A Window With A View

     Just recently, I was able to spend some time with a young man from our church as he sat in a hospital. I am hoping at some point, he may give his testimony so I am not going to reveal his name. But he was in the hospital for some very serious reasons. In fact, it was so series that his room was isolated. Not until walking through an adjacent room, covering my face with a medical mask and washing my hands thoroughly was I able to go in to see him. He was on the 11th floor. We began to talk about things. It had been about a year before that I had first visited him in the hospital. He  reminded me of that. Over the past year,he has begun to come to church and God has him on the right track. It was a cold room. The bed was nearly slid under the television because there was almost not enough room for both of them. There were no roommates, no one to talk to,but there was a window. And it was a window with a view.
     

      “When I look out that window, I can see the building where I used to live. In fact, I can see the window to my old apartment,” he told me. Not realizing the significance of where his conversation was going, I casually said, “Oh,yeah.” I quickly realized this was not just a window with a view of his old apartment. God had been speaking to him. He told me how that when we first met a year earlier, he doubted the existence of God. “If God really exists, then why is all of this happening to me?” was his continual question. But as he looked out this hospital bed to see his old apartment, he remembered the ‘bad things’ that happened there. He understood that God was delivering a message. God had brought him into the hospital to remind him of where God had found him. He recounted to me who he used to be and then he said, “But now, God lives in my heart.I am going to church and learning how to live like God wants me to. I am making wiser decisions.” He had hope for his future and he had hope for eternity. “I remember hearing you preach about a man in Hell who could see into Heaven and I just remember thinking that the worst thing in life would be to live eternally in Hell being able to see my children, but not talk to them, give them or hug, or anything. I just couldn’t handle that thought. I want to be with them in Heaven.”

     We prayed and I left. Removing the mask and washing my hands again in the adjacent room, I was moved by the Holy Spirit. My eyes had just witnessed a miracle. I spoke with a man who had lived on the doorstep of Hell, but was now a citizen of Heaven. When I consider all of the great miracles recorded in Scripture, there is none so great or as precious as when a soul dead without Christ is resurrected and ushered into life. His name erased from the book of eternal damnation and recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

     I pray that we all remember from where we came and the muck and mire in which we were stuck. For every believer is one of God’s greatest miracles. May He remind us of the place and point where He first encountered us. We have been brought from death to life and our resurrection has been made possible by the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As we consider the scene of the empty tomb with the stone rolled away this season, I pray that He give us all a Window With A View!

Posted March26, 2010 by Pastor Lee Young, CrossRoads Community Church