Journey of the Heart

In the mid years of my ministry while I was serving the Vidalia Church, I preached a six month series on the letter Paul wrote to the Romans.  It provided me meaningful preaching text for the year, but it also forced me to do a more intense study of a section of Scripture.  It could be said that I did it for the church, but I also did it for me.  I kept those sermons for a long time.  Somewhere in the move into retirement, the sermons got lost.    

I wish I still had them.  It would be interesting to read something I did over twenty years ago to see if I would say it differently.  I have a feeling the years might cause me to say or express things differently.  From the very beginning of my preaching ministry, I would stick a copy of a preached sermon in a file.  I remember somewhere along the way looking back at those first few years of preaching and being amazed that I preached what was on the paper and that anyone stayed to listen.  One thing learned, and there have been many things learned along the way of being a disciple of Jesus, is that things change.  The Word surely stays the same, but every time we come to it, we come to it looking through a lens never before used.  Our changing view of the world and our experience does not change what the Word says, but it can cause us to read it differently.  

The longer we live and study the Word, the more we see the grace of God between the lines.  We see more kindness.  We tend to be more generous in our own giving of grace and less judgmental.  In some ways the the life lived in these retirement years has brought along with it an awareness of how much God's grace has blessed me and how I need to be more grace giving of others.  This journey with Christ is always a journey.  Sometimes it takes us to different geographical places and other times it is a journey of the heart.