Next week I’ll be bringing a
visitor with me. I hope you get a chance
to meet him; his name is Muhammad.
Muhammad is from the Gaza Strip, and he’s a terrorist. He was involved in a couple of bombings of
Coptic Orthodox churches in Egypt, has helped fire rockets into Israel, and
even shot up a bus full of tourists with an AK-47. But you see, all that has changed now;
Muhammad has come to know Jesus Christ, and he’s a changed man.
Does he make you nervous
anyway? It’s no surprise; I would
undoubtedly be nervous too if Muhammad came to church (he’s not, by the way – I
don’t know anybody named Muhammad).
After all, people like that never come to church… do they?
When the apostle Paul first came to
church, can you imagine the uproar? The
concern? The outright fear? This was a man who was zealous in persecuting
the church, who had dragged people away to be killed and imprisoned! Yet there he was, in the church praising
Jesus as Lord.
Later he would write to the
Corinthians in 1Cor6 an entire list of sinful behaviors, but he would say in v.
10 “that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified,
you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of
our God.” He certainly knew what he was
talking about! God can cleanse people of
even the most horrific sins, and use them to further His Kingdom – so don’t be
surprised when He does. The question is,
would you accept the apostle Paul? Would
you accept Muhammad?
No comments:
Post a Comment