IN THE END, THE EXCLAMATION POINT

“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

DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM

“But God is so rich in mercy, and He loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, He gave us life when He raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!) … God saved you by His grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.”  (Ephesians 2:4,5,8,9 NLT)

Doctors study medicine not so they can go around telling people they are sick, but so they can heal those who are sick, and the healing care can’t start until patients are willing to admit they are sick. Once patients admit this, there is the important task of the diagnosis, which then makes possible the cure. So it is with Christianity. We speak about sin in an attempt to diagnose the spiritual malady that affects us all. My goal, then, is not to accuse you of being, or even to tell you that, you are sick, but to offer you the medicine that makes you well. It’s not simply to ask you the question, but to lead you to the answer. Yes, we’re all sinners, and yes, this is a serious issue. But God is a God of grace and mercy. 

-- Adam Hamilton in “Forgiveness: Finding Peace Through Letting Go”

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