Failure and success.  We spend a lot of our lives trying to get away from failure and get to success.  We have sayings about failure and success.  We say failure is not an option.  We associate success with winners and failure with losers.  We make little posters on the walls that talk about success and achievement and teamwork and we hang them up in our workplaces so everybody will work harder and cynical people like me make other versions of them to send around on the Internet with other sayings on them.  You get those in your email from time to time.  And they say stuff like “Failure is when your best is just not good enough.”  You’ve seen that one.  We spend a significant amount of effort dealing with failure and success and we fear failure and we want to be on the road to success.  And somewhere along the line failure became a bad word.  I mean we all want to be successful right.  We want to be successful parents.  So parents I have a question.  Are you successful if your child is 28 years old and still living at home and working for minimum wage at McDonald’s?  Are you a successful parent if your child doesn’t grow up and accept Jesus as their savior? 

Two Choices

Key text: Romans 6

Well this is the sixth message in a series on Romans.  This is based on chapter 6.  I want you to get out your Bibles.  Turn to Romans chapter 6.  Just put it on your lap.  You will need it today.  I will have some scripture on the overhead in back of me but actually the majority of it is going to be in your lap their with your own Bible.  So please open your Bibles to Romans chapter 6 and we are going to be starting at verse 1 in a moment.

Now today’s message is called Two Choices.  And two choices when you think about it Adam and Eve had how many choices about that tree in the middle of the garden?  Eat it.  Don’t eat.  Eat it.  Don’t eat.  Right.  When Noah got onto the ark, all those around who lived near the ark had a choice.  What are the choices?  Get on.  Don’t get on.  Get on.  Don’t get on.  At the second coming of our Lord there are two choices, and by then the choices have been made.  What are the choices?  Want to go.  Don’t want to go.  Want to go.  Don’t.  There have always been two choices.  It’s not three choices.  Not four.  Not two in a half.  Not one in a half.  Two.  So this is called Two Choices.

What if our Bibles were really important?  I mean really important.  A story is told of an old man who loved the books.  And he was talking to one of his friends and his friend had just thrown away an old Bible that he had found in the attic of his ancestral home.  And the friend said, “Yeah it was an old Bible.  It was printed by Gutten somebody or other.”  And the book lover said, “Not Guttenberg.  That was like one of the first books ever printed.  Why one of them just sold for $2,000,000.”  And his friend said, “Mine wouldn’t have brought a buck.  Some dude had written German all over it named Martin Luther.”  I doubt that story is true but it brings up a point.  What if our Bibles were valuable not because of who had printed them, or who owned them, or that it was a leather book, or it was fancy paper but it was valuable because of the words on the page?  What if any old ordinary Bible that we can go down to the Christian bookstore and buy right today had value?

EACH YEAR millions around the world observe the strangest of all festivals, Hallowe'en -- All Hallows Evening. Especially so in Great Britain, Scandinavia and the United States. Every autumn, young and old alike anticipate its revels. It's a night of frolicking fun and frivolous foolishness. All kinds of nonsense and superstitions are associated with this festival.