Sermon by Dr Peter Masters
The world’s worst tyrants turn out to be insecure hypochondriacs, because people are never what they seem. And nor are we the people we often think we are. Here is God’s diagnosis of our problems, and His unspeakably gracious remedy, securing our eternal happiness
‘And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, these things say the amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God… I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot, I would thou wert cold or hot, so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’
Well, we’re reading human character this evening in this passage. You may sometimes think there is a seemingly perfect person and if you have the opportunity to get to know that person, to get better acquainted, you’ll soon discover he isn’t perfect or she isn’t perfect by any means. We’re used to great people and biographies are written of them and often the biographies, well, they are debunking biographies, they’re tearing down the picture that we’ve had of the great person. And even the sympathetic biographies have to let us see into reality and see that those great people were not so great in many respects as we thought they were.
Now, there has not long since died a celebrated genius in the world of electronic communications and I don’t want to mention names but already snippets of information are coming out, a biography has been published, other people are joining in to publicise their views and their comments, people who knew the great man and one I noted, I don’t know whether it’s true, but somebody very close to him who worked with him for many years said of this particular man, regarded by many as a genius, oh, but if he was frustrated by anything, he had to work that out of his system by hurting someone, by being cruel to someone, doing them down, doing something treacherous or extremely damaging to them. And you read these things and you’re taken aback.