Sermon: The Rest of the Story

#1640A
Mark Schindler
Given 26-Feb-22; 48 minutes

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Once again (to borrow a page from Joe Baity, who is careful to keep us mindful of the swift passage of the time God has graciously given to be ready for His holy days), the first day of Unleavened Bread is a short 49 days away. This puts the Passover just less than 7 weeks from now.

So today in this message, I hope to help us add to what we are mulling over in our minds as we head into these most important days. I hope in this brief sermon we will begin to find another vital aspect of our part, as God’s elect, in remembrance, repentance, and reconciliation that can only be accomplished within the reality of Jesus Christ at work in our lives.

We will begin with some very familiar scriptures, especially at this time of year. We will be turning first to the hinge pin verse for this time of year, I Corinthians 11:29.

This verse has been the subject of David Grabbe’s CGG Weekly over the last three weeks. So before we turn there, let me quote from the last part of David’s third installment, because when reading it I thought it had a great deal to do with the pivot point within this sermon today.

David wrote within the very last paragraphs:

Thus, if we are not adequately judging ourselves about the value we place on all parts of His spiritual Body, and God deems that it is time for Him to judge us instead, then partaking of Christ’s sacrifice will not provide healing but the reverse.

If we are in opposition to Christ through despising parts of His Body, His sacrifice will not be a blessing for us but more like a curse.

It is impossible to appreciate and value the shed blood of the Savior at Passover, while devaluing parts of His spiritual Body throughout the rest of the year.

Now, if you have not already turned there, please turn to I Corinthians 11 and we will pick it up in verse 23-32.

I Corinthians 11:23-32 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me."

In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes. Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.

Brethren, please keep what I cited from the end of David’s essay firmly in your minds, as we are in this period of self-examination, particularly while asking God to show us our secret sins during this preparation period. We need to make Psalm 19:12-14 consistently part of our prayers throughout the year and especially now. It would be a good idea for us to turn there and remind ourselves of this important prayer.

Psalm 19:12-14 Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer.

Hopefully by the end of this sermon God will have helped us look into a presumptuous sin we continue to overlook.

Please turn with me now Romans 6.

Romans 6:1-9 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?

Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.

For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him.

Romans 6:17-18 But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

We were slaves in more ways than one! But we are not to continue with the same mindset we had when slaves. Through Jesus Christ we have now been given the responsibility and the ability to live as Christ lives. We have now been given the ability to do something through Christ, who now lives within us, that is impossible for this world without Him! This was something that was impossible for Israel as they were delivered from their slave captivity in Egypt.

Do we see this, brethren? In God’s incredible plan and His multiple purposes, He delivered physical Israel from the bondage of slavery in Egypt as part of His fulfillment of His promises to Abraham, but also for a permanent example for us. Except for a select few, they continued living with the minds of slaves during this part in God’s plan without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, (which Levi Graham talked about in his sermonette).

I want to firmly establish in our minds what Jesus Christ expects of those who have been given His Holy Spirit to do what Israel never could have done.

Turn to Matthew 5.

Matthew 5:14-22 "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.' But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be in danger of hell fire.”

Matthew 5:27-30 "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”

Matthew 5:43-48 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

Turn to Deuteronomy where we will read through a number of scriptures without comment but mindful of what God was doing to set the ground rules for us and a much higher bar for those called, baptized, and given God’s Holy Spirit to truly learn to live as God lives.

Deuteronomy 6:17-25 You shall diligently keep the commandments of the LORD your God, His testimonies, and His statutes which He has commanded you. And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the LORD, that it may be well with you, and that you may go in and possess the good land of which the LORD swore to your fathers, to cast out all your enemies from before you, as the LORD has spoken.

When your son asks you in time to come, saying, 'What is the meaning of the testimonies, the statutes, and the judgments which the LORD our God has commanded you?' Then you shall say to your son: 'We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand; and the LORD showed signs and wonders before our eyes, great and severe, against Egypt, Pharaoh, and all his household.

Then He brought us out from there, that He might bring us in, to give us the land of which He swore to our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that He might preserve us alive, as it is this day. Then it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to observe all these commandments before the LORD our God, as He has commanded us.'

Deuteronomy 7:6-11 "For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the LORD loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face. Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.”

Deuteronomy 8:1-6 "Every commandment which I command you today you must be careful to observe, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land of which the LORD swore to your fathers. And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.

So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD. Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the LORD your God chastens you. Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the LORD your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him.”

Deuteronomy 8:11-18 "Beware that you do not forget the LORD your God by not keeping His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes which I command you today, lest—when you have eaten and are full, and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them; and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied; when your heart is lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, in which were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty land where there was no water; who brought water for you out of the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do you good in the end—then you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.' And you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day."

Deuteronomy 9:1-6 "Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said, 'Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?'

Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you. "Do not think in your heart, after the LORD your God has cast them out before you, saying, 'Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land'; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out from before you.

It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore understand that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people."

God has set a much higher bar for us, expecting us to do through Jesus Christ what they never could do, as a stiff-necked people of a physical circumcision.

With a circumcised heart we must remember the lessons of the trials and tribulations of this people God had set apart from physical slavery. Physical Israel was not just as a representative of His power and righteousness to the nations around them, but they are the very real example of what He expects from those who have been buried with Christ in completely breaking the bands of slavery to sin made possible only through Jesus Christ.

With all of this in mind I am now going to quote extensively from a book that is a true story of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

I am going to begin with an excerpt from the first chapter of a book called The Railway Man and I hope you will be patient with all that I am going to cite from the book. There is a purpose to the occasionally tedious descriptive account I will be reading.

Although you may only see a very vague connection between this and the spring holy days, I hope by the end of this message it will help to give us a little more to consider, as we prepare to remember the incredible work of reconciliation by the Father and the Son and what is expected of us.

The Railway Man was written by Eric Lomax, who was a severely tortured prisoner of the Japanese for three years in World War II. He was a young British officer and part of the real group of slaves forced by the Japanese to build the Burma Railroad and the bridge over the River Kwai.

He begins his narrative this way:

“I have a painting in the hallway of my house in Berwick-upon-Tweed, by the Scottish artist Duncan Mackellar. It is a large work set in St. Enoch Station in Glasgow on a dusty summer evening in the 1880s. A woman in late middle age, dressed in dark and modest clothes and carrying a parasol, is standing tense and distraught, looking out beyond us, oblivious of any other presence. Behind her the high smoke-grimed glass and wrought iron walls of the station rise up. She is gazing off the edge of the platform at a vanishing train, so that we see her through the eyes of a receding traveler, and she has the flat restrained face of a person who has learned to swallow grief.

Her sudden loneliness is captured as she strains to keep an image of her child, or so we assume, who is on the train heading for the emigrant ship or a colonial war—India, Afghanistan, the Gold Coast.

Although it is a conventional image, it is genuinely moving. I have always loved it. Railway stations have always attracted me, not just because trains are there, but because they are also ambivalent places, echoing with completed journeys and shrill with the melancholy noises of departure. Mackellar’s painting is about the inevitability of separation, the cost of journeying. And we have never created any sound as evocative of separation as the whistle of a steam locomotive; that high note of inhuman relief as vaporized water is blown off and meets the cold air.

That age is gone now, but the realities of grief, and the consequences of grief, of which Mackellar caught something in his painting, are not so easily banished. The passion for trains and railways is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture.

These two afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. But it took me nearly fifty years to surmount the consequences of torture.

I was born in 1919, the year the World War I formally ended, the year that Alcock and Brown drifted down out of the rain over the Atlantic and landed their frail bomber in an Irish bog. I remember being told about this feat of aeronautical engineering and skill at a very young age, and I remember thinking about the two intrepid pilots as I walked along the grey promenade of the seafront at Joppa, to the east of Edinburgh. Joppa is the name of the biblical town where Jonah went when he was fleeing God, and from which he took ship. I discovered soon enough, though it was a long time before space on that scale meant much to me, that this sea was a sheltered inlet, the Firth of Forth, and that even though the distant shore could only be seen in fine weather there were worse seas out there behind the fog and wind.

Brethren, it is of interest and pertinent to the latter part of this sermon, that he would mention Jonah and fleeing the Sovereign Creator! Jonah could not agree with God’s mercy toward that nation, which he saw as unworthy of God’s mercy and his own time and efforts. To his mind Jonah determined the Ninevites deserved no quarter because he considered their unforgivable violence against his nation!

Eric Lomax was a prisoner and slave laborer on the Burma railway. Most of you are probably familiar with the 1957 academy award winning film, Bridge on the River Kwai. Except for the historical setting, Pierre Boulle’s book and the 1957 movie that followed was fictional and considered an affront by those prisoners who actually were the tortured slave labor used to build the 261 mile stretch of the railway through the Burmese and Thai jungles to support the Japanese military for the invasion of India.

Over 60,000 Allied prisoners and 200,000 Asians were used as slave labor by the Japanese. The railway has been called the Death Railway, because of the over 100,000 deaths during its construction from 1942 to 1943—over 90,000 Asian civilians and over 16,000 Allied prisoners died as slaves to the Japanese military.

Many of the Japanese treated the Allied prisoners with intense cruelty and torture, because they considered them less than dogs because in their culture, surrendering made them beneath contempt.

Although the casualty count was over 100,000, many if not most who survived, went home at war’s end physically and mentally scarred for life—for some a fate worse than death! Eric Lomax among them.

Eric Lomax was a lieutenant with the British signal corps when they surrendered in Singapore in 1942. They herded them like cattle in sweltering trains without water to the prison camp of slave labor for the railway.

During the hours before the surrender, as they destroyed any equipment that could be useful to the Japanese, he and some fellow officers smuggled some discarded radio parts with them.

In the camp they assembled a workable radio, not for transmission but to listen to broadcasts on the war effort. He also drew maps of the Burmese railway, not for spying but because he had been an avid railway devotee all his life both before and after the war. He drew the maps to keep his sanity and pass the time.

However, when the Japanese discovered the radio and the maps, he and number of his fellow officers were taken and viciously tortured, almost beyond human endurance by the Japanese Kenpeitai, who were the Japanese counterpart to the notorious German Gestapo. Some did die brutally, while some like Eric Lomax suffered through the daily physical, emotional, and mental torture, while being constantly questioned and threatened to confess to spying and broadcasting.

No matter how much truth he told them the torture became worse and worse, leaving scars and deformities—physically, emotionally, and mentally that could never be healed!

I will not even begin to try to describe the almost unbelievable torment these men were forced to endure, because it is almost too awful to repeat, especially with your children that may be listening to this sermon. But suffice it to say it went to the very depths of demonic cruelty that men can often be driven to when God removes His hand.

This left these men so scarred beyond the lifelong physical infirmities that many became seething cauldrons of hidden hatred that could be shared with no one else but their brothers in arms.

After scores of pages detailing the horror of their imprisonment Eric Lomax writes:

One evening early in August, Bon gathered us round him on our beds and told an incomprehensible story, which he could not credit himself.

He said that a new type of bomb had been used over Japan, that it had destroyed the city of Hiroshima; that it was a weapon of terrible power developed in secret by the Allies, and that there was talk of surrender, but none of us believed it. False optimism was at a premium in Changi by late 1945.

The Japanese medical inspections continued even now. On 9th August eight men were judged fit to return to Outram Road and that evening the reports from the secret radio spoke of another bomb of almost cosmic power and another Japanese city destroyed. I was passed over (again) in the selection. Six days later Japan surrendered. Four days after that, those gates of hell were opened from the inside, and all the surviving Allied prisoners were brought from Outram Road to Changi.

However, for Eric Lomax and all the other slave labor prisoners, the slavery and torture had been imbedded in their lives.

He writes:

The nightmares began soon after my return. They were usually about Outram Road. I would be left in a cell on my own, with no food or water, starving and suffocating and crying out for release, and in the dream’s compression of time months would pass while I was ignored, and I knew I was never going to be released. Or I would be doing something perfectly innocent and would suddenly find myself back in Outram Road, the victim of some arbitrary justice, this time with no prospect of ever getting out again because there was no reason for me to be there. At other times I would fall endlessly and painfully down the iron staircase covered in disgusting sores. They were all the same dream. In the cold light of day my anger was more often turned to the Japanese who had beaten, interrogated, or tortured me. I wanted to do violence to them, thinking quite specifically of how I would like to revenge myself on the goon squad from Kanburi, and the hateful little interrogator from the Kenpeitai with his dreadful English pronunciation, his mechanical questions, and his way of being in the room yet seeming to be detached from it.

I wished to drown him, cage him, and beat him, to see how he liked it. I still thought of his voice, his slurred elocution: ‘Lomax, you will be killed shortly;’ ‘Lomax, you will tell us . . .’—you remember phrases from encounters that have hurt you, and my meetings with him were cast in a harsh light. The Kanburi Radio Affair was already a footnote to the history of the war.

I wanted you to hear this account from Lomax so that you might understand just how important his worldview had been by what he had gone through.

Through the entirety of Eric Lomax’s book, he was aimed at one remarkable point. Although the majority of the 276 pages of his book deal with his own torturous life during and beyond the years of his captivity, it is the last 50 or so pages that deals with the incredible reconciliation of him with the Japanese interrogator who had been such an intrinsic part of Eric Lomax’s living hell for almost 50 years.

The final part of his book deals with the determined work of his wife, Patti, to help her husband forgive and move beyond the past and to accept the genuine and heartfelt plea for forgiveness from the Japanese man who had been the consistent source of his wrath and desire for revenge for almost 50 years—the Kenpeitai translator, Nagase.

Although this only takes up 20 percent of the book, it is the soul of the book dedicated to the incredibly difficult journey toward forgiveness and reconciliation between the tortured and the sincerely repentant torturer, which had been facilitated by the determined love of Eric’s wife, Patti.

Almost 20 years after the book was published it was made into a movie that focused mainly on the storyline of the last 50 pages of the book. The focus of the movie was mostly on Eric and his wife Patti from about 1980 through the incredible reconciliation.

However, now, as Paul Harvey used to say, here is the Rest of The Story!

I hope through the rest of the story, you will see a very valuable lesson we need to consider as we approach the Passover regarding what could be our secret sins that we may not even recognize because of our own self-centered worldview regardless of the painful source of that worldview.

We have to be quite clear in our minds that no matter what we have been through under God’s hand, it does not entitle us to be dismissive of the views and needs of others. It is another face of the self-centered mind of a slave to sin that destroys relationships with God and men.

Continuing the rest of the story, the dedication page to the book reads:

For Elizabeth Sutherland Lomax (1877-1942) and her grandchildren, Linda, Eric and Charmaine, who never knew the story.

Elizabeth Lomax was his mother. Linda, Eric, and Charmaine were his children (who were never even acknowledged in the film). You see, missing in the account is Eric Lomax’s first wife, to whom he had become engaged in 1941 shortly before leaving for Singapore, and who he married shortly after returning from the war, as a different man.

Lomax wrote in his book:

One of the first unbridgeable distances between us was created simply by our inability to talk. I have spent most of my life unable to talk about my experiences in Southeast Asia, but I am pretty sure that in those early years of intimacy with my wife I wanted to try to tell her, to explain to her what it had been like. It was hard for her to be interested.

I was expected to behave as though my formative years had not happened. My fumbling attempts to begin a description of the effects of what my comrades and I had experienced in Kanburi, or to talk about the Japanese who had done these things to us, were brushed aside.

She naturally felt that she had a hard time of it too. For civilians, there had been the difficulty of getting eggs, the air raid warnings, the waiting in lines. She simply did not know, and I am sure that tens of thousands of returning soldiers walked bewildered into the same incomprehension.

It was as though we were now speaking a different language to our own people. The hurt I felt silenced me as effectively as a gag. It was hard to talk, but my wife made it easy not to.

Eric Lomax wrote a bit further along, expressing his disdain for those who had not been through what he had been through:

[I]ntolerance over things so surpassingly trivial was very hard for me to take. I had felt less morbid vindictiveness towards the Japanese guards in Changi than these seemingly normal Scottish middle-class people were displaying to their own blood relatives. Marriage can be like incarceration without a key, as I was beginning to find out. Of course, it takes more than one person to create what Milton called, “Disconsolate household captivity,” and my withdrawals into cold and blank anger in the face of hostility, pulling my shell around me and locking it tight, cannot have made things easier. Confrontation threatened my whole being, triggering flashes of memory that I could not articulate to anyone, and most tragically of all, not even to my wife.

I could not help noticing that most of the veterans had done very little in the war; their complaints about how awful “fire watching” duties had been did not under the circumstances engage my full sympathy. I became impatient at their ignorance and their sheer hypocrisy.

Brethren, after just hearing me read what he wrote about his lack of communication with people, especially his wife, let me read to you what Eric Lomax had considered the greatest torture he himself endured during his slave labor imprisonment under the Japanese.

The worst new enemy which we faced, even compared to the dirt and hunger, was perhaps the most formidable of all: silence. It was often absolute. There could be a sick, deadly hush throughout the entire prison.

It seemed particularly sadistic to make us share a cell and forbid us to speak to each other and at the same time deprive us of books and distractions of any kind. There was precisely nothing to do in that room. Sometimes the slot would fall open when we were talking quietly and a voice would shout at us in Japanese to shut up; at other times the door would be thrown back and a guard rush in, his sheathed sword whipping down on our heads and shoulders like a hard rod, the shock worsened by fear that the blade of the sword was only a thickness of leather away from slicing us apart.

We were here because we had broken a taboo on listening to forbidden words. And their ban on talking had an obscene aptness about it, whether they were aware of it or not. We had survived two years in the camps only by endless talk; our need to know what was happening around us was now greater than ever.

This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts—starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.

Brethren, without knowing it and from the depths of his own tortured past he was doing the same to those around him because they could not possibly understand how much more he went through than they.

I would like to read a few lines from an article I found shortly before the movie was released in 2015 that contained an interview with his daughter, Charmaine.

The article reads:

Eric Lomax, who was tortured by the Japanese during the Second World War and eventually rescued from his torment through the love of his wife Patti.”

But there are three names you won't hear during the film: those of Nan, Eric's first wife, and Linda and Charmaine, his daughters. The four of them were a family for 37 years yet they are completely missing from the film, Today Nan and Linda are dead, and Eric himself died last year.

Charmaine said after seeing the movie:

What I saw for the first time was the man Dad should have been, the man he would have been if he hadn't suffered in the terrible way that he did.

That understanding has meant the end of a long journey to forgive her father. That is an extraordinary feat, because the truth is that Charmaine, Linda, and Nan were victims of torture just as Eric was. But while he was the victim of appalling physical torture, his family was tortured secondhand for decades because of what it did to him and to their relationship.

Brethren, the book and film about Eric Lomax were both intended to be just a story about human repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. However, to me the rest of the story became a much more important issue for us to address as we approach the Passover, while seeking God’s direction to show us our secret sins that could ultimately, if left unchecked, not only take us out of the God family but pull others along with us.

What was impossible for Eric Lomax and Israel in the wilderness is required of us, because with Jesus Christ we can do what they could not! But if we are not considering our secret sin of a self-centered world view generated by our own life experiences, and we are subtly devaluing others, we could be trampling on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

I would like to end this sermon with two sobering sets of verses—both I think, along with the rest of Eric Lomax’s story should give us something to consider as we examine our relationships with others in the Body of Christ as we prepare for the Passover.

Turn to Luke 18.

Luke 18:9-14 Also He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.' And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Now turn with me to something that is not quite as obvious as that is. Let us go to Jeremiah. As you are turning there, remember that this is a prophecy of physical Israel returning from captivity following the tribulation. But in truth this is our reality right now.

Jeremiah 30:1-11 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, “Thus speaks the LORD God of Israel, saying: 'Write in a book for yourself all the words that I have spoken to you. For behold, the days are coming,' says the LORD, 'that I will bring back from captivity My people Israel and Judah,' says the LORD. 'And I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.'"

Now these are the words that the LORD spoke concerning Israel and Judah. "For thus says the LORD: 'We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask now, and see, whether a man is ever in labor with child? So why do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labor, and all faces turned pale? Alas! For that day is great, so that none is like it; and it is the time of Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.

For it shall come to pass in that day,' says the LORD of hosts, 'that I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds; foreigners shall no more enslave them. But they shall serve the LORD their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up for them. 'Therefore do not fear, O my servant Jacob,' says the LORD, 'nor be dismayed, O Israel; for behold, I will save you from afar, and your seed from the land of their captivity. Jacob shall return, have rest and be quiet, and no one shall make him afraid.

For I am with you,' says the LORD, 'to save you; though I make a full end of all nations where I have scattered you, yet I will not make a complete end of you. But I will correct you in justice, and will not let you go altogether unpunished.'

Jeremiah 31:1-3 "At the same time," says the LORD, "I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people." Thus says the LORD: "The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness—Israel, when I went to give him rest." The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying: "Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.

Jeremiah 31:8-9 Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the ends of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and the one who labors with child, together; a great throng shall return there. They shall come with weeping, and with supplications I will lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters, in a straight way in which they shall not stumble; for I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn.

Jeremiah 31:18-19 "I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself: 'You have chastised me, and I was chastised, like an untrained bull; restore me, and I will return, for You are the LORD my God. Surely, after my turning, I repented; and after I was instructed, I struck myself on the thigh; I was ashamed, yes, even humiliated, because I bore the reproach of my youth.'

Brethren, why do you think those who had been scattered among the nations are weeping as Jesus Christ, Himself, is leading them back out of captivity following the Tribulation? Tears of joy? Perhaps!

But more likely, under Christ’s direction, they realize that they could have just as likely been the persecutors, as well as the persecuted! We must learn to do as the apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians (2:3) and learn to wholeheartedly esteem others better than ourselves, regardless of the life circumstances that God has very specifically allowed for each of us to go through, or the rest of the story might be that we find ourselves judged by God among the persecutors of the Body of Christ!

Let us all be looking to God to lead us in wholeheartedly esteeming others better than ourselves and let the mind of Christ truly be in us with a selfless outgoing concern for everyone.

MS/rwu/drm