He corrected even my prayer that I said at the beginning of our homiletics class! He was my homiletics professor during my college years and he was known as the toughest professor at the school, and somehow he became fixated on me. It seemed I could do nothing right in his class, and it also seemed he was intent on scrutinizing every move and word I made in the preaching class. He would say things like “Mr. Powell, words are your tools. Would you trust a mechanic that just tossed his tools around his shop as if they meant little to him? Words are your tools, Mr. Powell. If you aren’t going to use them well, you are an unfaithful steward of the gift God gives you!” Needless to say, I walked into his class for two years straight a bit nervous! That’s right, we were required to take two years of homiletics classes! Words were our tools after all, and using them well was a skill the school expected us to master!
The fact is that having the right tool and knowing how to use it well is vital to completing the tasks in our lives, and conversely, not having the right tool or not knowing how to use the right tool often produces inferior results. Sometimes, even disastrous results.
If this is true in the world of communication, and in the world of mechanics, and every other aspect of modern life, how much more is this true in our own spiritual lives? Can we really justify remaining ignorant of the right tools that produce a spiritually healthy person? Missing the resources given to us by a God Who has loved His world so much that He has literally lavished spiritual insight and direction all across the landscape of human development seems, in the light of our embarrassment of riches, the height of folly! Just look at all the resources God has left us and continues to reveal to us through the loving presence of His Holy Spirit in His Church: The lives of the saints, the Holy Scriptures, the liturgical traditions and prayers of our Faith, the challenges of living in parish life so full of opportunities to be shaped and embrace the wisdom of God, and even our daily relationships that continually offer us practical ways to live out the best of our Faith. We simply have no excuse for remaining immature in our spiritual development when all around us are the riches of wisdom laying at our feet ready to train us and shape our lives to fit into eternity! All these tools wait for is an act of our will to reach out and take hold of them and be transformed by them!
This is exactly what our Lord was trying to teach those around Him as they missed the greatest moment in human history: to actually have God in the Flesh standing among them, offering to teach them how to be what they were created to be! And they missed it! Talk about misusing the tools given to you!
Look at the pericope of today’s Gospel Lesson: At that time, as Jesus was now drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:37-44)
The Lord, standing in the midst of them, warns these religious leaders that soon the blindness of these leaders will result in the destruction of their whole way of life. This sad reality came true in A.D. 70 when the Roman General Titus marched his army into Jerusalem and literally left not one stone upon another. The Romans burned down the Temple, plundered the city of its riches and the Temple worship of the Jewish people came to an end, to the point that the Jewish religion became one of the synagogue without any of the Jewish worship and sacrifices of the Jewish Temple. All because the people of God failed to know “the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:42) The consequences of what we don’t know can sometimes be devastating!
Today, do you know “the things that make for peace” for your life? Are you willing, today, to reach out and take up the spiritual tools left for you by your loving Lord? These tools can be found in your prayer book, your prayer rope, your icon corner, in your church building, in the loving words of your pastor, in the daily challenges of your relationships; all waiting for you to courageously take them up and apply their wisdom to your life today. Why not stop right now and pray “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
P.S. This Sunday on Faith Encouraged LIVE we revisit the very popular subject of the Second Coming, the Millenium, and the End Times. But this time, instead of focusing on the errors of popular theologies today we will explore the powerful and comforting wisdom of the teachings of the Church since the beginning. Listen this Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern for the program “His Kingdom Will Have NO End” on Faith Encouraged LIVE. Please share this with a friend!
