1-14-2025

Good Morning All,

     Romans 5: 3-5; “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

    Have you ever seen an antique sale of old furniture?  I’ve watched a couple.  I remember the first time I watched as an old table was sold.  I couldn’t figure out why anyone would pay that much for a beat-up table when they could buy a new one for a lot less.  So, I listened to the people around me talk about the table and how the table had real character.  Now to me it only had some dings and burn marks and a stain on it.  Yet they called this character, a sign that it had survived while serving the purpose for which it was constructed.

    Now I really like a table with character.  Actually, I like to be around the people who know the character of the table.  You can listen as they tell how their older sister put a hot kettle on the table without a pad under it and it burned a ring into the table.  They can point to the spot where they all bumped their heads as they started to take their first steps.  All that “character” tells the story of the family that grew up around that table.

    We too, develop character as we age.  It comes at different rates and stages, but we all have some.  We all have those little marks or big marks that showed we lived a life.  We have scars on our body from injuries or surgeries.  We may be missing a tooth from a fall on an icy sidewalk.  We may have a shoulder or an arm that doesn’t work quite the way it should. We all have those little signs of living a life that banged us around once in a while.

    Our faith life is the same way.  We have all experienced times in our life when we got a little beat up.  Maybe it was when one of your parents died or maybe it was a spouse.  Perhaps you had a serious health scare.  Maybe there was a time when you thought that your financial situation was failing.  Perhaps here was a rough time in your marriage. We have all had some things which tormented us and caused us to ache in one way or another.  But suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character.  All those things which we have endured left a little mark on us, but they never defeated us.

    When we see that God’s love is there to provide for us as we suffer through those events, we see that we are not the strong ones but rather he is.  We know that the scratches and burn marks show us that we have endured our life because of God’s grace and in his grace, we have hope.  We have hope because God has been faithful to us in the past and he is faithful to us today and he will be faithful to us tomorrow.  Being sure of that hope, not because of some wishy-washy feeling inside but because of the testimony and the certainty of Scripture; we have a hope that never fails and is never put to shame.

Dear Father, Your mercies are new to us every day.  We give you thanks for the character of our life.  Through it you have molded us into the disciples which you want us to be.  Use our character to reach out to others and to show them the Gospel even if we have to speak it.  All this we ask in Jesus’ precious name, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret