Forwarded Emails

I got this one today. You might have seen it:

"DID YOU KNOW THESE FACTS?I SURE DIDN'T TILL NOW

Death is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death!

Make a personal reflection about this..... Very interesting, read until the end.....

It is written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7):

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: For whatsoever a man sow, That shall he also reap."

Here are some men and women Who mocked God :

John Lennon (Singer):
Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said: "Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about That. I am certain. Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him" (1966).

Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.

Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):

During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency.

Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died.

Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):

During A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ),

While smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said:"God, that's for you."

He died at the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner.

The man who built the Titanic [no name provided and I don't have time to look him up]

After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be. With an ironic tone he said: "Not even God can sink it"

The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic

Marilyn Monroe (Actress)

She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show. He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her. After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said: "I don't need your Jesus".

A week later, she was found dead in her apartment

Bon Scott (Singer)

The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang: "Don't stop me; I'm going down all the way, down the highway to hell".

On the 19th of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.

Campinas (IN 2005)

In Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a friend..... The mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter holding her hand, who was already seated in the car: "My Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You." She responded: "Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause Inside Here.....It's Already Full "
Hours later, news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident, everyone had died, The car could not be recognized what type of car it had been, but surprisingly, the trunk was intact. The police said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was broken


Christine Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and entertainer) Said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written. In June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle.

Many more important people have forgotten that there is no other name that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus. Many have died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still alive.

"Jesus"

PS: If it was a joke, you would have sent it to everyone. So are you going to have courage to send this?. I have done my part, Jesus said "If you are embarrassed about me, I will also be embarrassed about you before my father."

You are my 8 in 8 seconds. I am not breaking this. No way!"

OK, I cleaned up the spacing but left the grammar and punctuation alone. My point is that I get these forwarded emails every day from people who love Jesus but who think that they're not serving Him if they don't forward these emails to everyone on their list - whether the facts have been checked out or not. Forget about whether these people did or said what they are purported to say. I'm focusing on the contradictions in an email such as this: God is an angry God and Christians need to be angry at the world too.

If I have to spend all this time condemning the world, I don't have time to do anything else. Sure, the world is a mess; but who's standards are we judging the world by? As evidenced in this case, we're judging the world through man's interpretation of scripture rather than God's view of the state of mankind. That sounds so much like the Pharisees in scripture; more worried about offending God than getting to know Him.

It's easy to condemn the drunk who drives the wrong way on the inner Beltline and runs head-on into another vehicle, killing three innocent people. If we know that the man was Hispanic and did not have a driver's license, he's double damned. We don't stop at condemning the drunken driver, we condemn the border guards who let him slip through. We condemn the government for not enforcing illegal immigration laws; the police for not apprehending him before he killed someone; the man's father for not loving him or beating him enough. We can go all the way back to Adam and blame him for causing all the troubles we have on Earth. And while we're at it, we can blame God for not stopping that man from getting behind the wheel or for not moving the innocent vehicle out of the way in time. There's plenty of blame to go around.

But have we stopped to consider how God sees this mess of a world? Has anything changed since the time of Adam's fall? Can we really comprehend how God can justify sending His Son to suffer and die on our behalf? Can we comprehend how God loves that drunken driver as much as He does the people who were killed? We certainly don't. Perhaps our problem is that we want a God who is made in our image; one who judges and condemns words, thoughts and deeds that offend us.

What if Jesus really meant it when He said, "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved"? What if instead of a judging God we have a redeeming God? What if we spent as much time focussed on loving people as we do condemning them and let God worry about whether they deserve to be punished for their sins or not? We certainly don't need to accept sin in our lives, but rather than focus on our failures and the sins of others, we focus instead on showing and telling people how much God loves them? How about an email that simply says, "Jesus wants me to tell you that He loves you - and so do I!"