Remember church history

Colossians 4:3 Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:

I love to read church history because it's a constant reminder of where we have come from as the church. Once it stops being pen and ink and it becomes reality to you, you can't remain normal again.  

The pain experienced by the apostles in establishing the gospel in far lands, the missionaries that came to Africa, an unknown land to them, leaving the comfort of their jobs, family and usual environments because they did not think about themselves but thought about the salvation of us all. 

There is a common saying, salvation was free, but it came to us at a high cost. Someone had to pay a price. Leave alone the negative things some Europeans brought along with them. The best we have ever received was the gospel from genuine God loving people. I don't think I would risk my life to die in a foreign land because some greedy politician has sent me to go and soften the hearts of a hostile group of people through preaching the Bible like history propaganda asserts, never. I believe the missionaries loved God and responded to the great commission. Then followed the opportunists who came with other interests. Dr David Livingston for example was a young man who had just graduated as a medical doctor but gave up on pursuing a medical career to come and reach out to Africa. The list is endless. The surprising bit is that we shall sit in the same heaven with such people.  How shall we look then if all we can remember in our Christianity was that we twisted the scriptures to believe for a house, a car or a spouse yet they used the same scriptures to believe for one more soul, one more church planted, one more Bible translated, one more king and people reached out to etc!

All in all, if we cannot do the same to the unreached souls around us and in the regions far from home, we simply become educated people but not learned. We need that information to affect our present day to day. How come some Christians have never reached out to someone else? It maybe because our minds are turned away from the beginnings of the church.

Let's return to the beginnings of the church so that we advance Jesus' cause further.

Further scriptures 

Hebrews 13:3 Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; [and] them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.