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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Clothing and Spiritual Change</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Clothing is a common New Testament metaphor for spiritual change. Paul wrote in Romans, "Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature" (Rom 13:14).<br>
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And in First Corinthians, "The perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. (1 Corinthians 15:53).<br>
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In Colossians, we read, "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. (Colossians 3:12).<br>
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Finally, in First Peter we are admonished, "All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble'" (1 Peter 5:5).<br>
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Being clothed anew is a consistent New Testament expression for holiness and righteousness. The old clothes have to come off and new ones put on.<br>
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This text confronts us with the paradox of God's free invitation to the banquet with no strings attached and God's requirement of "putting on" something appropriate to that calling. The theological point is that we are warned of the dire consequences of accepting the invitation and doing nothing except showing up.<br>
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Mickey Anders, When Showing Up Isn't Enough<br>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Prayers Should Prepare Us</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Reinhold Niebuhr often quoted a remark made to him by an agnostic friend who objected to the church, "not because of its dogmas but because of its trivialities," by which he meant "preoccupation with trivial concerns with the world hanging on the rim of disaster." Fred Craddock was invited to attend a prayer meeting at a home in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta. He said the group shared "weighty" prayer concerns like a date coming up on Friday night and the purchase of a new car, and one man announced they had had 75 answered prayers since the group started meeting. Then one of them turned to him and asked, "What do you think, Dr. Craddock?" Craddock, usually more reticent to criticize anybody's praying, was offended by the superficial and mechanistic reduction of Israel's God to what Paul Tillich called, "the Cosmic Bellhop." He couldn't help himself. He said, "Do you mean to tell me when people are starving in Africa and the poor are suffering in India and parents in Latin America can't sleep through the night wondering if the death squads will visit them, you folks are praying about dates and new cars?"</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Larry Bethune, Friends in High Places</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Humor: No, I’m Just Seasick</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The writer Bill Henderson recalls meeting a man aboard a cruise ship who claimed to be an expert in guessing professions. "See that man over there," he said. "He is a physician." Bill checked and sure enough that was right. "How could you tell?" he asked the man. "Well," he said, "I saw the caring lines on his forehead and could tell he was a person of great compassion." Bill Henderson pointed to someone else and said, "What about him? What does he do?" "That's a lawyer," the expert said. Bill checked and sure enough, he was. The expert explained that the man had a scholarly look and was somewhat formal, indicating an attorney. Then Bill pointed to another man. The expert studied him and said, "That's a preacher." Bill approached the man and asked, "Are you a preacher?" "No," said the man. "I'm just seasick; that's the reason I look so sad."</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 13.5pt; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">How strange that many Christians have a long-faced reputation. Jesus could not have been that way; if he had been, children would not have clung to him so readily.<br>
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Bill Bouknight, Collected Sermons, Sermons.com <br>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Our Hope, Our Terror</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Several summers ago I spent three days on a barrier island where loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One night while the tide was out, I watched a huge female heave herself up on the beach to dig her nest and empty her eggs into it. Afraid of disturbing her, I left before she had finished. The next morning I returned to see if I could find the spot where her eggs lay hidden in the sand. What I found were her tracks leading in the wrong direction. Instead of heading back out to sea, she had wandered into the dunes, which were already as hot as asphalt in the morning sun.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A little ways inland I found her: Exhausted, all but baked, her head and flippers caked with dried sand. After pouring water on her and covering her with sea oats, I fetched a park ranger who returned with a jeep to rescue her. He flipped her on her back, wrapped tire chains around her front legs, and hooked the chains to a trailer hitch on his jeep. Then I watched horrified as he took off, yanking her body forward so that her mouth filled with sand and her neck bent so far back I thought it would break.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The ranger hauled her over the dunes and down onto the beach. At the ocean's edge, he unhooked her and turned her right side up. She lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped at her body, washing the sand from her eyes and making her skin shine again. A wave broke over her; she lifted her head slightly, moving her back legs. Other waves brought her further back to life until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold and push off, back into the ocean. Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I reflected that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Our hope, through all our own terrors, is that we are being saved. But this does not mean we lie down before the terrors. For as long as we have strength to fight, it is both our nature and our privilege to do so. Sometimes God's blessing does not come until daybreak, after a full night of emptying ourselves and wandering in the wrong direction. Our job is to struggle with the terrors, neither surrendering nor stealing away until they have yielded their blessings.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Barbara Brown Taylor, The Other Side – Tales of Terror, Times of Wonder</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Living in God</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In A Journey with the Saints, Thomas S. Kepler has written: "The secret of the revolution in the lives of the saints lies in the fact that their lives are centered in God. They never seem hurried, they have a large leisure, they trouble little about their influence; they refer the smallest things to God. They live in God." That is the great secret to successful living: the realization that when one reserves time to come to God's banquet, all of the rest of life will fall in place.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Adapted from Thomas S. Kepler</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">If We Miss a Deadline</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A tough, old cowhand sauntered into a saloon and began drinking whiskey by the bottle. The more he drank, the more unruly he became, shooting holes in the ceiling and floor. Everybody was afraid to take on the old cowhand. Finally, a short, mild-mannered storekeeper walked up to the unruly cowhand and said, "I'll give you five minutes to get out of town." The old cowhand holstered his gun, pushed the whiskey bottle away, briskly walked out, got on his horse, and rode out of town. When he left, someone asked the storekeeper what he would have done if the unruly cowhand had refused to go. "I'd have extended the deadline," he said.<br>
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Many Christians have that concept of God: if we miss a deadline, God will simply extend it. They do not take the judgment of God seriously…</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Many additional illustrations, sermons, commentary, and worship aids for this Sunday and for each week of the year can be accessed at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sermons.com/" style="color: blue; cursor: pointer;">www.Sermons.com</a>.</span></div>
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