Why Is It So Hard For Us To See?

Sermon Brief

Date Written: September 1, 2012

Date Preached: September 2, 2012

Where Preached: OPBC (AM)

Sermon Details:

Series Title: Miscellaneous Sermon

Sermon Title: Why Is It So Hard For Us To See?

Sermon Text: Luke 12:54-59 [NASB]

Introduction:

Did you know that statistics reveal that most flat tires occur either on Monday morning OR Friday afternoons? Now we are not really sure about the ACTUAL number of real flat tires or if they are just unverified reports of flat tires?

All we know is that it is usually Monday morning when we really don’t want to go into work, and that after lunch on Friday afternoon is when we really don’t want to go back to work…

The fact of the matter is as humans we find ways of rationalizing our choices… We make choices based on what WE want and then we build up the rationalization to justify our choice… “I really don’t feel like getting up and going into work this morning, I’ll sleep in and tell my boss it was a flat tire… who’ll know?”

Now we all know what happened here last week… Hurricane Isaac brought his slow moving, high wind and rain droppin’ self here to our fair city and he wreaked havoc upon our state, our city, and our community.

There are many of us who decided to stay here at home and ride out the storm. Many of us made this decision because they had said Isaac was not predicted to be that large of a storm… at best a Cat 2 Hurricane…

Another factor was probably the fact that the closer the storm came to shore, the more it looked as if Isaac would ever achieve Hurricane status…it almost looked as if he was losing steam and would dwindle to just a depression…

But eventually he did make it to hurricane status… and we found out that Isaac was going to take his sweet time as he crossed our path… He dropped over 10 inches of rain in some places! He lingered so long that his 70-80 mph wind became too much for a lot of the infrastructure and a lot of damage was done!

However, God is still good and even through the damage; God is still at work, both in our lives and revealing himself to the world…

Let me ask you a question this morning? How did you know that Hurricane Isaac was coming? [show of hands] Many of us heard it on the news… many of us heard it on the radio… some of us may have even tracked it on our computers or our smartphones or tablets!

In our world today there are MANY MANY ways to learn of this type of an event! But what I want to emphasize here is that when you heard of the storm coming… what did you do?

Well we all reacted in many different ways! There were some who boarded up our homes and got out of town, evacuating to a safe distance from the storm.

Others chose to stay and began to stock up on water and ice. Many ran to the grocery store and bought a lot of easy non perishable foods for our homes. Many went and sat in line at the gas stations to fill our cars and our gas cans…

There was a decision to be made… do we stay or do we evacuate? If we leave, to where do we evacuate? What do we take with us? What do we leave behind? These were the decisions ALL of us had to make based on the news we had about the coming of hurricane Isaac.

Some of us left the local area and traveled to family in other parts of the state or in other states. Some of us chose to stay and ride out the storm. The point here is that we had to make many choices… BASED on the fact that a storm was coming!

Today as we read our passage of Scripture from Luke 12 we see Jesus uses people’s knowledge of signs from nature and how they predict the coming events… Jesus did this to teach an object lesson to those following Him and to those who doubted Him as well. Let’s look at this passage found in Luke 12:53-59 [NASB]

Read passage here…

54And He was also saying to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and so it turns out. 55And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way. 56You hypocrites! You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not analyze this present time? 57“And why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right? 58For while you are going with your opponent to appear before the magistrate, on your way there make an effort to settle with him, so that he may not drag you before the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. 59I say to you, you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last cent.”