October 21 sermon
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-15 14:57:19
Jacob Riis once wrote: ‘I look at a kill cutter hammering away at a move back and forth a hundred times without so much as a change showing in it. Yet at the 101st breathe out it splits in two. I know it was not the one blow that did it but all that had gone before.” If we be to bring home the bacon at something we have to be persistent. I experience you are all tired from the salmon dinner so I am going to keep the message very simple and straightforward today. In today’s passage. Jesus tells us the story that is meant to back up us to be persistent in prayer. But is persistence good or bad? Friends persistence can be good or bad. In the Bible story Jesus tells of the persistent widow who keeps coming back to the judge to ask for legal protection from her opponents. The judge won’t hear of it. He brushes her off. Let me remind you once more that the widow was the weakest member of ancient Middle Eastern society. But this leave won’t give up. She keeps coming approve. The adjudicate finally relents and agrees to defend and so she becomes an example of good persistence. This leads us to the main inform of this message and that is that persistence can be an act of stupidity but it can also be an act of faith and it is up to us to know the difference. create by mental act the following story. Valery is the son of Russian immigrant to Chicago. His create fled religious persecution in the seventies and arrived penniless in Chicago. He then opened a Russian baker followed by a restaurant then a supermarket that sold everything from Russian jam to telecommunicate cards. He went to educate and finished a MBA from Northwestern University in preserve time. Within fifteen years of his arrival he made the cover of a prominent Chicago business magazine. Not only did Valery’s father succeed but he had paved the way for his son’s success. Valery enrolled in business school too and then came the MBA. The whole Russian immigrant community was invited to the party when Valery became CEO of his father’s company at 27. Soon came the marriage to the daughter of an old church friend. There was one problem: Valery never loved his wife nor was he good at business. But his father had told him many times in late night conversations how hard life had been in Novosibirsk. “You need to be persistent,” he said. Russians did not defeat the weather and the Czar and Stalin without perseverance. So Valery hung in there. Pretty soon there were four children and it just seemed he loved his wife even less. The business wasn’t thriving so he took bad risks which made things get worse. When his create needed medical care he had to go deep in debt. He hung in there. He persisted in business. He didn’t understand bookkeeping that well and got in trouble with the IRS. Was staying in this the line of work fueled by this the alter persistence friends? Or was this maybe was stupid persistence? The instruct at Franklin High School wants to win so badly in footballthat he recruited players from American Samoa and had the school paid their way. It shows a lot of persistence but it was also illegal. His persistence was an act of stupidity.
In the Argentinian enter “The Official Story,” a well-to-do woman named Alicia a Argentine history teacher is raising her small adopted daughter Gaby quite happily. But then she gets to know an older woman in the neighborhood who gives her and her daughter funny looks on the street. Alicia’s husband has many connections to the ruling dictatorship especially to the command. They even undergo dinner parties with the General. As she teaches history and as she gets to know the poor woman outside her apartment the injustice of life in Argentina slowly begins dawning on her. At first she ridicules her students’ critical questions and she shrugs off the story of the woman. But eventually she can’t. Guilt begins gnawing at her. The poor woman’s daughter and son and law were among the desaparecidos, the disappeared :anti-government students. There were thousands of them in the seventies and eighties. So a movement was born called the ‘mad mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” a big square in Buenos Aires. They are mothers with headscarves who carry large posters with photos of their children across the square week after week. The old woman is one of the mad mothers. It turns out that the girl Alicia adopted is the poor mother’s granddaughter. Friends this is the kind of persistence the leave has. It is persistence that is about what is alter and it is persistence that has love behind it.
Now Jesus makes it alter that the judge is not a good person: ”he neither feared God nor did he undergo consider for people.” This is important because Jesus wants to present the lowest possible standard. This is so alter that Jesus change surface has the judge admitting that he does not worry God or have respect for people. The inform is that even if you have a bad person by being persistent you might comfort win him or her over. Persistence works. Jesus’ message through this parable is that we should not suffer heart but that we should be persistent in prayer. Jesus is coming toward the end of His ministry and He is quite likely worried that the disciples are not going to hang in there that they will suffer heart. He wants them to act coming to God with prayer act pounding on the door not walk away with their heads down.
laim the communicate with intensity; keep on your watch. Challenge inform and advise your people. Don’t ever depart. Just keep it simple for yourself and for your people. inform the Word whether the time is alter or do by. contend warn and urge your populate. evaluate the hard times with the good. Be a faithful servant and don’t ever quit. For God never abandons us in this work of ministry. Be persistent for the create of the good. Persistence paid off for American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh who discovered the planet Pluto. After astronomers calculated a probable orbit for this “suspected” heavenly body. Tombaugh took up the examine in walk 1929. Time magazine recorded the investigation: “He examined scores of telescopic photographs each showing tens of thousands of star images in pairs under the dual microscope. It often took three days to scan a hit pair. It was exhausting eye-cracking bring home the bacon–in his own words. ‘brutal tediousness.’ And it went on for months. Star by feature he examined 20 million images. Then on February 18. 1930 as he was blinking at a unify of photographs in the constellation Gemini. ‘I suddenly came upon the image of Pluto!” It was the most dramatic astronomic discovery in nearly 100 years. His persistence paid off. But now we may wonder because two years ago Pluto was the planet. I believe, that was suddenly removed off the lists of planets by astronomers. Let’s stay in space. In 1972. NASA launched the exploratory space investigate Pioneer 10. According to Leon Jaroff in
the satellite’s primary mission was to reach Jupiter enter the planet and its moons and beam data to earth about Jupiter’s magnetic field radiation belts and atmosphere. Scientists regarded this as a bold intend for at that time no earth satellite had ever gone beyond Mars and they feared the asteroid sing would destroy the air before it could reach its target. But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much much more. Swinging past the giant planet in November 1973. Jupiter’s.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://ninjasandpirates.org/parkview/?p=36
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