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I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20
Reflect
Magic is, in essence, a lie. What we think is happening in front of us is absolutely not what’s actually happening. It’s an illusion – a trick being played on our mind to make us think that something else is taking place. No one knows this better than Jim Munroe, who has made his living playing tricks on people for decades.
As an in-demand entertainer, Jim knew well what went on “behind the curtain.” He not only knew how the tricks worked – he designed them himself and practiced them incessantly to ensure that the audience would never figure out how they were done. And while this was good for business, it was not good for Jim’s faith. He was a trained skeptic, and he tended to see the things of God as a trick designed to fool people, must like an illusion. But inside of his heart, Jim was being drawn to the Lord, but in his skepticism, he had a challenge for God: to allow Jim to see behind God’s curtain. Jim wanted God to reveal to him “how it was all done” in a way that was undeniable.
He didn’t know what he was asking for.
In 2009, Jim was diagnosed with a form of leukemia so aggressive that it required an entirely new blood system. Doctors basically needed to kill as much of Jim as possible to allow them to transplant another person’s bone marrow into him that would replace his system entirely. And it couldn’t just be any bone marrow. They needed someone who almost perfectly matched Jim or else the whole thing wouldn’t work.
It seemed like too much to hope for, but amazingly, out of 7 million people there was one person who was Jim’s perfect match – a 19-year-old girl from Milwaukee. Doctors told Jim that after the procedure, when they looked at his blood they would no longer see him, but this 19-year-old girl. And that’s when everything clicked in his mind: It would be no longer Jim who was alive, but someone else living inside of him. God had taken him “behind the curtain” to show Him exactly how salvation works.
I know that most of you reading this have already made a decision for Christ. If you haven’t, please don’t wait another day. I encourage you to go to Steps to Peace With God and invite the Lord into your life right now.
But if you have made that decision already, I hope this story encourages you by showing you the miracle of salvation. On a spiritual level, God took your failing system – one that could not possibly sustain your life – and replaced it with a perfect match. It required him to more or less kill you – at least spiritually – so that He could place the nature of Christ within you so that you would have the hope of an eternity with Him. (And you didn’t even have to get chemo or lose all of your hair…)
I think sometimes that we lose sight of that miracle. We say, “Yeah, I’m a Christian. I accepted Jesus when I was (fill in the blank),” without thinking about how the wonder that happened on that day. We should all look at our salvation the way that Jim Munroe looks at his leukemia cure. He doesn’t take anything about that for granted, and neither should we.
Today, thank God for being willing to cure you of the poison of sin and praise Him for substituting your failed spiritual system through the perfection of Christ’s blood. Ask Him for the opportunity to share that miracle with others – because this is not a story we should keep to ourselves. Others need to be taken behind the curtain, too.
(I’m sure you can tell that Jim’s procedure worked, and he is still performing – and also telling His story to people around the world. To see more of the story, you should watch the video Jim made for the Billy Graham Association. He tells the story a lot better than I do…)
Reflection copyright © 2021 Doug DeBolt
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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