Major Dalton - September 1, 2024
The Heart of a Killer
"If you were alive in 1850, would you be the kind of person who would own slaves?" A professor recently opened a lecture on Civil War history with that question. By show of hands, not a single student believed they would have taken part in that wicked institution. No doubt, the vast majority of us view ourselves as being incapable of such wickedness. But there is a problem with this assumption. By the start of the Civil War, nearly 1 out of 4 free people in the south owned another human being. Numbers can be unsettling things. This experiment tells us something important. Given the right circumstances, we are all capable of terrible things, acts that presently seem unimaginable. They did not believe it possible. But if the students had been alive during that period, the facts show that at least 25% of the class would have willingly endorsed what they currently believed to be unimaginable. Sadly, so would we. We can't envision the level of depravity we are capable of. That is one of the critical flaws of human nature, a failure of imagination. The week before his crucifixion, Jesus found himself in conflict with a group of people just like us. They could not imagine the horrific thing they were all about to do. But Jesus did. And in an important parable, he attempted to warn them. This Sunday, join us as we dive into this parable and reveal the uncomfortable truth about our own lawless heart, and the comforting truth about the loving heart of God.