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At the Feet of the Best
God has supernaturally
taken you back in time. The date is September 10th, 2001, the day before
the attack on New York's
famed Twin Towers. You and
two other speakers have been invited by the United Nations to address
one thousand employees at
the top of Tower One of the
World Trade Center. The subject you have been given is The Benefits of
My Religion. The other
speakers are a well-known
Hindu and a New Age teacher from Santa Barbara, California.
There is something
magnetic about Meyer Yogi Bharmu as he stands before the microphone. His
brown robes and dark flesh
contrast with the whites of
his sparkling eyes, giving him a fresh and healthy appearance. When he
smiles, his white teeth
add to his amazing
charisma.
The benefits of his
religion included the joy of yoga and what he maintained was good health
and a lasting peace that
came through daily
meditation. His serenity and joy-filled smile were a powerful testimony
to what he had to offer, something
reflected in the captivated
expressions on the faces of his hearers. The deafening applause at the
end of his speech confirmed
that he had made his point:
that Hinduism wrapped in yoga and meditation was an attractive package
for those caught in the
rat race of the new
millennium.
The second speaker, a
graduate from U.C. Berkeley, spoke with even more charismatic eloquence
than his predecessor. He
was a multimillionaire who
had reaped his financial crop in the mid-nineties and sowed his money
into a huge New Age estate
in sunny California.
The benefits of his
religion were a mixture of healthy living, communal exercise,
therapeutic music, financial stability,
and of course, a true and
lasting peace that came through a relationship with God. His image of
the creator was attractive.
No hell-fire preaching
here. To him, God was nothing but a loving and merciful creator, who
gave the herbs of the field for
the pleasure of mankind.
Each morning hundreds of life-loving New Ager's would meet and meditate
on Gods goodness, expressed
through His beautiful and
bountiful creation.
His PowerPoint
presentation was worth a thousand words. Each believer grinned with joy,
as he stood outside his low-cost
but opulent beachfront
house, complete with an Eden-like organic vegetable garden. Picture
after picture exuded beaming smiles
and obvious delight at each
believers one-with-God-and-nature lifestyle. The applause at his
conclusion was even more rousing
than after the first
speaker.
He takes his seat. Your
turn has finally come. You have a free reign to preach the entire
gospel. What an opportunity!
You gather your things, and
take the podium, but as you look over your notes, you become
uncomfortable. They begin with, My
religion is unique in that
it offers genuine peace and joy and true lasting happiness. You had
planned to give a personal
testimony that after trying
many things in life, Jesus alone was able to fill the God-shaped vacuum
in your heart. Then you
would give what was usually
the confident climax of your gospel presentation: God loves you and has
a wonderful plan for your
life.
You suddenly feel a
catch in your throat. You know what's going to happen tomorrow,
September 11, 2001. Can you really
look these people in the
eye and tell them God has a wonderful plan for your life? Within 24
hours almost every one of your
hearers will die in
unspeakably horrible ways. The plan God has for the rest of their lives
is far from what any sane person
could consider wonderful.
Remember, God has taken you back in time, but the Twin Towers are still
going to come down. You
cannot alter what is about
to happen... all you can do is preach the gospel.
You clear your throat,
straighten your notes, and take a sip of water. The crowd gazes back at
you in anticipation of
what you're about to share.
The pause has been uncomfortably long. You clear your throat again, and
your heart begins to pound
in your ears but you simply
can't speak as you consider the future these people know nothing about.
In an instant of time
many of these now pleasant faces will become human torches as jet fuel
saturates them, and their
bodies ignite. Others will
be horribly suffocated in a huge ball of fiery, poisonous gases as their
burning and heaving lungs
gasp for breath. Rather
than face the horror of burning to death, some will jump over one
hundred stories in inconceivable
terror to their deaths on
the unforgiving sidewalks of New York. Those who manage to stay alive on
the upper floors, will
eventually come down along
with the earthshaking weight of twisted metal and concrete their bodies
so horribly mangled as
to be unidentifiable. While
many more working in the lower stories will be crushed like helpless
spiders under the weight
of a resolute human shoe.
These unspeakable
images flood your mind, and in their wake an appalling realization
begins to dawn--if the message God
has a wonderful plan for
your life isn't applicable for the thousand people standing in front of
you, how can it possibly
be the biblical Gospel? The
shock of it strikes you like a train derailing.
You take another sip of
water and look down at your open Bible as you prayerfully whisper, What
are the benefits of knowing
Jesus Christ? If it isn't
the promise of a wonderful life, then what is it? Your Bible on the
podium has fallen open to the
book of Isaiah, and you
read:
"I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of
salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness..." (Isaiah 61:10)
Gods plan of salvation
was for Jesus to suffer and die on the cross, so that humanity could
receive the gift of righteousness.
That is the uniqueness of
Christianity. Only by being made righteous in Christ, can guilty sinners
escape the just wrath of
a holy Creator and be
brought into a right and loving relationship with Him.
You turn back to your notes that were slipped into the Book of Romans. Again your eyes fall upon the Scriptures as they
present the plan of salvation:
What shall we say
then? That the Gentiles, which followed not after righteousness, have
attained to righteousness,
even the righteousness
which is of faith. But Israel, which followed after the law of
righteousness, has not attained to the
law of righteousness For
they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish
their own righteousness,
have not submitted
themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the
law for righteousness to every one
that believes. Moses
describes the righteousness which is of the law, That the man which does
those things shall live by them.
But the righteousness which
is of faith speaks on this wise, Say not in your heart, Who shall
ascend into heaven? (that is,
to bring Christ down from
above:) For with the heart man believes unto righteousness; and with the
mouth confession is made
unto salvation (Romans
9:30, 31, 10:36, 10:10).
You remember how Jesus
warned His hearers that unless their righteousness exceeded that of the
religious leaders, they
wouldn't even enter the
Kingdom of God. In your mind the message of salvation is suddenly bathed
in a completely new light.
You realize now that it's
not about telling a dying and Hell-bound world that Christianity will
give them a better, more wonderful
life. An unexpected relief
washes over you as you realize you no longer have to try to out-joy&
the world.
You whisper, God
forgive me, and prepare (with His help), to preach the true Gospel,
pleading with your hearers to embrace
the message of salvation,
Flee to the Savior for the righteousness that God offers only in Jesus
Christ! Turn from sin and
surrender to Jesus Christ,
so that your sins may be blotted out and you may be saved from the wrath
to come.
-- By Ray Comfort
What's the point?
Christians must stop telling unbelievers to come to Jesus for the
promise of a happy lifestyle. Why?
Because Jesus didn't
promise a happy lifestyle -- He promised that His followers would
undergo temptation, trials and persecution.
We don't come to Jesus for a
happy lifestyle -- we come to be clothed in the righteousness of Christ
so that our sins will
be forgiven and we won't
end up in Hell for all eternity.
It is imperative that every Christian
learn how to share the Gospel
effectively, Biblically...
the way Jesus did.
To learn more, please
listen online--for FREE--to a message called "Hell's Best Kept Secret,"
(taught by Kirk
Cameron). We also recommend
that you get a copy of the book Way of The Master (by Ray Comfort)
which deals with this subject
in depth.
If you'd like to make a comment on what you read here,
please send it to email@livingwaters.com.
Prayerfully consider forwarding this "wake-up call"
to all the Christians in your circle of influence.
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