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The Road-Trip Lament

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5 October, 2025Pastor John Strelan

Sermon - The Road-Trip Lament - Pastor John Strelan 20251005.pdf
Growing Faith @ Home [48 Proper 22 C]

If you’ve travelled along South Road recently you’d have seen that the T2D project is well underway. According to the promotional material, ‘drivers will be able to bypass 21 sets of traffic lights between the River Torrens and Darlington as they travel through two separate tunnels, connected by an open motorway’ saving up to 40 minutes in travel time! That’s the clincher isn’t it? We’ll be able to get to wherever we’re going quicker! Which, it seems, is what life is about these days. Quicker. Immediately. Instantly.

A 2015 Time Magazine article infamously reported that people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish*! (Are you still with me?)

So, perhaps we can relate to Habakkuk’s four-word cry: “How long, O Lord?” (even if it’s probably expecting too much to ask you to read the other 1384 words attributed to him).

It’s not just a lament for us in our instant-gratification world, but a challenge. Especially since God seems to run by his own schedule.

But, now that we’ll have an extra 40 minutes because of the T2D project you might spend 5 minutes of that time reading those other 1384 words.

Pastor John Strelan

* In case you were wondering, according to the article, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds.

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; 3:17-19a

1 1 The prophecy that Habakkuk the prophet received. 2 How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save? 3 Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. 4 Therefore the law is paralysed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.

2 1 I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint. 2 Then the Lord replied: ‘Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. 3 For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay. 4 ‘See, the enemy is puffed up; his desires are not upright – but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness.

3 17 Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the sheepfold and no cattle in the stalls, 18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour. 19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength.

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