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Years ago, before Korea was divided, a theology professor
from Yale visited a mission in northern Korea. He wanted to
preach in a country church, so the mission sent him with a missionary interpreter to a rural Korean village. The professor began his sermon, “All thought is divided into two categories, the concrete and the abstract.”
The Korean interpreter looked at the tiny congregation sitting
with eager attention on the floor of the little church…toothless grandmothers, barefoot schoolboys…and made a quick decision. “Dear friends,” he translated, “I have come all the way from America to tell you about the Lord Jesus Christ.” From that point on, the sermon was firmly in the interpreter’s hands. (Christianity Today, 11/14/94]).
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On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, John T. McCutcheon drew a famous cartoon. He showed 2 Kentucky backwoodsmen standing at the edge of the woods in the winter. Snow was on the ground and the trees were bare. One man asked the other, “Anything new?” To which the other replied, “Nothing much… oh, there’s a new baby born over at Tom Lincoln’s house, but that’s all. Nothing much. Nothing new ever happens around here.”
Nothing except the birth of perhaps America’s greatest president, that’s all. Likewise many years ago someone might have asked in Bethlehem, “Anything new?” To which the answer might have been, “Nothing much… oh, they say a woman named Mary gave birth to a baby boy in a stable last night, but nothing new ever happens around here.” Nothing except the birth of the Savior of the world, that’s all! Many of God’s greatest happenings begin so quietly that they seem no more important than the planting of a mustard seed or the making of three measures of meal. Read the rest of this entry »
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Last week we studied the first 9 verses of this chapter, and we saw that the common perception held by many in Jesus’ day (and the common perception still held by many today) is that human suffering is directly related to sin… Job’s 3 “friends” are the classic example of this type of thinking. Paralleling this line of thought is the assumption, if you are alive and well, you must be good… God is blessing you. I trust you can see how this lends itself to the promotion of the prosperity gospel. In our text today we are going to meet a woman who has been struggling with a physical affliction for 18 years. It’s not hard to anticipate what the religious leaders thought about her, but before we finish our studies today, I trust you will see once again that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Read the rest of this entry »
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As I am preparing this sermon (April 6,2009), the headline in today’s news reads as follows: Crews Search for Survivors of Deadly Italian Earthquake… a powerful earthquake in mountainous central Italy knocked down whole blocks of buildings early Monday as residents slept, killing more than 90 people in the country’s deadliest quake in nearly three decades. Tens of thousands were homeless and 1,500 were injured.
Under this headline another article captures our attention this way: String of Bombs Kills 36, Wounds More Than 110 in Baghdad.
And then still on the front page we are greeted with this story: Police: Man Killed 5 Kids When Wife Said She Was Leaving
Just 3 days ago the following story made the headlines: 14 die in shooting at N.Y. immigration centre
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Several months ago I was watching Bill O’Reilly one night, and if you have ever seen the show, you know Bill is a great debater (or at least he thinks he is!). The subject under discussion on this particular segment was on spiritual things… Heaven, salvation, Jesus Christ, etc. Someone who knew his Bible told Bill that Jesus didn’t come to bring peace on earth, instead Jesus came to bring a sword. Bill went ballistic and accused the man of being absurd. “Everybody knows that Jesus came to bring peace on earth,” Bill ranted. But Bill was wrong. He was dead wrong.
