Daily Manna from Heaven

by Dr. Harold Sala

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” -John 1:12

When the Swiss Air flight went down off the coast of Newfoundland, the black box on the plane indicated that sixteen minutes elapsed from the time the pilot first recognized the plane was in trouble until the fatal crash. Sixteen minutes—one minute more than a quarter of an hour. Sixteen minutes to make peace with God.

Every one, of course, realizes that someday he will die, in spite of the fact that we usually live as though that day will never come. Thomas a Kempis, the churchman of the Middle Ages, urged, “Labor now to live, so that at the hour of death thou mayest rather rejoice than fear.” No one, of course, knows when the hands of the clock will stop, and in all probability those on board that ill-fated Swiss Air flight didn’t themselves know whether they had sixteen minutes or some forty-plus years left. That’s the reason why you need to make peace with God now.

If you knew that you had sixteen minutes to live, what would you do? When the Titanic went down, some walked around straightening picture frames that were hanging at an angle. But nobody in his right mind waters flowers in a burning building.

Question: Is sixteen minutes long enough to make peace with God? I mean, can you go through the inventory of what you need to confess in sixteen minutes? Let me put the answer like this. When Christ was on the cross, two thieves were crucified with him. One of them cried out, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” And immediately Jesus responded, “Today, you will be with me in paradise!” That didn’t take sixteen minutes, but barely sixteen seconds.

Making peace with God doesn’t take a long time but it takes a deep contrition. How do you do it? Following an earthquake that threatened the future security of a Roman jailer, Paul said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). To believers in Rome Paul said, “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9, NKJV). Yes, sixteen seconds is long enough to do that. But here’s the problem.

Matthew Henry brought it into focus some 250 years ago. He said, “Deathbed conversions are seldom true, and true conversions are seldom made on their deathbed.” In other words, he is saying that now, when you are rational and cogent, is the time to make peace with God. Then you live each day as though it were your last, so if by some strange series of events you are down to your last sixteen minutes, you know that heaven is on the other side, and you know how to get there.

The person who is always going to get right with God often never has the time to do it. I’m thinking of the time I stood at the bedside of a man who was dying, and I inquired, “Tell me about his faith.” Instead, his family told me about what he had done—his success in the business world, his relationship to the family and the community, but they didn’t tell me about his relationship with God.

“Did he go to church?” I asked. “No,” a daughter finally said, sadly adding, “He never had time for that.” I didn’t say it but I thought he had fifty two Sundays a year for more than sixty years, and he was down to his last sixteen minutes, and it was too late.

Don’t wait until you are watching the clock and you have sixteen minutes. That may well be plenty of time, but again, who knows? John told us how to make peace with God. He wrote, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). And that transaction takes much less than sixteen minutes but lasts for all eternity.

*Permission to reprint this article is hereby granted by Guidelines, Inc.*

-Money In Your Underwear [click here]-

by Dr. Harold Sala

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest.” -Matthew 11:28, The Message

Making peace with God is the most important thing you will ever do in life, and it isn’t something that you can necessarily put off until five minutes before your encounter with the Almighty. But the sad thing is that life gets so full of things that we seldom think about the importance of making peace with God until it’s too late.

I’m thinking of the time I was called to the hospital to visit a man whose hours were numbered. I wasn’t very well acquainted with this man, but I knew he had been successful as a rancher and cattleman. As I stood outside his hospital room as doctors fought a losing battle for the man’s life, I talked with family members. “Tell me about your dad,” I asked. The response was a series of stories and anecdotes.

“Can you tell me about his relationship with the Lord?” I asked. Things grew strangely quiet. “Dad never had time for that sort of thing,” one of them said. Guidelines is a commentary on life and our times, and though we seldom think about it, the end is just as much part of the whole as is the beginning when God sends the spark that ignites life and a baby is conceived.

Birth, of course, is usually a much more celebrated event than a memorial service. Though someone has lived a long and full life and those of us who remain are glad that a loved one no longer suffers, and though we inwardly rejoice that someone we loved is now in the presence of the Lord and will never face another long night of suffering, we, nonetheless, don’t dance and celebrate at a funeral the way we do at the welcomed birth of a baby.

Making peace with God is not much different from reestablishing a relationship which has been broken by misunderstanding and or wrongdoing. Isaiah said, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). Without a shepherd, sheep quickly wander and go astray. That’s why the shepherd is so important. Left to their own, sheep are vulnerable to predators and enemies of all kinds and descriptions.

The Bible describes this wandering or going astray as a deliberate act of spiritual rebellion of the heart, a missing of the mark (using the analogy of an archer whose aim falls short of the target). The Bible calls it sin. The middle letter “i” best characterizes what it’s about: my will as opposed to God’s will.

Making peace with God begins when you acknowledge that you have gone astray. This should not be too difficult. You know that, down deep in your heart. The second thing you must do is to recognize the voice of the shepherd and acclaim Him as your Lord and Savior. Jesus, using this very analogy, said, “I am the good shepherd.” He also said, “I am the way and the truth and the life…” (John 14:6).

Now, a word of warning. There are a lot of false shepherds out there—individuals, philosophies, even religions that claim to take you to God. But there is only one Shepherd who proved that He was the Son of God by dying and rising again the third day. It was this which proved that Jesus was and is the Great Shepherd, the One sent from God.

The final step in making peace with God is to claim His Son as your Shepherd and Savior and begin to follow Him. Too easy? Some think so, but I have learned that when you follow the Shepherd, you will get to know Him, and when you really know Him, you will love Him, and when you love Him, you will obey Him and keep His commandments.

**Permission to reprint the above article is hereby granted by Guidleines, Inc.**

How To Know If Your Dreams Are God’s Dreams - [click here]