TEXT: Psalm 2
One of the great epics of classic Greek literature tells of a woman who was separated from her husband. He had gone off to a foreign war. The months and the years had passed by, but no word had come of the missing Ulysses, tossed up and down on the waves of the ocean and tempted by sirens. The multitude of suitors pressed about Penelope, as she sat surrounded by her maids "laying her hands to the spindle and holding the distaff," and urged their claims upon her; but she was faithful to her absent lord—in Stephen Phillips' words, “True to a vision, steadfast to a dream, Indissolubly married to remembrance.” At length Ulysses himself in the guise of a beggar appeared one day among the suitors, took his own great bow and bent it, and thus revealed himself as the lost husband; and the fidelity of Penelope was rewarded. Even so, the church, the bride of Christ shall be rewarded if we remain faithful to Jesus, rejecting the advances of the suitors of the world, sin, and the devil.