When I was in high school, I had a friend whose dad was always watching WWII documentaries on his TV/VCR. He was an ex-U.S. military personnel and he would be sitting on his easy chair watching and falling asleep to these old black and white footages from WWII. And I thought to myself, “how can anyone watch that boring stuff?” Never mind that it was WWII that liberated my grandparents and parents from the Japanese control of Korea where I come from. I just couldn’t fathom what WWII had to do with my life and therefore found it boring. But it wasn’t that WWII wasn’t relevant to me. It was more that my life wasn’t relevant to WWII. Call it immaturity or stupidity. I wasn’t mature enough to realize the relevancy of WWII to my life. But, now I see it….

When we go to church and listen to a sermon, we “rate” the sermon by how relevant and helpful the sermon is to us. If the preacher happens to be speaking about things we struggle with and need help on, we will rate it high. “Wow, that sermon was very relevant to me!” we would exclaim. But what about the sermons that didn’t quite connect with us? The sermons that weren’t relevant to us… Have you ever asked this question: Is my life relevant to the sermon? Have you ever considered that maybe it’s not that sermon is irrelevant to you but you are irrelevant to the sermon?

You see, when we ask the question, “Is the sermon relevant to my life,” what we are assuming is that our life is at the center of the universe. Therefore, even the sermons we hear from our pastors are either good or bad depending on how they are relevant to us. But as Christians, we are to conform our lives to the word of God. That means the word of God should dictate how our life should go. What this means is that if a sermon is not immediately relevant to us, it might be that our life is not relevant to God.

When you read or hear the word of God, how much of it do you find relevant? Is it only every so often you find it relevant? It might be that you are so far removed from the heart of God, your life has become irrelevant to God. It’s not that God is irrelevant to you. YOU are irrelevant to God.

Reading Jeremiah 49 on, I hear nations getting judged by God. I DO remember reading this part of the Bible as a youngster and thinking, “What does this have to do with my life?” But I see the relevance now. When I hear on CNN nations being displaced (e.g. Syria, Yugoslavia, old Soviet blocs) and disasters happening, I see God at work just like it is written in the Old Testament.

God is at work. Do you see it?

PH