By Austin B. Tucker
“It was really quite simple. I bought a pencil for a penny, sharpened it, and sold it for two cents. With this I bought two pencils, sharpened them, and sold them for four cents. And so it went until I had amassed $10.24. It was then that your Great Aunt Selma died and left us $10 million.”4
The cartoonist probably never meant that to illustrate spiritual truth, but it might. Think of the testimony of one who does not really appreciate salvation by grace. “I joined the church and was baptized. I started working in the church and giving to the church. Then I discovered that Christ died for all my sins.”
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As a diamond is shown to its best advantage in the right mounting, so a familiar quote sparkles more in its historical setting. A preacher citing Martin Luther might be surprised how many in the congregation think he is quoting a mid-twentieth century civil rights leader rather than the seventeenth century reformer. I was in college and had heard the “Here-I-stand” statement numerous times before I learned the Diet of Worms was a general assembly of the empire and not what Luther had to eat in prison. Let the preacher give a thumbnail sketch of Luther’s life with focus on that crucial scene.
What if you need help with the biographical data and don’t have a good reference book like Moyer and Cairns, Wycliffe Biographical Dictionary of the Church? You can do an online search with the help of Google or Yahoo and probably find more than you ever wanted to know. Just be sure to use a reliable source.
Sometimes a scene in a Christless book, movie or television show will be useful for presenting Christ as the hope of the hopeless. Get the notebook habit. I keep a few index cards handy while relaxing with TV or leisure reading.
There is a telling scene in the 1986 movie The Trumpet of Gideon still seen occasionally on TV. It speaks volumes to the impasse of hostility that continues between Arabs and Jews and to the larger problem of terrorism and war in general. Steven Bauer plays a young Israeli secret service agent named Avner. He and his select team are on a mission to avenge the Munich Massacre. They have traveled the world killing Arab terrorists. This, of course, stirs Arab retaliation. One after another of Avner’s team members are killed. They are blown up or shot or stabbed until he alone is left. Returning home to Israel, Avner expresses his misgivings to his commander, “We can not go on this way — ‘an eye for an eye’ — pretty soon the whole world will be blind!
The commander retorts: “What is the answer then?” To which Avner replies: “I don’t have the answer!” We who preach the crucified Christ claim that we do have the answer