Ambushed

I am curious about the random verses that suck people into the kingdom of God as they are minding their own business. I know they're out there, because one ambushed me a few decades ago.

I was walking down the street in Villars, Switzerland, with a friend. I was not a Christian, and he was. I confided to him a strange phenomenon of human behavior (or at least my behavior), thinking that I had observed something no one else had ever noticed before.

I told Bob that for years I had tried to lose a few pounds but was not successful. On the one hand, I was sure it was a form of servitude or bondage of the will, because I had never been able to overcome it. On the other hand, I also was sure that every time I picked up a morsel of food, it was an act of pure, unconditioned choice on my part. I found it quite a fascinating philosophical conundrum-how bondage and choice could both be true.

Bob immediately told me to look up Romans 7, which I did when I later went to the hotel. I was so amazed to find the exact description of my dilemma that I mark this epiphany as the beginning of my slow surrender to Christ.

I know a man named George, who is in a Michigan prison. He came to Christ when his cellie, in the course of a conversation, said the words "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything else shall be added to you." That did it for George. He never looked back. His former cellie tells me that guys come up to him in the exercise yard and ask him what's up; they tell him they see something different in him.

I know a man whose marriage was dead as a doornail. The house was sold, the lawyers were involved, and he had moved in with his adult daughter and her husband. Then he was reading the book of Hosea one day and it dawned on him that if Hosea, at God's urging, pursued his wife this persistently, God must want him to pursue his wife too. So he picked up the phone and called her. A dam of tears burst on her end, and she called off the lawyers. They have been back together for almost a year now.

Then there is my friend who was in a season of depression over the divorce of her son, and she was angry with God. On a Saturday night, just as she had decided that she would tell her husband in the morning that she was no longer going to church, he happened to come into the room and read her Isaiah 9:6, as it was near Christmas. When he got to the phrase "and the government will be upon his shoulders," her life changed. She understood with great relief that the government of things in life is on Christ's shoulders, not hers. She did not have to carry the world, or the destinies of her children.

I wonder if any of you out there have been ambushed by a verse in the Bible.

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