Saturday: A Butcher Knife and the Way
WEEK 37
SATURDAY
A BUTCHER KNIFE AND THE WAY
Acts 16:25-34
We continue to look at the mastery of the ingrown through turning life into outgoingness in evangelism. I was talking with a man who told of a reporter investigating crime in this country. At the end of the investigation, in which he laid bare the crime situation in some of our cities, the reporter was so depressed by what he had found that he committed suicide. He had no inner resources to match these outer conditions, so he simply backed out of life through self-destruction. The people in the Acts, finding in the Holy Spirit inner resources, were able to walk into life with all its evil and sin and call it to repentance and conversion.
This tragic dilemma is seen in this case: A woman who was an alcoholic had a daughter, who after examination, was told that she had cancer. The shock to the family circle was terrible. The husband said to the wife, “This has come upon us because of the way you are living.” It angered her, so she left and went to her parents’ home and told what the husband had said. The parents said, “Well, maybe your husband is right.” This made her more furious. So she went back home and found her husband gone. She decided to commit suicide; tried to do so with some electric gadgets and failed. She then took the butcher knife, determined to slit her wrists. She took the knife into the living room and laid it down on a book in order to gain time to get up the nerve to end things. She noted the title of the book, The Way, one I wrote.* She began to thumb through it, was arrested by it, and began to read it. In the midst of reading she dropped on her knees and surrendered her life to Christ and was converted on the spot. Her alcoholism dropped away; she became an entirely new person, and is on top of her world and its tragedies.
The coming together—of that butcher knife and The Way on the same table—represent dramatically the human alternatives: the way of self-destruction through despair or the way of self-surrender to the Deliverer. It is the way of the slit wrists or the nail-pierced hands, suicide or salvation.
O Jesus, you are standing at the crossroads of human life. Help us to take not the ways to dead ends but the Way, the Way of release and freedom and victory. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall illustrate the Way and not the way of escape.
*E. Stanley Jones, The Way (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015).