Evil Takes No Holiday

On Christmas Day, as we have been following the news in the last two weeks, there was an attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound Delta or Northwest Airlines jetliner, as we all know, by an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. And fortunately, he did not succeed. I think we all know the story of that, unless we've been living in a cave the last couple of weeks. What is interesting, and what I've noted about that, is that it occurred on Christmas Day, and I think that was by design. Oftentimes, you'll find certain events that will take place on a major holiday or a weekend when leaders and general public's attention is diverted by leisure, or in this case, the major holiday of the year for most people. And when people tend to relax, let down, let their guard down, things can happen.

Case in point, in 1962, the Soviet Union, with their East German proxies, decided on a weekend, I think it was in August, to start erecting a wall down the center of the city of Berlin.

And they chose a Sunday morning to do it. And they chose Sunday morning because they knew that the powers in Washington, the president, the secretary of state in all, would be at their weekend homes.

And their reaction time to this new crisis would be delayed. And so early, early on a Sunday morning in Berlin, they started doing that. And true to form, John Kennedy, who was president, Dean Rusk, who was secretary of state, found out about it while they were either on their boat sailing or on the beach. That delay and that let down, an enemy calculates into their attack. And so I think the same thing happened as to why Christmas Day was chosen. I don't know that for a fact. I'm just surmising. But I did notice, even in my own reaction, as I was watching the news that day and caught the news of it, it just didn't register even with me. And I wasn't keeping Christmas, but because it was kind of a day off, a change of pace, you find yourself relaxed or you're not alert. And I find myself thinking, oh yeah, a little bit later. Wow, that's big. That could have been really big. And maybe you had the same reaction. And it taught me and reminded me of a very important spiritual lesson. And that is evil takes no holiday.

Evil doesn't take a holiday. And there's a major spiritual lesson there. My sermon today is not about terrorism in any way, shape or form necessarily, but to remind us of something that Satan is the source of evil in this world. And he is always on alert. He doesn't take a holiday. He doesn't take any time off, whether it's God's holy days or the holidays of the world that he has inspired to counterfeit God's truth and plan and foisted off in this world. He doesn't observe any of them. He is always 24-7 on alert to do his work and to press his advantage because days and hours and minutes mean nothing to a spirit being. And so he is always constantly on alert. I've been playing into something else that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

And it's really part of one of the wiles and attacks that Satan uses on a regular basis and can use with any one of us. There are a number of different things we could use to explain and to illustrate Satan's methods of attack. But the one I want to focus on this morning is what can be called an unforgiving spirit. An unforgiving spirit is one of the chief tactics that Satan uses to attack, thwart God's purpose, and certainly to get into the heart of the people of God. And if you and I, as Christians, ever really get into an unforgiving spirit, which is what was being discussed in the sermon at this morning, we can fall prey to Satan. If we fail to forgive, we can be exposed and easily taken captive by Satan to do his will. Satan can play you and I as he chooses if we allow ourselves to be bitten by an unforgiving spirit.

Now, you and I may not be walking around every day just thinking, I can't forgive that person. I'm going to hold this grudge forever and ever.

It's only at times when we might be caught up in a particular problem or we might run across someone who's harmed us, someone we look upon as an enemy or a foe or someone who's offended us, or maybe legitimately done some harm in the past, that we might be reminded of that.

Normally, you don't walk around in an unforgiving spirit, but that's the subtlety of Satan's wiles.

Because while we may think everything's okay and life is good, got a little jingle in the pocket, health's okay, job's flowing along pretty good, we're okay, you're okay, I'm okay.

Satan can still be doing his work and he lets us go along with that. But if we have not learned this particular lesson of being able to forgive our enemy, forgive those who do wrong us, and we hold a grudge, that can be triggered by Satan whenever he wants to play that card in our life to his end within the church, to destroy us, to keep us from achieving our potential. An unforgiving spirit. This was graphically, visually brought to my mind by a recent movie that Debbie and I went to see a few weeks ago. You can still see this movie. It's still in the theaters. It's not making as much money as Avatar or the vampire movies that are out there, but it's doing respectable business. But it's one I would recommend. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the others, but I would recommend this if you want, during this cold weather and you find yourself a little bit too housebound, you want to go see a movie, you might want to go see this one. Pay the extra bucks it's worth it instead of waiting for it to come out on Netflix or rental. The movie is called Invictus. Invictus. I-N-V-I-C-T-U-S.

The title is taken from a poem, an old Victorian poem, that plays into the movie. But the movie is a story of Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela, many of you will know, was the first black president of South Africa. He was a political prisoner for 27 years under the white apartheid government of South Africa when he was released in 1990 from jail. And in 1994, he became the first elected black president of the nation of South Africa. The movie portrays this story quite well. The movie is done by Clint Eastwood, who always seems to do a pretty good movie as a director.

The part of Nelson Mandela is played by well-known actor Morgan Freeman, and he does a very, very good job. The story talks about Mandela when he was released and when he became president. And it also brings in another prime character, the other star of the movie, who is Matt Damon. They have, you know, got an old guy like Morgan Freeman, and then they got Matt Damon for the younger set.

Matt Damon plays a an individual. This is all a true story. It's a true story. Matt Damon plays a character, an individual named Francois Pinard, who was the captain of the South African rugby team in the early to mid-1990s. And as the movie goes through it, it shows how Nelson Mandela, when he became president of a highly divided, fractured country between black and white along some very, very well-defined racial lines, sought to keep a civil war of bloodshed from erupting, and how he used the national white sport of rugby to keep things together and keep it from the nation from erupting into bloodshed. You have to understand a little bit about rugby, which is not a normal North American game. It's played in some areas, but rugby is probably the predecessor of our American football. It's a very rough physical game. It is played around the world. In South Africa, it was the game of the white ruling class. Okay. The black class of South Africa, their game was soccer. It probably still is. Rugby was identified with the white Afrikaner in English.

Blacks didn't even associate. They didn't root for it. They always rooted for the other team, whoever was playing South Africa there. And so the movie shows how Mandela used this to bring together the people, as in 1995, South Africa was hosting the World Rugby Cup.

The World Championship. And Francois Pinard, played by Matt Damon, was the captain of the rugby team. Mandela reached out to him and persuaded him to help him with his cause. And even to the point of Mandela of putting on the green and gold colors of the springbok. That's what they were called, the springboks. A springbok is a kind of a gazelle, antelope type of animal in South Africa. The springboks were the rugby team. Mandela even put on their hat and wore their colors into the stadium on the day of the final game against New Zealand. And it just brought down the house. That's all told in and through the movie. It's all true as to what happened. For the black South African president to put on the green and black colors of the white Afrikaner, the oppressor's team, and to wear that in that stadium at that time was a very, very strong statement. What Mandela did was use sport, in this case rugby, to appeal to the hearts of his enemy and to avert a bloodbath and to try to bring the nation together at a very critical moment in its history as it was transitioning from a white minority rule to the black majority rule. That's essentially the story of Invictus. And as I watched that, I knew basically what it was that I was going to go see in one sense, because I'd seen the trailers and read a little bit about it. It reminded me of Romans 12. And I'd like for you to turn there, because this will be the scriptural foundation of today's sermon, Romans 12, leading up to verse 21, which caps off that section of Romans 12. For us here in Fort Wayne, this is kind of an extension of our Bible study that we started earlier this year, or last year, on the book of Romans. We got through chapter 11, so this is a continuation of it. We'll just focus on a few verses here in Romans chapter 12, where it begins in verse 9. We can begin there.

The first 11 chapters of Romans are very, very heavy doctrinal subjects Paul covers.

With chapter 12, he begins to get into some practical, basic Christianity relationship items. And here is the heart of one right here that is what came to my mind when I watched this movie. Verse 9, he said, "...let love be without hypocrisy, abhor of what is evil, and cling to what is good. Be kindly affectionate to one another, with brotherly love and honor, giving preference to another, not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer, distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality." And then beginning in verse 14, he gets into the theme that he carries through to the end of the chapter. Verse 14, he says, "...bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse." You know, the other verses leading up to it, no argument there, right? Should be given hospitality. Should be kindly affection to one another. But, oh, blessing somebody that persecutes us and not cursing? That's hard. That's difficult. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things. Do not be wise in your own opinion. Then again, in verse 17, he comes back to that thought, repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in a sign of all men. If it is possible, as much as depends on you, on you, not the other person, but as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men, including those who persecute, including those who would harm you. Beloved, in verse 19, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath. For it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

And then verse 20, therefore, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him drink, for in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.

This instruction on these points here, beginning in verse 14 forward about blessing those who persecute you, not repaying evil for evil, run counter to our human nature. Run counter to the way many of us may have been even taught by example or even word and deed in our youth.

Runs counter to human nature because we want to get even. And someone who is evil or someone who harms us or someone close to us, we want revenge. We don't want to give them food if they're hungry.

We don't want to give them water if they're hungry. We want to see them suffer, just like we suffered or like someone else suffered that they may have harmed, right?

Yes, we do. Every one of us wants that to some one degree or the other. And it's hard to fight that off. It says, don't be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. This is the section that I thought about after I watched this movie, Invictus, a true story of a very, very interesting political situation that developed over a number of years and kind of came to a head in South Africa in the 1990s, as told in this movie. Now, you don't like a lot of movies that are based on real things. They don't tell you everything because they only have a couple of hours or so. And this movie is a little bit more than two hours. It's a rather long movie by feature-length film standards, but it still doesn't tell you the whole story. What's interesting is the movie is based on a book that just came out a couple of years ago. And the title of the book is called Playing the Enemy, written by John Carlin, subtitled Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation. And the game that is referred to as the final game of the World Cup Rugby game match, held in South Africa in April of 1995, played between South Africa and New Zealand. That was the final game. I'll go ahead and spoil the movie for you. South Africa won that year. But what made it even more sweet is the fact that South Africa had been barred for years from international rugby competition because of apartheid, the political philosophy that separated the races for decades in South Africa and came to a conclusion and to an end in that period of time, the 1990s. And so for South Africa to win that rugby match was even a greater step because it helped them regain some international respectability. And sport, as we all recognize, has a way of drawing people together, lifting people out of the—every day, out of the ordinary to one degree or the other, many times for good things. And we all get caught up in our favorite team regardless. I mean, even if you're just anti-sports, usually every couple of years when the Olympics come around, you get caught up in the Olympics and start rooting for, you know, your team to win, therefore your nation to win, even if you don't care whether the Colts win or lose or the Cubs or the Pacers or, you know, whoever it might be. Sport has a way of doing that. And this is how—this is what was interesting and what Nelson Mandela recognized as a way to bring his country together and to keep a bloodbath from erupting. And so we read the book. Debbie and I made a trip to Mobile, Alabama a couple of weeks ago over the Christmas weekend. We got the book on tape from the library, and it took us about 11 hours from our driveway all the way to the end of Interstate 65 in Mobile, Alabama to finish the book. And it was a good read as we made that trip, and it was based on this book here. And I'm going to take you through just a few quotes from it. But let me help you to understand a little bit about the background to South Africa, apartheid, and to understand just what a task faced the nation, and particularly Nelson Mandela, because the book tells more than the movie can. And it is a fascinating story in conflict resolution.

How many of you on your jobs over the years have ever had to set through a class or a seminar on conflict resolution? Yeah. Okay. Common business practice today. I mean, because there's always conflict. You get two or three together, and instead of Christ being in the center, usually there's conflict. It just happens in the office, in the school, in the workplace, in the church, in the congregation. Conflict is a part of life, and so it is a big business.

And it just is. I don't know how effective your seminars have been. I hope they were useful.

I would recommend, and I said this last week in India, I would recommend if you want a really cheap class on conflict resolution, go see the movie Invictus, and then read the book, Playing the Enemy. And then get on your knees and read Romans 12, and maybe fast a little bit as you pray about that and really think about it. Because the story, at least as this is told, is a real-life example of how a political leader, Nelson Mandela, resolved conflict for a moment in time at a very high level and saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

Because with what was primed to happen in South Africa in the early 1990s, the nation was on the verge of a civil war in which tens of thousands or more would have died in a racial conflict between black and white as the nation moved through a transition. Why was that? I need to understand a little bit about the history and apartheid and the history of South Africa.

South Africa is a diverse country. The original peoples were black, different tribes even among the blacks of South Africa. What was the book? James Mishner wrote a book about South Africa. I think it was The Chosen or something, one of his long, mammoth books that he wrote. He based one of them on South Africa, and he tells the story there.

Originally, nobody lived there. Black tribes did migrate in over the centuries from the northern sub-Saharan part of Africa. Not even the blacks were the original. They came in, they migrated from other parts of Africa, but they were there before the whites. 1617 hundreds, white settlement began. First, the English came. Then the Dutch came to the Cape area, it's the very tip of South Africa, Cape Town. The English then established a trading station there, and then the Dutch came in, and they began through capitalism to develop the area.

They came into the 1800s. The English and the Dutch couldn't get along together.

The Dutch decided they were going to leave, and they made a big migration in the middle of the 1800s. They made what they called the Great Trek North. They made this trek, and the Dutch were a very hearty, conservative, God-fearing religious group of people.

They became what are known as the Afrikaners. They made this long northern trek up to the area of what is now Johannesburg and Durban and the central areas of South Africa. They wanted to get away from the English, and so they made their trek up there. They did their own battles with the Zulus and the other tribes and had the normal atrocities on both sides. The blacks massacred the whites. The whites beat up on the blacks as well. It's a bloody story. The Afrikaners had a very, what the book here calls an Old Testament Christianity.

An Old Testament Christianity. They basically took the Old Testament, and they tried to fit it into their New Testament type of religion, but it evolved around themselves as the chosen people, chosen of God, very righteous in their approach to the Bible, to God, to life. They developed a very, very thriving society, the Afrikaner society. Their Afrikaans language is a variation of Dutch. In time, they became the dominant white portion of South Africa. So that by the 1930s, 1940s, the whites had the ascendancy in terms of the political power in South Africa. They were still a minority. There were more blacks, but because of the times and what happened, they became the dominant party or the dominant race.

And within the whites, the Dutch Afrikaners became dominant. They only made up about 65% of the white population, but they became politically dominant. And in 1948, they enacted a series of apartheid laws that very narrowly and rigidly divided the racial population of South Africa into categories, not only in terms of how you looked at people, but even where you lived and how you interacted.

They even developed their own theology through the Dutch Reformed Church to justify their approach toward other peoples. Essentially, you had four categories of people that were divided. At the top were the whites. They were the number one category. The number two category was what was called colored, a mixed race. Number three were the Indians. Over the time, a number of Indians had migrated in from the nation of India.

So they were number three on the totem pole, and at the bottom were the blacks. And how you even determined whether you were colored or black. They even had regulations down to... I won't even go into all of it, but the book talks about how they would determine by physical appearance and even other tests to determine whether you were colored or black, if you could tell just by looking. Very, very dark skinned black, but colors were mixed race. So there was a lot of other different racial characteristics mixed in there.

And then where you lived, intermarriage, all of that was highly, highly regulated. And if you wanted to go from a... Say if you were classed as white, and you wanted to marry somebody that was colored because you'd fallen in love with someone who was colored, you had to get yourself reclassified officially as a colored. That's the way the laws were written under apartheid. We had our own problems in America during our period of time and our racial problems. They had a unique set of them as they developed in South Africa.

Nelson Mandela was an early activist of the African National Congress, what is called the ANC, which is the dominant political party today in South Africa. He was trained as a lawyer, but in the 1950s, he began to get highly politicized and agitate, as my dad would have said, toward wanting to fight back against the laws. And by 1962-1963, he was so prominent, he was kind of a leading black in the African National Congress.

And because of the laws, because of the Afrikaner dominance, he was eventually jailed as a political prisoner. He burned his passbook and incited others to burn it as well. You had to have a passbook to move throughout the country, and that passbook told you whether you were white-colored, black, or Indian, and determined a lot about your life. He burned it. You've got a picture in the book of him burning it. So he became a political prisoner.

The white apartheid Afrikaner government put him in prison, and he stayed there for 27 years.

27 years, most of which were on a place called Robins Island in a very small cell. He got up at 4 o'clock every morning, exercised. There was no hope of release in those years. Had to do a lot of hard labor, hitting the rocks out in the yard. The movie shows that. All true. And Nelson Mandela learned early on that his ultimate goals of a black rule or more equality justice, to achieve them, he was going to have to know his enemy. Hence the title of the book, Playing the Enemy. So what Mandela did in prison was he began to study the Afrikaner history, so he could get to know his enemy. He learned Afrikans, which is a form of Dutch.

Mandela was a black tribesman. He was of the Cosa tribe, which is spelled X-H-O-S-H-A, I believe.

When they say it, the Kosas, they say it with a clicking sound, Kosa. I'm not doing it right because they can click and say it at the same time. And it's one of those things you just have to learn from your youth. But he was a Kosa. Zulu is another big tribe in South Africa, but Zulu's in Kosas, might as well be black and white in terms of how they get along historically. But Mandela was a Kosa, is a Kosa. He was a chieftain within the Kosa tribes. But he learned Afrikans, the language of his enemy. He learned their history.

And a gradual repair time, he was still within prison the dominant black and the cause of the whole issue in South Africa. You may have begun to remember him before he was released from prison.

He could have been released earlier, but he wouldn't take it during the later years, because he knew that it wasn't right, that the time wasn't right. He had other fellow political prisoners there, they weren't going to let out. And it wasn't right, so he deliberately stayed in. And in fact, he got to the point where he was such a celebrity internationally, and the white Afrikaner government knew of his power, that he began to...they even moved him to a house, would give him freedom to kind of walk and go about the streets at times before he was officially released. And he would even...he had occasion to begin to meet with the government officials, even the Prime Minister, P. W. Bota, who was next to the last white president of South Africa, as they began to negotiate with him in the years prior to his release. So that when he walked out of prison in 1990, he was primed and ready to lead the Black African National Congress politically as the dominant black spokesman. And then four years later, in 1994, he was elected president, first black president of South Africa. But he learned a lot during those years, as he assumed his role and worked even among his own people. And let me read just a few quotes from the book here, take a minute to do that, because it brings out the spiritual points that I want to make. It says here on page 16 that he worked strenuously, Mandela, to persuade his own black supporters to abandon the entirely justified prejudice of a lifetime and support of the Springboks, the white rugby team. That's why he wanted to show the Afrikaners in the stadium the day of the final match that their team was his team as well, and that he would share in their triumph. In jail, it says that he judged that the way to kill apartheid was to persuade white people to kill it themselves, to join his team and submit to his leadership. That's how he learned to play the enemy. And he was a political realist, but he also hit on some spiritual principles that Romans 12 actually brings out. On page 27 here, it mentions that his first challenge was to get to know his enemy, a task to which he applied himself with the same rigor he devoted to his physical exercise. Remember, I said he was up every morning at four o'clock exercising in his little postage stamp-sized cell. And later, when he was moved to a bigger room with some other prisoners, he would run laps in the room. A room would be about the size of this middle section.

So he started running laps in the room every morning at four o'clock. So he had a regimen, and he kept to it. But he also says he had two tools at hand, books through which he learned about the history of the Afrikaners and taught himself their language, and the Afrikaner prison guards, who were simple men, occupants of the lowest-growing and apartheid's great white labor scheme. So even among the whites, you had your classes of the elites and the middle-class whites and the lower-class whites, just like you do in any other system as well. But he learned to, in fact, one of the guards he became very, very good friends with, and the guard made Mandela his godfather of his child years later. But the book talks about when he was brought out at one point to meet with P.W. Bota. P.W. Bota, I mentioned, was next to the last white president, and he was the epitome of Afrikaner apartheid policy in South Africa. And these two, coming together in the same room, Mandela and P.W. Bota, was quite an event. What it says about how they handled one another and how Mandela handled the situation is quite interesting.

It says, Bota showed Mandela unqualified respect. Mandela, too, was polite. But where he had the edge over the president was in the gile of his seductive arts. He reached out by drawing analogies between the black people's present struggle for liberation and the Afrikaner's similar endeavor in the Anglo-Bora war with England back at the turn of the 20th century.

Bota had a father and a grandfather that fought the British in that war. Mandela knew the history. He related to that. But they both showed each other a measure of respect. And they talked.

Bota was later asked about that meeting and how it went and what he learned. And he said, Mandela knew how to use his power subtly. It was like comparing old money and new money. He knew how to handle power without humiliating his enemies. And there are two key points in terms of conflict resolution, in terms of giving your enemy something to drink or something to eat when they're hungry or thirsty. Show people respect. Never ever humiliate someone to the point where they lose face and you do that and you don't have a situation. Whether it's in the office, whether it's in the church congregation, wherever, you have to show respect.

Always maintain a level of respect for even your enemy if there is ever any hope to resolve the conflict. Don't show them respect. Don't expect any in return. And don't humiliate your enemy. This is what Mandela learned as he approached even the arch enemy himself, the prime minister who was the embodiment of apartheid. And he did not humiliate him but found common ground.

In another episode here, as Mandela, as 1994 approached and the election that was going to turn the whole tide and elect a black president, the nation was on the verge of civil war. And there were a group of white Afrikaners, and you have to remember the Afrikaners controlled the army, the South African Defense Force. And they were not ready to just give up power. And so they were on high alert. And there was a faction of the white military that were called the Bitter Enders. They were going to hold out for white minority rule to the Bitter End. And if that meant bloodshed to preserve their way of life, they were going to do it. So they were called the Bitter Enders. And they even brought back a former chief of staff of the South African Defense Force to lead them in this rally, this last stand against what they felt was going to be total chaos and a disruption of their way of life. They felt communism was going to was a part of the ANC, and there were socialist communist elements there. But they felt that there would be just a complete upheaval and overturning of the status quo of South African society. And it was quite high. It was quite wealthy. The whites had developed a high level of not just government, but certainly an economic structure there. And what Mandela had learned to do is that he says, you don't address their brains, you address their hearts. And he did that with the white defense leader or chief of staff, a man by the name of Konstant Vilgene.

He addressed both his head and his heart, but he said it was the heart that won out in the end, and it helped a huge amount in the ending of the problems and what had developed along this way.

And this Konstant Vilgene was later asked about how he met with Mandela, because eventually these two men came face to face. And they sat down across the table at one critical moment to try to work out a solution to keep the army and these militias from springing up and trying to hold on to white rule. And Mandela, who was about to be elected as the day of the election was coming closer, they sat down across the table. And this Konstant Vilgene, who was the white military leader, was asked, what was the decisive factor? Because what he did is he basically realized that this was not going to work, and he cautioned the forces, the military, to stand down.

He said, what was the decisive factor? And Vilgene replied without hesitation, the character of the opponent, whether you trust him, whether you believe he's genuinely for peace. The important thing when you sit down and negotiate with an enemy is the character of the people you have across the table from you, and whether they carry their people's support. Mandela had both. And so this white military man saw that in Mandela, he had character, and he had the support of his own people behind him. Mandela did. But he said he had character. And that persuaded this white military man, who all his life had been steeped with the idea of apartheid being a righteous cause in the white South African, to recognize that it was over. It was time for a change. And that even this man, Mandela, who was his enemy, there was something there that we need to give it a chance. And he saw the character of the person. Again, Mandela showed the man some respect.

And the fact that when two people can sit down and talk, it's another key to conflict resolution. You've got to always be talking, whether it's a cup of coffee at Starbucks, a conversation after church, a kind word here or there. Keep the dialogue going at some level, if you ever hope of reconciling the conflict with, quote, the enemy. And this is one of the keys here. It was brought out rather dramatically in the story here. This is not something that made it into the movie. It would have been a good part of the movie, but they just didn't have time for it. One of the bitter enders was a militia man by the name of Eddie Van Maltz. The name itself conjures up his own image. But he wore military camouflage all the time, always carried a gun, had his own little private militia on his farm in South Africa. And they were going to hold out against this black insurgency, whatever it took. They were going to protect their women and their children and their way of life. And this man was a typical South African redneck, Eddie Van Maltz. And he was very vocal, very opinionated. Mandela was on a radio talk show a few weeks before the election in 1994. He was taking all his questions live on the radio, Mandela was. Eddie Van Maltz was at his farm with his cronies, with his friends, and they said, Eddie, why don't you call in and give Mandela a piece of your mind on national radio live. Tell me what you think. So Eddie Van Maltz calls up, gets on, and is talking to Nelson Mandela on the phone. For a full three minutes, he ranted and raved at Mandela, communism that, terrorists the other, the destruction of our culture, civilized standards and norms. Total three minutes. He ended with a brutally direct threat. Quote, this country will be embroiled in a bloodbath if you carry on walking with the communist thugs. After a tense pause, Mandela replied, well, Eddie, I regard you as a worthy South African. And I have no doubt that if we were to sit down and exchange views, I will come closer to you and you will come closer to me.

Let's talk, Eddie. This is live radio. He says, let's talk, Eddie. To which Eddie replied, right. Okay, Mr. Mandela. Eddie muttered in confusion, thank you. And he hung up. Now, they didn't talk, but Eddie did eventually talk with a local black political leader, actually was invited to this black man's birthday party. And he walked in carrying his guns because he didn't know if he was going to be ambushed in there, but he was treated with respect. In fact, Eddie Von Maltz said later on, he said, I got more respect from the blacks than I get from my own whites, which was a reason that he said, we've got to give them a chance. We've got to give this thing a chance. And he did. He got his men to stand down and the elections went through. Again, respect, respect.

Page 252, it says, it begins to sum this up. It says, Mandela's weakness was his greatest strength. He succeeded because he chose to see good in people who 99 people out of 100 would have judged to have been beyond redemption. He saw good in people that 99 out of 100 didn't see any good.

That was his strength, and it says, as well as his weakness. Mandela zeroed in on the hidden kernel where their better angels lurked and drew out the goodness that is inside all people. That's a remarkable statement about Mandela, what he was able to do in this tense situation in South Africa. The book goes on to show that he stopped a war from happening at that time.

Now, it's a remarkable story. As I said, see the movie, read the book, read Romans 12. It's a good lesson in conflict resolution about his good, certainly cheaper, and maybe even more effective than one we might get put on by some high-powered group that does this all that would do it all the time because it worked at that time and it kept a bloodbath from happening. When I was in South Africa for the feast in 2000, we spent a month in that area. It was a remarkable trip. Got to know a number of the members of the church in South Africa. And there was one man who was at the time a member of the South African National Church Council. His name was Roy DeMont. Roy DeMont and his family own a big farm in the area called the KwaZulu-Natal. He grows tea, the first time I'd ever been on a tea plantation. He grows sugar cane, has wood business going on. He's got several enterprises with himself and his family, his sons there in South Africa. Anyway, we got acquainted with him and he was telling me, he made a statement at the time, this was 2000, and I didn't know the whole story of Mandela and all of that at the time, but he said, and I will have to admit, I'd been a little bit prejudiced because of some of the conservative talk in America toward Mandela at that point in time, and I just didn't know the whole story, but he said, Roy DeMont said to me one night, he said, Nelson Mandela, he said, I tell everybody this, Nelson Mandela kept us alive. He says, it would have been a bloodbath and a lot of us whites would have died. Roy DeMont speaks from experience because one day he narrowly survived or missed an attempt on his life. He would regularly pick up day laborers at a particular spot to bring up to his farm to work. He had a big truck that he would drive down to a big parking lot and pick up day laborers, mostly black. One day, as he was driving in in the early morning to pick up his normal daily load, he was slated that day, but he didn't know it, but he was slated that day for murder. Somebody was hiding off on the other side of the parking lot behind a car, truck, or whatever, and they were going to kill him. For the only reason, because he was just a wealthy white farmer, represented the enemy. This was after 1994, after the whites had gained political power. And what happened is he drove in, he told me the story, as he drove in to his particular point, and he would do this on a regular like clockwork, so they knew his habit, so it would have been easy to pick him off. As he drove in that day, another big truck or a bus happened to pull in beside him between him and the assassin and foiled the attempt. They called it off or they didn't shoot him. He found out about that later. And so when he says that Mandela, through his efforts, saved their lives, he knows wherever he speaks, because it was a highly charged political social atmosphere during that time. Mr. DeMott and his family are still there and still farming. South Africa, the subsequent story is an interesting one. It's mixed results. They still have a high, very high crime rate. AIDS is rampant. Still have a lot of problems.

The blacks are still the politically dominant party. Mandela is still alive. He's in his early 90s. He's in retirement. But what he did at that particular point is a remarkable story, and it is one to note as the movie and this book talks about and should help us, I think, to understand something. When we go back here to Romans 12, we are given a very specific set of instructions from God as to how to conduct ourselves as we play the enemy.

In our enemy, we tend to put a face on a person in this situation. We think that that enemy is so-and-so, the person in our cubicle next to us, the boss, the teacher, the next-door neighbor, the guy down the street, maybe even the minister or somebody. We put a face to the person, and Paul tells us that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness, powers in high places. And Paul tells us here not to curse in verse 14 of Romans 12. He says, do not curse.

Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse. In verse 17, he says, do not repay anyone evil for evil. In verse 19, he says, don't take revenge.

He says, do not be overcome by evil. In verse 21, high, high standards. What he is outlining here for you and I as Christians is our personal conduct. These are very specific. We are not to strike back at those who injure us, those who become our enemy, those who become a foe in some way. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not justice. You have to read on into chapter 13 to see what he has to say about there is a time and a place for justice. There are laws, there are magistrates, there are those in authority, both civil and within the church, to deal with wrongs and fractions and problems. That's chapter 13. But he says, that's for the duly constituted authority. When it comes to you and I as Christians, what he says in chapter 12 is still harder and important for you and I to hold up to because this deals with our personal conduct. We have to take a harder, steeper route. We have to bless our enemy.

We have to bless our enemy. Like Tevye said, do you have a blessing for the czar?

The rabbi says, a blessing for the czar? May God keep the czar far away from Anatev. That's a blessing. Sometimes your prayer as a blessing is, God keep enough distance for a while between both of us, but bless our enemy. We have to do what is right and live peaceably. We have to avoid anger. It's not our place to take revenge.

That's God's. In verse 18, we have to take initiative in positive peacemaking if it is possible.

Paul even leaves out here, he's realistic, he says sometimes it may not be possible. If it is possible, sometimes it's not because the other person just is recalcitrant.

They're entrenched. They will not change. They will not allow a dialogue or any type of an effort to resolve a conflict. But that should not be because of you and I. That's the point Paul is making. That's because they take that approach. You and I do not have the luxury of saying, that's it. Bars go up, walls draw the line in the sand. We don't have that luxury as a Christian.

If it is possible, live in peace.

Verse 19, it says, give place to wrath. That's really talking about God's wrath, not necessarily ours, because it goes on to show that God will repay. He says, vengeance is mine. I will repay. Verse 19, which is in God's timing, which is why you and I are not God. Because if we were, we'd zap them before their time. Yes, you would. You'd zap them, just like I would if we had the power. That's why it says, give place to wrath. In other words, give God's wrath. God's wrath is always perfect because He's God, not man. He's God, and His timing is always right. We have to show faith in God's timing. And again, chapter 13, the governmental powers that do exist by God's permission, are there at times even to allow God to use and to work in certain cases through. We are to heap coals of fire on the enemy. Verses 19 and 20.

Pull their shirt back, their blouse back, and just drop a hot coal down there.

Watch them dance, squirm, hop back and forth. That's what we're to do. Now, how do you do that?

Now, you may want to put a few coals of fire in their pants or down their back.

Literally, He's speaking figuratively. How do you do that? By loving, praying for them, serving even, give them food, give them water. Which means that there are certain tangible acts of kindness and human, just plain human goodness that we should do.

They have a loss in their family, take them a dish. Send them a card if they're sick.

Put coals of fire down their back. Serve them and seek their highest good.

Those coals of fire should heal or to shame them into repentance, into seeking a change.

This is a better. This is a different way. This is God's way. This is the hard way, yes.

This is as somebody would say, this is the cowboy way. It's not the easy way, it's the cowboy way.

It's hard for every one of us, but it's there. And I'll tell you, when you read the story of a Nelson Mandela, a modern example of how he did it in his own time and in his own way, over 27 years in prison, and coming out and having the the the wily intuition and developed ability to recognize how to not only get his way, carnally speaking, physically, but to do it in a way that saved lives and brought people together, at least for a moment, and kept thousands from dying and brought a nation together. It's a remarkable story. It puts us to shame in some cases. Puts me to shame. It reminds me of what Christ said in the parable in Luke 16 of the steward who was caught pilfering from his master and said he was going to be fired. So he calls in all the debtors of his master and starts forgiving their debt because he knows when he's out of a job, he's going to go to them and they're going to help him. And you know what Christ said? Luke 16.8. He said, the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.

Nelson Mandela was pretty shrewd, sometimes smarter about doing certain things than those of us who are children of light.

We have a checkered history in the church of conflict resolution.

Witness all the differing factions that you see about the landscape today, the people who claim to be a part of the church of God, not to go too far into all of that, and even within our own midst. We have our conflicts. That's why, brethren, we need to fast and pray.

And as I stand back and look at it and I look at this story, I look at where we are, we find ourselves from time to time in the church, where we find ourselves today. And I recognize, you know, a man like Nelson Mandela could play the enemy and learn to work with his enemy and make his enemy his friend. And that's a son of this world, as Christ called them. And they're shrewder than the children of the sons of light at times. And so I had no problem with going to this example or any other that you might want to come up with and learning a lesson. If Mandela in South Africa can kind of hurt bloodshed and come to peace, how much more us, one to one, on whatever level, we care to measure it within our church experience, how much more should we come to the point where we are not overcome by evil, but we overcome evil with good?

To quote verse 21 of Romans 12, Evil takes no holiday. Evil takes no holiday. An unforgiving spirit is one of Satan's prime tools.

Don't ever let it be found among us.

Let's take the hard way to overcome it and to put it behind us and learn to recognize our true spiritual enemy. It's not ourselves. It's a power far greater than that. But if we give him place in our hearts, he can play us. And we'll play one another as enemies. But that's not God's way.

That is not God's way. Let's learn that lesson and let's pray for God's way to prevail among His people.