I wrote a little poem which didn't make it into the message on Sunday.
A Christian without fellowship is like:
a student without school
A carpenter without a tool
A Christian without fellowship is like:
A salesman who never sells
A school with no bells
A Christian without fellowship is like:
An author with no books
A restaurant with not cooks.
A Christian without fellowship is like:
A parent with no kids
An auction with no bids.
A Christian without fellowship is an oxymoron.
SMJ
I only touched upon it briefly in the message, but those two men in white offer an interesting study. Throughout the scripture we see angels communing with mankind. Often they are telling us not to be afraid. What these two angels ask is such an appropriate question - why are you standing here doing nothing? Seems like a good question to ask our selves! SMJ
Preparing sermons demands that a large number of decisions be made. Any text - particularly a historical text - has a number of directions it can take you. Our text for Sunday provided three distinct directions I could have headed. I could have emphasized verses 4 and 5, and talked about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Another direction we could have headed was from verse 8 and the whole issue of the great commission.
This of course would have been further broken down to understanding the power of the Holy Spirit as it relates to our witnessing, what being his witnesses entails, and an understanding of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth.
I chose to look at the impact of the kingdom because it provided an opportunity for me to give an overview of Acts, and also fit well with our discussions of the past three weeks where we also spoke of the kingdom. SMJ
One rabbit trail I considered taking was into the passage immediately preceding the text for this Sunday's message. In it Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool. It is a parable which speaks strongly to our society. Someone once defined true wealth as the ability to sustain your present lifestyle without ever having to work again. That your investments are able to produce, without much oversight, enough income for you to take life easy, to eat, drink and be merry. Of course that is exactly what the rich fool was set to do.
And Jesus challenges that manner of thinking through this parable. We strive so hard to accumulate wealth (I want to have $2,000,000 in the bank before I retire....) and when we do so our focus is messed up.
Well, I decided no to go down that rabbit trail because it is a topic which deserves a full message in itself! SMJ
Something I considered doing on Sunday (only briefly since it would have taken far too long) was to "play telephone" with the congregation. You remember that kids game - you whisper something to the person at the beginning and they continue to whisper what they thought they heard to the person next to them and so on throughout the group. At the end you compare to see if what was finally heard comes close to what you started with. Seemed like a decent way to introduce the idea of getting your information directly from the source (God speaking to us directly through His son). It of course had a couple of shortfalls. The time for such a message to get through the entire congregation for starters. But more seriously, the comparison with biblical inspiration falls apart quickly. In telephone there is no guiding of the Holy Spirit to direct what is said from one person to then next. So I canned the exercise! SMJ
I thought about talking about the way the priests were chosen to burn the incense. The priests were divided into 24 divisions. Each division had about 1000 priests in it. Each division came to minister at the temple for two weeks out of the year, along with the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of Tabernacles and the Feast of Passover. Zechariahs' division was serving at the temple and chose who would burn the incense by lot. If each priest served on a rotation, they would burn incense once every 14 years or so! Life expectancy was about 50 years at that time (for those who made it into adulthood - 3 out of 4 children born died before the age of 10) If you figure Zechariah was about 20 when he became a priest, he would have had maybe 2 opportunities in his lifetime to burn incense!
Each Monday morning I will post some interesting thoughts that didn't make it into my message for the previous Sunday. These thoughts may have taken too long to develop or created a rabbit trail...
