Promise

Kalina and Shane Pavlovsky planned a beautiful wedding reception at the Barn at Scappoose Creek, Oregon, but were met with disappointment when, out of the 40 guests who RSVP'd, only five showed up.

Kalina told a reporter, “It was a feeling I can’t even describe, having to hold my smile and walk through … the biggest punch that I’ve ever felt.” Of the 40 guests who’d originally responded in the affirmative, Kalina said she’d made direct contact with at least 25 who promised they would come.

The couple’s disappointing reception entrance was caught on video, so she posted it onto TikTok, where it was viewed over 12 million times with more than 20,000 comments. Kalina says she posted it during a lonely moment, but she was also motivated to show off the venue itself, which was tastefully decorated with white lights and draping sheer fabric. She said, “It was just so beautiful, I thought someone has to see it.”

Pavlovsky expressed her feelings about the moment in her TikTok video post. “It just makes me think, like, why? What did we do? Am I that bad of a person? What did my husband ever do to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t we matter enough for people to show up?”

Despite the disappointment, the couple made the best of the situation, but had to cancel planned events like dances and cutting the cake. Despite the hurt caused by the no-shows, Pavlovsky said she's also been touched by the outpouring of support from strangers who saw her story and felt empathy.

“My hope is that people understand how important it is to show up,” she concluded.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Faithfulness of God - Unlike some of our flakier friends, God does not ghost us when we need him most. On the contrary, God shows up when we need him most. 2) Promises – When we make a commitment we should keep it. If we have no intention of keeping the commitment, we should be honest to say so.

A tourist in Las Vegas hit the jackpot on a slot machine, but he was never informed due to a malfunction in the machine, according to gaming officials. Now after an exhaustive search, the Nevada Gaming Control Board says they have identified the winner of the nearly $230,000 prize.

A man, later identified by officials as Robert Taylor, played a slot machine at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. Due to a communications error, according to gaming officials, the slot machine malfunctioned and didn't notify Taylor or casino personnel that he was a winner. By the time the error was noticed, casino personnel were unable to identify the man, who was from out of state. The gaming board took on an exhaustive search to make sure the man would be awarded his prize.

To identify the winner, gaming officials combed through hours of surveillance videos from several casinos, interviewed witnesses, sifted through electronic purchase records, and even analyzed ride share data provided by the Nevada Transportation Authority and a rideshare company. The jackpot winner was determined to be Taylor, a tourist from Arizona.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We too are the inheritors of a great wealth, the Kingdom of God, but we go through life living unaware. How would it change the way we live today if we truly understand the vast riches of tomorrow?

Life on Earth requires a lot of “fine tuning.” Our planet is just the right distance from the Sun to allow freezing and melting, and the planetary axis tilted just so for seasons. There is a moon for tides to circulate and cleanse shores and oceans, an atmosphere to distribute heat (otherwise the sun-side would cook as the night-side froze), and a magnetic field that contributes to our protection from harmful solar radiation.

That all these needs were met (and many more) is all a big (coincidence) for evolutionists – we just lucked out and got just what we needed.

But we didn’t need rainbows. And yet, as astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez recently noted, we’re on the only planet in the Solar System to get them. What’s needed for a rainbow is:

Suspended water droplets in the atmosphere and the direct sunlight that results from the sun being between the horizon and 42 degrees altitude. This typically occurs just after a thunderstorm has passed and small droplets are still in the atmosphere, and the sky is clearing in front of the sun. Seems like a simple setup. This must be a common phenomenon in the cosmos, right?

But it isn’t so simple. Our moon doesn’t have the atmosphere. Mars doesn’t have the moisture. Venus has too thick an atmosphere and as we head further out, the other planets don’t have liquid water. So, the only planet to have rainbows is the only one with people on it to see them. To evolutionists that’s just one more (coincidence). To God’s people, just another example of his love and care. It’s as if someone has been trying to get our attention with a pretty shiny object writ large across the sky, saying, “Look here. ... This is important!” “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth” (Gen. 9:13).

The pandemic has done a lot of strange things to the global economy over the last 14 months, from creating a massive shortage of semiconductor chips to a ballooning supply of hand sanitizer.

The US housing market has gone haywire too, as urbanites took advantage of remote work to leave expensive cities and resettle in smaller towns across the US. But it's not all that simple. Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin, broke down some of his observations of just how unusual the current US housing market is in a Tuesday Twitter thread:

Inventory is down 37% year over year to a record low. The typical home sells in 17 days, a record low. Home prices are up a record amount, 24% year over year, to a record high. And still homes sell on average for 1.7% higher than the asking price, another record.

It has been hard to convey how bizarre the US housing market has become. For example, a Bethesda, Maryland homebuyer included in her written offer a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller. She lost.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God’s people have no such worry. We have a guaranteed home in heaven, personally prepared by Christ, reserved in heaven for us. And, we should mention, it is fully paid for.

Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin.

The problem is that years ago Mr. Thomas lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations—to no avail. Thomas said, “I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

Bitcoin has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time. But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent—currently worth around $140 billion—appear to be in lost or stranded wallets. Brad Yasar has put his hard drives, containing millions of dollars in Bitcoin, in vacuum-sealed bags out of sight. He said, “I don’t want to be reminded every day … of what I lost.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This sad story is in sharp contrast with the security of our inheritance that is guaranteed in heaven. “An inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4).

Clark Cothern, in a sermon titled “Joyfully Rescued,” talks about the inheritance promised by God to his children:

Mom kept saying, “After I’m gone, keep your eyes out for the gold.” My sister and I chalked this admonition up to a little memory loss. But, just in case, we kept our eyes open. As we sorted through Mom’s things shortly after she went to heaven. We looked under drawers, behind cabinets; anywhere we thought she might have hidden some gold, but we didn’t really expect to find any.

Then I went to Mom’s bank to get the life insurance policy from her safety deposit box. In a tiny privacy room, all by myself, I opened the long narrow metal box. Under the life insurance policy was a brown paper lunch bag. There was a rubber band wrapped around it which crumbled into tiny pieces because it was so old. I opened the crinkly paper sack. There were two, 3-inch long rolls of gold coins. I laughed out loud.

As you can imagine the contents of that lunch bag were extremely valuable. My sister and I used that money to help us prepare Mom’s house for market. That gold was still just as shiny as the day Mom had purchased it over 40 years earlier. And it was a lot more valuable than the day it had been purchased. It had been kept safe for my sister and me, as part of our inheritance. We hadn’t done anything to earn it and yet it now belonged to us.

Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:4 that our spiritual inheritance, worth far more than gold, will one day be ours. Our inheritance will never decay or fade. It is growing more valuable the older we get. Jesus Christ did all the work for it and then banked it in heaven where he is keeping it safe.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, singer-songwriter-guitarist J. Tillman (now known as "Father John Misty") was asked: "You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you?"

Misty responded, "I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone's eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, 'God's always been.' For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque."

Misty was then asked: Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? Misty replied, "I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There's something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem."

What comes to mind when you first hear the name Lebron James? Big ego, ball-hog, best NBA player? Lebron is hoping you will add a different title to that list: Hope Creator. Lebron and his foundation are partnering with the University of Akron to provide the 1,100 students that are a part of Lebron's program I Promise, with full ride scholarships to the University. Lebron recently said, "As a kid growing up in the inner city and as an African American kid, you don't really think past high school because it's not possible or your family can't support you. For us to be able to do something like this ... it means so much." Although, Lebron said that the cost doesn't matter, ESPN crunched the numbers. For Lebron and his foundation to send 1,100 students to Akron will cost 41.8 million dollars.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story has two possible preaching angles: (1) positively, it's an example of financial generosity leading to a rich legacy of helping others; (2) negatively, although we can credit Lebron with a good and generous deed and program (and hats off to the man), can any human being or institution really serve as a "Hope Creator"? Isn't there only one source for true and lasting hope?

Gordon MacDonald writes:

In the fall of 1956, I began my final year at the Stony Brook School, then a boys' college preparatory school in New York. Among the required courses that last year was Senior Bible, taught by the school's headmaster, Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein, a man who required us to memorize 300 verses of Scripture over the course of that year. If he met a student on the pathway from the class room to the dining hall, he might say, "Gordon, give me John 13:34 please." He expected us to recite the verse from memory without faltering.

One of the passages he tasked us to memorize was Psalm 46. For days we memorized, recited, memorized, recited until the Psalm 46 was part of us. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble period. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea…."

In the spring of 1957, Senior Bible ended. We put our index cards away, graduated from Stony Brook, and went off to college. Occasionally, I returned to Psalm 46. As a pastor I preached on it a few times.

Then 56 years passed and my doctor called me. "Gordon, I have some difficult news for you. There's a tumor in the back of your head in the lining of the brain. It is not malignant, but it will have to come out." I have spent my whole life helping other people face doctor-call moments like these. Now it was my turn and the very first thing that began to surge through my mind was: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble period. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed…."

When I was a teenager, a brilliant and godly man pumped my friends and me full of Scripture. But now his effort is paying off. Thanks to Dr. Gaebelein and Psalm 46, I may be concerned and cautious, but I am not inclined to be fearful.

In his book Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer shares three lessons we can all learn from the Exodus event of the Old Testament:

What the Exodus … taught: first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt. Second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land. And third, that "the way to the land is through the wilderness."

When I took the job as head football coach at the University of Colorado in 1982, I made a solemn promise: I told everybody that with me, God was first, family second, and football third.

But I didn't keep that promise for long. The thrill and the challenge of resurrecting a football program in disarray simply took too much time and attention. As my teams kept winning year after year, I kept losing focus of my priorities.

When we won the national championship in 1990, many people said I had reached the pinnacle of my profession. But for me, there was an emptiness about it. I had everything a man could want, and yet something was missing. I was so busy pursuing my career goals that I was missing out on the Spirit-filled life that God wanted me to have.

All because I had broken my promise to put God first and foremost in my life.

A young woman in England many years ago always wore a golden locket that she would not allow anyone to open or look into, and everyone thought there must be some romance connected with that locket and that in that locket must be the picture of the one she loved. The young woman died at an early age, and after her death the locket was opened, everyone wondering whose face he would find within. And in the locket was found simply a little slip of paper with these words written upon it, "Whom having not seen, I love." Her Lord Jesus was the only lover she knew and the only lover she longed for.