Ministry of Holy Spirit

Imagine the awful inconvenience of being declared dead by the United States Government. Consider this true story:

Susan and Darby Nye of Arlington, Virginia, have been married for 30 years and were looking forward to many more in retirement when Susan started receiving condolences from various federal agencies regarding the death of her husband. But there was one big problem: Darby was alive and well.

It started when Darby’s purchase at a pharmacy was declined. He called to find out why. “Well, they said the Social Security Administration has informed us that you are dead,” he said.

When someone dies, they’re supposed to be put on the Death Master File. The Social Security Administration uses the death data to terminate benefit payments and report deaths to other agencies. But one typo can mistakenly declare someone dead, digging a grave that buries them along with their finances.

Darby’s plight as a categorized deceased person is not singular: it is estimated that every year, some 12,200 U.S. citizens are declared dead by the Social Security Administration due to "keystroke errors." Those affected become like the walking dead, unable to secure a job, make financial transactions, file taxes, or visit the doctor, and for months on end, must endure the nightmare of convincing a large bureaucracy that they haven't yet bit the dust.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Being declared legally dead is a terrible inconvenience for people in our society. But being declared legally dead to sin is a tremendous blessing for believers that promises incredible freedom and hope.

In an article for The Atlantic, David Graham wonders, “Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?”:

Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. I seldom write by hand anymore. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas. And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out.

The sticky, white correction fluid was designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving. It’s a mystery of the digital age.

But today, even printer sales are down, casualties of an era when more and more writing is executed on-screen and never printed or written out at all. Yet correction fluid remains remarkably resilient. As early as 2005, The New York Times pondered the product’s fate with trepidation. Yet somehow, more than (two decades) on, it has kept its ground. Who’s still buying these things? Even as paper sales dip, upmarket stationery is one subsegment that is expected to grow, thanks to a Millennial affection for personalized stationery.

For Millennials…the attraction to Wite-Out is the same as any other handmade or small-batch product: The physical act of covering up a mistake is imperfect but more satisfying than simply hitting backspace. There’s also a poignancy to a (messed up) generation gravitating toward Wite-Out.

You can’t erase the past any more than you can erase a printed typo or a written error—but you can paper it over and pretend it didn’t happen.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn’t it a relief to know that God doesn’t cover up our mistakes and sins and “pretend they didn’t happen.” At the cross He permanently and completely removed them from our record. “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow” (Isa. 1:18); “He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross!” (Col. 2:13-14)

It’s not clear what Joby Pool was planning for this year’s Easter feast, but if his snack plans were any indication, it would’ve been an epic celebration. That’s because police arrested Pool for stealing a trailer containing 200,000 Cadbury Crème Eggs.

The haul was valued at approximately $37,000, an amount that local police described as “eggs-travagant.” The sweet confectionary treats contain a mixture of white and yellow fondant resembling an egg yolk covered by a chocolate shell, and are always in demand due to their limited availability in the spring.

Police say that Pool broke into an industrial unit in Telford before driving off with the goods in a previously stolen tractor unit. Prosecutor Owen Beale claims the crime had to have been premeditated. He said, “This is clearly an organized criminal matter. You don’t just happen to learn about a trailer with that kind of value being available.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Cross; Easter; Grace – Easter season reminds us that Jesus came to give, not to take. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

In the fall of 1937, Ed Keefer was a senior in the school of engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Tall, slender, and bespectacled, Keefer was the president of the calculus club, the vice-president of the engineering club, and a member of the school’s exclusive all-male honor society. He also invented the Cupidoscope.

The electrical device could not have been more perfectly designed to bring campus-wide fame to its creators, Keefer and his less sociable classmate John Hawley. It promised to reveal, with scientific precision, if a couple was truly in love. As the inventors explained to a United Press reporter as news of their innovation spread, the Cupidoscope delivered on its promise “in terms called ‘amorcycles,’ the affection that the college girl has for her boyfriend.”

Built in the school’s physics laboratory, the Cupidoscope was fashioned from an old radio cabinet, a motor spark coil, and an electrical resistor. To test their bond, a man and a woman would grip electrodes on either side of the Cupidoscope and move them toward one another until the woman felt a spark—not of attraction, but of electricity. The higher her tolerance for this mild current, the more of a love signal the meter registered. A needle decorated with hearts purported to show her devotion on a scale that ranged from “No hope” to “See preacher!”

It all sounds like a slightly painful party game—but the Cupidoscope was one experiment in a serious, decades-long quest to quantify love. This undertaking garnered the attention of leading scientists across the United States and in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and it is memorialized most prominently in the penny arcade mainstay known as the Love Tester.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“How do you measure love?” The Bible gives an answer to this important question: It is measured by the self-sacrifice of the Cross—“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16); “Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:17-19).

In the opening scene of the 2016 film Collateral Beauty, advertising CEO Howard Inlet explains that his strategy is driven by three things. At the end of the day, (1) we long for love. (2) We wish we had more time. And (3) we fear death. These three things, Howard claims, drive every human act.

But then we see him three years later. His six-year-old daughter has died of cancer. It has destroyed him. In his lament at life, he writes letters to love and time and death. To death he writes: “You’re just pathetic and powerless middle management. You don’t even have the authority to make a simple trade.”

Later, he explains what he meant: “When we realized our daughter was dying, I prayed. Not to God or the universe. But to death. Take me. Leave my daughter.”

Like Howard, Jesus volunteered to make the trade for us. But unlike death in Howard’s mind, Jesus wasn’t middle-management. He was completely in control. He is the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Jesus really did die for us.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks visited John Hopkins Hospital complaining of bleeding. Doctors discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. Lacks began undergoing radium treatment for cervical cancer and later underwent a biopsy to determine the progress of the treatment. Doctors were shocked to find that Lacks’ cells were unlike any others they had ever seen. Whereas other cells that they used for research would die, Lacks’ cells doubled every 20-24 hours.

Today, these cells, nicknamed “HeLa” cells, are replicated worldwide and have been used to study the human genome; the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones, and viruses on the growth of cancer cells; and played a crucial role in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines. Lacks’ cells were the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cells in medical research.

Henrietta Lacks died more than seventy years ago at the age of thirty-one. History would have long since forgotten her if not for that special something drawn from her blood. Today, scores of polio survivors and the billions who've been vaccinated for COVID-19 owe a great debt to this woman of whom most people have never heard. Only as her story is retold each February as part of Black History Month is she remembered.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus' story bears many similarities to Henrietta's. He, too, died around the age of thirty. He, too, might have long since been forgotten if his story wasn't regularly retold and at Easter especially. Like Lacks, Jesus is honored for that special something about his blood. As Isaiah puts it, "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

When twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong in June of 2013 with a plethora of top-secret NSA and CIA documents, he created a firestorm of controversy that still rages. He has many on his side who are convinced that what he did was heroic and much needed. Others have charged him with being a traitor. In fact, the United States government has charged him with three counts under the Espionage Act. He currently resides with his wife in Moscow where he has been given asylum.

What is of profound interest is Snowden's disclosure that virtually every digital communication made by US citizens—including text messages, Skype calls, emails, Facebook posts, phone calls, Google searches, credit card pur­chases, or the like—is part of what he calls a permanent record. Snowden brought to the attention of the American public that there was little in their lives that they might reasonably regard as private. This permanent record of their movements, purchases, internet activity, and virtually all forms of communication and digital interaction with other people will likely never disappear, at least not in our lifetime. It will always be there for the NSA and the CIA to see and make use of, if they so choose. It is frighten­ing, to say the least.

But I worry far less about any record the government might permanently possess than I do about the fact that God has made a permanent record of my wicked choices, thoughts, fantasies, and failures. The mere thought that my sins are forever registered in the mind of God or written down in some celestial volume is far more unsettling and disturbing to me than knowing that my government knows as much as it does.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Here is the good news: God has erased every last trace of the condemning guilt of our transgressions if you know and trust Christ. This did not happen because God sovereignly destroyed the heavenly server on which this record was stored. Instead, he took the guilt of our sin and imputed it to Jesus. In the death of our Savior for our sins, all trace of anything that might otherwise be held against us is gone.

When police officer Cpl. Annette L. Goodyear holds up her hand to direct traffic in front of the local middle school, drivers usually stop. But when one driver didn’t, Goodyear didn’t have time to get angry or offended--she was instead focused on the girl crossing the street.

Cameras caught Goodyear as she pushed the child out of the way and was instead struck by the car herself, landing hard on the pavement. Goodyear said, “It was strange. As I’m lying there, I’m thinking to myself ‘this actually did happen.’ It didn’t seem real as it was happening.”

Authorities cited the driver for multiple infractions including negligent driving, failure to stop for a pedestrian in the crosswalk, and an expired registration.

Despite her hard landing, Goodyear was not significantly injured. She was in good enough spirits when she left the hospital that she immediately went to check on the student, who while not injured, was too shaken up to go to school.

Goodyear said, “She saw me standing there and as she was walking toward the door, she was getting teary-eyed. And when she got teary-eyed, then her dad started getting teary-eyed, and we all started at that point. I was just so thankful she was standing there and that she was OK.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When you put your safety on the line for the benefit of others, you embody the sacrificial love that God has for all humanity which he showed in his Son on the Cross.

How are we to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” along with his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God “if possible, let this cup pass from me?

Here’s the (question): Many mere mortals have managed to face death with more (composure) than Jesus did—Stephen, for example, just months later. Jesus knew he would rise from the dead, so why all the anguish?

In his ordeal on the cross … Christ mind-reads the mental states found in all the evil human acts human beings have ever committed. Every vile, shocking, disgusting, revulsive psychic state accompanying every human evil act will miraculously, be at once, in the human psyche of Christ … without yielding an evil configuration in either Christ’s intellect or will.

Such psychic agony “would greatly eclipse all other human psychological su­ffering … Flooded with such horror, Christ might well lose entirely his ability to find the mind of God the Father.” This drives home the suffering of Christ, a suffering so comprehensively horrible that it surpasses even the physical abuse of crucifixion.

Just outside Carlsbad, CA, a chaotic scene unfolded as several cars stopped in the middle of the I-5 freeway to grab money that spilled out. At 9:15 a.m., the back doors of an armored truck popped open and bags of $1 and $20 notes burst open across the Interstate. One patrol officer described the scene as “free-floating bills all over the freeway."

Some motorists thought it was "Free money" and were grabbing hand fulls of cash and celebrating their good fortune. Others posted stories on social media platforms, sharing with their followers their good luck.

While some returned their bounty, others drove away from the scene. The authorities warned that they would be watching the videos posted online and all the money had to be returned within 48 hours to avoid criminal charges. Imagine the disappointment of those who thought they had easy money.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is easy to have our hope and affections set on the wrong things. The free grace that God offers us in salvation does not disappoint us. Once we receive it, it cannot be taken from us.

David rejoices in the fact that God's steadfast love toward those who fear him can be illustrated by the height of the heavens above the earth (Ps. 103:11). David was not an astronomer. He had no grasp on the unimaginable magnitude of the height to which he refers. But we do today.

A good way to help us fathom the unfathomable is the light-year. A light-year is how far light travels in one calendar year. Light moves at 186,000 miles in one second. Multiply 186,000 times 60 seconds, and you have a light-minute. Mul­tiply that figure by 60 minutes, and you have a light-hour. Multiply that figure by 24, and you have a light-day, and that by 365, and you have a light-year. So, light can travel almost six trillion miles (the number six followed by 12 zeroes) in a 365-day period. That's the equivalent of about 12,000,000 round trips to the moon.

Let's assume we are speeding in a jet airplane at 500 miles per hour on a trip to the moon. If we traveled non-stop, 24 hours a day, it would take us just about 3 weeks to arrive at our destination. If we wanted to visit our sun, 93 million miles from earth, it would take us a bit more than 21 years to get there. And if we wanted to reach Pluto, the dwarf planet farthest away in our solar system, our non-stop trip would last slightly longer than 900 years.

Now, try to get your mind around this: The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of a galaxy some 13 billion light-years from earth. That would put this galaxy 78 sextillion miles from earth (the number 78 followed by 21 zeroes).

If we are traveling at 500 miles per hour nonstop, literally 52 weeks in every year, with not a moment's pause, we would reach this galaxy in 20 quadrillion years (The number 20 followed by 15 zeroes)! And that would get us just to the farthest point that our best telescopes have yet been able to detect. This would be the mere fringe of what lies beyond. It is currently estimated that there are around two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Pause for a moment and let this sink in. Are you beginning to get a feel for what it means to know that God's love for you, is greater than the distance between the heavens and the earth?

Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was a death sentence. Here’s the life-saving story of how scientists discovered insulin. The American Diabetes Association reports:

In 1889, two German researchers, Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering, found that when the pancreas gland was removed from dogs, the animals developed symptoms of diabetes and died soon afterward. This led to the idea that the pancreas was the site where “pancreatic substances” (insulin) were produced. In 1910, Sir Edward Sharpey-Shafer suggested only one chemical was missing from the pancreas in people with diabetes. He decided to call this chemical insulin.

So what happened next? In 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best figured out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas. Skeptical colleagues said the stuff looked like “thick brown muck,” but little did they know this would lead to life and hope for millions of people with diabetes.

With this murky concoction, Banting and Best kept another dog with severe diabetes alive for 70 days. The dog died only when there was no more to extract. With this success, the researchers went a step further. A more refined and pure form of insulin was developed, this time from the pancreases of cattle.

In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying from diabetes in a Toronto hospital, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. Within 24 hours, Leonard’s dangerously high blood glucose levels dropped to near-normal levels.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The discovery of insulin, brought life to those near death, giving hope to those at death’s door. We are all sick with sin but the discovery of the gospel and Christ Jesus brings life, and hope.