How to Be Mighty for God - Pt 3

Mensa is an organization whose members have an IQ of 140 or higher. A few years ago, there was a Mensa convention in San Francisco, and several members lunched at a local café. While dining, they discovered that their saltshaker contained pepper and their peppershaker was full of salt. How could they swap the contents of the bottles without spilling, and using only the implements at hand? Clearly this was a job for Mensa! The group debated and presented ideas, and finally came up with a brilliant solution involving a napkin, a straw, and an empty saucer. They called the waitress over to dazzle her with their solution.

"Ma'am," they said, "we couldn't help but notice that the peppershaker contains salt and the saltshaker—"

"Oh," the waitress interrupted. "Sorry about that." She unscrewed the caps of both bottles and switched them.

The work of God is simple: Love God and do what you want. As you love God with all your heart you will end up doing what He wants. Don't complicate God's work or His will. Paul said there was one thing he did. He kept it simple and kept his focus.

III. DAVID’S MIGHTY MEN WERE AWARE MEN (32)

2 Peter 3:3 "First of all, you must understand that in these last days some people will appear whose lives are controlled by their own lusts."

[to the Pharisees and Sadducees Jesus] replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ 3 and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times."

We need to know what is going on around us and meet the needs.

I have been noticing recently that some of the secular commentators of our day are growing extremely frightened and disturbed about the conditions of life in America. For example, Richard Reeves, a New York columnist, wrote recently:

I can barely stomach the newspapers here in my hometown. In the tabloids, day after day, the first four or five pages are routinely filled with stories of parents beating or starving their children to death, of children plotting to kill their parents, of people being killed by random gunshots, of people chopping up other people, of cyanide being put in yogurt at the supermarkets.

America, I think, is out of control in some very weird ways. I don’t know how bad it really is or exactly why it is happening. There are obviously many, many reasons, beginning with the unrelenting pressure of living in an open and competitive society.... I don’t know the answer to any of this. I suspect that things will get worse before they get better.

Observe the mood of bewilderment there, the lack of understanding of why things are going wrong.

Richard Estrada, who writes in the Dallas Morning News, describes something very similar, and then comments:

More than anything else, this ugly social breakdown threatens to desensitize us as a nation. Wild West shoot-outs that kill innocent bystanders have become commonplace. Drug dealers and gang members have taken to using children as murderers. Executions of entire families by drug dealers are not unknown. Sweeps of whole communities by police bent on stopping the killing are now routine in Los Angeles.

Numbed by it all, we as a people, shrug our shoulders. Something is disastrously amiss. This is not the America most of us grew up to revere...We are demeaned as a people by this retrogression. We are less and less civilized.

Those words are not written by Christian writers. Those are the thoughts of secular commentators who see the results of rejecting the wisdom of God but they do not know to explain it. They do not know the cause of the terrible evil they chronicle.

It is only when you open the Book of God that you learn the reason for these kinds of conditions. We learn from the Scriptures that as individuals, and as a nation, we have turned our backs on God’s ways and wisdom. We have ignored his laws. We have missed the glory of his plan. We have messed up the beautiful world that he gave us. When we see the sad results and hear them poured into our ears continually by the media, it makes us weep, doesn’t it? It makes us sorrow for all the fine young people who are being destroyed by these terrible practices.