A Story of the Golden Gate Bridge

In 1918 an engineer named Joseph Strauss stood on a windswept cliff overlooking the Golden Gate and the city of San Francisco. He pictured in his imagination a bridge spanning that wide and often stormy strait.

Most people said it couldn't be done. The winds were too strong. The tide too powerful. The waves too devastating. The distance? Certainly too great. No major harbor entrance had ever been bridged. The vertical clearance would have to be greater than any other bridge over navigable water.

Strauss believed it was possible. He made a great commitment to his dream.
He sketched a daring plan with a suspension span of more than 4,000 feet - far longer than anything yet attempted.

People laughed at his plan, but he refused to give up. Finally years later on January 5, 1933, almost 15 years after the dream, work on the Golden Gate Bridge began. The pier at the Marin end created few problem. But the San Francisco pier, 1,125 feet off shore, was totally unprotected from the open sea. It was rammed by a ship and partially carried away by a storm. Finally the piers were completed, the great towers rose, and the cables were suspended.

The Golden Gate Bridge was completed and ready for traffic on May 28, 1937. On the day before it was opened for pedestrians only, and 200,000 people walked across the new bridge.

The great strait that separates us from God has been bridged by the wonderful facts of the Gospel. The death, burial, resurrection, and appearances of Jesus Christ were a dream of God because it bridged the gap that could not be bridged any other way.

The authority of the Gospel came not by men but from God. And now today thousands of people around the world are walking across the bridge that spans the ocean of sin beneath.

Will you walk that bridge today if you have not? Will you step out into the aisle and walk to the front to make that commitment that only the Gospel of Christ could make possible?