It’s a beautiful day today. The sky is clear, the trees are shedding their leaves as they do with the onset of the season and with it comes the coolness of fall. God’s creation is truly beautiful and amazing. I want to talk for a few minutes about something no one wants to think about, much less talk about. That is… death. In particular your own death. Death comes at some point to all living things be it plant or animal. One day, I will die. One day you will die. It is a door which every single person, regardless of wealth, or status, or power absolutely must walk through. Death does not care if you are rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, a star athlete or a fan in the stands. It doesn’t care if you are black, white or brown. It doesn’t care if you are from America, Ethiopia, Vietnam or Bora Bora. Death is truly the “Great Equalizer.” Life has a 100% mortality rate. We can delay death with medicine and machines, we can ignore the thought of it in our daily l...
This morning we’re going to take a little time to look at one of the minor heroes from the Old Testament, a minor hero in terms of the overall scope of the Bible, but to the Israelites of his time he was very important to them as well as to Jehovah. We turn to a remarkable passage — Judges 3:12-30 — the story of Ehud, a left-handed deliverer who was raised up by God to rescue Israel. This story is rich with themes of sin and bondage, crying out for deliverance, weakness and unlikely victory. It reminds us that God often works in ways we don’t expect , through people we wouldn’t first pick — so that the glory goes to Him. We don’t often hear sermons about Ehud, in fact I don’t believe I’ve ever heard one. Now Ehud was the second judge of Israel in about the year 1320 BC and he is mentioned about 12 times in the Bible principally in Judges 3:12-30 which will be our main scripture reference this morning, and ...