Love Letters From God

(I began the sermon by showing the following video featuring Jeff Foxworthy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxFqVQFvhvw - starting at timestamp1:40). The following is a transcript of the portion of his talk:

Jeff Foxworthy agreed to do a small group study with the homeless at an Atlanta Christian Homeless shelter. He said: “I couldn’t get them to talk because if they had ever been to church its – they don’t participate. You just sit there and listen. And so I learned early on – OK, I gotta come up with questions.

“So, the 2nd or 3rd week my question was “what the Bible?” And all I was trying to get out of them was that, unlike any other book, that it was alive. That different things talk to you at different times. This is an example: I opened my Bible to the book of Romans, and I had 7 different highlighter pens. OK, so at some point I’ve been on these two pages in 7 different something else spoke to me.

“And one of guy said ‘Well, it’s just a book of rules.’ And my buddy (chicken man) who goes down there with me says “Really? It’s just a book of rules. It’s just a book.” And there was a trashcan he slid in the middle of the floor and he took his bible and threw it in the trashcan. There’s just a hush in the room, and nobody was comfortable with it. This great big named Wayne gets up and goes over there and he pulls that Bible up out of the trashcan and says, ‘Don’t do that.’ And Chicken man says “Well, if its just a book, why would that bother you?”

And Wayne says “Let me tell you a story. My mom died several years ago, and when she died, I got $70,000 in life insurance from her.” And he says “I’d never had a wad of money like that before, and I lost my mind. I got 2 girlfriends, and we start partying night and day. But because you’re partying night and day you quit going to work. When you quit going to work you lose your job.” He got fired. He lost his job, quit paying his rent, he gets kicked out of his apartment. He said “So got all my possessions in 4 or 5 suitcases and a couple of backpacks. And the only thing that I owned from my mom was my Bible from when I was a kid. And on the inside page, my mother had written me a love letter when I was a kid.”

“But we’re drinking, we’re smoking, and I don’t have a place to live. So, we go over to the west side of town and we’re in these cheap hotels and the party is rolling day and night. We’re smoking crack and having a great time. But as we’re bouncing from hotel to hotel, I keep losing my stuff, and at one point I realize I’ve lost that backpack that had that Bible – the only thing I had from my mom. But the party keeps going, we’re smoking crack. Several months down the road of course the money runs out. The day after the money ran out, the girls left. So now, I don’t have a job, I don’t have an apartment, I’m a crack addict and I’m on the street. I’m on the street bumming money so that high – for a year and a half. One day, this guy comes along and he said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ I guess I did a good job because a week or so later the same guy shows back up. He says, ‘You did a good job last time, so I need you and another guy to help me do something.’ There was another homeless guy reading a newspaper, and he thought “hey, if he can read, he’s smart” so he got the two of us and he took us in his car over a hundred miles away from Atlanta. The guy had bought an old apartment building and he kinda wanted to gut it out and renovate and rent the apartments. He says, “so we cleaned out the ground floor together” and he says, “the other guy’s up there on the 2nd floor and sweeping up putting it in trash bags and dropping them out the window.” He says “I’m getting the trash bags and walking them out to the corner to the dumpster. And this goes on for a couple of hours till he quits dropping bags and I figured he’s done. So, I go up there and he’s done a great job of cleaning up the 2nd floor. It looks good, except there’s a pile of stuff in the corner.” He’s like “Dude, you missed the stuff over there. And he said ‘No, no. That’s stuff I found and cleaned it up that might be worth something.’