Can You Do Any Better?

A young boy complained to his father that most of the church hymns were boring to him — too far behind the times, boring tunes, meaningless words. His father put an end to the discussion when he said, “If you think you can write better hymns, then why don’t you?” The boy went to his room and wrote his first hymn. This was in 1690; the teenager’s name was Isaac Watts. “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross” and “Joy To The World” are among the almost 300 hymns written by him[i].

Isaac Watts

It is easy to list the things that are wrong but it is much better to do something about them. In 1^st Peter 4:9-10, we read,

“Be hospitable to one another without complaint. As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”

Instead of finding fault, lets us our gifts to serve. Most people wait for a glossy embossed invitation before they will volunteer to serve. Instead of that, understand that a need is an invitation to serve! If you can see a problem well enough to voice a complaint about it than you have enough reason to go about fixing that problem. The problems we have in the church do not stem from a lack of talent, but rather in a lack of use of the gifts we already have.

Why not try to make better by using your gifts than making it worse by complaining?

[i] Findlay church of Christ Sparta, TN via BULLETINDIGEST.com

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

The Other Peter Principle

Simon wasn’t very good at his job. For most folks, fishing is a hobby a good time on the lake even if you get skunked. Not so for the professional fisherman. A day without a catch means no product to sell, no money collected, and nothing to bring home to the wife and kids. Those days seemed to happen a lot to Simon. Maybe I’m wrong but all I can go by is the history we have on him and every time we have it recorded, he caught nothing, at least on his own. You would have to be hard headed to keep at it with all that failure. No wonder he got the nickname of rock. So perhaps, that’s why when he got the chance at a new career he jumped at it. Well, not so much a new career but a different form of the old one. He would still be fishing just going after a different kind of fish. This time he would have a boss, one that had shown him, even in his old job, a better way to do things. And that made all the difference. Simon didn’t al...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog