Matters of Life and Death...And Life Again
Luke 24: 1-6 On
the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices
they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from
the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.
While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed
like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with
their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the
living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you,
while he was still with you in
Elizabeth Taylor died this week at the age of 79. Death is always the great equalizer. No matter how famous someone is. No matter how rich someone is. One day we all will return to the dust from which God created us and we will stand before our Creator and give an account for the life we lived. There once was a great chasm separating man and God. But God desired to commune with us again:
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2Corinthians 5: 18-21 (NIV)
Before we were reconciled to God through Jesus Christ we lived in rebellion to God. I did, you did, and Elizabeth Taylor did. The only way to accept this reconciliation is to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and have a relationship with Him. Too often in modern American Christianity we see the compromising of the Gospel. We see Christian leaders embrace heretical teachings to avoid being perceived as offending someone. As the old adage goes, you can't offend them to hell number two. Yet time and again we see leaders compromising the message:
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14: 6 (NIV)
In a world where absolutism is mocked, there is no equivocation in the words of Jesus. He is the way, period. No one comes to the Father except through Him. There are not "many paths to heaven." We all do not serve the same God. You must realize beloved, this is not a case of religious bigotry it is a matter of faith. If I believe that you must have a relationship with Jesus Christ or you will spend eternity in hell separated from God then do I care about you at all if I do not tell you? At a bare minimum, shouldn't I warn you of the impending judgment? If I offend you in this life but see you in the next, that has to be a trade off I can live with.
We are fooled into thinking that we have so much time on this earth. The enemy convinces us we can always put off things until tomorrow but sometimes tomorrow doesn't come.
"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' Luke 12: 20 (NIV)
