A common cliche is that you will catch far more flies with honey that you will with vinegar. Now, I’ve never put this statement to a literal test. Perhaps if I had a little more free time this past week I would have gotten things together to have a little experiment of this statement. We know it is likely true without testing it but we know that the point of this cliche isn’t actually whether honey would catch more flies than vinegar. Our grandmothers or some other wise individual that transmitted this information to us were wanting us to understand that if we are kind and loving people are more likely to be drawn to us than if we talk to people harshly and treat them poorly.

The conscience is an interesting thing. Sometimes it is a mere whisper in your mind and at other moments it is voice that rings through over all the other noise in your head. It is that voice that we try to silence but it can’t be avoided or ignored. It is something that we can’t quantify or maybe even explain but we know it exists because we have all felt the pangs that it creates within in us. One thing that is amazing about our conscience is that often it causes us to remember things that we have done in the past and we feel this unbelievable sense of guilt.

We often see people who make waves and from our perspective it seems as though their rise is quick and out of nowhere. As a baseball fan I usually think about the player who makes it to the major leagues and you’ve never heard their name before in your life and suddenly they are getting on base and knocking in runs at the most opportune time for your favorite team. Suddenly this person whose name you might not even have been able to pronounce three weeks ago is the talk of the team’s fandom. It seems as though its about luck or just pure God given talent from our perspective but the truth is this person’s rise to being famous had a lot to do with paying their dues and putting in the work.

I can honestly say that in my many years of doing youth ministry I only ever forgot a student one time. Now, you are probably thinking that doesn’t seem like much of a stat to brag about but let me explain the story. We had been painting our youth room and the kids had been working hard and we were approaching noon and so I decided to buy the students dinner. Now, don’t think too much of my generosity here, it was back when McDonald’s had McChicken’s and Double Cheeseburgers on the actual dollar menu. This was so long ago that it was before there were one dollar, two dollar, and three dollar tiers.

It wouldn’t take too much thinking for us to come up with stories in the Bible where the people in the stories are facing the worst of circumstances and then we find out that this is the means by which God has decided to accomplish his purposes. I’m sure you have some that have come to mind but we aren’t exactly the blurt out answers kind of church so I’ll save you the awkwardness of that and float a few that have likely come to mind for you.‌

There are some character traits that you just know when you see it. When someone acts with integrity you don’t sit there and wonder if it was a good thing or not. When someone acts with virtue we are able to identify it without question. The same applies to behavior that we would consider to be vile. When we see someone doing something that we consider to immoral or even distasteful we don’t have to run it through a filter to determine how we feel about it, do we? We know it when we see it.‌

Did you come here this morning expecting an Old Testament reading like that one? We have probably all come to passages in the Bible that are strange and, for lack of a better description, awkward and maybe even a little distasteful. Without too much thinking we can think of a few other stories just in the book of Genesis. We have Noah getting drunk and cursing his son for looking upon his nakedness. There is Abraham not trusting the promise of God and having a child with his wife’s handmaiden and then Sarah banishing them. Then you have the sons of Jacob convincing a whole group of men to be circumcised and they get vengeance for the rape of their sister by killing them while they are sick after the ritual is performed.‌

We have all seen instances where siblings aren’t necessarily so nice to each other. It is a normal thing. I enjoy leading people on when they don’t know about my life. I will let on that I have a sister and I’ll add that I don’t ever remember having a fight with her when I was a kid. People will look at me in disbelief. Often they will tell me that I’m lying to them. I insist that I’m absolutely telling truth. I leave them on the hook a little for fun and then I let them know that we are 15 and a half years apart and I honestly really don’t remember her living at home other than coming home from college. But, as I’ve mentioned in the past, it is something that I have observed as a child through my friends and quite honestly I was very happy that I didn’t have to go through that. As much as you want a sibling for great things like playing catch or other enjoyable activities I never once envied my friends having siblings close to their age when they were torturing them.

I am not the type of person who usually remembers his dreams. I know that I dream. If I wear my watch when I sleep it gives a report of how well I slept and it confirms that I had multiple extended periods of REM sleep during the night. While I don’t remember the dreams I wake up knowing that there were periods during my sleep where I remember seeing images but I very, very rarely remember any details of my dreams. Even when I have the ability to recall what I dreamt it is usually just vague recollections. Maybe you are like me and don’t remember many details when you wake from your slumber or perhaps you are like some other people that I know who can tell you significant details about their dreams. I might remember the general theme of what was occurring in my dream but some people can describe the entire scene of what was going on around you down to small and insignificant details.