Judge Me by This–Run to the Love

I never apologize for or am ashamed of being a committed follower of Jesus Christ. Because of that, I face rejection quite often. If I am going to be rejected for being a Christian, I decided to make certain it is because I am guilty of being a committed one. All my friends who do not know what I stand for may as well know exactly what I believe.

When I served Satan, I was plenty proud of that position. One night I saw where I was and who I was. Further, I saw what I was going to become and where I was going to end. Then I was offered a way out and I took it. Should I be quiet about it just because someone does not believe that my experience was/is real? Here is a story that provides a good example.

A friend was walking along a small, clear, mountain stream. He came upon a dead, rotting deer lying in the water wedged between some rocks. As he continued down stream a short distance, he met a friend who was supposed to meet him to go hunting.
Just as his friend knelt down to get a drink of water from the stream he shouted, “Don’t do that!”
His friend replied, “Hey, I’ve been drinking from mountain streams all my life. So don’t tell me what to do.”

He didn’t say another word as his friend drank his fill, letting the water run down his beard and wetting his shirt.

As they discussed where to hunt, he suggested that they go back up stream for a bit and his friend agreed. When they came upon the deer, his friend could not contain his nausea, to put it mildly.

There are a lot of things in this temporal world that look okay and even feel great. But if you don’t know the source, why trust your life to it? If someone knows the source and tries to warn you, why rely on lack of knowledge or experience to reject the warning?

Christ Jesus saved me from a shortened life of blindly following my fleshly desires and Satan’s masterpiece, the World System. The World System is a polluted stream. Its poison(s) taste exquisitely great to the human spirit, and are almost always fatal if you imbibe them long enough. The more one drinks that diabolically addictive mixture the less he or she desires anything else. Additionally, such a one does not want to know a freed soul or in anyway have any contact with one. The freed souls is viewed as an idiot, a do-goody whose pilot light went out somewhere along the way and they swallowed a Bible.

In my opinion, they have good reason to think this way. There are plenty of people who want to escape the consequences of sin, but don’t want to surrender to God. Some of them claim to be Christians. Hypocritical professing Christians have done more than sinners to ruin the name of Christ. Satan rejoices in this fact. He can circumvent any attempts to give someone the truth by whispering in their spirit, “That’s just another stupid Bible-thumper who’s no better off than you are.” When I played the nightclubs, I met many of those hypocrites. The organ player in the church I was forced to attend as a youngster, and her deacon husband, regularly showed up. They usually arrived drunk and left drunker, separately, each with someone else. They looked so sad in church each Sunday that I thought they were very pious. A pastor from a neighboring state came to drink and party on Saturday night, then drove back home to preach the following Sunday morning. I wonder if his congregation thought he looked pious.

Okay, so we’ve acknowledged the hypocrites, but does that make the entire message false? If enough people decided to change history, erase Hitler’s name from the record books, eliminate any mention of the Holocausts, would that make it less true? Some idiots believe so, but rational people believe otherwise. What people got together and decided to corrupt our laws, change our Constitution, and lie about what this nation was founded on? Would that make our actual history any less true? There are many people, who do not claim to serve Christ, who are boldly rising up to protest this very process that is now occurring in our country. Some of them would reject me as a Christian based on the same grounds that they are protesting against.

To be honest, if a hundred false policemen had taken a shot at me, I’d be very suspicious if I saw a real one coming my way. However, instead of judging someone based on bad experiences with someone else, we ought to judge them based on who they are and how they have treated us. Sadly, that is not human nature. Human nature is to learn how to survive. Surviving sometimes means to reject the good with the bad because to let a bad one slip through would be too painful. For some people, learning to love after a bad relationship takes a lot of time. Getting abused children to trust adults is very difficult.

Having said all that, in the case of ones eternal soul one eventually has to take a risk. The risk is not as great as it seems. The reason is because no one really has to trust me beyond listening to (or reading) what I have to say. Then I am easily proven as a lying fraud or a bearer of truth. It does not matter how many conceited televangelists fly their Leer jets about to fleece the ignorant faithful. It does not matter how many of them cheated on their wives. It does not even matter that there are countless churches that every Sunday are teeming with hypocrites, dry hirelings in the pulpits, whose only purpose is to collect money and meet. It only matters what each person believes about Jesus Christ and what they do about that belief.

When we all stand before the judgment throne of God, He will not say, “Although you denied and rejected Me, you are excused because of all those bad influences around you.” He will not allow a defense based on the claim that you didn’t know the truth, you were cheated by a so-called Christian business person, or even that some preacher committed adultery with your wife. If so, He may as well say, “Oh, so sorry, Satan tricked you, so come on in.”

He won’t allow that excuse because of one reason…He sent us the pure truth. Anyone who does not want pure truth not only will not receive my words, they will not receive anyone or anything else that God sends to them. This means that they would not receive His instructions about how one should respond to the question of what happens to his or her eternal soul. Our bodies will eventually expire, on that we all must agree. The date of expiration was stamped somewhere inside. There is a right and wrong way as to how we will prepare for that expiration. The wrong way is to simply give in to the deadly mixture that will cause it to expire prematurely.

Then what? If there is a God, each one will have to stand before Him and be made accountable. The right response is to just believe in God and His gift of life through His Son Jesus Christ. It takes absolutely no effort, no thought process, and no change to be an unbeliever. All one has to do is what comes naturally. To believe is to do what comes supernaturally. Pure truth is a supernatural flow of information from God into this polluted world filled with lies. To believe His truth, you have to go against what the lying enemy of your soul wants you to believe and expire under. He wants you to have no fear of death or God, or of a spiritual world that your soul will enter. You will either enter that world with a promise of eternal life from God or His guarantee of an eternal death in everlasting torment. Eternal death is called the “second death”, which is separation of the soul from God. It does not mean an eternal sleep where you drift into nothingness with no cognizance of existence.

There, I’ve written it. It will always be among my notes. Now you can reject me with full knowledge. There is no guessing about what you are rejecting me for. The message is true even if you could find a thousand flaws in me. However, I promise you that God will never fail you, Jesus Christ will never disappoint you or abandon you, and if you trust in the truth you will not be sorry when your expiration date comes due. And I will rejoice if I see you on that great day when God puts a final end to Satan wreaking havoc on this planet and its inhabitants. No matter what you decide, God still loves you.  Christ Jesus loves you so much He died for you, and I love you. Don’t let time run out. Abandon the thinly disguised hate of Satan’s World System and run to the Love.  Run to Jesus!