And Jethro rejoiced for all the goodness which the LORD had done to Israel, whom He had delivered out of the hand of the Egyptians. Exodus 18:9
On the final night of a recent Gospel series, one of the preachers paused just before his closing prayer, and issued an appeal to those in his audience who were not yet saved, ‘Please’, he urged them, ‘if you get saved, give me a call. It doesn’t matter the time of day or night, I want that call. I would love to get that news.’ And we would agree, that would be wonderful to hear, just as Jethro rejoiced at the news of God’s wonderful deliverance of Israel.
The greatest individual deliverance by God for the children of Israel in their entire history was the exodus from Egypt and the subsequent destruction of the Egyptian armies at the Red Sea. To this day the Jewish people celebrate that deliverance, and well they should. Our conversion at salvation’s day was our greatest deliverance as we passed from death to life and from darkness to light. Surely we, and likely many others, rejoiced on that occasion. The Lord Jesus reminds us that it was an event that triggered genuine rejoicing in Heaven too.
Often, news of someone trusting Christ is about a family member, a child perhaps, whose family has been fervently praying for that one. Just as we ought to have been fervently praying with them, so too we ought to join in the rejoicing. Sometimes, the news is of a soul, or souls, that we never heard of being saved as a result of a Gospel effort in a far away place. There is no less reason to rejoice over that news, to thank God for rescuing another sinner from the road to perdition.
We love to sing ‘O happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away’. And we ought to also consider it a happy day when we hear of others entering that same wonderful deliverance. -Jim MacIntosh
Here is the link to the video of this message: https://youtu.be/lLGPzlTJJto