Christ Has Called Us to Set the Captive Free

On Sunday, October 29, 2006, I had the privilege to preach for Pastor Alex Gillies at Victory Christian Center in Glasgow, Scotland.

During my time with Pastor Alex, he said something to me I will never forget: “All a man needs is a vision.ˮ Those words spoke to the core of who I am as Christian. We are followers of Christ and our hearts are open to hear His word for our lives. I want to share a story with you about a woman who had a vision from God that changed the course of history in America.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was living in a rented house in Brunswick, Maine, with her seven children. Her husband was a minister and college professor who worked at the nearby Bowdoin College. Her father, husband, and six brothers were all Congregational ministers. Harriet said, “I will preach on paper just as the men preach in pulpits.ˮ It was not until August 18, 1920, that the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote in America. One night in November 1850, at their rented house located at 63 Federal Street, she provided refuge to a runaway slave, John Andrew Jackson, who was on his way to Canada. Harriet fed him, clothed him, and cared for his back that was covered with scars from whippings by his slave owner. In the morning she sent him on his way with five dollars and food for the journey.

Harriet was part of a group of Christians working to abolish slavery in America. She would frequently write articles for publication in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. That winter, in February of 1851, during a Sunday morning communion service at church, God gave her a vision for a novel. The sermon was about the suffering Christ endured being whipped before he was nailed to a cross. The memory of John Andrews’ back, scarred from the whipping he endured, flooded her imagination. She envisioned a story about a slave named Tom being whipped in the same manner that our Lord Jesus Christ was whipped and crucified. After the church service she went running home in tears. She began to write on scraps of paper the vision God gave her that would be the tragic ending to the novel, Uncle Tomʼs Cabin. In 1852, Uncle Tomʼs Cabin was published by John P. Jewett & Co. in Boston, Massachusetts. It was to become the best selling book of the 19th century—second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Eleven years later, in 1862, after the Civil War began, she travelled to Washington, D.C., to meet President Abraham Lincoln at the White house. President Lincoln greeted her by saying, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!ˮ Just like Harriet, all you need is a vision from God.

Do you want to be used of God to change the world? In our work serving the poorest of the poor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, we see the scars from the abuse people have suffered in their poverty. Christ came to liberate people from sin and suffering. As Christians, our calling is to liberate people. Our legacy is not the accumulation of things, but the life and liberty we give to people through the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. ~George DeTellis, Jr.