A Century-Old Sermon
I had lunch with a good friend yesterday who also serves as a pastor in a small church. When we finished, he gave me a Christmas gift. It’s the original sermon notes written by a preacher you’ve never heard of who first delivered the sermon in December 1929. The preacher titled the sermon, “Launching Out.” The actual content of the sermon is interesting. It’s about launching out after failure, from Luke 5:4-5 where Jesus asked Peter to cast out his nets again after he had been fishing all night without success.
Look at the picture of the second page that I’ve attached. He typed it on an old typewriter on now yellowed and fragile paper. On the second page, the words begin to trail off the bottom of the page because the paper was slipping from the typewriter spool (Kids, ask your parents!). It’s covered in handwritten cross-outs and edits. I can imagine him sitting in his office typing and editing. It struck me that since Paul handwrote his letters 2000 years ago in candlelit dungeons, humble preachers in small churches have been faithfully preaching the gospel year after year, encouraging the discouraged, and waiting with eager expectation for the Lord’s return. Though technology and culture has changed, preaching the word has not. This preacher did just what I do every week. He typed out his sermon and then furiously and ruthlessly edited it until the moment he delivered it. I can speak from personal experience that preachers don’t always love their sermons. We keep editing to the moment we step into the pulpit. Mercifully, Sunday morning comes so the editing must end and the sermon must be delivered, like it or not.
The date of the sermon reminded me that Christmas 1929 was fast approaching, and the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression happened only two months earlier! If we bemoan the fact that we are living in troubling times, imagine what life was like for people who had lost everything they owned only a couple months earlier. How much did they need the encouragement of their pastor to remind them of the love of the Lord Jesus Christ?
The pastor who gave me the sermon attached a note that said, “It (the sermon notes) reminds me that we have received the pastoral baton from the previous generation and are in the process of passing it to the next.” How true, not only for pastors but for all of us. Jesus commanded us to go and make disciples. Faithful Christians have engaged in that task for 2000 years now.
It’s impossible to know the impact that this sermon had, but I think the preacher liked it. On the back of the last page, there are handwritten notes marking when he preached it. He preached it at a church in Massachusetts in November 1942, only 11 months after Pearl Harbor. He preached it again in Belle Meade, Florida in August 1945, just a few months after the war in Europe ended and the month that the US dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war in Japan. We lost over 400,000 Americans in the war, and another 671,000 were wounded. How the country needed the gospel during the war, just as much as during the Great Depression.
The lesson is that no matter what is going on in the world, whether it’s the Great Depression, World War II, or Covid-19, the gospel is always applicable. It’s timeless, timely, and needed now as much or more now as it was needed then. As that preacher encouraged his flock, allow me to encourage you. No matter what is happening in your life today, Jesus loves you. He gave His life for you. Trust Him with your circumstances. Remember that He is sovereign and that He is good. He has a purpose and a plan. Take comfort in that today!
