May 20, 2022 – Click here to listen
My brother became close to the Lord a couple of years before his death. He was one of those people who had sunk to the very bottom of the barrel of life and with nowhere to turn for help, and out of sheer desperation and agony turned to the Lord.
I was the person he called when he reached rock-bottom and desperately asked for advice to bring about change to his life. I flew him to Atlanta and my pastor and I explained how he could know peace and happiness in his life by accepting Jesus as his Savior. He got down on his knees and asked for forgiveness for his sins and was wonderfully saved. I took him to Borders book store where he bought a Bible to study and it is still in my possession today. I love to look through it and read all the many hundreds of verses that he’d underlined that pertained to helping him in his struggles.
Upon receiving the Lord as his Savior and beginning to follow Him, his life immediately and wonderfully and miraculously turned around for the better. He reconciled with his wife and they along with their young son were all baptized together. He gave up the drugs, booze, and playing guitar in nightclubs and instead got into hunting, fishing, photography, and wood-working, and moved to a nice house in the suburbs. It was almost as dramatic a turn-around as my own life had been upon accepting Christ as my Savior.
Sadly, it didn’t last. He began to backslide and whenever I called and asked if he had attended church the previous Sunday or had been reading his Bible, he would tell me that no, he knew that he needed to be doing those things, but he had not gone to church lately or cracked his Bible open and studied it. I would urge him to return to God, but he wasn’t listening.
The last time I ever talked to him I remember the words that I spoke to him verbatim. I told him in no uncertain terms that he better be careful, because if he turned his back on his Lord and Savior, God just might turn His back on him.
I reminded him of how his life had been prior to accepting the Lord and of the dramatic change for good that he enjoyed immediately thereafter and warned him that he needed God every day and to pull near to Him and God would pull near to him and keep him safe and happy.
Unfortunately, it fell on deaf ears and I guess he got tired of me preaching to him and after that call he just quit taking any more calls from me and just let them go into voice mail.
About a month later one stormy night I was in Chicago trying to get out on the last flight and home to my family. My wife called late in the night and told me that my beloved brother had committed suicide by shooting himself.
Apparently, he had been fighting with his wife who had told him she was going to divorce him adding to his list of other failed marriages. He had many other problems he was facing and when combined with the past several decades of problems, I suppose it was just too much for him to bear all alone. This time he did not call me in desperation and ask what he could do to alleviate the pain he was living through and instead, (I’m sure at the urging of Satan), took matters into his own hands and put a 9MM handgun to the temple of his head and pulled the trigger.
If you have turned temporarily from God and have not attended church or Sunday school lately and your Bible is collecting dust on a shelf somewhere, it is my hope that you will take heed of this true story and get back on the road to recovery. You might think you are safe and things are going great right now, but that is the exact same thinking that got my brother into trouble. Don’t wait until something bad happens to jolt you back into reality. We are all on the road to recovery from our fallen state and we cannot make it on our own. We need God in the good times as well as the bad whether we realize it during the good times or not.
The choice is ours and not anyone else can make it for us. If I could have forced my brother to be in church every Sunday and live for Him during the week I would have done so in a heartbeat. If I had, I believe he would be alive and happy today; however free will means you and I are free to follow the world and Satan or God. As for me I choose to follow the Lord.
Psalms 145:18
The Lord is near to all who call upon Him.
Have a great weekend and go to church this Sunday!