After the Israelites moved into the Promised Land, as detailed in the Book of Joshua, for a period of about 400 years they were a loose confederation of tribes. When trouble came, God would raise up an individual to lead them. The term used was for the leader was a “judge”. The judge would lead the people of Israel for a period of years or decades, then they would go back to being a loose confederation of tribes.
Around the end of this time, the High Priest of Israel was a man named Samuel, who everyone recognized as being godly. The story of Samuel is told in the Books of 1 and 2nd Samuel. The people had decided they needed a king like the surrounding people did. After all, they never could see God – but they knew that the kings surrounding them had armies.
God and Samuel talked about this. Samuel said to God “I know this is a bad idea”, and God said, “You’re right, but they need to learn. Warn them what a king will do, but then we’ll find them a king.”
And Samuel told them of the costs of having a king. He would take their money to pay for soldiers, draft their sons to be soldiers, and take their daughters for his court. But they wanted a king, so God and Samuel found them Saul, a big tall guy, about 6’ 4” tall at a time when the average man was 5’ 4”. And Saul led Israel for many years until he disobeyed God and David took over.
After David was Solomon, and during this time, Israel controlled the land from the Euphrates River, beyond Damascus in Syria, much of Lebanon, most Jordan, and even most of the Sinai.
But soon after Solomon, Israel had a civil war. The Northern Tribes formed Israel. The two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin formed Judea, based on Jerusalem.
And this continued for a couple of hundred years.
1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; 1 Kings 17:8-16
It was toward the end of this time that a great prophet appeared – Elijah the Tishbite. His great enemies were the king and queen of the northern kingdom of Israel – King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Jezebel was the daughter of the King of Tyre, near modern day Beirut Lebanon. She brought the worship of Baal to Israel, a cult which required infant sacrifice and priests who cut themselves during worship. King Ahab began to allow and even support Baal worship throughout the land, so Elijah the Tishbite, following God’s orders, walked into Ahab’s court one day and announced that because of the Baal worship, there would be no more rain in Israel until he said so. And then he walked out and went into the wilderness, while King Ahab searched high and low for Elijah because the rain did stop. Now recognize that when you don’t have any rain, that meant in that day that you didn’t have any food, because donkey carts aren’t going to bring food from hundreds of miles away like our railroads and tractor-trailers bring food from California and Florida. No rain means no food and that means famine. For everyone. But Elijah had found a spring and God commanded the ravens to bring him food.
And now we have reached the time of our Old Testament Reading from 1 Kings 17.
Elijah heard from God to go to a small town in Lebanon near Sidon where he would have a widow ready to provide for him. This area was mostly a Baal-worshiping area near Queen Jezebel’s home town.
So Elijah strolls into town and there is a poor widow gathering wood. Now we need to remember that in a time of drought, in a time of famine, it is the poor who suffer first, because they don’t live on the good land and they can’t afford to buy food when the prices go up. But Elijah says, “Could you get me a cup of water?” And she goes to get it. As she is going, he yells after her, “Can you also bring me a piece of bread?”
That stops her. She turns and tells him, “Look, buddy. I don’t have bread baked. I’ve only got a little bit of flour and oil. I’ve been gathering sticks here so I can bake that up, feed it to myself and my son, and then we’ll die of starvation.”
But Elijah has been listening to God and Elijah has faith in God. Elijah tells her. “Bring me a little cake, a biscuit. Afterward, you may make some for yourself and your son, for this is what the Lord God of Israel says, ‘The flour jar will not become empty and the oil jug will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the surface of the land.”
And the woman showed her faith in God and Elijah, because that is just what she did. Notice that she made the biscuit for Elijah FIRST – for God FIRST – and then she made it for herself. And then the miracle happened.
The woman, the boy, and Elijah ate for many days, for months – and they did not run out of flour or oil.
How did this happen?
A literal reading says that the flour and the oil miraculously appeared in the pantry. God may have done that.
A more skeptical reading says that Elijah bought the flour and the oil and put it in the pantry every so often. Perhaps he did. But does that make it any less a miracle, just because Elijah bought and brought the food?
I don’t think so. Look at the situation from her point of view.
One day, she is just about out of food. The prices are high at the supermarket – She has no husband, only a young son, she’s out of money, she doesn’t have any food stamps, there’s no garden because there’s no rain and she doesn’t have any running water. She has to walk probably hundreds of yards with a heavy ceramic jar to draw water from a deep, community well.
I’ve seen photos of these wells. Maybe you have too. The women – and it was always women who did this – had to walk down slippery, muddy steps ten or fifteen feet to where the water level was. And then, carry that forty-pound jar back up the steps with two or three gallons of water in it, then back home with the water. A couple times every day. There’s no way to plant a garden. And there’s no food left.
But God had spoken to her about a man who would come and rescue her. So she decides to trust this man and his God. She makes him a biscuit.
And now, for weeks, there’s flour and oil in the pantry.
Does it matter to her whether God directly put the flour and oil in the pantry or whether the man God sent put the flour and oil in the pantry? NO! It’s a miracle either way. She lives – and her precious son lives and grows with food. Does it matter? She becomes a believer in God over those weeks and months.
And then there is the day almost a thousand years later when Jesus and His disciples are sitting near the Temple treasury, watching people drop coins into the box. Rich people were putting in large collections of coins. But a widow came by and dropped in two lepta, the smallest coins in circulation in Judea at the time. We can think of them as two pennies. And Jesus praises her. Why?
She could have said, “I can’t give twenty pieces of gold, so I’ll just go home rather than take the chance someone might see me put in just two cents.” She could have said, “What I do won’t make any difference.” She could have said, “I need those two cents far more than this big temple needs money.” But she didn’t. She gave. And Jesus praised her for it.
The rich people gave from their surplus – what they had left over. The widow gave everything she had. She was like the widow from Elijah who gave away some of the little bit of food she had left to live on before making the meal she thought would be her last.
In both cases, the widows gave to God a critical amount. If God doesn’t step in, bad things will happen in their lives. But they trusted God – and they believed that God would take care of them. They weren’t worried about the future – God would take care of the future – and God would take care of them.
In our culture today, we are bombarded with advertising that talks about preparing for retirement. The question is asked over and over again – do you have enough money saved for retirement? Our fear is fanned with the commercials. Soon, we have visions of having our house foreclosed upon, of moving into the mission, or worse yet, living with our children because we can’t pay our bills! We think about living in a tent somewhere in Randolph County because we can’t afford a home, we eat venison and ramps and berries that we’ve picked. And we shiver as the snow flies around us.
But the reality is that God still takes care of us. Because of the impact of Christians a hundred years ago, we have Social Security and Medicare. We have access to food stamps, so much food at such low prices that our problem is not starvation, but that we are overweight. Those who are truly homeless in this area for more than a few days are almost always homeless because they have chosen to spend money on chemicals rather than on food and shelter – or because they have become unwilling to live agreeably with others in our society. Oh, there are those who find themselves suddenly without a job, without support, in poverty because of the choices of others. But we have the systems to help people in those situations – if they will humble themselves enough to follow the rules for a while.
And this is one of our culture’s great problems. Pride. Most of us don’t want to accept help from others. Most of our financial problems are because we think we need something like the wealthy people we see on television. We can’t drive an old car, we can’t live in a small house, we can’t wear hand-me-down clothes. We must look better than other people.
I know of people who simply won’t shop at Wal-mart because of pride. We must have the smart iPhone – never the old flip phone. We must have the cable television package with three or four ESPN channels – never the rabbit ears. We must have the SUV – never the four-cylinder used car with rust.
The way of Jesus is different. He calls us to follow Him. And His way is to become homeless – yet always have a place to sleep. His way is to not have any money – but always to have food. His way is to walk from place to place – and to talk with the people He met. There are only two times he is recorded to have ridden – and both times it was on a donkey, the most basic transportation of the time. And one of those times, he was still being carried in His mother’s womb. Jesus didn’t believe in prideful things. He awaits the future to ride on His white horse. He trusts in the Father to provide, as the widows trusted in the Father to provide.
And this emphasis on being humble goes beyond material things.
Our culture urges us to consider education and training and expertise for every job. We have bought into the culture’s idea that only nurses can nurse, only teachers can teach, only certified mechanics can fix cars, only doctors have any idea how to fix illnesses, only musicians can sing, only preachers can preach. Deep down, we sort of believe that the only people who can do certain jobs sort of fall out of the sky – even though we know that they mostly just went to classes for a few years to earn the right to handle the job.
I have seen this with the things I can do well. People say, “Some people just understand math, others don’t”, as though some people are born knowing algebra, completely disregarding the hours spent working homework problems. People say, “Some people can sing, others can’t”, as though the hours spent singing poorly in choirs didn’t mean anything. People say, “Some people can teach, others can’t” as if some people started teaching when they began speaking at 18 months of age. And people say, “Some people can preach, others can’t”, implying that preachers all know that they are preachers from about age 6.
I’m good at math. But it took me a year, working homework every evening, to learn Algebra – which, amazing enough, is how long the course lasted. I can sing well. It took me about four years of singing in choirs before I could sing well. It took me another couple of years of trying solos in choirs before I had the nerve to sing a solo without a choir to hide in. I can teach well. It took me five years of teaching in a classroom before I felt confident in my teaching. I can preach – I’m still learning how to preach well. The first time I preached, I was 50 years old. I’ve been doing carpentry work since I was twelve years old. So far, I have one piece of furniture that I think looks good. All the other things I’ve built are rough-looking, functional, but they look like a teenager built them. I occasionally do carpentry work for myself, but I don’t do that work for others.
Can you imagine if our veterans had all looked at the world this way? Can you imagine all those young men and women saying, “I don’t know how to drive a tank, so I won’t join the Army?” Or “I can’t fly an airplane, so I can’t join the Air Force?” Or “Some people are just born knowing how to fire artillery, and others don’t know.”
Can you imagine if Christ had looked at the world the way our culture looks at the world? He could have said, “I think that because my Father is God the Father, I’ll just take over this world. Anything less would be denying my abilities and background.” And instead of dying on the cross for us, He might have taken over. But thank God that He did not. For Christ was humble enough to know that His purpose was greater than His body, that dying on the cross for all of us sinful people was more important than His pride.
Our culture is wrong. We do not know what we are capable of from birth. Everything we are good at is a combination of God’s gifts, hard work, training, & practice, a focus upon becoming good, and God’s blessings. So often, we don’t do something because of our pride – since we can’t put twenty pieces of gold proudly into the treasury, we are afraid to put our two pieces of copper into the treasury. We let our pride get in the way. We believe that because we can’t sing as good as Frank Sinatra or Michael Buble or Amy Grant, we shouldn’t sing. We believe that because we can’t act like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts, we shouldn’t act. We believe that because we can’t preach like Billy Graham, Charles Stanley, or Beth Moore, we can’t preach. We let our pride get in the way of following what God wants us to do.
Last year, in this state, about 30 Methodist preachers retired. Only about a dozen new preachers started out. Churches were closed because of this.
This June, about 50 Methodist preachers are expected to retire in this state. Only about a dozen or so new preachers are expected to start out. More churches will close because of this.
If you have ever thought about preaching, let me give you the facts about the job.
You will not be paid well – but you will receive a home, with all utilities paid.
Some people will leave your churches the day you arrive – But others will come to your churches over the next few years.
You will upset and offend some people – but you will also have people tell you that you have become their dearest and closest friend.
You will never be able to count on staying in the same home from one year to the next – yet you will always know that God is with you, for God walks into homes, hospitals, nursing homes and funerals with you.
You will often wonder if you are doing God’s will – and you will often see that God was working no matter what you did.
There will be days when you feel like you are working just for bread – but you will learn that the flour and the oil will always be there, alongside the living water that flows from the Words you read through the sermons you preach every week.
There will be days when you will not feel like you have made any difference in the world – and then, the next day, as you put your two cents into God’s treasury, you will know the Father’s blessing.
There are several of you who have been toying with the idea of leading a church for a while now. You have daydreamed about what you would do, what you would say, how you would do things differently. I’m here today to tell you that God has been sending you those daydreams through the Holy Spirit.
Most pastors that you will talk to will tell you the same story. They heard the call one day and then made excuses why they couldn’t or shouldn’t answer the call. They were too young or they were too old. They had too many children or not enough education. They needed money or they were scared of speaking in front of people or they were scared of speaking to people in their homes or hospital rooms. They felt they couldn’t put twenty gold pieces of difference into the world and so they held back their two cents worth. They delayed and they delayed and then finally, they took a step forward and found they had made a mistake. The mistake, they’ll all tell you, was in not stepping forward sooner.
If you are interested in considering the ministry, the path is simple. Talk to me. There are many starter churches available, part-time churches with 15 to 20 people – about the size of a solid Sunday School class. Mary Ellen Finegan, our District Superintendent, and our Bishop have both put out a call to find new pastors.
It’s time to put aside your pride, your fear of failure, your fear that you don’t have twenty gold coins to put in the treasury – and put in your two little copper coins. For you may not become the next Billy Graham, leading four million people to the altar – but you may lead one person, a person who will not spend eternity in hellfire because of you.
Just like everything else, becoming a pastor is a matter of God’s gifts, hard work, training, & practice, a focus upon becoming good, and God’s blessings. God took me, a man with experience in automating factories and developing an Internet business and made me a pastor. God took Saundra, a woman whose first job was sewing gloves for a living, who had jobs selling everything from insurance to electronics to secretaries to inkjet ink and made her a pastor. God took our son Andy, who had a year and a half of college and had only worked at the Boy Scout camp and made him a pastor. God took our friend, who did prison time for beating up a guy he was selling drugs to, and made him a pastor. God took our other friend, a union carpenter, and made him a pastor.
And God may want to make you a pastor.
Will you give Him permission? Will you put away your pride and put in your two cents?
And now we have reached the time of our Old Testament Reading from 1 Kings 17.
Elijah heard from God to go to a small town in Lebanon near Sidon where he would have a widow ready to provide for him. This area was mostly a Baal-worshiping area near Queen Jezebel’s home town.
So Elijah strolls into town and there is a poor widow gathering wood. Now we need to remember that in a time of drought, in a time of famine, it is the poor who suffer first, because they don’t live on the good land and they can’t afford to buy food when the prices go up. But Elijah says, “Could you get me a cup of water?” And she goes to get it. As she is going, he yells after her, “Can you also bring me a piece of bread?”
That stops her. She turns and tells him, “Look, buddy. I don’t have bread baked. I’ve only got a little bit of flour and oil. I’ve been gathering sticks here so I can bake that up, feed it to myself and my son, and then we’ll die of starvation.”
But Elijah has been listening to God and Elijah has faith in God. Elijah tells her. “Bring me a little cake, a biscuit. Afterward, you may make some for yourself and your son, for this is what the Lord God of Israel says, ‘The flour jar will not become empty and the oil jug will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the surface of the land.”
And the woman showed her faith in God and Elijah, because that is just what she did. Notice that she made the biscuit for Elijah FIRST – for God FIRST – and then she made it for herself. And then the miracle happened.
The woman, the boy, and Elijah ate for many days, for months – and they did not run out of flour or oil.
How did this happen?
A literal reading says that the flour and the oil miraculously appeared in the pantry. God may have done that.
A more skeptical reading says that Elijah bought the flour and the oil and put it in the pantry every so often. Perhaps he did. But does that make it any less a miracle, just because Elijah bought and brought the food?
I don’t think so. Look at the situation from her point of view.
One day, she is just about out of food. The prices are high at the supermarket – She has no husband, only a young son, she’s out of money, she doesn’t have any food stamps, there’s no garden because there’s no rain and she doesn’t have any running water. She has to walk probably hundreds of yards with a heavy ceramic jar to draw water from a deep, community well.
I’ve seen photos of these wells. Maybe you have too. The women – and it was always women who did this – had to walk down slippery, muddy steps ten or fifteen feet to where the water level was. And then, carry that forty-pound jar back up the steps with two or three gallons of water in it, then back home with the water. A couple times every day. There’s no way to plant a garden. And there’s no food left.
But God had spoken to her about a man who would come and rescue her. So she decides to trust this man and his God. She makes him a biscuit.
And now, for weeks, there’s flour and oil in the pantry.
Does it matter to her whether God directly put the flour and oil in the pantry or whether the man God sent put the flour and oil in the pantry? NO! It’s a miracle either way. She lives – and her precious son lives and grows with food. Does it matter? She becomes a believer in God over those weeks and months.
And then there is the day almost a thousand years later when Jesus and His disciples are sitting near the Temple treasury, watching people drop coins into the box. Rich people were putting in large collections of coins. But a widow came by and dropped in two lepta, the smallest coins in circulation in Judea at the time. We can think of them as two pennies. And Jesus praises her. Why?
She could have said, “I can’t give twenty pieces of gold, so I’ll just go home rather than take the chance someone might see me put in just two cents.” She could have said, “What I do won’t make any difference.” She could have said, “I need those two cents far more than this big temple needs money.” But she didn’t. She gave. And Jesus praised her for it.
The rich people gave from their surplus – what they had left over. The widow gave everything she had. She was like the widow from Elijah who gave away some of the little bit of food she had left to live on before making the meal she thought would be her last.
In both cases, the widows gave to God a critical amount. If God doesn’t step in, bad things will happen in their lives. But they trusted God – and they believed that God would take care of them. They weren’t worried about the future – God would take care of the future – and God would take care of them.
In our culture today, we are bombarded with advertising that talks about preparing for retirement. The question is asked over and over again – do you have enough money saved for retirement? Our fear is fanned with the commercials. Soon, we have visions of having our house foreclosed upon, of moving into the mission, or worse yet, living with our children because we can’t pay our bills! We think about living in a tent somewhere in Randolph County because we can’t afford a home, we eat venison and ramps and berries that we’ve picked. And we shiver as the snow flies around us.
But the reality is that God still takes care of us. Because of the impact of Christians a hundred years ago, we have Social Security and Medicare. We have access to food stamps, so much food at such low prices that our problem is not starvation, but that we are overweight. Those who are truly homeless in this area for more than a few days are almost always homeless because they have chosen to spend money on chemicals rather than on food and shelter – or because they have become unwilling to live agreeably with others in our society. Oh, there are those who find themselves suddenly without a job, without support, in poverty because of the choices of others. But we have the systems to help people in those situations – if they will humble themselves enough to follow the rules for a while.
And this is one of our culture’s great problems. Pride. Most of us don’t want to accept help from others. Most of our financial problems are because we think we need something like the wealthy people we see on television. We can’t drive an old car, we can’t live in a small house, we can’t wear hand-me-down clothes. We must look better than other people.
I know of people who simply won’t shop at Wal-mart because of pride. We must have the smart iPhone – never the old flip phone. We must have the cable television package with three or four ESPN channels – never the rabbit ears. We must have the SUV – never the four-cylinder used car with rust.
The way of Jesus is different. He calls us to follow Him. And His way is to become homeless – yet always have a place to sleep. His way is to not have any money – but always to have food. His way is to walk from place to place – and to talk with the people He met. There are only two times he is recorded to have ridden – and both times it was on a donkey, the most basic transportation of the time. And one of those times, he was still being carried in His mother’s womb. Jesus didn’t believe in prideful things. He awaits the future to ride on His white horse. He trusts in the Father to provide, as the widows trusted in the Father to provide.
And this emphasis on being humble goes beyond material things.
Our culture urges us to consider education and training and expertise for every job. We have bought into the culture’s idea that only nurses can nurse, only teachers can teach, only certified mechanics can fix cars, only doctors have any idea how to fix illnesses, only musicians can sing, only preachers can preach. Deep down, we sort of believe that the only people who can do certain jobs sort of fall out of the sky – even though we know that they mostly just went to classes for a few years to earn the right to handle the job.
I have seen this with the things I can do well. People say, “Some people just understand math, others don’t”, as though some people are born knowing algebra, completely disregarding the hours spent working homework problems. People say, “Some people can sing, others can’t”, as though the hours spent singing poorly in choirs didn’t mean anything. People say, “Some people can teach, others can’t” as if some people started teaching when they began speaking at 18 months of age. And people say, “Some people can preach, others can’t”, implying that preachers all know that they are preachers from about age 6.
I’m good at math. But it took me a year, working homework every evening, to learn Algebra – which, amazing enough, is how long the course lasted. I can sing well. It took me about four years of singing in choirs before I could sing well. It took me another couple of years of trying solos in choirs before I had the nerve to sing a solo without a choir to hide in. I can teach well. It took me five years of teaching in a classroom before I felt confident in my teaching. I can preach – I’m still learning how to preach well. The first time I preached, I was 50 years old. I’ve been doing carpentry work since I was twelve years old. So far, I have one piece of furniture that I think looks good. All the other things I’ve built are rough-looking, functional, but they look like a teenager built them. I occasionally do carpentry work for myself, but I don’t do that work for others.
Can you imagine if our veterans had all looked at the world this way? Can you imagine all those young men and women saying, “I don’t know how to drive a tank, so I won’t join the Army?” Or “I can’t fly an airplane, so I can’t join the Air Force?” Or “Some people are just born knowing how to fire artillery, and others don’t know.”
Can you imagine if Christ had looked at the world the way our culture looks at the world? He could have said, “I think that because my Father is God the Father, I’ll just take over this world. Anything less would be denying my abilities and background.” And instead of dying on the cross for us, He might have taken over. But thank God that He did not. For Christ was humble enough to know that His purpose was greater than His body, that dying on the cross for all of us sinful people was more important than His pride.
Our culture is wrong. We do not know what we are capable of from birth. Everything we are good at is a combination of God’s gifts, hard work, training, & practice, a focus upon becoming good, and God’s blessings. So often, we don’t do something because of our pride – since we can’t put twenty pieces of gold proudly into the treasury, we are afraid to put our two pieces of copper into the treasury. We let our pride get in the way. We believe that because we can’t sing as good as Frank Sinatra or Michael Buble or Amy Grant, we shouldn’t sing. We believe that because we can’t act like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts, we shouldn’t act. We believe that because we can’t preach like Billy Graham, Charles Stanley, or Beth Moore, we can’t preach. We let our pride get in the way of following what God wants us to do.
Last year, in this state, about 30 Methodist preachers retired. Only about a dozen new preachers started out. Churches were closed because of this.
This June, about 50 Methodist preachers are expected to retire in this state. Only about a dozen or so new preachers are expected to start out. More churches will close because of this.
If you have ever thought about preaching, let me give you the facts about the job.
You will not be paid well – but you will receive a home, with all utilities paid.
Some people will leave your churches the day you arrive – But others will come to your churches over the next few years.
You will upset and offend some people – but you will also have people tell you that you have become their dearest and closest friend.
You will never be able to count on staying in the same home from one year to the next – yet you will always know that God is with you, for God walks into homes, hospitals, nursing homes and funerals with you.
You will often wonder if you are doing God’s will – and you will often see that God was working no matter what you did.
There will be days when you feel like you are working just for bread – but you will learn that the flour and the oil will always be there, alongside the living water that flows from the Words you read through the sermons you preach every week.
There will be days when you will not feel like you have made any difference in the world – and then, the next day, as you put your two cents into God’s treasury, you will know the Father’s blessing.
There are several of you who have been toying with the idea of leading a church for a while now. You have daydreamed about what you would do, what you would say, how you would do things differently. I’m here today to tell you that God has been sending you those daydreams through the Holy Spirit.
Most pastors that you will talk to will tell you the same story. They heard the call one day and then made excuses why they couldn’t or shouldn’t answer the call. They were too young or they were too old. They had too many children or not enough education. They needed money or they were scared of speaking in front of people or they were scared of speaking to people in their homes or hospital rooms. They felt they couldn’t put twenty gold pieces of difference into the world and so they held back their two cents worth. They delayed and they delayed and then finally, they took a step forward and found they had made a mistake. The mistake, they’ll all tell you, was in not stepping forward sooner.
If you are interested in considering the ministry, the path is simple. Talk to me. There are many starter churches available, part-time churches with 15 to 20 people – about the size of a solid Sunday School class. Mary Ellen Finegan, our District Superintendent, and our Bishop have both put out a call to find new pastors.
It’s time to put aside your pride, your fear of failure, your fear that you don’t have twenty gold coins to put in the treasury – and put in your two little copper coins. For you may not become the next Billy Graham, leading four million people to the altar – but you may lead one person, a person who will not spend eternity in hellfire because of you.
Just like everything else, becoming a pastor is a matter of God’s gifts, hard work, training, & practice, a focus upon becoming good, and God’s blessings. God took me, a man with experience in automating factories and developing an Internet business and made me a pastor. God took Saundra, a woman whose first job was sewing gloves for a living, who had jobs selling everything from insurance to electronics to secretaries to inkjet ink and made her a pastor. God took our son Andy, who had a year and a half of college and had only worked at the Boy Scout camp and made him a pastor. God took our friend, who did prison time for beating up a guy he was selling drugs to, and made him a pastor. God took our other friend, a union carpenter, and made him a pastor.
And God may want to make you a pastor.
Will you give Him permission? Will you put away your pride and put in your two cents?
A good read. Not only being reminded of what happened centuries ago to teach lessons about God, but how it applies to today. I like being able to connect one service to another as regards learning how to put the Bible 'puzzle pieces' together. And then, to have it dawn on me that the 2 coins given by the poor widow probably led to the saying 'putting in my 2-cents worth.' And, that verse is among the possibilities of the sayings' origin. Thanks for the blog we can read to reinforce the sermon. It definitely helps me to remember better.
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