Sermons

I recently read the story of an elderly man who was laying on his bed at the point of death. With each breath feeling as though it would be his last, the aroma of his favorite freshly baked sugar cookies filled his room. Gathering his remaining strength, he lifted himself from the bed, and leaning against the wall he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort, gripping the stair-rail with both hands he crawled downstairs. With labored breath, he leaned against the doorframe gazing into the kitchen. If it wasn’t for the pain, he would have thought that he had already died and gone to heaven; for there, spread out upon waxed paper on the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favorite sugar sprinkled cookies gloriously warm and soft, fresh from the oven.

At my first fulltime pastorate in Junction City, Kansas, there were several Korean speaking people in the church, along with couples where one spouse was South Korean and the other American. To address the spiritual needs of the diversity in our church, I invited a Korean evangelist as our guest speaker for a revival. The evangelist spoke in Korean while my wife translated his message into English through the use of wireless headphones that the English speaking members were wearing

What is the most difficult thing you’ve ever been asked to do? Was it to give someone bad news, or maybe to fire someone? Maybe you were asked to give up something so that someone else could have it, or to make a sacrifice of time or money for a cause. What did it cost you to do that difficult thing? The apostle Paul was given the unenviable task of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. I say “unenviable” because his fellow Jews had a very difficult time believing that Gentiles could become members of the exclusive club known as, “The People of God.” But this was the ministry Paul was given, and he gave it everything he had. It cost him his vaunted status among his countrymen; it cost him freedom; it cost him physical harm and mistreatment; and eventually it cost him his life. He talks a little about the cost in the 2 Corinthians. Reluctantly responding to the Jewish crowd who considered themselves superior to Paul and who constantly criticized him, he writes in chapter 11, beginning at verse 22,

How many of you have looked at yourself in a mirror at least once today? I’ve looked several times. We look in the mirror to assess how we look to ourselves, but have you ever stopped to consider that what other people see when they look at us is the exact opposite of what we see in the mirror? I don’t mean this spiritually, but literally the mirror image is the opposite of who we really are. In the mirror our right is left, and our left is right, and we part our hair on the other side of our head. We spend a lot of time looking at ourselves in the mirror and we think we know how other people see us, but if we could hear what people say behind our back, we might be surprised. We think we look and act like a Christian, but we might be shocked to hear them saying that we think we’re better than everyone else. Or, they might have seen that little outburst of anger, and they’re saying, “I thought he was a Christian!

Have ever taken the time to just sit down and meditate on what God has done to bring us back into a right relationship with Him? I mean, think about it . . . we were dead in trespasses and sin, lost and undone without God or His Son, when He reached down His hand, brought us out of the deep miry clay, and put our feet on the Rock to stay. We weren’t looking for Him, but He came looking for us. As the Hindsons’ used to sing, "And I'm so glad He found me..."

It was March 11th, 1989, and I was standing outside the nursery in the Bradley County Hospital in Cleveland, Tennessee, looking through the glass at the bassinet labeled “Hardgrove”. The babies were lined up, as if in a display case at a high-end department store. The Hardgrove bassinet was the third from my left, and it held my second child, my first and only daughter, who was lying in a room among a dozen or so other little bundles of joy, tightly wrapped in receiving blankets like burritos in a Taco Bell to-go box.

In the military, soldiers are required to have what is sometimes called a “go-bag,” or a “bugout bag.” It is a duffle bag packed with everything a soldier is required have if suddenly called to deploy, night or day. All the soldier has to do is grab that duffle bag and go, because everything needed to go to battle is in the bag. In a way, Paul is describing the go-bag of the believer. What Paul describes is the spiritual armor we should put on now, because it’s go-time. The battle is on, so we must be ready to deploy, to withstand and to stand “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

Several years ago, my friend bought a vintage 1967 Camaro with a perfect body and flawless interior. He would sit in that car for hours dreaming of driving it around town. It looked great in his garage and he visited it often because he was very proud of it. The problem was … it had no motor. On the surface it looked great, but it had no motor so it had no power. Nice to look at, but it was worthless as a car because it had no motor.

Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong? Like everyone else was in on the joke, but you. They had a way of talking and interacting that you didn’t quite understand, and you always felt awkward no matter how hard you tried to fit in. Let me give you an embarrassing example from my own life. Other than the second grade and half of the third grade, which I attended in Smyrna, Tennessee, my entire childhood and teen years were spent in areas of the country where 99 percent of the people were white. It wasn’t until I went to college, and later in the Air Force, that I really began to have relationships with people of other races and ethnicities. At first, I was awkward, but I was willing to put myself out there even if I got it wrong, because eventually I’ll figure it out and get it right.