How do you make a dead man see?
I mean what really happens to a person when they are converted?
If you are unconverted to Christ, you are still dead. You are moving along throughout life but you are dead spiritually… there is nothing there. You are as cold to God as a corpse. When asked about going to heaven, you say things like “I hope so,” or “I know I’m better than Charles Manson… or Hitler…” or “I don’t know but if I go to the other place all my friends will be there.” And you give a nervous laugh.
You don’t really have a clue what you are talking about but in the meantime it does the trick and takes people off the topic. There is no conviction of sin, no sorrow for offending a holy God, – there’s only a numbness to any sense of responsibility or accountability. That’s why people can go for years doing the same thing over and over again and seemingly be unaffected. They are dead.
But then something flickers, something changes. Something happens. But really what happens?
You start to see some things, things like if God is real and heaven is real, then there is no chance in heaven that I will get there. You realize your own good works are motivated by selfish reasons when you really looked at them. And you start to despair inside because there is no way to change your heart. You are guilty, guilty, guilty.
“There is no use me even trying,” you say. “I’m no good. God couldn’t love me even if He did exist. I cannot be a member of a church – they wouldn’t have me, let alone God!”
But something has shifted; something has awakened in you, something deep inside that causes you to long for truth, to long for a touch of God, the real thing, to just experience him, really. Did you do something to make you come alive?
If your nature was against God, if you were at enmity with God (sworn enemy) what made your enmity decide to bless God or even consider God? Can the blind man perform surgery on his own eyes? Can the hard stone be a source of its own softness? Enmity against God cannot choose love for Him.
Who opened your spirit up? How did that happen? Why doesn’t it happen for everyone? Why not all at the same time?
Just when you are fully despaired, realizing that no one can save you and you cannot save yourself, that’s when the Holy Spirit – usually through the preaching of the Word of God – causes you to cast your eyes before a wooden cross where the Prince of Peace shed his blood for you. You get it. You bow your knee. You yield your life and you invite Christ to save you, to give you His gift of eternal life, knowing that He has paid the just price of your sin for you. And you enter in, a humble sinner, relying on the grace and mercy of a holy God.
Otto von Hasburg, whose full name was Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius von Habsburg, was born in 1912 in Reichenau, Austria.
He became crown prince when his father, Charles I, was crowned emperor in 1916, during World War I. After Austria and Germany lost World War I, the Austria-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, Charles I had to abdicate and Austria went on to become a republic.
In 1919, Charles and his family had to leave the country for what turned out to be permanent exile in several different countries, including Switzerland, Belgium, and France.
After his father’s death in 1922, the nine-year-old Otto officially took over as the head of the House of Habsburg. He tried to negotiate his return to Austria in 1935 and again in 1938 when he even sought to become chancellor to fight the expected invasion by Hitler’s troops, but could not gather enough support.
Instead, he found a channel through the U.S. embassy in Paris to contact President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later claimed to have prevented Allied bombings of a number of Austrian cities by pleading with the U.S. military.
He was also credited with having helped about 15,000 Austrians, including many Jews, escape the Nazis. From early in World War II in 1940 to after the Allied invasion of France in 1944, Habsburg lived in Washington DC, before returning to Europe to live in France, and then in Poecking, Germany after 1954.
Still, he was not allowed to return to Austria until 1966, five years after he officially renounced the crown. He later claimed to be baffled by the hostility and criticism he faced in his home country.
Despite his opposition to the Nazis, Habsburg was at times faulted at home for being too right wing. In 1961, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco offered to make him king of Spain after his own death.
Habsburg declined, but later praised the fascist leader for helping refugees, calling him a ‘dictator of the south American type … not totalitarian like Hitler or Stalin.’
More recently he was criticised for remarks in 2008 in which he insisted Austrians were the victims of Hitler – who was Austrian born – rather than accomplices.
Otto died last year. His funeral was held in July, 2011.
As their family tradition has it (for the last 600 years) his funeral procession included the following ceremony… the grand entourage arrives at the door of the monastery and a herald knocks at the gate.
From within comes the elderly voice of the Abbot asking “yes, who is it? Who knocks?”
“I am Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary.
“I don’t know you. Tell me again who you are.”
“I am Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, Dalmatia, Grand Duke of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Styria and….and a myriad other titles and achievements..”
“We still don’t know you. Who are you?”
Whereupon the herald knocks once more, (and traditionally though not this year, kneels down) and said “I am Franz Joseph, a poor sinner humbly begging for God’s mercy.”
And the gates were flung open.
Man can do whatever he wants here on earth, garnering wealth and titles, prosperity and power, but until he humbly bows his life and declares himself a poor humble sinner in need of the mercy of God, he will not actually enter into the Kingdom of Heaven or its Glory.
Being a monarch or a king was not good enough to enter into the kingdom of heaven, only admitting your guilt as a sinner will get you in.
