I sat watching
TV. A reporter was narrating the story
of a man on Death Row for the heinous crime of murdering a mother and the
unborn baby inside her womb. How I
hated. I had thoughts of killing the man
myself. The man was getting what he
deserved...death. The reporter altered
the story a bit by injecting his professed conversion to Christianity. Right, he is using that to impress the judge
for commutation of the ultimate sentence by man's judicial system. Kill him...the liar. The family of the murdered mother was
unforgiving and skeptical to say the least.
As a Christian, I was scoring high marks
with our Lord. That is why he sent this
thought crashing like a lightning bolt into my brain; Acts 22:19-20 NIV.
"'Lord,' I replied, 'these people
know that I went from one synagogue to another to imprison and beat those who
believe in you. And when the blood of
your martyr Stephen was shed, I stood there giving my approval and guarding the
clothes of those who were killing him.' ..."
Hmmm...Paul, one of our beloved disciples,
was used and loved by our Lord after committing such heinous acts upon our
early Christian Saints. How our holy
book, the Bible, is filled with stories of those redeemed from the darkness to
be used to carry out the will of our Father.
The power of these stories like Paul's can be life-changing.
It comes down to this: do we believe or
not? If God the Lord and Creator of all
forgives and loves, who are we to judge?
Our Father judges by a person's entire life not just a few or even most of his acts. It is what a man ends as...not what he was.
I can condemn and hate the act, but not
the man. It is our command to love the
least, the worst. It is our command to
let God be the judge for only he truly knows what is in one's heart and what
one has gone through to become that which he is. Only our Father knows if that man's
conversion is real, is pure. Let us love
him and support his conversion.
It is tough to do these things. It takes practice. If this love and non-judgment thing is not
becoming easier or more reflexive, then we are not practicing. Step out and separate yourself from shallow
Sunday Christians. Whew, it is tough my brothers
and sisters in Christ. Do we believe or
not?
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