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The Amish Voice
MAP
P.O. Box 128
575 U.S. Highway 250
Savannah, OH 44874
(419) 962-1515
January 2017
Welcome to the fourth and last part of
Emanuel Schrock’s true life story.
4. The Answer
Perhaps you are in the same condition
that I was. Perhaps you, too, would like
to be born again and have tried to
persuade God to save you, but He seems
to remain distant. Perhaps your
conscience is pressing down on
you with guilt. Maybe you are
stuck like I was, and you feel
that you have tried very hard to
please God, but He doesn’t seem
to care. You have tried your
institution’s prescribed way of
reaching God, but somehow you
fell through the cracks, and the
formula didn’t work for you as it
seems to have worked for others.
Maybe you are terrified at the
thought of meeting God, as I
was. And maybe, just maybe, you hate
the sin that you are living in, like I did,
but you keep going back to it. Maybe
you, too, fall asleep on a tear-soaked
pillow, praying that you will not die,
because it is the only prayer you dare
pray.
I know all about that. Fear and misery
were my companions for months and
years. The devil made me the object of
his amusement, dangling my soul in that
miserable space between damnation and
salvation, where I had the knowledge of
salvation, but not the faith to receive it.
You and I both know the hellish torment
of that space.
As a former companion of your misery, I
have a few things to say to you. First,
understand that there is nothing wrong
with you. You are feeling exactly the
way you should. You and I are sinners,
and the guilt, the torment and misery, and
the separation from the God we long to
know, should only be expected. Hell
from beneath is calling our name,
because we belong to it. It owns us,
because of our sins and our filth. If home
is where the heart is, then the only home
we dare hope to find for our sinful hearts
is hell.
Perhaps you have told yourself to shake
off this misery and get a grip on life. No,
my friend. Because of your sin, you and
misery belong to each other. You and I
became the products of the sum total of
all our choices in life, choices that we
squandered and forfeited for
moments of pleasure and
enjoyment, at the high cost of
disobedience to God. If God is
indeed a God of justice as He
claims and as our consciences
have been telling us all of our
lives, then there can be only one
end for people like you and me.
We dare not even implore the
goodness of God, because His
very goodness condemns our
filth.
Ephesians 2:12 gives us a perfect
description of our serious condition:
That
at that time ye were without Christ,
having no hope, and without God in the
world.
The darkest and most hopeless
condition to be in is to be without God.
Without God, there is no hope, and sin,
my friend, has cast you
and me into that hopeless
chasm of godlessness.
My Story, Part 4
—
By Emanuel Schrock
Continued
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