HERE WAS A MAN

HERE WAS A MAN

This sermon was taken from a book and adapted in different versions, usually with music, and sometimes broadcast during the Christmas season. Go here. Or here.

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Here was a man.
    A man who was born in a small village, the son of a peasant woman. He grew up in another small village.
    Until he reached the age of 30 he worked as a carpenter. Then for three years he was a traveling minister. But he never traveled more than two hundred miles from where he was born. And where he did go he usually walked.
    He never held political office. He never wrote a book. He never bought a home. He never had a family. He never went to college. And he never set foot inside a big city. But yes, here was a man.
    Though he never did the things that you'd usually associate with greatness, here was a man. He had no credentials but himself. He had nothing to do with this world except through the divine purpose that brought him to this world.
    And while he was still a young man the tide of popular opinion turned against him. Most of his friends ran away. One of them denied him. One of them betrayed him and turned him over to his enemies.
    Then he went through the mockery of a trial and he was nailed to a cross between two thieves. And even while he was dying his executioners gambled for the only piece of property that he had in the world, and that was his robe.
    When he was dead he was taken down from the cross and laid in a borrowed grave provided by compassionate friends.
    More than nineteen wide centuries have come and gone and today he is the centerpiece of the human race: our leader in the column to human destiny.
    And I think I am well within the mark when I say that all of the armies that ever marched, all of the navies that ever sailed the seas, all of the legislative bodies that ever sat, and all of the kings that ever reigned, all of them put together have not affected the life of man on this earth so powerfully as that one solitary life.
    Here was a man.

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