Good People vs. Bad People (2)

His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Luke 3:17

Although the people got all riled up at John’s radical ideas and thought of them as politically subversive, I think they missed something. The problem is that John’s message was more subtle and disturbing than the people originally thought. 

It’s too easy to think that ‘evil is out there somewhere’ and that we just need a new political leader to defeat it. The problem with evil is that it’s inside of each of us. The Russian author and political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it this way:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? 

Talk with Jesus about the evil you see in your own heart. What if that’s where the real problem is?