Thursday, November 8, 2018

Perfect

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?
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com
[2] Luke 20:9

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