Your Best Investment in the Stocks

I went to New Orleans Baptist Seminary and sat under Dr. Harold T. Bryson for Intro to Preaching in my first year there.  He is an excellent teacher and it was a blessing to have him as a professor.  I was very impressed with him at the time and I wanted him to know what he had by having me in his class.  One day I was walking down the hall of most of the faculty offices and I caught him in the hall and gave him one of my sermon outlines.  It was a sermon concerning the Acts 16 passage that we study today (www.lifejournal.cc) with a focus on Paul and Silas in prison.  Their feet was placed in stocks, so I came up with the very clever title, "Your Best Investments in the Stocks."  I thought it was great!  I gave him the sermon title, the passage, and the points of my outline and waited for him to stand back in awe. He took it in and said little.  I figured he was just stunned, stunned like when Paul saw the light and voice on the road to Damascus.  I could understand why, because it was good stuff. 
The next day I sat on the front row of a class of at least seventy and took in what he said.  He turned to me about midway through the class and ask me  to give him that sermon again.  Apparently he was now going to lean on me to get him the best in Christian proclamation.  I gave it to him and he proceeded to butcher my sermon in front of the whole class.  He said it was wrong contextually, organizationally, and practically.   Zorro and his gay blade could not have sliced me up any better.   I picked the pieces of my sermonic image up off the floor and crawled out of class when class was over.
I don't remember what he said in class, I have repressed it.  I do remember vaguely the stunned, slow motion like terrorizing of my ego though. 
Having said all that, I still believe that whether it is a real prison, a real dungeon, real stocks, or whether it is the prisons of our spiritual walk, the dungeons that dog us in our mind or the stocks that stretch us spiritually to uncomfortable points, I still believe your best investment in the stocks is like Paul and Silas.  Your best investment is 1) to give God praise in the midst of it.  2)Influence those around you with your faith in Christ.  3)Just watch how Christ can set you free.  I encourage you to do those very things with the worries of your day today.

By the way, I recently preached a sermon by the same title.  It was not the same sermon.  My preaching has changed a lot in 20 years but the idea hadn't changed much.

....Oh, and by the way again, God used Dr. Bryson's personal recommendation to one of his best friends to help me become the pastor of my first church...Dr. Bryson had a sense of humor....and I believe God does too.   Have a good one!