A Closing Word of Prayer

On Sunday, March 19^th, Joy and I attended the Ashland City Free Will Baptist Church.  The pastor there, Wayne Bess, is a friend of mine stretching back to college days.  He is in a series of sermons on Heaven.  His remarks were based on Revelation 7:9-17, broadly expositional, well illustrated, and enthusiastically delivered.  I was glad that we attended, right up to the end.

It is not unusual as a visiting minister to be asked to pray.  As we stood for the closing song, a debate began in my mind.  If Wayne called on me to pray, what should I say?  I could use the generic, “It has been good to be here. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to worship,” but that would mask over the question I have been pondering for about a year now.  There is a well-worn saying that expresses it this way, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die!”  The Bible tells us in Philippians 3:20 that “our citizenship is in heaven,” and a standard gospel song puts it, “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.”  Ok, I get it; we are to live in this world with a confident expectation of what God has promised His children about the next. The rub comes when you begin to know something about the time of your departure.

After I got my preliminary diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration, I did what doctors tell you not to do--I looked it up on the internet.  Somewhere in this process I came across the general rule that most folks with CBD live five to seven years from diagnosis.  When I mentioned this to my neurologist at my next appointment he said, “I wouldn’t take those numbers as absolute; they are just an estimate.”  I suppose it was the fact that I looked so relieved that he followed up with, “But nobody measures CBD expected life span in decades.”

Years ago, I heard Jonathan Thigpen speak in chapel at FWBBC.  He had been battling with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, for some time at that point.  In fact, he had planned out a series of speaking engagements that he was calling his “farewell tour.”  It was a deeply moving message.  One of the lines that burned into my mind that day was, “We are all going to die.  The difference between you and me is I know what will take my life.  All of us should be ready.  I am, are you?”

Am I ready?  Yes.  Does that mean I want to leave now?  No.  I have tried to “set my house in order,” to use the biblical phrase, I just want to enjoy it awhile longer.  Is this because I love this world too much, I don’t love heaven enough, or both?  Probably the third option is closest to the mark.  I have grown to more deeply appreciate the Apostle Paul when he wrote, “I am hard-pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better; nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you” (Philippians 1:23).  While I long for that level of spiritual maturity, I know I am still far short of it.

When I told my deacons that I would have to resign, I said I was praying the Lord would give me a Sabbath.  At that point I was sixty years old and wanted to have some time, perhaps a decade, to rest from my labor, reflect on God’s goodness to me, and reassure my family of how much I love them. 

Bits and pieces of all of this flitted through my mind as Wayne called on me for a closing word of prayer.  So, what did I say?  “Lord, help us to live here with an anticipation of what we will have there.”  That is what I am trying to do.  What about you?

What are you doing with now?

I have been fortunate enough to be invited to preach at Good Springs and Ashland City Free Will Baptist Church in the last month.  At both churches I preached the same message, a modification of the message I delivered at the National Association in 2014, based on Galatians 6:7, 8.  I have often chided my friends in denominational ministry for having only a few “traveling sermons” that they use over and over again.  My not so subtle jibe was that, unlike local church pastors, they did not do the week- in week-out study, preparing a new message for each Sunday.  Their counter to this is that, unlike pastors, they don’t have blocks of time in which they could study.  Why not fall back on what they think of as a sure-fire sermon rather than throwing something together in the snatches of time available? 

Ok, I see and will even grant their point, but what was my excuse?  After all, I am retired and have all day to pour over the Bible and ponder how to present the truths I find in it.  The fallacy in that logic is that I have been quite busy over the last month.  More than one friend has asked me about how I use my “free” time, now that I have so much of it.  Well, I have been an “online facilitator” for Welch College for about five years now.  When I was pastoring I would only take on one class each semester so that they would not interfere with my primary responsibility to my church, but at retirement I decided to increase the workload.  I may have overdone it.

I am now working on the third unit of study in a row.  This involves knowing the class material better than the students, being thoroughly familiar with the textbooks, and spending hours on my computer interacting with the students.  An additional load came my way when I was asked to be the teaching assistant for one of the classes at Welch which would be using an internet format for a couple of weeks as construction on the new campus was completed.  The operative phrase in that sentence is “a couple of weeks.”  I remember thinking, “I can work through anything for two weeks!”  That two weeks became four and demanded more time and attention than any online classes I have ever worked with.  The first week I spent a little over 30 hours at my computer!  I told my dear wife that this was way too much like having a regular job!

Does all of that justify not having a new sermon for Good Springs and Ashland City?  I think so, but the friends I mentioned earlier may not.  I will say that I have a new appreciation of their world and will not be nearly so critical of it in the future.  A final point though arises from that sermon which spurred me to write this blog post.  The passage I spoke from centers on the truth that “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap!”  One point I tried to make was that our destiny is dependent upon how we use the present moment, the now.  Keeping with Galatians, if we want to harvest the fruit of the Spirit, then we must cultivate that now.  In my message I quoted the great evangelist D. L. Moody who said, “It is a solemn thing to think that the future will be the harvest of the present – that my condition in my dying hour may depend upon my actions today!  The opportunity for sowing will not last forever; it is slipping through our fingers moment by moment; and the future can only reveal the harvest of the seed sown now.”  So I conclude with the same question I began with, what are you doing with now?  I have tried to show you what I’m doing with my now.  What are you doing with yours?