A 911 True Story

I want to read to you a letter that I received in the mail just a few weeks ago. It's a letter from a man who was on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. One of the planes, the wing of the airplane, actually came through his office.

He described it to me like this. He said the building exploded in flames. The man who was in charge of his floor, the executive director of his business, screamed out, everyone get in the stairwell.

He said it took him an hour to make it down to the bottom. What should have been taking only 15 minutes took him an hour to get down. As he looked out the window going down the stairwell, he saw people jumping off the building.

When he got to the bottom, there were bodies everywhere, people that had jumped because it was either jump and die or be burned to death. They knew they were going to die, but they were wondering which would be the most painful, and they chose to jump to their death. Some of you that saw those pictures, there were men and women, women and women, holding hands, jumping out of the building together all the way, 84, 85, 86 floors, all the way to the bottom to meet certain death.

This man in this letter, he writes that he made it all the way down to the bottom, and as he got down to the bottom, he heard a rumbling, and dust started bellowing up everywhere. He looked off, and there was a group of 25 people. Suddenly, they all started crashing on one another, and they were all piled on top of one another, and this man began to call out to the name Jesus.

He's a Christian. And then he said he felt the Spirit of the Lord come on him and say, these people that are around you do not know me, so he started screaming out to them, how many of you know Jesus? And he said, right now, everyone needs to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior. You're hearing tonight, friends, some of the stuff that went on behind the scenes.

These are things that you'll never hear on CNN. He said the whole crowd, they were all crumpled together, piled on one another. They all began to cry out to the name Jesus and repent of their sins.

He jumped up after leading 20 to 25 people to Jesus. He jumped up, and he stumbled, and he saw a little light that was blinking. Those of you that remember the stories on television, it was one of the fireman's lights, the little lights that come on, and it was blinking, and he was looking through the haze and the smoke, and he started working towards that light.

As he moved about 10 or 15 feet away from that group of people, the building came down on top of them. Every one of them perished. He stumbled.

An FBI agent grabbed ahold of him, and they stumbled outside the building, and he was delivered on that day. He wrote me a letter to let me know that he's left his business, and now he's preaching the gospel around the world. He said he got ahold of some of my videos, and he was watching the videos, the altar calls at the end of the videos.

He said he'd never seen anything like it, and he began to give altar calls like that all over the world. He said in one service he saw 1,300 people run to the cross as he gave the altar calls. I'm sharing this at the beginning of my message, my friend, because Isaiah made a statement that it would do good for everyone in this room and everyone at home to take heed to tonight.

He said, Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let me give you an education right now about what's going on in the world.

You still have the opportunity to receive Christ as Savior. We are living in the dispensation of grace. There is a loving Savior.

His name is Jesus. Everyone say the name Jesus. There's a loving Savior who 2,000 years ago hung on Mount Calvary, had spikes in his hands, a spike through his feet.

He looked out at the crowd. This was after a whip had been lashed across his back. They plowed his back like a farmer would plow his field.

And Jesus, in the most excruciating pain a man can go through, chose not to call a legion of angels down from heaven. He could have called down a legion and said, God, my Father, slay the world. But he chose to take the beam on his back.

He made his way to Golgotha, laid on the cross. His hands were pierced. His feet were pierced.

He looked out at the crowd and said, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. He hung his head.

He said, It is finished. He died. He went down to hell, snatched the keys of death, hell, and the grave from the devil, the liar, the father of all lies.

He took the keys. He skyrocketed back, skyrocketed back, walked on planet Earth for 40 days. People have asked me, What period of time in church history would you like to live in, Steve? It's the 40 days after the resurrection.

Because Jesus was walking through doors. Jesus was... Did you know that when Jesus Christ died, people that were in the graveyards came out of the graves? That means if you had an uncle and you had been to his funeral a week earlier, he suddenly came up to your house, knocked on the door, and wanted to have a spot of tea. Jesus spent 40 days, and then he went up.

And this is where we're living right now. When he went up, the disciples looked up and went, Oh, no. And the angels looked down and said, What are you looking at? The same one that went up is coming back down.

He's coming back for you. But for some reason, you and I have been privileged not to be born in the B.C. era, before Christ. We were born after Christ.

We were born during the dispensation of grace. That means God's unmerited favor is still, for some reason, pastors, and I don't know why, he's still holding back his judgment.