When Jesus Comes

December 3, 2012 (Monday)
When I first started preaching I was 17 years old, still in high school, and open to any suggestions that might be offered to me. When I heard a young evangelist say that I should mark my Bible in red I believed him. He explained that every time the Bible says “Jesus came,” “Then came Jesus,” or something similar, great things followed. He told us, “You should mark in red every instance of “Jesus came” and then underline the event that followed. I took him at his word and started marking and underlining those scripture verses in my Bible. Well, wouldn’t you know, every page turned red. I only did this on some of the first pages in Matthew when I began to realize that I was underlining in red just about everything that happened in the Gospels. When everything is emphasized, then nothing is.
I had more than one teacher in school who told the class to use exclamation points sparingly. Why? If every sentence is outstanding, emphatic and imperative, then the significance is lost amidst the exclamation points.
When I first started using email, I wrote some of them in capital letters only, believing that style to be easy to read. I soon learned that email protocol considers a word in all caps as “shouting.” I changed back to normal upper and lower case letters.
Emphasizing the words of Scripture, “Jesus came,” is still a good idea. You might not want to mark your Bible (or you may desire to do so, it’s up to you), but a good private Bible study using this phrase and similar ones might be helpful to you. What the young evangelist said is true: “When Jesus comes, good things happen and life becomes exciting.”
A wonderful old song, “Then Jesus Came,” shows the truth of this idea [Lyrics by Oswald Jeffrey Smith (1889-1986); Music by Homer Rodeheaver (1880-1955)]: