Topic(s): Encouragement

One day as Abraham Lincoln was leaving church, he was asked what he thought of the minister’s sermon.

“The minister had a strong voice and good delivery,” the President began, “But he forgot the most important part of a sermon. He forgot to ask us to do something great.”

Sometimes it is the preacher who forgets; sometimes it is the listener. But we need reminding. Biblical preaching is neither negotiating, nor clichés. Great preaching does not deal in the petty and the trivial. Like a soft drink in melted ice, we allow the call of Christ to become diluted, at times. God does not merely call on us to be nice, or polite, or congenial. The call is to discipleship, and sacrifice, obedience to Him, and service. The call is global, the implications eternal, the stakes are nothing less than the souls of men and women. Yes—do demand that your preacher call you to something great! He should have love in his heart, but fire in his belly. And when he does, understand that call for what it is! There should be urgency in both the preaching, and the listening. If you hear platitudes, you heard a “thought for the day.” But if you hear the voice of God through Scripture, you were called upon to do something great!

—Stan Mitchell

“I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”—Ephesians 4:1

Australian Preachers Face Charges

Topic(s): Moral Issues, World Religions

Efforts continue to silence preachers stating unpopular views. First it was the long-running prosecution of a Swedish preacher for criticizing homosexuality. (He was finally exonerated by Sweden’s supreme court.) Now it’s another nation and another topic, as John Leo writes:

In Australia, a state tribunal found two preachers guilty of “vilification of Muslims. They had argued that Islam is inherently a violent religion, and that Islam plans to take over Australia. To avoid up to a $7000 fine or three months in jail, they were ordered to apologize and to promise not to repeat their remarks anywhere in Australia or over the Internet.” The preachers “refused to comply and are appealing to the Supreme Court. The case has become a major cause, with churches and Christian leaders fighting to overturn the law, and Muslims pushing for a broad hate-speech law.”

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo/2006/03/05/188673.html

“So Walk”

Topic(s): Christian Life

When a person goes off to college, he often discovers many talents that had remained hidden through the years. Being exposed to great minds and the uppermost levels of academia seem to have an awakening effect on the latent abilities. As a freshman at Alabama Christian College back in 1969, I discovered one such gift.

As it happened, the bed in my dorm room lay right along the exterior wall. After several months of listening to my fellow students stomp up and down the exterior corridors, I discovered that I could identify people merely by the sound of their foot steps.

One day, after telling my roommate about this learned ability, he insisted that it was not possible. So, we engaged in a little research. My roommate stood at the window peering through a slightly parted curtain as I took a strategic position on my bed. Time after time, as sorted stompers and shufflers made their way along the corridor, I was able to identify each one without fail. On one occasion, as two people walked along together past our room, I identified one of them and correctly perceived that the other person was obviously a visitor to the campus as I did not recognize his foot falls. My roommate recognized these two young men as a student and his brother, visiting the campus for the weekend, and yet he was still not impressed. He began to look for holes in the wall or some possible way that a reflection might be tipping me off. Finally, he admitted that my talent was genuine and we concluded that the way someone walks can identify a person as uniquely as their fingerprint. This triumph in higher learning never won us a Pulitzer Prize, but it did help pass the time on a lonely Saturday afternoon.

Life is often referred to as a “walk.” Those who live the Christian life are said to “walk with God.” There are so many references in the Bible to this kind of “walk” that I couldn’t possibly refer to them all. The following are just a few examples. Do we walk like any of these?

• “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
• “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying” (Romans 13:13).
• “Walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Ephesians 5:2).
• “Walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:10).
• “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Colossians 2:6).
• “For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies” (2 Thessalonians 3:11).
• “. . .if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
• And finally, Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

As surely as I could identify my classmates by the way they walked, God can identify his children by the way we walk. One day, our “walk” on this earth will be over. Let us live that God may recognize our foot steps as someone who belongs to Him. —Ron Lamar, Carrollton, Georgia