The Unexpected

Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. Romans 5:16

Thankfully, there were no tragic results in Cebu City, which is in the Philippines.

It could have been different.

Using bars and picks workmen were excavating the foundation of a four-story building. They ran into some complications when they discovered a very large, very stubborn piece of metal in their way.

The workers pounded on that stubborn bit of metal. They pounded with a vengeance. They pounded, I mean pounded, until one of them stepped back to get a better perspective on what they were doing.

He got it. Realizing what they were working on, he shouted one word and he ran. The word he called out was "bomb!" And so it was. It was a 500-pound, live bomb, which we used to call a "blockbuster."

The sight of those workers scrambling out of the foundation's hole must have looked like a cut from a Keystone Kops silent film.

Thankfully, the bomb didn't go off.

That's not always the case, is it? Every day we Christians see people pounding away at spiritual bombs ... bombs that sometimes go off with a loss of life.

You do know the kind of bombs I'm talking about, don't you? There are bombs like envy, lust, greed and idolatry.

When those bombs explode, they can do horrible things. They can ruin an individual's outlook on life; they can turn a person away from the Lord.

This is why we need to be ready for the explosives the devil puts in front of us. At those times, at all times, we need to be relying on the Savior who put Himself between us and the forces of these killer explosives.

Pastor Ken Klaus Lutheran Hour Ministries http://www.lhm.org/ all rights reserved; not to be duplicated without permission.

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