Posts
Scene one. Midnight. The couple is resting, unaware of any danger. A young woman enters their room on tiptoes and checks to make sure the owners of the house are asleep. Then she shuts off the alarm system and turns on the light of the outside passage way to make it easier for two young men to enter. As they come in, the young woman looks for plastic gloves to protect their hands and panty hose to hide their faces. Minutes late, the men slip into the bedroom and beat the husband and wife to death. The girl watches calmly. After the couple are dead, she and one of the young men, who is her boyfriend, go to a motel to celebrate.
At 3:00 in the morning, the oldest daughter of the murdered couple arrives at home. She has been out, and before going home, she stops to pick up her little brother, who has been at an electronic game room. When they get home they confront the scene of horror and blood. The daughter looses control and curses the people who have done such horrendous deed. At the funeral in the cemetery she weeps hysterically and someone has to catch here as he starts to faint.
Some days later the police arrest the murderers. they confess and reveal that the one who thought up their evil plan helped them carry it out was the very daughter of the murdered couple. Yes, the girl who at the cemetery who wept so bitterly the day her parents were buried!.
What could happen in the mind of an 18-year-old girl that would lead her to commit such horrifying act? How can anyone explain it? Nevertheless, the Bible says that in the last days of people will be "disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good".
Scene two. While the whole world awakens from the nightmare and together turn its attention to the people affected by the devastating tsunami of 2004, the police discover and organized group who look for orphan children to be used in prostitution or to remove and sell their organs. Human hyenas taking advantage of the suffering of others to benefit themselves? But, again, it is the truth.
One day as I had lunch with a friend we discussed the incident. His eyes filled with tears, and almost instinctively, he said to me, "I'd kill those savages. They are animals and don't deserve to live".
An instant later he blushed and said, "Sorry, I forgot that I am a Christian; of course, I should never think like that".
Without realizing it, he was fulfilling another prophecy of the last days. Jesus said: "Because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold".
Scene three. A harmless city in the interior. The night is darker than usual. The rain pours in torrents. Joaquin and his wife are returning home from a wedding. Having been the godparents at it and still are wearing their food clothes, they happily remember their own wedding. The years have passed and they are more in love than ever. God has given them two children. That night the children stayed home with a babysitter. Then something unexpected interrupts the husband and wife's animated conversations. By the side of the road they see a couple in trouble. Apparently there vehicle was broken down. in spite of the rain Joaquin and his wife decide to help. A terrible mistake. A few minutes later he is dead, his face disfigured by a shotgun blast. The wife has been raped and at the point of death. It will take her years to recover, and the two little children, robbed of their father at an early age, never can understand how death could be the reward for an act of kindness. Would you have the courage to stop along the highway to help someone after hearing the story?
We live in dangerous times. The apostle Paul said that in the last days people would be "brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited". Everyone would be afraid of everyone else. No one would trust anyone. Gangs on every corner would fill cities of every size. The strong would take advantage of the weak. Large cities have turned into jungles in which the wild beast are the humans who live there. The love of many has indeed, grown cold. Perhaps you see on the street corner a crippled child begging, and a short distance away you spot those who exploit of the child, waiting for daily earnings. feeling mocked and wounded in your heart, you decide never again to let anyone play you for fool.
The doorbell rings and you answer the door. A tire woman with child in her arms asks for a glass of water. Your heart moved to help, you go to the kitchen to get the water. When you return, the woman has vanished---taking with her sound system from your living room.
Do you still feel like helping? Your Christian spirit motivates to continue despite the frustrations and the deception, but the majority of people today will think long and hard before they aid others. The love of many has grown cold. Jesus had said it would. Evil will increase more and more as people who care will be fewer and fewer.
Why do people do such things? Not even they understand why. They only know that they are seeking for something and, in their headlong race to find it they hurt and wound others, even if the "others" are the people they love most.
The day I wrote this page the police, tipped off by the informer, knocked down the door of an apartment located in the most expensive part of a great city and found a scene that would disturb even the hardest heart. A 12-year-old girl had been tied up in the servant's quarter. As she hung by her arms from iron stairway, her feet almost didn't touch the floor. A piece of gauze soaked in pepper covered her mouth, and eight of her fingers had been broken. most of her nails and been torn out. "I began to shake so much i could hardly untie her", said a policeman accustomed to seeing scenes of horror. What makes the incidents especially barbaric was that the one responsible was the child's adoptive mother.
Every day, in every country, one encounters violence and abuse---even one's own home.
Alan Weisman, in his new book The World Without Us imagines how our planet would be without people. Some might think that it would be better off, but I personally don't think so. I believe that the real problem is that the human race is lost the shadows of it's distance from God. There is no other explanation.
One early Thursday morning in June, Sirlei, a poor and struggling domestic employee who lived on a salary of $200 per month, was waiting for the bus that would take her to a medical appointment. Needing to arrive in time to get a place in line, she kept glancing impatiently at the clock. The bus was late. A few meters away the waves were breaking noisily against the beach. Sirlei kept thinking about her 3-year-old son at home. He was the reason for her every effort.
Suddenly a blow to her neck knocked her down. Next she felt a kick in her face. Instinctively tried to protect herself with her arms, but it is useless. A rain of blows and kicks on her from all sides. Her maternal instinct instantly makes her think of her child. She doesn't understand what was happening. No one could. Even today society struggles to understand why five middle-class university students felt pleasure in mutilating a defenseless woman.
The police caught them later. Their parents argued the they were just having fun. Sirlei escaped death only because a prostitute, who happened out of the time of the morning, began to scream for help.
What is it that people are looking for and can't find? Human being today seem permanently hopeless and desperate. they may deny it, argue discuss, cry out that it's not true, but they are dissatisfied. No matter what they get it's not enough. Lost in the tangled webs of their own desires, they slide into chaos that may destroy not only themselves but others.
Every year addicts consume $150 billion worth of illegal drugs. It is one of the most profitable businesses in the world after oil. if we were to add the $104 billion spent on tobacco and $525 billion on alcohol, we can understand and realize the complete inversion of values in our society.
Some believe we need to consider the legalization of drugs and other crimes associated wickedness as a sign of the last days, He was not pretending the people to be this way. He was simply describing the reality HE could foresee. The teenagers who attacked the young mother in the incident we mentioned earlier, voluntarily chose to behave the way they did. They decided to be violent and treat a fellow human being worse than an animal on their act. They weren't trying to rob her, they had money. One of them had just spent six months in Australia practicing surfing on the pretext of learning English.
A sociologist try to explain their behavior as a product of the present-day culture of impunity. but the truth is something else. the Prophet Jeremiah wrote: "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it"?
The problem of human beings is their twisted and evil heart. Violent by nature, it is evil deceitful, untrustworthy, perverse, and cruel. Education can teach people how to disguise their evil intentions but it can never transform their hearts. They will still be dishonest and selfish no matter how sophisticated they become. For example, those who present passionate speeches in favor of peace may at the same time actively promote war. Five of the countries that earn most from the sale of arms are in the U.N. Security Council.
Only Jesus can change or transform the heart. he doesn't work from the outside. His transformation begins deep inside, reaching the roots of human behavior. "And i will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh".
I have seen the transformation that Jesus can bring to the lives of people who accept Him as their personal Savior. Nothing is impossible for Jesus. There is no one who cannot be helped and turned around.
One day He came to Bethany and found that His friend Lazarus had been dead for four days. His flesh had already started to decompose. no one could ever imagine the remedy for a problem like that. Science can do nothing and money is useless. So is technology and everything else. But Jesus came, and when He did, life came too, Because He is life.
When Jesus said, "Lazarus, come forth!" the dead man sprang back to life. I have seen Jesus do the same miracle today. i see it every day in the countries where I conduct evangelistic crusades. People who were spiritually dead come back to life, destroyed homes are made new, and broken dreams are converted into reality. Jesus life, and wherever He comes in, there is fullness of life.
I met Andres in the one of the most violent cities of the world. He had spent years in prison paying in for his crimes. But Jesus found him there. One cold winter night Andres was dying. Shaking violently with cold, nearly frozen, he expected to die. It was in that condition that he heard me on the radio of a cellmate. That night the spirit of God touched his heart. Although he had heard about Jesus many times, he thought religion was for weaklings and had always considered himself to be tough. Heartless and cruel, he had chosen a life of crime when he was scarcely an adolescent, and he blamed society for not having given him any alternative.
That night he felt himself a few minutes from death, and the thought terrified him. Yet in the dark shadows of that night he began to understand that God loved him and wanted to give him a new heart. After crying out to Jesus for a second chance, he fell asleep.
The next morning the sun streamed in his window, breaking through the clouds in spite of the thick fog. He was in the sick ward of the prison.
"I was alive", he told me, unable to hide his emotions. "I hadn't died. God was giving me a second chance".
It has been 30 years since that cold night in the freezing prison cell. Andres is today a living testimony of the transforming power of Christ. Now free, he is doing an outstanding work for an NGO dedicated to reaching delinquent children and youth.
The marvelous Christ who touched the life of Andres as he was dying can also enter to your heart if you will let Him. Read what Jesus says to you: "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest".
Life without Christ is, indeed, a heavy burden. The weariness of spirit that some people call depression become the illness that destroys many lives without killing the bodies. In the last days we have given it a more sophisticated name, but it is still the weariness of being alive. But Jesus urges: "Come to me". He wants to give you rest and peace. Isn't that what you've been longing for?
The answer is yours alone.
0 comments:
Post a Comment