“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 15:55,57 NIV)
Several years ago, I received a phone call from a young woman in my congregation, asking if I could go to the hospital to see her… For several months she had experienced upsetting symptoms, but had charged them off as related to pregnancy and delivery… She was a victim, her doctors reported, of multiple sclerosis…
There are times when it is very difficult to be a parish pastor. If you care about people and want to help them, you dread those moments when almost anything you say will seem trivial. If you’re a medical doctor, you can begin outlining a series of treatment or medication, even if both of you know that it’s only a stopgap. But when you’re a pastor, you deal only in words and in the intangibles of faith; and you’re afraid that any words you speak at such a moment will be inane, and that if you try to convey faith, your words won’t be heard. You wish, often, that faith could be bottled or packaged in some physical form, so you could hand it to a person, and they in turn could grasp it, then perhaps take it like a capsule, three times a day, with a glass of water.
But suddenly -- I shall always credit it to the Holy Spirit – a sentence came to me, and I spoke it. “Multiple sclerosis isn’t the last word,” I said. “It isn’t even the next-to-last word. The next-to-last word is faith, and the last word is God.” We talked a while longer, and we prayed. But most of all we remembered that the last word, always and always, is God. The devil will seek to push any number of counterfeits upon us, to persuade us that we have come to an end. But it is never the end until we have said God. And after God comes the exclamation point…
Because that’s the way it ends if you place yourself in Jesus Christ, because He has made an ultimate end to death. No comma or semicolon, no poor period, no fumbling ellipsis, and surely no question mark. An exclamation point! Thanks be to God, an exclamation point!
-- J. Ellsworth Kalas, excerpted from a sermon entitled “In the End, the Exclamation Point”, February 28, 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for sharing your comments about a quote or about this ministry. Please include your name and what state or country you live in. If you do not have a registered profile, you can login using the "Anonymous" tag in the "Comment as:" box below.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.