HOW KYB WORKS
Help me think through this, please. I’d like to figure out why the angels rejoiced last week. Oh, I know it was because a young lady named Jenny O. had just been baptized in Davenport, Iowa – but I would like to trace exactly how that came about. I know she visited with Randy Schilling, the minister at the Central Church of Christ in Davenport, and then he baptized her – but how did they get together? Kind of an “accident” actually. It was Randy’s day off, plus he wasn’t feeling well; but he had an appointment to let a service tech into the building for ten minutes. He was only in the building for a few minutes out of the whole day. That just happened to be when Jenny drove past the building, saw the church of Christ sign, and decided to stop in and talk to someone about being baptized. So, why would she do such a thing? Because she had learned about scriptural baptism in a Bible study course she had been taking. The course was mailed to her by Roberta, her grader at the Burlington, Iowa church of Christ. The Burlington church had answered the phone when Jenny called to request the Bible study she had heard advertised on a television program called Know Your Bible. If she was a typical student she had watched the program for a number of weeks and had learned quite a bit from the answers to all the viewers’ questions she heard each week. Two guys named Toby and Steve answered all kinds of questions – and they almost always showed a Bible passage that contained the answer. Eventually she decided she would like to personally know more about the Bible – so she called the 800 number.
So now we know. Heaven’s rejoicing was due to a TV broadcast in the Quad Cities area. But how did that come about? Well, that broadcast was possible because a whole lot of people – mostly Northsiders, but many other individuals and congregations – believe so strongly that it is a great way to spread the gospel that they have given generously and sacrificially over the past 30 years. They’ve given so generously that the program was able to spread from Kansas to Missouri to Iowa/Illinois to South Dakota, and has resulted in an untold number of “Jennys” who are now in the Kingdom.
We can stop there. I’ve traced the “how” as far as humanly possible. But of course I haven’t gotten to the real reason. Remember the story in Acts 8 about a preacher from Jerusalem and a treasurer from Ethiopia meeting on a desert road? The “how” of that story is humanly inexplicable. But, God simply told us to sow the seed and He would know where the good soil was. Isaiah 55:11 promises, “…[My Word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” That explains it.