Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 3 verses 16 through 17:
16 John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
A couple of weeks ago I talked about my grandfather Fred in church. He was a real mess. Born in Clinton, Arkansas, he was the son of a moonshiner and went off to play basketball for the Longhorns before being dismissed from the team -- apparently he didn't know there was also a university attached to that basketball program. He met my grandmother with what is perhaps the most unique first line I've ever heard. "You're the prettiest pregnant lady I've ever met." The rest was mostly downhill from there. He drank whisky and played golf daily and at his funeral someone called him a cross between Archie Bunker and Howard Stern. Fred would have taken it as a fine compliment.
Maybe right up until the end.
But just before Fred passed I talked to him on the phone from where I was living in Vermont. He must have known the end was near. He kissed me as always, but then he got sort of serious. "Will you preach me a good sermon?" he asked.
"I'll sure try," I said.
Then he got real serious. "Do you think once saved always saved?"
No matter how hard the exterior is, there is something soft inside us all. It's the kernel inside the shell -- the tender heart hidden beneath all the bluff and bluster.
God has a way of getting at that heart, of touching it.
Believe me, God does have a way.
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