Instructions for the King's Knight

By Terry A. Smith

This is an uplifting collection of sermons written by the Rev. Dr. Terry A. Smith, encompassing lessons about life, death, love, marriage, divorce, forgiveness, and entertainment, to name a few. After his death, his son, Michael A. Smith, found in his father's effects the results of a forty year career spent studying and telling people about the Word of God. If ever a son was left with an instruction book about how God wants us to live, containing all of the wisdom from the life and career of his father, a wise, gentle, brilliant, prolific warrior of the Light, this is it. May you find inspiration and instruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry A. Smith
• Release date: Oct 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452487151

Book preview

Instructions for the King’s Knight

From the writings of Terry A. Smith

Edited by Michael A. Smith

Cover Design by Michael A. Smith

Published by arrangement with Michael A. Smith at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Michael A. Smith

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction

God Exists - So What? / Exodus 33:12-23

Being A Gift / Mark 5:1-20

Choose Your Ruts Carefully / James 17-27

God Is No Bargain, Part 3 - The Return / Matthew 12:38-45, Jonah 3:1-10

Good Isn’t Good Enough / Matthew 5:17-26

Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide? / Galatians 3:1-10

Glimmers Of The Real Life / 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:5

Living In Temporary Housing / Corinthians 4:13-5:5

One Heart and Soul / Acts 4:32-37

The Lost Sacrament / John 13:1-17

Divorce / Mark 10:2 - 16

Let's Talk About Sports / I Corinthians 12

The Bad News And The Good News / Acts 2:29-41

When Cultures Conflict / Genesis 9; Revelation 7:9-17

To Make A Difference / James 1:1-18

To Make A Difference – Part 2 / James 1:2-14

I Say To You: Get Up! / Luke 7:11-17

Strength In Weakness / 2 Corinthians 12:1-10

The End Of The Matter / John 11:1-47

God’s Foolishness / 1 Cor. 1:18-31

Is Religion Political? / Genesis 1:25-31, Acts 17:16-31

All Is From God - Part 1 / Romans 8:28-39

All Is From God: Part 2 / Romans 8:28-39

It All Depends / Matthew. 3:12-22, John. 1:35-42

Thirty Years Down The Road / Luke 10:38-42

Is Anybody Listening? / 1 Samuel 3:1-20

Get Up - And Fear Nothing / Matthew 17:1-9

Sufferings and Glory / Romans 8:18-25

We Don't Know What We're Doing / Matthew 25:31-46

Still Under Construction / Ephesians 1:3-19

Water Is Thicker Than Blood / Acts 8:26-40

Prayer Is A Childish Thing / Luke 11:1-13

Who Wants To Be A Christian-aire? / Mark 9:38-50

About the Author

Editor’s Introduction

This book began thanks to my friend and teaching colleague Mia Henry. One day she posted that she needed some inspiration. I had some for her, but to explain it will take a bit of a detour.

I grew up listening to Dad preach every week of my life. We also shared a love of Sci-fi and fantasy adventure books, and he had talked about writing one for a while before it actually happened. I am proud and humbled to have been a creative consultant, as in 2002 he published "The Last Bridge. It is an awesome story and you should read it. He had begun the sequel, The Last Guardian," and had written a 21-chapter outline, and 6 full chapters and a few pieces. We had had quite a few animated conversations about how the plot would twist. Then, in August of 2004, while working on the log home in Durham, Maine that he had designed and been talking about for years as his retirement home, he fell just wrong and passed triumphantly to his reward.

It took me a while to get my head around Dad’s death enough to start writing the rest of the sequel. I had been creative consultant but had never actually considered writing a book. One of the characters he had introduced is a minister, and there is a spot where she performs a dedication service for a newly constructed church (so said the outline). (I won’t give too much of the story away because it is also an excellent one and you should read it, too.) I remembered a time in my childhood when Dad had led just such a service, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I would see what of that I could use. Mom, having an organizational disposition, in short order produced the bulletin from that dedication service, and the audiotape of same. So I spent a little time transcribing.

The sermon that Dad preached on that day was what I quoted to my friend Mia, in response to her request for inspiration, to wit:

"…For every good, noble, worthwhile person, or adventure, or project, or event in life, there is an idea or intention present in the mind of God. There is a pattern, so to speak, of what each thing in it’s purest perfection is capable of becoming. And it’s out of the desire to reach God’s perfect intentions that the highest and most joy-giving inspiration available to men and women come.

"And the degree to which that perfect intention of God, for anything or anyone, is realized, is the one standard of judgment that matters of every work done by men and women. Does that sound like a narrow, restrictive view of life to you? If it does, I say to you that you need to know your Creator better than you have, so far. Because to find and reproduce the picture of your life that is in the mind of God is to find your true self, and your true destiny. It’s to find out what you are here for. It’s to find out why you were created at all.

"This picture, this pattern, is not just to be found in the world around you, or in the events that go on. It’s not just to be found within you, either.

"It is in God. And you can find it. It is available. It’s there to be had for every one of us..."

Mia responded back that this was exactly what she needed to read.

I had also found the last 20 years of Dad’s sermons on his laptop. He suffered from organizational mind, too, and in so doing wrote out his sermons longhand, then into a computer, word-for-word, for his whole career. So I began reading them, and they read like an instruction book for life.

Now for the rest of the title: In the late seventies/early eighties, during my late grade school years, Dad bought a CB radio, a safety measure for our periodic car trips from Connecticut to Maine. Also around this time, he had taught me to play chess (which he lost interest in soon after I started beating him). On one of our trips nawth, he decided his CB handle would be the King’s Bishop. Appropriate, considering his vocation. I, of course, became the King’s Knight.

So, as I was reading through these decades of sermons, written with the inevitability of gravity and that read like instructions, the title of Instructions for the King’s Knight, became obvious.

My father was an educated man. When his faith became real to him, he studied and learned and read. Wishing to read the Scriptures in their original languages he learned Greek, and Hebrew, and Aramaic, and ultimately earned his Masters’ and Doctorate degrees. He made his life and career about understanding the Word of God, and telling people about it.

I cannot ask him questions today. I miss him every day. But when I weep, my tears are for me, not him. He has triumphed and come into the Kingdom of God, his true home. But if ever a son was left with an instruction book about how God wants us to live, containing all of the wisdom from the career of his father, a wise, gentle, brilliant, prolific warrior of the Light, it is I. And it is this that I offer to you here. May you find inspiration and instruction.

Michael A. Smith

Durham, Maine

October, 2010

God Exists - So What?

Some of you know that I spent a few days recently on study leave. I attempt to do this three times each year, in order to have some uninterrupted time for planning my preaching and the leading of worship. Some of my colleagues in the ministry don’t find such study retreats necessary; but because of the way I tackle planning I must get away from all the daily routine in order to concentrate effectively on this essential task. By the daily routine, I mean not only the ringing of telephones, but also such things as television newscasts and even the newspapers. I begin each day of such a study retreat with some physical activity - on the golf course, if I’m fortunate to have good weather - and then by noontime I’m ready for a long period of serious work.

I did have good weather this week. It’s a wonderful time of the year; everything is green and growing, the sweet scent of flowers is in the air, the sky is clear and blue. Robert Browning’s verse comes quickly to mind:

The year’s at the spring and day’s at the morn;

Morning’s at seven; the hillside’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn;

God’s in his heaven -- all’s right with the world.

But while I was out there in the beautiful world this week, the Old Testament passage from Exodus 33 also came to mind...this strange little narrative about the time that Moses asked to see God’s glory, and how God told Moses he would hide him in a cleft in the rock, and how God would put his hand over Moses until he had passed by, and then he would let Moses see his back... but not his face; "because, God said, no one shall see me and live."

And I stood out there, in our beautiful world that to me is so obviously God’s world, and I thought about a question that I think occurs to everybody at some time or other. This question comes into my mind, at least, not when the world is hard or ugly or painful, but when it’s at it’s most beautiful, as it was for me this past week. The question I thought about was this one: if God really exists, why in heaven’s name doesn’t he just show himself to us, and prove it once and for all, and end all the unbelief and uncertainty and doubt and despair in the world?

I have a suspicion that almost every one of us, at some time or other, has wanted God to do that if he’s really there. Furthermore, I suspect it’s true of people who profess to be unbelievers just as much as it is of those who profess to be believers.

So... I have a question for you: what do you think would happen if God were to do that? Have you ever wondered?

Some time ago, one of my favorite writers - Fred Buechner - wondered the same thing. Being a writer, he put his wonderings down in print. I found his speculations fascinating; and he came to a conclusion with which I completely agree. Buechner remembers - as I do - lying on the lawn in back of his house on starry summer nights, looking out to forever. Just suppose, he says, God should decide to rearrange the stars in the Milky Way. And all of a sudden one night, people would step outside after sunset all over the world, and they would look up, and instead of seeing the familiar millions of scattered points of light filling the sky, instead they’d see spelled out by the stars, all across the heavens from east to west, in letters light-years tall, just four simple words: I REALLY EXIST -- GOD.

And suppose the letters just stayed there, night after night. You can just imagine the reactions that would take place those first few nights. All over the world, some people would sink to their knees in worship...a natural reaction to such a supernatural spectacle. I daresay there would be other people who would run back inside their houses and hide in the basement, fearing that the day of judgment had come and in terror of God getting back at them for things they’d done in their lives. I think there would also be many, many tears of regret shed all over the world, as people would say: If only I’d known! What a different life I would have led!

And think of the people who would experience a sudden overwhelming sense of hope. A sick old man or woman, lying in bed unable to sleep, would look out the window into the sky to see the message...and would know at last there is a reality beyond the brief years of time we spend in this world. I venture to say all the preachers and the theologians would be as astonished as everyone else. Those men and women who’ve spent their professional lives talking and writing about God would discover, all of a sudden, that they’d been right... maybe a lot more right than they’d even been able to believe, themselves.

Churches all around the world would suddenly be filled to overflowing. Wars would stop. Crime would stop. A great hush - a worldwide peace - would descend on the entire planet from east to west and pole-to-pole. Doesn’t it give you a thrill inside, just thinking about what it would be like?

Fred Buechner said he’d like to write a book about it someday, in which he’d suggest many of the things like this that would happen if God did such a thing. He says he’d be tempted to have God convince every last hardened skeptic that it wasn’t just a billion-to-one freak of nature. Maybe he’d have God write it out in different languages every night, for example; or maybe accompany the message with bursts of music so heavenly beautiful that finally everyone would have to admit there could be no other explanation for it - God must really exist, after all.

But then, Buechner says, he’d have to be honest and include something else in his book. One night, he says, as his story was about to end, he’d have a child look up at the message in the sky - just an ordinary garden-variety kid, with freckles on his nose and a wad of gum in his cheek, maybe. And the kid would look at the dazzlingly-beautiful message for a little while; and then, with the crazy courage of childhood, the kid would turn to his father and say...or maybe he’d just look up into the sky and say to God Himself: So what if God exists? What difference does that make?

You see, we’d all like God to prove He exists - or we think we’d like it. But that kind of proof wouldn’t answer our real needs at all. We don’t really need to have messages in the stars. We need to have the messages right down here, in the muck and the marvel and the misery of the world we move around in every day. We need to have messages from God in the intensive care units of hospitals, and in the houses and apartments of our cities where people live lonely and isolated lives, and on the streets after dark where some people don’t dare to go because of the traffic in drugs and sex which goes on and makes junk out of people’s lives, and yes - even in the church services where we talk so much about God.

It is in everyday places like that where we really need the message and miracle from God. And I’ll tell you something, my friends; I think God really gives us his message and miracle in just those very places, speaking to us in intensely personal and real ways. I believe God does - really, actually does - speak to every last one of us, far more often than we realize... or choose to realize. I have come to believe that the single greatest task, the most important challenge for human beings, is to learn to pay attention to God and listen to Him.

St. Paul was writing to the Philippian Christians about how they should live the kind of lives that would be pleasing to God; and almost in passing he slipped in a thought that defined all his advice. Rejoice in the Lord always, he wrote, and again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. And then came the thought: The Lord is near. Some people got the idea from this that Paul believed the second coming of Jesus was about to take place; but that’s not what he meant at all. His language is plain; he means God is here and now; every day, every place.

I believe that God speaks to every one of us... to every human being on the planet, every day. He speaks in the midst of and through the usual, ordinary, humdrum events that fill up most of our days. All we have to do is learn to listen to him.

Who knows what God will say to you today...or in what unlikely manner he might choose to say it?

I’m not just being mystical here, my friends. There are some things that are generally true about the ways in which God speaks to people like you and me. First of all, every one of us has inside us a certain emptiness, or restlessness, or feeling of dissatisfaction... sometimes more, sometimes less. That’s the sound God’s voice makes in a world like ours that for the most part has no time or attention to spare for him. St. Augustine put it well, centuries ago, when he said: You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Secondly - and much more importantly - when God speaks to us, he usually speaks about what he wants us to do and the kind of people he wants us to become and how he wants us to treat one another. He does it all the time...even when we choose not to listen.

Here’s just one example; it’s happened to all of us. You’re in a group of people somewhere, just talking about normal stuff. Then someone in the group makes a cruel joke about somebody else. The crowd laughs, maybe; and maybe you laugh along with them. But down inside you there was a momentary little nudge, almost like an inner prompter, which urged you to speak the truth about cruelty instead of laughing. Maybe you listened and maybe you didn’t...but guess who that still, small voice was?

I’ll tell you something...whether you listened or whether you didn’t, he’ll speak to you again. The more you disregard him, the harder he’ll be to hear...but that’s your problem, not his. And the more you listen and do what he prompts you to do, the easier he’ll be to hear the next time. That’s the way God proves to us he exists...in here, not out there.

Being A Gift

Well, here we all are again. Sunday morning has rolled around once more, and our community of faith, our portion of the Church of Jesus Christ, has come together for public worship. Or has it? Has it really?

Are we actually all together here in this sanctuary? Oh, I know we're here physically - but we can be here, you know, without being together here at all. We can come in the door, smile and say: Hello, good morning, nice day, sit for an hour or so, even drink a cup of coffee or lemonade after the service, chat about the weather or some such thing, shake hands again and smile pleasantly on the way out - and never be really close at all. And when we do that, we have not been a community of faith, even though we've gone through the motions and even breathed the same air.

It's kind of a funny business - this community-of-faith stuff. We talk a lot about it; we know we need it; and sometimes in church we even try to make it happen by doing things like greeting each other right in the midst of the worship service. The leader says, for example - turn around and greet the people behind you. And we have to stand up to do that, of course, because pews weren't designed for such things; and if the leader tells us what to say to each other, such as: the peace of Christ be with you, we say that; and if he doesn't give us a script we smile kind of self-consciously and shake hands and mumble something or other. We're self-conscious at such times; and I think that’s true at least partly because we know this sort of thing is all rather a failure. Either you already know the person you're shaking hands with - in which case you'd like to have some time really to talk with him or with her, do some real sharing; or else you don't know the person - in which case you need more time to connect. It's not that it's bad to make greetings a part of the worship service, but its not real Christian community either.

And taking time isn't all there is to it, either. We say the reason our