Many good men and women have gone to prison for the sake of the Gospel. They’ve been captured and persecuted for spreading it, honoring it, and defending it. Some wrote from those prisons like Paul or John Bunyan. Some strengthened the faith of those around them, the way we saw Lady Jane Grey do last week while she awaited her execution from isolated detention.

But imagine– instead of a jail cell with a cot, a chamber pot, and a desk with some paper– you were chained to a bench. And your hands constantly hovered before a massive oar on board a galley ship. Imagine instead of being a prisoner, you were a slave, forced to row military ships when the wind was not in favor of the sails. This is how John Knox lived for nineteen months in the late 1540s, after he was captured by the French when they took back Scotland’s St. Andrews Castle. The fortress that had become a safe haven for Protestants during the tumultuous period where Scotland hung in the balance between the Reformation that King Henry VIII had inadvertently given rise to, and the Roman Catholic church that constantly sought to regain a foothold there.

Back in the early 2000s, our scope of who could be accessed for Biblical teaching was limited. You had your pastor at your local church, maybe a few tele-evangelists, and whatever books you could get your hands on if you had a Christian bookstore around. It was probably more simple to sift through sources and try other teachers if the Gospel wasn’t being preached.

Compare that to now, and the information, teachers, and material at our fingertips is so endless, you could never possibly get through it all. With the internet, you can access this past Sunday’s sermon from any given church that has a video camera, a microphone, and a YouTube channel– and that includes megachurches right on down to the tiny, country church in America’s smallest town.