Jesus Calling
As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake-for they were fishermen. And, He said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As He went from there, He saw two other brothers, James, son of Zebedee and his brother, John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed Him. Matthew 4:18-22
We just heard Jesus calling Peter, Andrew, James and John. He was calling them from something that they were very familiar with. He was calling them away from what had been the only life they knew and what appeared to be their life. They dropped everything and followed Him. My, what faith! Guts? All we know from scripture is that they were fishermen, living day after day in their profession. It doesn’t tell us if they had a passion for anything different than the only thing they knew, fishing.
What we do know is that Jesus had a plan for them.
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He did it.
John Templeton was from the small town of Winchester, Tennessee, the son of a poor cotton farmer. He went to Yale, graduated near the top of his class in 1934, became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and eventually the founder of the Templeton Growth Fund. He was a brilliant man, extremely successful and a generous philanthropist. Despite becoming a billionaire, he lived frugally and lived quietly in a fairly modest home in the Bahamas.
He also had a keen interest in reconciling science and faith in the pursuit of ultimate truth, and collected books on the subject. He wanted that work to continue, so he built a library outside of Sewanee, Tennessee, where his books would go after he died, with apartments where scholars could come and study. It was completed in 2000, the year that our family arrived at Sewanee, where I went to seminary.
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The Chasm Crossed
This week’s parable is, without question, the scariest. It includes dogs licking sores, death, and eternal punishment in a place filled with eternal flames and endless thirst. The indictment for not having a truly godly heart is clear. People know better, but apparently choose to ignore or at least minimize passages like this from Deuteronomy that are consistently in the law and the prophets.
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