One Hundred Years Later
It was 1894. The proprietor of a small confectionary shop in the tranquil southern city of Vicksburg, Mississippi was dreaming. It was not the kind of dream that comes in the night with sleep, but the kind that comes in the day to men of vision. It was the dream of sharing a tasty soft drink with people who could never come to his soda fountain.
Eight years before a man named John S. Pemberton of Atlanta had delighted soda patrons of his city with a new carbonated drink which his bookkeeper had dubbed Coca-Cola. Sales soon multiplied. By the time Asa G. Candler acquired Pemberton’s business and formed the Coca-Cola Company in 1892, hundreds of customers were drinking Coke—but always at a soda fountain, nowhere else.
But a man of vision named Joseph A. Biedenham asked why Coca-Cola couldn’t be made available to people where they were, rather than require them to come to his busy soda fountain. So in 1894, in the back of the Biedenham Candy Company, Joseph Biedenham bottled the first Coke.The bottles were rather crude (by our standards) but they worked for the purpose intended. The straight Hutchinson bottles with the wire bales and the rubber stoppers were somewhat difficult to handle (they had to be stored upside down), but the dream of getting Coke to the people was realized.
John S. Pemberton
Soon the requests for the newly bottled Coke
multiplied. At first Biedenham had been assigned Mississippi as his
territory, but he soon was sending Cokes into Monroe, Louisiana. From
there his territory widened to Shreveport, then Texarkana, then Wichita
Falls...and on and on. Through the years bottled Coca-Cola has reached
beyond the South and this nation to encircle the globe. The vision of
the company’s leaders is to send their soft drink into every home in the
world.
All of this has been said to make one point. Coke could not reach the masses until it got out of the soda fountain establishments and into the homes and businesses where people live every day. And, brethren, neither can the gospel of Christ reach the teeming world masses until we get it out of our church building and into our members in such a way that they gladly take it into every home and business they visit! We cannot bottle up the gospel of salvation and ship it in cases to thirsty souls, but we can each so drink of Jesus that He makes in us a well of living water and then go out and share that refreshing drink with all we meet.