The Lord Jesus Christ came and he appointed his apostles (the twelve plus Paul for the Gentiles), and they planted churches across the ancient Near East. And in those churches they appointed elders, and in Paul’s letter to Timothy it says that those elders were to be entrusted with teaching others who would teach others. In what John Stott went on to call the ‘genuine apostolic succession’, Paul said:
the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Ti 2:2)
And so the gospel has been passed down generation after generation through all the rolling centuries, like a baton being passed from one runner to another. Through all the ups and down and turmoils and complexities of church history, the golden thread running through it is that of the gospel, passed hand to hand from Christ himself, through the apostles, and down through the generations. And now it lands here with us.
The baton of the gospel has been passed on to you and I by somebody. It’s in our hands! We have the Spirit of God in our hearts, we have the word of God in our hands, we have the gospel. The baton now sits with us and the question is who will we pass it on to? Will we pass the baton on to the next generation or will it stop here with us? We’re primed with the word, we’re energised by the Spirit.
Where will we pass the baton of the gospel on to next?
Prayer: Thank you Lord for the people who told me about you, and the people before that who told them. Thank you for people who have faithfully translated and preserved the Bible too. Please enable me not to just run a good race myself, but to faithfully pass the gospel baton to those who come after me. Amen.