Eternity

For those who missed it, here’s the true story I told last Sunday which begins and ends with the same question: How broken does your life have to be for God to stop using you to speak to the world about Jesus Christ?

It’s 1930. You are young, and you are in Sydney, Australia, the Harbour Bridge is nearly finished. But you have had no education to speak of, and you can’t even write. However you are really good at one thing, drinking – you are an alcoholic. The only job you can get to fund your drinking is being a lookout at a brothel; and the most popular prostitutes at the establishment are your sisters. You know what they do; they know what you do. This is your life.

On the night of August 6^th 1930 you drift into the back of St Barnabas Church and you hear Rev R.B.S. Hammond preaching on everlasting life through Christ and you are inspired, converted by the thought of ‘eternity’. Later, at another meeting, you hear an evangelist, John Ridley, speaking on Christ and on eternity (from Isaiah 57:15) – that word again. Ridley’s sermon climaxed with these resounding words: Eternity, eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney…where will you spend eternity?

You leave the meeting with the word Eternity going round and round in your head, and sobbing you kneel on a Sydney street. Then you take an old crayon from your pocket and you, an illiterate man, write one word in the most ornate copperplate script - Eternity. That in itself is a miracle. The next day you leave home at 5am, this time with chalk, and you write Eternity on the streets of Sydney in the same ornate script – you do it each day for the next 35 years. No one ever sees you write it so the anonymous man who writes Eternity becomes a legend in Sydney. Eventually you are found out by your vicar, we know everything, and you became a hero in Sydney. Your script, pointing to the eternal hope we have in Christ, is immortalised in a wrought iron replica in Town Hall Square.

The man in question was called Arthur Stace; he died in 1967. In the year 2000, 33 years after his death, Sydney had a colossal fireworks display to celebrate the new millennium, the 2000^th year after the birth of Jesus Christ. The climax of the display was one enormous word ablaze in burning lights on the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge in a beautiful copperplate script – Eternity.

How broken does your life have to be for God to stop using you to speak to the world about Jesus Christ?