The man wouldn't say anything. Just kept saying he was only going to talk to 'our own people,' whoever they are. Too bad, he could probably have said something that might have helped your church with the people of this city. Seemed like a real friendly fellow."
What a sermon that newspaperman was preaching to Seventh-day Adventist ministers, and particularly leaders of our faith! He had come to a giant meeting, which drew more than twelve thousand Seventh-day Adventists. He was expecting to get a few sentences of quotations from the message one of our church leaders would be presenting. His editor had assigned him to do a major story on the meeting, and the story would surely be incomplete without some representative quotations from the speaker's talk.
Unfortunately, the reporter did not have time to wait for an hour before the speaker would talk and then an additional thirty minutes through the talk to see if he could possibly glean something from it.
So as is common at many large gatherings of all religious faiths, he met with the speaker for a few moments before the meeting was to begin to ask for quotes. "Sorry, I'm only going to talk to our own people," he had been told. "I'm sure there wouldn't be anything for the public in it."
How sad. Here was an opportunity to talk to an audience of 250,000 (the paper's circulation). But the speaker was talking only "to our own people."
Surely God must be disappointed when we bypass such signal opportunities to speak for Him. He must weep over us as He did over Jerusalem. For those 250,000 souls represented by that newspaper's circulation are to God as precious as our very own; as worthy of hearing the gospel story as we ever were.
Whenever news personnel ask us to speak, let us speak, asking God to give us wisdom proportionate to the importance of the situation. For if we do not speak, we leave a vacuum for the truth that will most certainly be filled by the sinister forces of evil.
