Gen 6:6 - 8 So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them. It broke his heart. And the Lord said, “I will completely wipe out this human race that I have created. Yes, and I will destroy all the animals and birds, too. I am sorry I ever made them.”But Noah found favor with the Lord. (emphasis mine)
There is a quote by Margaret Mead that says, “Never doubt that a small group of determined people can change the world.” Replace “small group” with “single person” and you get the gist of the above Scripture. One man changed God’s mind and reversed a course of action that would have meant a non-existence for all of us.
Noah is my Sunday School lesson to my teenagers tomorrow, and when I talk about this section of the Word, this ability for an individual to make real change is going to be emphasized to them. I want them to know that they stand at a door of possibility to make a very real change in their world. To know that when the Word says that “I can do all things through Jesus Christ” and “With God, all things are possible”, that it really means it.
Popular belief among the Pentecostal movement (and others) is that we are living in the last days. This very well may be the case, or it may not. The Scripture talks about timing of the End Times and uses phrases like “an hour when you think not” while emphasizing our need to be ready for whenever the hour comes or when we individually die. My reason for mentioning the last days is to say that I think that churches often find it too easy to write the world off as a lost cause, since it is assumed we are in the last days, and to hunker down and hold on to what we have. I think this is a strategic mistake, because while the world might ultimately be a lost cause (I have read the back of the book on this one), we don’t know God’s ultimate timing. I’m certainly not a historian, but it is plain to see that the values of morality often swing on a pendulum. We go from the raucous Roman Empire to the relative conservatism of the Middle Age. The vulgar living of Shakespeare gives way to the Victorian area. I know I’m leaving out lot of ‘eras’, but my point is to say that the pendulum has swung before from debauchery to Holiness, and I’m not ready to concede that God’s not able to let it happen again.
If the world is in its final go around, then so be it. We still, however, cannot write it off because the individuals are certainly not without hope. Such were you and I before the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ. It is everyone’s command from Christ to win the lost through love and sacrifice. I’m speaking to myself chiefly, because I’ve spent too many days wrapped up in my own affairs. Too many hours doing nothing to save anyone. To coin a line from Veggietales,
“The World needs a hero!”
“I… AM… THAT… HERO!”
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