Have you ever wished you could travel through time? I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by people, places and events far from my own home. I remember traveling to the Frontier Culture Museum in Virginia with displays representing several cultures, including 1600’s Ireland, as well as 1700’s England, Germany and West Africa. Some buildings had even been brought from around the world to be reconstructed on site. Other buildings showed what life was like for early settlers in Virginia. I learned a lot on those visits!

Biographies and historical fiction have transported me and my imagination around the world, and I’m certain many of you can relate.

Today I’d like to invite you to join us on a special journey over the next several weeks. This trip can change your life! We’ll travel through time to visit with some familiar, and perhaps some relatively unfamiliar, men and women of old. We will have the unique opportunity to view them with God himself as our tour guide. Our guidebook will be the pages of Scripture.

Romans 15 says that what was written long ago, in the pages of God’s Word, was written for our instruction. It was not just for the people of that day and time, but for ours as well, and it gets even better. These things were written so that through endurance (some translations read “patience”) and through the encouragement (or “comfort”) of the Scriptures we might have hope!

Are you facing challenges today? Perhaps an illness, or family problems? Is there some unresolved conflict or misunderstanding? Do you have dreams that so far seem impossible? Is someone jealous of you, and you wonder how to handle it? Guess what. There’s someone on the pages of Scripture who faced something similar.

“Our ability to handle the difficulties of life is undergirded by feeding on the Word of God. We can live out our lives in a posture of hope and endurance because of the encouragement that we find in Scripture” (R.C. Sproul1)

How about it? Will you join our team as we look at a number of scenes from the early days of the Bible? Are you willing to see what encouragement and endurance we can glean, and what hope we find as we look at men and women of old? Let’s see what God has in store for us, what he might wish to teach us as we journey together. Shall we?

God, thank you for the Bible and the many truths you’ve clearly given us there. Thank you too for the people you’ve shown us, complete with real problems, hopes, dreams, challenges. As I see them, where they’ve trusted you and where they’ve failed, I find encouragement that I’m not alone in my challenges, my problems or my dreams. As I take this “journey”, would you open my eyes to the hope you want to give me? Help me in turn to encourage others. Amen.

Song of Encouragement: Open My Eyes

1 Sproul, R. C. (1994). The Gospel of God: An Exposition of Romans (p. 240). Christian Focus Publications.



Tags: Studying the Bible Romans 15 Endurance