Grains of Sand

When I was setting things up for the Thanksgiving display at the church, I came across some loaves of bread that had been left over from last year’s display—perfectly preserved after a year in storage. I’m not sure what that might say about what was baked into those loaves to keep them from going moldy, but I was impressed nonetheless—even though they were as hard as rock! Jesus described Himself as the bread of life (John 6:35). “ ...the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world...I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty ” (6:33-35). No illustration can compete with the real thing, but those hard Thanksgiving loaves did remind me of the permanence of God’s gift of the bread of life. Unlike those loaves, God’s gift never gets stale or hard, but it is a “forever” gift, one that will outlast any circumstance and any attack. The implication of the text here is that this “brea...

Reading: Matthew 5-7 The Sermon on the Mount would probably not score high marks in a Homiletics class. It has more than three points, no particular central theme, no clever “hook” to draw its audience in, and seems to end quite abruptly. Granted, we don’t have the whole sermon recorded for us and I’d bet the farm, if I had one, that it took Jesus a lot longer than 30 minutes to preach it! One thing the longest recorded teaching of Jesus can’t be accused of is being comfortable. The Beatitudes (5:3-12) remind us that believers need to be totally counter-culture if they expect blessings from heaven. The Ten Commandments, which we thought were difficult enough, are made even more difficult (5:17-48), and prayer is more about God than it is about being admired for our eloquence or George’s lack of employment (6:1-18). Heaven is to be our focus rather than earth (6:19-23). Worry is a no-no even when the wolf is at the door and the knees are out of your pants (6:24-34), which means...