People, past and present, love to communicate and share stories. Throughout our history, we have found new ways to communicate over distances near and far. People want to communicate important moments in their lives and share them with others. Ages ago, in Altimira, Spain and in Lascaux, France, prehistoric people painted cave drawings depicting their existence and their daily struggle to survive. From cave drawings, we advanced to writing letters on papyrus. Papyrus is like thick paper and prepared from the pithy stem of the papyrus water plant. Joined together, side by side, and rolled up in a scroll, papyrus was used to make early forms of books. The alphabet took shape and the Greeks and Romans introduced ways of composing letters, teaching these methods in their schools.
The early Christian church relied on communication to share the Gospel and to spread their faith. Jesus, the son of God, himself, used stories to teach valuable lessons to his followers and vast audiences. While miracles demonstrate God’s power and mercy, parables illustrate God’s grace and judgment. The truths of the parables teach the natural and confirm the inevitable.
In the mid-1400s, Johaness Gutenberg introduced his printing press to the world, using it to record early church processes and capturing an early written version of the Bible in print. His moveable type press sparked the beginning of the Printing Revolution, making it possible for people to replicate their ideas rapidly and share them with large audiences.
Fast forward to the late 20th century and 1989, the year that public commercial use of the Internet began, followed by the introduction of social media, a group of computer-facilitated technologies that make it easy for people to create and share information, ideas, interests, and many other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.
Today, more than ever, Christians have a greater ability to spread the Gospel and to share their God-stories with a lost and hurting world. The internet and social media can be great tools to communicate what we are for, what we are about, and how God has transformed our lives for the better. In a barrage of news highlighting our shortcomings and failures, we need to do a better job illustrating that we are for people, not against them.
We can use modern communication methods to show how God has worked in our lives and how He is continually at work around us. We can share stories about having the privilege of joining God in His work and tout the modern-day miracles God is performing in our midst, in a world often too blind to see them or too hard-hearted to accept them.
If the early Christian church grew through sharing stories and letters recorded at the hands and feet of the early disciples, many who were unschooled fisher men, then imagine what we can do to advance the Kingdom with the embarrassing abundance of tools we have available to us to communicate the love, grace, and mercy of God.
We have the tools. How we use them is up to us. We can use them to sow discord or we can let the world hear the Good News that we have, by His grace, come to know.
I pray that you will share what was freely given to you with someone today. Our world needs to hear the Gospel more than ever. When you do, I’d love to hear about it. Please share your experiences in the comments section. Blessings.
The Devotional Guy™ 
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