Help!

By Clint Mitchell and David A. Sargent

    Imagine working on a homework assignment in Algebra, and you can’t remember how to solve a quadratic equation.  You’ve looked at the examples in your textbook, poured over your notes from class, but you still can’t figure it out.  You can’t phone your teacher.  Your parents don’t have a clue.  What do you do?
    When she needed some tutoring in math, Nadia called her cousin, Salman Khan, who has earned three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard University.  In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad.  When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube.  The popularity of these videos and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance in 2009 as a hedge fund analyst and focus full-time on the tutorials.
    His work – and many tutorials to help you with your homework – may be viewed at the Khan Academy website: www.khanacademy.org.  The website gives this description of the academy: “Khan Academy is an organization on a mission.  We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.”  The project is funded by donations with significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and other philanthropic donors and foundations.
    According to Wikipedia, “The website features thousands of educational resources, including a personalized learning dashboard, over 100,000 exercise problems, and over 5,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, general chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.  All resources are available for free to anyone around the world. Khan Academy reaches about 10,000,000 students per month and has delivered over 300,000,000 lessons.”
    We ALL need help, and it’s not just with math problems.  Each of us has deep needs, the greatest of which is salvation from SIN.  “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  “And the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
    But God, because of His great love for us, came to our rescue.  He provided
a Book (the Bible) that tells us of His great love and His answer to our greatest problems.  In His Word, we learn that He sent His Son Jesus into the world to live among us (John 1:14) and then to die on the cross as payment for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21; Ephesians 1:7).  We learn that through Jesus, we can be saved from our sins and look forward to an eternal home with God in heaven (Acts 4:12; 1 Pet 1:3-5).
    God will save those who place their faith and trust in Jesus (Acts 16:30-31), turn from their sin in repentance (Acts 17:30-31), confess Him before men (Romans 10:9-10), and are baptized (immersed) into Christ for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38).  The blood of Jesus will continue to cleanse those who continue to walk in the light of His word (1 John 1:7).
    Sinful man cries, “Help!”  God has answered by sending His Son Jesus to our rescue.
    Won’t YOU accept His offer of salvation and eternal life on His terms?

- David A. Sargent, minister for the Church of Christ at Creekwood in Mobile, Alabama, is also the editor of an electronic devotional entitled Living Water."  To learn more about this excellent resource contact David via their website: http://www.creekwoodcc.org

* Information gleaned from www.khanacademy.org and the “Khan Academy” entry at Wikipedia.org