It's About Time [ Page 4]

It?s About Time...Continued from page 3


Some of you have assumed you will get things right with God, that you will make a profession of faith, that you will accept the call of Jesus in your life, that you will do the things He has told you to do, and you will do them when you’re ready ? when you feel like it ? some other day. “Seek the Lord while He may be found,” Isaiah cries out to his people. “Seek the Lord while He may be found.” There is a clear implication here that there will come a time, there will come a day when you will seek the Lord and you will not be able to find Him. It simply will be too late.

My Old Testament professor was Dr. Clyde Francisco. We loved Dr. Francisco, because he was always mad that God made him teach . He was. He would tell you, “If it is ever up to me I would pastor a church because I love to preach.” Now here was the code when you had for Dr. Francisco. If he had his glasses on that meant he would “lecture” and that was going to be on the exam. If he took his glasses off, he was preaching and that would not be on the exam.

You also found out real quickly in class that Dr. Francisco’s favorite prophet was Jeremiah. When you took him for Old Testament you were taking Jeremiah and a few of his friends, but you ended up in Jeremiah. One Tuesday afternoon he was lecturing, telling us about Jeremiah and the challenges this prophet of God faced. He came to chapter 8, verse 20: The harvest is past. Summer’s gone and still we are not saved.

Jeremiah is lamenting all of the markers the people had put on their calendars that were to be saved by this date, by that date. All of these dates had come and gone and still the people were not saved. The city would be overrun soon. The nation would be destroyed. Harvest is past. The summer is gone, and still you are not saved.

Then, to our utter amazement, Dr. Francisco put his glasses down on the lectern and he began to preach to those of us who were in that classroom. We were each going to do something in the church. We were going to do something in the denomination. That’s where our lives were going. We had told everybody. We had made it public.

Dr. Francisco started telling the story, “Most of you grew up in families who never gave you the choice about whether or not you would go to church. As long as you can remember you were taken to church. People would say you needed to make a decision and get baptized, and you may have, because everybody else around was.

“You didn’t know what you were going to do with your life. You didn’t pay attention. So you got through high school with no clear direction and somebody of importance said to you, ‘You may be called to the ministry’ and without a second thought, and without any kind of hesitation, without any kind of prayer, you ended up in seminary, thinking that each moment along the way you’d finally stop and decide. You would make the decision for yourself. You’d find out who Jesus Christ was.