What If?

What if?

Illus. From sermon central

A certain king needed a faithful servant and had to choose between two candidates for the office. He took both at fixed wages and told them to fill a basket with water from a nearby well, saying that he would come in the evening to inspect their work.

After dumping one or two buckets of water into the basket, one of the men said, "What is the good of doing this useless work? As soon as we pour the water in, it runs out the sides."

The other answered, "But we have our wages, haven’t we? The use is the master’s business, not ours. He is a wise King, and must have his own purpose that we do not understand."

"I’m not going to do such fool’s work," replied the complainer. Throwing down his bucket, he went away.

The other man continued until he had drained the well. Looking down into it, he saw something shining at the bottom - it was a diamond ring.

"Now I see the use of pouring water into the basket!" he exclaimed. "If the bucket had brought up the ring before the well was dry, it would have been filtered out in the basket. The King was looking for his diamond. Our work was not useless."

The King found his most faithful servant!

We're all a diamond in the rough aren't we? As the old song goes; " i'm just an old chunk of coal but I'm going to be a diamond someday."

Faith? What an awesome concept!

Faith defined; 1. belief and trust in and loyalty to God 2. firm belief in something for which there is no proof, complete trust. 3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction.

Hebrews 11:1-3 MSG

11 1-2 The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.

3 By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.

If the world, which is about the most difficult challenge imaginable to create, was called into existence by faith in God's spoken word. Then we who are Christians, should realize that nothing is out of the realm of God's possibilities, in any area of our lives. Amen??

However, Man likes to think that mankind has evolved a long way from the beginning. Almost to the point to where man doesn't have to be so dependent on God, or have faith in God.

Makes me think of a funny story I heard one time...

God is sitting in Heaven, when a scientist says to him, "Lord, we don't need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing, in other words, we can do what you did in the Beginning."

"Oh, is that so? Tell me," replies God.

"Well," says the scientist, "we can take dirt and form it into the

likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man."

"Well, that is interesting, show me."

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.

"Oh no, no, no," interrupts God.

"Get your own dirt."

Faith appears 458 times in the New International Version, 389 in the New King James Version, 378 in the New American Standard Bible and 521 in the Good News Bible.

With the word faith appearing so many times in scripture, we can clearly see that it is something that God wants us to get a hold of and to use in our daily walk, life and relationship that we have with him!

It's kind of funny, but we can remember life lessons our elders taught us when they thought we weren't listening. You know something that someone told us maybe one time. And in that one time what they told us, affected us and had a great and significant impact on us, our whole life through.

I personally, have had people come to me and tell me something that I had said, had affected them in a Greatway, in their life. And in telling me, I could tell they had never forgotten what was said, even though I could not remember the event ever happening.

And yet I found it pleasant and pleasing that something I had said, had meant so much to them!

That's kind of how it is with God. And by that I mean when we get a hold of something that his word tells us and we do it, it is pleasing to him. And it moves him to do things for us when we ask him to do them.