November 17, 2015
Putting Out Your Sign
Disconnected phone numbers
and incorrect addresses are a couple of reasons I’ve had difficulties finding
some of the churches I’ve wanted to visit. One address turned out to be a
tattoo parlor, so I called the phone number listed and the man laughed and
said, “Well, just get a tattoo and then come on upstairs to church!” The
church, which was in a strip mall, had relocated to an upstairs room. However,
in order to find the church entrance I had to drive through the alley, locate
an industrial door with a small church sign and then climb a flight of stairs.
At the conclusion of the service I told the pastor about my difficulty in
finding them and he said, “Well we used to put a sign out front on the
sidewalk, but we just got tired of putting it out.” I suspect that as individuals
may of us are of a similar mindset. Having been believers most of our lives we
forget the importance of putting out our own personal sign of hope and
salvation. The writer of Hebrews said, “We have this hope as an anchor for the
soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf. He has
become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 6:19 20 NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----Having been pretty much crabby most of my life, I have a very big, black backdrop against which my emerging joy can contrast. And it even seems the people around me have taken on a better demeanor, especially those I see regularly, like the employees at City Market where I’ve been going almost daily for thirty years, and those at the post office, and the people at church. It’s like when the joy finally started breaking through my crusty exterior, it was breaking through everyone else’s too.
-----But that doesn’t make sense. I love coincidences. One of my favorite sayings is “history loves a coincidence”. But this is too coincidental. And of course, I never thought of it as a coincidence. I always thought of it like you’ve probably been thinking while reading this, “Come on, Steve, people react to other people’s moods in like fashion.” So. When I finally began letting my joy shine around, other people have been having fun with joy too.
-----What finally pressed my joy through my crusty surface? I’ve always been very sure of my salvation. The Bible says salvation is easy. Desire God and call on Him for it. Then having it, my hope is established. But I was inwardly angry with God for many years. I never cared much if my stuff got broken and my health bit the dust. I have always thanked Him that my stuff has hung together remarkably well considering the care I don’t take of it, and that my health has always been incredibly great considering the same. What’s angered me inwardly is that God’s Word is perfect reasoning, the most sense anything in the world has ever made, it’s superior level of rationality demanding belief, yet regardless, if it were so true, the early history of man it presents would be unarguably verifiable by archeological finds and paleontology. Rocks don’t lie. Neither does the Word. Yet they seem to say two different things.
-----I never really talked much about this with any of my siblings in the Lord. I always knew what they would say, “If you have to have evidence, then ya ain’t got faith.” Well, OK. But God is rather evidential Himself, “There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree,” (I John 5:8) putting a finger on the tip of that iceberg in the Bible. The Bible is full of God’s evoking evidentiary matter, “And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him.” (Deut 18:21-22) God is an evidentiary God, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them,” “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (Rom 1:19, Ps 19:1 and is that not a bit of evidence, too!)
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-----In these last two decades God has ripped open the veil of deceit “scientists” have pulled over the eyes of the people. Some of His servants have written books about the gospel in the stars. Some have shown evidence from men’s early histories corresponding to the disbursement of the nations after that Babel thing. Thirty years God let scoffers deny the existence of David until in the mid-90’s He shoved one small, 10th century inscription bearing “the House of David” right down their scoffing throats. And the evidences of God’s truth have been leaping out of the dirt and showing in the sky at an ever increasing rate. It is as if He were speaking to the world before something stark overtakes it.
-----It wasn’t a lack of faith thing that had me angry with God. It was more a lack of His visibility within what He already owns. Then I realized, visibility of truth is something only fit for eyes to see. And the more you desire to see and ask, the more He shows, because the more your eyes become seeing. And the stuff He has led through my eyesight in these last couple years has me hopping inside. Half of the days I was hopping inside in High School, too, and the kids, some of whom I didn’t even know, would ask, “Every time I see you you’re smiling. Why?” I wish adults would do that as much, because my sign today has an answer to that question, “I’m alive in Jesus who’s more real than the air we breathe. And it’s time to scramble out of the wine press, because He’s coming quickly.”
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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