The great British Bible teacher David Pawson was in fine form. Visiting a rather traditional church with a large choir, he made this statement: “Sentimentality is the worst enemy of the kingdom.” And then he stuck his hand out in the general direction of the choir and said, “That is sentimentality!”
I never ceased to be amazed he was not shot from behind before he finished the rest of his message.
You may argue with the way he made his point, but the point itself is worth considering.
Yesterday we walked past a recently closed diner. In the window was a sign with these words: “Prepare to meet thy God.” Hmmm. Was the food really that bad?
Then I talked with my friend Stuart, living in the eye of an epic hurricane in Houston. I asked him how he was preparing for the storm.
We did a lot of things to prepare for our move. The list seemed endless, and we just had to work our way through it. I’m glad we did, because now we are reaping the benefits of our preparation.
Last week I talked about moving and the challenge of change. You have to pack everything up, live in a state of upheaval for weeks, if not months, and then hope you can actually make it from one place to another with your stuff and your sanity intact. With the sacrificial help of a great bunch of friends, we did.
If you’re smart, you give away a lot of stuff, and take note of how we accumulate way too many possessions, especially for those of us who profess to follow a man who owned none.
Change comes to all of us, whether we like it or not. Personally, I’ve never liked change a whole lot. I get settled in a routine and it’s hard to get me out of it.
God thinks differently, of course, than we do, on this subject as on everything else. He continually uses the pressure of circumstances to force change on us.
Next weekend, we move out of the house we have lived in for nineteen years and the community we have lived in for thirty-four years, in fact for our entire married life. We move out of a relatively secure job I have held all that time and into a who -knows-what-will-happen self-employment role.
On a down day, I think my whole life has been one long battle against fear.
There are so many things to be afraid of. My grandson is apprehensive of spiders. At least one of my daughters has inherited my fear of heights. The funny thing is how each of us is terrified of different things. The first time I entered a public speaking contest, my twelve-year old knees were shaking. I won the contest in spite of it, and now it doesn’t bother me at all to stand up in front of a crowd of people. While I’m fine about public speaking, when it came to swimming, I was scared stiff. It took me months of lessons to make it into the deep end of the pool without panic setting in. A friend said to me, “What are you afraid of? It’s only a swimming pool.” Yeah, that’s the problem!
