Power of a person

(new article for certain tomorrow. unbelievably, I just came down with another cold! my mother has had one and I've wondered if I was going to catch it from her. I am now fully engaged with all the symptoms and, as an added bonus, should expect diminished tastebuds for our traditional prime rib dinner on Christmas day)

To mimic Jesus Christ’s birth, Hindu devotees celebrate Lord Krishna’s birth.

As a woman from India was quoted reporting on the event in a PBS show, “There's loud chanting and people are singing and getting very excited about the midnight hour, and we're getting ready to welcome Krishna. As the midnight hour approaches, we dim the lights. The priest comes out and actually brings a live baby in a cradle, carrying him on his head, depicting how it truly happened with Lord Krishna.”

“There’s not any religion on the face of the earth that does or ever has had anybody like the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s not a philosophy, not a system of economics, or politics, or academia that has anything like Him. No religion.

“One of fascinating things about all this is humans are always talking about, ‘How do you know something’s true?’ There are a lot of evidences that God is--not just direct ones, but just common sense evidences that come along.

“I was reading a book where the guy made the point, ‘Where’s anybody who ever sang, ‘Oh how I love Buddha, oh how I love Buddha.’ Nobody sings, ‘Allah paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain; Allah washed it white as snow.’

“Do you know there are thousands of songs written about one person, the Lord Jesus Christ? Love songs. Do you know that’s the kind of songs people write? I mean, whether they’re hillbilly songs, rock songs, contemporary music, people write songs about what they love; what they value and esteem, what captures their heart.

“The last thing John says in the Book of John is, ‘And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.’

“The songwriter says, ‘Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky.’

“How in the world do you explain the fact that no religion in the world has anybody writing love songs about their religion and how much it’s done for them and then along here comes the Lord Jesus Christ? Psalm 69 says He’s going to be the song of drunkards. Even drunks write songs about Him.

*****

“You get out there in the world and listen to the songs. You know the Frank Sinatra lyric, ‘Chicago, Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down.’ You know that line? Why? They’re bragging about the fact that Billy Sunday went all over America preaching the gospel and getting people saved and yet he couldn’t . . .

“In northwest Alabama, there’s a little town called Reform. The Billy Sunday of the South was a man named Sam Jones. He did in the South what Billy Sunday did in the Midwest and East. Jones went into that town and it was a mecca of gambling and the liquor trade.

“He preached the gospel for about three months and people got saved left and right and the newspaper accounts of it are that by the time Jones got through with that revival . . . They said if you wanted to cuss you did it under your breath. All the liquor establishments were closed down. All the bars were closed down. All the gambling houses were closed down. The city council voted to change the name of the town to Reform!

"What is that?! That’s the power of a person, the Lord Jesus Christ. Acts 20:28 says, [28] Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

“Who was it on the Cross shedding His blood? Christ. But whose blood was that? Who really was that on the Cross? It was God. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. It was God’s blood that flowed through Emmanuel’s veins.

“Just about everything you can think of, you can think of a gospel song or hymn that takes any experience in life and relates it to a love affair with the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the Word; He’s the one who brings God into every aspect and facet and experience of our life.

“I John 4:7 is a fascinating verse of scripture: [7] Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

“If you’re going to love people, you’re going to have to know God. And if you don’t know God, you’re not going to know how to love people. You go out into the world we live in and it’s filled with strife, envy, hatred, violence, crime, on and on.

“People say, ‘If we could just take that away and let us have peace.’ You know the only thing that will satisfy that? ‘Love one another.’ It’s the only source to get rid of war, all this opposition.

“People think if you just have an egalitarian society where everything’s equal--love everybody, accept everybody, let everything be okay. Don’t call evil ‘evil’ or good ‘good,’ and that way you get rid of all the conflicts. And if you can get rid of conflicts you can get rid of war, right? Wrong.

“Look at what God says: ‘[2] And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. Paul writes in Romans 3:25, [25] Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

“Love is associated with God coming down into our humanity and sacrificing Himself for our sin. ‘He put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.’ Love has to do with dealing with SIN.”