Thursday, November 15, 2001
After watching the World Trade Center as part of my skyline for many years, it hit pretty hard that awful September 11th to see those towers come crashing down - and thousands of lives with them. The day after the first attack on the Trade Center in 1993, I was greeted by a TV crew as I got off a flight from Newark. They asked me as a New Yorker how I felt after that bombing. "Vulnerable" - that was my answer. Well, since the events of September 11, and the days since then, I think a lot of us are feeling that way. We watched everyday people like us, doing things we do - passengers on a jetliner, folks at their jobs -suddenly wiped out en masse. We're uncertain about what a new kind of war might mean, what's going to happen economically. And some of us are trying to help our children understand what we're not sure we understand. We feel vulnerable. It's as if some of our own sense of personal security and safety came crashing down with those majestic towers.
Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A WORD WITH YOU today about "When Our Towers Came Crashing Down."
Even without the disturbing events in the news, we all know the feeling of having things we had counted on suddenly gone - a person we love, our job, the collapse of a marriage, a bad report from the doctor. In times like these, we're hungry for something we can anchor to -- for something to sustain us when the bad news is more than we can bear -- for something that will make us feel really safe.
When our President addressed the nation on this generation's "day of infamy," he alluded to the one source of comfort and hope in moments like these. He quoted from that treasured 23rd Psalm in the Bible - actually, Psalm 23:4, our word for today from the Word of God. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me."
The Bible holds out to you and me a security that can keep you safe in life's deepest valleys - even the valley of the shadow of death. That security is a relationship, a person - "You are with me, Lord." All our lives we've been looking for one "unloseable" love. And there really is one. It's the love of the One who made you -- the One you will meet on the other side of your last heartbeat -- the One whose love caused Him to literally lay down His life for you.
In your vulnerable moments, your moments that are more than you can handle alone - those moments when you've gone seeking God - maybe you've realized that there's something that is separating you from Him. The Bible confirms there is - "your sins", God says, "have separated you from your God" (Isaiah 59:2). But Jesus came to remove that wall between you and God - the only way it could be removed - by Jesus dying to pay the death penalty for you and me hijacking a life that God was supposed to run.