“COUNTING"

The Scene:  Jesus has been crucified.  Jesus has resurrected from the dead.  Jesus will shortly return to heaven.  The apostles are out on the Sea of Galilee fishing all night without success.  Come morning they see a man on the shore.  He tells them to cast their net on the right side of the boat; a large catch is made.  The apostles return to the shore to find that Jesus awaits them with breakfast prepared.  At this point in the story we are told there are 153 fish in the net.  Now it might be that God revealed this number to the inspired writer.  For our purposes today we are going to assume that someone at the scene was counting the fish. 

The Story:  One of the apostles is busy counting fish; another one calls out, “Hey! Come on, Jesus is here! Let’s spend some time with Him.  Who knows when we’ll see Him again.”

“I’ll be right there as soon as I’m done counting…”

“But you don’t understand…Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

“Later.  I’m counting.”

You know we do a lot of counting today.  Take cars for instance.  We count miles until oil changes, number of doors, miles per gallon, number and size of tires, 0-60 in x amount of seconds… 

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

Think about the counting we do in regard to our homes.  We count number of rooms, market value, does it have 2 or 3 bedrooms, 1,2, or 2 and a half baths, how many bays does the garage have. 

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

Oh, the counting we do with our money.  We count interest (how much money our money can make).  We count tax deductions (how much money we don’t have to pay on the money that our money made)…

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

And sports.  We count not only the number of home runs but now we count the distance of the home run through formulas that figure if the ball landed in the 19^th row of section L at seat 24 then it was a 450 foot home run.  We count RBI, batting averages, slugging percentages, touchdowns, Red Zone stats…

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

We count phone minutes, stock values, gas prices, cholesterol, triglycerides…

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

We count the number of times we’ve been offended, the number of good things we did for them compared to the number of bad things they did for us. 

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here!”

We have all been in one or more of these situations. Or maybe you are counting something not mentioned here.

As foolish as the person counting the fish while the Christ is awaiting him…as silly as that picture seems to us…maybe now we know that we are just as foolish as we sit around counting knowing that

“Jesus Christ has been crucified, Jesus Christ has risen, Jesus Christ is here for us today!”

 -Randy Abraham

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