Ponderings

Devotionals, prayer & insights from my Bible reading

My first sermon

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I have had the opportunity to speak in church a few times, and I sang solos a number of times when I was much, much younger, but today was the first time I’ve been invited to do the whole sermon!

It was a humbling process to prepare for it and hope that what I was planning to share would be meaningful and relevant to the people who would hear it. We are doing a series called “Family Apps” from Proverbs, and my message was primarily from Proverbs 13, with other verses/passages for illustration. The topic was “Choice Words,” and we talked about words to avoid and words to encourage.

We had a friendly contest to see who could quote the number Pi to the furthest decimal place, and I was impressed that a fairly young kid won! (There was a point to mentioning Pi, but I’ll save the explanation for now.) Also, two of my monkey boys (No. 1 & No. 5) helped me do a skit to reinterpret the parable of the father and his two sons, which was a lot of fun.

It really warms my heart that so many folks – even people I don’t know well, if at all – came up to me after the service to say that it impacted them. When I heard those types of comments, I realized that it was a God-thing, not just a me-thing! 🙂

P.S. When our terrific A/V, IT and all-other-things-techie volunteer gets it ready, the video will be posted here.

Of Strength & Hope (Prayer Devotional for the week of June 10, 2012)

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I looked away from my computer on a particularly challenging morning one day last week and read the daily Bible verse on my desktop flip-calendar. It was from Proverbs 13:12 – “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” I realized that my attitude had gotten the best of me, because I was hosting a pity party instead of giving my concerns totally and irrevocably to God. I had prayed about this particular situation, of course, but I was still trying to “fix” it. It was irreparable! There was nothing at all that I could do in my own power to change the circumstance, but I was still mumbling and grumbling about it.

I decided to look up passages about hope and see what I could find. This one from Job resonated with me like a pinky toe against the leg of a coffee table. It comes from chapter 6, and Job is responding to his friend, Eliphaz, who had offered him advice on how to face life’s trials back in chapters 4-5:

“What strength do I have, that I should still hope? What prospects, that I should be patient? Do I have the strength of stone? Is my flesh bronze? Do I have any power to help myself, now that success has been driven from me?” (Job 6:11-12)

Ouch. Job, man, you read my mind! It is so easy to fall into the pity party trap and focus on what ails us, instead of hoping against all odds and leaning on the one who is in control, anyway. Besides, even if I did have the power to “fix” the problem, my solution would have looked vastly different from the way the Lord began putting pieces in place in the coming days. I never would have imagined a solution like that, but then again, how could I? His thoughts and his ways are so much higher than any I could dream (Isaiah 55:9).

Let’s focus our prayer time this week on the hope that he offers us.