We Are Living Schindler’s List

It is award season, and we are all hearing the Oscar buzz. Will it be the musical about the transgender drug lord?  The biopic about Bob Dylan?  The musical about witches in Oz?  While some of the movies are pretty good, none of them really stand out as a film that we will be talking about or quoting five years from now.  Some films actually do stand the test of time.  Lately, I have been contemplating a memorable Best Picture winner from the past. 

The big winner at the Oscars for 1993 was Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, Schindler’s List. The film was based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman in Poland, who hired Jewish workers for his factory during World War II.  When the Nazis began to round up Jews to be sent to death camps for extermination, Schindler became a hero by helping Jews escape being murdered at the hands of the Nazis.

Today, most of us think that we would have done the same, but very few did stand up for Jews in occupied Europe during World War II.  Schindler risked his own life for the lives of others.  Looking back, it was obviously a noble cause. 

Contemplating Oskar Schindler made me think about an acquaintance of mine who was always desperately longing to be part of a noble cause.  Unfortunately, he also desperately wanted to be liked and approved of by our mainstream, secular culture.  For this reason, he started looking at the causes that were popular in society.  He tried to take up the causes of the people who see themselves as victims.  He began to see race as the motivating force for everything.  He looked to the past and saw the civil rights movement of the middle of the last century, and since that was an important, noble cause, he wanted to be a part of it.  He got caught up in the slandering of whites and the police.  It turned out not to be enough for him for a couple of big reasons.  First, the real civil rights movement was won before he was born.  Segregation had ended.  Jim Crow had been defeated.  People who think skin color makes somebody better or worse are hard to find.  The only people still pushing race as a problem are hucksters like Al Sharpton who are trying to make a buck.  My acquaintance’s second problem was that he is not black.  He could not claim to be a victim himself.  This eventually led him to other woke causes, none of which are noble.

He was led astray by his searching for meaning and something to fight for, but most people do want to be part of a noble cause.  It gives purpose to your life.  Instead of looking to the past for a cause that our grandparents already fought, we need to fight a fight that is relevant now.  Here is the thing.  We can have an even bigger impact than Oskar Schindler did.  We are living Schindler’s List right now.  In fact, there is a cause that is even more important than Schindler’s.  While the Jews of Europe were boarding trains to almost certain death at Nazi death camps, many more people today are boarding a train to eternal death and torment in the next life.  We have the opportunity to help these people like Schindler helped those that he saved.   Countless people have not accepted Jesus as their Savior and are thus on the path to Hell and eternal damnation.  It should be our cause to tell those people about Jesus.

Matthew 28:18-20 says, “And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’”  This is our mission on Earth. 

Not only that, but nothing you do in life is as important as what you do that directs people to Heaven.  If you are the best athlete on the planet, it is meaningless if it does not point people to God.  If you have career success and immense riches, it is meaningless unless that career or your money shows people the route to Heaven.  If you are powerful and lead many people, it does not matter unless you lead those people to the truths of the Bible.  This does not mean that you have to stand on a street corner preaching, but it does mean that everything you do should be done with God in mind and the glory should be given to Him.  If you do this, you have that noble cause.  You are just as important as Oskar Schindler.