Tall tales are something fantastic, unbelievable, stupendous. For example, can you imagine a winter so cold that the snow turned blue. That’s cold. That’s how Babe, Paul Bunyon‘s Blue Ox turned blue. He was really cold. Growing up in Minnesota I know a thing or two about being cold. The story of Paul Bunyon and the exploits of him and pet ox are legendary. Actually they are legend. As in they aren’t true. They fall into the genre of literature known as tall tales.
The stories of God’s love are no less fantastic and wonderful, but they are true. They are more real than the laptop I’m typing on right now. Everything else around will fail eventually, but the love of my God is endure forever.
On that topic of enduring forever – and it’s Father’s Day – I want to take you back down memory lane, back to when my kids used training wheels, back to my back yard. I came home from work only to find my son’s bike in the back yard. I could have called him down to put up his toy (good stewardship), but I decided to walk the bike back to the garage myself. Or… maybe I rode the bike around the house. I’m a ~200 male and by the time the bike made it to the driveway the chain fell off because… I bent the frame.
I asked my son about this and he must have blocked out the trauma because he doesn’t remember that fateful day.
I tried to get the chain back on the wheel, but nothing worked and I couldn’t unbend the frame. It was ruined. The bike wasn’t worth that much so after a short time I gave up.
I tell you this story to ask how long God should spend working on you before he gives us? We are all broken. I have 43 years worth of brokenness, and God still hasn’t given up on me. He never will. In fact he doesn’t fix lives – he makes them new. That’s might sound like semantics, but it’s not. Our lives – our souls – are damaged beyond repair. When Jesus died on the cross he didn’t fix us up. Jesus made us new!
Want to hear more, including how Pecos Bill road a tornado? Watch this Sunday’s sermon taken from Romans 5.
Book(s): Romans
Tag(s): Grace
Speaker(s): Fred Guldberg