Category: 2019

In 30 years of ministry, I have observed three kinds of people in the church. First, there are the “good-time Christians,” the people who only serve God in the good times. As long as everything is going well and there are no storms to rock their boat, they are cheerful Christians coming to church with a song and smile. But let anything bad happened to them and it knocks the victory right out of them. They get mad at God, start singing the blues, and are right back into their former sinful life crying in their beer and blaming God for all their problems. This is because they were living with the illusion that if they went to church, gave their tithes, and had enough faith, then nothing bad would ever happen to them, but life has a way of straightening out bad theology. Jesus said, the sun rises on the evil and the good, and it rains on the just and the unjust (Mt. 5:45).

Have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about all the stupid stuff you did when you were younger, and thought, “Wow! If it had not been for the Lord on my side, where would I be?” I am grateful for every day that I wake up in the land of the living. Some of you may not have done the kind of stupid stuff I did, but I should have been dead at least a dozen times, and yet God chose to protect me from myself and extend my life so that He could save me, He could raise me, and He could use me to serve Him in His kingdom. Every day I wake up, I’m still amazed by His rich mercy and amazing grace. The alcohol that didn’t kill me, the fall from the women’s dorm in college that didn’t end my life. The man with the gun in my face that didn’t shoot me. The car crashes that never happened, the water that didn’t drown me, my momma who didn’t beat me to death, my wife who hasn’t killed me in my sleep. Praise God for grace! This is what Paul highlights in our passage today.

When I was a child visiting my cousins at our grandmother’s house, if any of us were in a room together and we turned out the lights, my grandmother’s super-senses were alerted and she immediately came to the room to see what we were up to. In her words, “Nothing good can be going on, if the lights are off.” For example, one night some of my cousins and I caught a mason jar full of fireflies (or as we called them, lightnin-bugs), and we had the ingenious idea to close the door to the living-room, turn off the lights, and set the lightnin-bugs loose in the house. It was going to be a magical display of lights the likes of which would make Times Square in New York City green with envy. Our plan worked to perfection, until granny burst through the door into her living-room and found it filled with the frantically flashing lights of dozens of terrified fireflies.

For years, employment and management professionals have championed the idea that if we want to get ahead in life, if we want the promotion, if we want a better job, if we want to be taken seriously and respected, then we have to dress for success. A person who comes to an interview for a corporate management position dressed like a farmer in bib overalls is probably not going to get the job. If he wants to be a manager, then he has to look like a manager, talk like a manager, walk like a manager, and act like a manager.