It has indeed been awhile. I have been dreading this post for reasons you will soon know. I truly appreciate the help all of you have been in digging through this topic of confession. It has been a great blessing to me and, Lord willing, to many others some day. I thought that day was to be May 6th, however...
On Monday April 9th, I went to our preacher and asked him if he knew what subject I could preach on in three weeks that would fit into his series on spiritual growth. He left it up to me so I told him I would like to speak on confession. He agreed so I began my preparations. This is when I enlisted your help and did my best to lay out the foundations of the sermon to be. I tried to think through everything well in advance because the week before my sermon was going to be jam packed with trips and events. With your help, I had my entire sermon ready to put on paper by April 22. But, when I arrived early that Sunday morning, I was stunned to see the title of that morning's sermon, "Confession".
That morning I realized that I had a long way to go in controlling my temper. There are now some knuckle holes in the wall of our sound room and some paint off of the door stuck to the back of my song book as reminders of my shortcomings in that area. I was amazed that anyone could be so thoughtless. But as I read his sermon, I realized that very little of what I was going to say was used in his sermon. So I decided to press on with what would now be the second installment of a two part sermon on Confession.
Friday, April 27th
I get an email from one of our elders asking me if preparations were going well for our Missions Sunday on May 6th. And this whole time I was thinking Dustin was inexcusably forgetful.
In the words of Homer Simpson, "DOH!!!"
I now had to scrap the Confession sermon and save it for a later date and come up with an entirely new Missions sermon. The problem is that the 28th-29th we were on a retreat to meet with the other groups going with us to Mexico. The 30th- May 2nd was a Youth Ministers retreat hosted by Lipscomb. May 4th-5th was our 30hour famine. Also on May 5th was a city wide service day hosted by 2 baptist churches, 1 methodist and our church. The 30 hour famine ended at 10pm Saturday night. Then I had some cleaning up to do so I didn't get home until about 11:15 the night before I was to preach. Fortunately, I believe God worked through me that morning. I was perhaps more bold in some of my statements than I would have been if I had been more prepared. All in all, things worked out for the best.
Since there is not much material here for discussion, lets see if any of you can figure out the connection between this post and the picture above.
