The Stories You Want To Be True.
As Christians we need to be careful. You may not think of yourself as a “leader” in your church or community, but if you are a Christian and living your life that way then someone is looking to you as an example.
The other day I was watching a video of a preacher in what seemed to be an old fashioned, southern church. He was emphatically preaching about the anguish that General Eisenhower went through the day before D-day as he knew that he was sending thousands of young men to their deaths. He went on about the General meeting frequently with the chaplains in the days and hours leading up to it, imploring them to redouble their efforts to get the men to accept Christ before they went to their deaths.
The preacher expressed that Eisenhower found out that less than half of the men he was sending either already were believers or had made a confession of faith in the hours leading to the attack. Hearing this, he supposedly went into his tent and wept bitterly about the concept of dooming thousands of souls to an eternity in Hell.
The preacher used this as an example of how we should be concerned for the lost. We might not be sending them to their deaths, but they will die and if they reject Christ, they will be forever lost.
The problem is that the story of Eisenhower is a myth, an urban legend, an apocryphal account. It never happened. To be sure, Eisenhower was burdened with grief over the responsibility of sending so many men to their deaths. As bad as D-day was it was expected to have had much higher casualty rates.
What made me doubt this was that I had just done some research on Eisenhower for one of my recent sermons and, at that point in his life, he wasn’t extremely religious. He believed in Jesus, but Christianity had faded in his main focus.
I would assume that the preacher had the best of intentions, but what happens if someone in his congregation, or watching his video is already having doubts and then hears a story like this, suspects that it sounds phony, and finds out that it is 100% made up?
Just because we hear a story, see a social media post or watch a movie and we WANT it to be true because it really fits well with our beliefs, we need to be cautious before we just blindly repeat it as fact. If you become the “Great Aunt Matilda” that no one believes because you share and repeat things that just aren’t true, they won’t believe you when you share the truth of Jesus Christ.