In what or whom do you trust?
Do you ever find that you're trusting in yourself or what you have – your talent, youth, diligence, discipline, wit, bank account? Learning to trust in the Giver, not His good gifts, is a lesson on which I’ve been forced to focus this past year. And it was this lesson that came to mind as I read an article in today’s Washington Post about local preachers’ struggle “to make the centuries-old story of the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ relevant to today’s worshipers.”
Hundreds of ministers in the Washington region will face packed churches tonight when they preach one of their most important, and challenging, sermons of the year as Christians gather to celebrate Christmas.
With high-flown rhetoric or plain-spoken bluntness, brevity or long-winded oratory, ministers will try to make the centuries-old story of the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ relevant to today’s worshipers.
It’s not easy, ministers say.
I wonder whether some of these ministers, perhaps caught up in the pressure of the moment, are trusting too much in their God-given intelligence, humor, cleverness or oratorical skills? I wonder whether they might find preaching on Christmas Eve less of a struggle if they looked to Saint Paul as an example?
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power (1 Corinthians 2:1-5).