THE MOST IMPORTANT THING

We can endure life's uncertainties without fear

(from the Sunday Sermons On CD-ROM Collection)

"Be constantly on the watch! Stay awake! You do not know when the appointed time will come" - Mark 13:33

The Apostle Paul understood clearly that the most important thing in all of human life is God's Love. His own life was transformed by it-revolutionized-and he just could not stop talking about it. But he did have a problem with his fellow early Christians about this. And Christians have been having the same problem ever since, namely, we get to the point where we take this most important thing in life for granted. We repeat the cliches and the standard phrases about it, and we sing the traditional songs about it, until they become very commonplace in our lives. They cease to be meaningful statements about life and death and about who we are and what we ought to be doing. They become instead signs of this problem of taking the love of God for granted.

• A World War II Navy man tells the story of what happened aboard his destroyer when news of the War's end came and orders were received to destroy all the big shells on board. "When they started their work," he said, "the men treated those shells with great respect. They cradled them in their arms very carefully and carried them to the side where they eased them overboard. But there were hundreds of shells to be destroyed and, as the day wore on, the men became more and more careless. Toward afternoon's end, I actually saw them tossing the shells to each other and even contemptuously kicking them overboard." The man who tells this story says that he often thinks about the episode to keep himself from taking the big things in life for granted.

When the love of God first comes into our lives and we feel the explosive power of it, we treat it with great reverence. But, as time goes by, we begin taking it for granted-in some cases, treating it contemptuously and even kicking it out of our lives.

This is one of the things Paul had in mind when he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians. The people of the Church at Corinth gave him more trouble than any other Church he had organized. They were always having problems. Someone has said that First Corinthians is "the most typical Church-book in the New Testament because it opens with a dispute over the preacher and it closes with a collection." And what Paul is trying to do in the pages that fall between these two episodes is to remind the people of the great thing God has done for them in Jesus Christ and to apply this fact of God's love to their everyday problems. For example, to help them heal broken relationships with one another, he wrote the beautiful section we call the Thirteenth Chapter, perhaps the greatest thing every written on love. In the Fourteenth Chapter, on spiritual gifts, Paul reminded the Corinthians that God created each of them as unique persons and that God wants each person to make his or her own kind of music and to sing his or her own special song. "Everybody's beautiful/In his own way" is the way we hear this wonderfully expressed in one of today's songs. God knows that! God has given you a unique combination of gifts that He has not given to any other human person and never will. His love is in you, calling forth this individuality. And when you become the one God has created you to become, He rejoices. Jesus said, "There is joy in Heaven" over this.

This is our problem today-many times over. Everywhere the tremendous burden of broken relationships is being felt: husbands and wives estranged after years of marriage; parents and children out of communication with each other, living in completely different worlds; friends, neighbors, races, nations even fellow-churchmen, destroying each other. And modern psychiatry is just getting around to telling us what Paul was saying a long time ago about this problem. Part of the problem, we are being told, is that many of us are ego-centered, and that there is no way for a self-centered person to avoid hurting other people-especially those who are closest to them.

• The story is told of a political leader in Washington, D.C., reading the newspaper in his living room one evening. He turned to his wife and said, "My dear, do you know how many truly great men there are in the world today?" Unhesitatingly, she replied, "No, I don't, but I do know there is one less than you think there is."

Many of us have this problem. Being ego-centered, we end up hurting other people. We need to cast off our self-centeredness but we need also to take on self-assurance in order to relate to others as God wants us to. Before we can truly give of ourselves to another human being we must understand that the gift of self is the most worthwhile gift we have to give. And this can only come from an awareness of how much God loves us and of our total worth in God's eyes. Only then can we say "I love you to another and truly mean, "I am giving myself to you for your fulfillment."

"God is faithful," Paul writes (1 Cor.1:8). God loves us with a love that goes beyond human understanding. This means that each of us is worth more in God's eyes than we can begin to imagine. This means that each of us has the potential of being the greatest gift that can come into another's life.

• There is a prize-winning biography of Amos Fortune by the American Author, Elizabeth Yates. Amos Fortune was an American slave who purchased his freedom and settled in the little town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire after the Civil War. He worked very hard and became successful as a tanner. As such, he was accepted as part of the town's life. He was a good provider for his family and even managed to make regular deposits into a savings account. The problem was that he was the first Black person to settle in Jaffrey, and the town's citizens kept reminding him that he was "different," not really one of them. They allowed his daughter to attend the public school, but there she suffered much cruelty and humiliation. Amos Fortune was a deeply religious man who loved God and was open and sensitive to God in his life. He attended the local Congregational Church regularly, where he was forced to sit in a segregated gallery and was not admitted to participation in the Lord's Supper. He had to sit and watch the Communion Service. But Amos Fortune was a good man and a strong man. He bore his hurt nobly, with great dignity. He did not bow down in humiliation, but he did his best to be a reconciler. The people of Jaffrey finally came to appreciate him later-one hundred and fifty years later, to be exact-when they established the "Amos Fortune Memorial Lecture" in recognition of his great moral strength and of the peace-making quality of his life. But Amos Fortune is remembered most in Jaffrey, New Hampshire for the Last Will and Testament he left when he died. Part of his savings he bequeathed to the School District in which his daughter had suffered so much, in the hope that it might be improved in some way. And part of it he left to the Congregational Church which he attended. His instructions were that the money be used to purchase a silver Communion cup and plate, good and beautiful enough for the day when "all of Christ's people would be one.

As we enter the Advent Sunday, Jesus tells us to "Stay awake" and "be constantly on the watch" because "you do not know when the appointed time will come." (Mk.13:33). Life is full of uncertainty, especially the part about when it will end for us. What does tomorrow have in store for us? Will we even be here tomorrow? We cannot answer precisely. God, in His great Wisdom, has asked us to endure this burden of uncertainty, but with one most important exception. He wants us to be absolutely certain of His love and concern for us. If we are "awake" to this reality, if we are "constantly on the watch" for the signs of love God is always giving us, we will be able to endure the uncertainties of life without fear, and even rejoice in them.

The realization of anything important in life depends upon our acceptance of God's great love. Don't take it for granted. Take it for your life's fulfillment.

(Reprinted with permission from the Sunday Sermons on CD-ROM Collection. This collection, which contains seven complete fully-illustrated sermons for each Sunday of the three year lectionary cycle and regularly sells for $297, is available through December 24, 1999 for the special price of $199.95. For more info or to order, please visit the Homiletic Resource Center.)