Easter sermon focuses on faith and hope in times of tribulation
God prefers losers.
That statement sounds positively un-American. As General George Patton famously remarked, Americans love a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Then we have this from Coach Vince Lombardi: Show me a good loser, and Ill show you a loser. We all want to be on the winning team, dont we? Thats why millions of people filled out brackets during March Madness, and its also why over 100,000 people gathered at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky last Saturday for the Kentucky Derby. And its why millions more watched the live telecast. That multitude included my wife and me. I learned about the back stories on a number of different horses and their owners. So you find yourself inevitably pulling for this horse or for that jockey or for that set of owners. I say that as someone who generally has no interest whatsoever in horse racing. But the truth is, if Im watching a sporting event where I dont already have a favorite team, Ill pick one of the teams to root for. I just do that automatically. I suppose most people are like that. We like competition, and we like to be on the winning side.
But the preeminent example is football. At least down South its always football. Here in Mississippi we have a heated rivalry between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. A few miles east you have Alabama and Auburn. Further south you have Florida and Florida State. Up north you have Ohio State and Michigan. In South Bend you have Notre Dame versus everyone else.
A year ago I attended the Ohio State-Michigan game in Columbus, Ohio. I was one of over 100,000 fans who gathered in the stands to watch one of the most storied rivalries in college football. A few days after the game a friend sent me a copy of The Winners Manual by Jim Tressel, head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Besides being a fine coach (his teams at Youngstown State and Ohio State have won five national championships), he is also a man of character and a strong Christian. In his chapter on Handling Adversity and Success, Tressel includes this provocative quote from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft:
Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they cant lose.
Then he adds his own commentary:
I love that quote because it puts so many things in perspective. When smart people think they cant lose, theres an upset brewing. Thats when David beats Goliath and the underdog triumphs (p. 156).
Thats the problem with winners. Once you think you cant lose, you feel invincible. At that point, youre about to become a loser. You just dont know it yet. You can win too much, too soon, too easily. Before long you prove the old adage that its just a short step from victory to defeat. For all the problems that losing brings, at least it cures the illusion of invincibility.
When I say God prefers losers, I mean he prefers people who know their weakness, see their flaws, admit their mistakes, and cry out to him for help. God specializes in taking losers and displaying his power through them. During a radio interview I was asked why so many of the heroes of the Bible had serious flaws. My answer was simple. Thats all God has to work with. All the perfect people are in heaven. The only ones on earth are the folks with serious weaknesses. The talent pool has always been pretty thin when it comes to moral perfection. So God works with sinners because thats all he has to work with. In heaven we will all be perfected by Gods grace. But until then, he uses some pretty ornery people who fall short in many ways, and he does some amazing things through them.
Consider the roll call of Gods imperfect heroes:
Noah got drunk. Abraham lied about his wife. Sarah laughed at God. Jacob was a deceiver. Moses murdered an Egyptian. Rahab was a harlot. Gideon was fearful. Jephthah made a foolish vow. Samson had serious problems with lust and anger. Eli failed as a father. David was an adulterer and a murderer. Solomon married foreign wives who turned his heart toward idolatry. Elijah struggled with depression. Jonah ran away from God. Peter denied Christ. Paul argued with Barnabas. Barnabas compromised the gospel. James and John wanted special seats in the kingdom. All the apostles argued about who was the greatest.
If God chose only well- rounded people with no character flaws, some of the credit would inevitably go to the people and not to the Lord. By choosing flawed people with a bad past, a shaky present, and an uncertain future, God alone gets the glory when they accomplish amazing things by his power.
Please do, on this Easter Sunday. BTW on LP, I happened to stumble over this little egg:
#441. To: socalV8 (#437) (Edited)
Yukon and his boy toys have been posting sly references to my info since I've been here. They think I'm buckeroo.
No thinking required you are a man of many faces and many screen names, buckeroo.
Behind each face and screen name is the same artful, calculating, crooked, deceitful, double-dealing, duplicitous, errant, erring, evasive, fishy, foxy, fraudulent, guileful, indirect, insidious, insincere, oblique, obliquitous, put on, roundabout, scheming, shady, shifty, shrewd, sly, sneaking, sneaky, surreptitious, treacherous, tricky, underhanded, wily, mercenary, mingy, miserly, niggard, parsimonious, penurious, rapacious, scrimpy man from SoCal.
Post the countdown here since the thread at LF is locked.
Gatlin posted on 2011-04-24 9:42:48 ET
I want to thank you for your Easter services, Pastor. Oh and please enjoy your little "Easter EGG Hunt" and share all the little goodies with your fine friends, family and especially us, your Internet Pals. We can barely wait for your revelations in less than 12 hours! Yummy!!!!
Since its inception, the IC3 has received complaints crossing the spectrum of cyber crime matters, to include online fraud in its many forms including Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) matters, Computer Intrusions (hacking), Economic Espionage (Theft of Trade Secrets), Online Extortion, International Money Laundering, Identity Theft, and a growing list of Internet facilitated crimes.
To: harrowup
FYI, I have reported your scheme to the authorities this morning, at the link furnished above. I included all appropriate information, links, text and even printed off the pages to hard copy as I was instructed, in case the information suddenly disappears. I did not go as far as searching out your personal information, but I'm sure that's not necessary.
I can only hope that this gets infinitely more interesting than you hoped for.
#88. To: hondo68, harrowup, gatlin, yukon, stretchedmind, Wood_Chopper, socalV8, nolu chan, Fred Mertz, DBR, and hundreds of posters from around the Internet (#87)
Will anyone bow down and kiss yukon's gay ass to avoid the publication of their personal info?
Well, it looks like I am the bad guy, all along. So, on this Easter Sunday, I am going to finally confess. I am going to do a complete statement not so much because of the intimidation for over a month from "yukon" and his good friends both Gatlin and harrowup besides 22rifle and WhiteSands.
My statement is soon to appear in a complete confession. I shall take FULL responsibility for the whole issue. Just give me a few minutes to complete the text; right now, because of my tears streaming down my eyes I have created some typos that need repair so that the complete and precise language is fully understood from the beginning of time until just a few hours ago.
I am coming clean on the caper, hondo. I don't want anyone else getting in trouble. I respect A K A Stone, too.
Be right back after I dot an i and cross a few ts that I missed.
Looks like harrowup's Online Extortion/Blackmail attempt has been reported to the FBI.
It has. Odds are nothing will happen. But...who knows.
If he follows up on his threats then that evidence will also be copied and forwarded.
It's the right thing to do and it's not like some unknown assailant hacking a password, IF that really did happen. The perp has posted the evidence himself for all to see. Hopefully, the right person will see.
It all started when I learned about yukon's fantastic vocabulary, such as "LOL" or LOLAY" or "ROTFLMAO" I knew right then that this yukon fellow was someone to reckon with. The wit, the pure intellectual capability and more than that: the complete understanding in a few uppercase letters was all I could take.
So I plotted, I schemed and I used skills that could take him down because of his own mental prowess dominating the Internet and the BEST channel ever such as LP. Initially, I thought maybe I should grovel at his feet. But then I thought, maybe he would shake me off like all his sub-ordinates.
So, I learned the art of black-majeackic upon the Internet. And with all these new acquired tools, I choose to use my talents to steal his password on LP and then leave behind an obvious mess for him to this day. I wrote the script; I chose the actors and I all by myself because I am jealous of those one line sentences chose to do harm upon the entire political forums community.
Yes, only I the buckeroo owning multi-clients and parrots could have pulled it off. So, I stand before everyone today to ask for absolute forgiveness before I am turned in.
#95. To: hondo68, We The People, A K A Stone (#87)
Looks like harrowup's Online Extortion/Blackmail attempt has been reported to the FBI.
What a friggin waste of time for the FBI.
The FBI has more important things to do than to read and respond to some hysterical complaint about a perceived threat on a chit-chat forum.
Last year the FBI received 300,000 complaints, averaging just over 25,000 a month, involving Internet crimes, the majority of those included the non- delivery of payment or merchandise, scams impersonating the FBI and identity theft.
According to the recently released 2010 Internet Crime Report, nearly 170,000 (Stack A) of the complaints that met specific investigative criteria ... such as certain financial thresholds ... were referred to local, state or federal law enforcement agencies. The other 125,000 (Stack B) were shit-canned.
Of the two stacks, which stack do think the report submitted by WTP will wind up in for 2011 ... Stack A or Stack B?
I can tell you.
It was just a few years ago that someone submitted the same report form on the same link to the FBI ... and reported that I was threatening them. They too had a hysterical overreaction. Goldi remember that happening, Mel remembers that happening, the poster who submitted the report remembers that happening and I remember that happening. What we all also remember was that nothing was ever done about that report. No one ever received any inquiry or response from the FBI ... NOTHING!
That report went into Stack B, as will this report submitted by WTP.