As I mentioned before in these posts, we are beach people. I saw the ocean for the first time when I was in basic training in 1969 at Fort Dix, New Jersey. My cousin drove up to Fort Dix with her husband from Maryland, picked me up on a Sunday afternoon, and took me to the shore for a nice lunch.
I don't know if my wife and I ever missed a vacation at the beach in 39 years. We even honeymooned at Cape Cod. So our son had plenty of beach time also. I started a tradition with him when he was real young, one that I continue with my wife today. We would buy a few of those little bottles half-filled with sand and tiny sea shells at one of the boardwalk shops, put a gospel message of some sort in, and then throw them in the surf. The last time I did this was about three weeks ago at Ocean City, New Jersey. Only nowadays I put the URL of this blog in the bottle along with the sand and sea shells. There are probably some of those bottles from twenty-five years still floating around.
Sermon In A Bottle.......March of 2014
I received a letter in the mail today from a former pastor. Yes, I said the mail. I've written about him in the past but in a forum like this, old posts can be lost forever. That's why I bring back posts so often or write often on the same men and themes and times and ages. He's about my age, this pastor friend.... 66 to my 64, but he's much older than that, almost 400 years older. He was our pastor for about ten years. Our son grew up in the second pew in front of his preaching.
He wore a preacher's robe in the pulpit and spoke softly but passionately with just a slight trace of a stutter on occasion. In conversation he always paused before offering an opinion or answering a question. I just sat and looked at the letter for a while with a smile on my face before reading it. It was cursive writing, barely readable, on what looked to be note paper from a small notebook. There was a second paper in the envelope, actually six pages, they were typed...on a typewriter, on what must have been a very old one at that. It was a sermon preached a few months ago. The type was very light and every so often a letter was missing. I doubt if this man has ever punched a key on a computer.
I was in full memory mode, sitting in that pew and looking up to the pulpit as he turned the same folded pages. I could see from the pew that sermons were written on the back of some paper he must have had lying around the house. Such a simple man is he.....simple yet highly learned and profound. It was the same today. The back of the paper was a receipt from a Christian book dealer! Some things never change....and I'm so very glad for that.
I said that he was much older than 66....almost 400 years older. Well, maybe that was a little bit of exaggeration....let's say 150 years older.......and from London........Charles Spurgeon's London and J. C. Ryle's London. I'll title this post "Sermon in a bottle" for it's as if his sermons could have been printed and tossed into the raging sea of this world many years ago. He preaches Christ....not the name....the Person. He's a fish out of water today. Let me take you back about a dozen years when we were part of his congregation. The church building probably goes back to the 1800s with white stone latticed together by orange stone of a Victorian church architecture but more importantly is its history. Renown Presbyterian scholar and pastor John Gerstner once filled it's pulpit. Add to this my former pastor and it should be a legitimate historic landmark to those who know Christ, who bow before His majesty, humble themselves before His holiness and exhaust themselves in praise to His goodness, mercy and love to us.
I would enter the sanctuary on the Lord's Day morning in great expectation and hardly ever be disappointed. He presented Jesus Christ to us in all His majesty. We knew we were sinners and were glad to be reminded of it but joyful in being reminded also that we were redeemed. Very seldom could I even rise immediately after the sermon for I needed time to catch my breath.
He moved to the Midwest and eventually we moved to a church closer to home for it was about a forty minute drive. It's faithful men like this and books telling of more faithful pulpit ages that fashioned many of my posts on today's preaching. I'll add but a little bit of the sermon I received today that was filled with Scriptural proclamations of Jesus Christ and the answering of the question from Hebrews 2:3, "How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?"
How great is our salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord. Is it great above anything, greater than everything, greatest of all things? How many more degrees of greatness can we add? The Bible employs this simple term which supersedes all degrees of greatness. "So great". The greatness of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is unsearchable, incomprehensible, unspeakable........how great is the atoning sacrifice which Christ accomplished for us, to redeem us from our sins......who are we in Christ, what has happened to us, what is the momentous change, of so great a salvation in Christ.....we have undergone a change, greater than any other possible change--greater than from poor to rich, than from sick to well, than from danger to rescue.....for our great change in Christ is that we have been changed from death to life......Christ has delivered us, out from the power of death and darkness, and the devil; into his kingdom of power of life, of light, and of the salvation of Christ.....
Note to this older post: In what is remarkable in this saddeningly weak age in America for the preaching of Jesus Christ in all his majesty, glory and power, I regularly hear a preacher like this again today. With one arm on the railing for support and the other using a cane, this man of my age slowly ascends the steps to the pulpit for he has a progressive and degenerative disease. It came upon him quickly. Yet he also has been gifted of God to proclaim the Lord of glory such that the heart swells, the mind is alive with wonder and the eyes behold!
