Sermon Central
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Walk In The Blessing
Contributed by Mark Jones on Aug 17, 2010 (message contributor)
Summary: There is a path in life that we may choose where the blessings of God abound freely.
Walk In The Blessing
2Corinthians 5:21
(21) For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
(1) Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
(2) but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
(3) He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
Essence of the Lesson in a Sentence: There is a path in life that we may choose where the blessings of God abound freely.
I’m always amazed by how God reveals Himself in nature. How could it be any other way? The artist will spill his innermost thoughts onto the canvas or other media.
One thing that I enjoy about working outdoors in the yard, in the garden or anywhere in connection with nature is that I usually do it by myself. I intentionally avoid having a radio or MP3 player going because it’s one of the quieter times when I can be totally focused on something. I find that the Lord often speaks to me very clearly when I’m cutting grass, eating weeds, pruning trees or plowing and tending my little garden.
Just last week I was at work, and in the late afternoon a storm blew up. I keep a pretty close eye on the weather as a part of my responsibility for the campus, and we knew rain was coming, possible thunderstorms. I don’t have a window in my office but as I sat at my desk I began to hear the wind pound against the building. I heard thunder crashes and the lights began to flicker. I walked out front to see what was going on and the rain was beating down so hard and so fast I began to think about flooding. I looked at the flagpole out front and it was literally blowing around so much I thought it might uproot at its base or snap off. I jumped on my computer to check for tornadoes, but there was no real threat. The storm passed rather quickly and I literally had to wade to my car through a low area in the parking lot.
On the way home, all of 2.5 miles I thought about how this rain would help my parched lawn and garden! I was so tired I was secretly glad that it would be too wet to cut the grass this evening, which I had planned and needed to do. But the rain is what we needed! It had cooled things off some and thank God that the earth had been replenished.
I got lost in thought during my five minute drive home, but I noticed something odd on the way. I saw several people cutting grass; I saw one guy on a commercial mower thought “hmm, it’s not good for grass to cut it when it’s this wet.” Before I could really settle my thought process and look around a bit more, I was driving up in my cul de sac, and guess what I saw? My next door neighbor was cutting her grass and it was making mine look really bad because our lawns adjoin! I remember thinking “Wow, she’s going to dull her blade and probably damage that nice centipede out front, she really shouldn’t be mowing right now.”
But as I got out of my car, I notice my grass still looked parched. I thought “wait a minute, the driveway is not even wet. What in the world?” I opened the door and hollered to Angie “did we get any rain here?” And she said “no, it kept looking like it but not a drop.”
How in the world can something like an angry storm be so precise, that it can rain like a monsoon at point A, and point B just two and a half miles away doesn’t even get a mist? I know you’ve seen this too: Have you ever been driving down a highway and see it rain in the oncoming lane and not a drop of rain in yours? It always reminds me that God says “it rains on the just, and the unjust.” Nature is very precise, and under God’s express authority.
The weather is something that we can predict somewhat, but to this day with all our technology the meteorologists sometimes miss it by a mile. Predict it? We can to an extent. But control it? There’s not a nation on this earth with a technology great enough to control the weather. We work with it and around it, we position ourselves so that the weather can work for us rather than against us.
