Choose Sides

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

Mark 8:34-38

During WWII the United States military drafted many men into the armed services. You can imagine that few men who were fit for duty and who actually wanted to serve in the military were turned down. One young man was. In 1942, two years after having been turned down, this young man sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt requesting to be allowed to serve. He had a particularly strong reason to want to fight in the war and the United States had an equally strong reason to doubt his motives. You see this young man's name was William Patrick Hitler. He was Adolph Hitler's nephew. Incredibly, after being cleared for service by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself, William did go on to serve in the U.S. Navy from 1944 until he was injured in 1947. (William's letter and other details of this story can be read here on the blog Letters of Note.)

We all have to choose sides. This is no less true in the epic struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan. Jesus tells us that there is an associated cost no matter what side you choose. If you choose to follow Christ, then everyday you must take up your cross. You must die to your fleshly desires and choose to live for His kingdom and glory. No doubt this is a high price to pay, but the accompanying reward makes it worthwhile. Those who lose their life for Jesus in this world will preserve their eternal life in the next. They will gain an inheritance in Heaven with the Son (I Peter 1:3-5).

On the other hand, if you choose to live for yourself in this world, then you can fulfill all your lusts and fleshly impulses. You can serve the gods of money, self, sex, drugs, or men's approval. But this will be a pitiful comfort when you lose your soul for eternity. Having chosen Satan's side in this world, your eternal fate will be tied to his in the next. Those who reject Jesus will spend an eternity in torment in the Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:7-15). Additionally, there are those who claim to follow Christ, but whose behavior betrays them. If you are ashamed of Christ and do not obey His commands, you will lose your soul.

This world and the next are at odds. You simply can't have both. You must make a choice, one that will require you (like William) to turn your back on old ways of living, on friends, and even on family at times. Think carefully about your choice and count the cost but remember you are not guaranteed tomorrow. I urge you to choose Christ now by faith, believing that what you gain far outweighs anything you give up.

For further reading...

• I Peter 1:3-5- Consider the inheritance we gain as believers.
• Rev. 20:7-15- Consider the fate of those who reject Jesus.

Go and Tell

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

Isaiah 52:7

For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Romans 10:13-15

In his book entitled Night, Elie Wiesel tells the story of a man named Moshe who lived in the town of Sighet in Transylvania where Wiesel grew up. In 1942, at the age of twelve, Wiesel had began to be mentored by this barefoot Jewish mystic. Wiesel tells of how one day the Hungarian police loaded all of the foreign-born Jews onto cattle trains and shipped them away. Moshe was one of those Jews. The native Jews with Wiesel eventually came to accept this as a reality of the war, until one day Moshe returned.

"He told his story and that of his companions. The train full of deportees had crossed the Hungarian frontier and on Polish territory had been taken in charge by the Gestapo. There it had stopped. The Jews had to get out and climb into lorries. The lorries drove toward a forest. The Jews were made to get out. They were made to dig huge graves. And when they had finished their work, the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoners. Each one had to go up to the hole and present his neck. Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets. This was in the forest of Galicia, near Kolomaye. How had Moshe...escaped? Miraculously. He was wounded in the leg and taken for dead..."*

Wiesel tells of how Moshe went from house to house warning the Jews of what the Gestapo had done, but nobody believed him. Maybe he has gone mad, they said. Perhaps he is just looking for sympathy. "And as for Moshe, he wept. Jews listen to me. It's all I ask of you. I don't want money or pity. Only listen to me."*  They would not listen to Moshe but perhaps the saddest part of Wiesel's account is that as days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, eventually Moshe stopped telling his story. Later Wiesel and many others from Sighet witnessed the horrors of the Nazi hatred for Jews firsthand, but Moshe had long given up hope of convincing them of the terror that lay ahead.

May we never grow tired of warning people about Hell, because unlike Moshe we have good news to tell as well. We have a Savior who has already fought the enemy and has already won the victory for all those who will believe. He commanded us to "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything [He commanded us]” (Matthew 28:19-20a). And so we must go! We must go and tell even when they won't listen. Even when they tell us to stop. Even when they threaten our lives. We must tell... in love, in gentleness, and in humility. And we must go to wherever there are those who haven't heard and to wherever there are those who have rejected the message. May we never lose heart. May we never give up proclaiming the good news of His glorious gospel! 

For further reading....

• Romans 1:16- Ashamed of the gospel?
• Matthew 9:35-38- A plentiful harvest.
• I Peter 3:15- With gentleness and respect.
• John 3:16- Whosoever believes.

*Wiesel, Elie. Night. : Bantam Books, 1960. Pages 4, 5.

A Precious Treasure Hidden from the Nazis

If you put all these people to death, leaving none alive, the nations who have heard this report about you will say, ‘The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land he promised them on oath, so he slaughtered them in the wilderness.’


“Now may the Lord’s strength be displayed, just as you have declared: ‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’ In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now.”


The Lord replied, “I have forgiven them, as you asked."

Numbers 14:15-20

This week I came across a summary of Corrie ten Boom's story. I confess that although I had heard of Corrie and her best-selling book The Hiding Place, up until this week I really didn't know what that book was about. The ten Booms were a Christian family living in Holland during Nazi occupation that bravely chose to hide runaway Jews in their three-story home above their family's watch shop. They had a secret room constructed next to Corrie's bedroom which they called "The Hiding Place." Thanks to the ten Boom family and this hiding place, seven Jews were protected from Nazi concentration camps. These Jews were never found, but Corrie and her sister Betsie were eventually arrested and sent to the women's extermination camp at Ravensbruck.

"At Ravensbruck the women were permitted worship services in their crowded barracks. At every meeting a crowd of thin, sad-faced women gathered around Corrie and Betsie to hear the sisters read from their hidden Bible. One read the Dutch text and the other translated aloud in German. Other interpreters then passed the precious words along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, and other languages. These evenings were 'little previews of heaven' Corrie later wrote in The Hiding Place."*

This image of malnourished women crowding around the Word of God, devouring its precious truth, and taking great pains to share the hope they find in it with others struck me. The truth is that God's Word is always this precious and this powerful, but we do not always treat it as such. In the above passage we find that Moses did though. God has just told Moses that He is ready to wash His hands of the Israelites. They have rebelled one too many times. After the Lord rescued them mightily from Egypt, brought them through the Red Sea on dry ground, and then sustained them across the desert with bread from heaven all the way up to the Promised Land, the people of Israel choose not go in. They fear the giants in the land and still doubt God's power after all He has done. So God offers to destroy them all and start over and make a people for himself through Moses. We see Moses' response above.

The careful reader will notice that Moses recites God's words back to Him. On Mt. Sinai Moses was given a precious revelation from the Lord. God placed him in a hiding place, in a cleft in the rock, and caused His glory to pass in front of Moses. As He passed before him the Lord declared His name and character to Moses. It is clear from the fact that he quotes it back to God as the reason why He should show compassion that Moses treasured these words.

It's unfortunate that we don't appreciate God's Word in the same way. Take a lesson from Corrie and from Moses today. Open the Word and treasure it!

For further reading...here are some places you might start:

• Exodus 34:5-9- Check out the special revelation Moses experienced on Mt. Sinai.
• Psalm 23- Try one of the most loved Psalms in the Bible. 
• John 1:1-18- Sample one of the most beautiful explanations of Jesus' true identity ever written. 
• Romans 8- Give the chapter that some have called the "crown jewel of the New Testament" a chance.  

*I am indebted to James and Marti Hefley's book By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the Twentieth Century for the information in these two paragraphs.