Radio Leicester Thought for
the Day
© John Denney, 18 February
2000
It was quite
chilly yesterday at Filbert Street. It wasn’t the
overnight frost that caused it. No, it was Martin
O’Neill laying into Stan Collymore and the rest of the team
for their tomfoolery in the bar of the sports club in Spain.
Grown men should have known better than to let their high spirits
get the better of them. And Martin O’Neill didn’t
mess about: he imposed severe penalties on the guilty men and
made them pay personally for the costs involved.
Theresa Gorman MP
was carpeted yesterday too. A House of Commons committee
found she had failed to register her financial interests in the
register of members’ interests. She had even taken
part in the debates on the subject of landlords and tenants when
in effect, secretly, she is one. The committee hasn’t
messed around either: they’ve recommended she be excluded
from the House of Commons for a whole month.
And over in
Germany, more and more revelations are coming out about the
corrupt funding of the Christian Democrat Party under former
Chancellor Kohl. The party and several senior politicians
are being exposed as dishonest and devious. Maybe even
criminal fraud is involved. This story is going to run and
run, but already several political heads have rolled, and it
looks as if things are going to get worse for the Christian
democrats, who are coming out as rather undemocratic and
certainly far removed from Christian standards of behaviour.
Quite a lot of
chickens have come home to roost this week, at Filbert Street, at
Westminster, and in Berlin. One day, Christians believe we
shall all have to account for our actions. We call
it the Day of Judgement. God will judge everyone. Everything
bad we’ve thought, everything bad we’ve said,
everything bad we’ve done, everything good we should have
done but didn’t, will be recited before Him, and He will
judge us accordingly. Christians, though, will find that
all the wrong things in their lives have been erased from the
record, because Jesus has forgiven their sins.
And back here,
we’ve still got a chance to do something about our attitudes
and lifestyle. We can ask Jesus for forgiveness; in the
words of the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our trespasses.
And in these times of 10 pence rise on the minimum wage and 75
pence rises on the state pension, it’s sobering to remember
that the wages of sin are exactly the same as they always were.