LIFE: It's How We Finish That Makes A Difference!

"… his wife … looked back; and she became a pillar of salt"

Genesis 19:26

"We have finished our years like a sigh."

Psalm 90:9

"Remember … your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, 'I have no delight in them.'”

Ecclesiastes 12:1-8

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

Philippians 1:21

Auto racing is well known all over. In fact it is one of the most successful sporting endeavors in the world, with attendance statistics that are the envy of many sports entrepreneurs.

Professional racing teams spend a lot of time perfecting their skills: terrifying turns, speeds that would paralyze an ordinary driver, and terrible crashes are every day occurrences at the track.

The last ten miles, I am told, are the best – especially in a long race – just lasting to cover those final ten miles is something unique. Drivers say the strain of all that preceded those last ten miles is worth the rush of adrenaline and the excitement.

[Provided by subscriber Merilyn Derkson, Chaplain of Broadway Pentecostal Lodge, Vancouver, BC; edited for publication]

Life should be like an auto race; we should get pleasure out of the race, but the last few miles should be our greatest joy.

A friend says she wants to take a Caribbean cruise … NOW! She doesn’t want to wait until she has to be pushed up the ramp in a wheelchair! What a pessimistic attitude. Those seasoned years should be looked forward to.

The wagon trains which came West, to settle this continent, had joyful people looking forward toward new hills, new experiences, and the thrill of opening up a new land; they also had mournful people looking backward at what was left behind.

Are we like the latter, sadly looking out the rear window of life – saying, “If only … ! If only …!”? Or are we on the bench seat, holding the reins, looking in awe at what life has yet to bring our way?

Christianity, Illustrations, Religion

LIFE: What are we doing to one another!

OF PLANTS AND OTHER LIVING THINGS: 1 John 1:5-7

Just because a thing is assigned a particular name doesn't mean it will absolutely function according to that name. For example, calling a thing a "house" plant doesn't mean it will thrive, or even survive, in every house; especially flowering houseplants.

All plants, at least all flowering plants, require certain essential things in order to thrive and survive: sunlight, carbon-dioxide, moisture, nutrition.

All over the world, there are places where houseplants will not thrive or survive, their environment is hostile to them, especially the outdoors. If there is a lack of life-supporting essentials, this too will stifle and thwart the well-being of a plant. We now know the absence of an unseen intangible (tenderness perhaps, some might say love; I'd say support and encouragement) will also affect a plant's quality of life.

Simple calling a person (or yourself) a Christian won't in and of itself insure thriving or even surviving under all conditions; a houseplant left outside will die; a houseplant deprived of nourishment and care will also die, even though inside the house.

On the one hand, we tend to project an unattainable standard upon those called "Christian," sort of recreating them in our own image, insisting they meet our expectations just because they are called Christian.

On the other hand, we tend to knowingly place ourselves in environments hostile to our well-being. This ought not be!

Like houseplants, Christians need a particular kind of light and moisture, a special diet, supporting encouragement and fellowship (prayer and koinonia), as well as a manageable environment. Struggle (sometimes stunting or even death) comes from the absence of these growth essentials. We all need to mindful of our own needs and the needs of others if we expect growth in ourselves or them.

Christianity, Growth, Illustration, Religion

HYPOCRISY: Not a Fatal Disease But It Ought to Be!

LEANING ON A BROKEN CRUTCH: [James 3:13-17]

A few years ago a sixteen year-old told me he didn’t need God because he was “not that insecure.” What did he mean by that statement? He was implying, “You Christians only go to church and believe in a thing called God because you're insecure and need a crutch to get through life." Where do young people get ideas like this?

First, they see the way some of us live and see that the walk doesn’t agree with the talk, so we’re hypocrites in their mind. As a result, they want nothing to do with what we’re selling.

Second, they lack simple life-experience [aka: common-sense], which breeds selfishness and self-centeredness. As I age, and gain in experience, I’m amazed I survived my own youth.

Much of what we say as young people becomes a hardened belief as an adult. We hear things from others, whom we respect, and accept them as gospel without question. What we don’t know, at that age, is that much of what we hear is what others also heard and accepted without question. The young man I shared my faith with was himself guilty of hypocrisy; however, he lacked sufficient life-experience to discern it.

In repeating, as truth, something acquired from another, without personal knowledge of its truthfulness, we are guilty of using that person as a crutch in the same way Christians are accused of using God ... only we have personal knowledge of the Gospel’s truthfulness.

LIGHT - Let the be no darkness at all!

BETTER TO BE BLIND! [John 8:12; Illumination, Jesus, Life] (Added 3 June 2006)

Imagine no red rose, no blue sky, rolling but grey hills, and a several shades of grey Monarch Butterfly. Without light, there is no color. Color is just bands of light reflected off an object; which bands are reflected depends on the nature of the object. Without light, things would be very plain … AND VERY DARK.

So too without Christ … imagine no hope, no love, no future, and no present purpose for living.

Jesus said, "I am the light of the world; he who follows Me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life."

Without the light of Christ, there would be no spiritual blessings, no sustaining grace, and no “daily bread” worth eating. Just as it is impossible to receive mail without a delivery address, it is impossible to receive a true blessing outside the person and authority of Christ but it is the individuals nature that brings His ultimate blessing.

TAGS: Blessings, Color spectrum,
Darkness, Illumination, Nature

COME INTO THE LIGHT! [1 Peter 1:19; Revelation, Sin, Truth]

One of our church janitors was in my office the other day and told me a fascinating but sad story.

A hardworking man finally had time to go to a night baseball game with his family. They were doing the usual things: eating hot-dogs and peanuts, drinking cokes, and complaining about the prices.

His wife, a registered nurse and mother of his three kids, said something and he turned in such a way that the park lights were directly in his eyes. She gasped and took his face in her hands to have a closer look. Her suspicion was correct, his eyes were jaundiced, a sign of several serious diseases. Within a few weeks her childhood sweetheart and the father of her three children was dead.

Man must come into the light of God to see the ravaging affects of his sins. He is little more than the walking dead without the cleansing power of the blood of the Lamb. The Light reveals the truth for all to see. Many will come into the light too late. [1 Corinthians 4:5]

TAGS: Blood of the Lamb, Death,
Kingdom of God, Sin

CONSUMED BY HIS POWER! [2 Corinthians 4:4; gospel, power (God's)]

My associate pastor, Dan, used to work for Orkin (the pesty people); he was pulpit supply for me this morning and I was blessed to hear an illustration he used on the whole armor of God [Epesian 6:10-17].

Orkin evidently had special Maglites with custom commercial grade batteries in them ... make that battery. Instead of four D-cells it had a single, long battery. I gather They're like those used by law enforcement. At any rate he said it was a blessing when he was crawling around in attics and under houses; it would light up the area from one end to the other.

He used this tool to illustrate the power of the Light of God, Jesus our Lord. When an ordinary flashlight was shined directly into the beam of light coming from his Maglite the beam from the common flashlight was consumed by the power of the more powerful light.

So too the power of Satan, when it is exposed to the Light of God.

TAGS: God, Power of Satan

LAVA LAMP BELIEVERS! [1 John 1:6,7; apostasy, believers, nominalism, testimony, witness]

Lava Lamps have made a comeback in recent years (2002). Many of today’s versions are more creative than when they were first introduced some forty years ago.

All lava lamps have one thing in common, none of them are adequate as a source of light. They're called a lamp, but they're not a lamp.

The age of their introduction was an age of darkness and half-light. People in that day didn’t want a lot of light. You might say they wanted just enough of the real thing so they could call the facsimile by name of the real thing.

Unfortunately, many Christians aren’t much better than lava lamps; they don’t really want the whole Light of God, just enough so they can go by the name of the Genuine Light yet remain in the shadows.

TAGS: Lava lamps, Testimony, Witness

TURNING TOWARD THE LIGHT! [Ephesians 5:7-10; other topics - Holiness, Righteousness] (Added 3 June 2006)

Our adopted daughter, Naomi, was admiring one of her mom’s houseplants. Her older sister, Jennifer, asked her if she noticed how the plant leaned toward the light coming through the front window. She said, “Yeah!” He sister then told her, “If you turn the plant around halfway, the plant will lean back toward the light inside of a week.” Naomi said, “Wow!”

Likewise genuine Christians; separate them from the Light, or turn them away from the Light, and inside a short period of time they will have leaned back toward Him.

TAGS: Conversion, Nature, Turning

Topic TAGS: Christianity, Homoletics, Illustrations,
Light, Preaching, Religion, Sermons

IMPRESSION - At least make an impression!

TOO MANY WATERBED SAINTS! [Ephesians 1:18-21]

Ever notice the difference between a water bed and a pillow top bed? On the former, no matter how much it’s slept on no impression is left; on the latter, the more its slept on, the greater the impression.

People’s lives are like that. Some lives are lived and leave no impression; like a finger pulled from a glass of water, when the finger leaves the water closes in behind and no one would know the finger had ever been there.

Other lives are lived and the impression left behind requires decades, even centuries, to erase. A very few are never erased because of the depth of their impression on this world (Socrates; Plato; Michelangelo, Da Vinci; Mother Theresa, Stalin, Hitler, Pasteur, Edison, Noble, Carver, Gandhi, Confucius, to name a few).

Only one man has left an eternal impression, our Lord. When all is over and the ash is blown away, only one name will be above all names, the name of the man Jesus Christ.

LIFE - The newness of true life!

WITHOUT SPOT OR BLEMISH! [Romans 3:23; Cleanliness, Consecration, Holiness, Righteousness, Sin]

Any one who has traveled to Switzerland immediately notices how spotlessly clean the country seems to be – from their snow capped mountains, to their crystal-pure lakes, from their alpine glades to their doll-like villages.

Even their money seems spotless and to crackle with crispness; every bill looking and feeling new. Old bills are plucked from circulation before they rip or even the hint of a stain can disgrace them. Each year around one-third of all Swiss bank notes are removed from the public’s grasp at a cost of over 20 million Swiss francs (roughly $15 million). The old bills are burned in a furnace.

Why do they bother, why can’t they be more like the British or the Americans? Because, says the chief cashier of the Swiss National Bank, “The first thing you see when you arrive … is the money. It’s like a national identity.” [Adapted from an article by Bhushan Bahree in The Wall Street Journal]

In other words, the Swiss take their image very seriously. This causes me to ask, “What if God wanted a spotlessly clean world like the Swiss want a spotlessly clean country?”

What if God decided to pluck up people before they became too stained or blemished by life? What if one-third of the human race was shuffled off to heaven and hell each year because of the blotch of sin on their lives? After all, the first thing you see when you arrive is people in the delivery room.

The reasons He doesn’t are simple: first, “God so loved the world”; second, “God sent His Son” while we were sin blotched; third, the Good News would not be good news at all; and, fourth, God expects us to keep our-selves unstained from the world [James 1:27; 1 John 2:15-17; 1 Peter 1:13-19]. This doesn’t even address the implied promises in Isaiah 42:1-4.

How sad the Body of Christ has more problems with its image than Switzerland has with its.

SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE (Abortion, etc) - How Precious It Is!

PERSPECTIVES

The death toll of the South Asian earthquake this past Christmas has focused out attention on life and death like nothing else can or will.

If, for the sake of discussion, we set the death toll in South Asia is about 250,000, would you be surprised to hear it will take the United States less than two months to kill that many unborn children? Now that's not including deaths from euthanasia or abuses such as drugs and pornography.

This issue is not just a Christian issue, though it is primarily Christians who are leading the way. The fact is this issue has ramifications which will affect civilization as we know it.

PRO-CHOICE DISQUALIFIES FOR OFFICE!

John Piper writes in the Kairos Journal (Member login required) ...

We were buying a dog a few years ago. At the humane society I picked up a brochure on the laws of Minnesota concerning animals. Statute 343.2, subdivision 1 says, “No person . . . shall unjustifiably injure, maim, mutilate or kill any animal.” Subdivision 7 says, “No person shall willfully instigate or in any way further any act of cruelty to any animal.” The penalty: “A person who fails to comply with any portion of this section is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

This set me to pondering the rights of the unborn. An eight-week-old human fetus has a beating heart, an EKG, brain waves, thumb sucking, pain sensitivity, finger grasping, and genetic humanity, but under our present laws is not a human person with rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that “no state shall deprive any person of life . . . without due process of law.”

I wondered, if the unborn do not qualify as persons, it seems that they could at least qualify as animals, say a dog, or at least a cat. Could we not at least charge abortion clinics with cruelty to animals under Statute 343.2, subdivision 7? Why is it legal to “maim, mutilate and kill” a pain-sensitive unborn human being but not an animal?

These reflections have confirmed my conviction never to vote for a person who endorses such an evil–even if he could balance the budget tomorrow and end all taxation.

VIABILITY IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT

I was listening to the Laura Ingraham talk show this morning (10 January 2006) and picked-up the following.

The pro-choice folks constantly remind us a fetus is not a viable human being; meaning - if you remove a fetus from its mother's womb and lay it on a table and it dies, it's not viable; if, on the other hand, it survives, it is viable.

A caller made the following point (my paraphrase): "A baby is viable in its environment. In the womb it is cared for and nourished. Let's strip the mother naked and chase her out onto polar ice cap and see if she's viable outside her environment!"

I love it! I absolutely love it!


TAGS: Abortion; Anecdotes; Christian anecdotes; Christian Illustrations; Illustrations; Roe v Wade; Sanctity of life

Resurrection

Dead or Alive? [Hebrews 9:27; other topics - Eternity; Life (after death)]

Television commercials showing famous actors such as Fred Astaire, dancing with a vacuum cleaner; Humphrey Bogart, hustling jewelry; and John Wayne; hawking Coors beer, can be powerful sales tools. Although these particular ads were authorized by relatives, every so often advertisers will simply pirate a celebrity’s likeness to move a product.

In California, where Hollywood has clout, a bill is working its way through the state legislature which would provide protection for dead icons. Among the key proponents are actress Janet Leigh and Astaire’s widow, Robyn. “Celebrities have control over their images when they’re alive and we ought to give them that same control when they are dead,” said state Sen. John Burton, D-San Francisco, author of the California bill. As Leigh put it, “My image is my product, my franchise, my commodity.”

Perhaps someone should go to the Actors Guild and tell those folks what is really important after death.

[Adapted from Jeff Wilson, “Digital technology raises questions as it raises the dead,” AP/MSNBC, 7/8/99]

PRIDE: First sin in the Garden!

THE PARABLE OF THE WHALE! [Proverbs 16:18]

Remember, it's when a whale surfaces that it gets harpooned. Whales blow to clear their air passage of water in order to replenish their air supply.

Man doesn’t blow to get air; he blows to get attention. So, beware, if you plan to rise to the top in order to blow your horn, keep the parable of the whale in mind … that’s when you’re most likely to get harpooned.

[Neil Anderson (Practical Theology class notes); edited for publication]

Modern Man - Same Old Problem [Genesis 2:7 (11:6)]

Edie Lau, Science Writer at the Sacramento Bee, writes, “The cute and healthy-looking ones get names such as Dolly, Amy, Betty and Daisy. They get their pictures taken. But for every good-looking lamb and calf conceived in a laboratory dish, a confounding number of animals come out oversized or malformed or aren’t born at all.”

What is Lau talking about? He's talking about cloned animals. The problem is so tenacious in “artificially reproduced and genetically engineered animals that some scientists are devoting their full attention to what they call Large Offspring Syndrome.”

Lorraine Young, a research scientist at the Roslin Institute, said, “I think at the moment, (the syndrome) is the norm.”

Nowadays, animal cloning is not as impressive as it once was; chances of producing healthy young from cloning and other reproductive techniques involving genetic orchestration is quite low, ten percent at best. Scientists want to know: Why doesn’t it work more often?

Lau quotes Dr. Torben Greve, a veterinary researcher in reproduction at the Royal Veterinary Agricultural University in Denmark, “The prospect of hidden health problems troubles [me].”

Greve says, “The main problem ... is the subtle differences that nobody wants to admit to. What if life expectancy is changed?”

In discussing in vitro fertilization, the scientists note that the same technique has been used for 21 years to assist humans to conceive, with no obvious ill effects in their babies. They ask, “What is the difference?”

“It’s extremely curious,” remarked Young, noting that mice also seem not to experience the syndrome. “We don’t understand that yet. .... [But] just because it hasn’t happened in people doesn’t mean it won’t,” Young lamented. ”I would feel happier knowing (the cause),” she said.

Young said scientists believe “imprint genes” from the male promote growth because it’s in the father’s best interest to have the biggest and strongest babies. The mother’s interest, on the other hand, is best served by limiting womb damage so she can bear several babies, so her genes limit growth.

Somehow, so the theory goes, manipulations external to the body topples the balancing act. If true, Young says, the challenge will be to identify the factors controlling these genes. “I don’t think (the problem of abnormal offspring) has to be the norm,” she said. “We think we can improve it.”

Man always thinks he can improve on it: he continues to build his Towers of Babel, when what he really needs is the Ark of the Lord. Man, it seems, will go on and on trying to elevate himself to the same level of God; if that doesn’t work he will try to pull God down to his level.

As they said, “It is in the Father’s best interest.” [Adapted from “Dark side of cloning perplexes scientists,” The Sacramento Bee; Aug. 18, 1999]

Christianity, Illustration,
Pride, Religion