Voices From the Past

       There are times that my memory is jogged by something and a person from my past comes to mind and i think, "I wonder what happened to that person?  Most of them are good memories and may have been one of my supervisors in one capaccty or another.  Likewise,  I wonder what happened to the people who struck Christ and buffeted Him on the night of His mock trial?  We sometimes hear of people who are acting in a very perverse way and how another person will not want to stand next to them for fear of God striking them dead with a bolt of lightning.  While God doesn't seem to work that way in most cases today, there still is the fear that He might destroy something as a result of being in conflict with Him and His Word.  In the closing chapters of the Gospel of Mark, we read of the events of that night and how the people indeed hit Him and to spit on Him.  We all think that was at terrible moment and truly it was.  One has to wonder whatever happened to those people who struck the Son of God in anger.  Perhaps the next event was even worse.  Mark 14:72 says, "And the second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept."  

         One of His own beloved disciples, the Apostle Peter, denied Christ.  He even denied Him three times.  We all know the account as it appears in the Gospels.  Peter had claimed that He would rather die with Him.  This he claimed just a few short hours before the events that led to his denying Christ on that night.  While there are many lessons we might learn from Peter, let us learn just one today.  We don't know what we are going to do in the face of adversity.  We have not suffered so much in this country, at least, as in other countries where saints are being slain for their faith in very brutal ways.  In the same moment, we perhaps do not voice our denials to the world, but we sometimes to deny Christ by our actions.  We begin to adapt the ways of the world into our lives so that we look like the world, smell like the world and act like the world.  We are so much identified with the world that there is no cause for anyone to suspect that we are Christians in the first place.  It is as one person put it, "If we were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict us?"  For many, it would be a short trial. and the judge would say, "Not guilty."  So, while we did not verbally deny Christ, our lives already had done so.  We have been reminded in the Sermon on the Mount to let our light shine and not to hide it under a bushel.  Christ has instructed us to be His witnesses and we are to fulfill the "one another" commands of the Word of God.  May our lives today be a living testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Praise God today for His faithfulness to us.  May we be faithful to Him.