Jabez and OJ

I've really felt the need for something good to chew on the last couple of days. Brian downloaded a couple of sermons for my iPod so I decided to check one of them out. It was a Chuck Swindoll sermon that was preached at a Seattle Pacific University Chapel meeting in November of 1984. I didn't realize how significant the date of a sermon could be until I listened to this sermon! He started by talking about "someone you have probably never heard of before"...Jabez! I just about died. He did the whole prayer of Jabez sermon before it was popular! I never have been a fan of the prayer of Jabez stuff mainly because of all the hoopla surrounding it. It was made into something it never was which drove me crazy! But, in all fairness, the way Chuck told it made me really stop to think about what was said in Jabez's prayer. It was good. And I didn't even need to read The Prayer of Jabez book, use The Prayer of Jabez journal, or look things up in The Prayer of Jabez study bible to get something out of it. Now if I could only find a WWJD...what would Jabez do...bracelet to wear to remind me of what I learned!

After the Jabez bit Chuck ended with a story about a guy who overcame the odds and is now a huge success. This boy was born into a poor family in a bad neighborhood. As a child he had rickets and was the president of a gang. He was arrested 3 times as a juvenile, but despite such a bad start he ended up being a great man. He has everything that he could want in life now. A home in Brentwood, California, a fancy car, and the respect of so many people. He is still tough..."tough enough to be gentle...he is a gentle man." Orenthal James Simpson...OJ. What???? I just about died laughing at the closing of this sermon. Now like I said before it was 1984 which was 10 years before we got to see OJ's fancy car in the car chase that changed history in June of 1994. I had to play the last bit for Brian, because I knew he would think it was funny. He reminded me of something we recently heard a preacher say about using people as examples. He said that he only uses dead people as sermon examples, because live people can still make mistakes. A dead person can't mess up anymore! Maybe Chuck needs to adopt that strategy!