons ago, and simply walked away. No personal God, no life after death, no final judgment, no heaven, and no hell. To believe any other way was foolish superstition. That was until one fateful sleepless night, when the haunting voice of a dying man pushed him from a calloused skeptic to a convinced servant.