Thursday, November
8, 2018
It happened again for the umpteenth time
in recent memory of those conversations where you’re giving information to
somebody who is recording that information.
The young lady on the other end of the phone used that dreaded filler
word: PERFECT! You are no doubt familiar with the filler-words:
um, uh, so, you know … you know?
I gave her my information, a series of
numbers to back it up, my mother’s maiden name, an answer to a challenge
question about my elementary school, and she ended it all with PERFECT! How did she know it was PERFECT?
Too many of those called by God to be
preachers of the Gospel are plagued with the tendency to say more, rather than
less. We want to explain better, go
deeper, say it stronger; we want to be precise and perfect, and wind
up doing nothing more than keeping people longer! Lord have mercy!
Paul was certainly like that; just ask
Eutychus, the young man who listened to Paul’s all-nighter of a sermon sitting
in an upper room window sill. He dozed
off, fell through the window and died from the fall![2] The apostle rushed to the scene below, took the
young man in his arms, and he came back to life. I bet from that moment on Eutychus was a
sermon illustration in a lot of Paul’s preaching about the resurrection (as
well as warning not to go to sleep during sermons!).
The verboseness of preaching and preachers
is legendary. But, that aside, there
were times when Paul just hit the nail on the head squarely, forcefully, and
finally…sufficiently to bring the conversation to a life-changing apex.
Here is one of those sentences:
When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Romans 5:6(NLT)
When it comes to helping us appreciate the
first Christmas gift ever, this sentence does it for me. It describes the helpless, sinful condition
of all humanity. It describes the
impeccable timing of Christ’s arrival, and the whole purpose for his sacrifice
on the cross, planned from before the beginning of time. In 17 words the preacher proclaimed our condition
and God’s solution … it was … perfect!
And added to Paul’s perfect preacher sentence,
and eternally more important than Paul’s words, is what those
words mean: God’s salvation is PERFECT!
For You Today
You can’t get better than perfect;
so why would you try?
Go to VIDEO
[2] Luke 20:9
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