Who would think you'd miss a fleet of big brown trucks? Man, if they say UPS on the side, you'll miss them if they're off the streets for long! That's what America found out when the UPS drivers went on strike. Within hours in some cases, days in almost every case, thousands of UPS customers were in a crisis. I couldn't believe what the strike revealed, that 80 percent of America's packages, at least before the strike, were carried by UPS! Apparently, all the other guys were fighting it out for the other 20 percent. On the first day back after the strike, I'll bet some of those drivers were greeted with a standing ovation by some of their customers, "You're back! We're saved!" What a mess it was, huh? Businesses were almost on the ropes in a few days. They were manufacturing their product, the folks on the other end needed their product. But it wasn't happening. A sender and a receiver aren't enough, if the person delivering it isn't doing their job!
Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Delivery Crisis."
There is an ongoing strike that is affecting many, many lives, in fact, costing many lives. Some of the people not getting their delivery may be folks you know, folks you love.
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from 2 Kings 6. God's people, the Jews, are under siege in their capital city of Samaria. Their food supplies have been cut off by an invading enemy and no one is coming out or going into the city. The siege got so long and the starvation in the city so desperate, that people were spending big money for even a morsel of food. There had even been incidents of cannibalism.
Enter the four lepers. Because of their disease, they are forced to live outside the city walls. So they are really starving. In one last act of desperation, they decide to walk over to the enemy camp, surrender, and throw themselves on the mercy of those soldiers. They figure they'll die either way. But they don't know that God is carrying out a miraculous deliverance that scatters the enemy army, and leaves their camp totally untended, food and all.
It's almost amusing to think of these four lepers first expecting an arrow at any moment. Then wandering around this empty camp, looking for someone to surrender to, and then realizing that they are the new owners of enough food to feed an army! That's when it stops being amusing. They're gorging themselves, totally forgetting about the people who are dying in their city. The package was there, loaded with food, the people who needed were there, desperate for food - but they went on dying. Why? The people who should have been delivering it were on strike.
2 Kings 6:9 - a word for those overstuffed lepers and for us overstuffed Christians, surrounded by people dying of spiritual starvation. The Bible says, "Then they said to each other, 'We're not doing right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves. If we wait, punishment will overtake us." Thank God, the delivery guys woke up, they realized they couldn't wait any longer to bring life to people who were dying without the food they had so much of.
I guess there's not much comment needed. Except to say that it could be that the place where you work, where you live, where you go to school has no one delivering Jesus to them right now. God has paid with the life of His only Son for the eternal life He wants to give them and the people you know are so in need of a Savior. But none of that matters if the person assigned by God to be delivering Jesus to them is on strike. That could be you.
This is a day of good news, we cannot keep it to ourselves, we're not doing right. You are the precious link between your Savior and someone He wants to rescue. Please, be sure the delivery gets through, whatever it takes.