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My Two Cents
by Rev Chuck Behrens
August, 2015
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Past Articles |
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OK. . .I admit it. . .one
of the very many mistakes in my life. Are you ready? Here it is, True
Confessions: I ONCE OWNED A CHEVY VEGA I noticed what no one ever wants to
notice coming from their exhaust pipe. It was a gigantic Black funnel
cloud that would have scared most massive Tornados. One mechanic told me,
"I wouldn't leave town with that car if I were you." And he was right.
Guess what? The smoke wasn't the problem. The problem was the engine, and
it didn't need to be fixed. It was too far gone for that. It had to be
replaced!
The Vega I drove away from that gar-age looked like the same car I drove
into that garage. But that was not true! It was new on the inside, and as
a result it was no longer leaving an ugly trail. Actually, a lot of us
have some emissions coming out of our lives that aren't too pleasant
either. Maybe you know some of those feelings, and too often there's anger
spewing out. There's self-pity because you feel like a victim, or just
critical attitudes, negative attitudes. You later regret what you said.
You do something that you regret later. Maybe you're hooked on what you
wish you could stop and wish you'd never started. We leave a trail behind
us of people who have choked on the smoke and the pollution we put out.
And it's not that we haven't tried to fix it; New Year’s resolutions,
religion, self-improvement. We've tried to stop polluting our own lives
and the lives of those around us, but there's a problem inside. And God
diagno-ses that problem in His Book in Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is
deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" The
engine is shot and it can't be fixed. It has to be replaced.
This leads us to God’s tremendous offer from Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give
you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you. I will re-move from you a
heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit in
you." God says our heart is too darkened and hard-ened by sin to ever quit
putting out pollution.
We can certainly never get into His to-tally unpolluted heaven with this
polluted heart. We all have it. Our only hope for this life and for
eternal life is a new heart. And we can't perform heart surgery on
ourselves. On-ly the Divine Surgeon can do that, and He stands ready to
take that heart of yours that's been hardened by all the hurt, the anger,
the sin, and He will replace it with a heart that is clean, and sensitive
and new. He'll put His Holy Spirit in you to make you the person you've
wanted to be but never could be.
But the operation had to be paid for; just as the engine replacement on my
Vega had to be paid for. And, you know, I didn't have the money to pay.
But to my amaze-ment, some of God's people quietly got to-gether from my
little student church and ac-tually paid that bill. That's what Jesus was
doing for you when He was agonizing on the cross. He was paying the bill
for your sins that you could never pay so you could be for-given.
You ready for a new heart? All of our lives we try to stop the ugly stuff
that comes out of us, but it just doesn't come until we get a new
engine--a new Heart. . .The WAIT HAS BEEN OVER FOR SOME 2000 years. .
.unless you want to prolong it?
See you in Church,
Rev. Chuck
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