DAILY DEVOTIONAL – September 25, 2019
“It’s No Fairytale”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, as You stood on trial before Pontius Pilate, falsely accused, You told Pilate, “anyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Lord we live in a world that pridefully denies the truth, and we admit Lord, that before You so mercifully revealed Yourself to us, we too were lost in the lies of the Devil and in our own sin. Jesus, in Your mercy, we pray that You would use even us to proclaim the truth of God’s love and forgiveness that can only be found in You. Amen.
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17-21
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Daily Devotional – “It’s No Fairytale”
In August of 2018, the Daily News reported the tragic story about the death of an American couple overseas. A young American couple, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, 29, quit their jobs to take a year-long bike trip around the world. They’re trip took them from the southernmost tip of Africa in Capetown, to South Africa, to Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Montengro, Kosovo, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and finally Tajikistan.
Tragically, while rounding out their trip in Tajikistan, Jay and Lauren were murdered along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. On their route near the Afghanistan border they were brutally stabbed to death. After local investigations, a group of 5 members of the ISIS terrorist group claimed responsibility for the murders.
Jay and Lauren were warned about the dangers of traveling through that area, especially as non-Afghan residents, and especially as Americans. Unfortunately, Jay and Lauren ignored such warnings. They ignored them not because they were ignorant or naïve. They ignored the warnings because they believed a lie that many believe today, a lie that the Devil is a master at convincing people of. The lie that people are inherently good. The lie that evil doesn’t exist. In fact, in a blog that Jay wrote while on his biking trip around the world, Jay made it very clear that he believed evil was a make-believe concept. This is what Jay wrote on his blog while traveling through Morocco:
“You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are ax murderers and monsters and worse.
I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.”
Obviously, the revelation that Jay and Lauren thought they had received, wasn’t true. The only true revelation we can rely on for truth is God’s revelation in Christ Jesus and in His Word. Jesus says in Mark 7:21-23, “For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come–sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
We live in a culture and society today that is lost in a vicious cycle of self-justification. Those who hate religion claim that to believe in God or in Jesus is a crutch for those who are too weak to deal with the reality of the world, and that if we would only turn to science, human reason or some other false idol, then we would see that the world is not so bad and that all the broken parts can be fixed by politicians or policy or different laws.
There are consequences to living in denial of such a fundamental reality. It causes us to turn a deaf ear to important warnings we might otherwise heed; Jay and Lauren’s tragic death being a prime example.
But there are also spiritual consequences to living in denial of the existence of evil. When we refuse to acknowledge the sin that dwells within us, we turn a deaf ear to God’s warnings of impending judgment and to our personal need for salvation. As tragic as the story of the Jay and Lauren is, denying the reality of sin and evil not only in the world but within ourselves is far more tragic.
Faith in God and in Christ is anything but a crutch. In fact, the whole reason people hate religion and Christianity in particular is because Jesus and the Word of God make it painfully clear that the hearts of all men and women, of all mankind, are helplessly wicked from birth – that we have not only been corrupted since the fall of Adam and Eve but continue in our own personal rebellion and sinfulness against God. If there is any weakness, it is found in denying that evil is real, that the Devil is real and that we ourselves are the ones responsible for bringing evil into our own lives. It’s one thing to be suspicious of the “narrative” presented by the media and their biases, it’s quite another to deny what we all know so intimately – the darkness that is in all of us. It’s not “make-believe” to believe that evil is real, but it is pure fantasy to deny what we all know to be true within.
True strength and hope in the midst of this tragic world can only be found in confessing our wickedness and sinfulness to God and pleading for His mercy; His mercy that has in fact been given in the blood of His Son Jesus. We cannot save ourselves from ourselves. We can only rely on He who is bigger than we are, He who is truly holy and righteous, He who is perfect in both love and justice and He who has provided both to us in Jesus Christ. When we acknowledge our need for a Savior and turn to Jesus as the One True savior of the world, God has promised to forgive us for Christ’s sake and to make us a new creation in Christ Jesus and give us a new heart toward God and toward one another. This message of God’s love and transformative grace found only in Christ Jesus is the only hope humanity has – the only hope we have to be saved from sin and death and to be saved from our own wickedness and evil.
As Paul says in our text for today: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation… Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”
Hearing such unfortunate stories like this one of Jay and Lauren should break our hearts. It breaks God’s heart. Jesus wept over the death of His friends Lazarus, but Jesus didn’t just weep, He took action and rose Lazarus from the dead. We are not Christ, and neither has Jesus called us to go into the world trying to resurrect the dead, but He has called us, commanded us, and commissioned us to be His ambassadors and give the world the only hope that there is; the message of Jesus Christ and the salvation from evil and sin and death that can only be found in Him. When we sit and watch our televisions at night, it is not enough to just shake our heads and complain to our friends about how bad things are. Christ calls us to take action, to be available to be used by Him in order to bring hope to a dying and wicked world through the message of and the message in Jesus Christ.
God bless you my friends, and may God bless those to whom you bring hope today with the Good News of Jesus. Remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
