Faith & Stewardship

Rahab was a female Canaanite prostitute with all the attendant prejudice and disadvantage. But God chose this unlikely woman as His own. John Hamlin says of her, "Rahab was a paradigm of hope, showing that the old idols, the old corrupt ways of the past, could be given up.....The contrast between Rahab at the bottom of the social scale and the king and nobles of Jericho at the top illustrates well what Jesus said: 'the tax collectors and prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.' (Matt. 21:31)" - footnote 1 - E. John Hamlin, Inheriting the Land. Wm. B Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1983, pp. 16-17.

Rahab doesn’t have much going for her. She is not of much value in the structure of that world, or of our own.

I have to tell you, there is almost a mantra that I hear when I tell people where I’m from. For the near six years I’ve lived in Buffalo, every single time I tell people I hail from Southern California, they raise their eyebrows and ask me what I’m doing here. Buffalo seems to have a self-image problem. Somehow, people seem to have a notion that Buffalo is not as desirable, as valuable, as Southern California.

It makes me wonder if Buffalo is the place that God is going to use to revive this nation. What good thing can come out of Buffalo? What good thing can come out of Galilee and Nazareth? It is exactly those places and people that the world does not value that God chooses to work through.

Years ago a Sunday school in Philadelphia was overcrowded, much like some of our children's departments today. A little girl was turned away. She began, that day, to save her pennies to help the Sunday school have more room. Two years later, she died. They found a pocketbook by her bed with 57 pennies and a little scrap of paper with a note saying to help the church build a bigger Sunday school.

The pastor of that church, Dr. Russell Conwell, used that note to make a dramatic appeal to his congregation. People's hearts were touched. One realtor gave the church a piece of land. He said he just wanted a down payment of 57 pennies.

The local newspaper picked up the story, and it was carried across the country. The pennies grew, and the results can be seen in Philadelphia today. I've never been to that spot, but I'd like to go see that church. It seats 3,300 people with a large Sunday school department. I'd like to visit Temple University and Good Samaritan Hospital that came about as a result of that initial effort. I'd like to visit the room at Temple University where that little girl's picture is on the wall with the reminder that she gave 57 cents with an amazing result (Bob Russell, "Take the Risk," Preaching Today, Tape No. 143).

You may not think you have much to offer. Rahab, if she had believed the world she grew up in, she probably would have thought she did not have much to offer either. But she did.

The whole city is frightened of the Israelites who are not too far away. But she takes that fear, and she turns it into faith. She decides that she will trust that God she has never known before. She’s had plenty of other gods to believe in. “The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.” She took all she had and was, she trusted this new, one God. And it worked itself right out in what she did.