You can change the world for at least one person and one person can change the world.

This story will take a minute to unfold but it is worth the telling. Read on.

Edward Kimball was a young man who lived in Boston. He was the Young Men’s Sunday school teacher at his church. He wanted to get to know his students better so he decided that he would visit each one of them on their jobs; a different student each week.

One Sunday a challenging teenager showed up in his class. The boy was seventeen, a bit rough, poorly educated, and prone to outbursts of anger and profanity. Edward thought about how he might reach this boy and decided to visit him at the shoe store where he worked. Kimball passed by the store once, trying to get the courage to speak to the boy. What would he say and how would he be received?

Finally, he entered and found the boy in the back, putting shoes on a shelf. Edward went to him, put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, and mumbled some words about Christ’s love for him. The timing was just right, because right there in the shoe store, the boy was moved to commit his life to Christ. His name was D.L. Moody, and he became the most successful evangelist of the nineteenth century, preaching to an estimated one hundred million people during his lifetime and traveling perhaps a million miles – before the time of radio, television, automobiles, and air travel!

Moody himself, in 1879, was instrumental in the conversion of a young man named F.B. Meyer who also grew up to become a minister. Meyer mentored J.W. Chapman and led him to Christ. Chapman became a minister and evangelist and started an outreach ministry to professional baseball players. One of the players he met and mentored was named Billy Sunday.

Billy Sunday learned to preach from Chapman and he started holding evagelistic meetings. He became the greatest evangelist of the first two decades of the twentieth century in America. One of his revivals was held in Charlotte, North Carolina in the 1920′s. It was so successful that an associate of Sunday’s, Mordecai Ham, who years earlier had given his life to Christ at one of the crusades, was asked to come back to Charlotte a few years later to hold a second series of meetings. On one of the final nights, when Ham was preaching, a gangly teenager came forward and responded to the call to “give your life to Christ.” His name was Billy Graham.

Do you think that Edward Kimball had any idea that God would use him in such an incredible chain of events? Do you, for one second, believe that Kimball thought that his teaching on Sunday morning was going to change the nation and the world? But it did and it is. Won’t you please give what you have? God wants to use us to change this planet, one person at a time. And the first person he wants to change is me.