March 06, 2015
Any Season
Years ago I listened to a
speaker and afterward commented on the presentation. She let me know that any analysis
or feedback immediately following her presentation was not good timing on my
part. Obviously she felt I’d committed a faux pas. Her response set me back on
my heels and my worldly nature kicked in, so
praise and kudos are the only things you want to hear after a presentation. It is curious how often we feel we must set
the stage and schedule our comments to coincide with when we think someone is receptive.
Unfortunately many of us use this same thought process when we share the Gospel.
However Paul said, “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct,
rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction” (2 Tim 4:2
NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----If a person means his comments to make a particular effect, then timing is crucial. Sometimes there is cause for this. My mind goes to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last Tuesday. So also we see politicians, celebrities, and race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton making mad scrambles to the cameras and microphones, interjecting what we should think about whatever has occasioned their same old, drumming message. Public comments, especially on the national stage, are more timed than the general populace would ever imagine.
-----And I like to imagine physic’s conservation of energy principle applies here, too. Let’s say the energy of a message is its force. Then we can see the force of a message being in either its timing or its accuracy. Complete and total disregard was given the truth when Ferguson streets were crawling with vandals screaming with force, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” A couple nights ago a race-baiter guest on the Shawn Hannity Show was making obvious gulps of embarrassment as images of Eric Holder explaining how the Federal investigation into the “Gentle Giant’s” shooting also found no hands were up while the shoot was necessary. Oops! The force of the message has now changed from a well timed lie to that of a poorly timed truth.
-----But imagination is good for only so much. In actuality, the eventual force of this belated truth would not be available now if the same truth had not been presented over and over and over from the very beginning in spite of the continuous, overpowering mayhem of deceit. Likewise, we can easily see why we are on the verge of loosing our long cherished liberty from this country. At the beginning of Obama’s campaign his Constitutional disqualification was pointed out by Hillary Clinton and successfully examined by many others. But the force of well timed, persevering deceit began to so tarnish the reputations of any holding up the truth that the truth was dropped for an agreement with deceit to just not think about it anymore. We now have a very real philosophical problem on our hands, one that I suspect may have been the aim of the left wing producing this character for Presidential consideration in the first place. Do we continue accepting the shear force of fallacy while paying lip service to a Constitution rendered feckless by that same unchallenged fallacy? Or do we keep dragging onto the stage all of the relevant history regarding what our Founding Fathers meant by “natural-born citizen“ until the public can no longer obfuscate the point, regardless of the threats and brutal, bully tactics of the political left? Yes, we should; but no, we’re cowards. This lie was so well timed that everyone knowing the truth swallowed the truth and accepted being silent. Then we go off to church and worship the Truth? What hypocrites! We’ve exchanged the truth and persecution for the lie and “security”.
-----Maybe careful timing is important for particular purposes. But if you ever want the truth to prevail without Jesus havening to return and stomp the lying grapes of wrath Himself, then the truth must actually be vociferously shouted into deceit’s mayhem until it’s opportunity is finally born. If you want your messages to carry the force of truth, do not exchange truth for timing; speak truth now; speak truth always! It’s the only way truth achieves timing.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
PS Did you ever wonder what might be the implication of the Supreme Court having decided one day that the Shared Responsibility Payment of the Affordable Care Act was a penalty so it could legally hear a case against it, then Chief Justice John Roberts ruling two days later that the Shared Responsibility Payment was a tax so the Court could uphold the Affordable Care Act? Is it not a lie to call something this as opposed to that one day to make an objective possible, then call it that as opposed to this two days later to achieve that objective? Is there somehow you can figure the Supreme Court illegally heard a case regarding a not-yet-levied tax in order to legally find it constitutional? Or did it legally hear a case on a penalty to later uphold the ACA on the merits of an illegally heard, not-yet-levied tax? Doesn’t anybody care about the sharp divisions arising between reality and our current government? Or is reality now that our government, once fashioned by regard first for the truth, died? So heretofore only timing matters, never truth? Only who has the microphone and camera matters, never who has the truth? Paul tells us that the end of this evil era will ride in on a tide of deceit. But does that mean we who know the truth must stop standing on the truth like mighty oaks rising above that tide? Must we who know the truth sink beneath the flood of deceit for God to achieve His objective? No! Stand like the mighty oaks He made us to be and throw truth at the deceitful flood like bricks; they may never stack like a rampart against the flood, but when the Lord returns to dry up the deceit, you will be known by how you stood more than by how you felt. Scuttle timing! Speak the truth always!
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