PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Reconciliation-Reconstruction-Renovation”.
(By: Ron Woodrum)
Remember as kids when we sang the nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down”? It went something like this-“London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down. My Fair Lady”. The next verse said, “build it up with wood and clay”. That verse was followed by the warning “Wood and Clay will Wash Away”. Answer-“Build it up with Brick and Mortar” But the retort followed-“Brick and mortar will not stay”. How about reinforcing it with “Iron and Steel? Iron and Steel? Iron and Steel?”; “Iron and Steel will bend and bow, bend and bow, bend and bow!”; “Build it up with Silver and Gold,Silver and Gold, Silver and Gold”…”Silver and Gold will be stolen away…My Fair Lady”. “Set a man to watch all night…watch all night…watch all night”. “Suppose the man should fall asleep? My Fair Lady”. That little rhyme is packed with theological truth. Man’s best creations…man’s best defenses…man’s best efforts are doomed to fail! Fallen man is hopeless without the intervention of God in his desperate situation. St. Augustine expressed that truth very well when he wrote, “Adam himself lies now scattered on the whole surface of the earth. Formerly concentrated in one place, he has fallen; having been broken to pieces, as it were, he has filled the universe with his debris. However, God’s mercy has gathered together from everywhere his fragments, and by fusing them in the fire of His love, has reconstituted their broken unity!” Satan led mankind into the fall that has brought our race to the brink of destruction. History has been a vivid story of the hopelessness and helplessness man has found himself trapped in-awaiting the final destruction. But God, in Christ, and through the Cross has provided the way of Reconciliation-The Way of Reconstruction-The Way of Renovation. Paul was engaged in that kind of gospel ministry in the first century. His ministry was described in II Corinthians chapter 5. We too are challenged to join him in carrying out that ministry in these last dark days. To do so is to be numbered among “Heaven’s Heroes!”.
Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, in their book In His Image, illustrates this truth with a vivid example from history. In September 1940 London Bridge was literally in danger of “Falling Down”. Hitler had unleashed the unrelenting “Blitz” on London. It was his famous “Luftwaffe”. Brand writes graphically these words, ” In forty years of surgery I have encountered my share of human drama, but nothing has surpassed my early experiences as a surgical student during the German bombings of London in World War II. Daily, squadrons of ugly, fat Luftwaffe bombers filled the sky, their engines growling like unbroken thunder, their bomb bays belching out cargoes of destruction. I remember one direct hit on a Turkish bathouse in the Imperial Hotel. The raid had come without much warning, and the baths were still full when the bomb exploded. When I arrived it was a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Another night, I was watching from my hospital roof when a bomb fell into an infant ward at the nearby Royal Free Hospital, causing the upper floors to collapse into smoldering ruins. There volunteers dug for newborns, most less than a week old, and found survivors and casualties covered in blood, grime, and glass. Rescuers set up a human chain, like a fire brigade, to pass bundled infants out of the hospital rubble to the waiting ambulances. The babies thin cries seemed a pathetically inadequate response to the horror of that scene!…During one period, the Luftwaffe attacked our city on 57 consecutive nights, with the raids lasting as long as eight hours without pause. Fifteen hundred planes came each night, in waves of 250. In those dark days, we could not help believing that everything we cherished-our freedom, our nation, our families, our civilization-would be buried in the wasteland created by those hated bombers.
Only one thing gave us hope: The courage of the Royal Air Force Pilots who rose in the skies each day to battle the Germans. We could watch the aerial confrontations from the ground. Royal Air Force Hurricanes and Spitfires, tiny and maneuverable, looked like mosquitoes pestering the huge German bombers. Although their cause seemed futile, and more than half of them were shot down, the Royal Air Force pilots never gave up. Each day they sent a few more of the dreaded bombers cartwheeling in flames toward the earth, and all of us spectators cheered wildly. Eventually Germany could not sustain further loses from the increasingly accurate fighter pilots and Hitler called off the raids. London sept again!…I cannot exaggerate the adoration that Londoners gave to those brave Royal Air Force pilots. Winston Churchill , if anything, underestimated that grattitude when he said, ‘never, in the history of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few!’ “.
Paul saw the ancient world facing such destruction at the hands of the evil one. He was enlisting brave Christians to join him in the rescue mission of reconciliation, reconstruction, and renovation included in the power of the the Gospel Ministry he preached. Like those brave Royal Air Force pilots, these men and women were “heaven’s heroes” going up against all odds to “rescue the lost and perishing from his evil grip!”. That is the message of II Corinthians chapter 5. C.S. Lewis talked about our ministry in this activity when he wrote “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and godesses, (he is referring to those made in the image of God, and His Son Jesus Christ), to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations!’ That is the ministry of Reconciliation provided through the cross of Jesus Christ. God, like Paul, is looking for those who will enlist in this kind of ministry. The sad truth is…people are perishing and none of us seem to care. Psalm 142:4 says, “I looked to my right hand, and beheld there was no man that cared for me…no man cared for my soul!” How tragic. In Ezekial we hear God saying, “I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it…BUT I FOUND NONE!” (Ezekial 22:30). Will you join Heaven’s Heroes in this Courageous Ministry in these last days? In heaven the word will be “Never has so many owed so much to so few!” Are you willing to join Jesus and Paul in this great ministry? That is our calling!