My former Hebrew professor’s teaching assistant has posted a good sermon online at Sermon Exchange on the topic of Glorification and the various passages of Scripture that expound upon it. I encourage everyone to read it and be encouraged! Below is an excerpt…
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by Ike Huges
House, MASH, St. Elsewhere, ER, Doogie Houser, General Hospital, Scrubs, Trapper John, MD, Dr. Kildare, Becker, Ben Casey, Chicago Hope, Gray’s Anatomy, Medical Investigations, Grosse Anatomy. What do all of these have common?
These are all shows about doctors. Some are dramas. Some are comedies. Some are soap operas, or stories as my grandmother used to call them. When you have shows about doctors, what else do you have?
Sick people.
Hollywood has made a very lucrative industry out of shows about sick people.
Then there are books. I went into our bookcase, well one of our book cases, to look for a medical dictionary so that I could regale you with big medical terms and I looked at some of the books that Michelle kept from her time in nursing school and I about fell over.
She has a stack of 4 or 5 books that equal close to an entire semester’s worth of reading for me. And those were a small token of what she had to buy and read during nursing school. I’m sure that Becky and Celia have similar books in their libraries.
Then there are friends of mine who are doctors. I checked out a website that told me it could take up to nine years to become a doctor.
9 years of your life in school and as an intern and as a resident. If you want to specialize in a certain field, it would take another 3 years of study.
Nurses and Doctors spend a great amount of time and effort to gain the information that they have to take care of …sick people.
There are health programs and diet programs and all sorts of programs where you, in the comfort of your own home, can help to prevent some of the illnesses that we deal with in life.
We as a nation invest thousands of dollars into research to prevent many of the illnesses. We take medicines; we exercise; we use anti-bacterial soap all in a effort to keep ourselves from getting sick.
America has made a huge, expensive industry out of health care.
But this fixation on health comes from a deeper drive. This drive to keep from getting sick is pushed on by our drive to stay alive. In many of the shows that I listed above, the people get better.
Usually someone only dies on a show when the actor is ready to move on. And then we know that they will show up on another show or in a movie at some point.
But it’s not the same with you and me. We know that many of the sicknesses that we face end in death. Cancer; Leukemia; Lou Gehrig’s disease; Muscular Dystrophy; Cerebral Palsy, just to name a few.
Funeral homes today are nationwide chains. I worked for a very short period of time with one of the chains that owned 6 funeral homes in Tampa and many more around the country. And I never set foot in a funeral home. I worked in a sales office selling arrangements. My job was to sell you your arrangements prior to your death.
Death is a huge industry in our lives.
No matter where we look, no matter what we do, no matter where we go, sickness and pain and suffering and death are all around us. Some of us today are sick; some of us today are in pain; some of us today are suffering.
Today we are going to look at what hope the Christian can take in the midst of all this pain and sickness suffering and death. We are going to look at a concept called Glorification and what it means for the Christian in light of the fact that we are surrounded by pain, suffering, sickness and death.
