July 31, 2019 – Click here to listen
Recently I was reminded of a German businessman, Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and spent all of his fortune in World War II to save 1200 Jews from the Holocaust. He initially bought them because he thought it was a good business move, but later developed real compassion for them and would buy all the workers headed for concentration camp furnaces from the Germans that he could muster under the pretext of needing them as workers in his factory.
In the movie Schindler’s List which depicted this season of his life, he worked feverishly to buy more and more of them, realizing that each one he purchased was being snatched from a gruesome death. He sold nearly every possession he had in order to obtain the funds to buy as many as he could, and as time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.
As Germany began to lose the war in July 1944, the Germans began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the remaining prisoners westward. Many were killed in Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camps. Schindler convinced the commandant of the nearby Kraków concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brünnlitz, thus sparing his workers from certain death in the gas chambers. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the slaughter of his workers until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, by which time he had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market purchases of supplies for his workers.
At the end of the movie the Nazis had been defeated and the scene depicted all of those Jews coming out of the factory to thank him.
Instead of smiling and graciously accepting the accolades for his heroic act of saving so many Jews from certain death, he began weeping and lamenting the fact that if he had only worked harder, he could have done so much more. He looked at his car and mournfully said, “I could have sold my car and bought two or maybe three more; I could have sold this ring and maybe bought another”. As best I recall the movie ended with a scene of him dropping to his knees and sobbing over and again that he could have saved more of them.
In 2000, the original list of Jewish employees drawn up by Oskar Schindler to save them from the Nazis was discovered in a suitcase full of papers left to a German couple. The couple, relatives of close friends of Schindler, found the list of 1,200 workers among other papers which dealt mainly with Schindler’s life after World War II. The documents included a speech Schindler gave on May 8, 1945, in which he urged the Jews who worked for him not to pursue revenge.
This got me to thinking and wondering if he was a Christian. I Googled: “Was Oskar Schindler a Christian?” I found that he was raised a Catholic, but apparently had fallen away and done some things that non-Christians do. As I continued my online search I found two comments made in a blog about him that seem to me to depict representative views of what might be found in an average church:
“Oskar Schindler was not a faithful Catholic & therefore, the very basis of this question is incorrect. I also suggest that the German Catholic church of that time had no problem with Jews being sent to the gas chambers; the pope of that time & Hitler exchanged Christmas cards each year with each other.
Oskar Schindler’s Wikipedia pages states, “Schindler was brought up within the Roman Catholic Church. Although he never formally renounced his religion, Schindler was never more than an indifferent Catholic.” He was an adulterer, a poor businessman who, in peace-time, was unable to run a successful business. I suggest that the help that he gave to Jews during the 2nd World War was motivated by opportunism & the excitement of such a venture rather than anything that the Roman Catholic church had taught him.”
Another person wrote:
Oskar Schindler personified Christianity at its core. I am not talking about political or false Christianity. It isn’t the type that destroys or kills for Christ did not seek to change the world in this manner. A true Christian does no harm. This is how you can tell the difference between someone who only claims to love Christ and someone who really does. Christianity is truly love. It is a willingness to lay down your own life and safety for others. It is loving and respecting all humans because you see the God in them. It is doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Oskar Schindler loved life and God is life. He did not do it for his own welfare. That is a lie spread by those who are ashamed that they would not be as good of a person as he was in the same situation. He did it because, despite his faults, he was a good person and God and Christ loved him very much.
Hmmm . . . I agree with the latter. So how does this lesson of life relate to us?
I think we should all try to be more like Oskar Schindler. I have personally witnessed to large numbers of non-Christians. I don’t know how many the Holy Spirit saved through the blood of Jesus Christ, only He knows that, but it is not nearly enough. I feel just like Oskar Schindler in that I could have done so much more to witness to the lost.
Yikes! I just realized something; the war isn’t over and there is still time.
I challenge you this morning to do more while there is still time. A vast sea of lost souls will be lost forever if they do not hear the word of God and accept Christ as their Savior. I urge you to use every last resource that you possess in a last ditch effort to reach the lost for Christ.
One day the war will be over and then it will be too late, but today there is yet time and in fact the fields are white for the harvest. Selah . . .
John 4:35
You know the saying, ‘Four months between planting and harvest.’ But I say, wake up and look around. The fields are already ripe for harvest.