Daily Lesson for August 25, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Philippians 1 verse 6:

"He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it."


Yesterday was a great day in the life of our church as we celebrated our 56th anniversary as a congregation. One of our former senior pastors Hardy Clemons, who led our church for 21 years, was our guest proclaimer for the occasion. His text was from the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Philippians, a letter written by a pastor to his former church:

"I thank God for you every time I remember you. In all my prayers for you I always pray with joy, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will be faithful to carry it on to completion on the day of Christ Jesus."

After the service, we went outside for a service of groundbreaking for the memorial columbarium our church is building on the south side of our property. The text for that service was from Genesis 23, where Abraham selected a plot of ground to bury his wife Sarah.

I shared with those gathered there that the site Abraham chose to bury Sarah was the only piece of the promised land he ever owned. Promised by God long before that one day the land would be his and his children's children, Abraham had come near the end of his life without it having come to pass. Yet, when Sarah passed he was steadfast in securing that plot in order to bury her in the promised land.

It occurs to me that in making that purchase Abraham must have known that he would not live long enough to see the promise fully realized. And so, Abraham's purchase of the land was a kind of token, a sign of his trust in God's promise, and his trust in future generations' ability to live out the promise. In other words, what Abraham was saying to his children with the purchase of that piece of land was that even though he may not have seen the promise come true in his time, he still believed in it, and was going ahead and staking his claim on it.

In other words, Abraham was saying to his sons the same thing Paul was saying to the church at Philippi and Hardy was saying to us: "He who began a good work . . . will be faithful to carry it on to completion."

That's a good and hopeful word from one generation to the next.