Passing On The Good News Transcript

I want to take a few moments to talk about this message and offer you some hope and insights on this Mother's Day. As I've talked to people who have raised children into adulthood, I hear two stories most often, though there often can be a third. One of the ones I hear is we raised our children up. They grew up, they became adults and they're going to church and they're faithful followers of Christ and they're teaching it to their kids and they're happy and ecstatic about this because they feel like they've done things well and I congratulate them. On the other hand, perhaps equally as often, or as in today's world, the opposite is true. I feel like I've done everything right. I shared the gospel, I took them to church, I taught them what it means to follow Christ, and they still don't do it. What did I do wrong? To them I also say you have done well. 

What we hear in today's passage is that our role is not to change someone else, because we can't do that. Only the Holy Spirit can bring about the change in life that we seek for our children, our grandchildren, our neighbors and friends. That is the work of the Holy Spirit, and we cannot claim that role for ourselves or we will always be disappointed. What, then, is our role? What is our role as parents, as mothers, as grandmothers, as aunts, as friends? It is to share the message. It is simply to share the message of Jesus Christ Through our words, through our lives, through our deeds, through it all. We share the message of Christ, not because we trust in our ability to share it, not because of our trust in our ability to convey it well so that they believe and follow, but because we have faith in the message itself, but because we have faith in the message itself. Paul says what matters is that we keep preaching and that you have faith in this message. 

I love Paul's story here. It gives me heart and it gives me hope, because it reminds each and every one of us that we are receivers of a story that had been passed over time. The people who heard it and saw it firsthand, the disciples and the 500 that saw him raised in one day those people are long gone, and what is left are those who have heard the story from someone who believed in it, who have trusted in it enough to shape their lives by it. Paul says I preached the message that I preached to you when we first met. It's the essential message that you have not only taken to heart, it's the central story that you now base your life on. 

And when you base your life on a story of God becoming flesh, walking among us, preaching the good news, preaching release to the captives and those who are bound in sin, and proclaiming forgiveness and God's love, all the way to the point that the Roman authorities saw him as a threat and wanted to put him to death, and succeeded at it. His love was so great, his message was so world-turning that the only thing that the evils in this world could do was try to silence it. In death and in God's love, the sun was risen. Death could not silence this good news, and if death can't silence it, then nothing else that we see in the world today can make this story go away. 

So if you're one of those people, your children do exactly what you would hope they would do in terms of believing and having faith. Good for you. If you're not, it's okay. It's not your fault. What we can do and what you can do, no matter which situation you find yourself in, is base your life based on the love of God, expressed through Christ, and share the message because you have hope and faith in it. If you do that, you truly live as a faithful son or daughter of the living God, Amen.