Getting It Done For God

We are a nation blessed with good roads and interstate highway systems that fill our needs in travel. However, when building these highways, homes have been demolished, buildings of all kind have gone down. Residents have been compelled to move. In the process some have lost their tempers, some lost sleep, and it called for many to change the pattern of their lives. It is destructive, disturbing and expensive. However, there was no other way to do it!! There is no way to have a non destructive, non disturbing and inexpensive way to put a highway through the land.

We today must be in the highway building business! Consider John the Baptist for a moment. John lived up to the advance notices of the prophets before him. John was a disturbing preacher. He called people snakes and laid the ax to the root of the tree. He blasted, dynamited, and demanded “fruits meet for repentance.” (Matt.3:8). John was no mild-mannered man standing before a congregation of mild-mannered people, exhorting everybody to be more mild-mannered. John the Baptist was not out preaching rose-water sermonettes on how to be more relaxed. He never thought about sending a manuscript of his sermon to some Jerusalem office to be looked over and edited by some little swivel-chair expert who couldn’t preach if his life depended on it.

Tishomingo county is in need of another highway program today. We line our community with good roads, but God does not have the main line in our fair city and/or county. However, be it remembered, that highway building is destructive before it is constructive. We cannot build a highway for God amidst the shanties and hovel of carnality. We cannot build it over crooked living and unconfessed sins. It will always call for a heart cleansing and house cleaning, a bonfire of junk and the smashing of the altars of Baal. However, that will take place only when our heart is centered on or in Christ our Lord!

Highway building is disturbing! How can we expect to clear a way for God when we sit in our church buildings Sunday mornings with a “PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB” written all over our faces? Things must be done. There must be a filling process. . . The empty places of our lives must be filled, not with cheap trash of this world, but with prayer, God’s word, and service. There must be a leveling process. Our pride must be flattened out! There must be a straightening process. Things need to be made right in all the facets of our lives, both social and spiritual.

We have a job to do in our beloved community. It will cost in time, prayer, and self sacrifice. Jesus paid it all, the next phrase is ours - “All To Him I Owe” !!

. . . . Fred House