Tag Archives: God

If Shoes Could Talk

I have been preaching through a sermon series called “True Love.”  Lately, I have been focusing on the characteristics of love.  In other words, what does love look like?  One of the characteristics of love is this: “love despises evil, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6).  What does this phrase mean?  It means two things: first, if you truly love someone, you don’t want them to be tangled up in some kind of sin that will ultimately destroy their life.  You genuinely want them to be free from sin.  Second, you do not want bad things to happen to people.  You want them to be blessed, just like you want to be blessed.

Do you hate seeing people being destroyed by their sin, or does it not affect your heart?  Do you care when others are going through a difficult time in their life because a tragedy has struck them?  You might be able to say yes to each of these questions.  It is not hard to say “Yes” when sin and tragedy affect those you find easy to love.  But what about those people who rub you the wrong way?  When something bad happens to “that jerk” at work, do you find your heart a little happy that he or she got what they deserved?

Deeply loving people are merciful to everyone because they understand that God has been merciful to them.  Deeply loving people never want someone else to be hindered by evil, because they think to themselves: if I were that person and evil came on me, then I wouldn’t like that.  Deeply loving people understand Jesus’ words: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7).

How do you change your heart towards someone who doesn’t deserve good in their life?  How do you transform your mind into wanting the best for someone who rubs you the wrong way?  Exchange sneakers with them.

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What if shoes could talk?  They could tell us stories about their travels.  Some of the shoes would have boring stories, while others would have fascinating tales of adventure.  I’d like to hand you a few of my shoes that I have worn over the years so that you can venture a little deeper into my life story.  I would like to first give you a brown pair of dress shoes.  I was wearing these brown dress shoes back in 2006 when we buried our second daughter.  Her casket was tiny.  There were only a few family members with us at the cemetery for this short and yet bitter funeral service.  We named her Claire.  She would be seven years old if she wouldn’t have died.  If shoes could talk, what would they say?

Can I also hand you a pair of Nike high tops that I wore in 2009 playing basketball on Saturday mornings?  Go ahead, try them on.  Forty-five minutes into playing, I ruptured my Achilles Tendon while I was wearing them.  I had surgery that next week to repair it.  Do you know that I dislike those shoes?  It was on that morning almost five years ago that I retired from basketball.  If shoes could talk, what would they say?

I’d like you to try on one more pair of shoes.  I was wearing a pair of Reebok’s the first time I met my grandfather back in the 1990s.  Our family only spent a couple hours with him that afternoon, but I walked away from that encounter wondering how a man could turn away from his family.  Did he carry around any guilt?  Was he able to sleep at night?  I never asked my grandfather why he decided to abandon a wife and six children, but I wonder what kind of answer he would have given if I would have had the courage to ask.  This event filled me with thankfulness that my father was not like my grandfather.  In fact, he was the polar opposite.  If shoes could talk, what would they say?

I have just allowed you to wear three different pairs of shoes that I have worn in my years on this earth.  When you are having a hard time loving someone, try visualizing yourself in their life.  Wear their shoes so that you can understand where they are coming from.  This doesn’t excuse their behavior.  It doesn’t make what they have done okay.  But it does allow you to sympathize with them.

We have all met people we just don’t like.  They seem to rub us the wrong way.  This happened to me a while back.  The guy was just over the top arrogant.  He talked down to people as if he was better than them, and regularly made fun of people and would always say, “I’m just kidding.”  I found in my heart that I was really starting to dislike this guy and I just didn’t want to spend any time with him.  He asked me if he could take me out to lunch.  It is a good thing that God was working on my heart because my answer would have been, “Sorry, I think I am booked the next several months, maybe we can try in a year or two.”  But I told him, “Sure, we can go and have lunch sometime.”  As we were sitting down at our table at the restaurant eating lunch, he told me his life story.  It was a tragic upbringing.  He had a horrible family life.  I walked away from this lunch with a little more understanding of why he was so difficult to be around.  Not that it was okay how he acted, but it helped me grow in my mercy towards him.  I could sympathize better with him.  When he told me his testimony, he told me that someone showed him love and told him about Christ, and that is how he became a Christian.  He even admitted that he was still working on things in his life and he even apologized for the times when he was a little too outspoken.

Do you have someone in your life that you just don’t like?  You avoid him or her.  If you are honest with yourself, you have never even thought about where this person is spiritually with God.  Deeply loving people reach out to the “unlovable person” because they would never want someone to go to hell.  Deeply loving people want everyone to go to heaven no matter how much they might have hurt them.  That is God’s heart and if you have someone in your life where you just can’t imagine them in heaven because of something they have done to you or to someone you love, then you need to ask yourself if love is truly the supreme value in your life.  “But Jeremy, you don’t know how much that person hurt me!  I will never get over it!”  Try to understand why someone is the way they are.  It doesn’t mean that you accept what they have done, but it will help you have more mercy towards them instead of judging them for only the things you have seen them do.

If shoes could talk, what would they say?

If you would like to listen to some of the sermons in this series on TRUE LOVE, click here.

Would you DIE for the GOSPEL?

This weekend, a segment of my sermon will focus on the phrase “I am not ashamed of the gospel.”  Over and over in my mind, I keep asking myself, what does it look like for someone to not be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ?  After pondering this thought for several days, I believe there are three encounters that will determine whether or not we are ashamed. 
    
Encounter #1: If we face DEATH because of our faith,  will we decide that life with Jesus in heaven is more important than this earthly life?  This encounter with death is foreign to 99.9% of American Christians.  At this point in our nation’s history, we do not have to chose between following Jesus and waking up to see another day.  But many of the early Christians faced the reality of dying for their faith.
 
Those closest to Jesus Christ when He was walking this earth were so convinced that Jesus was the Son of God (a.k.a. God Himself) that they were all willing to die for following Him.  Take for example, the apostles of Jesus.  All, except for John, were killed.  According to church tradition, here is how all twelve of the apostles died (note that Matthais replaced Judas).
 
Peter was considered the leader of the twelve, but during the final hours of Jesus’ life, he denied Jesus three times and finally deserted Jesus so that he would not be killed along with Jesus.  But something happened to this coward.  The resurrection account in Luke shows us that Peter didn’t even believe the women when they told him that Jesus was raised from the dead.  He ran and found out for himself.  Guess what? Peter showed up in Jerusalem preaching boldly, at the threat of death, that Jesus was the Christ and had been resurrected.  Tradition teaches us that Peter was crucified upside down (he requested to be upside down on the cross because he didn’t think he was worthy to be crucified exactly like his Savior).  What transformed him so dramatically into a bold lion?  He saw the resurrected Christ!  Andrew was crucified on an x-shaped cross.  James (son of Zebedee) was killed with the sword.  Interestingly, John faced martyrdom when he was placed in a huge basin of boiling oil during a wave of persecution in Rome. However, he was miraculously delivered from death. John was then sentenced to the mines on the prison island of Patmos. He wrote his prophetic book of Revelation on Patmos. The apostle John was later freed and returned to what is now modern-day Turkey. He died as an old man, the only apostle to die peacefully.  Philip was crucified.  Bartholomew was whipped to death, then placed upon a cross to show everyone he died.  Doubting Thomas said he wouldn’t believe that Jesus was raised from the dead until he had put his finger in the nail prints.  Thomas later died a martyr’s death for Christ by having a spear thrust through him.  Was he deceived?  He bet his life he wasn’t.  What changed Thomas?  He saw the resurrected Christ!  The ex-tax collector Matthew was killed with a sword.  James (son of Alphaeus) was crucified.  Thaddaeus was killed by arrows.  Simon was crucified.  Matthais, the one who replaced Judas, was stoned and then beheaded.
Each of these men were willing to die for the gospel message because they had no doubt that their eternal home was secure in heaven.  They were not “ashamed of the gospel.”  There might come a day when you will be faced with the same question the apostles were faced with: follow Jesus and be killed, or deny Jesus and live your life out here and yet forfeit your eternal life.  I pray and hope that you will have the courage to die for your faith if it comes to that someday.
Encounter #2: If we face RIDICULE because of our faith, will we decide that our reputation with Jesus is more important than what others say about us here on earth?  Many Christians have been mocked and made fun of because they believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I was seventeen years old the first time I was ridiculed for my faith in Jesus Christ.  I was sitting in English class and that day a substitute teacher was leading the class discussion and the topic turned to religion.  He started teaching universalism, the belief that all religions lead to heaven eventually.  I raised my hand and made this statement: “Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven.  If someone doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ they will go to hell.”  The room became totally silent.  One of my friends looked at me (who was not a Christian), and she asked me point blank: “So what you are telling me is that if I don’t believe in your Jesus, then I am going to go to hell when I die?”  At this point, I wanted to remain silent.  But something inside of me influenced me to open up my mouth and answer her: “Yes, I do believe that you will go to hell if you don’t place your trust in Jesus Christ.”  Then the substitute teacher chimed in on the discussion.  He looked at me and asked me how I could be so arrogant as to think that this nice girl sitting next to me was going to hell just because she didn’t believe in the right god.  I admitted that it sounded harsh, but I also stated that it was the truth.  I looked her in the eyes and told her that I don’t want her to go to hell, and that God doesn’t want her to go to hell.  But if she never asks Jesus Christ to be the Leader and Forgiver of her life, then she will eventually end up in hell.  The substitute teacher once again “mocked me.”  He scolded me for thinking that Christianity is the only way to heaven.  He said, “That is the problem with some Christians, they think that everyone else is going to hell.  I just can’t accept that kind of religion.”
Soon after this, the bell rang and we were off to another class.  Two things happened after that class.  First, several of this “unsaved” girl’s friends gave me dirty looks and ignored me for a few days.  Second, other students came up to me when we were in the hallway and thanked me for standing up for our faith.  I said to them, “No problem,” but I was angry inside at them.  They were ashamed of the gospel that day in class.  They remained quiet and so one Christian student was mocked and ridiculed by a self-proclaimed philosophy guru who was disguised as a high school substitute teacher.  Even though I was angry at my Christian classmates for not standing up for the gospel with me, I was glad that I was ridiculed.  There is a joy that can be found in standing up for your Savior that cannot be found in anything else we do in life.  We shouldn’t try to do things to be ridiculed, but when it does happen, we should react like the early apostles did when they were persecuted: “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41).
It is my prayer that when my daughters get old enough that they will not be ashamed of the gospel.  Instead, when they are ridiculed for their faith, that they will stand firm and will not back down.  I want to instill within them a faith that will never be shaken, no matter how unpopular they might become.
Encounter #3: Do we become UNEASY around others because their actions do not measure up to God’s standards?  You might find yourself in awkward scenarios when you are with unbelievers because of our faith.  Every Christian has encountered this.  This last fall I helped co-coach my daughter’s soccer team.  The other coach on the team got really mad one practice at the players and said a couple curse words in from of them.  This made me really uneasy.  So, I confronted her when the kids were running laps at the end of practice that I really didn’t want her to curse in front of them anymore.  And then I felt led to say this to her: “If you need to curse in front of me, I can handle it.  I don’t like it, but I can handle it.  But I really don’t want my daughter and the other kids learning words like that as part of their vocabulary.”  She agreed and apologized and her husband, who was there said that she shouldn’t be cussing in front of a pastor anyway.  I responded: “Don’t worry about me, worry about God.  I am not the holy one, God is the holy one.”  We all laughed.
It would have been really easy for me to just bite my lip and act like the curse words were no big deal.  But they were a big deal because one of them used the Lord’s name in vain.  I can handle a number of curse words, but not that one.  To not stand up for my God in a situation like that is to be ashamed of the gospel.
I write these things because for every Christian who is obnoxious about their faith and is too “in your face” about his or her faith, there are 1,000 Christians who keep their light hidden for no one to see.  I wonder why that is?  Why are so many Christians so silent about their faith?  It is my prayer that the next time you encounter uneasiness, ridicule, or maybe even death because of the gospel, that you are not ashamed!