Gongs and Cymbals

In these "do not touch me and stay six feet away"  days, it is nice to remember a different time.  Back in the preaching days, there was that moment of standing at the door after the worship service had ended to greet and shake hands with everyone who endured my sermon.  Actually, it was a habit of mine to go to the front door about fifteen minutes before the service time to greet folks as they entered.  Most folks said a positive word about the sermon, but once in a while someone would come through with a brutal word of truth about my preaching, or with an axe to grind. 

 

What happened at the church door happens over and over again in all our lives.  I could stand there and hear a hundred positive words and then one person comes along with a negative or critical word and all that can be remembered is that one word.  Why is it that we allow the hundred good words to disappear when one negative word is spoken?  Why is it that the critical word is all we remember on the way home?  Maybe we are made that way.  Maybe we are so hungry to be loved and appreciated by everyone that we forget the impossibility of such a goal.

 

God did not make us to please everyone else.  It seems to this one who seeks to walk the road of faith that He is more interested in what I do to please Him than what I do to please others.  It is not that He wants me to win the most unpopular guy award, or maybe He does.   He certainly seems to have done that with Jeremiah.  What preachers often forget is that if a sermon does not please God, then it is not worth the words uttered to preach it.  And, the same is true for all of us.  If we are not living to please God, then everything we are doing to please others sounds like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal to Him.