In his inspiring book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum gives us his very practical guide to life: “Share everything.  Play fair. Don’t hit people.  Put things back where you found them.  Clean up your own mess.  Don’t take things that aren’t yours.  Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.  Wash your hands before you eat.  Flush.  Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.  Live a balanced life ‑ learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.  Take a nap every afternoon.  When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.  Be aware of wonder.”

Sometimes one practical saying is worth ten philosophical, theoretical ones!  But having said that, let me also tell you that in seminary we were cautioned against giving this kind of very practical sermon because preachers already have a tendency to want to tell people how they ought to be living.  If we are not careful, such sermons will degenerate into legalistic laundry lists, complete with finger-pointing instead of a proclamation of God’s grace.  It is good to remember that whenever the scripture gives us a very practical list of things to do, it is most often given to us as something we want to do in response to God’s grace.  The writer of Ephesians gives us plenty of deep thoughts to chew on:  Before the foundation of the world, God predestined that we would be adopted as His children through Jesus Christ.  God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing to be found in heaven!  God has raised us with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms.  In response to all of God’s goodness to us in Christ, the writer urges us to show our faith in these very practical ways:  Be careful and wise in how you live.  Make the most of every opportunity.  Remember that we live in evil days.  Don’t be foolish but instead understand God’s will.  Don’t get drunk but be filled with God’s Spirit.  Speak to one another with words of hymns and carry around music in your heart.  Always give thanks to God for everything.

The line of this sage advice that really stands out to me is the one that says that the days are evil.  From time to time I hear folks imply that we live in the worst times that have ever been and that they are only getting worse.  I’m not sure this is true.  To be sure, we live in a time when everything that happens in the whole wide world is beamed by satellite right into our dens and so we are more aware of evil than we have ever been.  A hundred years ago, we would not have even heard about it at all.  My personal belief is that while some evils are worse now than ever before, the world has always been an evil place to those who are God-loving, law-abiding citizens.

There is a popular song on the radio today called “Calling All Angels” by the group Train that begs for angels among us to make themselves known to us so that we can have some hope in a time “when there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head, when you feel the world shake from the words that are said, when children have to play inside so they don’t disappear.”  Like every previous generation, we find ourselves living in a world that can be very evil, and the same will be true of every successive generation, as long as fallible human beings live on planet earth and until Jesus returns.  The fact that the days are evil should be taken very seriously by those who are determined to follow Jesus.  At the same time, we should never forget that there is so much beauty and joy to be found during our days.  We are now, as Christians have always been, like pioneers trying to establish a colony for the Kingdom of God in a hostile world.

Ephesians also urges us to not be unwise or foolish.  Now he’s gone to sounding just like my Mama and Daddy!  “What were you thinking?  You are supposed to look before you leap!  That sure was a dumb thing you did!”  What other bits of sage advice did your parents tell you?  “A fool and his money are soon parted!  Beauty is only skin deep.  What part of ‘don’t’ don’t  you understand?”  Have I hit your favorite yet?  Bad things happen to us when we act foolishly, without thinking things through, without considering the consequences, without considering the will of God.  My seven-year-old daughter told her four-year-old brother that he would be able to fly if he jumped off of the roof of our house, and he learned real fast who not to trust!  Be careful.  Be wise.  Don’t be foolish.

The writer then gets very specific as to one foolish thing to avoid, and this just goes to show you that the same problems have been inflicting human beings for several millennia!  “Don’t get drunk,” he says.  Now, remember he is writing to Christians about their behavior, but since he talks about getting drunk, I am sure that he couldn’t be talking to Methodists or Baptists!  Yeah, right!  Just before I was appointed to Edgefield United Methodist Church, a delegation of pastors went to visit a man who opened a liquor store on the outskirts of town, urging him to close down his store or  move it out of town.  He looked at the five or six pastors standing before him and replied, “If you can get your church members to stay out of here, I’ll have to move!”  Those pastors never bothered that red-dot store owner again!

But being serious for one moment, regardless of your politics on the issue, and regardless whether you are a T-totaler or an occasional partaker in fermentation,

is there anyone here who does not believe that the overuse of alcohol and drugs is a real problem in our society?  Is there anybody here who thinks that it is a good idea for people to drink so much that they cannot drive safely or that they become abusive to their families?  How many people are killed each year and how many unplanned babies are the results of drunkenness?  CDC studies show that if teenagers start drinking before age 15 years of age, they are five times more likely to become alcoholics later in life than those who begin drinking at or after age 21 years.  If you could walk in a pastor’s shoes for a few days, you would meet some very sad individuals whose lives have been totally wrecked by alcohol abuse.  Surely God is right in telling us in Ephesians that we are better off  to avoid drunkenness.  Instead we should fill our lives with the Holy Spirit, the idea being that God can give us natural, emotional highs through fellowship that is better than anything that comes bottled!

Well, enough of the negative!  This passage also gives some very positive, practical advice to us.  “Make the most of every opportunity.”  Even though they will worry you to pieces by coming by your house on foot or on bicycles, you’ve got to admire those Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons for their dedication to their churches!  But there are less invasive ways that we can give witness to our faith because opportunities to serve others in Christ’s name come our way every day.  If you just open your eyes, you’ll see that many opportunities will come your way, opportunities to speak a kind, uplifting word, opportunities to offer friendship to someone, and occasionally opportunities to talk in depth with someone about the hope you find in Christ.  In hearing our youth talk about their recent mission trip, I heard them say that their Vacation Bible School had gone smoothly because of their detailed advanced planning, but what really excited them were the unexpected opportunities to bear witness to their faith that came their way while playing on the playground or basketball court with lonely children.  They walked the children home and got to meet their families, and some of them had a prayer with those families.  Sometimes we have to make our opportunities, but most often the opportunities just come to us if we are looking for them.

While I was being trained in selling life insurance, I was amazed at the success my boss had in finding opportunities to tell people about life insurance, and he was not obnoxious about it.  He was a master in listening to people and finding an opening in the conversation to plant a seed of thought about insurance.  When I was driving a bread truck – that was the only time I ever was rolling “in dough” – I had a trainer who could also find opportunities to bear witness to his faith.  A store-owner would mention to him that his wife was in the hospital, and my trainer would put his hand on the man’s shoulder and say, “Tell your wife that I will be praying for her.”  That simple gesture was so meaningful.

One day several of us pastors were sharing some coffee at Waffle House when a woman walked over to us and asked if one of us would be willing to speak to her son.  The son, in his early twenties, had more chrome on his face than a Honda Accord!  His mother explained that her son didn’t want to discuss anything with us; he just didn’t believe that a preacher would be willing to say “hello” to someone like him.  He must have had a very low self-esteem.  Well, of course, we all were willing to speak to him, and I felt like crying!  Poor guy!  How easy and simple it was for us that day to see this as an opportunity to extend the love of God to a child of God who needed it.

Jesus knew how to do this.  He could begin a conversation with a woman about a drink of water, and before the conversation ended He had led her to reconciliation with God.  This may be a troubled world we live in, but it provides us with ample opportunities to share God’s love and our faith story.

Next Ephesians tells us to speak to each other with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.  I know that this sounds pretty dull and boring, and if we applied those words literally and legalistically, people would look at us like we were crazy!  Even our founder John Wesley advised us to use common, ordinary words instead of religious language in our daily lives.  I don’t think that Ephesians is talking about merely lacing our language with religious terminology.  I am sure that it means for us to speak words of comfort and encouragement to each other, for psalms and hymns express the joys and sorrows of human existence and then lift our spirits in hope. The psalm that begins “My God, why have you forsaken me?” ends with a promise of God’s nearness: “[God] has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”  We are to speak words of hope and encouragement to one another.

Uplifting music is good for our souls also.  Mama used to sing or hum as she did housework, and if I have household chores to do, I put some good music on the stereo.  Recently, the teenagers teased me, asking me if I still use an 8-track player.  Hey, I do still have one!  Making music in our hearts is good for us.

The writer concludes this practical sermon by encouraging us to give thanks to God for everything.  A thankful heart is a joyful heart, one that becomes more aware of all that God has done for us.  Be careful and wise in how you live.  Make the most of every opportunity.  Remember that we live in evil days.  Don’t be foolish but instead understand God’s will.  Don’t get drunk but be filled with God’s Spirit.  Speak to one another with words of hymns and carry around music in your heart.  Always give thanks to God for everything.  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Someone once said that the speeches of most politicians are like a Texas longhorn steer: they have a point here and another point there, but there is a lot of bull in between!  Someone else said that hearing a political speech gives him tonsilitis because it is hard to swallow.  The crowd that followed Jesus from the feeding of 5000 hillside to Capernaum listened to a lengthy sermon from Jesus, and the more He said, the harder it was for them to swallow what He was saying.

Jesus told the crowd, “I am the bread of life.”  This is the first of the seven great “I am” sayings of Jesus, recorded in John.  “I am the bread of life.  I am the light of the world.  Before Abraham was, I am.  I am the Good Shepherd.  I am the resurrection and the life.  I am the way, the truth, and the life.  I am the true vine.”  Every time that Jesus uttered the phrase “I am,” He was repeating the name of God which was given to Moses.  “Whom shall I say is sending me to Egypt to free the people from slavery?” Moses asked God, and God replied, “Tell them that I AM (Yahwah) sent you.”

Part of the problem with the “I am” sayings of Jesus is that Jesus was speaking metaphorically instead of literally.  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.  This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”  Symbolic speech must be chewed on for a while in order to be digested properly.  One can’t just swallow it whole.  The crowd near Jesus that day must have wondered if Jesus was a poet or a crazy person.  And yet, some of our greatest doctrines and communion liturgy have come from this beautiful passage.

From our point of view, it is easy to read Holy Communion into Jesus’ words.  As we partake of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we break bread in remembrance of the One Whose body was broken for us.  We understand that Jesus filled our hunger for righteousness by giving His life for us, and now we aren’t famished for right-standing with God any longer.  We know that we have been given eternal life by Jesus, and so this bread from heaven which we have eaten, that is, this Christ we have placed our trust in, will keep our lives safe in Him.  We will never die, even though our bodies will.  The bread represents the flesh and the wine represents the blood of Jesus.  It is easy to imagine that this passage from John’s Gospel found its way into the communion services of the early church, and perhaps that is why John recorded these words.

It is interesting that John recorded these communion words because John never tells us about the first communion!  He does tell us that Jesus and His Disciples came together to share the Passover meal on the night Jesus was arrested. He tells us that Jesus washed the Disciples’ feet. But look closely at John 13 through 17.  You will not find in John where Jesus took bread and broke it, saying “This is my body” or where Jesus took a cup and said “This is my blood; do this in remembrance of me.”  It is not there!  It is in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and First Corinthians but not in John, causing some theologians to think that John wasn’t that much into the sacrament.  If it is true that Holy Communion was not that important to John, that would make him a good United Methodist because we stay away from church in droves on the Sundays we observe the sacrament!  Someone asked me recently why we don’t celebrate communion more often and I replied, “Because we can’t afford to!  People stay home on those Sundays and keep their offerings with them!”  I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek with these comments, but it is true that people make a point of missing church on communion Sundays, maybe because the service calls us to examine our hearts with a willingness to change, or maybe because the service is a bit longer, or maybe because it requires us to sit still and quietly meditate, and we don’t do that very well. We really need to examine our faithfulness in participating in communion because it has always been the center piece of Christian worship.  And we might better practice worship and meditation before we get to heaven because there will be a lot of it there!  But I really believe that John was a fan of Holy Communion because he gave us this beautiful sacramental passage in John 6.

There is almost as much debate over the meaning of Holy Communion as there is over baptism.  With baptism, we argue about how much water is necessary, whether it should be administered to adult believers only or to infants, and whether or not it is necessary for salvation.  With the Eucharist, theologians have long debated the meaning of Jesus’ words, “This is my body; this is my blood” and also “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”  Some groups of Christians have interpreted this to mean that the bread and wine actually become flesh and blood through a process called transubstantiation and that the physical act of eating and drinking the communion elements is absolutely essential for salvation.  In those groups, to miss Holy Communion is to put yourself in danger of losing your salvation because you have failed to eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood.

The problem most of us Protestants have with this interpretation is that it makes our salvation dependent on a ritual.  If you don’t get dunked right and if you don’t eat and drink right, you aren’t saved.  That makes faith impotent and God’s actions insufficient.  The sacraments are better understood as conveyers of truth.  Baptism doesn’t save us, but it reminds us that the God Who saves us washes us clean of all sins and immerses us into the fellowship of His body, the Church.  Bread and wine are not transubstantiated into literal flesh and blood, but as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we experience the real presence of Jesus with us and are reminded of how God has acted in Jesus’ crucifixion to save us.  “Eating my flesh and drinking my blood” would then mean to draw our spiritual nourishment from Jesus’ life and example.

This passage also has helped the Church in formulating some of our most important doctrines because it tells us a lot about Christ’s identity.  One thing Jesus claimed to be was the one who had come down from heaven, and as such, He claimed to be the only person Who had ever seen God and known God intimately.  Jesus’ kinsmen grumbled at this statement: “How can he claim to be from heaven?  Isn’t He the son of Joseph and Mary whom we know?”  One of the doctrines developed in the early church was the idea that Jesus was both 100% God and 100% human.  Paul wrote it this way in his letter to the Romans: “regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.”  The doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that He united God and humanity in His flesh, and united us again by His death.

Did I ever tell you folks that if everyone in the United States of America would buy a pink automobile, then we would be a pink car nation?   If I already have, you are wondering why I would repeat it, and if I have not, you are wondering why I would say this in the first place!

The doctrine of the Incarnation is one of the most meaningful of our beliefs.  It tells us that God loved His children so much that He chose to come here to be with us, taking upon Himself our human form and nature.  The One who is holy came into this imperfect world and in-fleshed Himself in our humanity with all its weaknesses and temptations.  Through Christ, God has experienced birth, life, temptation, happiness, loneliness, grief, death, and resurrection.  Whatever you are experiencing in life, God now understands.

It is because of His intimate knowledge of God, His oneness with God, that He can be the revealer of God to us.  Jesus knows what He is talking about.  The picture He gives us of God is the clearest we can ever expect because He has seen God and He has come to earth to tell us about God.  If you are wondering what God is like, just look at Jesus.  And if you wonder why the God that Jesus revealed is a little different from the concept of God found in the Old Testament, it is because the Old Testament people lacked the personal knowledge of God that Jesus possessed.  If they had been able to have a perfect understanding of God, Jesus would not have needed to come as our teacher.

One of the concepts that helps me in my study of the Old Testament is the concept of “Progressive Revelation.”  What this means is that as history unfolded, our understanding of God’s nature progressed from ignorance toward truth.  As successive generations built upon the understanding of their parents, Noah would have understood God better than Adam did.  David would have understood God more fully than Moses did.  The prophets would have had an even clearer understanding of God.   That helps me explain why the attributes of God seem to change as we progress through the Old Testament period.  His nature seems to change from an almost warlike God in Genesis to a more Father-like God in the prophets.  But it is Jesus who gives us to clearest picture of God ever because He has seen God and He was God on earth.

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.”  He is the bread that came down from heaven, and by feasting on Him, we grow into His likeness and are given eternal life.  He satisfies our thirst for God and our hunger for righteousness.  He has given us the sacrament of Holy Communion so that we can be reminded to feed upon Him daily.  Jesus is the only one who has ever seen God “up close and personal,” as we say, and He was God’s incarnation on earth, fully revealing God to us.  May God draw all of us close to Himself and open our understanding to His nature as revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Making this sanctuary comfortable for all of you folks is quite a challenge.  Some of you tell me you are too warm while others tell me you are about to freeze!  It was so cold in here one Sunday recently that someone even quoted Matt 22:14 to me: “Many are cold and a few are frozen.”  It is hard to feel called when you are too cold, and if you get really uncomfortable you may even feel culled from our numbers!

Are you familiar with the word “culled”?  The root of this term is the word “collected” but it has a negative connotation.  Inferior or unwanted products are collected for disposal.  I first came upon this term while working with the Salkehatchie Summer Service project, repairing the houses of needy families.  We would go to a lumber yard, looking for slightly inferior lumber that had been culled because it would be cheaper.  In agriculture, livestock is culled of the undesirable cows or pigs, and I would imagine that around here peaches go through a culling process, too.  Like the one bad apple that spoils the whole bunch, culls only drag down the value of the best products and so they must be separated from the best.  The Gospel lesson today tells about a time when Jesus was still calling disciples, but on this occasion He felt it necessary to separate the called from the culled.

The setting of the story is just after Jesus had fed the 5000, after the Disciples had left in the boat without Jesus and gotten into rough seas, and after Jesus had walked on the water to go rescue them.  The crowd that Jesus had fed wondered where Jesus had gone.  He hadn’t left with the Disciples but He wasn’t anywhere to be found.  Perhaps they heard from some of the people on the arriving boats that Jesus was now across the lake in Capernaum, and so they set out on a search for Him.  A fairly large crowd made this journey, and you would think that Jesus would have been very pleased that so many people were interested in following Him.  But His reaction to them is very surprising.  He is cool to them, to say the least.  Rather than building upon the momentum of the moment, He seems to do all He can to defuse their enthusiasm and discourage them from following Him.

I want you to really grasp what Jesus does in this story.  Every church that I have ever been connected with has been concerned with church growth.  If a church isn’t adding new members, then it is dying.  We have to be concerned about new members or else there won’t be a church here one day.  How would you react if your pastor acted like Jesus did in this story and gave visitors a cool reception and then discouraged them from joining the church?  I think you’d want a different pastor!  The crowd in our Gospel story discovered that they really wanted a different Messiah.

Since the union between The Evangelical United Brethren Church and The Methodist Church in 1968 – to form The United Methodist Church – we have been losing members at an alarming rate.  That’s all we talk about at Annual Conference!  We’ve got to stop this decline.  But it isn’t us alone.  The Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians have also been losing members, and now the Southern Baptist Convention is quite frightened because their membership is declining, too.  Churches have tried Vision 2000 and Natural Church Development and it has helped a little – in some cases, a lot.  I am not putting down these efforts at all.  I am simply pointing out that our reaction is the normal one while Jesus’ reaction is not.

So, what’s with Jesus, that He reacts so abnormally?  His reaction causes His church to shrink in numbers quite dramatically.  Rather than becoming an instant overnight mega-church, His group becomes a tiny little church.  After the reception the crowd received, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed Him,” we are told.  His actions may have called a few but it culled even more, and I think that is the point of Jesus actions.  It was necessary to cull His followers of those who were following Him for all the wrong reasons.

This was not the only time that Jesus did this either!  Another time, a very rich young man whose wealth could have really blessed Jesus’ work came to Jesus asking what he needed to do in order to have eternal life, and Jesus told him to give all his money away to the poor and then he could become His follower.  What would you all do to me if I refused to welcome a wealthy person into our church?  Luke 14 tells us about a time when another large crowd was traveling with Jesus when He stopped, turned to face them, and said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters‑‑yes, even his own life‑‑he cannot be my disciple.  And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  In our world today, where every church so badly wants to grow that we will welcome anybody into our church membership, perhaps we need to follow Jesus’ culling examples and be clearer about what Christian discipleship entails.  If people are not willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work in the church, if they aren’t willing to dig down deep in their pocketbooks and give sacrificially to the church, if they aren’t willing to make church attendance a high priority in their lives, and if they are not willing to change so that their attitudes become more Christlike, perhaps we need to tell them that they aren’t ready for church membership yet.  If Jesus was your pastor, that is exactly what He would do!

Back to the Gospel lesson for today: The first thing that Jesus says to discourage the crowd from following Him is to tell them that they are following Him for the wrong reasons.  They wanted Him to feed them again every day.  They had found plenty of food on that hillside where Jesus fed the 5000 but they had not recognized the miraculous hand of God in that feeding.  Proof of that fact may be found in the fact that they asked Jesus “What miraculous sign will you give that we may see it and believe you?  What will you do?”  They had been a part of a great miracle, but their hearts had been too hardened to even recognize it.  But we shouldn’t be too hard on them.  We, too, are surrounded by God’s miracles every day and we fail to see the merciful, miracle-working hand of God all around us.  The universe exists today only because God gave it permission to continue.  The stars will shine in the sky tonight because God has extended their contract for another day.  Every day is God’s gift to us.  Jesus culled those who were unwilling to see God working in and through Him.

Secondly, they were wrong in not seeing that there is a deeper hunger, a spiritual hunger, deep inside each of us that is more important than our hunger for daily bread.  The crowd finally tipped their hand by telling Jesus to show them a miraculous sign like the one witnessed by their ancestors in the desert, a reference to the manna given to the people as recorded in Exodus 16.  The people of Israel had complained to Moses, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt!  There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”  God told Moses that He would rain down bread from heaven for the people so that they would have plenty to eat.  “Do something like that, Jesus, and then we will believe you.”  All they wanted Jesus to be was their chef, not their chief.  Jesus replied that God was sending them some bread all right, but that the true bread from heaven was for the spirit, not the stomach.  “I am the bread of life,” Jesus said.

If there is any good that can come out of our current economic recession, maybe it will be the discovery that we Americans have built our hopes for happiness on the wrong things.  Happiness is not found in stockpiling possessions and wealth.  Do we really need to always be buying bigger houses and faster cars and other stuff while there are places in this world where our brothers and sisters go to bed hungry every day?  Could we spend our time more wisely by investing in spiritual resources like higher education, church camps and retreats, experiences that would strengthen our marriages and our homes, things that have lasting value?  Did you know that our Annual Conference and the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference plan many wonderful events in South Carolina and at Lake Junaluska every year that end up being canceled due to lack of registrations?  We may become too poor to support our church like we should, but we can still afford to attend college football games and go to the movies whenever we want to.  Jesus said, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  Jesus culled away those who were unable to see that spiritual values and inner resources were of much greater importance than acquiring possessions.  There is a satisfaction to be found in Jesus that fills the longing of the soul for God, that quenches our thirst for right standing with God.  I ate breakfast but I am hungry for lunch already!  But I ingested God’s grace into my life at a very young age and I haven’t been lacking His love ever since.  I ate my fill of God’s grace!

There is one more reason that this crowd was culled rather than called.  That reason is found in the question they asked Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires?”  Their question shows the very common but incorrect assumption that salvation is earned by our doing good works that will fulfill God’s requirements for acceptance.  While a child of God ought to live in such a way as to show who he or she is kin to, nobody becomes a child of God by those good works.  We become a child of God through an action of God – His adoption of us, His redemption of us.  Our part is to accept God’s action, to trust in God’s goodness.  Jesus told that crowd that what God desired from them, what God required of them, what work God wanted from them was for them to believe in the One sent to them by God.

When you and I speak of believing in Christ, we mean much more than just intellectual agreement with the truth that Jesus was sent by God and that He was God on earth.  It means much more than just believing that Jesus exists.  It even means more than believing that Jesus died on the cross for us and that by His death we were saved.  It really means that we accept the concept of God that Jesus presented to the world, a God Who is always ready to forgive us, a God Who claims us as His children, a God Who did all that was necessary for our salvation.  It was the lack of trusting faith in Christ that led ultimately to this crowd being culled instead of called.  They couldn’t understand salvation by God’s gracious actions.

After the crowd departed, Jesus was left with a much smaller band of followers, but this smaller group had a much clearer idea of what was expected of them and what they could expect from God.  God has always been able to do more with twelve deeply committed disciples than with twelve hundred half-hearted followers.  Jesus is always more concerned with the level of our commitment to Him than He is with the number on our rolls.  May we be those who are called, who see God’s miraculous hand working around us, who treasure spiritual values above material possessions, and who know the God of grace Who has made us His children through the work of Jesus.  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt