THE BAD NEWS AND THE GOOD NEWS

And lead us not into temptation,but deliver us from the evil one.

Matthew 6:13

In his book Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner related an incident in which the well-known preacher Henry Ward Beecher traveled to Yale University to deliver the first of the Beecher Lectures, a series established in honor of his late father.

Beecher passed a troubling night because he had no idea what he would say. The next morning as he shaved, suddenly it came to him.Staring into his own eyes, he knew that his life had become a farce. He thought of the furor that was brewing in his own parish, the results of his own actions: gossip, tales of adultery, tearful confessions. And he was at the center of it all.

At that moment, Beecher’s razor slipped, and he cut his face. He wrote notes for the sermon in his own blood!

What a dramatic picture of coming face-to-face with our own sin. As Buechner put it, “Well the old pulpiteer might have cut himself” because his lecture came from “the deep trouble that he was in or the deep trouble that was in him.

”There is deep trouble in us all—trouble that we may manage to turn our eyes from . . . until that day when we are shaving or putting on lipstick and suddenly there it is—staring us in the face.

Read the Bible and you’ll meet the cast of characters on every page: This great march of humanity. This great parade of sinners.

From Adam to Paul, with the exception of Jesus himself, all of them weak and faulty and fallen and frail. All of them in need of a Savior.

And unfortunately, sin is an ongoing predicament. Our susceptibility to it never goes away.

That’s why Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Lead us not into temptation and keep us from the evil one.”

But there is an awesome postscript that comes on the heels of the bad news.

It is the good news of Calvary.

Buechner put it this way: The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner . . . that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob.

That is the tragedy.

But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for.

Oh, Lord, how good you are to us, your children.

We let you down and still you love us.

We fall and you lift us up.

Forgive our sins today, Father, and deliver us from the evil one.

Amen

#pray