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No Room in the Holiday Inn |
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Themes: "God is Calling, Rejection War was raging. It had gone on for months. Sarejevo! Bosnia-Herzogovina! Names that were in the news every night. The world watched as starvation and death seemed to be encircling the city like a vise.
Four hundred tired soldiers were marching along a dusty mountain road. They had come all the way from Canada to besieged Sarejevo. They had come to secure the airport so that desperately needed supplies, food and medicine could be flown in to save the people.
They were a Canadian Infantry Battalion. They couldn't land in Sarejevo airport so they had to land over 200 miles away and walk the rest of the way. Over mountain roads they came. It was a long and hard 200 miles. Probably every soldier thought about the good deed which he was doing: they had not come to destroy lives in fighting, but to try and save lives. They probably expected a very warm welcome by the people of the city. Their saviors had come.
These and other thoughts must have filled their minds as they finally approached the city. Orders were to proceed to the Holiday Inn in Sarejevo where they would find beds and food. It was July 3, 1992. The city was almost in ruins. The help of these soldiers was desperately needed or no one would survive. Even the Holiday Inn would soon be no more.
But when the four hundred soldiers came to the Holiday Inn, they were turned away. They were not welcome there. No one had promised the Inn keepers how they would be paid. The men who came to save the city, were not welcomed.
In our Bible story, Stephen tells the Jewish leaders and people how that every savior God had ever sent to the nation was always rejected. When God sent the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, the people rejected Him as well.
You might think it amazing that a city about to be destroyed would worry about who was going to pay for the soldiers hotel rooms. You might correctly say that without them, the city would starve. How foolish to reject them.
Yet the Bible makes clear that men and women, boys and girls today, just as people in the times of the Lord Jesus, frequently refuse the offer of salvation which God is giving. People are condemned because they "believe not" (John 3:18). They refuse to accept God's word about His Son.
Years later, Paul could accuse the people of rejecting the Word of God and judging themselves unworthy of eternal life (Acts 14). God has made a full and free provision for salvation in His Son. There was no room for Him in the inn at His birth (Luke 2). Will you accept Him or reject Him.
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Jim Batterton