Foul or Home Run?

The Louisville Slugger Company, Louisville, Kentucky makes baseball bats. It’s the preferred bat for major leaguers. Major league players broke 1,697 bats in 3 months in 2012. Wow! It’s not surprising, given what the skinny piece of wood has to withstand. When a 90-plus-mile-an-hour pitch makes contact, it exerts about 8,000 pounds of force, and vibrations ripple across the bat. If the ball hits a weak spot, the wood breaks or splinters. For infielders, it’s time to duck and cringe.

 

Everyone knows that baseball is the great American pastime. In fact, any televised sport is the great American pastime. Let’s cut to the chase, anything televised, computerized, Facedbooked, Tweetered or Twittered is the great American pastime. Sitting in a bar drinking the day away, or melting some heroine in a spoon, or gambling at the casino all day have all officially taken a backseat to the electronic entertainment industry. What’s next, will we see kids (and adults) wired directly into the electrical outlet?

Reading is becoming a lost and dying art form for some people. That’s a shame because God doesn’t speak through many “burning bushes” these days. He also doesn’t make stone commandments to be read before the huddled masses anymore. And the last time anyone checked, there hasn’t been a dove landing on anyone’s shoulder while being baptized in the Jordan River lately. That leaves the old fashioned written Word to be read, digested and practiced the old fashioned way.

Broken bats may be a growing problem among baseball players but there is another growing problem among many churches these days. Broken lives are being traded in for healing and fixing. This is causing no little amount of stress on preachers and Bible teachers. What to do with all these lives that once found comfort in this dying world are being reconditioned and taught about God and His plan for regeneration. The bars, gambling casinos, and drug dealers are crying foul. They complain that the church is stealing their customers! It seems the church is making Home Runs because when you plant greener grass, all those unhappy and lost sheep come a ‘grazing.

In the Book of Romans chapter 11 the writer speaks of broken branches and new branches being grafted in. To save you some digging, the broken branches are the nation of Israel who rejected the Messiah. The grafted branches are the Gentiles who accepted the gospel being preached. The olive tree is the Abrahamic covenant that draws both Jews and Gentiles to Christ. Isaiah chapter 60 gives you an inside track into Jews and Gentiles sharing salvation. Great stuff!

In the final analysis, all of us are absolutely dependent on God. He is the source of all things, including ourselves. He is the power that sustains and rules the world that we live in. And God works out all things to bring glory to himself. The all-powerful God deserves all our praise.

Bottom line

Slugger’s dilemma? Naah! Go to bat for God and forget about all that Foul stuff.