Choose to flee temptation!
One Monday morning my secretary burst into my office with a worried look on her face and said, “Pastor, there is call you’d better take.”
When I placed the receiver to my ear, a woman screamed, “Help me! Pastor, he’s going to kill himself!”
It was a gracious lady of the church who was referring to her husband who seemed to have everything: houses, lands, sports cars, condos, beautiful children and a lovely wife. He was now locked in the bathroom and she believed he was attempting suicide.
I bolted from my office and sped across San Antonio in my station wagon, as if the Interstate was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
At the please of the wife, I went upstairs to the locked bathroom door, and as I was in no mood to administer the Harvard Temperament Test through a locked door, I applied a technique more often employed by a blitzing middle linebacker and ripped the door off its hinges.
The husband, lying on the floor, his face pale from loss of blood from slashes on his right wrist, told me, “I’m tired of living. I don’t want to live anymore" and he pleaded for me to let him die. I picked him up and carried him down to the car and rushed him to the emergency room. After surgery and blood transfusions, when he realized he was going to live and have to face the realities of life, he wept, “Where did I go wrong, Pastor?”
“Happiness begins with a choice,” I told him. “You’re in this hospital as a result of poor choices. You chose to break the laws of God and now you’re suffering the consequences. You can be happy the day you choose to obey the divine principles of truth recorded in the Word of God.”
The man had tried to kill himself, it came out, because his mistress was pregnant and was about to file a massive lawsuit exposing his private life. As a high profile executive with a major company, the adverse publicity created by such a suit would doubtless cost him his job with all its perks and prestige, the respect of his children and his church and might very well cost him his marriage.
There is a high price to be paid for low living!
Source: Being Happy in an Unhappy World
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