I would like to make a sermon on “The Burden Of the Blessing.” What an interesting God we serve. Joni is in a wheel chair and Hugh Hefner is in a velvet cocoon and I know where they are both headed, but if Hugh sees the light on his death bed, he is in. I know Joni knows where she is headed, but I am sure that she can still cry herself to sleep at night and wish God would give her a day off.
But God came to earth and went screaming through the birth canal, and wished that he had one disciple who didn’t irritate him and entered heaven with a thief who changed his direction. the thief’s, life in a few seconds on a cross. He didn’t have a place to sleep and went hungry on occasion. Nothing he did seemed to make his disciples or the multitudes happy. What if the thief knew the cross was in his future. Since he was human, he might have wondered whether it was worth it.
Job, Moses, Jeremiah, the whole bunch. Poor Jeremiah. Every time he did what God wanted him to do, he wound up in a well up to his armpits in mud. Moses leaves a comfortable, actually two, comfortable existences to pry the Israelite loose from Egypt, leads them grumbling and trying to stone him, to the edge of the promised land and then hits the wrong stone with the wrong stick.
I don’t question for a minute that God is right and good and what happens is the best, but I am more than a little uncomfortable with some books and preachers who say that a life pleasing to God will leave you with an angelic family, a paid off mortgage, and vibrant good health. How could we have missed the message that seems to be on every page of the Bible. A very good, Bible believing scholar, wrote a book about Paul and speculated that his “thorn in the side” might have been migraines induced by the vision on the road. He didn’t seem to see the irony in that. I know Paul did not regret the vision, but probably prayed in tears to make the pain go away.
My Bible Study Notebook 