"Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings." - Ed Gardner

This is a photoshop job, right?

Our routine is to watch Mike & Mike in the morning on ESPN2. The days Pam doesn’t work - and some of the days she does - it’s over to NBC for the Today Show from 7-8 a.m. We try to turn the TV off at that point or it tends to get in the way of getting anything meaningful done. I’m a news junky, so if something significant happened overnight it will be covered in that first hour. After that it’s all fluff.

Sometimes it’s fluff even during that first hour. You’ve probably seen the clip of the grandmother in England who broke up a jewelry store robbery a couple of weeks ago by running down the sidewalk and then swinging her purse at the six thieves. She was a special guest on the Today Show this morning, a segment that ran well over five minutes. I put the sound on “mute” because I find the continuing coverage of this barely interesting human interest story annoying and beyond excessive. Can’t we move on to something more recent and relevant?

Even with the sound off I noticed the banner across the bottom of the screen: “Super Granny Speaks Out.” Really? I don’t know what a super granny is but it seems like it should require a cape and - heaven forbid - a spandex unitard. And “speaks out?” Doesn’t that phrase imply someone who has hitherto been silent but now reveals their shocking information?
Manufactured and hollow hype.
Like the beaten to death Law & Order tease line, “Ripped from the Headlines.” Ah, come on. What you really mean is you’re running out of plot lines so you stole one from the evening news.

In a similar vein, is there any continuing value to President’s Day except to the retailers who use it as an advertising ploy? How many people know the purpose of the holiday?

We watched an award show years ago (Grammy’s?) and saw Dolly Parton go up to receive an award. She was wearing a shawl that didn’t go with her dress at all. In her self-effacing way she explained that the bodice of her dress was too tight and had burst open just before her name was called. She thanked the person who had loaned her the shawl and then said, “It’s like my daddy used to say, ‘Never try to put 5 pounds of potatoes in a 10 pound sack.’”
I thought of dear Dolly this morning when I was writing my sermon. I’ve got a good 10 pounds of potatoes. What to do?

So let’s talk about sermons.
Years ago a grumpy old guy in my church complained loudly and frequently that I didn’t preach evangelistic sermons. He thought I should preach the gospel message often. I countered that when I looked out at the small congregation week after week after week I knew beyond reasonable doubt that everyone in attendance was already a believer. So I should preach a basic salvation message to people we all knew had been saved, some of them longer than I’d been alive?

But his complaint raises an interesting question. Should sermons be preached to the people who are there or the people who could be there? That is, would a sovereign God send someone he is drawing to faith to a church where the gospel is not preached?
Or is it rather, to paraphrase Kevin Costner, preach it and they will come.

I don’t know.

If I were God and I wanted someone to hear the good news of Christ’s death for our sins I wouldn’t send him to a church where that wasn’t gonna happen. By the same token (what does that phrase mean?) many of us have heard of - and some of us have experienced - the stereotypical church were “Just As I Am” is sung over and over again at the end of the service when all 30 people have known each other all their lives.

So here’s how I’ve handled the dilemma. In that aforementioned church I preached the gospel message when it came up in the course of my series. If I was preaching through 1 Corinthians, for example, some passages almost required that I present the simple truth of salvation by faith in Christ’s substitutionary atonement. I figure if God is sufficiently sovereign to bring a ready unbeliever to church he’s sovereign enough to bring them on that Sunday.

What’s interesting is that Pathway seems to have unsaved people visiting more frequently than any other church I’ve pastored. I’m also preaching the gospel more frequently. So is there a cause/effect relationship there?

In our current series “Credo” last Sunday’s sermon was “What We Believe About Salvation” so my sermon obviously included a presentation of the gospel. We had someone who had, if I understand correctly, never been in a church before that service. This Sunday it’s “What We Believe About Sanctification.” I’ve been told we’ll have a self-professed atheist visiting. I think I’d be derelict if, knowing that, I didn’t make it clear in the course of this message that good works are something we do because we’re saved not in order to be saved. But that’s easy; I’ve been told and I’ve written my sermon with that fact in mind.

I’m at least sufficiently open to a cause/effect relationship between evangelistic preaching and the frequency of unsaved visitors that I’m making an effort to include the gospel more often than I have in the past. But it could be something very different at work at Pathway, like a congregation more inclined to invite unsaved friends. Hey, maybe because of their demographic and this area’s demographic they know more unsaved people than the people in that earlier church.

Either way I’m humbled by the opportunity Pathway and its preacher have to spread the good news of life through Christ and his work on our behalf.