Mark 6:4
One of the great parts about going home on holidays is getting to see familiar faces. On the morning of July 4th I walked up to the grocery store (Ingles) to try and find a small box of strawberries for my mom. Although the store had obviously ran out of strawberries, it was full of faces that I grew up with.
I didn’t have long elaborate conversations with anybody this time, but I did say hey to a few people. Most of them know that I am a minister now, so they don’t need to ask me every time I come into town what it is I am doing. I remember though how difficult and somewhat embarrassing it was when I first began telling people I was called to the ministry and was in Divinity school. Not that it was a huge shock to everybody but let’s face it, it isn’t normal or typical for young guys to end up being called to preach.
Not too long after I confessed my calling, my preacher told me to prove it. “Prove you are called to be at the pulpit and preach on Sunday morning,” he said. Without experience, confidence, or charisma I showed up the next Sunday with my sermon. The only thing I had going for me was my faith, so that was what I preached on.
The bottom line is that the sermon was horrible. I messed up more than I could count and a few people said I did a good job. That’s it. No big conversions, only big smiles as the people left their pews as quickly as possible to go home and get lunch (luckily their reactions were much different the last time I preached there).
I did well enough for me to not get too discouraged with what happened, but I definitely didn’t move everyone into repentance of all their sins like Billy Graham can. Yet even Billy Graham, as amazing of a man as he is, can’t make people listen to what it is the Lord may be saying through a sermon. Even Jesus, arguably the greatest preacher of all time (or at least He should be), couldn’t change how the people responded to His sermon. In effect, He says about Himself that even He is without honor in His own house and among relatives (Mark 6:4).
How can this be? Jesus was God and human! Well, living in Nashville I know and have met a lot of the people that the World seems to look up and worship like a god: Christian, Country, and Pop stars. As I have lived life with some of them, I have realized one thing that I’m sure Jesus’ friends and neighbors knew of him; they’re normal. People who make millions and/or are the “movers and shakers” in society are all normal. They go to the bathroom like everybody else does.
This doesn’t mean that we just give up on what we have going on in our lives and from talking about God with our friends back home. It means that we have to hold on to the one thing that got me through my first sermon: faith. That may not seem like much, but it’s the one thing that pleases the Lord (Hebrews 11:6), and it’s what the righteous live by (Romans 1:17). The next time we get discourage, the situation may not change, but we can always keep faith.
Matt Wertz wrote a song entitled Keep faith, in which the chorus goes like this, “Even when your hope is gone, even when you’re barely holding on – if there’s anything that I’m sure of, I know that we were made for love. So if you start to break, Keep Faith.” Buy his new CD entitled “Under Summer Sun.” It comes out in September.